3.22 - The Conquering Faith
Chapter 22 The Conquering Faith
St John’s Life-span—The World of his Time—The Long Campaign—The Centre of the Battle—Ancient Doketism—Modern Humanism—A Real Incarnation and Atonement—Love and Discipline—Loving the Begetter in the Begotten—Depth and Breadth of Christian Love—The Anvil of Character—Failure of Undisciplined Churches—“His Commandments not grievous.”
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Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ, is begotten of God;
And whosoever loveth Him that begat, loveth him also that is begotten of Him.
In this we perceive that we love the children of God,—
When we love God and do His commandments;
For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments;
And His commandments are not grievous!
For whatsoever is begotten of God, overcometh the world;
And this is the victory that hath overcome the world,—even our faith:
Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus
is the Son of God?”
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ST JOHN writes as a veteran leader in Christ’s wars, standing now on the verge of the Apostolic age. The sixty years of his ministry have witnessed all that God had wrought by St Peter and St Paul, for Jew and Gentile; they have been illuminated by the judgement-fires of Jerusalem’s overthrow and the martyr-fires of Nero’s persecution. The Christian faith has encountered, under one shape or other, most of the world-powers hostile to it. By this time the Church is firmly planted in the cities of the Mediterranean shores; Christ’s fishers have spread their nets and are plying their craft along all the currents of life that flow through the Roman Empire. Looking back on his Christian course so nearly finished, remembering the triumph of the Captain of Salvation which has been repeated by His followers in life and death upon so many fields and looking forward with the eye of prophecy to the advent of the new heaven and earth, the old Apostle is able to say, in no presumptuous assurance, “This is the victory which hath overcome the world,—it is our faith!”
It was a dismal world St John surveyed—the world which had Domitian for its emperor, Juvenal for its poet, and Tacitus for its historian. In all directions men lay crushed beneath the tyrannies and evils of the age. He and his comrades alone upon that wide arena stand erect and free; nowhere but in the Christian camp are there found confidence and resourcefulness: “Who is he that overcometh the world,” the Apostle cries, “save he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?” Victory is the word in which, at this threatening hour, the last of the Apostles sums up his personal experience (ἡνίκηἡνικήσασα) and records the issue of the first grand campaign of Christ’s kingdom, during which its future course and history had been rehearsed. He sees “the darkness passing away, and the true light already shining.” So Jesus had been bold to say, with Gethsemane and Calvary awaiting Him, “Be of good cheer: I have overcome the world!” (John 16:33.)
St John thus celebrates the end of the first century. We have witnessed the end of the nineteenth; and still the fight goes on,—a weary warfare! As one crisis after another passes, the war of the ages opens into larger proportions; it sweeps over a wider area and draws into its compass more completely the forces of humanity,—this immense combat between the sin of man and the grace of God in Christ. The end is not yet. The powers of evil recover from defeat; one and another of the heads of “the wild beast” are “smitten unto death,” and “his death-stroke is healed, and the whole earth wonders after” him again (Revelation 13:3). The advance of Christ’s kingdom calls into the field at every stage new opposers; treasons and schisms, and collusions and compromises with the enemy, have caused innumerable repulses and indefinite delays in the subjugation of the world to the rule of Christ, which seemed imminent to the fervent hope of His early followers. Still their faith remains—our faith—after this long testing, the rallying centre of the spiritual forces, the fountain of hope and refreshment for all that is best in mankind. Everything else has changed; empires, civilizations, social systems, religions and philosophies, have gone down into the gates of Hades; but the Church of Jesus Christ survives and spreads, the imperishable institution of our race. Still the Gospel shines out over the storm-swept shores, the one lighthouse for the labouring ship of human destiny. The Christian faith, as St John proclaimed and held it, is the most vital thing in the world, the most active and ameliorative factor of modern history. “Neither is there salvation in any other”; up to this date, “no other name has been given under heaven amongst men, whereby we must be saved.” Nothing since its coming has touched human nature to the like saving effect; nothing else at the present time takes hold of it so freshly, and with an influence so powerful for good, and for good so manifold, as the doctrine which St John calls “our faith.” The struggle in which John the Apostle was engaged as a foremost combatant, while it has swelled into world-wide dimensions, has assumed features outwardly far different from those of his times. But the identity of principle is profound. And the conflict of faith in the twentieth century, in some of its conditions, repeats the experience of the first century more closely than has been the case at any intervening epoch. Now, as then, the contest centres in the primary facts of the Gospel-record, and in the nature and authority of Jesus Christ as thereby authenticated; other issues are brushed aside. Once more we “have the same conflict which” we “saw to be in” St Paul and St John. Present-day discussions are going to the root of things in Christianity; and Christians may rejoice in the fact, since a conflict so radical should be the more decisive. The testimony of the Apostles to Jesus Christ the Son of God, and the living work of His Spirit amongst men: these two demonstrations, just as at the beginning, supply the ground on which faith and unbelief are now contending. Here lie the burning questions of the hour; other debates, momentous as they have been and still may be—concerning the authority of Church or Bible, the validity of Orders and Sacraments, or the doctrines of Election and Free Will—have fallen into abeyance in comparison of these. Who was Jesus Christ? Does He live and work in the world, since His death on Calvary? and if so, where and how? This is what men are wanting to know; and who of those that have known Him can tell us better, with more intimate knowledge and transparent sincerity, than His servant John?
Let us endeavour to get behind the Apostle’s words in this passage, asking from them two things: First, what was the specific object of the world-conquering faith, as St John held it and witnessed its early triumphs? and in the second place, what were its characteristic marks and the methods of its working?
I. The answer to our first inquiry lies close at hand. “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ, is begotten of God; . . . and whatever is begotten of God, overcomes the world.” Again, “Who is it that overcomes the world, but he that believes that Jesus is the Son of God?” A little further down (1 John 4:9-10) we read: “This is the witness of God, viz. that He has borne witness about His Son. . . . He that does not believe God, has made Him a liar, in that he has not believed in the witness that God has borne about His Son.” Further back, in 1 John 4:14-15: “We have beheld and do bear witness, that the Father has sent the Son as Saviour of the world. Whoso confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwells in him and he in God.” The assertion of the Divine Sonship of Jesus was the Apostle John’s battle-cry. It is enunciated not as the stereotyped and conventional article of a long-accepted creed, but as the utterance of a passionate conviction, the condensed record of a profound and vivid life-experience,—a belief shared by the writer with numerous companions, which had proved no less fruitful in the salvation of others than it was real and commanding to the consciousness of the first confessors. That “Jesus is the Son of God,” that “the blood of Jesus, God’s Son, cleanses from sin,”—these facts were the life of life to the fellowship which the old Apostle had gathered round him; in these two certainties lay the kernel and essence of the faith which the testimony of the Church has sustained in the world until now.
The Apostle, in making these emphatic and repeated statements about his Master, is denying as well as affirming. By the time that he wrote this letter, it is likely that most intelligent and candid men who had acquainted themselves with the facts were persuaded that Jesus was in some sense a Saviour and Divine. But then differences began. To people of philosophical training and ways of thinking, the Godhead appeared so remote from material nature that to accept Jesus of Nazareth as being, in any proper sense, “the Son of God” was for them extremely difficult; it ran counter to all their accepted principles. To think of a Divine person being born of a woman and subject to the mean and offensive conditions of physical existence—this was monstrous! The idea revolted their sensibilities; it was an outrage upon reason, to be classed with the Pagan myths of the birth of Athena or Dionysos. For the visible data of the history of Jesus Christ His disciples were competent witnesses, and should be listened to respectfully; but the interpretation was a different matter, and required a philosophy beyond the fishermen of Galilee. Faith must be wedded to reason, the revelation of Christ adapted to the mind of the age. With this purpose of rationalizing Christianity on a Hellenistic theosophic basis, and of reconciling the incompatible attributes of Deity and manhood in the Redeemer, the Doketists (the “men of seeming”) broached their theory, probably before the close of the first century. This hypothesis explained our Lord’s human and earthly career as being phenomenal, an illusion of the senses, an edifying spectacle and parable, a kind of Divine play-acting, behind which there lay a spiritual reality wholly different from the ostensible and carnal (compare pp. 88, 318); to this deeper content of the Gospel, hidden from a vulgar “faith,” the men of advanced “knowledge” (compare 2 John 1:9; also 1 Timothy 6:20) held the clue. The writer traverses the Doketic doctrine specifically in 1 John 4:2 ff.: “In this perceive the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses Jesus Christ come in flesh, is of God; every spirit that confesses not Jesus, is not of God. And this is the spirit of the Antichrist” (compare 2 John 1:7; John 1:14, etc.; also 1 Corinthians 12:3). The emergence of the controversy so early shows how strict and high a doctrine of the Godhead of Jesus Christ was held in the primitive Church; this doctrine is its datum and background. To a humanistic and positive age like the present, the offence of the Person of Jesus Christ lies on the other side. Our aversion is to the transcendental. We are sure that Jesus Christ was man; how can He have been at the same time the very God? The problem of our Doketism is to explain His seeming Deity. It has become the fashion to say that Jesus Christ “has the value of God for us”—a subtle phrase capable of more meanings than one, but which serves in the case of many who use it to eliminate from the God-man all real Godhead. Let us begin to suspect that Jesus Christ is God simply in human estimate, and we have ceased to esteem Him so. If the face-value of our Lord’s name has no solid ascertainable capital behind it, the Christian currency is indefinitely depreciated; all the contents of our faith are depleted, and the entire stock becomes a nominal asset. To say that our Lord has “the value of God” though He is not God, is to take from Him all distinctive value.
Other Gnostic theorists of St John’s later days would have it that Jesus Christ consisted of two persons temporarily allied or amalgamated: their views we have stated in Chapter 10 and Chapter 19 (see especially pp. 219-220). The notion of a double personality in the Lord Jesus Christ, worked out with numberless variations in detail, was a general tenet of early Christian Gnosticism. The Apostle gives in this letter to all such evasions a point-blank contradiction “Jesus is the Christ—Jesus is the Son of God.—God loved us, and sent His Son a propitiation for our sins.—The blood of Jesus, His Son, cleanseth us from every sin.” As much as to say, “Jesus Christ is not two persons but One—the God-man, the sinless Sin-bearer! We have a real incarnation, a real atonement; and not a system of phantasms and dissolving views, of make-believes and value-judgements.” By delivering this witness—“the testimony of God,” the Apostle call, it, “concerning His Son”—St John has preserved Christianity from dissolution in the mists of Gnostical speculation. He has kept for us the faith which saves men universally and subdues the world—“to wit,” as St Paul put it, “that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself “ (2 Corinthians 5:19). Our human nature is a paltry thing enough, in many of its aspects; but when one sees how it has required, and how all over the world it responds to, the manifestation of God in Christ, it becomes a grand and awful thing to consider. Nothing less, it seems, than the very God made man suffices to fill and satisfy, and thoroughly to save, the soul of a man; no cheaper blood than that of “Jesus, God’s Son,” would avail to wash out the turpitude of man’s offence and to cleanse his conscience from dead works for service to the living God. These assertions of the New Testament anticipated the experience of nineteen Christian centuries. To say that the old controversies about the nature of Christ, or the modern discussions in which they are revived, are metaphysical subtleties of no importance for practical life, is to say a thing about as mistaken and superficial as could be put into words. By so much as anyone has subtracted from the human reality of the character and life of Jesus Christ on the one hand, or from His Divine glory and authority upon the other, by so much he has diminished the efficiency of the Gospel, its power to win and awe the general spirit of mankind and to save the people from their sins.
If Jesus Christ be in point of fact what His Apostles said, if the infinite God has in Him stooped to our flesh and lodged Himself there for our salvation, then the grace of God and the nearness of God to men are brought home to us indeed. Let me grasp for myself the fact that God so loved the world,” that the man who lived the life of Jesus and died the atoning death upon the cross, is one with the Almighty and is His own and only-begotten Son, the effect on my nature is instantaneous and immense; life and the world are changed to me from that hour. This faith becomes, in those who truly have it, a spring of moral energy such as rises from no other source, a fountain of hope and resolution which nothing can overpower; its source is “the bosom of the Father” (John 1:18). To have such inward life is, in St John’s sense, to be “begotten of God”; it is to become the child of God through faith in His Son’s name.
II. The second question, as to the distinctive marks of the conquering faith and the methods of its working, is not answered here so categorically as the former; but its answer is implicitly contained in these verses and occupies a great part of the Epistle. The answer turns on the two main points of feeling and doing, of temper and conduct. The conquering faith, the faith that will meet human nature and needs, that takes effectual hold both of the individual man and of society, must teach us first how to love and then how to behave. Now, faith in the Son of God incarnate does these two things, like no other principle. It inculcates love and discipline; it kindles a holy fire in the heart, it puts a strong yoke about the neck. The Christian faith, where it is truly and rightly held, teaches men to work by love and to walk by rule.
1. For the former of these two marks 1 John 4:19 has spoken: “We love, because He first loved us.” Love is the primary fruit and palmary evidence of the Spirit of Christ (compare Galatians 5:22). “Herein,’’ says our Apostle, “have we cone to know love, in that He (Jesus, the Son of God) for us laid down His life” (1 John 3:16); it was as if the world had never known love before. Alike in quality and quantity, love has wonderfully grown amongst mankind since; the Christian era; it is reinforced, like some feeble stream that was dwindling in the sands, by a new and vast reservoir gathered high in the mountains of God. In its noblest, tenderest, and most fruitful manifestations the love that prevails in the world can be traced back to the coming of the Son of God and dates historically from the Incarnation. That God the Father should have the love of our whole being, was “the first and great commandment” of Jesus; His gospel secures the keeping of this law. Let any man believe in his soul that God was in Christ, let him behold, as Saul of Tarsus did on the way to Damascus, the glory of God shining on the face of Jesus, and a boundless love is awakened in his heart towards the Great Being who has thus sought his salvation. He begins from this time to serve God as a beloved and trustful child obeys the father; he counts himself a son amongst the many brethren of whom Jesus is the firstborn. That faith in Jesus as the Son of God generates an adoring devotion to the Father who sent Him, the Apostle assumes as a matter of course, and of every-day experience amongst his little children.
It is the further consequence, touching the second law of Jesus, that St John is at pains to insist upon; he returns to this subject again and again (1 John 2:6-11; 1 John 3:10-24, 1 John 4:7-21). For it was here that the difficulty was found in the working of the new faith, as our Lord had predicted (see, e.g., Matthew 24:10-12). Just upon this point the victory within the Christian heart, and within the Church, was stubbornly disputed; and for the same reason the conquering faith has suffered most of its rebuffs and the long delays of its march through the world. The love toward God to which faith in Christ gives birth, is calculated to give rise to all sorts and forms of beneficent love to men. Thus it was to yield its manifold remedial fruit; from this spring were destined to flow the streams of mercy and bounty that should renovate human society and turn the barren earth into the garden of the Lord. The Incarnation is the basis of the loftiest and most powerful human affections. Love to God and to man are, according to St John, identical passions; they are the same love toward kindred natures—kindred, however distant, since they are one in the person of the Son of God and since men are made sons of God through Him; for “whosoever loveth Him that begat, loveth him also that is begotten of Him” (1 John 4:1; compare p. 354). It is the nature of God that one loves in His children; and if one does not love that nature here, one does not love it there. The pious man who is not brotherly, is a gross self-contradiction. St John is very short with people of this class: “If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar!” (1 John 4:20; see Chapter 21). Either he is a hypocrite, wilfully deceiving others; or else he still more completely deceives himself. “He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, cannot love God whom he hath not seen”: there is something of God in every good man, and if one does not see and love that something, it is because the eyes of love are wanting. It is not in reality the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ that the selfish and suspicious Christian professor loves, but a theological figment of his own brain. According to the doctrine St John has just taught in the closing verses of chapter 4, one cannot love God truly without embracing in the same love men who are His image. On the same principle of the solidarity of God with men in Jesus Christ, one cannot love men rightly without loving God who is their original: such is the argument contained in 1 John 4:2. If love to men proves the truth of our love to God, love to God proves the worth of our love to men. Love to God is impossible without love to man; love to man is possible indeed, but imperfect and unsure without love to God. While the human affection reveals the existence and employs the energy of the Divine, the Divine affection guards the purity and sustains the constancy of the human. There are those, indeed, who love their fellow-men without any manifest regard to God—amiable, generous, philanthropic men who are not religious. But if the Apostle John was right, there is a grave anomaly, there is some great mistake or misunderstanding, in such instances as these. Some men have more religion than they will admit, or are fairly aware of, as others certainly have very much less. “Herein,” St John writes, “we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and do His commandments.”
We must, to be sure, take the word “love” in its Christian sense. We have nothing to do here with the love which is animal passion; nor with the love that is corporate selfishness—the devotion of a man to his family, his friends, his clan, which is consistent with harshness and injustice towards those outside of the narrow circle,—a love without humanity. There is, again, much humane affection which looks to the physical well-being of its objects, but without thought for the true ends and the inner wealth of human life. The higher love includes this lower, which touches bodily need and natural welfare (τὸνβίοντοῦκόσμου, 1 John 3:17; compare James 2:15-17); but the lower is often found without the higher—a philanthropy that sees in the man only the more sensitive and necessitous animal, and knows nothing of his hunger for the bread which came down from heaven. That love alone is worthy of a human being which embraces his whole nature, and strives to reach through the flesh the depths of his spirit, as the compassions of Jesus did. The charity which supplies the body’s needs must be instinct with a sense of that which lies behind them in the sufferer’s soul, or it degrades instead of blessing. When we love in our offspring not our own so much as God’s children, we love them wisely and well. When it is not their wealth nor their wit, nor the charms of person and manner, for which we prize our friends and cleave to them, but character—purity, courage, reverence, goodness, the God-given and God-born; when it is this, in man or woman, that our affection seizes on and that we treasure as great spoil, then we “love in deed and in truth”; then we know what this great word means, for “we love the children of God.”
All deep human love strikes down somewhere into the Divine, though it may strike darkly and with a dim feeling after Him who is not far from any one. “Every good gift and perfect boon cometh down from the Father: love is the best of all His gifts; coming from Him, it leads to Him. If that leading be resisted, both God is missed and love is lost. It is a daring word of our Apostle, but we may trust it, if we esteem love worthily: “Love is of God; and every one that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth God. ... He that abideth in love abideth in God, and God in him” (1 John 4:7, 1 John 4:10).
Here lies the secret of “the victory which hath overcome the world.” Love is ever conqueror. There is no refuge for the heart, no fortress in temptation but this. There is nothing that so lifts a man above the sordid and base, which so arms him for the battle of life, as a pure and noble passion of the heart. Where kindled and fed from above, it burns through life a steady fire, consuming lust and vanity and the evil self in us, melting out earth’s dross from heaven’s pure gold. Of all such love working through the world’s mighty frame, the love of God the Father who created and redeemed mankind in His eternal Son, is the central pulse; and the Christian faith creates the main channels and arteries by which it is to reach mankind.
2. To the first characteristic of “our faith,” viewed in its operative force, we have to add a second—thediscipline into which the Divine love translates itself: “For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments “ (1 John 5:3). In Jesus the Son of God mankind has found its Master. We have in Him a King to obey, a law to fulfil, a pattern to follow, a work to do, a Church, which is His body, to serve as its limbs and organs. Discipleship spells discipline. Antinomianism is the most shocking and deadly of heresies. Free Churches in which the adjective of their proud title overshadows the substantive, where combativeness and self-assertion have free play and men will not “submit themselves one to another in fear of Christ,” are doomed to sterility and disintegration. Without rules and bounds, love spends itself in emotional effusion, it exhales in vapid sentiment. Let the stream be banked and channelled along the natural lines of its course, and it turns a thousand busy wheels, and spreads health, fruitfulness, beauty over the plain which, if left unbridled and unguided, it converts into a stagnant marsh. There is nothing that sustains and deepens true feeling like wise restraint and the harness of well-ordered labour. What becomes of the love of man and woman without the Seventh Commandment? of the endearments of home without toil for daily bread, without household laws and the bonds of mutual duty? Where those once touched with the love of God and the fire of the new life are not taught, or refuse to learn, the right ways of the Lord, where they will not endure “for the Lord’s sake ordinances of men” and the “hardship” that makes good soldiers (1 Peter 2:13; Romans 13:1-7; 2 Timothy 2:3-5), there religious zeal proves evanescent or turns to a wild and hurtful fanaticism. Wholesome, honest love always means commandment-keeping.
“The world” on which the commandments of Love’s law directly bear is the sphere of each man’s personal lot, the homely, circumstantial world of his daily calling. There “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the vainglory of life—all that is in the world (1 John 2:16)—beset him in continual siege. In that small arena, watched closely by the eyes of God, and perhaps of two or three besides, is waged the unceasing conflict with appetite and pride and passion, with mean circumstances and petty provocations and saddening disappointments, with languor and indecision, with restlessness and discontent. On this secret battlefield character stroke by stroke is beaten into shape, through the hourly choice and acting out of good or ill amid the countless forgotten details of home relationship and business avocation. There the crown of life is lost or won. Of this near and more intimate κόσμος St John was thinking, rather than of the great world of history and of empires, when he assured his readers of victory; for it was in their personal habits, in the family system and social environment of the times, that the field of their severest struggles lay.
Any achievements gained, whether by the individual Christian or the Church collectively, in the greater world outside depend upon success here in the first place, on the trained fidelity of Christ’s servants in their private walks of life. Practised in that gymnasium—in the household, in the school, in the punctual and honourable discharge of daily business—Christian men will know how to behave themselves in the Church of God, how to “walk in rank” (στοιχῶμεν) as men “led by the Spirit” and “living by the Spirit” (Galatians 5:18, Galatians 5:25), keeping step and time with their fellows. That love of order, that instinct for unity of feeling and action, will possess them which our Lord prayed for in His disciples when he asked “that they all may be one, as thou Father art in me and I in thee “ (John 17:21). But where professedly religious men are undisciplined and self-indulgent in their private habits, loose in talk amongst men of the world, unscrupulous in business, irregular in worship both at home and Church, ready to turn their shoulder from the heavier burdens of Christ’s service, no one can wonder that discords break up Christian communion or that “our Gospel is hid” and “our faith” in many quarters is flouted by the world, since it is so cruelly wounded in the house of its friends. It is hard to say whether poverty of love or neglect of discipline forms the greater occasion of stumbling and cause of delay in the Church’s advance to conquest. In these defects it is certain our hindrances lie, far more than in any intellectual difficulties or skeptical prepossessions of the time. This is our Master’s first and last complaint, “Why call ye me Lord, Lord, and do not the things that I say?” To the Apostle John’s experience, love and discipline were one, as love to God and to men are one. Love, in practice, is keeping the commandments; obedience, in spirit, is simply love. “But the law of Christ,” someone says, “is stern and strict; it requires a righteousness exceeding that of the Scribes and Pharisees.” Certainly it does.—“I must be always giving and forgiving, always bearing and forbearing.” Indeed you must; who could think of following Jesus in any other way?—This reluctance means simply a cold heart towards Christ. Do our soldiers think it a monstrous thing that they must bear rigid discipline and bitter hardship, that they must shed their blood for King and country? The cruel thing would be to prevent them doing it. Or does the mother count it hard to stint herself for the babe at her breast? If mothers once began to reason thus, the race would perish. “His commandments are not grievous,” says the heart which knows the love that God hath toward us, “because they areHis—because I love Him and His lightest word is law to me.”
After all, the God-man is the Master of men; His “spirit of power and love and discipline” is bound to prevail with those who bear His name. However long a task it may prove, as men count time, the Lord Jesus will yet have His yoke fitted to the world’s neck; and the Father’s will shall be done on earth as in heaven. He must reign.