John is about to go into a summary section. In it, he kind of weaves in and out of several themes, specifically the importance of Jesus and his atonement for our sins and the importance of loving each other. For the sake of addressing these topics in a way that focuses on one at a time, I am reshuffling them. So the order of paragraphs is different than the text, but it’s still the text. First, let’s talk about Jesus.
1 John 4:7 My loved ones, let us devote ourselves to loving one another. Love comes straight from God, and everyone who loves is born of God and truly knows God. 8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.
9 Because of this, the love of God is a reality among us: God sent His only Son into the world so that we could find true life through Him. 10 This is the embodiment of true love: not that we have loved God first, but that He loved us and sent His Son to become an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
13 How can we be sure that He truly lives in us and that we truly live in Him? By one fact: He has given us His Spirit. 14 We have watched what God has done, and we stand ready to provide eyewitness testimonies to the reality that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the world. 15 If anyone unites with our confession that Jesus is God’s own Son, then God truly lives in that person and that person lives in God.
1 John 5:4 Everything that has been fathered by God overcomes the corrupt world. This is the victory that has conquered the world: our faith. 5 Who is the person conquering the world? It is the one who truly trusts that Jesus is the Son of God.
Last week John said: get Jesus right. Embrace that he is fully God and fully human, the Word become flesh. Here John comes back to the same thing Paul was so adamant about: Jesus’s death is what provides the payment for our sins.
In theological circles this is called penal substitution. Just like our prisons are called the penal system because there is penalty involved, this has to do with those of us who were in prison, slaves to sin and doomed for death. So, all of us. Jesus paid penalty we deserve when he died on the cross so we could be freed from the prison of our own making.
Why a cross? Here’s where we talk about covenant.
In the Ancient Near East, there was a thing called a suzerain covenant. A stronger party – the suzerain - initiated a covenant relationship with the weaker party.[1] In order to understand atonement theology, or penal substitution, we need to look at God’s suzerain covenant with Abraham.
When God made a covenant with Abraham in Genesis 15, (you get more details through chapter 22), God promised to bless the world through Abraham. This will happen in a number of ways, but it has traditionally been seen as a most importantly a foreshadowing of Jesus. There were only two stipulations for Abraham: leave his home/the gods of his fathers and follow God, and be obedient to the voice of God (Genesis 22).[2]
In a classic ritual that sounds weird to us but wasn’t to them, Abraham killed some animals, cut them in half, and arranged them to walk through. This was a Covenant Of The Pieces that contained a warning: that kind of penalty awaited the covenant breaker. A great darkness fell, and God, the stronger party, passed through the dissected animals (as a blazing torch) but never made Abraham, the weaker party, do the same.
By passing through the slaughtered animal, God was saying that if He didn’t bless Abraham and honor the covenant, God – the stronger, initiating party - would have to pay the penalty. That alone would be unusual, but that wasn’t the most incredible point. God was saying that if Abraham and his descendants didn’t keep the covenant, God would pay the penalty for them.
Fast forward several thousand years.
Abraham and his descendants had one job –well, two: leave other gods and be obedient to God. When God initiated another covenant with Moses, all the details got a lot clearer in the giving of the Law. It did not go well. The prophets had a loooooot of bad news to convey about just how badly this was going. If you’ve seen the Lord Of The Rings movies, there is this eerie start where the music is foreboding, and “men desire power,” and chaos reigns, and Middle Earth just goes off the rails as they wait for the Return of a King[3] who will make things right. That’s an Old Testament kind of epic.
Somebody has to pay the penalty for Abraham’s descendants breaking the covenant.
· If nobody does, what’s the point of covenant if it has no punch?
· If Abraham and his descendants do, what was the point of the promise that God would pay it for all parties?
We see God fulfill his covenantal duty and pay the penalty for Abraham in the death of the incarnate Jesus. On the cross, a great darkness descends again, and Jesus, the Light of the World, fulfills the conditions of the covenant. What was represented by the death of those animals thousands of years earlier was done to him. Jesus was Yahweh, the Covenant Maker and Covenant Keeper.
We Christians, now, are the children of Abraham (“Those who have faith are children of Abraham.” – Galatians 3:7). And we, too, have done a terrible job keeping the covenant stipulations we have been given in the New Covenant that started with Jesus. The reality that “the wages of sin is death”[4] must be honored. Someone must pay for our breaking of the covenant.
But “the gift of God is eternal life,”[5] and we commemorate how that penalty was paid by Jesus every time we partake in communion – His body broken, His blood spilled. “Do this in remembrance of me…remember his death[6]…”
The sacrifice that fulfilled the stipulations of an old covenant simultaneously took care of the inevitable failures of the new covenant makers. Because of Jesus’ death and resurrection, even flawed covenant makers are seen by God as flawless covenant keepers. This is what we celebrate when we take COMMUNION together.
* * * * *
John’s second point in his summary: When we are in communion with God, we are also incommunity that ought to be characterized by the love God modeled. True communion with God builds true community with others.
11 So, my loved ones, if God loved us so sacrificially, surely we should love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God with human eyes; but if we love one another, God truly lives in us; God’s love has accomplished its mission among us.
If I understand this correctly, the closest we will get to seeing God on this side of heaven is when we love each other as Jesus intended, and God truly lives in us. When we pray, “God is just want to know you real,” one of the primary ways God intends for this to be confirmed is by the way in which His children pass on the love of the Father.
19 We love because He has first loved us. 20 If someone claims, “I love God,” but hates his brother or sister, then he is a liar. Anyone who does not love a brother or sister, whom he has seen, cannot possibly love God, whom he has never seen. 21 He gave us a clear command, that all who love God must also love their brothers and sisters.
Everyone who trusts Jesus as the long-awaited Anointed One is a child of God, and everyone who loves the Father cannot help but love the child fathered by Him. 2 Then how do we know if we truly love God’s children? We love them if we love God and keep His commands. 3 You see, to love God means that we keep His commands, and His commands don’t weigh us down.
God’s love reaches the end of its mission when we enter into right(eous) relationship with others as a result of Jesus restoring us to right(eous) relationship with God.[7] There is no such thing as a truly transformative experience of God’s love that does not result in love for his people manifested by obedience to God’s word.[8] We love others best when we love them as God commands. That’s the most obvious sign that the Holy Spirit is the wind in our sails.[9]#lastweek’smessage
When this happens, God is now ‘seen’ in the world through his family (v.11-12). We are his “body.” He is the head;[10] we make up the rest. And when we pass on to others the love He has given to us, the mission of His love reaches the fullness of its expression[11] in obvious, profound and breath-taking sacrifice.[12] The ground should be littered with what’s been pouring out of us spiritually as we have been broken and spilled out for those around us.
So now we can begin to understand John's concern for love and unity in the church. This isn’t one of the extras one orders for church like the extra features when you get a new car. This is something without which there is no car. First-century Jewish writers were adamant about this:
“And it is impossible that the invisible God can be piously worshipped by those people who behave with impiety toward those who are visible and near to them.”[13]
* * * * *
There is a movement of people leaving the church today in what is being called “deconversion.” Some are leaving evangelicalism (“exvangelical”). Some are leaving white evangelicalism (#leaveloud) because of ongoing frustrations with how the legacy and on going reality of racism is (or isn’t) being addressed. (More on this next week). When people leave, it is rarely as simple as having been wooed away. There are three primary reasons (not the only ones, to be sure) that show up over and over again:
· they feel deeply wounded in some fashion
· they don’t feel safe wrestling honestly with life
· they feel[14] actively pushed away by terrible teaching, harsh people, or both
I don’t think I know anyone who has deconverted or become an exvangelical simply because something else caught their eye. The theme I hear over and over through personal conversation or through testimony online is the aftermath of disillusionment, frustration, and pain not just experienced in church but brought on by church, and it almost always has to do with not having the love of Christ passed on well.
We talk a lot about the dangers the church faces by getting sucked into culture, and that’s absolutely valid. But remember how John’s earlier focus on “antichrists” wasn’t outside the church? In fact, nothing in the book has warned Christians about the dangers lurking outside. It’s all been about how things can go wrong inside the church and shipwreck our faith.
Here’s my summary of why so many people are leaving right now (not a Bible verse…it’s my way of trying to summarize). A bad thing looks better than it deserves if a good thing looks worse than it should. I mean, if you give me a choice between shrimp and grits (the church) and liver and onions (the world), I’m only choosing the liver and onions if the shrimp and grits are nasty.
So what’s the solution?
Jesus entered into our world to show that he was qualified to be an empathetic advocate for us.[15] This meant a number of things:
· he “saw” people[16] (loaded word)
· he listened and thoughtfully responded (the Rich Young Ruler[17]; the woman who touched his garment[18]; the woman caught in adultery[19])
· he spent time with them (that crazy ‘friend of sinners’[20], an insult Jesus embraced).
· He invited himself into their homes (Zaccheus[21]).
· He went to their unclean neighborhoods (Woman at the Well in Samaria[22]).
· he spent 33 years on earth in our neighborhood, during which time “he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.” (Hebrews 2:17-18)
When we are promised an empathetic advocate, we know we have one. He didn't sit in the heavens are read about what it was like to be human; he became human.
When we ‘enter into the world’ of others, we model the example of Jesus. We see; we listen; we spend time together; we seek to understand so that we might be faithfully and lovingly present in attitude, action, and word.
And when we do this, church life becomes very, very compelling. Imagine being part of a group of people who are committed to knowing you, understanding you, loving you, being poured out for you in honor of Jesus, who was poured out for us.[23]
11 So, my loved ones, if God loved us so sacrificially, surely we should love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God with human eyes; but if we love one another, God truly lives in us; God’s love has accomplished its mission among us.
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[1] Genesis 15-22; Deuteronomy 29 and 30
[2] On the other hand, there were at least 14 very specific promises that God puts on himself. http://www.lifeinmessiah.org/resources/articles/gods-covenant-with-abraham
[3] Please give me bonus points for LOTR references..
[4] Romans 6:23
[5] Still Romans 6:23 J
[6] 1 Corinthians 11:24-26
[7] Colossians 1:20-22; 2 Corinthians 5:18; Romans 5:10
[8] “The connecting lines of thought are not on the surface, and cannot be affirmed with certainty. What follows seems to give the clue to what otherwise looks like an abrupt transition. ‘I say we must love one another, for by so doing we have proof of the presence of the invisible God.’” (Cambridge Bible For Schools And Colleges)
[9] See Paul’s opinion on this in 1 Corinthians 13
[10] Colossians 1:18; Colossians 2:18-19; Ephesians 1:20-23; Ephesians 5:23-30; 1 Corinthians 12:27.
[11] Our love for God is no greater than our love for “the least of these.”
[12] We are never intended to be terminals of God’s blessings, like those things electricians use to stop the progress of the electricity going through wires; we were intended to be conduits or channels the keep the love from the source moving along. Think of spokes in a bicycle tire: as they get nearer to the center of the wheel, they get nearer to one another. (Believers Bible Commentary)
[13] Thanks to Zondervan Illustrated Bible Background of the New Testament for some great ideas here.
[14] “Feel” is a key word. Maybe they projected something into a situation…but maybe they didn’t, too.
[15] Hebrews 4:15 “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize (literally, “to have a fellow feeling with” in both Strong’s and the NAS Exhaustive Concordance; Thayer’s Greek Lexicon says “to be affected with the same feeling as another”) with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are--yet he did not sin.” (NIV) The NIV gets it right here. Though the word is often translated as ‘sympathetic,’ the best English equivalent is ‘empathetic’.
[16] Matthew 5:1; 9:36, for example
[17] Mark 10
[18] Matthew 9
[19] John 8:1-11
[20] Matthew 11: 16-19 & John 8: 1-11
[21] Luke 19
[22] John 4
[23] Philippians 2:8