1 John Devotiona

Good morning brothers! It is once again a pleasure and a blessing to address you all in a morning devo at a TLI course. For our devotional time we are going to be looking at two passages from 1 John that are interconnected, 1:5-10, and 2:7-11.

As we have already been learning in this class, one of the first steps to reading any NT epistle is to ask the question who is the original audience, and surprise, that audience is not an American or a Filipino congregation!

In this instance the Apostle John is writing to Christian Jews, as is the case with his Gospel as well. Particularly in reading 1 John, this fact is important as we will see here shortly.

So with the original audience in mind, please turn in your Scriptures to 1 John, and please stand in honor of the word of God to be read today.

1 John 1:5–10 “This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

1 John 2:7–11 “Beloved, I am writing you no new commandment, but an old commandment that you had from the beginning. The old commandment is the word that you have heard. At the same time, it is a new commandment that I am writing to you, which is true in him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining. Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness. Whoever loves his brother abides in the light, and in him there is no cause for stumbling. But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness, and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes.”

This is the word of God! Please be seated.

There is a lot to unpack here and many sermons can be spent on just these 11 verses, but for today I want to look particularly at John’s use of light and darkness throughout these two connected passages.

Speaking for myself, my usual reaction to this passage is to see light as righteousness and darkness as evil or sin. This seems obvious from the opening of verse 5 where John states that God is light and in Him there is no darkness.

But when we look at verse 8 where John writes that the darkness is passing away, this understanding of light as simply righteousness, and darkness as simply sin or evil comes into question, we can all attest to the fact that sin has not, and is not passing away even two thousand years later.

So John must mean something more than simply righteousness and sin.

Well how do we discover what John means here by light and darkness? Well we can see what else the writer has to say about light and darkness,

And so first we turn to John’s Gospel and we see light making an appearenace in the first chapter.

When writing of Christ in his opener, John writes in John 1:4–5 “In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

Light for John is the light of Christ. Particularly, it is the light that shines in the revelation of Christ as the Messiah.

But what does that make darkness? To understand John’s use of darkness we need to go one another step back in our exegesis. As to where we go, will, we need to go back to, “In the beginning….”

When we look Creation account in Genesis 1, which comes first, darkness or light? Well darkness, “for darkness was over the face of the deep…” Was this darkness, in and of itself evil?

Well no because when God creates day and night He declares both to be good. But the important thing to grasp here is that darkness came first. In fact, in Jewish reckoning of days, the new day began at sunset, which is why Sabbath begins then and why the Jews needed to take Christ down from the cross before sunset. Darkness begins the new day and daylight ends it. But most importantly, darkness precedes firligjtt.

So We know that John is writing to Christian Jews.

We know that the light is the light of Christ revealed in His incarnation, resurrection, and ascension. It is the light of the New Covenant

And what precedes the New Covenant, well the older Mosaic covenant, aka, the Jewish worship centered around the temple and sacrifices. So for John, one role that darkness plays is it represents the Old Covenant practices.

Now understand, the darkness in and of itself is not evil. It is simply the forerunner of the light. the Jews in the darkness of the Old Covenant were where God wanted them, where they needed to be. But when the light of Christ was revealed, when the New Covenant dawned on the Old, the darkness of the Old was replaced by the light. For where there is light, there is not darkness

And we know this, for all the temple imagery and sacrifices are what we call types and “shadows” of Christ.

And when light dawns, the shadows fade away. It would be like preferring the shadow of your wife over the physical presence of her!

And so once again, light is the revelation of Christ shining forth, while darkness is the ceremonial laws of the Old Covenant. And we see John use this imagery in his gospel, let me show you two contrasting examples.

In John 3, when Nicodemus comes to visit Jesus, it is not a coincidence that he comes “at night” as he comes as a representative of the Pharisees., aka the Old Covenant religious order  He is to sound out and understand this new light shining upon them. It might be that Nicodemus was afraid as well to approach Jesus, but the symbolism goes deeper than that!

Then, one chapter later, it is again not a coincidence that the Samaritan woman comes to Jesus when… in the middle of the day! And she walks away as a believer, something we should all see coming given the timing of her visit! And notice too, between the story of Nicodemus, and the Woman at the well, is a story of baptism… From the darkness of the Old Covenant, John takes his readers through baptism into the light of the New Covenant!

I could keep going on about this imagery in the Gospel of John but we must return to 1 John.

And now we get to a clearer understanding of what John is communicating to his Christian Jewish audience. Lets look again at verse 6 of chapter 1

1 John 1:6 “If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.”

John is telling his readers that they cannot have fellowship with Christ while walking in the darkness of the Old Covenant! (Again, there is definitely truth here that neither can we have fellowship with Christ while walking in unrepentant sin, but before we get there we must first understand what John is originally saying!)

You cannot be a Christian and keep to the Jewish sacrifices. Why! Because Christ fulfilled them! He has done away with temple laws and sacrificial codes and to keep to them is to repudiate all Christ has done! As the writer of Hebrews reminds us in Hebrews 10:11–14 “And every priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet. For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.”

This deeper understanding of light and dark also makes more sense of what John says when he writes “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” For under the delusion of those holding to the darkness of the OC, by offering sacrifices, and offering outward comformaty to the law, they held themselves blameless! Paul himself expressed this when referring to his time as Pharisee, before his conversaion he said he “a Hebrew of Hebrews, as to the law, a Pharisee, as to zeal, a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law, blameless.”

And this is the same man, who after his conversation declared “What a wretched man I am, who will deliver me from this body of death!”

So those Jewish Christians, who still held to justification by way of sacrifices have no part in Christ.

Finally, lets see how this reshapes our understanding of what John is saying in the companion verses to 1:5-10 in 2:7-11.

First, lets look at verses 7-8

1 John 2:7–11 “Beloved, I am writing you no new commandment, but an old commandment that you had from the beginning. The old commandment is the word that you have heard. At the same time, it is a new commandment that I am writing to you,

What does John mean here by no new commandment, but at the same time a new commandment?

First what is this not new/new commandment? John states it in verse 9

1 John 2:9 “Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness.”

Reinterpreting it in our understanding of ight and darkness

“Whoever says he is in the light of Christ, and hates his brother who is also in the light of Christ, is still in the darkness of the old covenant.”

Well the not new commandment goes back to the very foundation of the law, to love the Lord Your God with all (Motion for others to say with you) heart and all your soul and all your mind AND to love your neighbor as yourself.

The NEWness of the not new commandment is the revelation as to who is your neighbor, or in this case your brother. And the hard lesson for Jewish Christians was accepting the reality that Gentiles were now their brothers in Christ.

As we have read in Ephesians 2:11–17 “Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called “the uncircumcision” by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands— remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near.”

So when we read 1 John, closer to the context in which he was writing we get the very stark warning:

Whenever a Jewish Christian says he is in the light and yet hates his brother Gentile Christian, he still walks in the darkness of the Old Covenant and does not know where he is going because the darkness of the Old Covenant is still blinding his eyes.

John, more than just tackling a righteousness/sin dictomty, is addressing actual division within the church body, a division that the light of Christ should have erased.

And now we must ask ourselves, where do we hate those who we should call brothers? While we may not be tempted by the darkness of the Old Covenant as the Jewish Christians John was writing to were, are we guilty of drawing lines of division as these Jewish converts did?

These Jews apparently where still drawing the line of fellowship at circumscion.

But where does John draw the line of fellowship, at those who profess the name of Christ, and in professing, look to him for justification instead of outward practices.

That’s a pretty broad circle.

But do we hold to Christians as brothers in this way?

Do we too readily draw the line of separation between brother and not brother at a Calvinistic understanding of soteriology?

-If you don’t believe in election you are no Christian!

-If you hold to election you trample on the free will of man!

Or maybe closer to home, do we draw the line at belief over the active working of the Holy Spirit?

-If you are cessasionist there is no room in the body of Christ!

-Or if you believe in the continuing public workings of the Spirit I want nothing to do with you!

Do we seek to make our liturgical practices the dividing line?

-High liturgy is the most God honoring way to worship!

-NO, high liturgy is repetitive and not filled with spiritual conviction, go away from me!

Do we sharply and bitterly divide over baptism?

-If you baptize your infants you bring unbelievers into the covenant of faith!

-If you only baptize on profession of faith you are starving the holy infants God has given you!

And this bring up an important part of loving our brother, it is not a wholehearted endorsement of everything that everyone believes! Loving your brother means very much confronting them where you think they are wrong!

I am a Reformed, Cessasionist, High Liturigual, Infant Baptizing Christian! And I will debate with any other brother over my beliefs! But, let me emphasize, , I can, no, I must do so in love. I can hold to my convictions dearly, and truly believe in the wrongness of a baptized brothers beliefs, but do so without hate in my heart and anger towards his congregation.

Brothers, we are brought together by the light of Christ, may the darkness of divison and hatred be far from us. I end then with a paraphrase of 1 John

Whoever says he is in the light of Christ, and hates his brother in Christ, is still in the darkness outside of the light. Whoever loves his brother in Christ abides in the light of Christ and in him there is no cause for stumbling.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen!