1 John 1

The one sign of vital personal religion is growth. There is no growth in a life of spiritual routine, in a mechanical performance of duties however important, or a mechanical attendance upon ordinances however sacred. There is no growth without that sort of enthusiastic interest in religion with which a man must take up anything if he wishes to succeed in it. There is no growth in the deliberate adoption of a low standard, in the attempt to keep back a moiety of the heart from Christ, in consenting to go with God thus far only, and no farther. There is no growth in contenting ourselves with respectability, and declining the pursuit of holiness. There is no growth without fervent prayer, “in spirit and in truth.” And, finally, there is no growth (whatever be the hopes with which we may be flattering ourselves) without continual and sincere effort. E. M. G.—There are laws in the economy of grace as in the growth of the body and the mind. Blessings are according to faith. Spiritual glory will be revealed to spiritual eyes. Character will unfold and strengthen in its heavenly order. According to your faith it will be unto you. Every new year will set you nobly forward toward higher purities of sanctification. Power, patience, consistency, self-control, peace with God, joy in believing, victory over the world—these and every other grace will grow with your growth. Such a life will be a perpetual journey of honor, with light all the way, and immortality at the end. F. D. H.

And knowledge. Seek not so much either to vent thy knowledge or to increase it as to know more spiritually and effectually what thou dost know. And in this way these truths will have a new sweetness and use in them, and in thy humble, sincere way thou shalt grow in knowledge too. L.

—It is by the believer’s walk with God, by the experimental acquaintance he gets with Him, that he attains to more solid, more comprehensive views of his glory, grace, and truth, as they shine forth in the person and work of Jesus. The truth, moreover, of God’s nature, as one God in trinity and trinity in unity, becomes daily better understood and delighted in, not as a matter of speculation, but as ministering a solid foundation of trust to a guilty sinner. As far as the believer can see, the very possibility of salvation rests on this distinction of persons in the one blessed God; so that the Father could give his Only-begotten Son, the Son could offer himself without spot to God, and the Spirit of the Father and the Son could go forth to apply this salvation by the testimony of Jesus, quickening his soul together with Christ, and fitting him for the enjoyment of God. The longer the Christian lives the more he sees of wisdom, holiness, and love in the plan, the accomplishment, the application of the salvation which is by Christ: mercy and truth blended with infinite holiness in the Father; infinite amiableness in Christ; infinite condescension and tenderness in God the Spirit. This knowledge, by sweet experience of the divine nature and character as they are made known in Christ, is the food and feast of his soul all the days of his pilgrimage; the foretaste of that fullness of delights which he shall enjoy when he shall see God as he is. Goode.

1. THAT which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of Life: 2 (for the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and shew unto you that 3 eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us;) that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us: and truly 4 our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ. And these things write 5 we unto you, that your joy may be full. This then is the message which we have heard of 6 him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say 7 that we have fellowship with him, and walk in 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 8 blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we

9 deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just 10 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.

FROM the absolute certainty of the divine existence and authority of Christ comes a certainty as perfect that to follow and love him, to trust ourselves to him, to be guided by his rules, to be vitally imbued and pervaded by his spirit, to be consecrated to the ends which he proposes, and to that sublime service to which he invites us—that this is the way of absolute safety, peace, and well-being to all who will take it! We can not be out of the path of safety, we must be in harmony with the wisdom, the righteousness, and the glory of the universe while we seek, and serve, and adore this Lord. Before his greatness royalties fade. Before his prescience that of sages is folly. His temper but expresses the perfection of God. His dominion stands supreme over nature and man. The earth is more sacred since he has been on it. The family is more august since he was born into it. Celestial spheres are nearer men since he has come from them to Bethlehem, and again has returned from Bethany to them. And while we serve and honor him with lip and life, with heart and strength, the power that lifted the dead is our guardian; the wisdom that illuminates the world is our teacher; the grace that sacrificed life on the cross is our guarantee of the future. R. S. S.

THE Epistles of John were undoubtedly written at Ephesus after the gospel, which is presumed to be known, and in the advanced years of the apostle, though before the date of the Apocalypse. The first Epistle attests itself at once by the introduction as well as by the striking similarity of thought and style, as the work of the author of the fourth Gospel, with which it stands intimately connected as a practical application. It is a circular letter of exhortation and encouragement to the churches of Asia Minor (comp. Rev. 2 and 3), which were already well versed in the faith, built on the golden foundation of Paul’s doctrine of grace. The object of the Epistle is to nourish the Christian life, and to warn its readers against moral laxness, against all intermixture of light with darkness, of truth with falsehood, of the love of God with the love of the world, and against the influence of those Gnostic, Docetistic “antichrists” who denied the reality of the incarnation, the true union of deity and humanity in Jesus Christ; who separated the knowing of Christ from the following of him, religion from morality. He briefly points out their fundamental error with profound discernment and holy horror, and contrasts it with the Christian principle. The simple, sublime thought of the Epistle, which he presents at the very beginning, and continually enforces under different shapes, is the love of God and of the brethren, founded on living faith in the God-man, whose history is fully given in the gospel; in other words, the idea of fellowship in its twofold aspect; the union of believers with God and his Son Jesus Christ, and the union of believers with one another. The latter is rooted in the former, and is its necessary product; the two are the marks of regeneration and adoption, and are inseparable from the keeping of the commandments of God, from a holy walk in the light after the example of Christ, as well as from true joy and the possession of the eternal life, which the incarnate Logos has brought into the world, and which he alone can give. These few thoughts, clothed in the simplest words, contain the sum of Christian morality and describe the inmost essence of piety. What Herder says of John’s writings in general may be applied with peculiar emphasis to this first Epistle: “They are still waters, which run deep; flowing along with the easiest words, but the most profound meaning.” P. S.

It is beautiful to notice how the apostle who had drunk the deepest at this river of revelation, and as if the cry of Moses and David and Habakkuk, and all the old yearning saints who panted for a sight of God, were ringing in his ears, as if in the straining eyes and wistful faces of every believer he read the same behest, and could hear from the bosom of the Church universal a murmur asking for God manifest—it is beautiful to observe how John the divine, in the beginning of his Gospel, his Apocalypse, and his general Epistle, comes bursting out with the wondrous tidings, and tells that the want is at last supplied, that the manifestation is vouchsafed, for which the weary Church had so long been waiting. Hamilton.

John is the apostle of spirituality. He goes for evidence, proof, satisfaction, within, into the breast. His wisdom is of the heart; his faith is less of belief than trust; less by argument than by intuition. No apostle seems to have clung with such reverential affection to the person of Jesus. His faith is all bound up in that personal attachment. John completes the full apostolic manifestation of Christian character. He is the fourth of that united quaternion that show us what we ought to be. He adds to Peter’s fervor, and Paul’s belief, and James’s morality, his own affection. He is a reconciler, and brings in that crowning and harmonizing element of love without which zeal and faith and conscience are all wanting. F. D. H.

1. The Word of Life.** In his divine nature, as Logos, he is the eternal Son of the Father, and the agent in the creation and preservation of the world. In him dwells all the fullness of the God-head bodily; and in him also is realized the ideal of human virtue and piety. He is the eternal Truth and the divine Life itself, personally joined with our nature, our Lord and our God; yet at the same time flesh of our flesh. In him is solved the problem of religion, the reconciliation and fellowship of man with God. P. S.—The Word has been without a human soul, but it was when the Word was in the beginning, and was with God, and was God. But ever since the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and manhood, that is, the whole of manhood, soul and flesh, was assumed by the Word, what was the result of the passion, what of the death, save the separation of the body from the soul? But the soul was not separated from the Word. For if the Lord died—yes, even because the Lord died—(for he died for us on the cross), doubtless his flesh breathed forth his soul; for a short space the soul forsook the flesh, but the flesh was to rise again when the soul returned to it. But I deny that the soul was separated from the Word. He said to the soul of the robber, “To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise.” He forsook not the robber’s faithful soul, and did he forsake his own? God forbid; as its Lord, he kept the robber’s soul safe, while he retained his own inseparably. Aug.

2. All heretics have set themselves against Christ. Manicheus opposed Christ’s humanity, for he alleged Christ was a spirit; “even,” says he, “as the sun shines through a painted glass, and the sunbeams go through on the other side, and yet the sun takes nothing away from the substance of the glass, even so Christ took nothing from the substance and nature of Mary.” Arius assaulted the Godhead of Christ. Nestorius held there were two persons. Eutychius taught there was but one person; “for,” said he, “the person of the Deity was swallowed up.” Macedonius opposed only the article of the Holy Ghost, but he soon fell, and was confounded. If this article of Christ remain, then all blasphemous spirits must vanish and be overthrown. The Turks and Jews acknowledge God the Father; it is the Son they shoot at. About this article much blood has been shed. I verily believe that at Rome more than twenty hundred thousands of martyrs have been put to death. It began with the beginning of the world—with Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, Esau and Jacob, and I am persuaded that it was about it the devil was cast from heaven down to hell; he was a fair creature of God, and doubtless strove to be the Son. Next after the Holy Scripture, we have no stronger argument for the confirmation of that article than the sweet and loving Cross. For all kingdoms, all the powerful, have striven against Christ and this article, but they could not prevail. Luther.

Manifested. By means of the incarnation, God has reduced himself to the level of human apprehensions and human sympathies. He gives us in Christ a definite object, upon which all our sentiments of love, loyalty, veneration, affection, may fasten; yet without fear of idolatry, inasmuch as this object is divine. To conceive of Christ is to conceive of God; and to love Christ is to love God; for he that hath seen Christ hath seen the Father. E. M. G.—How can you see life, but by seeing some one live it? You can not see a man’s life unless you see him live such and such a life, or hear of his living such and such a life, and so knowing what his life, manners, character, are. And so no one could have seen God’s life, or known what life God lived, and what character God’s life was, had it not been for the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ, who was made flesh, and dwelt among us, that by seeing him the Son, we might see the Father, whose likeness he was, and is, and ever will be. C. K.

3. May have fellowship with us. We have fellowship with those that speak, not only in their spiritual relations with their Lord (which they fully understood only after he was gone), but in their remembrances of him in that earlier time when he was yet with them. Their witness is effectual for this end. For us also it is all real. He dwelt among us. We beheld his glory. We caught the gracious words that proceeded out of his mouth. So things went with him. So he looked and moved and spoke. So he wrought and suffered and died. We have stood by the cross of Jesus. We have entered the empty sepulchre. We have seen him alive after his passion. He has shown us his hands and his feet. We have been led out as far as to Bethany, have seen the hands lifted up to bless, and watched the ascending form. T. D. B.—The great requisites for fellowship with the Father and Son are determined by the nature and character of God. God is light; and it is communion in the light. God is love; and it is a fellowship of love. D. F.

4. Joy. This affords a new proof of God’s infinite benevolence, that he has made it our religion to be happy. In exhorting us to believe, and hope, and love, he only summons us to that harmony of the powers which tends to their most blissful exercise. And hence, in the tender and affecting discourses which the Lord held with his disciples after the eucharist, having promised them peace, his own peace, he goes on to promise them joy, even his own joy. “These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.” J. W. A.—The latter words John here repeats. B.—Joy is of the soul, or the soul’s character; it is the wealth of the soul’s own being when it is filled with the spirit of Jesus, which is the spirit of eternal love. Every soul is made to be a well-spring of eternal blessedness, and will be if only it permits the waters of the eternal love to rise within. It can have right thoughts and true, and be set in everlasting harmony with itself. It can love, and so, without going about to find what shall bless it, it has all the material of blessing in itself; resources in its own immortal nature, as a creature dwelling in the light of God, which can not fail, or be exhausted. H. B.

5. God is light.** We get the full sense of this richly comprehensive word “light” as said of God when we combine the two great ideas—truth, and purity or holiness. God truthful; God sinless; God the fountain of all truth; God the author and giver of all holiness to his creatures—these are the great ideas which lie in the word Light as it stands here descriptive of God. H. C.

6. Light is clear and open.** If a man walks deceitfully, and has not the truth in him, but a lie, he offends against the perfect integrity of God, and has no fellowship with him. Light is inviolably pure. It takes cognizance of foulness and corruption, yet receives no soil, contracts no stain; shines on what is base and noisome, keeping itself unsullied, undefiled. If a man becomes contaminated with evil, and has fellowship with “the unfruitful works of darkness,” he has no fellowship with God. D. F.

7. The apostle, in these words of holy mystery,** contemplates the church of the sanctified walking together under the radiance of a common light, which streams from the presence of God, and which, involving them all, assimilates them all. He sees them move in holy fear, and yet holier hope, beneath the meridian blaze of the everlasting glory, receiving its rays, and, in the very community of the same gift, by the very force of a common investiture, enjoying blessed “fellowship one with another.” The fair procession of the people of God passes calmly on before his gifted eyes; and each, in the luminous robe that vests him, wears the high insignia of a celestial adoption. Co-heirs of heaven, they know their brotherhood; walking in that light which issues from no earthly sun, they feel it theirs alone, and recognize in each other the mystic fellowship it gives! W. A. B.

And what shall we do about our sins? Hear what follows: “And the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanses us from all sin.” It is great ease of mind that God has given us. The devil once held a bond of slavery against us, but it was obliterated by the blood of Christ. If you have confessed your sins, truth is in you; for truth itself is light. Your life is not yet perfectly lustrous, for sins are there; but yet you now begin to be illuminated, for confession of sins is there. Aug.—Nothing will do for a Gospel that leaves any trouble incurable, any sorrow uncomforted, any sin beyond forgiveness. The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin, all its kinds, and all its degrees—the hard cold sins of avarice and hypocrisy; the hot impulsive sins of passion and desperation. The most perfectly devised system of morality, or even of spirituality, if the Cross is left out of it, can do nothing like that. F. D. H.

8. Dreams of perfection in the flesh would be little entertained if men kept clearly in view the distinction between what we are in Christ and what we are in ourselves.** To be in him is to be saved at once and for ever from the condemnation of sin, but, as the lives of the highest and the lowest saints alike testify, not immediately from the presence and inworking of sin. Christ had sin upon him, though he had no sin in him. He that is in Christ has no sin upon him, though he still has sin in him. And just in proportion to the completeness of his abiding in him by communion and obedience will he be free from sin within him as he is from sin upon him. But let us not be deceived. Because the Spirit addresses us as those that are “sanctified in the name of the Lord Jesus,” let us not therefore claim to have reached a state of practical and realized sanctification in ourselves. “We are in him that is true,” and “In him is no sin.” “But if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” A. J. G.—The belief of Christian perfectibility seems inapplicable to individual practice from the very nature of Christian holiness. Were a perfect man to exist, he himself would be the last to know it; for the highest stage of advancement is the lowest descent in humility. As long as this humility is necessary to the fullness of the Christian character, it would seem that it is of the essence of the constant growth in grace (however encouraged by holy joy and inward testimonies) to see itself lowlier as God exalts it higher. In truth, it is only piety, and piety fervent and exalted, that can really feel how immeasurably far it is from perfect holiness. W. A. B.—The belief of one’s perfect freedom from sin, while God’s own discipline is going on to beat down sin, takes the place of faith in Christ, and plunges the soul into sin. So has that great master of the human heart, and of the workings both of nature and of grace in it, John Bunyan, presented the consequences of the self-flattering idea of perfect freedom from sin. The Flatterer may seem a bright, glorious man, in a white robe, with white, shining wings, without us; but he is the dark, deceitful old man within us. Grace in this world is medicinal, curative, as long as the world stands. G. B. C.

9. If we confess.** The man who confesses his misdeeds and reproaches himself for them sides and coöperates with God. God upbraids your sins; if you do the same, you act with God. That you are a man, ‘tis God’s work; that you are a sinner, ‘tis your own. You must abhor in yourself your own production, that you may love in yourself the work of God. Aug.—Under the teaching of Satan men invert God’s order. For God has at-

tached a sense of shame to sin, and given confidence to the confession of sin; but the devil attaches confidence to sin, and to confession shame. Chrys.