Bible Commentaries

Beginnings

1 John 1:1-5

IN beginning his Gospel the Apostle John says, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." In writing this Epistle he says, "That which was from the beginning." The Apostle was a man who took in a whole horizon. A clever man only takes in points; a clever man can, therefore, be dogmatic and impudent. The inspired man is filled with a sense of inexpressibleness, and, therefore, he must be sometimes apparently indefinite, but always he must be reverent. A fluent theology is a contradiction in terms; a stumbling, hesitant, groping, wondering theology may end in great certitude and reverent and tender worship. Always be on your guard against glib spiritual directors; the men who can hand you out what you want, as if it were all compact and ready for delivery. There is no such theology, blessed be God, in Holy Scripture. The Apostle John will not have the mere incident, he will have the atmosphere. It is the atmosphere that is so often left out in men's thinking, and men's pictures; there is a want of open air. The thing that is set forth may within narrow limits be most accurate, it may even be painfully accurate: we do not want mechanical accuracy, we want suggestion, air, atmosphere, that subtle interplay of unnameable forces which ends in a challenge, before which the whole imagination bows as before a new and sacred presence. Hence the man of facts is always making a fool of himself. Nothing can be so misleading as facts. We should look upon facts as only pointing to the truth. The truth was before the fact, and will be after it, and the fact itself will be sponged out as something no longer needed. We are going on to truth; that great dream, that eternal satisfaction, which is only an unbeginning beginning, only an endless end. What foolish talk this must be to the man of facts. I do not know that a piece of cabinet-work, as chair or table, needs much atmosphere, but a tree needs the whole air, and all the sky above it, to give it fit forth-setting. What the tree owes to the sky behind! That fine umbrageous tree is nothing at midnight. It is still there; in a sense it is still where you left it, but only in a very little, superficial, and useless sense. The tree is not there until the sky is there; you must have them both together before you can have the one. So it is with the great trees of righteousness, trees of truth, trees of history; we want the background we need the atmosphere, we wait for the shining sky, that everything may be coloured and set forth in significant emphasis.

So this Apostle will have everything from the beginning. He will have nothing new but conduct. There he will be as novel as you expect the very highest genius to be; when he comes to press home the utilisation of his gospel, he will have your conduct to be as new as the dew of the morning, as fresh and sparkling and beauteous as those pearls or diamonds of heaven. As to truth, thought, theology, he will have all things from 1 John 1:5-10

Light is not only, as we have already said, distance, as suggesting the ideas of largeness and liberty: light is also revelation. It shows a thousand things we could not have seen, but for the very degree of its intensity. A little light is a little revelation, a great light is a great disclosure; the light seems to create what it only displays. We point out to one another, as we stand in the valley, objects of beauty on the hill-top; perhaps these objects of beauty are quite little shrubs, but how well-defined they are against the silvery sky! how clear, how almost eloquent! it seems as if presently they might have something to say to us, returning our admiration with some words of grateful recognition. Even a grassblade looks more beautiful in a high light than it ever could look in twilight; we seem to see its green blood running all through its wondrous economy. The more light there is, the more knowledge, the more truth, the larger, clearer recognition and realisation, of things innermost and things most precious. What we want is more light. Persons will say, We do not want novelty. That is perfectly so, but light makes no novelty in any sense of frivolousness or mere experiment; light reveals, shows things that have been there all the time, and we never saw them because the light was never sufficiently intense and glorious. So with Bible-reading. Many a man sees things in the Bible which other people do not see, simply because he lives in a larger, truer light. It is difficult for twilight to believe in noonday. You cannot persuade morning twilight that it will grow into noontide glory; nor can you persuade evening twilight that but a few hours ago the whole heaven was dazzlingly effulgent So there are some persons you cannot persuade in relation to the larger light which other readers possess. Hence they call those readers novelists, dreamers, heretics; persons who want to be wise above that which is written. Impossible! What is written? Yes, that is the question. What is written to the blind man? Nothing. What is written to the man of imperfect sight? Just what he can see. What is written to those eagle eyes that wander through eternity? God, all love and truth and light and wisdom. We should rejoice in the larger, keener sight of other men; we should call them our better brothers, our elders, teachers, friends, companions with an interval, but companions with no interval in the matter of true sympathy: thus we should have great teaching, wide, varied teaching, and instead of finding fault with one another for variety of sight and variety of revelation, we should claim all good and true teachers as our helpers in the faith, as angels and messengers of heaven.

Light is not only distance, and revelation; light is welcome, in the sense of offered hospitality. See how the people go out when the sun shines! Why these crowds upon the thoroughfare? They are obeying the invitation of the sun—kind, hospitable, father-mother sun. He calls everybody to his bounty. They are not all rich people who are going out in the sunlight; they are not all driving forth in gilded and crested chariots to see the sun: there are little children, poor, ill-clad, but still under a strange fascination. Whither go ye, little feet? What is the answer? The answer is perhaps incoherent or partially beside the Mark , yet in it there is a hiding of the light of the sun: they are going out to see the light, to feel the warmth, to hear the birds, to cull the flower, to splash in the river: it all means that the ministry of light is acting upon them and calling them to the larger table spread by hands unseen. See! there is a threatening of thunder, there is a great cloud hastening up from the west: why are the parks being emptied? why are the gates being sought by eager crowds? Because of the darkness. The light took all the throng away to sit in God's great parlour of grass, his great drawing-room of shaded forests; but the darkness, the gathering rain-clouds, the threatening storm, these sent the people away to smaller hospitality, and to what they sometimes foolishly imagine to be securer protection. Light is welcome. Light says, Come away: an hour of my ministry will make you young again; come into the broad sanctuary; see what God has done; here is the summer God, he will not frighten you like the God of freezing, chilling winter: come! the Spirit and the Bride of light say, Come; whosoever will, let him come. He will come to bounty, to release, to larger life.

Light is not only distance, revelation, welcome; light is joy. Who could be really sorrowful in summer light? It seems to say to the heart, Why art thou cast down, O child of the Infinite, offspring of eternity, kin of God? why this downness of soul? thou shouldst rejoice and be glad and sing for very delight of heart. Men who are not musical can hardly forbear a little strain in the light. They shape their lips as if they meant to utter something in tune, and if they searched into the reason of that action they would find it was the result of the ministry of light. Putting all these considerations together they help us to understand a little—so little—of our Father in heaven, who has sent us this message concerning himself—God is light, and in him is no darkness at all: he is all glory, all splendour; he lives in light, nay, the light is but the robe which he throws around himself to give somewhat of definiteness and figure to that which otherwise would be without shape and palpability. The Bible is full of light. All truth lives in light. All real fearlessness of imagination and soul, conscience and understanding, calls out for more light. God is the giver of light. Christians themselves are secondarily lights of the world. Jesus said, speaking of himself, "I am the light of the world," and on another occasion, speaking of the disciples and to them, he said, "Ye are the light of the world"; and the apostles, urging and exhorting Christians to realise the breadth and grandeur of their vocation, call upon them to walk, not as children of the darkness, but as children of the light and of the day, sons of the morning, children of the midday. All these considerations should destroy slavish fear in relation to God. They should bring to our hearts a sense of vastness, of revelation, and of welcome, and of hope, and of joy. God is not a frown; God is not a living and penetrating rebuke: God is light, God is love; his mercy endureth for ever. The blackest sinner may stand before him, and with bent head may cry, God be merciful to me!—a prayer to which he never said No, when it went up from a ruined heart.

This would be meditation or contemplation worthy to be classed with the highest sentimentality. The great difficulty with the Bible is that we are no sooner into its poetry than we are out of it and into its morality. If the Bible had been all poetry it would have had few hostile critics. The morality of the Bible vexes men. So long as the Bible condenses itself into the twenty-third Psalm—certainly there is nothing like it for sweetness, comfort, minor tone, and soothing music—we could read it again and again with growing passion of sympathy and delight; but the Bible soon takes us out of that kind of Psalm and says to us, To-day we will try your scales. Then the Bible loses popularity. To-day we will go home and see how you behave yourself in your own family. Then the Bible loses a large following. To-day we will go into heart analysis, we will search into motives, we will try the purposes of the soul in the light of heaven: we will test all action in presence of the agony of the Cross. Then men go away: and the Bible says to them, Will ye also go away? The Bible will have every debt discharged, every duty fulfilled; it will have nothing to do with dishonesty, or indolence, or self-consideration; meanness, conceit, greediness: the Bible will have us all like God; and God is light; and light is revelation, welcome, joy, bounty. Light is always giving itself away, and yet the fountain thereof remains unshorn or undivested of a single beam. The Apostle therefore will have us walk in the light.

"If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not the truth." By "darkness" in this passage understand evil,—If we say that we have fellowship with God, who is light, and yet walk in darkness, which is evil, we contradict ourselves; not in the sense of telling a momentary lie, but in the sense of revealing the essence and nature of our heart: for we do not the truth, and the truth is not in us. Observe, we are not startled into a slip of the tongue, we simply reveal ourselves, and say we want a sublime theology, if its sublimity may only be used as a cloak for an imperfect morality. God will not have this, for God is light; Christ will not have this, for Christ is light—the light of the world, the light of holiness, the very glory of heaven, superseding the sun, of which there is no need where he sits as King.

"But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another": we enter into the spirit of trust, mutual confidence, social regard; we are united by bonds as indissoluble as they are tender and helpful. This is the secret of true society; this is the basis on which a lasting commonwealth rests. We have not a compact as between men in regions where language changes, and where covenants will bear one construction under one set of criticisms and another under a different set; we are first united in God, then social union becomes consequential, fluent, easy. These are the two commandments:—Thou shalt love the Lord thy God will all thy soul: and the second, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. You could not invert the commandments; you cannot start with a true love of neighbourliness; if neighbourliness is to be more than a compromise, a weak and uncertain concession, it must be founded upon eternal principles, and notably upon the principle that God has all the heart's love, and that the greater love includes the less. Why seek—let me ask once more—to scale the heavens with a ladder? Why try to do an action so easily convicted of frivolity and impossibility?

"If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." The Apostle here seems to anticipate the theory that sin is an invented term; that sin simply refers, in the estimation of some critics, to a degree of colour; so sinfulness is a state of the character, being off-colour. You take up a diamond and say it is large, and the price is very greatly reduced because the diamond is a little off-colour; had it been of a pure white, it would have been worth ten times the money: sinfulness, in the estimation of such persons, is a lapse of conduct, a momentary lapse, so that a man may presently recover himself, and walk on as if nothing had happened. Where that theory of sin lives in the mind the gospel is of necessity foolishness, because the remedy is so much greater than the disease; the idea of proportion as between a dying God and a soul that has made a momentary slip is infinite and incredible. The idea of sin in the Bible is that it is the abominable thing which God hateth; it is not being off-colour but off-life, off-truth, away from holiness and all moral beauty. In the estimation of the Bible sin is soul-poverty, soul-helplessness, soul-ruin. Now there is a proportion between the gospel and this condition of affairs: where sin has ruined the soul, the soul is unable to recover itself, and when there is no eye to pity and no arm to save, God's eye is filled with tears and God's almightiness is put out in an act of salvation. So we have no longer to deal with ourselves as if we were the victims of the fallacy that we have no sin, or no sin worthy of the name, no sin that goes really into the root and core of things. So long as a man is in that state, he will be a flippant self-excusant, he will be able to manage his own moral affairs, he will have no need of the gospel: but when a man says, "I have sinned against heaven and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son, " then he needs all Calvary.

Supposing a man to have this consciousness, what is his overt act to be? His overt act is to be an act of confession:—"If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." There must be no keeping back. We must plainly say to ourselves what we have done; we must write down in blackest ink everything we have done that is wrong. By no euphemism, by no crafty ambiguity of expression, are we to avoid the devil that we have created within ourselves. He must be delineated, portrayed, graphically, lineally, appallingly; and when we see the hideous sight we must say, My trangression is ever before me: God be merciful to me a sinner! I wronged that life, I slew that beauty, I burked that obligation, I told that huge lie, I was a party to that subtle craftiness, I told lies to myself, and I created a noise, that in the tumult I might escape the twinge and agony of conscience: God be merciful to me a sinner! When a man comes into that state of mind he knows whether he needs the blood of Jesus Christ, God's Son, or not, and he hears no word so large, so tender, so musical, as "The blood of Jesus Christ, his Son, cleanseth from all sin": then these words are taken out of the hands of the grammarian and the critic, and even the theologian, and become a great, sweet, mighty gospel, filling the whole life, and making the heart glad as with descending heaven.

"If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us." God therefore stands before us as the accuser; it is God who has discovered the sin, it is the Lord who has said, This is wrong, you ought not to have done this. It is not an offence that can be expunged, it is a wound that can only be healed by the medicament of blood.

So the great story stands; so the wondrous music of gospel and tragedy rolls on; so the river of God masses through all the tangled forests and deep valleys and mysterious places of this human life. This is a glorious gospel. It does not trim or compromise or deal superficially with the great questions of life; it gets down into deepest experience, into bitterest consciousness. This is the everlasting gospel. If any man will turn away from it he takes with him his own soul, and must not invoke me at the last as one who dealt falsely with him and whispered pleasant things to him when I ought to have told him burning, scalding truths. Nor will I allow this to be the last word. If we have entered into this mystery of life and this scheme of Divine forgiveness we are to prove it by our conduct, by love and charity, by pureness and nobleness of soul. If we say that we had fellowship with God, and yet our conduct is as bad as it can be, John says we are "liars." That is a hard word to use, and John was not given to the use of hard words when he was called to the discharge of duty, but when duty called upon him to be plain no man could be so definite. Here then we stand. It is possible for men who profess Christianity to be liars. Which would you rather be, an infidel or a liar—a speculative infidel, a man who says, "I wish I could see as you do, but I really cannot," or a man who says, "I see the truth, I admire it speculatively, but I am the servant of lies, the slave of darkness"? Behold, I set before you this day life and death. Choose ye. The choice is yours, and yours must be the destiny.

Prayer

Almighty God, thou are training us for thyself day by day, by ministries we do not fully understand, yet the benefits of which are shed abroad in our hearts, and are found again in our conduct. The Lord will work according to his own way, and none may say unto the Eternal, This is right, or, This is wise. The will of the Lord be done. If our school be on the mountain top, so be it; we shall enjoy the opening heavens, the fresh winds that blow from the skies, and the light will be plentiful: if our school be in the deep valley where we have to wait long for the light, a cold dreary school, where the learning is very difficult, and the teaching is not easy to be understood, the will of the Lord be done; the valley is the Lord's as is also the top of the hill, and if so be the Lord himself will teach us, all shall be well at the latter end, we shall be prepared to sing the song of the redeemed in fuller and nobler tones. We bless thee for thy providence; it is kind, sweet, continuous: behold, thou knowest what we need, and when it is best for us to receive it. Thou dost turn our notions upside down, we cannot tell when thou wilt come; it is enough for us to know that come thou wilt, and that thou art ever coming, if we did but know the way of the Lord. Even so, Lord Jesus, come quickly: come in any one of thy chariots, the thunder or the tempest; we would, if we might speak to thee, ask thee to come as a still small voice, for we are weary, and our hearts are often ill at ease. We have seen thee in the daytime, a great brightness; we have known thy nearness in the night season, because of a blessing that comforted the heart, and because in the darkness we have seen somewhat of the light that lies farthest away. Thou hast brought us up from being little children, thou hast never forsaken us; sometimes we thought thou hadst gone a long way from us, and lo, thou wert watching us in the very nearest shadow, and when we were about to fall thou didst guard us from stumbling, and in the darkness thou didst find for us a sanctuary. Thou hast kept our eyes from tears, our feet from falling, our soul from death; and amid all the controversies of the time thou hast blessed us with peace imperturbable, the very peace of God which passeth understanding. We bless thee that, if thou thyself art beyond understanding, so are thy gifts; we cannot understand thy peace which we have in our own hearts: how then can we understand the Giver of that peace? The joy thou dost create within us is joy unspeakable: how then can we tell the mystery of thy being and explain our faith in God? We bless thee for a silent theology, we rejoice in a worldless trust, we love to live in the region where there is no speech. Grant unto us daily wisdom for daily need; may we be anxious about this moment and not the next; at all times may we be found resting in the Lord and waiting patiently for him, that we may abound in all these virtues and graces: but what pray we for but for a double portion of thy Holy Spirit, but for a deeper acquaintance with the very heart of the Son of God who loved us, and gave himself for us? Amen.