02.01.02. 1John 1:5 - 2:6 God is light ...

§ 2. 1 John 1:5-10, 1 John 2:1-6

GOD IS LIGHT

St. John’s gospel of life consists first of all in a message about the nature of God. This is because what men will become and do depends in the long run upon what they believe about God. And St. John’s solemn message is given, not in terms of a logical definition of God, but in a brilliant metaphor such as can fire our imaginations and warm our hearts. “This is the message which we have heard from Christ, and announce unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.’’

What is this metaphor meant to convey?

Light is recognized by all as the source and condition of vitality, joy, beauty, security. And the Bible is full of the love of light in every sense. “Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun.” “If a man walk in the day, he stumbleth not, because he seeth the light of this world.” “In thy light shall we see light.” Thus to say that God is pure unqualified light is to convey to us the idea that He is ungrudging goodness, and glorious beauty, and pure truth, infinitely diffusive, rejoicing in the vigorous life and security and joy of His creatures. Certainly darkness is a very large element of our present human experience, deepening into the darkness of death. But it makes the whole difference if behind the darkness is light, and light which the darkness cannot overcome. It makes the whole difference if God, the source and ground of all being, is pure light. Then, as St. James puts it,’ “ every divine giving is good, and every divine gift is perfect in its origin, coming down as it does from the Father of lights, with whom can be no variation, or shadow due to change.”, But, inasmuch as St. John attributes this message specially to Christ, we must look closely at His teaching about “light,” especially as it is given in the Fourth Gospel. And this requires us to interpret the Statement that “God is light” with reference, in the first place, and indeed almost exclusively, to moral righteousness; and St. John, in fact, follows it up immediately with a statement of the incompatibility of any acquiescence in moral evil with the fellowship of God, which is religion. We are so accustomed, at least in theory, to the intimate and necessary association of morality with religion that we are apt to forget how much we owe it to the Bible. What may most properly be called “natural religion” all the world over is mainly non-moral. It is nature-worship in some form; and, as nature is non-moral, so is its worship. And where it is the worship of the productive and reproductive powers of nature it is often immoral. Thus Ephesus, where St. John wrote, was a famous religious centre. Its business was largely religious. But the worship of the Ephesian Artemis — as the Greeks called the “ great mother” — was wholly non-moral and largely immoral. Natural religion then consists generally in religious observances, rites and taboos, which are wholly divorced from any considera/bion of character. But in marked contrast to all this, the central doctrine of the Old Testament is the essential holiness of character in God, and the uselessness of all rites or ceremonies apart from character. This is the constant theme of the prophets. It is needless to quote. And the meaning of the moral claim of God is infinitely deepened and intensified by OUT Lord.

True religion, then, is utterly incompatible with “the works of darkness" What is the meaning o! this phrase and all the phrases which identify darkness and moral evil, such as recur in this Epistle? We may express it, perhaps, in this way. All decent human society involves some public standard of required goodness. This constitutes the moral light of the society. The rebels against this are the men who love the darkness, first of all because it enables them to escape detection. “They are of those that rebel against the light; they know not the ways thereof, nor abide in the paths thereof. The murderer rising when there is no light killeth the poor and needy; and in the night is as a thief. The eye also of the adulterer waiteth for the twilight, saying. No eye shall see me: and disguiseth his face. In the dark they dig through houses, which they had marked for themselves in the daytime: they know not the light. For the morning is to them even is the shadow of death; “if one know them, they are in the terrors of the shadow of death.” This gives one the primary physical meaning of “ the works of darkness.”

They are done in the dark to escape detection.

They are disreputable actions. But a man may be living a perfectly respectable life and still be living in ’’the darkness” and doing the works of darkness.” This is partly because God seeth the heart,” and requires purity of heart as well as outward conformity of conduct; partly because the standard of respectability — the traditional moral requirement made by society — may be itself defective. Like the Pharisees, men may “ make the commandment of God of none effect by their traditions.” Thus Christ came to penetrate all hypocrisy, conscious or unconscious, and all conventional morality with the searchlight of perfect goodness. He is “ the light of the world.” And the light condemns the darkness of conventional respectability as much as the darkness of disreputable sins. No one can study our Lord’s moral teaching without acknowledging, what so-called Christian society constantly ignores, that such vulgar sins as fornication or drunkenness or violence are in no way worse in His sight than avarice or pride or uncharitableness. The latter belong to “the darkness” as fully as the former.

Thus it is quite generally in view of sin of all kinds that St. John says “ This is the judgement, that the light is come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light; for their works were evil. For every one that doeth ill hateth the light, and cometh not to the light, lest his works should be reproved. But he that doeth the truth cometh to the light, that his works may be made manifest, that they have been wrought in God.”

This, then, is St. John’s primary announcement. God is absolute moral goodness without qualification. “God is light and in him is no darkness at all.’’ Fellowship with Him, which is religion, requires in us unqualified agreement in heart and conscience, as well as in outward conduct, with His character. To profess religion while living in sin — whether sin of outward conduct or of the heart— is to practise a lie and not to be living the truth. On the other hand, if we bring our whole life into the light of God, inwardly and outwardly, as Christ is in the light, not only do we have fellowship with God, but with one another also. For the obstacle to human fellowship is that men’s secret lives, their real ambitions and desires and thoughts of one another, are selfish and evil-that is, they are antisocial. And| on the other hand, to be really right with God is also to be a good comrade man-wards. Then the obstacles to real fellowship are gone. And if we are not sinless, yet we have the secret of redemption from sin. For wherever such real fellowship is established in Christ, there His blood — that is. His human life offered in sacrifice for man and by His Spirit communicated to men for their inward renewalcleanses them from all sin.

Here, then, there confronts us the need fully to recognize the fact of sin in ourselves. For we cannot come into the light of God without becoming immediately conscious of sin.

I thought I could not breathe in that fine air,
That pure severity of perfect light.” This had been Isaiah’s message as he contemplated the coming of God to Zion. “Sinners in Sion are afraid; trembling hath surprised the godless ones. Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings?” This “devouring fire, these everlasting burnings, are nothing else than God’s holiness and goodness as it presents itself to the “godless ones.” And it is not only the godless ones, as Isaiah had found in his own case, who feel this. “Woe is me!” he had been constrained to cry in the awful presence of God, “for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.” The better a man is the more he feels the awfulness of God. Thus St. John goes on to tell us that if any man does not confess to personal sinfulness, he is self-deceived and a liar. Confession of sin inevitably follows upon any sincere attempt to bring ourselves and our deeds into the light of truth. But the confession must be real. No vague confession is enough.

It must be confession of our sins in detail and particular, without any manner of palliation or self-excusing. And so great is the value of frank confession, because it is a willing coming into the light, that God shows His truth to His own promises and His real righteousness in no

We stand free to serve Him without the guilt or disability of the past. But he has declared us to be sinners, and confession — that is, practical assent to this divine charge against us— is absolutely necessary. To deny that we have sinned — to attribute our shortcomings to any other cause, such as our nature or our circumstances — is, in effect, to make God a liar and show that His word has no place in us. The object of this stem reminder which St. John presses upon us is twofold. It is both that we should cease to sin, and also that, when we fail and commit sin, he should know where the remedy lies. For we cannot redeem ourselves from sin. But we are not alone as mere individuals guilty before God. We have one at hand to speak to the Father for us — Jesus Christ, who, man like us, is perfectly righteous, free from all taint of sin; and it is to Him we belong. He, then, is the propitiation for our sins. In Him — by His mediation— we are set free from our sins to begin again. And He is the propitiation not for us only, not merely for any class among men, but for the whole world. In Him all alike can find the same forgiveness and the same freedom. But to be thus dealt with for Christ’s sake — to be able thus to feel the assurance of His advocacy— we must belong to Him. We must know Him. It is no mechanical process. How, then, are we to “know that we know him “?

There is only one ground of assurance — it is the way of obedience to His commandments. To profess to belong to Him or to know Him without a life of actual obedience is to show ourselves liars who are alien to the truth. But in the obedience to His word or teaching is the fulfilment in us of the love of God. This is actually to abide in Christ — ^to share His life and to know that we share it. And no one can claim to share His life who does not actually live among men as He lived. And this is the message which we have heard from him, and announce unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in the darkness, we lie, and do not the truth: but if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanseth us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye may not sin. And if any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and he is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the whole world. And hereby know we that we know him, if we keep his commandments. He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him: but whoso keepeth his word, in him verily hath the love of God been perfected. Hereby know we that we are in him: he that saith he abideth in him ought himself also to walk even as he walked.

1. There are very few passages in the whole of literature which are at once so simple and so profound as the passage which we have just read. It will be seen to traverse and correct with profound conviction and solemn authority a number of assumptions which are current in our world to-day. Thus, first, by beginning his account of the Gospel of life with a declaration about the nature of God, St. John would remind us that the only root of a really Christian life in an individual or a really Christian organization of society is to think rightly about God. Our Lord spent His pains as a teacher on nothing so much as in giving men, or helping them to gain, right ideas about God. This is “to love the Lord our God with all our mind/’ This is to avoid idolatry, which is, at the root, entertaining false ideas of God. And is there anything more lacking in present-day religion than a clear and living conception of God?

Secondly, St. John takes it for granted that there will be no such assurance as we need about the nature of God except by God’s own definite self-disclosure. Such a message from God about His own nature and character was delivered by the old prophets of Israel. But St. John’s attention is concentrated upon the last and fullest form of the message — that delivered by Jesus Christ. This, as it is given in parables and plain sayings, and as it is expressed in His own character, is vivid and plain enough. It wins us by its manifold expression of selfsacrificing love, by its assurance of the infinite value which God sets on every single human soul, by its free offer of forgiveness and welcome.

None the less the Gospels are severe books. The moral claim of God upon the soul of man and not less upon society, His inexorable righteousness. His tremendous judgements — these make it impossible for any real disciple in the school of Jesus Christ to lapse into the free-andeasy conception of a “good-natured” God who must somehow make it all right for every one at last, with which we are to-day obsessed. This, then, is surely the question of questions for us. Do we really believe that what was and is inaccessible by human philosophy has been really given by divine self-disclosure and in full and final form through the lips and in the person of Jesus Christ? Certainly He claimed to tell us about His Father with infallible authority.

’’No man knoweth the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him/’ This is no isolated text, but the spirit of His whole teaching about God. Can we stand face to face with Him and repudiate His claim? But if not, is there not a formidable reconstruction of our whole way of living and thinking required in most of those who call themselves Christians and in our whole social life? What we need truly is not to argue about Christianity, but honestly to try it.

Thirdly, St. John perceives that the disclosure of God was given, as it was needed, in forms intelligible to the common man. So it is in the parables and in the plain teaching of Jesus. So it is in the human character of Jesus in whom we are to see the Father. So it is in the three solemn expressions of the essence of God which we owe to St. John — the first (which he ascribes to Jesus Himself) “’ God is a spirit ’’ in such sense as not to admit of the thought of His being worshipped in one place rather than in another, or of His being satisfied with any external forms of worship; and the two others which he gives in this Epistle, “God is love “and “God is light” These are not intellectual definitions, but great thoughts of God which appeal to our heart and imagination and which stimulate our affections and our conscience. It is quite right that the theologians and philosophers should have used all the powers of the human intellect upon the idea of God. But if it be the case that the most trustworthy and complete material upon which they have to work is the revelation of the Father given by His prophets and His Son Jesus Christ, it can hardly be denied that in translating the picture into intellectual forms they have too often obscured it. But the account of God given in the prophets and of ’’the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ in the Gospels is as lucid and attractive as it is tremendous.

2. “God is light, and darkness in Him there is not any at all.” We naturally give to the metaphor of light and enlightenment an intellectual meaning. This is quite legitimate.

We must thankfully acknowledge that we cannot find in the Bible the least trace of obscurantism; and we can discern in the idea of wisdom, divine and human, in our Lord’s broad outlook on man and nature, as it appears in the parables, and in St. Paul’s conception of the divine order and system of the world, an encouragement to philosophy and science. But, on the whole, the New Testament conception of the divine light and of human enlightenment — both in our Lord’s teaching and in St. Paul, St. Peter, St. James, and St. John — is markedly ethical. This has been already pointed out. Here St. John’s bold assertion of the unqualified goodness of God under the figure of light is such as to attract and delight. But he insists upon it not as delightful, but as serious in its moral consequences. We must be fit to live in the unqualified light. And this brings him at once to the fact of sin. He condemns three attitudes towards sin — the sort of moral indifference which amounts to the denial that there is such a thing as sin or that it excludes from the fellowship of God (1 John 1:6); the denial of sin as a fact in ourselves which is simply selfdeception (1 John 1:8); and the denial of particular sins by which we make God a liar, because in all His dealings with man, and all men individually, He has treated them as sinners needing redemption.

3. And this leads him to emphasize the value of confession. There can indeed be no doubt about the value assigned to it both in the Old and in the New Testaments. “I said, I will confess my sins unto the Lord, and so thou forgavest the wickedness of my sin.’’

“And David said unto Nathan, I have sinned against the Lord. And Nathan said unto David, The Lord also hath put away thy sin.” At first sight it might be supposed that confession—mere frank acknowledgement-was a very easy thing and only a short step towards reformation. But, in fact, our knowledge of human nature, including our own, teaches us better. Many men live in a state of moral indifference. Many deplore their sins, but attribute them to circumstances or nature or heredity, or are content with being “not worse than other people.” Many, again, “deceive themselves’’ as to their motives and actions.

It is, in fact, quite rare to find a person who wholeheartedly desires to know the naked truth about himself. But this is the essence of a good confession. It is to bring ourselves without reserve into the light. It is to put away all self-excusing and all comparison of ourselves with others. It is to face the terrible truth naked before God. And as St. John implies, while self-deception leads to a general denial of sin a good confession must be a confession of sins — that is, of the particular acts of sin in thought and word and deed. It is to say, “I have sinned by my fault, by my own fault, by my own grievous fault, and in such and such ways.” This why a good confession is so great, a thing and brings so rich a blessing.

4. Does St. John contemplate confession to God only? Dr. Westcott denies this. “Confess our sins” he writes in his commentary on this place, “not only acknowledge them, but acknowledge them openly in the face of men,” There is no doubt that the Greek word, and its compound, wherever used in the New Testament, means open acknowledgement before men; but the Hebrew word for “confess” does not always bear this meaning-not in “I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the Lord” (Psalms 32:5), nor in “Confessing my sin and the sin of my people ’’ (Daniel 9:4 and Daniel 9:20); and I do not feel satisfied that the word used by St. John need mean more than confession to God. Nevertheless, the probability is, if we consider the ordinary meaning of the word he uses, that he was thinking of confession to man also, as in the cases of Achan, of those who came to John’s baptism, and of those who confessed to sorcery at Ephesus.’

Confession to "the brethren" as well as to God was the practice of the first Christians.

Thus from the first notorious and scandalous sinners who were put to open penance, as in St. Paul’s Epistles to the Corinthians, must acknowledge their sin openly before they could be readmitted to the fellowship. And apart from such scandalous sins, St. James exhorts all Christians to “confess their sins one to another" — their sins of all kinds, and not merely their “faults’’ against one another. And in an early document the Didache, we learn that mutual confession of sins before the Eucharist was the practice of the Church, “Having first confessed your sins, that your sacrifice may be pure.” Moreover, it must be acknowledged that the divine commission given to the apostles, and so to the Church, to absolve and retain sins only admits of special application to the individual Christian where the sins to be judged are known to the Church or its minister, It is on this primitive practice of requiring the confession of scandalous sins in the congregation, and encouraging the confession of sins generally, and on the divine grant of absolving and retaining authority to the Church, that the penitential discipline of the Church, which has varied greatly in different times and places, was built up. With us, in our part of the Church, there is no ecclesiastical requirement under ordinary circumstances of that confession to a priest which took the place in the Church of public confession to the congregation. But it must be acknowledged that, quite apart from the question of any ecclesiastical requirement we Englishmen forget the sense in which no confession to God can be real unless it at least includes a willingness that our sins should be known to men. Many a person, including many who frequent the confessional, would be furious if one of their fellow-men were to impute to them the very sins they had confessed to God. But this is hypocrisy. All honest confessions to God must exclude any desire to bear a reputation among men which is better than we deserve. We must want to be known just for what we are, as we shall be known at the Great Day of disclosure. And if social considerations make it undesirable to make public confession of our sins, yet where we have wronged an individual we should frankly confess it to him.

If I have told some one a lie of any importance, by far the best remedy against repeating such an offence is frankly to confess it to him; and there are innumerable alienations (for instance) between husband and wife which would be healed if the first offence were frankly acknowledged. "I am very sorry. I hope I shall not do it again." And beyond this, I am sure that we greatly need to remember St. James’s general admonition “ Confess your sins one to another.”

5. The divine gifts of forgiveness and cleansing wait on our confession (1 John 1:9), and herein the divine righteousness, no less than God’s faithfulness to His promise, is shown. Forgiveness has been greatly misunderstood. It is not the remission of punishment — the natural consequences of our offences. It is the greatest mistake to identify forgiveness with being “let off.” One who knows his guilt and has been forgiven will always be ready to be punished. And in Psalms 99:1-9 the record of God’s dealings with His saints is “Heard— forgiven— punished.” But to be forgiven is to be set free from bondage to our past. It is to be granted (and that over and over again) a fresh start. “ I will run the way of thy commandments, when thou hast set my heart at liberty.” And the condition of all forgiveness is the steady will of obedience in the future. This is what St. John proceeds to emphasize in the latter part of the paragraph that we are studying: It is most noticeable that in the parable of the unthankful servant, the remission of debt which is granted by the king unconditionally is found to be utterly reversed as soon as it is plain that the servant was showing no disposition to imitate his lord.Absolution is nothing but the being set free to go forward in the service of the Lord. It cleanses our consciences only in order that we may “ serve the living God.”

6. We should be profoundly grateful to St. John for telling us so clearly that if we are really right with God, if we “walk in the light,” we shall be also right with men. All social alienation, all class divisions, all personal quarrels, are due to men “walking in darkness,” living a life either of pride or selfishness or lust.

Real fellowship with God will remove all these causes of social alienation. And conversely the causes of social alienation will never be removed by even the best economic changes unless there is also the change of heart towards God.

7. The removal of sin is the work of Christ for us and in us. St. John would emphasize as much as St. Paul our absolute dependence for our redemption upon Another; and though, in his Gospel, St. John only indicates without emphasizing the function of atonement or propitiation, yet in his Epistle he makes it evident that, like St. Paul, he would emphasize equally both aspects of Christ’s work, propitiation and renewal — His work for us and His work in us. When St. John speaks of “the blood of Jesus” as “cleansing us from all sin,” we are bound to think of his Gospel — of the blood wherein we drink eternal life, and which is “spirit and life” (John 6:62-63). The root idea of sacrificial blood is that the life of the victim is in it: thus it is the sacrificed life of Christ, as communicated to us by His Spirit, which is to renew us inwardly, in the fellowship of His manhood, into eternal life. This is the teaching of John 6:1-71, taken with the figure of the vine (John 15:1-27) and the accompanying teaching about the Holy Spirit. And it is St. Paul’s doctrine as well as St. John’s. Herein, moreover, is the meaning of the Holy Communion. But there is something to precede this communication of life. That is the restoration of our standing-ground before God — it is propitiation. Of the moral necessity for propitiation St. Paul gives us some explanation. St. John simply assumes it.

We cannot appear before God in our bare selves. Our sinfulness precludes this. But Another has acted for us. He is our brother man, but sinless. He has offered the perfect sacrifice of a humanity in which God is perfectly well pleased.

He is our propitiation; we ask God to look at Him, not at us. He is our advocate; we ask God to listen to Him, not to us. But we can only ask God to do this because we belong to Him. In a sense all men belong to Him. He stands for humanity everywhere, “the whole world.” But our power to claim His advocacy and plead His propitiation depends on our belonging to Him. This is the privilege conveyed in our baptism, which is the instrument of our new birth. But St. John is not here thinking of this.

Baptism is quite ineffective morally without moral identification, without the will to obey, and that is what he emphasizes. Wholly without any merit of ours, and that again and again, we can accept of God’s free gift of forgiveness in the name and by the merit of Christ, but this only if we belong to Him or “know Him/’ and to know Him means that we are of His company and keep His commandments and walk even as He walked — if not faultlessly, at least in will and intention.

Truly I believe there would have been no difficulty about the Christian doctrine of Christ’s propitiation for us, appealing as it does to all the deepest needs of men, but for three most unfortunate mistakes: (1) that absolution has been confused with being let off punishment, whereas it means our being set free to serve, and there is, in fact, no absolution for those whose will is not set to serve; (2) that Christ’s work for us (propitiation) has been separated from His work in us (spiritual renewal), to which, in fact, it is only the prelude, as is represented by St. Paul and St. John; (3) that, contrary to all the teachings of the New Testament, the mind of Christ has been distinguished from the mind of the Father as mercy from justice. In the Gospel we notice that only the Holy Spirit is called the Paraclete or Advocate, yet in calling Him “another Advocate” our Lord implies that that office is also His and speaks of the exercise of it.”

8. The antithesis of light and darkness, as symbolical of evil and good, which is found in the New Testament, is not by any means peculiar to Christianity. In its Persian form it was already recognized and known in the empire at any rate some twenty years after St. John wrote; for the Gnostic leader Basileides speaks of those who declared that there were two original self-existent principles of all things, light and darkness. And in the form of such dualism it has played a great part in the thoughts of men. But when St. John proclaims God as pure light, he means that there is no rival God — no original or self-existent darkness — and that all the darkness in which the world lies is due to nothing else than either to the rebel wills of created spirits, or, we should add, to the law, which is God’s law for His world, that progress is only to be obtained gradually and through effort and struggle. A certain “darkness’’ belongs to undeveloped nature as well as to violated nature. It is profoundly characteristic of Christianity to deny either that there is any original evil principle in the world or any fundamentally evil substance. Evil lies only in the misuse of good things. And however evil a thing may be in its misuse, let it once be brought out into the light and revealed as it is and it becomes light-giving-as St. Paul says, “Whatsoever is made manifest is light.”