The Sharing of Life
W. Carl Ketcherside
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A consideration of the scope, or design, which the inspired author of any of the books of Scripture had in view, essentially facilitates the study of the Bible: because, as every writer had some design which he proposed to unfold, and as it is not to be supposed that he would express himself in terms foreign to that design, it therefore is but reasonable to admit that he made use of such words and phrases as were every way suited to his purpose. To be acquainted, therefore, with the scope of an author is to understand the chief part of his book. The scope, it has been well observed, is the soul or spirit of a book; and that being once ascertained, every argument and every word appears in its right place and is perfectly intelligible: but if the scope is not duly considered, every thing becomes obscure, however clear and obvious its meaning may really be. --Thomas Hartwell Home in "An Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scriptures."
I am indebted to John for a great deal I have learned about the real meaning of fellowship. I'm speaking about the son of Zebedee who was a fisherman until Jesus came walking down the beach and put the finger on him to enter training for an ambassadorship in the only kingdom that will survive the wreck of this world and last forever. John made good in the position and his official correspondence has the key to what it is all about.
One reason I am so thrilled with it now is because it contains the secret of the divine-human relationship like nothing else I have ever read. Of course the secret was all there all the time, but we were not. For years I read the new covenant scriptures through jaundiced eyes. After we waved the magic wand and converted "the restoration movement" into "the Lord's church" it was but one easy step to assume that all of the apostles were members of our particular faction, and the Spirit inspired them to confirm our opinions, deductions and interpretations, so we could point to ourselves and say, "This is the way, walk ye in it."
It was not too difficult to conclude that those who did not concur with our views were out of step with Jesus and His holy messengers, and had denied the faith and were worse than infidels. We were staring at every thing through clouded glasses ground by partisan optometrists. We looked at things "slaunchwise" as an old woodsman and tie-hacker down home used to say. That is the way I read what John wrote and I came up with some weird notions. That is why a dozen different factions had preachers who held forth on "The Way That is Right and Cannot be Wrong," and yet they all had a different way. They could not even call upon one another to lead in prayer.
No one ever said more about loving the brethren than did John. He did not condition that love upon conformity of
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We applied it to things of which John never dreamed and at which the Holy Spirit never hinted. Each faction had elevated some matter of opinion or deduction to the place where it became "the maypole" around which the partisans danced in proof of their loyalty. Whatever that thing was it became the criterion for measuring faithfulness. One might differ with the party on almost anything else, but if he was to be recognized as "sound" he had to be able to give the party password. If he did not do that he did not bring this doctrine, and he was not to be received or given a greeting. He was to be treated with such reserve and coldness that he would know he was in the "out" group.
If the test of fellowship was having only one container for the fruit of the vine in the Lord's Supper, that doctrine became "this doctrine." If the party was created to oppose the Sunday School that doctrine became "this doctrine." If the faction formed to oppose the method of financing the Herald of Truth program that doctrine became "this doctrine." Regardless of how much a person loved Jesus and sought to walk in the Spirit, if he did not endorse the party taboo he was left out in the cold. This doctrine was the twentieth century distillate of men's minds around which an exclusivistic clan gathered, and unless you could pass the eagle-eyed inspection of prying editors or preying preachers you were left on the outside looking in through the chinks in the blockhouse!
I seriously doubt the apostle ever had in mind the danger of our becoming partakers in such evil deeds as having individual containers to pass the fruit of the vine, or of having classes in which to discuss the revealed message, or of sending a check to Highland congregation in Abilene, Texas, as a contribution to the propaganda medium called "Herald of Truth." Anything becomes evil to one who wants to borrow it as something to which he can object and build his little party around the objection while blaming the thing to which he objects as responsible for division. All things are unclean to him who is unclean. But the fact that men have split the body into smithereens over such inane and innocuous trivia shows how little they regard the faith that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. The fact that they quote 2 John 9, 10 to justify their cold and callous treatment of God's other children demonstrates that the party spirit will stoop to any level to protect its fanatical regard for opinion.
It was a great day for me when I learned that John was writing about the majestic historical event upon which our blessed hope rests, and had no reference to our little partisan hangups. These are the mental toys over which selfish children squabble and fight. They cannot possibly mean as much to a loving Father as His children mean to Him. What a difference it made when I laid aside my "Church of Christ" bifocals and saw the epistles in their proper perspective.
I am now quite convinced that the community of the redeemed has always had to battle against two grave dangers--legalism and philosophy, the wisdom of this passing age. During the first century both of these tried the mettle of the faith. The untiring struggle of Paul won the day against "the Pharisees who believed" and the message was freed from the codicils and amendments tacked on it by those who preferred the security of law to the liberty of grace.
The destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman legions under Titus scattered the "salt" out of its original shaker and dispersed the saints abroad. It was, no
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Just as in the days of Paul it appeared that the saints might fracture into separate bodies composed either of the circumcised or uncircumcised, so Gnosticism threatened to split every congregation on earth over whether Jesus actually came in the flesh. By the time John arrived in Ephesus "many false prophets had gone out into the world," and the aging apostle identified those whom he so labeled. They were men who denied that Jesus had come in the flesh. His three letters, as well as his belated gospel record, were written to counter the ever-increasing effect of this deadly system.
Even the casual student of Gnosticism knows that its adherents were divided into hostile parties although one basic and underlying idea was common to all of them. It was not new, but had been around a long time. That idea was that all matter was inherently and irretrievably evil. It was when Gnosticism came face to face with the fact of Jesus it met its greatest challenge. If Jesus was the Son of God come in the flesh, this one historic event forever knocked the whole theory into the proverbial "cocked hat."
The amazing thing, and I take a lot of secret comfort from it, is that a number of Gnostics embraced the faith. This means that the historic facts were so positively established and the testimony so incontestable they were irresistible. The tension must have been great. Long since the Gnostics had concluded that God could not have directly created the earth for that would have been to accuse Deity of deliberately producing evil. The problem was resolved by assuming that Deity had sent out emanations in ever-widening circles of influence and these crystallized into creative intelligence, aeons or demi-urges. When one of these was far enough from Deity as a center so that Deity could not directly come in contact with matter, the demi-urge brought the material universe into existence.
This little background cannot possibly do justice to the system. Hopefully, it will be sufficient for our purpose. If we are to understand John's letters, however, there are a few facts we must not forget. Let me briefly mention them. Gnosticism was widespread. It was the accepted explanation of the origin and nature of the universe throughout much of the Greek world. The theory takes its designation from gnosis, knowledge. It had a real tug at the Greek intellect for the Greeks sought after wisdom. To be a Gnostic was to be sophisticated, to gain admission to the company of the intellectually elite, the inner circle of wisdom. The Gnostic was superior, the rest of humanity illiterate and barbarian. Only those could truly know the secrets of the universe who had made contact with the esoteric and been initiated into the Mysteries.
Any converts to the faith in the Greek intellectual world would more than likely have been steeped in Gnosticism. To them it was the only logical explanation of the world in which their lot was cast. That world had been conceived in the Logos of God. The Logos was the divine reason and word. It was this power which had conceived the means by which emanations could proceed until a creaturely world could be fashioned and set into whirling motion. To accept Jesus as a historical figure, declared to be the Son of God was one thing. To explain Jesus as having had pre-existence with the Father and having come in the flesh was a wholly different matter.
By the time John arrived in Asia Gnosticism had taken two forms in its attempt to explain Jesus. There were the Docetics who took their name from the Greek term which meant "to appear, to seem." It was their idea that Jesus was
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There was also the Cerinthian brand, named after its chief proponent, Cerinthus, who lived in Ephesus at the same time as John. A good deal of traditional material has been preserved about their personal encounters. The Cerinthian gnostics taught that Jesus was begotten by Joseph and conceived by Mary. When He was about thirty years of age and at the time of His baptism by John, the hagios pneuma, the Holy Spirit, descended upon and invested Him and it was this pneuma which was given recognition as the Messiah. Since it was reasoned that God could not be killed and the Spirit could not die, it was taught that Jesus yielded up the pneuma, and it was simply a man who died, not the Son of God.
It seems a little incredible to us that the doctrine which denied that Jesus came in the flesh could have gained such headway, but we live in a wholly different social culture. The faith has been debated, defined and refined during twenty long centuries of conflict and while there are pockets of what might be called "neo-gnosticism" our foes are of a different breed. It is important, if we are to understand what John is saying, that we put his writings back in the framework in which he wrote them. When we do this, we will at once gain some deep insights into what he is communicating.
For instance, we learn that many of the Gnostics had been in the redeemed community but they left the saints. John regarded their secession as proof that they never were really one with the brethren who accepted the reality of the incarnation. He says "they were not of us." He brands them as liars and antichrists, and defines a liar as one who denies that Jesus is the Christ, and an antichrist as one who denies both the Father and the Son (1 John 3:22). In spite of their defection from the body the Gnostics still attempted to seduce the brethren (3:26).
John exhorted the beloved not to be gullible, but to test the spirits whether they were of God. That the Gnostics were numerous is indicated by the fact that the apostle declares that many false prophets had gone out into the world. A false prophet was one who refused to confess that Jesus Christ came in the flesh. Such a one was not to be admitted to the house. No greeting was to be given to him on the street. There was a great gulf between the Spirit of God and the spirit of antichrist Nothing must be done or condoned which would leave even a suspicion that there was any agreement. All hospitality was to be denied to the wandering Gnostic teacher. Even the customary civility was to be avoided. The whole Christian faith rested upon the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh. There was no meeting ground with one who denied this great fundamental truth. He was to be met at the door of the home and refused admittance.
Having said this much it is my hope that my readers are prepared for that to which the preceding is prologue. It is my intention to share with you my analysis and explanation of the first chapter of 1 John. In doing so I want to emphasize the nature of the fellowship of which we are partakers. I want to lift it out of the
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This was not mere rhetoric. It was not written as an attention-getter. It was penned to saints who were under attack by a clever and designing philosophy. It is the opening salvo of spiritual firepower intended to devastate a Christ-denying doctrine and to reinforce the morale of believers. John is writing a letter to certain ones on a specific problem. But it does not begin like a letter. The faith is at stake and John has been brought in to save it. That is why he takes no warm-up tosses but whips a strike across the plate without indulging in the customary wind-up or salutation.
That which was from the beginning was the Logos, the Word who was with God and was God. He was the creative agent by whom all things were made. And it was the Word which was made flesh. It was not that the Logos invested one who was flesh, or came to one who was in the flesh, but the Logos became flesh. And He was the Word of life. In Him was life and the life was the light of men. It was not simply that He was alive, but He was the source of life. Life originated with Him. Do not forget that with John life is light. The life was the light! I shall expect to show that John uses three great words--life, light and love. In his context they are all the same. In this marvelous attack upon an insidious denial that Jesus Christ came in the flesh there was a real reason to affirm that "God is light" and "God is love." These are not different things at all. They are the same. This becomes apparent to the perceptive student.
The Docetic theory that Jesus never had a human physical body of any kind, that the Word of life could not have become incarnate, had no appeal to John. He knew better and he knew upon the best evidence in the world. If a body is composed of flesh and blood and bones, it is capable of being apprehended by the senses. Its presence and substance can be verified by the organs of sight, hearing and touch.
John was one of the chosen witnesses. He was present with Jesus from His baptism at the hands of John until He was received up into glory. He did not just hear about Jesus, he heard Jesus! Jesus spoke with human tongue. He employed human words. John saw Jesus. He makes it clear that those who saw Him did so with their eyes. It was not a dream or vision. It was not a phantasy. Cerinthus denied that men could see the divine Christ with the physical eye. John declares that he and others did that very thing.
He looked upon Jesus. This is more than merely seeing a person or thing. One could do that with a passing glance and it might be argued that his eyes deceived him in establishing identity. But this word means to gaze or scrutinize. William Barclay says, "The idea is not that of a passing glance, and a quick look, but of a steadfast searching gaze, which seeks to discover something of the meaning of the mystery of Christ." It was the term which would be used to describe the action of a researchist or laboratory technician who sought to understand the object of his examination.
John said the witnesses had handled Jesus, that is, had touched him and felt His flesh. It was Luke, a physician who examined the eyewitnesses, who recorded that Jesus said after His resurrection from the dead, "Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me and see, for a spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see me have" (Luke 24:39). Under ordinary circumstances, the testimony of eye and ear would have been the highest
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John did not rely upon visionary or hallucinatory evidence. He had auditory, visual, perceptive and manual proof of the reality which was affirmed. The term "Word of life" as used by John is so charged with significance that I find myself enthralled with it. To understand why I am so moved you will need to know that about the time Jesus was born, Philo, a brilliant Jew, was also born in Alexandria. He became a great student of Greek philosophy, especially that of Pythagoras and Plato, while holding to the divinity of the Jewish law as the basis and test of all true philosophy.
In trying to bridge the gap between the Jewish and Greek concepts, Philo taught that God was a Being without attributes, so exalted above the world that an intermediate class of beings was essential even to establish a point of contact These beings were ideas emanating from the infinite one, and the ideas were active powers employed as messengers. Philo said they were the beings called demons by the Greeks, and angels by Moses. These intermediate powers he called the Logos, and man was a creation of the Logos.
It was Philo, at the very height of his popularity at the time Jesus summoned John to leave his nets, who had given such impetus to Gnosticism which the German writer Graul called "the gigantic serpent which lurked by the cradle of the infant church." The Logos, said Philo, was one of the aeons, far enough removed from God that He could create a material world. To the Docetics He was an idea, a pneuma, incorporeal and spiritual. John's first sentence ripped the speculation to shreds. The Logos was not an emanation or reflection. He was in the beginning. He was not given life or being. He was the Logos of life, and had been made flesh. He could be heard, seen, examined and felt. Anyone who denied this was a liar. "Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ?" (1 John 2:22).
The word manifested is used twice in this verse. The original is used nine times in this short letter. That it was important to John in conveying his message can hardly be questioned. The verb is phaneroo, and phan means to shine. Thus the word means to make visible or clear. W. E. Vine says the true meaning is to uncover, to lay bare, to reveal. The life was exposed to sight. It was made visible. It was subject to examination.
But life as a quality, or essence, cannot be seen. No one has ever seen a soul as a vitalizing principle. We see life only as it is embodied. For life to be manifested it must be incarnated. No one knew better than the Gnostics what John was saying. They also knew that if John's little children, as the saints are called in these epistles, believed the aged witness, the days of speculative philosophy were numbered. They would be "weighed in the balances and found wanting."
The life that was manifested was eternal life. Eternal life is the life of God. It is the abundant life, the divine life. It is as unending and undying as God is. The fact that it was manifested in such a manner as to be susceptible to the senses is proof that eternal life can dwell in men of flesh upon earth. It is a relationship with the divine and one who has the Son dwelling in him has eternal life.
God gave a record of His Son, and he who believes on the Son has that witness in himself. "And this is the record, that God has given to us eternal life, and this life in his Son. He that hath the Son hath life, and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life" (1 John 5:11, 12). One reason John wrote his letters was to assure the saints that they have eternal life because they have the Son. "These things have I written unto you that be-
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I have eternal life. I have the witness in myself. I praise God that I know the life in the Son. It is because of this I live in the hope of the glory of God. I'm standing on the promises, not just sitting on the premises. John experienced the manifested life. He saw it in bodily form. He testified to it. He demonstrated or showed it. I accept without quibble that eternal life was manifested in the body of Jesus. I do not doubt that it is present in my fleshly frame. I believe implicitly what John wrote.
John states two reasons why he wrote about the personal experiences of the apostles with the incarnate Word of life. He declared these things to enable his readers to share in the fellowship with the eyewitnesses, who shared in the fellowship with the Father and the Son. He wrote the letter so that the joy of the saints would be complete and fulfilled. Fellowship is from koinonia, a word which means "to share a common life." It is so rendered in the New English Version.
The common life we share is eternal life, the life of God. When the Word of life was manifested He made it possible for us to share in the divine life. This is the fellowship into which we are called by the Father (1 Corinthians 1:9). We enter that fellowship by accepting the apostolic testimony that Jesus came in the flesh. It was what John saw and heard about the manifested life in the Living Word which was declared that we might have fellowship.
This immediately places fellowship on an exalted plane. If God and Christ have fellowship with men in the flesh, in their humanity, that fellowship cannot be based upon equality in understanding or knowledge. It cannot be founded on absolute conformity of the participants. If God does not condition His fellowship with us upon such criteria, we dare not set up such conditions for our relationship with the saints. The only way God can be in the fellowship with us is by being merciful, tolerant and longsuffering. Thus, the fellowship revealed in the scriptures is one which demands such characteristics.
This fellowship is not something to be extended or withdrawn by men. No man can bestow upon you a share in eternal life. No group of men can take away your share in eternal life. Men cannot touch your fellowship with God and Christ. They can put you out of their synagogues. They can persecute you, revile you and say all manner of evil against you. But if you accept the testimony of the apostles concerning the manifested life, and have pledged your allegiance to the Lord of that life, men cannot touch your relationship to God. They can kill your body, and even think that in so doing, they render a sacrifice to God, but you are beyond their power to harm in regard to the fellowship of life.
Any fellowship which does not involve the common sharing of eternal life is too mundane and trivial to be concerned about. It is merely a participation in organizational or institutional association. It is like being a member of a country club. If you attend and keep your dues paid and do not question the policy of the board of directors you are regarded as "a member in good standing." It is like being a member of a fraternity where you can be blackballed if you do not conform to the rules imposed by the controlling clique.
Do not misunderstand me. Organizations of men have a right to draw up rules and regulations to impose upon their adherents. They can decide how many meetings you must attend in order to be recognized. They can decide upon structures which you must help to build
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So-called "church fellowship" is generally of this nature. It has no real relationship to the fellowship of the Spirit. It is of the earth earthy, as are those who created it. There is a great difference between sharing in "church life" and sharing in eternal life. There are as many different kinds of "church life" as there are "churches" and you could get dizzy trying to share in all of them. Anything that men extend or withdraw is not too important. To cut one off from an organization does not particularly harm him. It may free him to serve Jesus, to think, speak and act upon a higher plane. Obviously, if one is in the fellowship of God and Christ, he will recognize his relationship to all others who are in that glorious fellowship. He will receive them all, every one of them, as God and Christ received him. That is real fellowship!
It is recognition of our sharing in eternal life through the enfleshed Word which brings joy in its fulness. Pause just for a moment, and let the thought of what it means to share in the actual life of God, seep into the moral fibers of your being. Unfortunately, we tend to confuse joy with pleasure or happiness, to which it may be related. But one's relatives are not himself, even though of the same stock. Joy is from the Greek chara, but our English term pleasure is from the Latin jocundus. Pleasure is produced from any or every object, and may be the result of gratification of our senses. But joy is derived from exercise of the affections. It is a vivid and more lasting sensation in the soul. It is contemplation of our sharing in eternal life which fulfills our capacity for joy. When the Spirit pours out the love of God in our hearts, and the never-disappointing hope floods our inner being we experience a degree of joy which no circumstance, not even death, can dim. This is the fruit of the fellowship which is sharing the common life of the divine.
At the very outset, let it be noted that John is not talking about the basis upon which we, as human beings, have fellowship with one another. His theme is the foundation of our mutual fellowship with the Father. If you will read this carefully you will see that the expression "we have fellowship one with another" refers to God and ourselves sustaining fellowship with each other on the basis of our walking in the light to the degree that He is light. That we will have fellowship with others who walk in the light is a foregone conclusion, but it is not the subject of this section of the letter.
John gathers up the revelation of the Word who was made flesh in one grand statement. "The message we have heard of him," does not mean the message about Christ, but the message which Christ announced or proclaimed. That message was that "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all." Light can be a symbol of many things. But whatever it represents, darkness is the opposite of that thing or quality. If light represents knowledge, darkness represents ignorance. If light represents moral purity, darkness represents impurity. If light represents prosperity, darkness represents adversity. If light represents happiness, darkness represents unhappiness or despair.
It is especially important that we ascertain what John means by light, because we must walk in that quality to the same degree that God possesses it. It is upon that condition that we have fellowship with God and receive continual
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All of these may be ideals toward which we should strive, but if they represent the light which God is, we must attain them perfectly in order to share the common life with him. I doubt that a single one of my readers would affirm he has reached such a state. Certainly Paul testified he had not done so. "Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect, but I follow after" (Philippians 3:12).
The fact is there is only one thing in which we are to be as perfect as God. That thing is love. "Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world" (1 John 4:1.7). When Jesus said, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect" He was talking about love. He was urging His disciples on to unlimited and unrestricted love "that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven" (Matthew 5:43-48).
Now it is my conviction that light is love in the context of John's letter. Let me tell you why I hold this view. John writes, "Brethren, I write no new commandment unto you, but an old commandment which you had from the beginning. The old commandment is the word which ye heard from the beginning" (2:7). What was the message heard from the beginning? Listen! "For this is the message that ye heard from the beginning, that you should love one another" (3:11). The command to love one's neighbor or brother was not a new one at all. It had been taught before Jesus came. He pointed this out. "You have heard it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy."
But John goes on immediately in the very next sentence. "Again, a new commandment I write unto you, which thing is true in him and in you, because the darkness is past, and the true light now shineth" (2:8). Jesus is the true light and Jesus was love incarnate as we shall soon see. The old commandment included hate for your enemy, but with the coming of the true light hate and hostility toward those who were enemies was abrogated by the death of Jesus. "But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us ...for if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life" (Romans 5:8, 10).
This is what the love that is light and life is all about. "Herein is love, not that we love God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins" (1 John 4:9). The new commandment is true in both God and ourselves. Jesus makes this abundantly clear in Matthew 5:44, 45. And John says in this letter, "Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another" (4:11). Something happened when Jesus came that added a whole new dimension to love, and wrote a new commandment. The darkness of hate was gone. The light of love now shone. But does John identify love of the brethren with life? Does he equate hatred of the brethren with darkness? Hear him!
"He that loveth his brother abideth in the light, and there is none occasion of stumbling in him." Love for a brother is abiding in the light! If light is love, darkness must be hate. Now read this. "But he that hateth his brother is in darkness, and walketh in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because that darkness hath blinded his eyes." Nothing so blinds one as a heart filled with hatred. "He that loveth not his brother abideth in death. Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer" (3:14, 15). "He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother is in darkness even until now" (2:9).
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Walking in the light as God is in the light is loving as God loves. If we do this God and ourselves have fellowship with one another. I share a common life with God if I love as He loves. Everyone who loves like this is born of God and knows God (4:7). "If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us" (4:12). "God is love, and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him" (4:16).
When we share in this common life of love, the wonderful blood of Jesus Christ His Son goes on cleansing us from all sin. To share the life of love does not mean we are sinless. We are in the flesh. We are still caught up in the human predicament. Our faith is in the clouds but our feet are in the clay. If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves. The truth is not in us. Sinlessness is not a condition of fellowship. If it were there would be no fellowship this side of heaven.
Recognition of sin, admission of it when we realize it, and confession of it, will always be a necessary part of our earthly plight. But God is faithful. He is just to forgive us our sins. Eternal life is not granted to the sinless but to those who are in the sinless One. It is not accorded because we are in the flesh but because we are in Christ. "And we know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us understanding, that we may know him that is true, and we are in him that is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life" (1 John 5:20). I know Him! I am in Him! And I know that I have crossed the frontier from death unto life because I love the brethren (1 John 5:14). Praise His wonderful name!
This is the secret of fellowship! It is the intimate, abiding relationship with my Father, the sharing of eternal life, which makes my cup run over with gladness. My joy is full! My hope is real! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord! Heaven came down and glory filled my soul! The darkness is past! I am no longer groping my way along. The true light now shines! God dwells in me and I dwell in Him! He is my everything! He is my all! That is the fellowship of eternal life. That is the fellowship which I know and experience. And no one will ever take it from me.
The answer is plain. This was John's prescription to the saints to enable them to stand against a foe which threatened the very foundation of the temple of faith. "These things have I written unto you concerning them that seduce you" (2:26). The word seduce is from a term which means to lead astray. In this case it means to entice men to renounce a belief in the incarnation of the Word and to leave the faith that finds reality in the person of Jesus.
These wandering Gnostic teachers were false prophets (4:1), antichrists (2:18), and liars (2:22). They were deceivers (3:7), were of the world (4:5), and motivated by the very spirit of error (4:6). Nothing is more important when the very life of the body is threatened than for the brethren to love one another. When danger from without is imminent the flock should huddle closer together. To become scattered is to invite disaster, to become divided can only mean death. It is a time to allow that which was heard from the beginning to abide within (2:24). It is a time to remember
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A recognition of the true nature of the fellowship is essential in time of crisis. Satan uses such circumstances to divide and conquer. If he can get the brethren to hating one another, or to act as if they do, he can use them against each other. The devil does not care who does his work, although it is more effectively done for him by professed followers of Jesus than by those who are not. In view of this I want to direct attention to one of the most abused passages in the new covenant scriptures. I refer to 2 John 9, 10. "If any one comes to you and does not bring this doctrine, do not receive him into the house or give him any greeting; for he who greets him shares his wicked work" (Revised Standard Version).
This was addressed to a lady and her children whom the aged John loved in the truth. It is probable that a congregation of saints met in her house. John rejoiced that he found some of her children walking in the truth. He begged her to remember the commandment they had from the beginning, "that we love one another." He said, "This is love, that we follow his commandments; this is the commandment, as you have heard from the beginning, that you follow love."
The apostle warns that "many deceivers have gone out into the world, men who will not acknowledge the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh; such a one is the deceiver and the antichrist." Then occurs this statement: "Any one who goes ahead and does not abide in the doctrine of Christ does not have God; he who abides in the doctrine has both the Father and the Son." The doctrine of Christ as here defined is that which one must hold in order to have God. It is that which makes possible the maintenance of the relationship with both the Father and the Son. The expression "One who goes ahead and does not abide in the doctrine of Christ" is a perfect description of a Gnostic teacher. It describes Cerinthus, the Ephesian leader of Gnosticism with exactitude.
The Gnostic claimed a special wisdom to which those who depended upon a mere understanding of revelation could never attain. He went above and beyond what was said by God and reveled in a superior knowledge reserved for one who was an initiate into the Mysteries. E. De Pressence in The Early Years of Christianity writes, "Thus we see that by its exclusively intellectual tendency, gnosticism abandons the noble banner of Christian spirituality, and returns to the dualism which was the curse of the ancient world. We shall observe how faithful it was to its principle, and with what treacherous art it revived the old errors which had brought to ruin the most brilliant civilization of the world. From this primary and purely speculative character, there resulted the haughty esoterism which reconstituted the aristocracy of intellect, and placed its barrier in the way of the young and simple-hearted."
Cooper, in his book on the Free Church of Ancient Christendom calls Gnosticism, "that yeasty product, thrown up by the working of the gospel leaven upon the dead mass of heathenism, which it was evermore powerfully striving to penetrate and quicken." What is the doctrine of Christ in which one must abide to have God, and to have both the Father and the Son? John writes, "By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God" (1 John 4:2, 3). Again he writes, "No one who denies the Son has the Father. He who confesses the Son has the Father" (1 John 2:23).
This doctrine about which John writes is the teaching that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. Denial of that great primal and foundational truth severed one from God. It made him the deceiver and the antichrist. But we have been subjected in our generation, twenty centuries this side of John, to a new brand of more childish, eccentric and extrava-
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Does a party exist to oppose individual cups as an anti-scriptural innovation? "If any man come and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into the house." Does the party exist to oppose classes in which to study God's revelation? "If any man come and bring not this doctrine, receive him not." Does the party exist to oppose the current method of supporting the Herald of Truth program? "If any man come and bring not this doctrine, receive him not." Does the party exist to oppose singing praises to God, accompanied by musical instruments? "If any man come and bring not this doctrine, receive him not."
My brethren, this is Church of Christism at its worst! It is the sectarian spirit gone to seed. To take an apostolic warning written to debar one who denied that the Word became incarnate, that Jesus Christ came in the flesh and was the Son of God, and apply it to an honest opinion held by one who confesses that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Lord of glory is almost as wild as you can become in the reckless and profligate mishandling of the apostolic teaching. To even suggest that a sincere opinion about cups, classes, colleges, music, money or the millennium, constitutes the kind of evil deeds in which John forbids participation is the height of absurdity.
And yet, I used to do this very thing! It seems incredible that I was ever so brainwashed by our partisan traditions that I would allow myself to be used and manipulated to arrogantly affront God's other children. In our intense fanaticism for the party position, if one came who disagreed with our unwritten creeds about colleges and other things, we glibly quoted, "If any come and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into the house." With this quotation we washed our hands of him and consigned him to hell. I was wrong, sinfully wrong. Any attitude which has to be maintained and justified by such reckless abuse of the scripture can never be right. To quote a passage referring to one who denied the Lord and use it to denounce a precious child of God who loves Jesus as much as you love Him is a blatant insult to God who received him and cherishes him as His own.
One is not a deceiver because he sees no harm in using individual cups at the table of the Lord. One is not a liar who sees no sin in having Bible classes. One is not an antichrist because he sends a contribution to Highland congregation in Abilene, Texas, to support Herald of Truth. One is not an apostate who believes he can praise God in song accompanied by musical instruments. Whether these things are right or wrong, those who claim that such children of the Father are deceivers, liars, antichrists and apostates, only reveal their own ignorance and become false accusers of their brethren. I abjectly apologize for my own former littleness and bigotry which tried to un-Christianize some of the finest people on this earth. I am ashamed of my one-time arrogance which was a clear proof of the party spirit, the spirit of sectarianism!
Our brethren have always been better than their creeds. The passage does not say, "If any man come and bring not this doctrine, receive him not." It says to receive him not into the house! I have never yet known one of the brethren to stand in the door of the meetinghouse and turn away one who could not see the harm in individual cups, Bible classes, support of Herald of Truth, or instrumental music. They receive such into the house and run half way across the auditorium to hand them a songbook so they can join in the praise of God. They give them a greeting when they come and when they leave.
I challenge those who quote this passage as the basis for their boorish attitude toward others to bar entrance to those whom they claim do not bring this doctrine! Until they do they are not
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I have never read a sterner indictment of my former factional position than the one written by Frederic W. Farrar in The Early Days of Christianity. Farrar was a Fellow of Trinity College at Cambridge, Canon of Westminster, and Chaplain in Ordinary to the Queen. His book was published in 1874. In dealing with 2 John 9, 10, he writes:
"There is something distressing in the swift instinct with which an unchristian egotism has first assumed its own infallibility on subjects which are often no part of Christian faith, and then has spread on vulture's wings to this passage as a consecration of the feelings with which the odium theologicum disgraces and ruins the Divinest interests of the cause of Christ. It must be said--though I say it with the deepest sorrow--that the cold exclusivesss of the Pharisee, the bitter ignorance of the self-styled theologian, the usurped infallibility of the half-educated religionist, have ever been the curse of Christianity. They have imposed 'the senses of men upon the words of God, the special senses of men on the general words of God,' and have tried to enforce them on all men's consciences with all kinds of burnings and anathemas, under equal threats of death and damnation. And thus they have incurred the terrible responsibility of presenting religion to mankind in a false and repellent guise. Is theological hatred still to be a proverb for the world's just contempt? Is such hatred--hatred in its bitterest and most ruthless form--to be regarded as the legitimate and normal outcome of the religion of love? Is the spirit of peace never to be brought to bear on religious opinions? Are such questions always to excite the most intense animosities and the most terrible divisions? Is the Diotrephes of each little religious clique to be the ideal of a Christian character? Is it in religious discussions alone that impartiality is to be set down as weakness and courtesy as treason? Is it among those only who pride themselves on being 'orthodox' that there is to be the completest absence of humility and justice? Is the world to be forever confirmed in its opinion that theological partisans are less truthful, less candid, less high-minded, less honorable even than the partisans of political and social causes who make no profession of love? Are the so-called 'religious' champions to be for ever, as they now are, in many instances, the most unscrupulously bitter and the most conspicuously unfair? Alas! they might be so with far less danger to the cause of religion if they would forego the luxury of 'quoting Scripture for their purpose.'"
This is but the first paragraph of several pages in which the eminent author expresses himself. He writes: "But there is too much reason to fear that to the end of time the conceit of orthodoxism will claim inspired authority for its own conclusions, even when they are most antichristian, and will build up systems of exclusive hatred out of inferences purely unwarrantable. It is certain, too, that each sect is always tempted to be proudest of its most sectarian peculiarities; that each form of dissent, whether in or out of the body of the Established Churches, most idolizes its own dissidence. The aim of religious opinionativeness always has been, and always will be, to regard its narrowest conclusions as matters of faith, and to exclude or excommunicate all those who reject or modify them."
The time has come for me to repeat again what I have often said before. I
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But I receive all who receive Christ and all whom Christ has received. I receive them on the same basis that Christ receives them. Wherever my Father has a child I have a brother or sister. If one is in Christ, I receive him and welcome him. And I receive him regardless of his opinion about cups, classes, colleges, music or the millennium. We are not one in opinion and we never will be. We are one in Christ, and I make nothing a test of fellowship which God has not made a condition of salvation. We are not one because we are in agreement but because we are in Christ Jesus!
I am thrilled to be counted worthy to share in the common life which was made manifest. Eternal life! That is what fellowship is all about and I am in that glorious and majestic fellowship with every person who has "set to his seal that God is true." What a blessing to know that one has fulness of joy, that he is "filled with the fulness of God." What a thrill to have the hope that never disappoints because the love of God is poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given unto us! Praise God from whom all blessings flow!