1 John I. 6—10.
If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth: but if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us.
You will remember the words which immediately precede these. ‘This then is the message which we have heard of Him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.’ I have spoken of that message already, but I must speak of it again, as all the rest of this chapter depends upon it. I can quite imagine a person saying, —‘Light! Darkness!— What exactly does he mean by these expressions? They are figurative. What is the literal force of them ?’
Now I am very glad to hear questions of this kind, and I will answer them as well as I can; but I must tell you why I do not expect that I shall ever be able to answer them as those who propose them may desire that I should. I have explained to you already that the student of morals does not want letters first and chiefly. He wants a Life. He wants letters only as they assist him to the knowledge of a Life. Well, then, if I am asked to find a literal meaning for these phrases, ‘Light’ and ‘Darkness,’ I must consider what I am about. They certainly are very living expressions. They belong to the life of us all. Every man who cannot read or write has to do with them, and knows something of what they signify, if he cannot convey his knowledge accurately to another. Nay, sometimes he can do that; an ignorant man may tell me something about the effect of darkness or light upon him, which may make me feel what they are more truly, more exactly, than any long descriptions of them which I meet with in a dictionary or encyclopedia composed by learned men. He may say, ‘My companion and I walked on pleasantly and cheerily enough as long as the sun was shining upon us. We saw the sky over our heads, and the trees, and the corn-fields, and each other’s faces. But night came on. All things were huddled together; we mistook old stumps of trees for houses, we were continually stumbling against each other; it was dreary work enough.’ If he only said this to me, I should understand him better—he would give me a fuller and more accurate impression of what light is and what darkness is—than if he had been able to supply me with the best definitions of them that were ever invented. Do you not see, then, that to get what are sometimes called literal equivalents for these words, which are just what a dictionary or encyclopedia affords, might be to lose clearness instead of to gain it? Let us not be deluded with phrases. If what is called figurative language brings us into closer contact with reality than what is called literal language, it must be better for our purpose; and we should resolve to let no one rob us of it under pretence of giving us something more substantial in exchange. If he can prove that it is more substantial, we will take it; if not, we will keep what we have.
Moreover, these expressions were wonderfully suitable for those to whom St. John wrote. The Ephesians had paid an especial worship to Artemis or Diana. They connected her with the moon, the night-ruler. They had paid a worship, in common with the other Greeks, to Apollo; him they connected with the sun, that rules the day. They connected them, I say, with these beautiful objects; but they were never satisfied with doing so. The god of light was the god whom they went to consult how they should manage states, conduct wars, make peace. They felt that a higher light than the light which the eyes could see must proceed from him. That could never enable them to choose the right path and avoid the wrong one. That could never keep them in fellowship with each other. But that which could, they were sure must be a light. They could not describe it in any language so well. It must be a better, purer, diviner light, than that which they perceived with their eyes. It must be a more human light; the other affected men in common with animals and plants; this must have to do with that in which they were different from animals and plants. So these old Greeks thought. And the more one reads of them, the more one perceives how much all that was great in them and in their deeds was produced by these thoughts. Yet they were perpetually confusing the light which came from the sun and moon—the light which they saw only through their eyes—with that light which they could not see with their eyes at all—which came directly to them. They were continually exalting the lower light above the higher light, and supposing the higher to come from the lower. This was their idolatry. They worshipped the visible things from which they thought that the light proceeded. All the time they felt that men were better than these things; therefore, if they worshipped these things, they must also worship men. And men could make wonderful things. They could imitate the works of nature. They could express the thoughts of their own minds in pictures and statues. Why should not these be worshipped too?
St. John had been taught almost from his birth, that he was not to worship things in heaven, or on earth, or under the earth, or the works of his own hands. He had been taught that the Lord his God was one Lord, that He was the Unseen Deliverer, Guide, Teacher, King of Israel. He had clung to this teaching. He had believed that all the institutions of his land were appointed to keep him and his people from forgetting it. He had believed that this was their distinction from the nations that were round about them; that they were a wise, and understanding, and united people, while they trusted in this Deliverer and King, whom they could not see; and that they became a stupid and ignorant and divided people as soon as they began to bow down to things which they could see. Now he had believed that this God had revealed Himself to them, not in the sun or in the moon, but in a humble and crucified Man. With this conviction becoming every hour deeper and deeper in his mind, he had settled in the city where Apollo and Diana were worshipped. He saw the mischiefs and dangers of that worship more clearly and fully than he did when people told him about it on the Lake of Galilee. But he did not think that these Ephesians had been wrong because they had dreamt of a God of Light. That was a true dream. Christ had come to fulfil it. The God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, whom Jesus had revealed, was this God of Light. The sun was His, the moon was His; He had created them for the blessing of all creatures. But that Light which belongs especially to man,—that Light by which he is to guide his steps,—that light which keeps men in fellowship with each other, that was His own true Light, His own proper nature; that was what He had manifested to men in His Son. For this was the message which they had heard of Him and declared to the Ephesians, that ‘God was light, and in Him was no darkness at all.’
If, then, I had told you that ‘light’ meant goodness, wisdom, justice, truth—and that ‘darkness’ meant the opposite of all these—I should have said exactly what St. John will tell us in very distinct words hereafter, and what he has intimated to us already. But I am so afraid of your thinking of these great realities as if they were mere words, that I have taken what may seem to you a roundabout course for the purpose of showing you how both Heathens and Jews were taught in their different ways to feel that Light, which is the great blessing of all in this creation of ours, is the symbol and witness of these, and that He, who is Himself Wisdom and Goodness and Justice and Truth, may be declared in one word to be Light. And I have endeavoured to show you also how there was a perpetual tendency in men to confine this Light by their own notions and imaginations; that is, in better and more intelligible language, by their own darkness; and how this confusion would have multiplied more and more, if He whom St. John saw and handled had not manifested forth this Light in its purity, free from any darkness at all.
But, as I hinted to you last week, there is another reason closely connected with this, why St. John could not abandon the word ‘light’ for any that was more formal and less living. A man may easily fancy that goodness, wisdom, truth, are possessions of his own. Whether he thinks he has got them for himself, or that some god has given them to him, he may still believe that he holds them just as he holds a freehold house or a purse of money. But you can never suppose that you hold light in this way. That I can never boast that I possess. When I go out and walk in the light, my eye receives it, my whole body is the better for it. I shut myself in a room with the blinds and shutters dark, or I close my eyes; the blessing is gone. Now the message which St. John brought to the Ephesians was not concerning a blessing of the first kind, but of this last kind. He did not tell them that God had given them certain possessions here, or had promised them certain possessions hereafter, which they could call theirs. He declared, ‘God has established a real intercourse between Himself and you. I have no better news for you than this: the fulness of joy lies in this.’ And he had a right to say so. For it was precisely this which men in all ages, and in all countries, had shown that they were craving for; not this, for the sake of other things, but other things for the sake of this. The religion of every people under heaven had meant a longing for intercourse or fellowship with some superior being; it expressed or indicated a conviction, that that superior being must be actually holding now, or be willing to hold some intercourse with them. The belief was strong, that all the arts of life, everything that made existence upon earth tolerable, as well as everything that had purified or elevated it, was owing to some visitation of mysterious celestial beings, or to some communication from them. The knowledge of the husbandman, as much as the inspiration of the poet, was traced to this source. Then came a terrible conviction that this intercourse had in some way been interrupted; that men had somehow failed in fulfilling their part of the relation. They could not tell exactly how; but it seemed likely that they had withheld from the gods that which they wanted, or had disobliged them as men disoblige their fellow-creatures. These were very natural thoughts; men were certain that there must be a truth at the bottom of them. For intercourse with the gods could not be an imaginary thing; it must be as real at least as intercourse with their fellows; it must have some direct resemblance to that, and connexion with it. Therefore they asked wise men to tell them what the gods wanted which they had not given; what had offended them; how the quarrel might be made up, and the intercourse renewed. Therefore they paid all respect to the soothsayers who pronounced that this or that was the god they had displeased—that this or that was the wrong they had committed—and to the priests who offered sacrifices to bring the gods into harmony with them.
You see that all these acts and services presume the existence of a being or beings above men, and of an intercourse between that being or those beings and men. It was possible for a teacher to come among them with the message, ‘There is no such being; there can be no such intercourse.’ I do not say that such a message would not have found listeners. I do not say that some who had been oppressed with the thought of the enmity which was between them and some power whom they did not see and could not approach, might not have felt that message a relief. But then I am not sure that any one could have received it fully; whether every one would not have had misgivings about it which would have made his life often as terrible as if he were afraid that the gods were always plotting against him. And I am quite sure, that if a man, or a nation, had been able to receive that message completely, it would have led to the death of all hope—ultimately, of all interest in the world—of all struggle to improve it—of all human cultivation. But supposing this message was not brought to men; then the only alternative was, that another should be brought to them. And that was St. John’s message: ‘You are not mistaken. The one living and true God does seek fellowship with you—has created you for fellowship with Him. He has opened the way for a complete fellowship between us and Him in His Son. That Son has made us understand, by His own words and acts, that God is not the suspicious, grudging, covetous being you have taken Him to be; that He has in Him no suspicion, no grudging, no covetousness; that all these have come to you because you were not holding fellowship with Him, because you were not walking in His light.’
That is the subject of the next verse. ‘If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not the truth.’ I hope what I have said will make you feel what an honest simple expression that walking in darkness is, and how impossible it is for us to find some better and more intelligible one. We have only to remember our experiences on a dark night, and then to compare these with the experience we have had in our own minds when we have been playing with some malicious or foul thought, to know exactly what St. John means. Walking in darkness is, alas! the phrase about which we have the least need of an interpreter. Every one interprets it himself. It addresses itself with terrible force to the rich and the poor, the wise and the unwise. Whatever else we have not learnt, we have learnt something of that. That darkness is in us, that it is possible to choose darkness rather than light—this every person can tell for himself. It is just the secret which he can tell to himself, and which he can impart very imperfectly to his neighbour. For this darkness comes to each man from his being shut up in himself, from his not seeking to get beyond himself. That is a thick darkness, a darkness which begins to be felt the moment a little light breaks in. When a man is hiding himself from all but himself, then the light never reaches him; it is to him as though there were none. And yet a man may go on walking in this darkness. Day after day he may become more used to it. Then how startled and shocked is he at even a glimpse of light! How he wishes to quench it, and cannot!
It is possible for a man to be in this dark selfish state, and yet to say that he has fellowship with God. He may repeat prayers, he may offer sacrifices, he may pass for a religious man. But his life, the Apostle says, is a lie. It is not only that he speaks a lie; he acts a lie. He does not the truth. This, indeed, he would have us to understand is falsehood—the very root of falsehood. If we are made in the image of God, it is a false and unnatural state for a man, not to be looking up to God but only to be looking down upon himself. It is the same sort of falsehood and contradiction as for the earth to be excluding the sun; only there is this more in it—the man feels that he cannot shut out God, if he tries to do so ever so much; he is haunted with the thought of Him; the thought of Him mixes with his bad deeds and bad purposes. Then he tries to worship God on purpose that he may persuade Him not to molest him. His prayers and his sacrifices are entreaties to God to go away from him, to leave him to do what he likes, to be as dark as he likes. Surely St. John’s words are the only proper description of this state of mind. We cannot make them stronger; we must not try to make them weaker. It is a lying state. The man who is in it is a liar. And yet every one of us has been in it, and may be in it, and may sink into it utterly.
And then comes the next sentence. But if we walk in the Light, as He is in the Light, we have fellowship one with another. The darkness of which St. John speaks is an utterly unsocial condition. A man thinks about himself, dwells in himself; the rest of the universe lies in shadow. It is not that he has not continual transactions with other people; it is not that they do not supply him with things that he wants; it is not that he could dispense with them. But all they do is only contemplated in reference to himself; they work, and suffer, and think for him. It is not that the things which he looks at are indifferent to him: he depends upon them; whether he has less or more of them is his chief concern. But he does not wonder at them or enjoy them; they, too, are only his ministers. Emphatically, then, he has no fellowship with men, no fellowship with Nature. All the world is only a looking-glass which reflects himself. What, then, is the opposite state to this? St. John says, ‘If we walk in the Light, as He is in the Light, we have fellowship one with another.’ The Light is all around us, while we are most dark. I cannot extinguish the creation because I do not think about it or care about it. Man is living a wonderful life; there is a wonderful life going on in earth, sea, and air; though I am only troubled about what I shall eat, and drink, and put on. But this recollection is not enough to bring me out of my dark pit. My selfishness is too strong for all, however bright, in earth, and sea, and air to overcome. It is not too strong for God to overcome. If I remember that He is in the Light; if I look upon the light which is in these things as coming from Him; if I believe that the light of men—the light in me—is from Him; if I believe that He is Light, and that in Him is no darkness at all; then I must believe that I am resisting His will when I am walking in that darkness—when I am acting and thinking as if I had no concern with any being but myself. All those strange intimations which come to me that I am not what I am meant to be, must be flashes of light from the source of light. They are painful flashes. I have often wished and tried to get rid of them. They have discovered me to myself in a way in which I did not wish to be discovered. They are just what men have tried by their false religions—by their insincere professions of fellowship with God—to drive away. But if, instead of doing that, we will hail them; if we will turn to Him from whom they flow; if we will receive them as His messengers, we may enter into His true order. We may walk day by day as if we were in His presence, as if He were looking at us and guiding us, and guiding all our brethren, and all this universe. And then we have fellowship one with another. The proper social life is restored to us, even if we are far away from our brethren. Yes; Alexander Selkirk in a desert island—John Bunyan in a prison, thousands of sick men and women in lonely rooms, may, in this way, have had a fellowship with the human race, such as we, who walk about the streets and talk with a number of people every day, know little of. By walking in light, as God is in the light—by continually recollecting that He was with them, and that He was with those whom they could not see—they may have acquired a habit of fellowship with those in the world now, and with those who had been in it generations before, which might make us covet their island, their prison, or their sick bed, if those could impart to us the same privilege. But they could not, there was no charm in them; St. John tells us the secret: ‘If we walk in the light, as He is in the light—wherever we are, in lonely rooms or crowded streets, we may have fellowship with each other: we may see each other, not as reflections of ourselves, but as images of Him.’
But what are these words which follow? ‘And the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin.’ They will strike a person who is making out a system of divinity or ethics, as very much out of place. For he will say, ‘The Apostle has given us no definition of sin. He has not even spoken of it in the verses we have read. And though he has spoken of having fellowship with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ, he has not unfolded any theory concerning the object or the effects of the death of Jesus Christ. How much, then, must be assumed and explained before this language can have any force or meaning for us?’
I have spoken to you about definitions already. I am convinced that if there is one word of which a definition will tell us nothing, unless we have learnt the signification of it first in some other method, that word is ‘Sin.’ And I am equally convinced that it is by that method, and not by a theological theory, that we must learn how the blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth away sin. What this method is, St. John, it seems to me, teaches us better than any one ever did. He appeals to our experience. You desire to be true yourself; you desire to have fellowship with other men. The moment that first desire is awakened in me, then arises along with it a sense of falsehood: ‘I have done false acts. I have been false. I have an inclination to do false acts, and to be false now. I have something in me which violently resists my craving to be true.’ The moment that second desire is awakened in me, there arises along with it a sense of selfishness: ‘I have done acts which imply that I have no relation to my fellow-creatures. I have been out of fellowship with them. I have an inclination to do such acts now, to be out of fellowship with them now. I have something in me which violently resists that craving for union with them.’ About this fact there is no doubt. Each of us can bear testimony of it. We want no doctor to define it or reduce it to a formula. And about the seriousness, the terribleness of this fact there is no doubt. It must be at the bottom of the insincerity of the world. It must be at the bottom of the discord and hatred of the world. But how shall I describe this fact? What name shall I give to that which is contradicting whatever is right in individual men, whatever is for the peace of society? I am at a loss; I cannot find a name. But I discover something more about the strange fact. ‘God is Light, and in Him is no darkness;’ I am intended to walk in this light. This inclination not to be true, not to have fellowship with my fellow-men, is an inclination not to walk in this light, not [to] be in that state in which He has intended men to be. Now I am, perhaps, better able to express this inclination of mine, and what has been the fruit of it. One name, however, does not satisfy me. I try several. I call it transgression; that is, the passing over a boundary which was marked out for me. I call it iniquity; that is, an uneven zigzag course, a departure from the straight even course. I call it sin; that is, the missing of an aim; the going aside from the goal which I was intended to reach. All these words imply that there is one who has marked the boundary for me, who has drawn the line for me, who has fixed the goal or aim for me. All imply a disobedience to a Will which I am meant to obey. But the last is the clearest and the most significant, because it implies that the aim or goal which I miss is Himself; that I am meant to set Him before me, and that I set some other end before me; that I am meant to be like Him, and that I prefer to be like something altogether different from Him.
If this be so, the word ‘Sin’ expresses the fact of our disposition to be false, and of our disposition to be at war with our fellow-creatures. Yet we do not feel the power of it, or give to it its full sense, till we believe that God is true, and that God has created us all to be at one. With that acknowledgment comes the acknowledgment of Sin. Now, the message which St. John brought to the Ephesians was, ‘God has revealed Himself to us in Jesus Christ as the perfect Truth. God has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ as the God who has created men to be one. Therefore it is a revelation to us of our sin; for it shows us how we have fought and do fight against this mind and purpose of God; how, in doing so, we fight against our own proper state, our own proper blessedness.’
I do not mean that this sense of sin did not exist before that full revelation of God in Christ. I have shown you already how strong the sense was in men everywhere of having in some way offended an unseen and powerful Ruler; how many efforts men made everywhere to remove the cause of offence, and to establish peace with the gods. And I will add now that everywhere this sense of wrongdoing was connected with a sense of defilement. Besides injuring the gods, they had in some way made themselves unclean. Purifications or lustrations were necessary for the removal of their own uncleanness, as sacrifices were necessary to appease their rulers. Such testimonies existed among heathens that they had evil in them; that they knew it. The Israelites were unlike these heathens, for they believed that the Lord had declared Himself, at the beginning of their Law, to be their Deliverer out of the house of bondage, and to be their God. They were taught that He was a righteous God, and that He wished them to be righteous. But, for that very reason, the commandments made them tremble; for they showed them what inclinations there were in them to be unrighteous, to break loose from the government of this Deliverer. Their sacrifices, they were taught, were His means of drawing them back to Himself when they had gone astray; their purifications were His way of showing that He was their Purifier. In both parts of the old world, then, there was this feeling of wrong and this feeling that they needed to be set free from the wrong. But how much deeper did each become in those who learnt that God was Light, and in Him was no darkness—that He was seeking to make them dwell in the light—that He had sent His Son to bring them into His Light! What a sense of sin must have been in them! How they must have felt, ‘It is our own fault, our own choice that we have been walking in darkness. We have been striving against a God who has been at every moment plotting for our good!’
If, then, the men in the times of old cried out for a purification—for something to cleanse them—those who heard this revelation must have felt the need of it immeasurably more. But what kind of purification could they have? Outward purification could not avail them in the least. It was in themselves they felt the sin. Into the core of each man’s heart the poison had entered. What could eject it? What could make each man right? What could make society pure? Such is the question which a man is obliged to ask himself when he seeks to walk in the light as God is in the light, and to have fellowship with his brother. And to such a man, says St. John, the answer comes, ‘The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin.’ There is a new life-blood put into this nature of ours. God Himself has infused it. The Son of God has taken our flesh and blood. He is the Head of our race. He is the bond of peace between it and the God of Light and Truth. He is the bond of peace between us and all the members of our race. When we seek to rise out of ourselves—to be delivered from our falsehood—to have fellowship with God, and fellowship with our brother; then His blood—the blood which He took for us, the blood which He poured out for us—is an assurance that we have that fellowship. It removes the sense of sin against God which is in us; it removes the sense of sin against men. It gives that atonement and that purification which nothing else in earth and heaven can give.
St. John speaks here of this blood as cleansing or purifying the man. He speaks afterwards of the way in which the death of Christ is a sacrifice offered to God. We must not anticipate any of his lessons, but follow them as carefully as we can. What I have given you this morning is quite enough for one time. As I hope to show you hereafter, it is connected with all that heathen writers have told us about man’s blessedness, about habits and virtues, and the choice of good and evil—with all that I have said to you in former lectures about the affections and the conscience and the will. But our Apostle never speaks of the principles of morals apart from the practice of them. He will go out of his way and repeat himself twenty times, rather than let his reader fancy that he has been listening to a disquisition when what he wants is help to live. There is an instance of this at the end of this chapter. St. John had told the Ephesian Christians that the blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin. He is afraid they should think, as many of them were in fact inclined to do, that by some charm or other, they, as Christians, had been put out of the reach of sin, and were not beset by it like other men. He hastens at once to rid them of such delusion: ‘If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.’ Instead of this fancy that you are without sin being a proof how clearly the light is shining into you, it is a proof that you are shutting out the light, for that would reveal to you your own inclination to fly from it and to choose the darkness. The truth makes us aware of our falsehoods; to deny that they are near us and ready to betray us every moment, is to put ourselves out of fellowship with the truth; with the God who is truth. Is that hard doctrine? No; for ‘if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.’ His faithfulness and justice are the enemies of our sins; therefore to them we may turn from our sins. They are the refuges from the darkness that is in us. A faithful and righteous Being is therefore a forgiving Being. We are unforgiving because we are unfaithful and unrighteous. But His forgiveness is not tolerance of an evil; such tolerance is cruelty. He forgives us that He may cleanse us. The forgiveness is itself a part of the cleansing. He manifests His righteousness to us that we may trust Him. By trusting Him we are delivered from the suspicion which is the very essence of sin.
It is plain simple teaching this; that a man throws off the burden of his sins by confessing them; and that he may confess to God because he knows that God cares for him, that He is true, and hates falsehood, and can understand him, and can set him free. It is simple, but oh infinitely deep we shall find it to be if we try! This confession, ‘Against Thee I have sinned,’ this daring to lay our sin bare; this asking to be made true in the inward parts, what power, what victory, what peace lies in that! And thus we begin to understand the Apostle’s last words which at first may sound very like a commonplace vehemently expressed: ‘If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us.’ If we will not confess the evil in us, we impute that evil to Him. We make Him answerable for that against which He is testifying in our consciences. We thrust away that Word which is shedding abroad His light in us; we bury ourselves in our own darkness. This is the effect of trying to make out a good case for ourselves, when it is our interest, our privilege, our blessedness, to justify God and to condemn ourselves; to say, ‘Thou hast been true, and we have been liars. Deliver us from our lies! Help us to walk in Thy truth!’