The Christian's Role in the Divine Drama

Introduction

The apostle John in 1 John 3 is making an argument for holiness. He is writing, as he has said previously, so that we may not sin. He is arguing for validity of this assertion from a variety of angles.

Argument #1 comes in 3:1. The Christian pursues holiness because they are adopted into the family of holiness.

Argument #2 comes in 3:2-3, and this is a two-pronged argument. The Christian pursues purity because Christ Himself is pure and because the Christian anticipates the glorious future day when they will behold Christ in all his purity.

Argument #3 comes in 3:4-6. The argument here is predicated upon three premises. The first premise is that Christ has no sin. The second premise is that the incarnation was fundamentally anti-sin, that is, the the reason that Christ came to the earth was for the purpose of eradicating or removing sin. The third premise is that the Christian who has truly seen and truly known Christ, abides in Him. The argument out of those premises becomes this: the Christian mortifies and puts to death sin by abiding in Jesus because Jesus mortified and put to death sin by example in His life, by penal legal transaction in His death, and by logical reversal in His resurrection.

John is now continuing that argument, that the Christian ought to pursue righteousness and purity, and make every effort to mortify sin, by placing the Christian squarely within the divine drama of redemptive history.

We therefore will see tonight that argument #4 for why Christians ought to pursue holiness and righteousness and mortify their sin is because they are “little snake-crushers.”