The Ground and Motivation of Purity - 1 John 3:1-3

Introduction

John’s chief concern throughout chapter 2 has been to expound upon the purpose statements he made in chapter 1: that Christians would have true fellowship with one another, with the apostles, and with the triune Godhead, distinct from fellowship with darkness, and that Christians would walk in the light, distinct from walking in the darkness.

John adds layers to those purpose statements throughout chapter 2, dealing with the connection between walking in the light and keeping the commandments of Christ. What are the commandments of Christ? Summarily, for John, they are to love one another and not hate one another. He has dealt with questions of Christian ontology and identity, answering the question: what defines a true Christian? He answers that with declarations of Christ’s advocacy on our behalf, the forgiveness of sins, knowledge of God in Christ, and spiritual strength.

John drills down even further into the distinctiveness between true Christian and false professions of Christianity by explaining the presence and activities of false teachers, and naming the specific false teaching that was present in this church: a denial of the homoousious hypostatic union of divine and human natures in the person of Christ.

Through all of this, John weaves a forward-facing, future-focused eschatological perspective into his exposition. He has declared that darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining, and then he encourages these Christians and us to abide in him so that when he returns, we may have confidence and know that he has made us stand in the last day.

That eschatological perspective continues to guide John as he moves into chapter 3, where he will continue to tackle the distinctions that mark true believers and false professors.

Let’s focus our attention tonight on chapter 3, verses 1-3. Here we see a kind of golden chain for John, a linked series of realities that stretch from eternity past into eternity future, assuring our faith, securing our hope, and purifying our lives.

Love - 3:1a

John begins with this poetic statement: see how great a love the Father has given to us. I love the eloquence of the King James here: Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us.

I like the KJV because of the way it translates that first word there, eidos in the Greek. See just doesn’t quite capture the magnitude I believe John intends. Behold carries a certain weight, which lends itself to an accurate interpretation of John’s intent here.

If we want to capture John’s thrust here, we need to understand the scope of New Testament usage of eidos.

Matthew 2:2 LSB

“Where is He who has been born King of the Jews? For we saw His star in the east and have come to worship Him.”

Matthew 2:11 LSB

And after coming into the house they saw the Child with Mary His mother; and they fell to the ground and worshiped Him. Then, opening their treasures, they presented to Him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Matthew 3:16 LSB

And after being baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water; and behold, the heavens were opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming upon Him,

Matthew 4:16 LSB

THE PEOPLE WHO WERE SITTING IN DARKNESS SAW A GREAT LIGHT, AND THOSE WHO WERE SITTING IN THE LAND AND SHADOW OF DEATH, UPON THEM A LIGHT DAWNED.”

Matthew 5:16 LSB

“Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven.

These are just 5 quick examples from the early going of the book of Matthew. This word eidos occurs all over the New Testament, and the consistent theme of it’s usage is this: when you eidos something, it is something wonderful. Something glorious. Something supernatural. Something beyond our comprehension. John is calling us to see something that we can’t fully grasp or fully comprehend right now.

It is no wonder then that what John wants us to see or behold is described here as great. This is a unique word in the New Testament, only used 6 times, and it further conveys this sense of wonder, amazement, and glory. Someone read Matthew 8:27

Matthew 8:27 LSB

And the men marveled, and said, “What kind of a man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey Him?”

Here in Matthew 8, upon a display of the omnipotent Lordship of the Son of God, the disciples first marvel, and then declare “See how great a man this is, that even the wind and seas obey him!”

So for John, there’s something what John wants us to see here that is so great, it is akin to Jesus calming a storm with a word. It’s glorious, it’s confounding, it defies human comprehension. We might well call it miraculous.

So what is it?

It is the love of God, the agapa sacrificial affection that would drive the King from His throne to rescue traitors and rebels by becoming one of them and receiving upon Himself the punishment they deserved so that they might go free.

We rightly sing of this love as magnificent, marvelous, and matchless, for such it is. For John, there aren’t adequate words to describe it.

What is John teaching us here then? That the agapa love of God is glorious. It is wonderful. It is supernatural. It borders on the incomprehensible. John will drill down in a moment into the specific expression of love that has so captured him, but for now I want to reflect on the glory and wonder and incomprehensibility of this love.

John principally wants us to feel something here. John isn’t primarily concerned here with what we do, or even with how we think. He is showing us how we are to feel. He wants us to look upon the love of God and be overwhelmed with it’s greatness and majesty.

David expresses this kind of deep, theologically informed emotion in Psalm 36:7-8

Psalm 36:7–8 LSB

How precious is Your lovingkindness, O God! And the sons of men take refuge in the shadow of Your wings. They are satisfied from the richness of Your house; And You give them to drink of the river of Your delights.

David informs us about the love of God in 4 ways here:

It is precious

It is a refuge

It satisfies

It is a never-ending stream of delight

This is how John wants us to feel about the love of God. Behold, what manner of precious, protective, soul-satisfying, eternally delightful love the Father has given to us.

John wants us to see this love, to behold it in all it’s glory, he wants us to know just how great it is, and he wants us to understand how we got it.

It was given to us, bestowed upon us.

This love is a gift of grace. Indeed, it is one of the brightest facets on the diamond of divine grace.

So I believe John would have us do two things here:

Reflect on divine love

John’s desire is that we would see the love that the Father has bestowed upon us. That we would catch a glimpse of the glory contained therein, and that we would marvel at it. For John, love is not something to be dissected or analyzed, but seen and savored. He doesn’t want us to act on anything so much as he wants us to just gaze upon the glory of this love.

So we need to make a regular habit of stopping our day, getting outside the whirlwind, and just thinking about God’s love. Roll it around in your mind. Memorize and recite Scripture passages and Psalms that extol God’s love. Sing great hymns that magnify God’s love.

John’s desire is that we would see it and savor it, that we would reflect on it and relish in it.

Receive divine love

Likewise, John’s burden is also that we would receive divine love. He makes clear that this love is given, and therefore the implication is that we must receive it. We can think of the reception of divine love in both an objective and subjective sense. In the objective sense, we have received this love permanently and inextricably if we are in Christ. We are eternal recipients of His love in an absolute sense. But there is also a sense in which that reception must happen daily for the believer. We receive God’s love with the hand of faith, as it were, through the ordinary means of grace. As Christians we ought daily to receive God’s love through it’s ordinary manifestations in the reading of His Word, prayer, fellowship, the sacraments, and the preaching of the Word. I urge you to remember, every time you participate in one of these ordinary means of grace, that in it God is demonstrating His love to you. So receive it with humility and gladness.

Having urged us to reflect upon the great love bestowed upon us by the Father, John now explains specifically one of the ways that love takes shape, in the doctrine of adoption.

Adoption - 3:3b

The next phrase here is “that we would be called children of God.” The particular expression of divine love that John has in view here is adoption.

Joel Beeke says that adoption in Christ may be the highest blessing of all of God’s blessings to us in salvation. Likewise, John Murray said that it is the apex and epitome of grace.

The Westminster Shorter Catechism, in question 34, defines adoption as the act of God’s grace, whereby we are received into the number and have a right to all the privileges of the sons of God.

It’s important to note that we define adoption as an act, not a work, because this happens once for all time. It is not a process, like effectual calling or sanctification, but a one-time transactional event by which our relational status is forensically changed from stranger to son.

There is much we might say about adoption, and much has been said and written over the course of church history. However, for our purposes tonight, I want to focus on a story from the Old Testament that typifies adoption and teaches us some important truths about it, truths that will, I think, help us understand that magnitude and greatness of adoption as an expression of God’s love.

2 Samuel 9:1–13 LSB

Then David said, “Is there yet anyone left of the house of Saul, that I may show him lovingkindness for Jonathan’s sake?” Now there was a servant of the house of Saul whose name was Ziba, and they called him to David; and the king said to him, “Are you Ziba?” And he said, “I am your servant.” And the king said, “Is there not yet anyone of the house of Saul to whom I may show the lovingkindness of God?” And Ziba said to the king, “There is still a son of Jonathan who is crippled in both feet.” So the king said to him, “Where is he?” And Ziba said to the king, “Behold, he is in the house of Machir the son of Ammiel in Lo-debar.” Then King David sent and took him from the house of Machir the son of Ammiel, from Lo-debar. So Mephibosheth, the son of Jonathan the son of Saul, came to David and fell on his face and prostrated himself. And David said, “Mephibosheth.” And he said, “Here is your servant!” And David said to him, “Do not fear, for I will surely show lovingkindness to you for the sake of your father Jonathan, and will restore to you all the land of your grandfather Saul; and you shall eat at my table continually.” So he prostrated himself and said, “What is your servant, that you should regard a dead dog like me?” Then the king called Saul’s young man Ziba and said to him, “All that belonged to Saul and to all his house I have given to your master’s grandson. “And you and your sons and your servants shall cultivate the land for him, and you shall bring in the produce so that your master’s grandson may have food and eat of it; nevertheless Mephibosheth your master’s grandson shall eat at my table continually.” Now Ziba had fifteen sons and twenty servants. Then Ziba said to the king, “According to all that my lord the king commands his servant so your servant will do.” So Mephibosheth ate at David’s table as one of the king’s sons. Now Mephibosheth had a young son whose name was Mica. And all who lived in the house of Ziba were servants to Mephibosheth. So Mephibosheth lived in Jerusalem, for he ate at the king’s table continually. Now he was lame in both feet.

Now if we want to understand how this story teaches us about our own adoption in Christ, we have to locate this story in the scope of redemptive history.

We can rightly assert that redemptive history is summed up in the conflict prophesied to the serpent upon the fall of humanity, namely, the conflict between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. We know that this is fulfilled ultimately in Christ’s victory over sin and Satan, first at the cross, and then at the second coming. But as we follow the narrative of Scripture, we discover that this conflict is ongoing and occurs in the micronarratives that make up the story of redemptive history.

A simple genealogy reveals that David is part of the seed of the woman. Both Matthew and Luke attest to this. Who is David’s most antagonizing adversary? One might throw Goliath in the mix, and I believe Goliath is certainly part of the serpent’s lineage in his opposition to David - let it be recalled that, just as the prophecy was given to the serpent that the woman’s seed would defeat him by a fatal blow to the head, so David’s stone defeated the Philistine by a fatal blow to the head - I believe that David’s most antagonizing adversary, and the one who most served as the serpent seed to David’s woman seed, is not Goliath, but King Saul the Benjamite.

From 1 Samuel 13 onward, Saul is consistently positioned opposite David as his principal opponent and the one with whom he has the greatest enmity. This is captured in 1 Samuel 18:29

1 Samuel 18:29 LSB

so Saul was even more afraid of David. So Saul was David’s enemy continually.

That word there, enemy? Same one as Genesis 3:15 - enmity between the serpent and the woman works itself out in 1 Samuel as enmity between Saul and David.

What the story of Mephibosheth shows us is this: being part of the seed of the serpent is not necessarily a permanent curse. Redemption and salvation is possible, even for those who were sworn enemies of the seed of the woman, and that redemption and salvation takes shape in the act of adoption.

All of us are Mephibosheth. Lame, crippled, dead dogs. The King would have every right to execute us by virtue of our tainted heritage.

But Christ the true and better David, in order to honor and fulfill His covenant, gladly brings the crippled, dead dogs into the palace, and gives us a place to eat at His table as one of His sons. We, like Mephibosheth, now eat at the king’s table continually.

That is the incomprehensible beauty and glory of adoption that John calls us to see and behold. The magnanimity of love expressed in adoption is this: that God in Christ would make enemies sons.

John Piper expresses it well:

Sermons from John Piper (1990–1999) The Depth of Christ’s Love: Its Lavish Benefits

Not only did it cost him his Son to save us from sin and death and hell (John 3:16; 1 John 3:16); and not only were we enemies so that God had to propitiate his own righteous anger in order to save us (1 John 4:10); but he went way beyond the love of rescue and the love of sacrifice and the love of clemency to his enemies. In and through all this he had a greater design. He showed us another kind of love beyond all that. He might have rescued us, sacrificed for us, forgiven us, and not gone any further. But instead he showed us another kind of love—he took us into his family. He made us to be called children of God.

Don’t take this for granted. First of all, he might not have saved us at all. He might have said, “Enemies don’t deserve saving, and that’s that.” He might have said, “My Son is too precious to pay for angels, let alone humans, let alone ungodly, rebellious humans.” But he also might have said, “I will save them from hell, and forgive their sins, and give them eternal existence—on another planet, and I will communicate with them through angels.” Nothing in us, or in the nature of the world required that God would go beyond all redeeming, forgiving, rescuing, healing love to this extreme—namely, to an adopting love. A love that will not settle for a truce, or a formal gratitude, or distant planet of material pleasure, but will press all the way in to make you a child of God. A member of the family.

John therefore calls us to reflect upon and cherish the fundamental reality of God’s love, expressed to us by His adoption of us as His own children.

But our adoption presents an outcome for our relationship with the world - alienation.

Alienation - 3:3c

Let’s look closely at John’s logic by following his proposition and then making a conclusion.

What is the world’s perception of God?

They do not know Him.

What is our relationship to God?

We are His children.

Therefore, what is the world’s perception of us?

They do not know us.

This is classic Johannine theology, but represents the first time we see this theme brought out in 1 John. This was a central theme of the Upper Room Discourse recorded in John 13-17, this notion that the world’s ignorance and hatred of the Father results directly in their ignorance and hatred of the church.

John is saying that each of us, by virtue of our adoption, bear the family resemblance, and that family resemblance is unsavory to the world. They won’t know us and they won’t love us because we are now part of a new family. As Christ Himself said, who are my brothers, and who is my mother? For my mother and brothers are the ones who do the will of my Father in heaven.

John is therefore urging us here to remain secure in our identity. We have no business pining after friendship and intimacy with the world when we have been adopted into the family of God. We are God’s children, we are not of the world, loved by the world, or known by the world.

Allow this reality to reinforce our assurance then. The world tempts us with it’s fools gold. Fleshly lusts and desires lurk around every corner. But as children of God those things must be wholly and completely foreign to us. They do not know us, so why should we know them?

This speaks to the tendency of churches today to try and copy what the world does. Utilizing the latest marketing trends and business growth strategies to lead and guide the church is a fool’s errand. Why? Because the world doesn’t care. They don’t know you. They don’t recognize you. Why would they care that you’ve adopted their principles and practices for getting in the door? That separating is precisely what makes the church attractive to those who are truly in Christ. By the Spirit, true brothers and sisters know us. They sense the innate connection and they’re drawn toward it. This is why we hang our hat on simple practices as a church. No smoke, no lights, no exposition of the latest cultural trends. As a church, if we stay focused on our identity as children of God, other children of God will find us and join the ranks. We don’t need to accommodate ourselves to the world. They don’t know us, and we don’t know them either. We are called to be separate, called to be holy. God will convert sinners and build His church. We just need to be focused on looking like our Father and making sure we represent the family name well.

Beatific Vision - 3:2

John now moves to another implication. Just as our forensic identity as adopted children changes our relationship with the world, so also it impacts our hope. We recognize, according to John, that we are now children adopted into the family of God. But we simultaneously recognize that we’re not all the way there yet. Our sonship, while real and true and eternally secured, is not yet fulfilled and perfected. There remains, on this side of heaven, only one son of God who fulfilled His Sonship perfectly.

And so we look to him and have hope. That hope is not yet realized, but it exists, it is here, and it drives us forward.

What is that hope that? That our true nature will be made manifest, that it will be revealed, that it will be made clear. That, as Herman Bavinck said, we will once again become truly human, for we will be perfected in our sonship.

But we confess with John that there is some obscurity. Press any pastor or theologian or Biblical scholar on the exact nature of humanity in heaven and they will be hard pressed to give a precise answer, and to avoid such an answer would be wise for even John seems fuzzy on the precise nature of our glorified state.

As John Stott said, our true glory will appear when He appears.

This second sentence encapsulated what theologians for thousands of years have called “The Beatific Vision,” or the blessed sight of the glorified Christ at His return.

This is the notion that Paul describes as “being transformed from one glory to another,” until that final day, when our “glory metamorphosis” is complete, and vision becomes assimilation. We see him and we are like him. John provides no details and seems not to need to. It is sufficient for John to admit that he doesn’t fully know or understand exactly what that glory will be like, much in the same way that we do not fully comprehend the glory of Christ Himself now. We cannot fully understand His glory, so it stands to reason that we would not be able to fully understand our own.

I could try to explain this doctrine, and fail. Or I could lean on the inimitable Dean of Oxford, the Prince of Puritans, the Pastor of Parliament, John Owen, to guide us through this doctrine of the Beatific Vision:

Works of John Owen: Volume 1 Chapter 12: Differences between Our Beholding the Glory of Christ by Faith in This World and by Sight in Heaven—The First of Them Explained

The object of it will be real and substantial. Christ himself, in his own person, with all his glory, shall be continually with us, before us, proposed unto us. We shall no longer have an image, a representation of him, such as is the delineation of his glory in the Gospel. We “shall see him,” saith the apostle, “face to face,” 1 Cor. 13:12;—which he opposeth unto our seeing him darkly as in a glass, which is the utmost that faith can attain to. “We shall see him as be is,” 1 John 3:2;—not as now, in an imperfect description of him. As a man sees his neighbour when they stand and converse together face to face, so shall we see the Lord Christ in his glory; and not as Moses, who had only a transient sight of some parts of the glory of God, when he caused it to pass by him.

John Owen further explains exactly what we are to do with this doctrine:

Works of John Owen: Volume 1 Chapter 12: Differences between Our Beholding the Glory of Christ by Faith in This World and by Sight in Heaven—The First of Them Explained

This immediate sight of Christ is that which all the saints of God in this life do breathe and pant after. Hence are they willing to be dissolved, or “desire to depart, that they may be with Christ,” which is best for them, Phil. 1:23. They choose “to be absent from the body, and present with the Lord,” 2 Cor. 5:8; or that they may enjoy the inexpressibly longed-for sight of Christ in his glory. Those who do not so long for it, whose souls and minds are not frequently visited with earnest desires after it, unto whom the thoughts of it are not their relief in trouble, and their chiefest joy, are carnal, blind, and cannot see afar off. He that is truly spiritual entertains and refresheth himself with thoughts hereof continually.

So let’s ask ourselves tonight with John Owen? Do we entertain and refresh ourselves with the thought of our glorious future sight of Christ? Do we breathe and pant after it?

Purity - 3:3

John now gets to the meat of his argument.

To summarize, what John is saying is that we are children of God, unknown and unloved by the world, with our hearts set upon an obscure but certain future glory, where we will behold the glory of Christ and by some incomprehensible miracle, absorb and receive that glory at the moment we lay our eyes on Him at his appearance.

This eschatological orientation, this blessed hope of a blessed sight of Christ, for John, is a motivating factor for our present purity.

To put it plainly, John says that as we look to Christ, we purify ourselves because He himself is pure.

As Robert Yarbrough says, to have the hope of 3:2 speaks of is to have a zeal for ethical uprightness.

In other words, we prepare ourselves for glory in the future by pursuing purity in the present.

This word here, pure and purify in the English, come from the same Greek root as the word holiness.

What John is getting at here is this: our sanctification is a critical part of our preparation for glorification. In fact, I believe John argues here that glorification is not possible apart from sanctification. In other words, if one would see heaven, one must cultivate and maintain a life of holiness on earth.

If our hope is in Christ and our hope is that one day we will be like him, we must actively pursue that now.

Paul likewise commands this in 2 Corinthians 7:1

2 Corinthians 7:1 LSB

Therefore, having these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.

So what is our target when it comes to purity and holiness and sanctification?

Simply this: Christ. If we would be sanctified we must set our eyes on Christ.

Pastor Scott will take us through John’s teaching next week in verses 3-6 that flesh out the implications of purity, and some of the theological underpinning of it. So for tonight, I just want to leave us with a few practical thoughts about purity and holiness.

First, purity is to be wrought in the believer only by the power of the Holy Spirit. We must never disconnect our sanctification from the Spirit’s work to sanctify. We should rightly affirm that we work within the Spirit’s work as we work out our salvation with fear and trembling.

Second, purity is to be wrought in the believer according to two means. I have adapted the following material from John Owen’s Discourse Concerning the Holy Spirit.

First, the pursuit of the acts and duties of holiness, consisting in obedience to divine commands. We might further distinguish that these duties are both internal and external.

Internal duties of holiness and purity have God Himself as both their object and end. These are such things as faith, love, trust, hope, fear, reverence, and delight. Properly speaking, these duties are not necessarily externally visible.

We also have external duties, both toward God and toward men.

Our external duties toward God might consist in those things that are public and visible, or at least might be public and visible, like prayer and praises. These are external duties that have God as both their object and end. These may rightly be called duties of the first table, or duties that are reflected in the first 4 commandments.

Likewise, we also have external duties that have men as their object, while retaining God as their end. These would be duties of the second table

Second, the mortification or putting to death of sin. Owen says that we are to make every effort to weaken, impair, and destroy the contrary principle of sin, in both it’s root and fruit, in it’s principles and in it’s actions.

Thirdly, if we are to be pure as Christ is pure, we must know him. We must see him. We must gaze upon him in his humility and in his exaltation. This is why I have recommended time and again a Bible reading plan which always has you reading a portion of the gospel accounts. If we would be pure, we must look upon Christ. If we would be holy, we must gaze upon him, meditate on his perfections, reflect on his glory. We must look until we think we’ve seen it all, then take a short break and look again because you’ve only scratched the surface.

If we are to be prepared for glory by a continual habit of purification, we must absorb ourselves in the person and work of Christ. We must hang on his every word, savor his every work. We must sit at his feet like Mary and simply bask in his light.

If He is pure, and He is, according to John, and He is the standard of purity, why would we look anywhere else?

Friends, he is coming. When he appears, we will be like him. So may we be a church who prepares for that day by purifying ourselves, cleansing ourselves, and making ourselves holy by gazing upon Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit.

May we not be ashamed at his coming.