1 John 1:5-2:2 Light

1 John 1:5-2:2 (Evangelical Heritage Version)

5This is the message we heard from him and proclaim to you: God is light. In him there is no darkness at all. 6If we say we have fellowship with him but still walk in darkness, we are lying and do not put the truth into practice. 7But if we walk in the light, just as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ, his Son, cleanses us from all sin. 8If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 9If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 10If we say we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar, and his Word is not in us.

2:1My children, I write these things to you so that you will not sin. If anyone does sin, we have an Advocate before the Father: Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. 2He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the whole world.

Light

I.

Light turned into darkness. At least, if you were in the path of totality. Around here, at 94%, the bright spring day only got a little dimmer, as if the sun were obscured by some haze from far-off wildfires, perhaps, or as if it were twilight.

Lots of people put on their sunglasses and went outside. If you looked up into the cloudless West Michigan sky to check out what you could of the eclipse, hopefully you took the proper precautions and put on a pair of eclipse glasses. But you didn’t want the protective lenses flipped up like this, you wanted them flipped down, like this, to get proper protection for your eyes. When you looked with the proper eye protection at the relatively rare phenomenon, you could see what was happening without doing permanent damage to your eyesight.

Remember Transfiguration Sunday several weeks ago? That was the day that some of Jesus’ disciples got to see a glimpse of Jesus’ glory. Matthew’s account of that event says: “His face was shining like the sun” (Matthew 17:2, EHV). Moses and Elijah appeared at the Transfiguration of Jesus. One day while Moses was leader of God’s people, he had asked to see God in all his glory. God told him: “You cannot see my face, for no human may see me and live” (Exodus 33:20, EHV).

Eastern religions have a concept called Yin Yang. The idea is that nothing is completely evil, and nothing is completely good; there is at least a little bit of good in everything evil, and at least a little bit of evil in everything good. The concept doesn’t work when it comes to the true God, does it? God is completely good—there isn’t even a speck of evil in him. In today’s Second Reading John puts it in terms of light and darkness. He says: “God is light. In him there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5, EHV). Even with your eclipse glasses on, you wouldn’t be able to look at God in all his glory; they simple wouldn’t be strong enough to shield you from such holiness and perfection. You need something more—something better.

Last week John spoke about our fellowship with the Heavenly Father, which was purchased and won for us by the death and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus, we said last week, enfolded us into fellowship with him. Another way of putting it is that Jesus brought us into the light.

II.

On eclipse day, did you try looking down at the world around you with those same special eyeglasses? They block out so much available light that you appear to be in total darkness, except for the little bands of light leaking in around the rims of your glasses. If you tried to walk around with the eclipse glasses on, disaster would strike. You wouldn’t be able to see steps, and would come tumbling down. You couldn’t see your hand right in front of your face, let alone anything else that might obstruct your path.

John uses a lot of “if” statements in today’s Second Reading. This one seems pretty important: “If we say we have fellowship with him but still walk in darkness, we are lying and do not put the truth into practice” (1 John 1:6, EHV).

Fellowship was established by Jesus. That’s really what we said moments ago and what John was teaching in last week’s reading. Being brought in to the fellowship of the light means believing and following the teachings of Jesus.

But some of those teachings are hard; they are difficult to understand; they don’t seem to mesh with human reason. Does it matter all that much if you just slide past the parts of the Bible that make no sense to you? What if you try to harmonize the Bible with the other things you have learned?

John says doing that is like walking around in darkness. You put barriers in front of the light. No longer are you walking in the light; it’s like you are stumbling around wearing your eclipse glasses as you study God’s Word. Any little speck of darkness that obscures the light of God’s truth is deadly. It means you are lying, as John puts it, and do not put the truth into practice.

John follows up with another “if” statement. “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8, EHV). It is easy to look at other people in the world and come to the conclusion that you are better than that person over there. There is so much unmitigated evil. But we aren’t to compare ourselves with other people. The Apostle Paul quotes King David saying; “There is no one who is righteous, not even one” (Romans 3:10, EHV). John said that to think we are sin-free is doing nothing other than deceiving ourselves. It’s like putting on the eclipse glasses and being totally convinced that you can see just fine walking around that way—nothing will happen to you.

John continues with a related “if” statement in our reading: “If we say we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar, and his Word is not in us” (1 John 1:10, EHV). God gave every human being a conscience that tells us that certain things are right and other things are wrong. Human beings dull that conscience with all the wrong things we do, so he wrote down a list of things to summarize his law so that we could refresh our memories and our consciences.

Claiming to be sin-free is actually even worse than deceiving yourself—it’s making God out to be a liar. Walking around with the light-obscuring glasses shows that we don’t think we need God’s Law. Without the law to show us that we have sinned and put ourselves outside God’s fellowship means that we don’t think we need the Savior God sent for us.

III.

A person can’t look at a solar eclipse without special glasses. Do you need special glasses for looking at the total light of God?

If you rely on yourself, you will always come up short. But John says: “My children, I write these things to you so that you will not sin. If anyone does sin, we have an Advocate before the Father: Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. 2He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the whole world” (1 John 2:1-2, EHV).

As John wrote the “if” statements of chapter one, he knew these words from chapter two were coming. He knew he was going to remind us of the sacrifice Jesus made to bring us into the light as people of God.

“But if we walk in the light, just as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ, his Son, cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:7, EHV). God made many special requirements of his Old Testament people to offer sacrifices for sin. They all pointed ahead to the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. Jesus lived perfectly for his entire life to present himself as the sacrifice God required for the sins of all people. Not only did he pay for sins, Jesus gives you and me his own perfection so that we can stand before God without any special glasses at the Last Day of judgment; God will see each of us as perfect and holy, righteous, just like he is.

IV.

“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9, EHV). Why do we find it so easy to speak the confession of sins early in our service? It’s because we already know the answer: God has forgiven us our sins already in Jesus. He already has been faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we didn’t already know that answer, we would tremble in fear. We would not even be able to take a quick glance at the light of God in all his holiness, even if we were wearing special glasses.

“But if we walk in the light, just as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ, his Son, cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:7, EHV).

You can put your glasses away for awhile. The next total solar eclipse is more than two years away, but if you want to see it you’ll have to go to Greenland, or Iceland, or Spain; or maybe Russia. The next total eclipse in the US will be in 2033, but only in Alaska.

But I’m not really talking about eclipses. You don’t need special glasses to look at your Savior. You have been brought into the light. Don’t put on glasses of false doctrine to obscure the light. The Holy Spirit has called you into the light established by Jesus. You are there. Now, continue to walk in the light. Amen.