James Thurber tells the fable of the bear that use to go on a
spree of drunkenness, and come home at night and break up the
furniture, and frightening the children and drive his wife to tears.
One day he reformed and decided to never drink again, and from
then on he would come home and demonstrate how fresh and
vigorous his new way of life made him feel by doing gymnastic
exercises in the living room. In so doing, however, he broke the
furniture, frightened the children, and drove his wife to tears.
Thurber is pointing out that one extreme is no better than another in
its practical outcome in life. One has little to boast about who has
escaped falling flat on his face by bending over so far backward he
falls on his head. It is the man who keeps his balance, and falls
neither way that represents the Christian ideal. Neither the rider
who falls off the horse on the left or the right side is to be compared
with the man who stays in the saddle.
Albert Schweitzer said, "No man ever gets a great idea without
carrying it too far." He illustrates his statement as he makes it, for
he certainly went too far when he said, "No man," for Jesus as a
man showed perfect balance. What he said, however, is a valid
judgment on most men and movements. The Apostle John in
writing this first Epistle is combating a movement that has gone to
an extreme and has become a dangerous heresy. The Gnostics, as
they were called, were not trying to destroy Christianity, but were
trying to make it an intellectually respectable philosophy that would
appeal to the contemporary mind.
They were doing the same thing that we see being done in our day.
There are men and movements within the framework of
modern Christianity who are saying we need to cleanse the church
of old ideas, and make its message relevant to the contemporary
mind. Such things as the virgin birth, miracles, and the literal
resurrection of Christ are not acceptable to many modern minds,
and so they are saying we need to cut them off as branches that will
bare no more fruit.
The Gnostics in John's day had the same idea, and there have
always been men in movements to promote this way of thinking.
That is why you notice this Epistle is not addressed to anyone in
particular. It is called a Catholic Epistle, which means, it is a
universal Epistle. It is God's perpetual answer to all believers in all
generations who are being thrust into turmoil and confusion by the
muddled thinking and speculation of men. God gave the church this
teaching and guidance through the Apostle John, who was one of the
first chosen by Christ; who was uniquely loved by Christ, and who
lived longest in the service of Christ. When we listen to John we
listen to the voice of experience, for no man who has ever lived has
had, either in quantity or quality, a greater experience with Christ.
John does not answer the heretics on the level of debate and theory,
but on the level of experience.
The Gnostics were very spiritual people. In fact they fit into the
category of those who are so heavenly minded they are no earthly
good. The Gnostics were so spiritual, so fanatically spiritual that
they became anti-Christ, for Christianity is based on the fact that
Jesus, the very Son of God, did not remain Spirit, but came in
human flesh. The Gnostics were too spiritual to accept this. They
said that God was spiritual, but they wrongly concluded that all that
is not spirit is evil. They said flesh is evil, and all that is material is
evil, and, therefore, the Son of God could never become a real man.
He only appeared as a man. He was like a phantom. He seemed to
be a man, but was really not. They denied the incarnation, and that
is why John is so emphatic when he says, "Every spirit that
confesses not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God."
The Gnostics had such a high view of the spiritually of Christ that
they actually became anti-Christ. They refused to balance their high
view with the belief in the incarnation, and so even though believing
Jesus to be divine, they were not Christians, but enemies of the
church. They illustrate that half the truth can be a whole lie. Half
truths are even more dangerous than lies, for they are often so
plausible. They deceive so many more people. Never be content to
ask is it true of a teaching, but go on to ask is this the whole truth.
Heresy is almost always based on half truths.
The Gnostics proved that even the best things of life, and God's
greatest truths can become curses if not kept in balance. The reason
the Bible is so full of paradoxes is to keep us ever mindful of the
need for balance. Fishing nets are only of value when they have
both lead and cork; the heavy and the light. If all the net had was
cork, it would float on the surface and catch no fish. If all it had was
lead, it would sink to the bottom and catch no fish. But with cork
and lead to make it both sink and float, it accomplishes its purpose
and catches fish. The Christian who is weighted down with the
duties of the Christian life is too gloomy to be an effective fisher of
men. The Christian who is super-spiritual, and floating on cloud
nine, is also too irrelevant to attract the fish. The effective Christian
life is the balance life.
The Apostle John is the great Apostle of balance. He was a
profound theologian, and also a man of great personal piety. He was
deeply profound and highly practical. Bernard Ramm wrote, "How
to put together theology and spiritual life has been one of the main
concerns of my life. Theology ought to lead to the depths of spiritual
experience. It certainly did with Paul. Spiritual experiences ought
to create a great hunger in the soul for the truth of God. But how
fractured we are! Theologians are frequently spiritually snobbish
or over-sophisticated. And men who emphasize the spiritual life can
be so theologically naive and Biblically illiterate. Great theology
and great spiritual experiences ought to go hand in hand.
The Gnostics were spiritual, but very poor theologians. Those
who stress the deity of Christ and deny His humanity fall on their
face, and those who stress the humanity of Christ and deny His deity
fall on their head. The Christian is committed to stand with John
with his unwavering balance based on historical revelation and
personal experience with the God-Man, Jesus Christ. Let us listen
to his authentic and authoritative voice first of all concerning-
I. THE HISTORICAL REVELATION verse 1.
John here, as in his Gospel, begins at the beginning. The source
of the Christian faith goes back beyond history into the realm of
eternity where Christ was eternally before the beginning. John only
goes back to the beginning, for that is as far back as creatures of
time can go. John is conveying to us the fact that Jesus was from the
beginning. He did not begin then, but was then. All else and all
others have entered the scene later, but he was the Alpha-the first to
be on the stage for the drama of history.
It is as if I said, Henry Ford was from the beginning of the Ford
Motor Company. This tells us nothing about what was before that
except that Henry Ford was in existence before the beginning of the
Ford Motor Company. He did not begin at the beginning of his
company. He only began his role as founder and creator of the
company at that point. Likewise, Jesus did not begin at the
beginning, but already was, for He was eternally with the Father
before the beginning. Jesus did begin at this point, however, as the
founder and creator of the universe. The eternal Christ did have a
beginning as Creator just as He had a beginning as a child, and as a
sacrifice for sin, and as a resurrected Lord and interceding high
priest at the right hand of the Father. The eternal Christ has a
variety of beginnings in various roles, because He left the realm of
timelessness and entered the realm of history.
John is making clear that the foundation of the Christian faith is
indeed the foundation. It is not secondary in any sense, but goes
right back to the very beginning of time and history. Whatever is
really new is not really true, for He who is the truth was from the
beginning. How could we trust our eternal future to anyone that did
not have an eternal past? There is no end to the newness of the
experiences we have in Christ, and new are His mercies each
morning, but all that is new is our personal experience of the eternal
grace of Christ. In other words, all we experience in time has its
origin in eternity. The Gnostics would not object to this, but John
then leaps immediately from the beginning right into the present
historical setting of his day and says that we have heard and seen
and even handled with our hands this one who was from the
beginning. He not only made the stage of history, but He came on
the stage to play a role Himself-the role of redeemer.
Now if John would have kept it more general he still would not
have been offensive to the Gnostics, but when he talks about actually
handling Christ with his hands he has gone too far for them. John is
saying that the eternal Christ actually entered history and was
manifested in human flesh. Westcott said, "A religion that is to
move the world must be historical." The world has had more than
enough philosophic speculation about God and religion. If
speculation could save the world, we would have been in paradise
long ago, but only a real, literal, actual historical Savior can really,
literally, actually, historically save us, and this we find only in Jesus
Christ. The God of eternity and the God-Man of history.
Often as Christians we speak of God being seen in His handiwork
of nature, but let us never forget that the Bible stresses far above
this the fact that God is a God of history. All the great acts of God
and revelations of God have been historical, and His final, fairest,
and fullest revelation was in the Incarnation when God became man.
This is so basic that to doubt it or deny it is to reject the Christian
revelation as a whole. John goes even further than emphasizing that
Jesus became man; he also stresses-
II. PERSONAL EXPERIENCE.
Jung once said, "The best of truths is of no use...unless it has
become the individuals most personal inner experience." Even truth
is not an end in itself. Even the Bible is not an end in itself. John in
all of his writing makes it plain that the eternal Christ not only
became the historical Christ, but that he must become the
experienced Christ to fulfill his purpose and our salvation. It is not
enough to know Jesus as eternal and historical if one does not know
Him as personal.
John says we have personal contact with Christ. We knew Him
through the avenue of our senses, and we bear witness of Him. John
is an eyewitness conveying his experience to those who were not.
Almost everything we know about any of the great personalities of
the past is known on the same basis as this: Personal testimony by
contemporaries. He who would doubt the historicity of Christ
would on the same grounds have to doubt all that is written about
Plato, Socrates, and all the Ceasars, as well as all the kings and
queens, philosophers and statesmen, and poets of the past. The very
knowledge of their existence is based on the same evidence that we
have concerning Christ.
John is no arm chair speculator, for he is an eye witness
contemporary of Christ. He was writing this 50 to 60 years after the
cross, but he makes it clear that Christ was still his contemporary.
In verse 3 he talks about present fellowship with the Father and the
Son that he and all that believe can have. His experience with Christ
is not a mere matter of memory, but a matter of continuous day by
day fellowship. This is the goal for every believer. This is the
ultimate in Christian happiness, for when we have come to this
experience, John says then our joy will be complete.
The evidence of the past is effective in getting one on the road to
belief, but the personal encounter with the present Christ is essential
to get us to the destination of certainty and commitment. John knew
the dangers that Christians faced in his day because of confused
thinking in theology. He knew that the anti-christs were already
come, and that believers would be in danger of being tossed to and
fro by every wind of doctrine. That is why he gives this strong
testimony as to the historical revelation and personal experience of
the eternal Christ. He knows a Christian needs to have a solid and
sure anchor when the storm hits. He knows a believer who is not in
a state of fellowship with Christ and fellow believers day by day is in
dangerous waters.
The same holds true for our day. It appears that there are rough
waters ahead for faithful believers. Doctrines unchallenged for
centuries are being rejected by leaders of the church. Men are
reviving the Gnostic plan to update Christianity so it fits the
thinking of our day. Subtle error is going to touch everyone of us,
but if we take advantage of the light we have and walk in it, we need
not fear the darkness.
Those men who became living torches in the garden of Nero, and
those women flung to wild beasts in the amphitheater were not
dying for any theory, or system, or vague hope. They were dying
because they had encountered the eternal Christ in their own
personal experience. James Stewart wrote, "Our religion is going to
make absolutely no impact whatever on the world....is going to leave
not the faintest impression on the paganism around, unless it is our
own assured possession." We know Jesus is eternal by revelation,
and we know He is historical by the witness of others, but we can
only know Him as personal and contemporary by experience. It is
time that we begin to take seriously our need for greater fellowship
with the living Christ, and for one another in Christ.
The American Commentary says on these first two verses, "In the
verses before us, we see a deep and vivid experience attempting to
put itself in sentences. The life in Christ has become life in John,
and he wants to make such a declaration, such a testimony of it as
will lift up all his readers to the same plane of divine
experience. "Personal experience is vital both for enjoying the
Christian life, and for sharing it with others. One woman said,
"You can no more tell what you don't know than you can come back
from where you ain't been."
What you have experienced is a reality that no one can deny. The
Pharisees said to the man who had been made to see by Jesus, "We
know that this man is a sinner." He answered in John 9:25,
"Whether he is a sinner, I do not know: one thing I know, that
though I was blind, now I see." The experience did not prove Jesus
was the Son of God, nor did it prove He was not a sinner, but the
experience convinced the man that he had encountered the
supernatural, and no one could refute that, or deny the reality of his
experience.
There's no way to escape the paradox of experience. It is both
essential and inadequate. Josiah Royce wrote in The Source Of
Religious Insight, "Without intense and intimate personal feelings,
you never learn any valuable truths whatever about life, about its
ideals, or about its problems; but, on the other hand, what you know
only through your feelings is, like the foam of the sea, unstable-like
the passing hour, doomed to pass away." We need the objective
theology as a source of our authority, and the subjective experience
as the source of our motivation.
Ruth Paxon in her classic Life On The Highest Plane writes, "The
grave danger of fixing one's eyes upon an experience, however
exalted and blessed, instead upon Him who bestowed it was
expressed very tellingly by Spurgeon when he said,
I looked at Christ
And the dove of peace flew into my heart;
I looked at the dove of peace-And it flew away.
Take you eyes off Jesus and you can have much religious
experience, but it is not related to any objective revelation and thus
it is unstable, and its value uncertain."
The craving for experience is both wise and foolish. During war
time young men fear they will die and miss out on much of life's
experience, and so they rush headlong into all sorts of immoral
behavior in order to experience all of life before they die. This war
mentality is becoming a standard philosophy for our world. You
only go around once so get all you can out of it, and live with gusto.
This is the modern version of, let us eat, drink, and be merry, for
tomorrow we die.
An old sea captain told of how an inexperienced youth went to a
hiring hall to get a job as a seaman. The hiring agent asked, "Have
you ever gone around the Horn?" Well aware that the shipping
companies preferred seasoned sailors who had made a trip or two
around Cape Horn, the young man admitted that he had not made
the trip. The agent said, "Follow me," and then led him into the
next room. A horn of a steer was in the middle of the floor. The
agent said, "Now just walk slowly around that horn." The startled
would be sailor did as he was ordered. "You have now gone around
the horn and I can get you a job on a ship going to India." The youth
had been made a sailor in name only. He had the name, but
not the experience.
There is a great deal of difference between calling yourself a
Christian and being a Christian by the experience of yielding your
life to Jesus Christ, and trusting Him as your Savior. Many take the
name, but do not have the experience. It is the experience that saves
and not the label. John had personal experience with Jesus, and his
whole letter is urging all of us to enter into personal experiences
with the Living Christ that we might like Him be able to speak with
the voice of experience.
