Light and Life

Reading: 1 John 1.1-10
One of the skills of the good cartoonist is the ability to caricature - to exaggerate some facial or other distinctive feature of a person in a way that is instantly recognisable. We could say that the person doesn't really look like that at all, and yet - there is no real question as to who it is! The intention of the cartoonist is not always kind and the caricature may not be complimentary. In spite of that, many politicians (who are often the butt of cartoons) enjoy the cartoons drawn against them and keep them in a file.

What would a cartoonist see in you? Now that's a dangerous question for a preacher to ask! There may be several cartoonists in this congregation who practise (and hide) their skills on the jotter near the telephone! That, of course, isn't really the point I am making. What is there about you - not just about your face, but about your whole disposition and manner - that is so characteristic that people would instantly recognise it as "you"? And are there any differences between "you" as you think of yourself and "you" as others perceive you? Which is the real "you"? And how can we become more real with less of a discrepancy between what we are and what we want others to think we are?

These are some of the questions that life thrusts on us. They are very old questions - they were about in Bible times. Indeed, they go back to the very beginnings of the human race when our earliest ancestors tried to hide themselves from God! They couldn't really do it. And yet there was something in that grasp for autonomy - what we call "sin" - that introduced serious complications into all our relationships with other people as well as with God.

It really pulls us apart because we were made for relationship with God and our spiritual hunger will surface. We see this in the unbelieving world around us - this quest to satisfy spiritual hunger. But when we seek spiritual fulfilment in the true and living God, sin forms a barrier that God alone can break down. And when we know forgiveness of sin in Jesus Christ the Son of God we still wrestle with the reality of sin in our lives.

The God Who can be Counted on

John, the beloved disciple who wrote the Fourth Gospel, probably wrote his first letter towards the end of the first century. At that time the view which came to be known as Gnosticism was starting to emerge. Among other things, it taught that the physical world was essentially evil and said that Jesus the Son of God couldn't have been a real human being.

John begins with a strong statement about Jesus. He is described as "the Word of life, which was from the beginning." These words recall the opening of John's Gospel - "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth" (John 1.1,14).

John strongly insists on the reality of the incarnation. This eternal Word of God, whom John also affirms as the unique Son of God, truly became a human being. Note the specific emphasis that John gives to this - "That... which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched... The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it... We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard..." (vv. 1b,2a,3a).

The Christian faith is quite unlike the philosophies and religions of this world. It is not a set of noble concepts, high ideals and religious observances which people have hammered out over a period of time. God has made himself known to us. God has entered our human history. This divine revelation is the basis of the eternal life we talk about (v. 2b) and our fellowship with one another is rooted in restored fellowship with the Father and with his Son (vv. 3,6,7).

The patient wife wanted to hang a mirror in the kitchen. Weeks had passed, and she finally did the job herself, fixing it neatly to the door of a cupboard. A few days later, the unfortunate mirror came crashing to the floor. Her husband - who should have done the job himself - consoled her, "Darling, a mirror must be fixed to something fixed!"

Our world - its values and way of life - is constantly changing. We know well enough that advertising slogans can't really be taken at face value. The struggle of each for his own material advantage is coupled with a kind of cargo-cult mentality that assumes that the system can give us value without our putting value into it by our own hard work. And then we wonder whether the whole of society is beginning to come apart at the seams.

In this situation it is good news that God can be counted on. He is "faithful and just" - "he will keep his promise and do what is right" (v.9), as the Good News Bible puts it. This is one of the prominent themes in John's letter. "God is light; in him there is no darkness at all" (v.5).

On the one hand this realisation makes us uncomfortably aware of the reality of sin which is incompatible with his nature and makes fellowship with him impossible. On the other hand, in the light of the revelation of his love in Christ and the gracious promises of the Gospel, it speaks deep assurance to us. God does not work by whim or fancy - what he says he will do, and what he does is consistent with his righteous love.

Forgiveness

The very certainty of forgiveness, then, is based on the character of the God who cannot lie. And forgiveness is absolutely essential. John makes this strikingly clear. "If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us... If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word has no place in our lives" (vv.8,10). So it's no use saying that we haven't sinned. But if we continue our association with sin we can't have fellowship with God - "If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth" (v.6). We need forgiveness.

And forgiveness is costly. On a number of occasions, I have asked classes of primary school pupils, "Which is easier to say, 'I'm sorry,' or 'I forgive you'?" The answers have been fairly evenly divided. The drive to justify ourselves makes it difficult for us to be on the giving or receiving end of forgiveness!

So often we have imagined forgiveness to be easy - particularly for the other person, and especially for God. Perhaps these school children were expressing an awareness that forgiveness costs them something.

At the simplest level, to forgive is to accept the hurt or wrong as something that will not be paid back - and there is justice in paying back (except that, as a warning, we usually pay back twice as hard!). At another level, forgiveness means that the debt has been cancelled and that the creditor has taken the debt on himself.

We look at the death of Christ on the Cross and see the cost of our forgiveness. And in that Cross we also see the sure promise of the faithful and just God to forgive and to cleanse.

Cleansing

We notice that forgiveness is only one part of God's work here. John says that God "is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness" (v.9).

Think back to the experience that Paul so graphically records for us in Romans 7. He describes himself as "unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin" (v.14b). "what I want to do I do not do," he says, "but what I hate I do" (v.19). He certainly knows his need of forgiveness, but he is desperately aware of his need for deliverance and cleansing! "What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God - through Jesus Christ our Lord!" (vv.24-5).

It is this sure promise of cleansing that John has in mind here, a cleansing that is the very purpose of Christ's coming, that is the very purpose of our being Christians, a cleansing that we will need to experience continually throughout our lives. John says, "if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us (or keeps on purifying us) from all sin" (v.7). We are restored into fellowship with God. On the basis of forgiveness and grace, we can live in the light and can experience purifying from sin by means of the redemptive blood of Jesus Christ.

John emphasises, not simply the importance of living in the light of fellowship with God, but also of living in fellowship with one another - with those who share our faith.

The redemption is once for all and is received in an act of faith which is valid from that time on for eternity. The cleansing will take place throughout a lifetime. John continues this theme into the second chapter.

The Big "If"

Yet all of this is preceded by the qualification, "if we confess our sins..." The promise is that the specific acknowledgment of the sins in our life will bring both forgiveness and cleansing.

So we must confess our sins - that means agreeing with God that they are sins and that they are serious! - failure to do so is to "deceive ourselves" (v.8) and to "make God out to be a liar" (v.10).

But we also make him out to be a liar when we fail to accept that he has forgiven us as he has promised to do in response to our confession. Someone has said that we should write all our known sins on a piece of paper, confess them to God and then burn the paper because they are forgiven! Then we need to accept daily the clean new life he offers to us.

Light and life - these are two big themes in 1 John. In fellowship with the Lord and with one another, may we live in the light and know the riches of eternal life which is his gift to us.


© Peter J. Blackburn, Home Hill and Ayr Uniting Churches, 30 April 2000
Except where otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the New International Version, © International Bible Society, 1984.

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