1 John V. 1-5.
Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God: and every one that loveth Him that begat loveth Him also that is begotten of Him. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God, and keep His commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments: and His commandments are not grievous. For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?
THE Apostle has been treating of Love. He passes in the first of the verses I have just read, to Faith. Formal writers on Theology or on Ethics would have stopped to announce the commencement of a new subject. They would probably have told us that they had been discussing one of the great Christian virtues or graces; now the time was come for explaining the nature and signs of another. If we find no such intimations in St. John, we must not hastily conclude that he is indifferent to method. Perhaps he is more careful of it than those writers to whom I have alluded. Perhaps he knows better than they what is the method of the human spirit, what is God’s method of awakening and directing the different energies with which He has endowed it.
At all events, experience has proved that very serious practical inconveniences, and very interminable controversies, are the results of those artificial divisions which have been thought a valuable improvement upon the teaching of Scripture. Simple men, who have had to work and live, possibly just about to die, have been driven nearly mad by discussions upon kinds, qualities, and conditions of faith, upon the relative value of acts of faith and acts of love, upon the possibility of faith existing without love or love without faith. And those who raise these hungry questions are never able to settle them. They are debated backwards and forwards with a subtlety and refinement that does not the least hinder fierce and violent passions from coming forth on each side. For the combatants know that their discourses are touching what is most vital in themselves and in their fellow-men. They know that the bystanders, who smile and ask them why they are making so much ado about nothing, are wrong, and may one day feel how much is at stake in what now seems a mere fight of words; they are half conscious that they have conveyed this false impression to men’s minds by their disputations; they are vexed and fretted by the contradiction; it makes them still more eager to confute their adversaries; it turns their zeal into gall and bitterness. A dreadful story, which those who engage in religious debates understand only too well, and which makes them sometimes tremble as they read the sentence, ’ Woe to the world, because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe be to him by whom the offence cometh. For it were better for him that a millstone were tied about his neck, and that he were cast into the depths of the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.’
Without judging those who enter into these disputes in one interest or another—for if we judge, we shall certainly be judged—and only desiring as much as possible to keep ourselves out of them, let us try if we cannot find how St. John escaped the peril into which they have fallen; why he can speak of Faith and Love without setting them up as rivals; how he ascertains the claim of Love to the precedence which his brother Apostle St. Paul had assigned it in his Epistle to the Corinthians, while he gives to Faith all the dignity and rights which that same brother Apostle had claimed for it in his Epistle to the Romans.
‘Every one who believeth that Jesus is the Christ, is born of God, and every one who loveth Him that begat loveth Him also that is begotten of Him.’
We are familiar with this language. We have seen before how the idea of a Divine birth, of Sonship to God, penetrates the whole mind of St. John. We have found now the acknowledgment of Christ as the anointed one, as endowed with the true Spirit, as manifesting the true life of God,—is connected with this divine birth, how His Sonship is made the ground of our sonship. Is there anything fresh to be learnt from this passage, then? Is it not a mere repetition of what we have been told more than once already? No! its position in reference to the statements in the last chapter invests it with a new meaning and importance.
We have heard the broad announcement, ‘God is Love.’ A man might say, ‘That is enough for me. I am content.’ There is nothing to fear. The words are without exception, without limitation. They are inspired words. They are Apostle’s words. Even so. But what are these? ‘And this commandment have we from Him, that he who loveth God love his brother also.’ You liked the first words. Do you like these as well? Have you kept this commandment? Are you able to keep it? Because, if we may trust the Apostle who delivered the one sentence, this is indissolubly bound up with it. He seems to intimate that those tidings will be of no profit to us if these are forgotten. Thus we are driven to inquire, whether there is no link between the God, the absolute Perfect Being, whose name is Love, and ourselves,—the feeble, the imperfect, yea, more than that, the unloving. Or if we begin at the other end, we are forced to inquire, how it is possible to keep that command, which, as I said before, is the most difficult of all to keep.
I believe that Jesus is the Christ. That is to say, I believe that there is a living bond between me, the poor, helpless human creature, and the absolute perfect Being. I believe that His Love has come near to me in a human person, whom I may claim as the brother of me and my race. I believe that Person is the Son of God; that in Him dwelt the fulness of the Godhead bodily. I believe, therefore, that I am related to that Love which created the world, and all that is in it. I may claim affiance in it. Again, I believe that Jesus is the Christ. I believe that He is anointed with the Spirit of God to the end that He may bestow that Spirit upon men. I believe that the Spirit in Him was a uniting Spirit, a self-sacrificing Spirit, a Spirit of active, suffering, sympathising Love. I believe that that Spirit is acting upon us, and can work in us the love which is most foreign to our selfishness.
Here is faith; faith in its simplest form; faith in its greatest might. It is simple, for this faith refers everything to God. It is the renunciation of every claim in a man to do acts of his own, to exist by himself. It is mighty, for by this faith the will of the man becomes altogether subject to the will of God. His might becomes its might. And so, as St. Paul speaks in the Epistle to the Romans, ‘boasting is excluded.’ The man can boast of nothing; least of all can he boast of his faith. That is not something which belongs to him, a gift which he can carry about with him, and say, ‘Now I am a believer.’ It is exactly the reverse of this. It saves him, by emptying him. It delivers him from himself; it attaches him to another. He is just by faith, because he believes in a just God. He is loving by faith, because he believes in a loving God. Truly, faith is the gift of God. He awakens it in us, as He awakens everything in us that is living, everything that is necessary to our life as men. He awakens it, as He awakens in us the powers of seeing, speaking, remembering, thinking. But as I have no right to say, I am different from my neighbours—better than my neighbours—because I have the use of sight, of smell, of hearing, of speech; as I ought to say, ‘How sad it is for any one not to have these common human endowments,—what an awful calamity blindness is, and dumbness, and deafness,—how sadly I have misused my eyes, and ears, and tongue;’ so it is with faith. That is more essentially, more characteristically human, than seeing, hearing, smelling, speaking. To be wholly without it, is to be a beast or a devil. To be endued with it in the highest measure, is only to be a true man. To abandon unbelief for faith, is only to return to a proper, calm, even state, to a right mind, after having wandered among the tombs, and been exiles from our kind. Faith saves us, as St. Paul says; saves us from an inhuman condition; saves us by joining us to the Man who cares for all men, and has refused to divide Himself from any.
But is St. Paul then inconsistent with himself in saying that Love or Charity is greater than faith? Hear how St. John interprets him. God is Love. Christ’s own Faith was in the love of His Father. He lived by trust. His glory was never to abandon trust, never to set up Himself. Faith, because it is Faith, must have something to rest upon. And that something is Love. If Love was not the ground of all things, there could be no Faith; there must be everlasting distrust; that is what we should be bound to cultivate in ourselves; or rather it would grow without any cultivation. And all Faith which does not look up to Love as its end, which does not look down upon Love as its root, is a mere phantasy or contradiction. It is a faith which does not believe in anything, or, most monstrous of all, which believes in itself, worships itself. But it is equally certain that all Love which we talk of as ours, or make a pretext for vanity, is a contradiction and a lie. Such love is without any object; it attaches us to nothing; it makes us incapable of being attached to anything. To talk of God bestowing Love upon us as if it were something which we could hold or get credit for, is indeed to set Love and Faith in opposition; but only because it makes one as utter a nullity as the other. So long as we adhere to St. John’s language,—so long as we speak of our dwelling in God and God dwelling in us,—the faith by which we confess God’s Love can never clash with the Love by which He works in us.
And so we understand the last clause of this verse, and see how necessary it is to that which went before. It was easy for a reader of St. John’s Epistle to misinterpret the words, ‘He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?’ The sense which has often been given them is, that we start from visible objects of Love, and so ascend by degrees to the invisible, and that any one who attempts to reverse the process, any one who begins from the invisible, and descends to the visible,—is a deceiver. I am sure that St. John did not mean this, and that we are contradicting his previous statements if we suppose that he meant it. No doubt, God educates us by visible and imperfect parents—fathers after the flesh—to seek for Himself the invisible and perfect Parent, ‘the Father of our spirits.’ Through brothers and sisters, through the love between the sexes, through the marriage bond, we are prepared to apprehend the relations in which we stand to the Kingdom of Heaven. But it happens very often indeed, that the child never learns to say the Lord’s Prayer in spirit and in truth, till it has lost the father on earth to whom it clung. His death perhaps first brings out the full consciousness that there must be One who lives for ever and ever. Not seldom the absence of love in the home circle drives it to seek a more perfect and enduring home. Not seldom shame for our indifference and coldness to those who have watched over us in our infancy forces us to turn to Him who has taken the blessings from us, and whom we feel we have grieved by our scorn of them. And, even if this were otherwise, St. John is saying nothing about our particular families and the lessons we may have learnt or not learnt in them. He is putting the question to us broadly, whether want of love to any brother, any man whom we have seen, does not imply want of love to the God whom we have not seen? Now to declare that we have a universal Love for our kind, and a special Love for each member of it, before we have any thought about God, before we have made any efforts after His Love, is certainly at variance with all experience; to declare that we ought to start with such a love, and that we can only climb to the love of God through it, would be a strange assertion for any man, an absolutely incredible one for an Apostle whose business was to preach the Gospel of God’s Love to a loveless world.
Lest, however, there should be any doubt about this matter, St. John here tells us plainly that the love of Him that begat is the root and not the consequence of the love of him that is begotten of Him. That is the natural order; that, we may say it confidently, is the universal order. For even in those cases to which I have alluded, of the love of children for their parents; of brothers for sisters; of husbands for wives, and wives for husbands; it is God who is secretly kindling that love. Though it is directed to a visible object, though without the sight of that object it might never exist, He has created the affinity between them; He attracts those towards each other whom He has intended for each other. He may be leading them through the earthly partial affection to one that is higher and more comprehensive; but that affection also is of Him, called forth by His Spirit, and, as we hope, stamped with His own immortality. In the earliest, simplest affections of which a child is capable, we are to discern the signs of His purpose. He is intending the creatures whom He has made in His image to share His own nature, to show it forth in all their intercourse with each other and with the world in which He has placed them. The forms which present themselves to our eyes are not as dear to Him as the spirit which is within them. But they are dear to Him. The face of man we call, and rightly call, the human face divine. He who was the brightness of the Father’s glory had the face and features of a man. Painters have not been wrong in thinking that, though it was and must have been a face of sorrow, the sorrow, being the effect of intense sympathy, revealed the glory as nothing else could have revealed it. Those who refused to see God in Jesus because He had taken upon Him the face of a servant, worshipped another God than the God who is Love. If we refuse to see the image of God in our fellow-men, because their faces are marred with sorrow—even marred with sin,—we do not confess His redemption, we do not believe that Christ is the Head of every man, we do not look forward to the day when He shall say to the meanest of them, ‘These my Brethren.’
One of these passages, then, throws back light upon the other. It tells why the love of the unseen God must involve the love of the seen man; why every man is walking about in a vesture of weeds and mourning to prove us whether we will recognize his celestial birth or deny it. And so we are able to profit by the test in the next verse, which at first may strike us as impracticable, as if the unknown were tried by the more unknown. ‘By this we know that we love the children of God when we love God and keep His commandments.’ I meet a man who offends me in a thousand ways. All his modes of thinking are different from mine; he evidently regards me with dislike; he gives proofs of it; he is aware, as I am, that there is antipathy on my side. Perhaps I have some valid reasons for objecting to him. He says something which wounds my conscience as well as my vanity: I do not know exactly which he has wounded most. I cannot distinguish one impression of annoyance from the other; they are curiously, inextricably mingled. I ask myself whether I am not indulging in wrong feelings towards him. I half justify myself by the evil that I have detected in him. It occurs to me, that if I were in a proper state of mind, that evil would grieve me for his sake. I try to think of the good which other people say is in him, which there positively must be in him though I have not perceived it. All is of no use. My bitterness increases. I would fain persuade myself that I love him in a sense; because I ought to do so. But in what sense? Some sense that is compatible with personal unkindness, ill-will, malignity. What, then, am I to do? Shall I allow the thought of God to mingle with these other thoughts of mine? Why is that so startling a contradiction?
The Apostle was not wrong. My conscience shows me that he is right. I must banish Him that begat from me if I am determined to be at enmity with those that are begotten of Him. He will not dwell with my malice. But He can separate that which is base in me, from that which is true. He can make me own His image in my foe as well as in myself. He can make me abhor what is contrary to that image in both. And since He commands me to love this man whom of myself I cannot love, whom it is my instinct not to love, I can ask Him to take me under His government and to make me do that will which I know to be the right one, which I feel to be the blessed one.
‘For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments: and His commandments are not grievous.’ Very comfortable tidings, if we take them in. God’s love is not that vague, distant, abstract Essence which we often fancy it to be; nor that terrible excellence which we must somehow imitate and cannot; His Love is that we keep His commandments. He desires us to be like Him. The energy of that Love which called the universe into existence is with us to make us obedient. And, after all, it is not a very grievous thing to be told that we must love. It is not a specially cruel and tyrannical obligation which we are laid under. We should not perhaps be restive under it, if we once knew what it meant. We should not complain that God would not suffer us to be without that which constitutes His own blessedness. We might not be fiercely indignant because that is taken from us which has set us at war with ourselves and with all creation.
But what is this martial note which follows? How does it accord with the soft gentle music of submission which has just been ringing in our ears? ‘For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.’ I told you it would be so. The Apostle, whom the painters represent as so tender, is a warrior to the last. He has not given over fighting himself. He will not let us plead any exemption on the score of youth or age. All through his Epistle we have heard that the world is our enemy; that we must overcome it, or that it will overcome us. Now we know better why it is our enemy, and what we have to overcome. God is Love. God commands us to love. The world will not own God’s love. The world commands us to be selfish.
The world says that we may enlarge our circle indefinitely, but that Self is and must be the centre of it. And we all are inclined to believe the assertion. It sounds most plausible. Sometimes we think it nearly self-evident. We wonder that any one can dispute it. At all events we cannot. ‘We have seen,’ as we say, ‘too many ghosts of ’perfectibility to believe in them. We have thought of ’a fellowship not based upon each man’s desire to trip up ’his neighbour, and to gain wealth and power for himself. ’We have been disappointed. It is time to take men as ’we find them, and not to give ourselves credit for being ’better than our fathers were before us.’ That is as good as saying, ‘We and the world have tried a wrestle, and the ’world has thrown us. Henceforth there is nothing better ’for us than to sprawl in the dust and confess our conqueror.’
Now, this is just what St. John was determined not to do. The world in his day was the same as the world in ours. It jeered at all efforts to assert any other principle than the principle of selfishness. It said, ‘People ’have sacrificed themselves for their family and country; ’but nothing has come of it. Every man, of course, ’seeks his own advantage. Every one, of course, cares ’for his neighbour only just so far as he serves his ’turn. Why cannot you be honest? Why will you ’profess that you have some wonderful secret which can ’raise you above ordinary human motives?’ Such words were very hard to bear. for, first, as we have seen, what St. John desired was to be an ordinary man; not to set himself above his fellows in any respect; to claim nothing which he could not claim for them. His fight, and the fight of all the Apostles, had been with the religious Jews who would have a heaven to themselves, who would not let the kingdom of heaven be opened to all men. And next such words were hard to bear; for no one knew so much of his own selfishness, and of the selfishness that is in the heart of man, as he did. No man of the world could pour out declamations and evidence on that matter which he could not endorse and expand a thousand-fold out of his own experience.
‘But this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.’ That faith of which he has been discoursing in this passage, that faith in the eternal love of God, that faith in Jesus as the Christ, the anointed of God, who manifested the nature of God, who imparts the Spirit of God; that faith carried him through all these arguments; that faith told him that the existence of no man, that the existence of no society, can stand upon selfishness. It must stand upon the opposite of selfishness, upon that which selfishness is seeking to undermine and destroy. Its root must be in love. That is the one binding force. Omnipotence is only in that. So far as any family or any nation has ever been held together, it has been held by the might not of selfishness but of sacrifice. So far as any man’s soul has not been torn by contradictory passions, it has been kept at one by the same might. ’The world’s mockery lasts from generation to generation, but each generation changes its note. Each generation accepts some new precious legacy from the self-sacrificing man, whose faith it has cast out as evil. It lives on because God maintains it by that principle which it declares to be good for nothing, to be prized only by fools and fanatics.
But we cannot overcome the world by reckoning the discomfitures which it has undergone, or by foretelling those which it has to undergo. This is the only victory which overcometh it, even our faith. Faith, not in its weakness, but in God’s strength; faith in that love which embraces the world, and which, at last, subdues the world to itself. St. John appears to be afraid lest even his grand language should lead to vanity. The Church might be proud of its promised victory over the world, proud of the faith that was to win it. He must remind his disciples in whom the faith was placed, what they believed: ‘Who is he that overcometh, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?’ It is not a special charm called faith, an endowment conferred upon certain favourites of Heaven that could give them a victory over the world. The notion of such an endowment might make them into another world more selfish, less godly, than that which they denounced. Only by believing that Jesus who died for all men is the Son of God, and only by seeking fellowship with all men, could they receive the Holy Spirit, and be the conquerors of the world’s Spirit. And what was true for them is true for us. We must be led captives in the world’s splendid triumph; we must put on its badges, and be dressed in its meanest livery; we must be the victims of its selfishness, and make our fellow-men the victims of ours; unless we believe that He who offered Himself as a sacrifice, is the Son of God. Believing in Him, we can assert for the meanest child of earth the right of a child of God. Believing in Him, we can be members of that society which will be growing wider, and diviner, and more blessed, when the world and all its selfish works have been burnt up in the fires of the last day.