1 John II. 12-14.
I write unto you, little children, because your sins are forgiven you for His Name’s sake. I write unto you, fathers, because ye have known Him that is from the beginning. I write unto you, young men, because ye have overcome the wicked one. I write unto you, little children, because ye have known the Father. I have written unto you, fathers, because ye have known Him that is from the beginning. I have written unto you, young men, because ye are strong, and the Word of God abideth in you, and ye have overcome the wicked one.
PERHAPS it may occur to some of you, that I did not fairly represent the obligations of Israelites when I read to you the Ten Commandments. You may have thought that the old commandment of which St. John speaks must have included many more precepts than these. For were they not bound to observe all the statutes and ordinances which are contained in the books of Moses? Were they not to circumcise their children, and to keep a number of feasts? were they not to offer sacrifices continually? Did the apostle mean that he and his flock at Ephesus ought still to keep these commands? If not, where was the line to be drawn? And that new commandment about hating the brother, did this also stand alone? Were there no ordinances and institutes which the Christian Church observed as well as this?
To understand this question aright, you should consider what St. John says is the end of keeping the commandment. Throughout, as I have shown you, it is the knowledge of God. Through obedience they would rise to this knowledge. They would become acquainted with His mind and character; they would have the acquaintance of belief and sympathy. But they would also understand one another. The commandments showed how they were bound to each other, as well as how they were bound to God. The commandments warned them of acts by which they separated themselves from each other, as well as of acts by which they separated themselves from God.
Unless then the Israelites remembered that they were united to God, and that they were united to each other, the commandments became unintelligible. They were worse than unintelligible. They were heavy burdens, grievous to be borne. They were letters written on stone, cursing them, not words coming forth from God to do them good, and give them understanding. Now, the precept to circumcise their children was a witness to them that they were united to God and to each other. It was a pledge that the Lord of all had taken them to be a people of inheritance to Himself. It was a pledge that He was keeping them at one. This precept was not a hard addition to the Ten Commandments; it laid a foundation for practical obedience to them; it gave them a new character; it changed them from the decrees of a Being who was at a distance from them, into the promises of one who was at hand to keep them in the right way. ‘Thou shalt not’ meant, ‘Trust in me, and I will not suffer thee to go astray.’ And this covenant included the child of eight days old, who as yet could read no letter, who could understand no precept, as well as the grey-haired man and the stout warrior. Over all God was watching; even the youngest had parents to bring them up in His faith and fear; and if their father and mother forsook them, He would be their guide; the eldest, who had no earthly guardians, would depend all the more securely and directly upon Him. He would go forth with the younger men in their hard fighting with themselves and with the world. This was the use of circumcision.
Well! and the Sacrifices, were they additional burdens laid upon the consciences of the Jews? ’They might become so, undoubtedly; they did become so. But when they were received as sacrifices ordained by God, they did not add weights to the conscience, but relieved it of a weight. Each Israelite was sensible that he had transgressed the commandment, that he had not remembered God’s dominion over him, and his relation to his fellows. He had not kept his position, but had lived as if he was a separate creature. The sacrifices were witnesses and pledges to him that the King of his land forgave him and received him back. The belief that it was so set his conscience free; he could act as if he was still God’s servant, one of a nation. He might again look his neighbours in the face, and be at peace with them; he might again do the work which was given him to do.
The Feasts, again, were witnesses of deliverances which God had wrought for the whole land; of a common law which He had given to Israelites; of His watchfulness over the seeds in the ground, that they might bring forth fruit in their season; of His presence with them when they journeyed and when they were settled in fixed habitations. They were to keep the feasts with joy and thankfulness, that they might grow in the knowledge of Him who was the same from generation to generation, that they might feel they were one people, however they might be scattered in different countries; yea, though some might be upon the earth and some in the unseen world. The feasts, then, gave a meaning to the commandments, they helped to accomplish the purpose of the commandments; if they were forgotten, the commandments were either forgotten or became oppressive.
Besides these institutions, the Israelites required, as every nation does, special arrangements adapted to the special circumstances of soil and climate in which they were placed, adapted to the special work to which the commonwealth was called, adapted to the pursuits of its different citizens. These precepts were declared to be statutes of the invisible Lord for the well-being and good ordering of His people. While they were so regarded they were not oppressive; they made the Israelites feel that the Highest of all cared for them; that His divine order had respect to all their common transactions, and that they might break through it by neglecting the care of their bodies or of their houses, by tolerating dirt or infection, as well as by graver crimes. Even in these little things obedience led to a deeper knowledge of God.
Did St. John then mean that all these commandments were still to be kept as in the beginning? I am sure that he clung—in fact, all the records we have of him prove that he clung—with the greatest tenacity and affection to the institutions which testified of his relation to the family and nation of the Israelites. He would not have given up circumcision, the pledge of God’s adoption of His people and of His care for them, if he had not believed that God had given a wider and more perfect sign of His adoption and His care. But when Christ bade the Apostles go and baptize all nations, He declared that that was a sign that God looked not upon Israelites, but upon men, as more than His servants or people, as His children, and that they might claim to be brothers of each other. Now that was a pledge of the new commandment, of the commandment which I said pointed not to neighbourhood but to brotherhood, which was granted at the revelation of Christ as the Universal Brother. St. John would not have parted with the sacrifices which were offered day by day and year by year in the temple (for they were dear to him beyond expression), if Christ had not given a sign which Jews as well as the Heathen might receive, that He had made one sacrifice for all; that all were forgiven for His Name’s sake. St. John would not have given up the feasts of the Passover, the Pentecost, the Tabernacles, if there had not been an universal feast, which gathered into itself the memory of them all; a feast at which the Heathen as well as Jews might give thanks to God as their Deliverer from sin and death, and all the enemies of man; to God, as enduing men with the Holy Spirit, and with all living powers; to God, as dwelling with them, as dwelling in them for ever. The new commandment, ‘Thou shalt love thy brother,’ required this support, as the old commandment required the support of the Jewish sacrifices and the Jewish feasts. The Eucharist was not a fresh burthen added to that commandment. It enabled the whole society to own the commandment as a living power. If they did not receive this pledge of the new life which God bestowed on them, and of His eternal presence, that commandment would become a weight to them; not, as it was meant to be, the divinest treasure, the way to the highest joy.
You see how the Christian Sacraments, as we call them, must have presented themselves to the mind of an Apostle who was educated as St. John had been educated under the Old Testament. I wish you to see it, because men in our day are often perplexed about them, and are inclined to suppose that we should be lightened of a load if we were excused from them. I am satisfied that no opinion is so mistaken as this; that if we lost the Sacraments, we should lose the pledges of God’s relation to us all, of the redemption He has wrought out for us all, and that the duty of loving one another, which we cannot be discharged from, would seem to us an oppressive duty that must be performed, but which we had no strength to perform. I am satisfied that we should then lose the sense of being called to share in a common salvation, and that each would be trying to obtain a salvation for himself by efforts of self-will. This is not what St. Paul calls working out our salvation; that we do, as he says, when we remember that God is working in us to will and to do of His good pleasure.
And thus I think we are able better to understand what the Apostle means when he writes to the little children, to the fathers, and to the young men of his flock. I have shown you how the institutions of the Jews appealed to all these different classes, what a testimony they bore that God cared for the youngest and the oldest in their weakness, and that He did not forget the middle-aged in their strength. St. John feels that we are not in a worse, but in a better condition under the new covenant than under the old; that though that is a wider and more general covenant, it takes not less but more account of all the differences in men, of all the stages of their youth, of all their special necessities. We shall very much mistake the character of Christian ethics, if we suppose that they reduce us all to an indiscriminate mass, because they speak of all as sinful, and of all as redeemed in Christ. The Apostle’s favourite language respecting the Light may tell us that this is not so. It is darkness which obliterates all distinctions; the light brings them all forth.
When men are struggling together as rivals, each tries, as card-players say, not to show his hand; he wishes to pass for having some of the qualities which appertain more properly to another; he will have credit for being able to do just what those who are contending with him can do. But in a united family each finds out by degrees what he is fit for, and what each of his brothers and sisters is fit for. Each learns some lesson which the other could not learn. The child is glad to be led by those stronger and more experienced; they gain as much from the simplicity of the child. The Apostle does but apply these truths to a larger family: to God’s Church. He does but hint to different degrees in the Church what wisdom they are most in need of, and are most competent to receive. He tells them how the witnesses or sacraments of God’s love in Christ, which are for all, may yet assume a different aspect and bear a different message to them, according to their preparations, and capacities.
I.
‘I write unto you, little children, because your sins are forgiven you for His Name’s sake.’ Many interpreters are careful to tell us that the Apostle does not mean actual children, but only children in faith or knowledge; young converts. I do not think this distinction is necessary. I like to take words in their simplest sense, if I can. I dare say the Apostle had in his mind some of those who had newly been baptized, even if they were adults. But I suspect he had also in his mind those sons and daughters of Christian parents who were receiving their earliest lore respecting the things of earth as well as of heaven. To both, I apprehend, the same language was suitable. Trust is the great necessity of a child. It wants to feel that it may go to those who are over it with confidence. It wants to feel that it may go to them when it has done wrong. It has many impulses which urge it to stay away from them then. It has been told to do what it has not done; it has done something which it has been told not to do; how natural to avoid the person who has given the precept, to seek any society rather than his! The concealment once practised is more difficult to break through; the eye which is to be met looks more lowering; shall it be encountered? There is a sense of guilt within; guilt and guile are closely allied, if they are not the very same. The simple child becomes insincere; it parts company with truth. The story is a very sad one; experience, the experience of ourselves and of children, explains it to us; the secret of education lies in knowing how to turn the experience to profit. Let the child expect to find a friend in the lawgiver; one in whom it may confide; one to whom it may make known its offence more safely than it can to any other. Let it be assured that the lawgiver means to have his laws performed; and that because he means this, he is ready to receive back the transgressor of them. Let him by his habitual conduct, destroy the barrier of suspicion which sets the child and himself at a distance. And so he will free its conscience, he will make it stronger after its falls than it was before them; stronger because more aware of its weakness, and more trusting. He will make it willing to bear any punishment which he may think good to inflict as a remembrance of the past and a warning for the future. But all this treatment of a particular child will be far more effectual for its cure and its education, if it sees others treated in the same way; if it perceives that this is the principle upon which its father and lawgiver acts in all cases; that it is his character to act so.
St. John would have us to understand that this course is right for men who are made in the image of God, because it is His course. He tells us that the first lesson of all to be learnt concerning God, is that He remits or sends away sins; for that is the force of the word. He would have all Christian children know this; he would tell it to the Heathen, who had been dreaming of gods altogether different, gods that had no delight in remitting sins. He does not expect that they will advance further in knowledge, if they do not get this lesson well into their hearts. But how were they to get it into their hearts? How was each particular child to feel, ‘I may go and tell what I have done wrong, every time I have done it; I may get my conscience set free; I may rise up in a right state after I have been in a wrong one’? It could not be unless the child felt that thus God was dealing with all; that there was a law of remission or forgiveness under which all were placed. We are very apt to think thus, ‘We belong to a guilty race; God looks upon us all as sinners. But perchance I may get Him to treat me differently; I may procure a separate pardon.’ No! that will not do. There is selfishness, there is separation from thy brother, there is the very essence of sin in that thought. St. John strikes at the root of it when he says, ‘Your sins are forgiven you for His Name’s sake.’ You are not looked upon as a sinful race; you are looked upon as a race of which Christ the Son of God is the head. When He offered Himself to God, He took away the sin of the world. We have no right to count ourselves sinners, seeing that we are united in Him. We become sinners when we separate from Him, when we forget His Name, and resume our own miserable separate name. But He does not forget, though we forget; He does not change, though we change. And therefore we may arise and go to our Heavenly Father in that Name which He has put upon us, and may have our consciences set free, and our sins sent away.
This, St. John treats as an early, fundamental lesson in Christian ethics, one in which we should be instructed from the first. But he does not mean that because it belongs to the elements of our instruction we must not continually go back to it, assure ourselves that we have hold of it, recollect what is the ground of it, what is the sign and pledge of it. I think experience must show most of us how little grasp we have of this truth; how apt we are to let it slip. I do not know any one that it is so hard thoroughly to retain, especially when we have most need of it for the actual struggles of life. It seems to me, sometimes, that we want a new reformation in our country, to make our people understand the length and breadth of this child’s truth; how it applies to all our most complicated circumstances, and yet how heartily the youngest could embrace it if we did not contradict it in our conduct and invent theories that are at variance with it. I will tell you plainly that it is the consideration of Baptism and of its meaning as it is set forth in our Child’s Catechism, which has given me the little apprehension I have of this truth, and that I would not part with that testimony to it, to obtain the wisdom of the greatest doctors in the world.
The Jewish nation is spoken of in the Old Scriptures as a holy nation, consecrated and sacrificed to God. Every Jew was to claim to be a holy, devoted, sacrificed man. When he confessed his sin, and presented the sacrifice, he was restored to his right position. St. John justifies the language, and extends it. The Jewish nation was holy in Christ its King. When that King was manifested as the Son of Man, not the nation, but mankind, was shown to be holy in Him. When He sacrificed Himself He offered up the race as a living sacrifice acceptable to God. Each man is to claim that privilege, to consider himself as sacrificed to God, as one of a redeemed body. When he confesses his sins,—i.e. his separation from Christ and His sacrifice,—he asks that he may be restored to the blessing of that sacrifice; he asks that he may offer himself again as a sacrifice in Christ’s name. This is the very meaning of Christian devotion. All our prayers and services have this ground: ‘Children, your sins are remitted for His Name’s sake.’ They imply that His Name is the only bond to God; that to lose hold of it is to fall back into our selfishness; that nothing else can raise us out of our selfishness. The other Christian sacrament is a pledge of this remission of sins and redemption for the whole body. It is our thanksgiving for the sacrifice of Christ’s death, which has bound us to God and to each other, and so has released us from sin. It is our confession how each of us has had some way or scheme of his own which has been inconsistent with our union to Him. It is the acceptance of God’s continued forgiveness and remission in His Name.
II.
Why does St. John pass at once from these children to those who appear farthest from them?—‘I write unto you, fathers, because ye have known Him that is from the beginning.’ I do not think that aged men are those who are least able to sympathise with children, or who most discard the lore of children. I think that the sight of the human as well as of the natural spring is a special delight to those who are feeling the winter—frosty but kindly. I think that what they heard and committed to memory in their earliest days comes back to them with a sense of its meaning and its power which men in the intermediate time do not possess at all in the same degree, and which they do not possess respecting the intermediate period in their own histories. St. John may have felt something of this himself. There seems to me a great beauty in his way of connecting the child’s belief in forgiveness with the aged man’s knowledge of Him who was in the beginning, as if one lay beneath the other, and as if the experience of each new year had been drawing it forth. The child receives forgiveness as a gift to himself. To be sure it makes him forget himself. It makes him think of the person who has bestowed it. But yet the blessedness of it springs out of the sense of having found a friend where he had deserved an enemy. The old man more and more sees this forgiveness as coming from the very nature of Him who was in the beginning. All the successive revelations of God discover to him the same unchangeable Will. In that he rests. The revelation of what God has done leads him to what He is. It is a delightful vision of a calm, clear old age. We need not desire to have it in this earth. The old Apostle must have entered far more fully into its joys himself, when his eyes were closed on the earth.
III.
And now he comes to a class which we know better than either of these, though perhaps it may not have the same charm for us as either. ‘I write to you, young men.’ We take it for granted that he is going to speak of hard, tough fighting, when he introduces these young men. How strange that he should add, ‘for ye have overcome the wicked one!’ ‘Overcome!’ we say; ‘they cannot be much like us, then. We are at best but able to keep ourselves from being overcome; and that by no means always.’ And yet I am confident he would not have wished any of us not to receive his writing as addressed to ourselves. I am confident he would have been greatly grieved if any one of the young men of Ephesus had said,—‘Yes! that applies to me; I can take it home to myself, but my neighbour here has no part or lot in it.’ I believe that just as he told all the children to believe that their sins were forgiven for Christ’s Name’s sake, so he meant all the young men to understand that the Evil One had been overcome for them in the same mighty Name. That is the meaning of our Lord’s Temptation. It was a victory over the power of evil, not for Himself only, but for those whose nature He had taken. ‘Man,’ He said, ‘shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God.’ He would not tempt God by casting Himself from the pinnacle of the Temple, that we might not tempt God by casting ourselves from any position that is given to us. He said, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan; thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only,’ that we might be sure we owe no worship to the Devil; that we might know he is not our master; that we might mock and defy him. St. John, therefore, could say to these young men, in the midst of all the toil and war of the world, ‘Ye have overcome the Evil One. Treat him as one that is overcome. Refuse him homage, and he will flee from you.’ And this is a truth, which we, too, must lay fast hold of; however strange and incredible it may sometimes appear to us. We must say, fearlessly, ‘The Devil is not the king of the world, though he may feign to be so. The good God is the King; whatever sets itself against Him will be found weak and contemptible at last.’
IV.
There is, however, a danger even in these blessed and necessary testimonies, if others are not joined to them; they must not be qualified, that we cannot afford,—that would have been unworthy of our Apostle’s truthfulness,—but another aspect of them may be needful that this aspect may be clearer, and that we may be delivered from any false impressions which the first may have produced on our weak eyesight. You will observe that the Apostle travels over the same ground again, not fearing the charge of repeating himself, if he can make his position more evident. I have written to you, little children,‘—not now, because your sins are forgiven, but—’because ye have known the Father.’ Christians have often exulted in the thought that their sins were forgiven, till an incredible conceit has taken possession of them, and the very belief that their sins are blotted out, has led them to commit fresh sins. Therefore he tells these children that the blessedness of being forgiven was, that it brought them to trust in a Father, and be acquainted with a Father; that it gave them confidence to approach Him and have fellowship with Him. This is not merely the correction of a possible (and a too probable) error. It is the enlargement and full illustration of the doctrine he had declared before. It shows how the forgiveness of the family is the foundation of the forgiveness of the individual. To draw nigh to God by that name of Father,—to understand how He thinks, feels, acts as a Father,—this is, indeed, the privilege of children.
The reason for writing to the fathers is the same as before; that deep-grounded knowledge of Him that was from the beginning, excludes false and self-conceited notions; nothing can be added to it which can make it more perfect. But the address to the young men undergoes a very important alteration: ‘I have written unto you, young men, because ye are strong, and the word of God abideth in you, and ye have overcome the wicked one.’ He gives them credit for strength. It belongs to their age. They have it even if they are misusing it; they have it, even if they are priding themselves on it, and require to be taught their weakness. But this is the secret of their strength. The Word of God abideth in them. It is not their own power which is struggling against all the temptations to evil within them and around them. It is the Word of God who is the source of all light and wisdom and power in man; it is the Word who took flesh and dwelt among them that He might overcome the Evil Spirit. These young men are engaged with a conquered enemy, but with one who will seek to persuade them that he is almighty. Only while they give up their own strength and depend upon that living Word who is sustaining them at every moment, will they be able to prove that they are not the slaves of the enemy.
All young men of this day, all that are now struggling against their own enemies and God’s, have a right to this same confidence. It is only dangerous when it becomes confidence in themselves. It is only dangerous when they forget that Christ’s victory in the wilderness was not the end but only the beginning of the conflict in which He was engaged for the deliverance of them and the glory of God.