1 John II. 23-28.
Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father: [but] he that acknowledgeth the Son hath the Father also. Let that therefore abide in you, which ye have heard from the beginning. If that which ye have heard from the beginning shall remain in you, ye also shall continue in the Son, and in the Father. And this is the promise that He hath promised us, even eternal life. These things have I written unto you concerning them that seduce you. But the anointing which ye have received of Him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you: but as the same anointing teacheth you of all things, and is truth, and is no lie, and even as it hath taught you, ye shall abide in Him. And now, little children, abide in Him; that, when He shall appear, we may have confidence, and not be ashamed before Him at His coming.
Our translators appear to have doubted whether the last clause of the 23rd verse is genuine; for they have taken the very unusual course of printing it in Italics, as they print words which they insert to fill up the sense of the original. Modern scholars, I believe, do not share in this suspicion; they suppose the words ‘He that acknowledgeth the Son hath the Father also,’ to be St. John’s as much as those which precede them. Certainly, they make his meaning somewhat clearer; but it would not be obscure, I think, if they were absent.
One peculiarity you must notice in each of these clauses. He says, ‘He that denieth the Son hath not the Father. He that acknowledgeth the Son hath the Father.’ A person writing a paraphrase of the Epistle would probably render the Apostle’s meaning in this way: ‘He that denieth the Son, virtually or by implication denies the Father. He that acknowledges the Son, virtually or by implication acknowledges the Father.’ One who ventured this alteration would think that he made St. John much more intelligible. I cannot tell how others may find it; but I do not find the expressions ‘virtually and by implication’ half so intelligible as the little words for which they are substituted. I do not mean merely that an ignorant person might be puzzled by these logical expressions, virtually and by implication. I mean that they do not convey to any one the full sense which, if I am not mistaken, St. John did convey to his little children at Ephesus by his own words. He is writing to them,—I have told you so before, I shall have to tell you so again and again,—as members of a family, as sons of God. He is writing to them just now about certain persons who had been members of their family, but had thrown off their fellowship. Why had they done so? He says, because they did not believe ’Jesus to be the Christ. Because they believed in a Christ who claimed high powers for himself. Because they did not believe in a Christ who was a Son. Therefore he says, they have not the Father. They refuse for themselves the title of sons of God. He in whom they suppose the highest glory to dwell, is not one who looked up to a Father. He is not one who has come from a Father, and gone to a Father. He has not come to be a brother of men, and to claim His Father as your Father.
Slight as this difference may appear, I believe it is very important for the understanding of St. John. The message which he and all the Apostles brought to the Jewish and Heathen world was, ‘You are not separate creatures, as you have taken yourselves to be. You have one Lord and Head; He being the Son of God has come into our world, stooped to our weaknesses, died our death, that He might make us one body in Himself, as we were created to be.’ They could not therefore say to those who separated from them, and set up another Christ, ‘You are committing an error of doctrine.’ They were obliged to say, ‘You are choosing not to have a Father. You are choosing not to own us common men as your brethren.’ It was no unfair charge. It was this which all their words and acts imported. They revolted from Jesus because He was lowly and meek; because He made Himself one with the most abject. They said that in so far as He wrought miracles, He had the signs of a divine anointing; but that when He died on the cross, if He died actually, He must have ceased to be the Christ; the Spirit must have forsaken Him. Whereas St. John holds that He never so thoroughly proved Himself to be a Son—that He never so entirely showed forth God—as in that death.
We sometimes suppose that the temper of mind which these teachers exhibited belonged only to their age. I cannot think so. There is a disposition in many of us to hold that Jesus proved Himself to be the Christ by doing great and startling miracles, by showing that He had power to break through laws which men generally are obliged to obey. This, we affirm, was the sign that He came from God. Now, the Gospels, it seems to me, represent the mighty acts of Jesus,—His healing the lepers, raising the dead, casting out devils,—in a light which is very unlike this. They say that He came to do the will of His Father; they speak of these acts as showing forth that Will, as accomplishing a part of that Will, by overcoming the enemies which had assaulted men, by breaking the fetters with which men were bound. They speak of these acts as acts of sympathy with human beings. ‘Himself,’ they say, ‘took our infirmities, and bare our own sicknesses.’ These acts, then, revealed the lowliness of Jesus, the submission of Jesus, just as His Cross and Passion revealed them. Did they not also reveal the power of God? Wonderfully, I think. They revealed that power to be a gracious, loving power; a calm power; a health-giving, life-giving power. They revealed the very mind from which laws have proceeded, the very might by which laws are executed and enforced. They are not breaches of laws, they are assertions of laws against irregularities and disturbances. Jesus vindicated laws as no one ever did. Obedience is the characteristic of His whole life upon earth.
This is what all the Evangelists report concerning Him; this is the honour, they say, that He claimed for Himself. St. John is especially occupied throughout his Gospel in setting forth the ground and principle of this obedience. ‘The Son can do nothing of Himself,’ thus he speaks in the fifth chapter of his Gospel; but ‘what things soever He seeth the Father do, these also doeth the Son likewise.’ It is filial obedience. It is the obedience of a Son to a Father, in whom He delights, and who delights in Him. And so He reveals the Father. And the Apostles receiving Him as the Christ, learnt from Him not to think of the Godhead as self-willed power or sovereignty. They thought of a Father and a Son. They could not see the Will of the Father except in the submission of the Son. They could not dwell on the submission of the Son without finding its ground and root in the Will of the Father. They were Jews; they had a greater horror of dividing the Godhead, of setting up two gods, than any of their countrymen had. But it was precisely this belief in the Unity of the Father and the Son which kept them from dividing the Godhead. If they had reverenced and loved Jesus as they reverenced and loved Him, and had not believed that He was one with the Father, they would have worshipped two gods, or they would have set a man above God.
St. John perceived that the preachers of a new Christ were guiding their disciples back into the old idolatry. The heathen gods each expressed some conception which men had formed of the Divine Being; some relation which they had seen must exist between them and Him, or some quality which they supposed must belong to Him, because they found it in themselves. The Name of God which the Christian Church proclaimed was, the Apostle believed, that Name which the heathens had been seeking after. It was the full revelation of Him Whom they had divided. If that Name were forgotten, Jupiter, Apollo, Minerva might not return in their old forms, but there would come in a multitude of vague conceptions and notions that would be far less real and personal than the demigods they displaced.
Therefore he says, in the next verse, ‘Let that, therefore, abide in you which ye have heard from the beginning. If that which ye have heard from the beginning shall remain in you, ye also shall continue in the Son, and in the Father.’ They had heard from the beginning that God had sent forth His Son made of a woman, that they might be the sons of God in Him. They had heard from the beginning that God had sent forth the Spirit of His Son, that they might be able to cry to God as their Father. This was the groundwork of the Apostolical teaching. Those who accepted it as true, those to whose consciences it came as a word sent to them from Heaven, were baptized. They might come from the East or the West, they might be Jews or Greeks, they might be rich or poor, they might be freemen or bondsmen. This baptism was for all nations. The Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit embraced all. Each man had a right to say, ‘It is put upon me. I am sealed with it. The God in Whom I am living, ’and moving, and having my being, has written His Name upon me, has made me a partaker of His life and blessedness.’ Therefore St. John says, ‘I do not tell you something different from that which I told you at the first. All I say is, do not forget that. Let it dwell in you. Let it enter more and more deeply into you.’
What would be the result? The two blessings which men want most: perseverance and growth. They would continue in the Father and the Son. The spirit wants a home and a dwelling-place as much as the body. It truly abides in a person or friend whom it trusts, as a body abides in a house. But the more it abides, the more it expands. It discovers more to trust, more to love in Him to Whom it is attached. It grows wider as it knows more of Him. St. John says to them, ‘Abide in Him, Who has united you to Himself, Who has died your death, that you might share His life; then every day will reveal to you more of that Father from Whom He came, Whose perfect image He is. It will not be dry, hard knowledge; it will be the knowledge you acquire of the home in which you have been brought up; it will be the knowledge you acquire of the brother upon whom you are leaning daily for succour and support; of a parent whose character is coming forth to you more and more through His affection to you and His care of you. You will continue in the Son and the Father. You are united to them already. God has established bonds between you and Him which cannot be broken. You will find how blessed these bonds are. You will learn more of their nature. You will see how all outward events, sorrowful and joyful, how all your inward struggles may be means of fastening them more closely about you. The thought of some other Christ, who is not a brother of man, who is not a Son, who exults in his power not in his obedience, will become utterly loathsome and intolerable to you. You will cry out in your hearts, “How long, O Lord, faithful and true, wilt Thou suffer these false Christs, these oppressors of the earth, these counterfeits of Thy loving power, to deceive men by their lies, and to trample upon them with their cruelties?” And every judgment upon the nations, every fresh morning that rises upon the earth out of the dark night, every tempest that sweeps the air, will be an answer from the throne of God Himself. ’Wait a little; I come to scatter all who divide and rend in pieces my heritage. I come to establish the throne of Him Who is the Prince of righteousness and peace. This is but one part—a small part—of the promise, ’ye shall abide in the Son and in the Father.’ How can I even dream what is the length and breadth of it? How could I express in words what I have seen among poor bed-ridden men and women of that which they were learning, as they kept up a continual trust in Jesus Christ their Lord, and so rose more and more into an apprehension of His Father and their Father? How could I guess at the glimpses which were afforded them of a love which passes knowledge, a love which comprehends all men and all things within its grasp? One can only judge of what was passing within them by the patience, hope, gentleness, self-sacrifice, which they shed forth around them. These were tokens, not to be mistaken, that they were drinking into a divine life; that it was the life of Him Who bore the Cross and denied Himself; that it was the life of that Father Whom He trusted, and Who dwelt in Him.
For St. John goes on, ’ And this is the promise that He hath promised us, even eternal life.’ In my second Lecture I dwelt on these words, eternal life. I endeavoured to make you see that the life which Christ manifested, the life of perfect truth, justice, charity, cannot belong to time; that it would be the greatest absurdity to measure it by hours and days and years. Our consciences and reasons utterly repudiate such a contradiction. How, then, shall we speak of it? St. John supplies us with the word. He calls it the eternal life. If it is the life of God, it must be that; if it is not the life of God, we deny his first proposition, that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, came to set forth the life of God. What St. John would have us feel is, that there can be no promise to compare with this; that we should share the eternal life, the life of God—every other must look pale and paltry beside it. This might appear a self-evident proposition, and yet there is none which we are so apt to set at nought in practice. We often speak as if people were to be paid for being good; not as if the being good were itself God’s highest gift and blessing. Such an opinion comes from our not thinking of God Himself as the good and the true Being, or else from our not thinking that He has made us capable of entering into His goodness and knowing His truth. The Bible from first to last is proclaiming that it is possible to know Him and to be like Him, that this is the end which men are to desire and expect, and that they cannot be content with any lower end. ‘When I awake up after Thy likeness, I shall be satisfied with it,’ says the Psalmist. St. John is unfolding to us the meaning of that verse, and is telling us in Whom it is that we may see God’s likeness; Who is opening the eyes of our spirit that we may see it.
‘These things,’ he continues, ‘have I written to you concerning them that seduce you.’ He had written to them concerning the Father and the Son, because the new teachers were drawing them from their allegiance to Jesus, Who had glorified His Father, and had set up Christs, who came in their own name, and sought their own glory. He had written to them about that which they had heard from the beginning, because these teachers said that their early lessons were obsolete, and that grown men must discard them. He had written to them of their abiding in their family fellowship, because these teachers, under pretence of giving them sublimer lore, would have led them to separate themselves from each other, and not to claim the blessing of a common life. And he had written to them concerning the promise of eternal life, because, in refusing the common life of men, he was sure they were also refusing the eternal life of God. They would not have the jewels which shall shine for ever in God’s crown, graciousness, self-sacrifice, sympathy. They would have those counterfeit jewels which glitter in the world’s twilight, and which will be shown to be worthless when the day appears.
‘But the anointing,’ says St. John, ‘which ye have received of Him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you: but as the same anointing teacheth you of all things, and is truth, and is no lie, and even as it hath taught you, ye shall abide in Him.’ I spoke, the last time we met, of that ‘unction from the Holy One, by which, as he says in the 20th verse, ’they knew all things.’ I maintained that this language, which sounds so strange to some of us, was strictly true language; language not belonging to that time more than to ours; language, the force of which we recognise every time we speak of the discernment which simple and pure women and men have of what is good and evil, of what is sincere and artificial. Nevertheless, I cannot pass over this verse, for it presents the subject in a new light, and it has a peculiar application to the seducers and antichrists whom he has been exposing. They boasted to be anointed with a spirit which separated them from other men, which endued them with such a power and a wisdom as God had not been pleased to bestow on other men. St. John speaks of an anointing which all had received, which abided with the whole Church; which every member of it might trust in if he did not seek to be anything in himself, if he did not wish to be above his brethren. In a Psalm with which St. John had been familiar from his childhood, we read these words, ‘Behold, how good and pleasant a thing it is for brethren to dwell together in unity! It is like the precious ointment upon the head, that ran down upon the beard, even unto Aaron’s beard; that went down to the skirts of his garments. As the dew of Hermon, and as the dew that descended upon the mountains of Sion: for there the Lord promised His blessing, and life for evermore.’ I dare to say this Psalm has sometimes puzzled you. What has the unity among brethren to do with the ointment that was poured upon Aaron’s head? Why is that comparison joined to another that seems so much more beautiful, about the morning dew on the hills? How is any illustration of the nature of unity to be derived from that? The writer of the Psalm regarded the anointing oil which was poured upon the high priest as a symbol and pledge that God had adopted and consecrated the whole nation of Israel. He was sure that the priest was not to be looked upon as a separate being, set up in contrast to the rest of the people. The running down of the ointment to the skirts of the garments was a sign that the great gift to the priest was a gift also to the people. It was a greater gift to them than if it had not been bestowed first upon him, for now they could feel that it was for all; that it united them; that it denoted them to be one nation. The thought of this unity fills the Psalmist’s heart with joy. He is sure it is God’s unity, not man’s. Oils and unguents in the East had a virtue which we do not commonly attach to them. They were associated with life and strength of limb, with the energy to run and to fight. All these the Psalmist connects with unity. The nation is crippled, helpless, dead, when it is disunited. God’s oil is to quicken and restore each separate member of it, and the whole body. And then the natural emblem comes in to assist and expand his contemplations. How dry and dead these hills would be if it were not for the dew which comes down every morning to moisten them! What life, what continually renewing life, there is in that! How all things spring up and flourish together under its influence! Is God’s dew for grass and flowers? Is there not a more precious dew for the dry and thirsty spirits of men? Is not that what must bind them into one?
So the old Psalmist thought and sung. How could St. John apply his words now that the office of the high priest at Jerusalem had become utterly degraded, if it had not ceased altogether; now that there was no unity, but the most frightful division and hatred in the Jewish Church, if it had not actually been deprived of its capital and its temple? He believed that Jesus being the Son of God and the Son of Man was the real high priest of the universe; that He had received the true anointing, the Divine Spirit of His Father; that this Spirit had not been poured on Him alone, but had run down to the skirts of His garments; that He was raised on high that men on earth might be filled with it. Because this Spirit of Christ, the anointed one, was present with them; because God had promised that it should be renewed in them day by day, as the dew fell every day upon the hills; therefore they could, as brethren, dwell together in unity; therefore the Church could live on amidst all the powers, seen and unseen, which were threatening to destroy it.
You see, then, the force of the Apostle’s words. ‘Ye have received this anointing; this Spirit does abide in you; and you have the highest, most perfect of all teachers with you at every moment. He can enable you to dispense with other teaching. He alone can make other teaching profitable to you. For He does not deceive you. He is the Spirit of Truth. He does not pretend to dwell with us and then desert us. The more you are willing to be under His guidance, the more you will be guided by Him, the more you will find that peace of God which the world cannot give, and which all its tribulations and all its temptations cannot take away.’
Some people will maintain that these words about an anointing, a Divine Teacher, a Spirit of Truth, were very suitable to the apostolic age, but do not concern us. I believe that the apostolic age was simply the witness of the treasures that are bestowed upon all ages. It was a witness that all powers of healing, of speech, of government, by whomsoever they are exercised, proceed from the Spirit of God, and are the signs of His presence with men. It was a witness that this Holy Spirit of God is greater than all other gifts, and that we, in our ignorance, feebleness, and despondency, may call Him to our aid, and may be sure that we do not call in vain. The men of the apostolic age had the same difficulty that we have in believing this; signs and wonders could not make them believe it; signs and wonders could not make us believe it; they were led to this faith by the perplexities of their consciences, by the confusions of their understandings, by the weariness and longings of their hearts: that same experience will lead us to it also.
I know not who want it so much as we do. For when were people so divided? When was there less of that dwelling together in unity which the Psalmist pronounced to be so good and comely? And surely all the arguments and arrangements in the universe will not bring it one whit nearer to us. We shall become more and more separate, each man will shut himself more closely in his own notions, conceits, and selfish pursuits, until we all own that we require the Spirit of God, of Unity, to keep us one. Then we shall find that He who has breathed into our nostrils the breath of life, does not deny us this more needful breath, this deeper life.
The two last verses of this chapter belong, I think, to a new subject, and are more properly connected with the opening verse of the following one. They are, no doubt, also closely connected with these of which I have spoken to-day; for the Epistle is a continuous work, and each doctrine in Christian ethics leads on to the next. But there is a pause, it strikes me, at the 27th verse, and I shall stop there. Many would say that I have not been occupied to-day with a question of morals at all, but with a question of theology. To speak of the union of the Father and the Son, and of an Anointing Spirit who testifies of both, is to speak, they would tell me, of a topic which has occasioned more controversy than any other, which has given rise to greater divisions. Perhaps they will quote against me the lines of Pope—
‘For forms of faith let graceless zealots fight,
He can’t be wrong whose life is in the right.’
And I, for my part, should be very glad to hear those lines produced, and to accept them as the utterance of a great truth. For, if I have not failed wholly to express the mind of St. John, I have shown you that it is Life we want; that everything is worthless except that. He denounces those who had separated from them only because they refused the humble life of Jesus, and preferred a proud, self-exalting life of their own. It is the life of a Son, a filial life, which he desires we should all possess; it is a life which does not exclude one human creature from its blessedness. That we rise into theology when we seek for this life, I have confessed from the first; for theology means the teaching or word concerning God; and St. John’s teaching or word concerning God is, that this loving universal life is His; and that He has made us partakers of it. But if we rise into theology, it is not that we may bring ourselves into a circle of notions, opinions, dogmas; it is that we may escape from them; it is that we may drop the forms and conceits of our mind, as the butterfly drops the chrysalis in which it has been buried. I know that there have been endless controversies about the Unity of the Father and the Son in the Spirit. These controversies have, I think, all served to show what a deep, all-embracing unity it is; how it takes up our different thoughts and conceptions into itself; how we enter into it most when we are most seeking for union and fellowship with all our brethren; with the God who in His well-beloved Son adopts them and us as His children. He who is proud and contentious, i.e. whose life is in the wrong, will certainly never acknowledge the Son and the Father as St. John acknowledges them, however accurately he may pronounce the creed respecting them. For he will have another spirit than that uniting reconciling Spirit, to which St. John declares that God in Christ has anointed us. And he who is humble and earnest, i.e. whose life is in the right, will find the Father and the Son, and will at last abide in them, however much he may be perplexed about the Articles of the Creed, because the Spirit of the Father and Son has bestowed that true mind upon him, and will guide him into all truth.