1 John 2:3-11
Preached 5/21/2023 [previous sermon]
INTRODUCTION
Those who are less than 60 years old do not remember how amazed everyone was when they first heard the words “live from the other side of the planet” on TV. This was made possible at the dawn of “the space age” with the advent of the first communications satellites being launched into earth orbit. Considering that this was just a little over 100 years after the first intercontinental telegraph cable was laid down in 1858, it shows how quickly the world has been drawn together. Today’s younger people take for granted being able to call anybody in the world on their cell phone or watch TikTok videos from someone in a far away country any time that they want to.
Back in 1967 when the first satellites were coming into service a plan was made to celebrate this new technology with a bold plan of a world-wide broadcast. The BBC, working with The European Broadcasting Union, started what became an international project to put together a broadcast titled “Our World”, which happened on June 26, 1967. The show included contributions from 18 different countries and it was watched on an estimated 170 million televisions around the world. The show climaxed with a special performance by the Beatles, who underscored the broadcast’s theme of unity with the first performance of their new song 'All You Need Is Love'. On a stage filled with young people in hippie attire the group sang that song, which expressed their hope that all the world’s problems and wars would be solved if people would just have love for one another.
But, while that generation’s ideas about love were often selfish or immoral, were they wrong? I would say no. But we must be sure to have a lofty enough definition of love or we will miss the boat completely. After all, the so-called apostle of love, John, wrote to us that “God is love”. Paul wrote the great ‘love chapter’ with its lofty and godly description of real love, 1 Corinthians chapter 13, which is often quoted at weddings but not always followed in the marriages that result. We read that “God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” And “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us”, so without God’s love we would only be subject to his justice and wrath for eternity. (Jn 3:16, Rom 5:8) We certainly need that love. What about us? Well, God gave us two special commandments that Jesus declared were a summary of every other commandment in God’s law. In the gospel of Mark we read that Jesus was asked what commandment is foremost of all, and he replied by quoting two scriptures:
Mark 12:29b-31 29 … “The foremost is, 'HEAR, O
In another passage Jesus said of these two commandments that “On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets." (Mat 22:40) If all of the law and the prophets are depended on this, then I think we can agree that “All you need is love.” But what a love. There are two things that we know as a fact:
1. Firstly, we know that if we loved God with all of our heart, soul, and mind and loved our neighbor as ourself, there would be no war, crime, cruelty, or abuse. There would be world peace and understanding.
2. Secondly, we know that we fall so short of these commands that without God’s love there would be no hope.
So we have come to a remarkable section of John’s first epistle. If we look closely at verses three through eleven, we can see that it closely follows the teaching of Jesus about these two aspects of love and the way that Jesus unfolded them in his teaching to his disciples about living life as a Christian. And John will apply them in his continuing list of signs that we can use to assure ourselves that we have eternal life. Remember that that was John’s goal for writing this letter: “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life.” (1 John 5:13) Of course, as is true with any test, you must pass it.
I Loving God – The First Commandment (v2:3-6):
The section starts with a clear application of the greatest commandment. Do you say that you know God? There’s a test for that!
1 John 2:3-6 3 And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments. 4 Whoever says "I know him" but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him, 5 but whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him: 6 whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.
John speaks very clearly here, and we are immediately reminded of Jesus’ challenge to the apostles hours before his arrest:
John 14:15 “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”
Jesus couldn’t have put it any clearer, could He? We can sing “Oh, how I love Jesus” all day, but if we constantly disobey his commandments we cannot escape the words of Jesus spoken on that night so long ago. “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” Does this mean that you must be perfect before you can claim to know him? Of course not. If it did, then we would have no assurance, because, as John has pointed out just a few verses back, “if we say that we have not sinned, we are deceiving ourselves” and that we must “confess our sins”. If you read through this epistle you will see that John is speaking of the overall direction of our life and our habits. But it is instructive to look down at verses 12-14 of this chapter, where John describes stages of Christian maturity. Interestingly he does so mostly in the sense of knowledge, which links us back to verse three here. The stages are roughly like this:
1. Stage one: infancy – our sins are forgiven and we know God as “daddy”.
2. Stage two: young man – strong and triumphant over the evil one as he comes to know God’s word, and
3. Stage three: a father – one who knows God (Him who has been from the beginning) fully.
So God reveals Himself to us at salvation, but we don’t know him well. Like a baby, we know that He takes care of us but our knowledge is limited. So how do we grow? We grow by learning his word and hiding it in our heart. As the psalmist wrote in Psalm 119:11 “I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you.” As we triumph over sin and study the word of God, we slowly but surely come to know God intimately. And the old saying is true: to know Him is to love Him.
All over scripture there is a beautiful relationship between the concepts of knowing and loving. All the way back in Genesis 4 we read that the first child was conceived when Adam “knew Eve his wife” and in Matthew 1:25 we read that Joseph did not ‘know’ his wife Mary until after Jesus was born. The word ‘know’ is used for closest intimacy and familiarity. As we grow spiritually we get to know God more and more intimately. Eventually we will experience what Paul wrote in his ‘love chapter’:
1 Cor 13:11-12 11 When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child. When I became a man, I did away with childish things. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known.
We see the equivalence between knowing and loving in verses 4 and 5. In verse 4 John refers to false believers who claim to know Him, and in verse 5 it says that “whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected”. Again, to know Him is to love Him, and to love Him means that we keep his word.
I should point out that the Greek in verse 5 leaves two interpretations as to what “the love of God” that is perfected means. Either interpretation does not change the overall test so I only mention it in passing. There are two possible objects in the verse, which means that this could also refer to the love that God has for us, which several commentators think is the correct rendition. In that case the test remains the same, and we get an additional reminder. Remember that in the end we will not be able to boast of any of our works because it is God working through us, as Paul reminded the Galatians:
Galatians 2:20 I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
John also says later in this letter that “we love because He first loved us”. So either way the test is the same. If we obey, it certainly shows our love for Jesus (as He told his disciples). But if we remember that our ability to obey and the leading to obey comes from God and now our own strength, then a changed life shows that the love of God that brought about our salvation through his grace has come to completion. I like this translation because it keeps me humble (correctly) even while giving me assurance of his salvation. And the Greek word for “perfected” conveys the idea of consummation, of attaining the purpose of something. What is our purpose? Paul wrote to the Ephesians 1:4 that “he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.” And he follows that up by saying that God did it “in love”.
So John uses many different ways to indicate a living faith: (1) we have come to know Him (v3), (2) the truth is in us (v4), (3) the love of God is perfected in us (v5), (4) we are in Him (v5), and (5) we are abiding in Him. To demonstrate this relationship, (1) we keep his commandments (v3 & 4), (2) we keep his word (v5), and (3) we walk in the same way that he walked (v6).
So the final part of this test is a matter of where we live. Where we are living our life (metaphorically) will give us surety about our salvation and our place in heaven. John uses two similar phrases for this: “we are in him” (v5) and we abide “in him” (v6). If we walk in the same way in which he walked then we show ourselves to be abiding in him. The word abide generally means “to remain and not depart”. At the end of this chapter John will admonish his readers to “abide in Him”. If we abide in Him then we will be ready when He arrives to take us to heaven and not, as John puts it, “shrink away from Him in shame at his coming”. That is not what a redeemed believer will do when Jesus comes. But if you know the Lord and keep his commandments and abide in Him then you can KNOW that you are saved, and that his purpose for you is to live forever with Him in joy!
The moral test is complete, now John brings us a social test.
II The Old and New Commandment (v2:7-8a):
In verses seven and eight John gives us a verbal conundrum – he states a sort of paradox in those verses that we will have to unpack carefully:
1 John 2:7-8 7 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. 8 At the same time, it is a new commandment that I am writing to you, ...
How can a commandment be both an old commandment that is not new but also a new commandment? On the surface this seems to be an unresolvable contradiction. But John is not exposing some sort of senility. We are meant to give this statement a lot of thought. So, to analyze this, let’s start at the beginning.
First, we see that John is writing to his “beloved”, or ἀγαπητοί (agapētoi). He uses this loving endearment ten times in his letters, and from the context it is referring to believers. In the same latter (in 3:2) he specifically tells the readers of this letter “Beloved, we are God’s children now”. In 4:1 he enjoins his beloved to use spiritual discernment to recognize true doctrine. And in verse 4:7 he ties this command we are looking at to those who have “been born of God”.
Second, he says that this command is “from the beginning”. What beginning? John uses this term in several ways, including near the beginning of all history (when Satan started sinning, 1 Jhn 3:8), or the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry (Jn 15:27), or eternity past (Jn 1:1), or when we first heard the gospel and its teachings (2 Jn 1:6). A good suggestion is to take this as “an old commandment that you have had all along.” What is the command that we have always had? I think that the previous verses and the following verses give us the context pretty clearly: the command John is talking about is a familiar one: “love one another”.
The beginning of verse 8 is translated different ways. Some versions say “Again, it is a new commandment”, some say “Yet”, others say “On the other hand,” and, maybe best of all, some translate it as “At the same time, it is a new commandment…”
But the question we must ask is: how can this commandment be both new and old? Consider a few ideas here:
As we have mentioned earlier, the second most important command in all of the Old Testament is “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” from Leviticus 19:18. Jesus Himself said that this command, together with the command to love God, was the very embodiment of “the law and the prophets”. And make no mistake, the religious leaders of Jesus’ time knew and agreed with that fact. We read in the gospels that one of the teachers of the law recited these commands to Jesus as the most important ones, to which Jesus said “you are not far from the kingdom of God. But the next thing out of their mouths when discussing this “old commandment” was the sad question “but who is my neighbor?” Why was this a sad response? Well, by that time the “experts” in scriptural interpretation had limited the scope of the command geographically and religiously so that their teaching had become (as Jesus specifically quoted in the Sermon on the Mount) “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” (Matthew 5:43) So Jesus turned that on its head and called for love, prayers, and good deeds even for our enemies! So in a way wasn’t Jesus’ teaching an old commandment that they had had all along but also a new commandment? In this case we might define new as “repaired, corrected, and reinstated”?
But referencing Leviticus 19:18 doesn’t take us all the way. While that take is perfectly true and applicable, it is an insufficient response. We can go to several places in scripture to make this point, but Jesus Himself laid it out at the last supper so let’s look there first. In John 13:34 and 35 Jesus told the apostles:
John 13:34-35 34 A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. 35 By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."
To back this up, John himself uses the same formula as he does here in his second epistle:
2 Jo 1:5 And now I ask you, dear lady--not as though I were writing you a new commandment, but the one we have had from the beginning--that we love one another.
Note that in that letter he also answers our question by specifically saying what commandment he is talking about. So it really is clear as day what John is talking about here. The command he is admonishing believers to be sure to obey is to “love one another”. This command is foundational. In John 13 Jesus basically told his disciples that the world would be able to see the truth of the gospel in the way believers loved each other. If you want to be an expert in apologetics, this was the main apologetic that Jesus gave. In fact, in his high priestly prayer in Gethsemane Jesus prayed to his Father that all of his followers would be one, “so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them.” We can think of it like this. When we are saved, we are given a love for God, but not only for God. We are also given a special love for the rest of his children.
This is sooooo important! This is not just a scholarly inference of high intellectual theology. This is basic truth. It is real “rubber meets the road” theology. It is not “advanced Christianity”. It is essential Christianity! In chapter four of first John he tells us that loving one another is a sign.
· It is a sign that we are born of God (4:7), and
· It is a sign that God dwells in us (4:12), and
· It is a sign that we love God (4: 20).
One big objection comes to mind pretty quickly. “Wait!” we might say, “I thought the Pharisees were wrong to limit the scope of the command to ‘love your neighbor as yourself’. Now it sounds like you are limiting the command again to just fellow believers instead of to the wider group that Jesus talked about in the Sermon on the Mount! Isn’t that hypocrisy on a huge scale?” The answer to this question is pretty easy, and the wording of John seems to have been specially written to answer this. This command is not a replacement for ‘love your neighbor as yourself’. We are not released from that command. That’s still the second greatest commandment. We are still responsible to be people of kindness, forgiveness and goodwill. We still have to obey the command to “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” [Luk 6:27-28]. This is an expansion of that command. It is a NEW commandment. And if we are not saved it is the natural behavior of a saved person. It is something that is put into the heart of believers as part of regeneration. It is part of that “assurance” package that John is describing in this epistle. We will “love the brethren”.
Therefore this test, proposed by John, is as certain a test of the veracity of our faith as the previous ones we have seen so far. If we don’t love God, and if we don’t love his people at all, then our faith is a fraud. When we get to chapter four we will read John say that anyone who spouts the words “I love God” but does not like being around other believers is … well … a liar.
III Loving One Another (2:8-11):
So let’s read what John writes to us about this “New Commandment”:
1 John 2:8-11 8 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. 9 Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness. 10 Whoever loves his brother abides in the light, and in him there is no cause for stumbling. 11 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.
Once again John returns to the idea of walking in light from chapter one, verses 5-7. Remember that back in that chapter he told us that walking in the light was synonymous with being a true believer. Now in this second mention he begins to flesh out at least one aspect of what “walking in the light” means. This test is simple: do you love or hate your brother?
Now we might answer John this way: “Hold on a minute! Sure, I don’t necessarily like going to church but I don’t hate my brothers and sisters. Don’t you dare accuse me of hating people. My sainted mother taught me never to hate people.” And I understand where you are coming from. We like to think in shades of grey, and “hate” is a very loaded and extreme sounding word. But John is the apostle of black-and-white. He contrasts two different conditions, and he calls them love and hate. Jesus did the same thing, so John is in good company. Remember when Jesus said this?
Luke 14:25-26 25 Now great crowds accompanied him, and he turned and said to them, 26 "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.
Jesus was not telling the crowds that the key to becoming his disciple was to disown and abuse your parents, thereby violating the ten commandments, to become a Christian. He was declaring a hierarchy of importance. Before the Ten Commandments tell us to honor our father and your mother, they tell us that we have have no gods before Him. God is first. He will not be honored by us less than anything in his created universe, either on earth or in heaven. Period. We must love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. In the light of that kind of love, all other love is “hate” by comparison. If we do not love our brother and sister in Christ, in this sense it is hate.
So we dither more. We might reply: “But I can do church at home. I can listen to streaming sermons and go to rallies and concerts and worship with other believers there. You can be a believer anywhere. Give me some credit! I love God, and I like visiting different churches. In fact, the more the merrier! But every one of them gets me down when I really get involved in the nitty gritty of fellowship. The actual people are disagreeable. A lot of them have said things that I don’t like. Don’t get me wrong. I love Christians. I really do! It’s just all those obnoxious people in churches I don’t really like. I could tell you a million stories about jerks I have encountered in the different churches I no longer go to. You would agree with me if you knew what losers I have had to put up with!”
Our big problem is that we have not really thought through was church is about. We expect the wrong thing. Paul wrote about Christians this way: “But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.” (2 Cor 4:7). We are nothing special in ourselves. God delights to show his power in our sanctification and growth. The church is a hospital for sinners, not a showcase for finished saints. Paul humbles all of us when he wrote to the Corinthian believers: “For consider your calling, brothers, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble. But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may abolish the things that are, so that no flesh may boast before God.” (1Cor 1:26-29 LSB) Those of us that feel that we have “arrived”, so to speak, and stay home, need to spend more time looking in God’s mirror and come to church more humble!
The devil loves to confuse us in this respect. C. S. Lewis had his senior tempter, Screwtape, give this advice to his trainee demonic tempter, on how to work to mess up the life of a new believer in his charge:
“One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread but through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes I our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. … When [your patient] goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather in oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbours. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like "the body of Christ" and the actual faces in the next pew. It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next pew really contains. You may know one of them to be a great warrior on the Enemy's side. No matter. Your patient, thanks to Our Father below, is a fool. Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous. … never let him ask what he expected them to look like. … Work hard, then, on the disappointment or anticlimax which is certainly coming to the patient during his first few weeks as a churchman. The Enemy allows this disappointment to occur on the threshold of every human endeavour. It occurs when the boy who has been enchanted in the nursery by Stories from the Odyssey buckles down to really learning Greek. It occurs when lovers have got married and begin the real task of learning to live together. In every department of life it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing.”
Conclusion
We could spend a lot more time on this topic, but since I will (Lord willing) be going through 1 John more in the future we will have many chances to get into these concepts more deeply. Remember that John wrote his letter in a sort of spiral form, returning to themes more deeply each time around the circle, and the themes of obedience and loving one another will reverberate more and more as we proceed.
To summarize, the types of love that we need are two-fold: we must have love for God and for people. And if we are truly saved then we will feel an attraction for the company of other believers. How can we be satisfied with a relationship that will end at death? As Paul wrote: [
2 Corinthians 6:14a-16 … what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, "I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
Are you spending more or less time with your church family? Have they grown more precious to you, or have they “worn out their welcome”? Are you pulled away from real spiritual fellowship by unsaved friends and activities that are destined to be lost or are you getting more acquainted with those that you are going to spend eternity with? These verses have left us with several self-test questions:
1. Do you know God as Father? Are your sins “forgiven for his name’s sake”, or are you just a “Christian in name only”, coming to services but not really committing or making sure that you know Him personally?
2. Are you becoming a spiritual adult by taking every opportunity to learn and internalize God’s word so that you can defeat the evil one? Are you really taking responsibility for your own knowledge of God, or are you leaving the growth for others to do? Does the thought of a good bible study make your spiritual mouth water, or do you find yourself lamenting “just another meeting”, keeping you from sleeping in or from watching your favorite TV show?
3. Are you keeping the word, or just pretending to? Are you motivated to please the Lord who saved you, or do you resent his interference with your life or ‘expressing your true self’?
4. Are you abiding in Christ, or are you ‘just visiting’ Him on Sunday mornings? Are you comfortable around his people, or do they generally annoy you?
These are the questions that John calls on us to ask ourselves. And he promises that if we do, we can know confidence before God, joy and hope. And they might just produce better Christians, and a flourishing local church. I assure you it is definitely worth the effort!
Having dealt with the types of love that we are supposed to have, we will move next to the type of love that we are not supposed to have. Love may be all you need, but some loves are not necessary but actually evil. So come back next week for 1 John 15-17 which I have titled “Crazy Stupid Love” – mostly because John MacArthur already had already used the better title “the Love that God Hates” and I did not want to be a copy-cat.
