3.16 - The Inadmissibility Of Sin
Chapter 16 The Inadmissibility Of Sin
Hope awakens Fear—Five Reasons against Sin in Believers—Sin Ruinous—Sin Illegal—Deepening of Sense of Sin in Scripture—The Constitutional Objection to Sin—Sin Unchristian—Bearing and Removing Sin—Sinlessness of Sin’s Abolisher—Sin and Christ incompatibles —Paradox of a Sinning Christian—Sin Diabolical—Extra-human Origin of Sin—The Dominion of Satan—Its coming Dissolution—“Children of the Devil”—Sin Unnatural in God’s Child—The Facts of Saintship—The Source of Saintship—The Christian non possumus—St John’s High Doctrine of Holiness.
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Every one that doeth sin, doeth also lawlessness;
Indeed sin is lawlessness.
And you know that He was manifested, that He might take away sins;
And sin in Him there is not.
Every one that abideth in Him, sinneth not:
Every one that sinneth, hath not seen Him nor come to know Him.
Little children, let no one deceive you:
He that doeth righteousness is righteous, according as He is righteous:
He that doeth sin is of the Devil,—for from the beginning the Devil sinneth;
For this end the Son of God was manifested, that He might undo the works of the Devil.
Every one that is begotten of God, doeth no sin,
Because His seed abideth in him:
Indeed he cannot sin, because he hath been begotten of God.
―—―♦——— THE Church of the first age lived in expectation of the return of the Lord Jesus from heaven. At any hour He might “be manifested” (1 John 2:28; 1 John 3:2), to the shame or glory of His servants. This ἀποκαραδοκία as the Apostle Paul called it (Romans 8:19)—the uplifted head and the wistful look of the Bride waiting for her Lord—was the attitude still maintained by the Christian communities amongst which St John laboured, toward the close of the first century. The expectation was less vivid and absorbing than it had been at an earlier time—the strain was too intense for continuance—but it remained, and supplied the motives for fidelity and aspiration to which the Apostle John appealed in the previous paragraph of the Epistle. For one who believes in Jesus Christ the Lord of glory, the hope of acceptance at His coming furnishes an incentive as powerful and honourable as any that the mind can entertain. This motive St John regarded as well-grounded, and as indispensable for his “little children,” though he seldom appeals to it. The hope of the Christian man, based on his Lord’s promise, is to see Him in His state of heavenly glory. Now that implies, the Apostle had asserted, a moral congruity, a harmony of character between the see-er and the Seen. Vision, in the spiritual sphere, turns upon affinity and moral sympathy.
There is a pre-adjustment between the eye and the light; the sun finds itself mirrored in the optic instrument. Those who expect to “see Christ as He is,” make their account therefore with “being like Him” and aim at this; he who seeks Christ as his goal, takes Him for his way and studies to “walk even as He walked:” so the Apostle has just been arguing (1 John 3:2-3; compare 1 John 2:6). But the “confidence” of the Christian at the Parousia may, on the other hand, be turned to confusion (1 John 2:28); his “hope” awakens a fear lest he should be found unlike his Saviour, and so debarred from a sight of His glory: this, fear is the other side of his hope, the hope translated into negative terms. In this association of ideas the tacit connection lies between 1 John 2:3 and 1 John 2:4, between the paragraph of encouragement in prospect of Christ’s coming (1 John 2:28-29, 1 John 3:1-3) and that of warning against the deceitfulness of sin, which is its sequel (1 John 3:4-9). That connection is aptly expressed by the language of 2 Peter 3:14: “Wherefore, beloved, as you expect these things, give diligence to be found in peace, without spot and without reproach before Him.”
1. Viewed in this light, the passage before us supplies a strong deterrent against moral declension, in the fact that such relapse will rob the servant of Christ of his dear reward, and defeat his hope of entrance into the eternal kingdom. In a word, sin is ruinous; it destroys the Christian man’s future, and turns the salvation he had looked for into perdition. This is the first of five reasons why they should not sin, which the Apostle gives his little children in this paragraph. The other four follow in the verses before us,—which are so many “Checks to Antinomianism,”77 so many darts aimed by St John’s powerful hand at sin in believers. The whole passage is a keen, concise demonstration of the inadmissibility of sin. In 1 John 2:1 (“My little children, these things I am writing to you so that you may not sin”) the Apostle acknowledged his fear on this account, and indicated one chief intention governing the Epistle. The present section of the letter shows how deeply this purpose entered into his thoughts (compare pp. 63-64), and how grave the danger was lest the Church, infected with Gnostic errors of doctrine, should be tainted at the same time with antinomian corruptions of life. He makes out that on every ground it is impossible for the followers of Jesus Christ and children of God to acquiesce in sin,—in any kind or degree thereof.
2. If the first reason against a Christian’s sinning, implicitly contained in 1 John 2:3, was that the act is ruinous to his eternal prospects, the second, explicitly stated in 1 John 2:4, is that sin is illegal: “Every one who commits sin, commits also lawlessness; indeed, sin is lawlessness.” To ourselves this is a commonplace; the predicate adds nothing to the content of the subject in the sentence ἡἁμαρτίαἐστὶνἡἀνομία, nor to its dehortatory force. The word “sin” carries, to our conscience, a fuller and more pregnant sense than “illegality” or mere “breach of law.” Not so for the original readers. Ἁμαρτία, i.e., “missing the mark,” did not convey in common speech a uniform nor very strong moral significance; it might mean no more than a mistake, a fault of ignorance, or ill-luck. This is one of the many Greek Christian words which had contracted a new religious stamp and depth of intension from the Septuagint. As the rendering of the Hebrew chaṭṭa’th, ἁμαρτία became something graver than before—more serious in the degree in which the faith of Israel was more serious and morally earnest than Greek humanism. “Sin,” it is said, “is a creation of the Bible.” Etymologically, this is perfectly true. For the Bible has given voice to the stifled conscience of mankind. Paralysed and half-articulate, the moral consciousness could not even name the evil that crushed it. “The knowledge of sin,” which, as St Paul says, “came through the law,” was a condition precedent to its removal. Sin must be known, to be hated; defined, so that it may be denounced and done away. It had to be identified, to be distinguished from the Man himself, to be recognized in its abnormal character and traced to its alien origin. And this was a first necessity of revelation; the task required the supernatural aid of the Spirit of truth and of God. The Apostle in saying “Sin is lawlessness” virtually affirms that “Lawlessness is sin.” His proposition is convertible; the predicate (ἡἀνομία) as well as the subject (ἡἁμαρτία), is written with the Greek article of definition: the two terms cover the same ground, since they denote the same thing, defining it from different sides. The Bible knows of no boundary line between the religious and the ethical. Since man was created in the image of God and the end of his life is determined by God, every lapse from that end, every moral aberration (ἁμαρτία), is an act of rebellion, a violation of the constitutional laws of human nature (ἀνομία). The equation is fixed by the intrinsic affinity of our being to the Divine. The heathen regarded the gods as, like earthly potentates, beings external to themselves, possessing certain rights over men and dictating certain duties for men as it might please them. So long as men give them their dues, observing the ceremonies of religion and conforming to the laws of the State imposed under their sanction, they are content. With private morals and the inner condition of the soul they have nothing to do: that is the man’s own affair. Individual thinkers—Sophocles, for example, or Socrates—might rise above this level of belief; but Pagan thought tended in general to externalize religion in forms of custom, and to divorce morality and piety. From the ethical side the same severance was maintained. The moral philosophy of the Greeks was developed mainly upon naturalistic and political lines, apart from religion; it suffers still from this deficiency. The attempts are constantly renewed to frame a self-contained ethical theory, resting on materialistic assumptions and historical induction in disregard of the religious implications of morality, to shape an ideal of human character and a norm of human duty wherein God the Creator has no place. This is to build without a foundation upon the sand. In quite another sense, the same artificial separation was made by Jewish Pharisaism. Formal transgressions of God’s written law, constituting indictable offences, were eschewed by men who contrived to commit notwithstanding many kinds of wrong and vileness. With wonderful ingenuity, they evaded the spirit and intent of the law whose letter they punctiliously observed and fenced round with regulations of their own, designed to ward off the most distant possibility of infraction. A man might sin, as it was supposed, might be morally culpable and contemptible, while he broke no law of God; or he might escape Divine chastisement by rendering a legal satisfaction, which had no ethical value and in no way touched the heart. The law of Israel was thus reduced to a system of technical jurisprudence, with which “righteousness, mercy, and faith” had little to do.
These sophistications, whether Jewish or Pagan in their conception, St John traverses, cutting clean across the web of error when he writes: “Whosoever doeth sin, doeth also lawlessness.” The teaching of the New Testament deepens the conception of sin, by treating it as a lapse from man’s true end posited in God; it broadens the conception of law, by regarding it as the norm for man’s action fixed by his relationship to God.
Both the end of man’s existence defeated by “sin,” and its rule violated by “lawlessness,” are grounded on the nature of God, in whose image man was made. This image is seen in Jesus Christ, “through whom are all things, and we through Him” (1 Corinthians 8:6). He presents to mankind the ideal, of which written codes are no more than the approximate expression. Thus Christianity brings the two conceptions into the same plane, and makes them coincide. Every deviation from the right (ἁμαρτία), every moral error and flaw, is opposed to the sovereignty of God and to the revealed law of our nature as men (ἀνομία). Here lies the fundamental and constitutional objection to sin. It is condemned by the laws of the universe.
3. In 1 John 3:5-7 St John goes on to say that sin is unchristian. Here, again, we must put ourselves at the standpoint of the readers, if we are not to make the Apostle write mere truisms. They had things to learn which we have been learning for centuries, and to unlearn evil presumptions that were their second nature. The current religions rested on non-ethical conceptions; their gods and prophets were not distinguished by much severity against sin or aloofness from it. To the Paganism of the day it was a startling message, to be told of a God who “is light,” in whom “there is no darkness at all” (Chapter 8). The same thing is virtually said, by the emphatic and precise declarations of 1 John 3:5 and 1 John 5:7, respecting the messenger, the Word and Son of God (1 John 1:1, 1 John 1:7), through whom the eternal Father was made known. The channel of the new life is as pure as its source. All Christians “know” this to be so; by their knowledge they are bound to abjure sin. “You know that He was manifested78 to take away sins.” St John has twice said, “if He should be manifested,” thinking of Christ’s expected revelation in that body of glory to which the children of God are to be conformed (1 John 2:28; 1 John 3:2); but “He has been manifested”—a signal appearance of the Divine in our flesh has taken place, which was God’s demonstration against sin. God’s Son was sent to rid the human race of it—to take the world’s manifold “sins” clean away (ἱνατὰςἁμαρτίαςἄρῃ). Christ and sin are utter contraries; each meant the death of the other. For “taking away (αἴρειν) sins “signifies more than the sacrificial bearing of sins; it adds to this the idea of removal. The Sin-bearer lifts the load and takes its weight upon Him, not to let the burden fall again upon its victims, but to carry it right off and make an end of it. “He hath been manifested,” as another writer puts it, “once for all at the consummation of the ages, forthe abolition of sins through His sacrifice” (Hebrews 9:26). According to the double use of the Hebrew nasa’, with chet’ or ‘avon, αἴρω in such connection has this twofold sense. Herein lies the completeness of Christ’s redemption. The cross destroys both the guilt and power of sin; righteousness is imputed and implanted in one act. St John does not credit this undoing of sin to the sacrifice of Calvary by itself, but to the entire incarnate revelation; for the verb ἐφανερώθη is unqualified, and recalls the saying of 1 John 1:2, “the life was manifested.” The whole appearance, character, and action of the Incarnate Son went to counter-work and overthrow the world’s sins. This manifestation of God against sin culminated in the “propitiation for sins” effected by our Lord’s sacrificial death (1 John 2:2; see pp. 126-130); all that Jesus was and did wrought toward this end, which He pursued with a single mind. We hear another echo (see p. 130) of the Baptist’s saying, which in the first instance led the Apostle to Jesus and supplied him afterwards with the key to his Master’s mission: “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh awaythe sin of the world.” The qualifying “our” of the Received Text, before “sins,” is due to the copyists: the Apostle is speaking broadly of that which is true not “for our sins” only, but “for the whole world” (1 John 2:2). Writing τὰςἁμαρτίας (plural) instead of τὴνἁμαρτίαν (as in John 1:29), he is thinking of the abolition of sin as this is to be realized in detail, and realized without limit: similarly it was said in 1 John 1:9, that God “is faithful and righteous, that He should forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” We speak too often, vaguely, of “sin,” as a general principle and power, too little of definite, actual “sins.” Yet an abstract confession of the former may cover an obstinate adherence to the latter. The Remover of sin is, to be sure, Himself without it. “And in Him there is no sin” sums up what has been said of Jesus in 1 John 2:2, in 1 John 3:3 above, what will be said in 1 John 3:7 below, and in 1 John 5:20 at the end of the letter. He is “righteous,” “pure,” “true.” He is “the Son of God,” “the Only-begotten”; “the eternal life” is His, and was manifested in His earthly course. These predicates altogether exclude the notion of sin from our conception of Christ. This goes so much without saying, and the negation of sin in Him is so obvious, that it would be superfluous to state it here, but for the sake of the inference forthwith to be drawn: since “in Him there is no sin,” no one “who abides in Him” can practise sin (1 John 3:6). The union of sin and Christ in the same breast is impossible. The man in Christ inhabits a sinless region; he sees a light unsullied, he breathes an air untainted. Sin has no foothold or lodgement, where the redeemed walk with the risen Christ; it forms no part or parcel of the life that is hid with Christ in God.
1 John 3:6-7 deduce, with a fine combination of mysticism and blunt simplicity, the consequences for Christians of what St John has testified about Christ. If He is sinless and came for the express purpose of abolishing sin, if Christ and sin are incompatible, then to harbour sin is to dissociate oneself from Him. Herein is the saying true: “He that is not with me, is against me.” Not only is the practiser of sin ipso facto out of Christ; his life argues that he always has been so, and that his Christian profession was never genuine.
“Every one that sins has not seen Him nor known Him.”79 The same thing St John had said of the “many antichrists,” extruded from the Church and seducing its membership: “they went out from us, but they were not of us” (1 John 2:19). Their outer severance and overt rebellion against the law of Christ disclose a radical difference of spirit in them. Men of religious profession living in deceit or impurity or lovelessness, who reconcile themselves to sinful practice and yet deem themselves Christians, had from the beginning (the Apostle supposes) no proper knowledge of the Lord they profess to serve. They have never truly seen what Jesus Christ is like nor come to any real acquaintance with Him, or they would recognize the absurdity of their position. For his own part, the writer felt that once to have known the Lord makes any other ideal impossible; once and for all, the love of sin was killed in the disciple by the companionship of Jesus. He would no more think of returning to it now, than the civilized man of reverting to the tastes of the savage, or the philosopher to the babblings of the child. “Mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” cries the young prophet Isaiah; his purged lips could not after this return to their uncleanness (Isaiah 6:5-7). “The time past may suffice” to have wrought folly, to have lived in envy and malice. The sun is up! who that sees it can longer walk as in darkness? The contradiction, lying on the surface, between 1 John 3:6, with its total exclusion of sin from the life of a Christian man, and 1 John 2:1 f. which provides for the case of a Christian brother falling into sin, was noticed in the consideration of the former passage (p. 114). There the aorist subjunctive suggested the possibility of such an occurrence (ἐάντιςἁμαρτῇ): here the present participle (ὁἁμαρτάνων, ὁποιῶντὴνἁμαρτίαν) presumes a habit and character. “Every one that sinneth, that doeth sin,” is as much as to say, “Every sinner, every one whose life yields sin for its product,” —or in the words of 1 John 1:6, “who walks in the darkness.” The Apostle is not dealing in casuistry. He has not before his mind the dubious cases—doubtful to human judgement—that lie on the border-line of Christian assurance, where a man with a sincere faith and love has acted inconsistently or has been “overtaken in some trespass” (Galatians 6:1). There are two broadly contrasted classes of men in view (compare p. 273), each claiming the Christian name,—those who follow the example of Jesus and those who do not. He is dealing with the latter sort, with pretenders to Christianity who excuse wrong-doing and make provision for the flesh to fulfil its lusts, who justify sin as allowable and even normal in the Christian man (since he lives in the body and under material conditions), and who see no necessity that the disciple should be as his Lord. Against these vain talkers and deceivers, against all abettors and apologists of laxity, St John reaffirms in 1 John 3:7 the axiom of moral common sense and of every honest Christian conscience: “Little children, let no one deceive you: he who does righteousness is righteous, even as He (the sinless Christ) is righteous.” His doctrine equally disposes of the modern antinomianism that goes about under an evangelical cloak, and would make the blood-stained robe of Christ’s righteousness the cover for a loose morality,—as though the Lord had said to the absolved adulteress, “Go in peace, and sin again”!
4. Being, negatively, an un-Christian anti-Christian thing, 1 John 3:8 affirms that sin is positively diabolical. The righteous Son of God stands forth as the leader of the sons of God, cleansed by His blood and abiding in His righteousness. For the doers of sin there is another leader; they choose another patron and pattern: “He that commits sin is of the Devil.” The reason St John gives for ascribing this shameful complicity to sinners is that “from the beginning the Devil sins.” There sin, so far as revelation indicates and according to the Apostle’s theory of evil, took its rise,—from that most wretched and wicked being whom Scripture names “the Devil” (“the slanderer”), and “Satan” (“the enemy” of God and man). Satan was the first to lapse from God; and he has continued to sin all along—he “sinneth from the beginning.” From this personal source the law of sin and death first proceeded and “the darkness” spread over the world, even as Christ’s law of love and all the light of the Gospel were “from the beginning” in God the Father (1 John 1:1; 1 John 2:7, 1 John 2:13). Sin is Satan’s domain, his sphere, his work; and every sinner is his ally and instrument. The committer of sin makes himself of the Devil’s party, of the Devil’s spirit, and finally—according to the fearful words of Jesus (Matthew 25:41)—of the Devil’s doom. He is engaged in building up those “works of the Devil,” which “the Son of God came that He might destroy.”80 Every such man is abetting the enemies of God and goodness; he aids the captain of rebellion to maintain that fortress of evil, that huge rampart erected in the universe against the holy and almighty will of God, which we call “sin.” To follow such a leader is as futile a course as it is evil. It is to resist the design of the mission of Jesus Christ and thereby to fight against God, opposing the central stream of His purposes toward mankind. To espouse the cause of Satan against Christ is to embark on a sinking vessel, to enlist under the flag of despair. With triumphant certainty St John writes, “For this end the Son of God was manifested—to undo the works of the Devil”! Unless the Son of God has come in vain, unless He has stepped into the arena to be vanquished, the mischief wrought by Satan in this world is to be undone; the entire confederacy, the compacted forces of evil, will be dissolved (compare Mark 3:27-28). The empire of “the god of this world” is in course of dissolution.
Included in “the works of the Devil,” the life-work of every man who has served upon his side and stood for sin and the world against Christ, is marked for destruction. The sentence “the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the Devil’s works,” is parallel to “He was manifested, that He might take away sins” (1 John 3:5): men’s “sins” are “the Devil’s works”—there is a superhuman potency and direction behind them; in “taking” these “away,” Christ breaks up the fabric of evil and brings Satan’s kingdom to an end.
“Children of the Devil” (τὰτέκνατοῦδιαβόλου) at last St John calls the antinomian religionists outright, who neither “do righteousness” nor “love their brethren” (1 John 3:10). He had the warrant for this epithet in the words with which the Lord Jesus stigmatized the Jewish party who sought His life, who hated the light that shone in Him because their deeds were evil: “You are of your father the Devil, and the lusts of your father it is your will to do. He was a man-slayer from the beginning, and in the truth he standeth not. . . . He is a liar, and the father thereof” (John 8:44). Those who claimed Abraham, and even God, for their father, are referred to this dreadful paternity, since they have Satan’s disposition and work his will against the Son of God. Their moral affinity proved their spiritual descent; their features betrayed their family. On the same principle, Elymas the sorcerer was in the eyes of the Apostle Paul, a “son of the Devil,” being “full of all guile and all villany, an enemy of all righteousness, a perverter of the ways of the Lord” (Acts 13:9 f.). It gives an added odiousness and horror to our sins to consider that they are no detached and casual misdoings, beginning and ending with ourselves. They are threads in a great web of iniquity, cogs in the huge machinery and system of evil extending through this world and reaching, it would seem, beyond it; they implicate us—each sinful act so far as it goes—in that monstrous conspiracy against the government of God, which is represented in the teaching of Christ and Scripture under the name of “the kingdom of darkness” and “of Satan.”
5. In his impeachment of sin in believers, St John comes round in the end to what, under other words, he had said at the beginning: Sin is unnatural in the child of God: it is contradictory–to the very subsistence of the regenerate life and constitutes the denial of its reality. Sin as foreign to the character of the redeemed man himself, as it is alien to the Christ in whom he dwells, and as it is congenial and connatural to the Evil One who tempts him. The two sentences of 1 John 3:9 amount to the above position: as a matter of fact, the child of God “does not do sin” (ἁμαρτίανοὐποιεῖ)—the produce of his life is not of that kind; and as a matter of principle, “he cannot sin.” In the former of these statements St John is appealing to the facts: they are “manifest” (1 John 3:10); the evidence is plain to anyone who cares to look. “We know,” he writes in 1 John 3:14 below, “that we have passed from death into life, because we love the brethren”; so in 1 John 2:13 f. he said, “You young men are strong, and have overcome the Evil One”; in 1 John 5:4, “This is the victory that has overcome the world,—it is our faith”; finally, in 1 John 5:18, “We know that every one that is begotten of God does not sin.” This was the witness of the Apostolic Christian consciousness to the moral efficacy of the Christian spirit. St John’s faithful readers know how widely different their life is from what it had been before conversion, from the daily life of the heathen around them,—and, as he seems to imply, from the life of the Antichrists and false prophets, who are thrusting on them their arrogant claims to a higher knowledge of God than that reached through faith. There are the grapes and figs on the one side—“the fruit of the Spirit,” in love and joy and peace; and the thorns and thistles giving their inevitable yield in “the works of the flesh,” upon the other. The contrast was patent, in the actual condition of society; Christ’s true disciples could not but know that they were “abiding in Him, from the Spirit He had given” them, in crying contrast as that was with the spirit of the world. Each believer had in himself the witness, open to be known and read by all men, of his new birth from God; his freedom from sin, the changed temper and tenor of his life, showed him to be a changed man. To many a one in his beloved flock the Apostle could point and say: “There is a man begotten of God; for, look! he lives a life unstained by sin.”
While behind all sin a Satanic inspiration and paternity are operative, the righteousness of the Christian is due to “a seed of God abiding in him “ (1 John 3:9). There is a hidden master-force governing the man’s behaviour, a mystic influence about him, a principle of Divine sonship in his nature counteracting “the spirit of the world” and rendering him immune from its infection (1 John 4:4; compare 1 Corinthians 2:12; Ephesians 5:8-9), a seed which bears the fruit of righteousness where evil fruits once grew rankly. That “seed of God” dwelling in the believer in Christ is the power of the Holy Spirit, concerning whom St John says in 1 John 3:24: “In this we know that He abideth in us, from the Spirit that He gave us.” The “seed” of this passage is the “chrism” of 1 John 2:27: it invests the Christian with knowledge and power; it inspires him with purity and goodness. St John’s teaching about the Holy Spirit and His relations to individual Christian men agrees with that of St Paul (see p. 68), who recognized in this gift of the Father at once the seal of the adoption of the sons of God and the seed of all Christian growth and fruitage in them. There are, it appears, two lines of spiritual heredity and propagation, diametrically opposed: the filiation from God and from the Devil respectively,—“the Spirit” with His “fruit” and “the flesh” with its “works,” each “lusting against” the other (see Galatians 5:16-24). Each desires what its opposite abhors. To be “led by the Spirit” is “to mortify the deeds of the body” (Romans 8:5, Romans 8:13); the man Spirit-born and Spirit-led works the works of God and counterworks, in and around himself, “the works of the Devil.”
Thus sin is got rid of not by repression, but by preoccupation. The man is possessed by another generative principle. As in land full of good seed actively germinating, weeds want the room to grow; so in a soul in which the Holy Spirit “abides “—where He dwells at the sources of feeling and impulse touching all the springs of action and breathing on all the issues of life, where this God-planted “seed” sends its roots into the depths and its branches into the heights and breadths of the man’s nature—what place is there left for sin? “He cannot sin,” cries the Apostle: “he has been begotten of God!” The children of God can no more live in sin than the children of the Devil out of it. To the Christian man, in the integrity of his regenerate nature and the consciousness of his fellowship with Jesus Christ and his filial relationship to God, sin becomes a moral impossibility. Could St John, for instance, lie or steal? could he hate his fellow-man, or deny the Lord that bought him? Such delinquency was inconceivable, in such a man. When the act of transgression is proposed to the child of God, however strong the inducements or fascinating the allurements it presents, he simply cannot do it. It is against his nature; to commit the offence he must deny himself, and violate not merely his conscience and personal honour, but the instincts of the being received in his new and better birth from God.
There is obviously a certain idealism in the Apostle’s sweeping assertions. His dictum in 1 John 3:9 applies in its absolute truth to the “perfect man” in Christ Jesus. Principle must be wrought into habit, before it has full play and sway. Ignorance and surprise will betray the unpractised believer, turning aside his true purpose; through the mechanical force of old practice, or the pressure of hostile circumstance acting upon him unawares, the man who is yet weak in faith may stumble or yield ground. He is bewildered, against his settled judgement, by some glamour of temptation or sophistry of error. St John would not count a babe in Christ so suffering as reprobate, nor be hasty to take that for a deadly sin which was not deliberately chosen by the will and did not proceed out of his heart. “There is,” he writes in 1 John 5:16 f., “a sin unto death”; and “there is a sin not unto death.” Acts of “wrong-doing” (ἀδικία, 1 John 5:17) are committed by Christian men, which call for prayer on their behalf—prayer that will be answered by God’s “giving life” to those that have so sinned. In all such instances—and charity will extend the limit of them widely—the intercession of the sinner’s Advocate is hopefully invoked (1 John 2:1 f.). Yet the sin itself in every case, so far as its scope extends and so long as it continues, makes for death: it clouds the soul’s light; it involves a forfeiture of sonship, a severance of someone or other of the bonds that unite the soul to God, a grieving of the Holy Spirit and a chilling of His fire within the breast; it calls for the special intercession of Christ, and a further cleansing by His blood (1 John 1:7). A deeper planting of the seed of the Spirit must take place, if the effect of the lapse from grace is to be undone. The hand of God must again be reached out, or ale man who has tripped will stumble into an utter fall; by such help he may become through his stumbling, like Peter after his denial of the Lord, the stronger and warier for the time to come.
Such qualifications of the maxim of these verses the Apostle does virtually make elsewhere. They do not militate against its vital truth, nor detract from the reasonableness and consistency of St John’s doctrine of Sanctification. Sin is that which has no right to be, which therefore must not be; and the Son of God has declared that it shall not be. In the offspring of God, the new man fashioned after Christ, sin has no place whatever; it is banned and barred out at every point, since it is the abominable thing which God hates, vile in itself and ruinous to His creatures. Sin is against law and against nature; it is un-Christian and devilish; it blights every virtue and every aspiration of our being. It is disorder and disease and disfeaturement; it is a shameful bondage, and a most miserable death. Sin is dehumanizing to ourselves, because it is the dethronement of God within us—unmanly, since it is ungodly; the perdition of the individual, and the dissolution of society.
Such, in effect, is St John’s indictment of sin; and he warns and arms his readers on all sides against this one deadly mischief, which besets men from first to last in the present evil world. From sin no salvation has been found save in the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord; but in His love there is a free salvation, and a salvation without limit either in duration or degree.