Snake-crushers - 1 John 3:7-12 - Part Two

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 in chapter 3.

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.

It’s important to note that John is actually making two arguments here. The first argument is that the Christian is part of the lineage or descent of the woman, and therefore is a “little snake-crusher.” We will explore what that means throughout our time tonight.

John’s second argument is that our identity as little snake-crushers is actually the fourth argument for Christian holiness, righteousness, and purity. In other words, the Christian pursues purity and mortifies sin because they are a little snake-crusher.

Last week we considered the first part of this argument under the first three of six axiomatic statements:

Snake crushers are not deceived. We went with John back to the garden, back to the original Satanic deception and the original temptation and the original sin. We witnessed Christ, the Great Snake-Crusher, refuse to be deceived by the devil in the wilderness, clearing the way for His church of little snake-crushers to not be deceived as our first parents were. We saw that, since we are little snake-crushers, we are not to be deceived, and are to be committed to the pursuit of truth in all things.

Snake-crushers are righteous. Under this second axiomatic statement, we see that devil specifically tries to deceive us regarding the nature of righteousness. We explored the truth that, for the Great Snake-crusher, habitual and sustained righteous acts are born from a righteous nature, and that righteous nature is inherent and merited. We further explored that, for the little snake-crusher, habitual and sustained righteous acts likewise come from a righteous nature, but our righteous nature is not inherent or merited, but is imputed forensically by faith in accordance with grace. We saw that the devil tries to deceive us in regards to righteousness in 3 ways:

The identity of the righteous

The nature of the righteous

The standard of righteousness

We received encouragement from John in knowing that when the devil seeks to assail us with doubts about the righteous standing of another, we can look to their complete body of work as a Christian for assurance that they are in Christ. Likewise, when the devil assails us with doubts about our own righteous standing, we can look to our own complete body of work as a Christian for assurance. Finally, in all things, we look to and rely on the completed and completely righteous work of Christ for assurance when the devil tries to deceive us, for upward we look and see Him there, who made an end of all our sin.

Snake-crushers do not sin. We saw that John places all people within one of two groups: the one who makes a perpetual practice of sin and is of the devil, and the one who makes a perpetual practice of righteousness and is of God, and the two groups are engaged in perpetual battle. We saw that this is a tale as old as time, and this battle is put forth for our consideration on nearly every page of the Bible, from Genesis 3:15 to Revelation 12:1-6. We deduced that snake-crushers do not and cannot sin, a point to which we will return tonight.

Having reviewed our material from last week, let’s continue now and consider our final three points concerning snake-crushers from 1 John 3:7-12.

Snake-crushers crush snakes - 3:8b

We’ve now reached the heart of John’s argument.

The devil sins from the beginning. Who can or will put a stop to it? According to John, the Son of God, the Great Snake-Crusher. What is His purpose? To destroy the works of the devil.

What are the works of the devil?

I believe we can sum them up as sin and death. We might call sin and death the henchmen of Satan, carrying out his will against the human race.

What was Christ’s purpose then? To destroy sin and death. How did He do it? He destroyed sin through His life of perfect righteousness. At every possible point, when presented with the opportunity to succumb to sin or to destroy it, He destroyed it and chose righteousness. How did He destroy death? By rising from the dead. It’s that simple. Jesus destroyed the works of the devil and proved his victory over sin and death in his life and in his resurrection. He slayed sin by virtue of his life and gutted the grave by virtue of his resurrection.

This was his purpose on earth and this was how he crushed the head of the serpent. His life, death, and resurrection crushed and destroyed the works of the serpent, the devil forever.

But remember John’s argument in the context of our participation in this great cosmic battle. Is there any sense here for John that we also as Christians crush snakes and destroy the works of the devil? Yes. Let me prove it to you from 3 passages:

Psalm 91:1–2 LSB

He who abides in the shelter of the Most High Will abide in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say to Yahweh, “My refuge and my fortress, My God, in whom I trust!”

Psalm 91:4 LSB

He will cover you with His pinions, And under His wings you will take refuge; His truth is a large shield and bulwark.

Psalm 91:9 LSB

For you have made Yahweh—my refuge, The Most High—your dwelling place.

Psalm 91:13 LSB

You will tread upon the fierce lion and cobra, The young lion and the serpent you will trample down.

Look at the progression here: place your faith in God, He will protect you, you will find refuge in Him, and then you will tread on the cobra and trample down the serpent. That’s not just flashy imagery. That’s real. Christ did it, and by faith we do it too.

Luke 10:19 LSB

“Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing will injure you.

Jesus tells the disciples here explicitly that His snake-crushing authority has been passed on to them, not of themselves, but because He gives it to them.

And in case you missed it with Luke, Jesus repeats himself with John in Revelation 2:26-27

Revelation 2:26–27 LSB

‘And he who overcomes, and he who keeps My deeds until the end, TO HIM I WILL GIVE AUTHORITY OVER THE NATIONS; AND HE SHALL RULE THEM WITH A ROD OF IRON, AS THE VESSELS OF THE POTTER ARE BROKEN TO PIECES, as I also have received authority from My Father;

The crushing implement given by God to Christ is now passed on to all those who are in Christ, so that they may likewise crush snakes in His name.

Now you may say, if Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil, and if He accomplished that on the cross and at the empty tomb, how are there any works of the devil left to destroy for the Christian?

I would argue on three lines of thought here.

By experiential logic. We affirm that the devil is, at present, bound in chains. He is like a dog on a leash. He is allowed to do evil works and indeed does do evil works. But He does not and cannot do any evil beyond what God permits. We experience this in our own lives. Jesus’ death and resurrection did not mark the final and absolute destruction of the devil. If it did, we would experience no evil right now. We do, so we must logically deduce that the devil still exists and is active and able to work in and on the world.

By illustration. Have you ever cut off the head of a snake? I have, and it’s an interesting sight. The body of that snake will writhe and jump around and do all sorts of things, completely devoid of and detached from it’s head. I once cut the head off a rattlesnake in my backyard and stuck the head in a clay pot. the body of the snake was writhing and wriggling as if the whole snake was still fully intact. The next day I found the body of the snake almost 100 yards away. Without making too much of a presumption upon the Biblical imagery, perhaps God is teaching us something by this. Christ cut off the head of the snake at His death and resurrection, but just because the head has been cut off does not mean that the snake is completely dead and lifeless right then and there.

By exegesis. If you were to parse this verb here, destroy, you would find that it is an active aorist subjunctive. Without getting too technical, the structure of the word implies at least loosely that the work of destruction is not complete, that there is still destruction left to accomplish. We would affirm that Christ will complete the destruction at His second coming but that truth does not abrogate the reality that we as little snake-crushers have a responsibility to destroy the works of the devil in small ways in our own lives.

I hope to have adequately demonstrated that the Christian has a responsibility to destroy the works of the devil, just as Christ destroyed the works of the devil.

So how does one destroy the works of the devil? How do we tread upon the head of the serpent? The same way Christ did. I see at least three ways.

When we forsake sin and deception and choose righteousness and truth, we tread upon the head of the serpent.

When we look forward to the hope of grave-gutting resurrection, we tread upon the head of the serpent.

When we fulfill the law in love, we tread upon the head of the serpent.

It’s what the Great Snake-Crusher did, and it’s what his little followers do now.

Snake-crushers carry the divine seed of the woman - 3:9

John now connects this cosmic battle directly to our lives here and now.

He says everyone who has been born of God does not sin. Again we have this present active indicative, showing us that John does not mean the one who is born of God never commit individual sins, but rather does not make a perpetual habit of sinning.

The phrase order is important here. John is not saying “the one who does not sin has been born of God.” He is saying “the one who has been born of God does not sin.” The significance is this: being born of God comes first, not sinning comes second. Not sinning is conditioned upon being born of God. Being born of God is not conditioned upon not sinning. We are born again first and stop sinning later, rather than stopping our sinning so that we might be born again. To borrow the common turn of phrase, there is no need to clean yourself up or get your act together prior to believing. In fact, such efforts would be in vain and may in fact preclude you from true faith. Rather, as one might hear at the end of a Billy Graham crusade, the Christian comes to God and is born again “just as I am, without one plea, but that Christ’s blood was shed for me.”

Why does the one born of God not sin? John tells us: because His seed abides in Him, that is, the seed of God.

Again John calls upon the protoevangelium, the first gospel in Genesis 3, to make his point, and this is where the cosmic battle described in Genesis 3 and Revelation 12 and on every page in between, connects directly to the Christian. We participate in this cosmic battle because the very same seed of the woman which was promised to crush and destroy the seed of the serpent, now dwells in us. We do not do the works of the serpent because his seed does not dwell in us, and in fact, as we will see, is destroyed by us.

Again John appeals to the familial reality of abiding with God in his argument against a lifestyle of sin. He is, in effect, saying that we do not make a pattern of sin because it is the family business to not make a pattern of sin. If God’s seed is in us, and we are his children, sin is no longer in our DNA.

But John makes a second point, and one that is perhaps more difficult to untangle, and that is this: the one who is born of God cannot sin.

So we see here that the Christian does not sin, and indeed cannot sin. It is both inaction and inability in regard to sin.

Now this seems to be counterintuitive at best and contradictory at worst. What does John mean when he says that the one who is born of God cannot sin?

John is not saying that the true Christian is constitutionally incapable of sinning. This would be a blatant contradiction and therefore cannot be John’s intent.

Rather, we would affirm that John is speaking of the essential incompatibility of habitual sin with the true believer. Again we see this present active participle that indicates to us that John does not mean individual acts of sin but settled habits and perpetual lifestyles of it. The best way to understand this would be to read it through the lens of Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 7:15-20

Matthew 7:15–20 LSB

“Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. “You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorn bushes or figs from thistles? “Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. “A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. “Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. “So then, you will know them by their fruits.

What John is saying, interpreted through the lens of the teaching of Christ, is that sin, being incompatible with Christ, is also incompatible with the Christian. Just as an apple tree cannot produce oranges, so also a Christian cannot habitually sin. If we are in Christ as branches are in the vine, if His seed abides in us, we are Christian in our very nature and essence. That nature and essence precludes not only the actuality of habitual sin but even the potentiality of habitual sin.

The implication is, of course, that the one who is in habitual sin ought to fall under intense scrutiny regarding their connection to Christ. This scrutiny must begin personally and internally. We must pray with the psalmist “Search me, O God, and see if there be any false way in me.” Ask yourself the hard question: do I commit the same sins over and over again? Or do I find myself victorious by the spirit? As we will see, destruction and crushing of sin is in our very DNA, according to John.

The Great Snake-Crusher was born of God and made a perfect practice of not sinning, and thereby crushed the snake. The little snake-crushers, while not perfect, still make a practice of not sinning, and likewise crush the snake.

Snake-crushers love their brother - 3:10-12

John again separates all of humankind into two groups. You are a child of God, or you are a child of the devil. This is where John gets explicit in his placement of the Christian within the context of the cosmic battle between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman.

All of us are part of one group or the other. We’re either of the devil, the seed of the serpent, children of wrath destined for destruction, or we’re of Christ, the seed of the woman, children of righteousness destined for glory. And by virtue of our very existence as Christ’s offspring, seed of the seed of the woman, as it were, we are engaged in this cosmic battle. This is why the apostle Paul is so fond of military language and imagery in his writings. He understands that the Christian life is not the life of a gardener but the life of a soldier (though we hope and pray for the day when the soldiers beat their swords into plowshares and retire from soldiering and take up their career in gardening). John speaks to that reality here as well.

But John is not merely concerned with the reality of the these two groups. Rather, he is concerned that we not be deceived about their existence and that we not be deceived about who is who in this cosmic battle. So he tells us exactly how to determine who is of the glorious seed of the woman and who is of the cursed seed of the serpent, and it’s really quite a simple formula: you will know them by their fruits. The one who makes a habit of righteousness demonstrates the presence of the seed of the woman within them, and the one who does not, demonstrates the presence of the seed of the serpent.

We’ve seen about as clearly as we can the emphasis John places upon righteousness here in these verses, but here at the end of verse 10, he now returns to a theme that captivated him in chapter 2: brotherly love.

John thus positions righteousness in general and brotherly love in particular as critical marks of the snake-crushing seed of the woman who abides in God. In that same vein then, the one who does not possess and express these critical marks can be safely assumed to be of the seed of the serpent, a child of the devil.

John concludes this section with a compelling intra-textual reference followed by a compelling intertextual reference.

First, the intra-textual reference back to 3:8, then to 2:7. Just as the devil has sinned from the beginning, so also God in Christ has loved from the beginning. God is love from all eternity and likewise His principle command from all eternity is that His followers ought to first love Him and then love one another.

The intertextual reference places the last piece of the puzzle in place for John. The first outworking of the enmity between the serpent and woman plays itself out in the story of the first murder. We don’t have time in this study to digest the particulars, but trust me when I say that the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4 is a stroke-for-stroke recapitulation of the story of the serpent and Adam and Eve in Genesis 3, and extends and explains the theme of enmity between the serpent and the woman. There is enmity between Cain and Abel, and just as God predicted, that enmity leads to violence between the two.

John makes explicit what Moses only implies: that Cain is the seed of the serpent. John says there in verse 12 that Cain was “of” the evil one. His DNA was evil, which made his deeds evil, which finally resulted in the ultimate act of non-love or anti-love - the murder of his brother. Cain thus becomes the first in a long line of woman-seed-opposing seeds of the serpent that are used by the devil to wreak havoc against the seed of the woman. We can move through Biblical history and find them on nearly every page. Ishmael. Esau. Joseph’s brothers. Pharaoh. Saul. Absalom. Haman. Judas.

These are not new ideas for John. In fact, as we have said, this is a tale as old as time. John is simply adding characters to the story. And those characters are you and me.

If we place our faith in the seed of the woman, the great snake-crusher, we become little snake-crushers. In a real way, we participate in this grand story. That is John’s whole point. He is working and writing and laboring to argue for the legitimacy of Christian holiness. He is writing so that we may not sin. And he argues from adoption, from the hope of glory, from the reality of the atonement, and he now argues from all of redemptive history that Christians must pursue holiness. We do it because it is our part to play in this divine drama.

Conclusion

If we hang our hat on the reality that we are little snake crushers, then there are certain implications:

Snake-crushers are not deceived. Adam and Eve fell prey to serpent’s deception, but the great snake-crusher did not, and so too the little snake crushers do not. We are therefore to be discerning and keep our guard up against the lies and deceptions of the serpent even in our own day.

Snake-crushers do righteousness and are righteous. The way of snake-crushing is the way of righteousness. We accomplish acts of visible righteousness because of the imputed righteousness that has been given to us. We now act in accordance with our justification.

Snake-crushers destroy the works of the devil. The great snake-crusher destroyed the works of the devil in his life and resurrection. In a smaller way, we likewise participate in that destruction every time we choose truth over lies, love over hatred, obedience over lawlessness. This is what Paul meant when he said that we are more than conquerors through Christ, and what Jesus himself meant when he said that the one who overcomes and keeps His deeds until the end will rule with a rod of iron. This text is in direct fulfillment of Psalm 2. There the true king of Zion is in view, but in Revelation 2 it is all those who are in Christ. We have been given a rod of iron to destroy the works of the devil. That rod of iron is our commitment to the word, to prayer, to the church, to preaching, and to the sacraments. Small disciplines that contribute to the destruction of the works of the devil every time we participate in them.

Snake-crushers do not make a habit of sin. If snake-crushers destroy the works of the devil, how can we partake in the very things that He has destroyed and we are presently likewise destroying?

Snake-crushers do righteousness by loving one another. This is principle way in which snake-crushers participate in this divine drama. It’s almost backward. It makes no sense in the context of a drama, and yet it is our chief responsibility and indeed the chief way in which we destroy the works of the devil. We do so by consistently and with discipline loving one another.

The great snake-crusher has come. He was not deceived, he did righteousness and was righteous, he destroyed the works of the devil, he did not make a habit of sin, and he loved others to the end. May we walk worthy of Him.