Maintain Gospel Centrality: 1 John 1:1–2:2

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson teaches on 1 John 1:1-2:2.

Don Carson: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us.

We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete. This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.

If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth. But 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 from all sin. If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.

If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word has no place in our lives. My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.”

So reads the Word of God.

We live in a time where a fair bit of Christianity is spinning off into the periphery. I have a friend on the faculty at Trinity where I teach who comes from Mennonite Brethren stock. If you’re not familiar with that heritage, don’t worry about it. He analyzes his own heritage this way. He says there was a generation of Mennonite Brethren who held to the biblical gospel but also saw there were certain social, political, economic entailments.

They thought through how Christians should live in society. Whether you agree with them or not is immaterial. The next generation assumed the gospel and identified with these entailments. The generation after that began to deny the gospel and made the entailments everything. Arguably there is a fair bit in current Christianity which is at least at stage two.

That is to say, we can more or less assume the gospel, think we have a grasp on it; whereas, what excites us, where we focus our attention, what we think about is something that is worth thinking about but is relatively peripheral to what is central. We can be very passionate about green or the kind of worship we espouse or ordination of women or abortion (for or against all of these issues and 20 or 30 more I could mention).

It’s not that those issues should not be thought about, but we can become so passionate about these issues that instead of thinking about them from the center, we identify with the periphery and begin de facto to lose the center. We displace the center. At that point, there is an urgent need to come back to basics again, find out what is immutable, what the givens are, and what it means to be a Christian.

First John is a book that is given to articulating basics. There is no great discourse here on the nature of church organization. There is nothing about women’s hats. There is nothing about speaking in tongues, nothing about styles of worship, and no complex discourse on the relationship between the gospel and the Levitical sacrificial system.

In one sense, it is a very simple book yet its simplicity masks a considerable profundity. It deals with a relationship amongst certain immutables, certain non-negotiables, certain basic doctrines that have to be believed because they’re true, certain reactions amongst God’s people that must be manifest in genuine Christians (transparent, selfless love), certain attitudes toward the Lord Christ (transparent obedience that will not flinch). It deals with such basics as these things, and thus, calls us to the fundamentals of the faith in a way that is remarkably stark.

One of the reasons John wrote the book is because he was confronting in his time a rather confusing heresy that later history has called Gnosticism. It was not a systematic sort of thing. It was what somebody called a theosophical hotchpotch. It was a way of looking at all of reality, and it infiltrated the church and in the second and third centuries became so powerful that it did enormous damage to early Christianity. John was facing the first fruits of this kind of pressure.

It sprang from a way of looking at life that said, “What is material is bad; what is spiritual is good,” by definition. The roots of that philosophy were centuries earlier, but they had spread throughout the Roman world. If you pushed that sort of view hard enough, you can see how it’s going to give you all sorts of problems with any sort of biblical teaching.

The Bible says, for example, God exists quite apart from the universe. He made the universe but is not to be confused with it. The one God who is there made everything there is, material and physical alike, and he made it all good, but if you believe, instead, that which is spiritual is good and that which is material is evil, then how could this good God have made all of this material mess?

Commonly in Gnosticism you find there is not simply one God but there is a kind of god who is hidden way back there somewhere and then there are emanations from him and various intermediary gods who are more or less good until, finally, you get down to a god who is actually corrupt enough to make us in the first place.

What do you do with something like Christ? Here we insist this is the God-man. Full-blown Gnosticism in the second century started arguing he only appeared to be a man. We all got snookered, in fact. He appeared to be a man so he could give us his message, but he wasn’t a real human being.

Already, at the end of the first century, there were pressures along those lines, which is one of the reasons why John is constantly trying to say Jesus … the Christ, the Son of God … is one person. Some were saying, “Christ came upon Jesus at his baptism and left him before the cross. The man Jesus is immaterial. Listen to the message of the Christ who was temporarily visiting him.”

Instead, you find things like this in John’s epistle, chapter 2, verse 22: “Who is the liar? It is the man who denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a man is the antichrist.” Chapter 4, verse 2: “This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God.”

In 2 John 1:7, you find exactly the same sort of emphasis. “Many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world.” Moreover, these people thought themselves at the cutting edge of theology. They thought they were advanced. They thought they were sophisticated. The result of this was a certain kind of arrogance toward everybody else.

You find this surfacing, for example, in 2 John 1:9. “Anyone who runs ahead and does not continue in the teaching of Christ does not have God; whoever continues in the teaching has both the Father and the Son.” It reminds me of the little poem by an aged minister who was trying to understand what is going on in society. He said, “You say I am not with it. My friend, I do not doubt it, but when I see what I’m not with I’d rather be without it.”

That’s what John is saying. You have to continue with the old roots. These are the basics and you are not to depart from them. For one of the things that transpired in the wake of this movement was a certain arrogance and coldness and superciliousness, a spiritual haughtiness, that eventually had this whole group moving out from the church. It finally set up its own camp, its own little religion.

Thus, you find John saying this in chapter 2, verse 19: “They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us.” There has been schism. John is facing that. Whenever you get schism, you have a lot of hurt feelings, broken families, lovelessness, one-upmanship, harsh tones, and bitter memories. While John wants to insist on the givenness of certain truth that is non-negotiable, he also wants to insist on love.

At the same time, these people, partly because I think they tended to compartmentalize human beings into the material and the spiritual, could be ever so religious and it didn’t have any strong ethical entailment. What happened in the body wasn’t really all that important compared with their spiritual commitments. That was a common view in the paganism of the ancient world, and it is one to which our generation is returning. You can be religious but it must not affect the way you view right and wrong.

I was in Vancouver a few weeks ago, and while I was there I went to visit one of my nieces who is a young and attractive and enthusiastic person who was brought up in a Christian home (my sister’s home). She lives a crooked and deceitful life, yet she’s quite open about it. I took her out for a meal and said, “You used to tell me I was your favorite uncle. I have to say some things to my favorite niece.” So I started asking her, “Do you still believe the things your mum and dad told you?”

“Yes, I believe them.”

“Do you still believe God judges human beings and holds us accountable?”

“Yes, I believe that.”

“Do you still believe Jesus came and died for sinners so we might be forgiven?”

“Yes, I believe that.”

“What bearing does it have on how you live, on the fellow you shacked up with, on the values you put on life, on whether you ever meet with God’s people, or whether you ever read your Bible? How do you put this together?” She said, “I believe all those things.”

“But isn’t there some sort of entailment for how you live?”

“Not really. God will forgive me.”

That, too, is not entirely uncommon today either, is it? Spiritual perceptions, a whole worldview of spirituality, has no necessary entailment on how we live. At that point, John starts saying some very strong things. He says, for example, in chapter 2, verse 4: “The man who says, ‘I know him,’ but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in him.” John starts stressing obedience.

For all of that, with people stressing the place of their Spirit-given experience, John starts talking about the Spirit, too, and what that looks like in life. All of these themes surface very clearly in 1 John. What we will do tonight is look at the first two sections. First, verses 1 to 4 … What is at the root of Christianity? And secondly, verses 1:5 to 2:2 … What is at issue in Christianity?

1. What is at the root of Christianity?

John begins with a complicated sentence in the original that the NIV has smoothed out for us, but it has basically smoothed it out in the right direction. The main verb in this long complicated sentence is in verse 3, “We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard,” but he starts off saying what we have seen and heard back in verse 1, and then verse 2 is a kind of parenthesis. Let me show you the logic.

“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—concerning the Word of life.” The NIV has thrown in this “we proclaim to you” to make it a little smoother. Then there is a sort of a little dash and all of verse 2: “The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you this eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us.” Then the dash, the end of the parenthesis.

“We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us.” What is John stressing there? John is stressing something that is almost painfully sensory: “What we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and our hands have touched.” This concerns the Word of life, the message of life, and then, if we still haven’t gotten the point, the parenthesis in verse 2: “And the life actually appeared.” It is not something abstract and other and spiritual and transcendental; it actually appeared.

“We saw it. We bear witness to it. We proclaim it to you. This life was with the Father, and now it appeared to us.” That controls the opening words, “That which was from the beginning …” John uses those words (what was from the beginning) several times in this book, and sometimes he means from the beginning of your Christian experience or the like. Sometimes he means from the beginning of the proclamation of the gospel.

Here, I would argue he means from the beginning absolutely. It always was. This was the life that was with the Father, we’re told, in verses 2 and 3. This was “The life … which was with Father and has appeared to us.” Over against those people who wanted to argue that Jesus was a man who came about by ordinary means of copulation between Joseph and Mary, and Christ came upon him for a while and then left, that’s not what John says happened.

He says, “That which was from the beginning …” Absolutely. That life which was with the Father, that very life, we heard, we saw, we touched. He is, in short, talking about what Christians means by incarnation. That is, the enfleshing of the eternal Son of God. Not some temporary visitor in the man Jesus, but the enfleshing of the eternal Son of God.

“This we have seen, heard, and touched, and we proclaim it to you.” In this context then, the we is distinguished from the you. Sometimes when a writer says we he is including his readers, and later on in his epistle John will say exactly that sort of thing: “We Christians hold this … We Christians don’t do that …” But here, clearly, he distinguishes between the we and the you. “This we proclaim to you …”

Because it is so tangible, so tactile, it has to be eyewitness, apostolic witness, which is what the early church insisted to when they said this was a book by the apostle John. I think the witnesses and the evidence are solid. “We witnesses proclaim to you this incarnation of the eternal Son of God.” This, he says, is non-negotiable.

This is astonishingly important, whether in the first century when you’re combating Gnosticism or in the twentieth century when you start talking about Christianity. Christianity is full of experience. It insists human beings come into contact with the living God, but it does not begin and end with experience; it begins and ends with God disclosing himself, revealing himself in real history to real witnesses.

Christian faith, although it is not the sort of thing that can be cranked out by a logical argument, is not abstracted from history. The way to faith is through witness, the witnesses who first saw and proclaimed and touched. If those witnesses are falsified, walk away; walk away from Christ.

In Buddhism, it doesn’t work like that. In Buddhism, if I could prove beyond reasonable doubt that Gautama the Buddha never existed, Buddhism would not thereby be either helped or harmed. It is a philosophical system that is abstracted from history. It doesn’t matter whether Gautama lived, but not so with Christianity.

If you could show Jesus never lived, if you could show he never died, if you could show he never rose from the dead, if you could show the incarnation was a lot of hooey invented three centuries later, Christianity is completely and utterly and totally destroyed. That’s why Christians have a vested interest in history.

We do not think people can be talked into the kingdom by merely appealing to history. There are always other interpretations. When God spoke in John 12 some said it thundered. There are always secularists and materialists around, but having said that, Christian faith is tied to history. God disclosed himself. The Word became flesh.

As the opening verses of the epistle to the Hebrews put it, “God, in the past, spoke to our fathers through the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us in his Son.” In other words, the Son is his ultimate Word. He has spoken to us in his Son. This is his message. God expressed himself. That self-expression was with God and became a human being. That’s what John says. He insists on it strongly again and again.

That is as true in the first century combating Gnosticism as it is today for those who insist the incarnation is just a myth or you can interpret it any way you wish so long as you are devout and pious about it. The Gnostics were pious, too. John insists this is based on witness, but at the same time he does not want to give the impression that Christianity is simply a doctrinal system and nothing more.

He immediately says, “We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete.” When we use the word fellowship, it takes on today rather smarmy overtones. If you have coffee or tea with a fellow student on your staircase who is not a Christian, it’s friendship. If you have coffee or tea with someone on your staircase who is a Christian, it’s fellowship.

It all depends, therefore, not on what you’re doing but on the person with whom you’re doing it. That makes it fellowship. We have fellowship hours after church meetings, which basically means we drink a lot of tea and coffee and talk about just about anything, but in the first century fellowship wasn’t seen that way.

In the first century, if two chaps went out and bought a boat and set up a fishing business on Galilee, that was fellowship. That is to say, it was partnership. They had certain commitments and things in common that brought them together with stated common goals, and they were, thus, in fellowship.

The fellowship of the church in the first instance was understood to be men and women brought together with certain things in common (shared commitments, shared values, and a shared knowledge of God), and thus, it could doubtless embrace having tea and being friendly, but it was not an end in itself. It was the shared values, the shared goals, and the shared vision that made them into a kind of partnership.

Now John says, “We witnesses who first came into contact with the living God by the Word made flesh, we have fellowship with him, and we proclaim this message to you so you may have fellowship with us.” The idea is, if we are in fellowship with the apostles who are in fellowship with God then we are in fellowship with God.

The apostles clearly see themselves as a critical link here. That is why they word themselves so carefully. “We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.” What is at stake, in other words, is the knowledge of God by the God-man, by his Son Jesus Christ.

“We proclaim these truths not to engender some theological system as something abstract in society, but so men and women may know God. We have fellowship with him. We are in league with him. We have come to share his values, his way of looking at things, his goals. We have come to grasp his truth. We have touched the manifestation of his Son. We are in fellowship with him, and if you are in fellowship with us, you too are in this same fellowship of God and his people.”

Thus, Christianity and the proclamation of it can never be merely an invitation to experiences like mine. They are necessarily an invitation to a shared commitment, a shared value, a shared goal that is tied to the God who has disclosed himself in the God-man Jesus Christ. Even this can sound a bit dour. Maybe these are all black-coated Hebrides Scots.

John won’t let it end even there. He says, “We write this to make our joy complete.” In the biblical way of looking at things, enduring Christian joy is a function of knowing this God who has disclosed himself. God has made himself known. “We have told you about it because we were there and saw the peculiar manifestation of God’s self-disclosure in his Son. If you have fellowship with us, then you join us in our joy at knowing the living God.”

We’ll come back to these themes again and again and again, but John begins by saying right at the beginning of his book that this is at the root of Christianity: God’s self-disclosure with witnesses who proclaim it to others so we might be in league with him and our joy in the knowledge of God, by whom we were made and for whom we are made, might be full.

2. What is at issue in Christianity?

What is so intriguing about this next session (1:5 to 2:2) is that at first glance he doesn’t deal with any of the heretical issues he deals with throughout the rest of the letter. In fact, he picks up on something he has already alluded to. It is possible to get into theological debates in the university and debates in our witness so we’re just dealing with system versus system and forget that what is at stake is the knowledge of the God who is there.

John immediately shows the entailments of all the debates he’s about to get into by showing what is at stake is whether or not we know this God and can be reconciled to him. He deals with sin, claims about sin, how we’re reconciled to this God, how we do know him. That is what is fundamentally at issue.

He begins, “This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.” Obviously, that’s a metaphor. The question is … What does it mean, and why does John use it? After all, later on he’ll say, “God is love” (chapter 4). Why doesn’t he begin there? “God is love.”

Elsewhere (these people know their Bibles), we are told God is holy. Why doesn’t he begin there? Why does he begin with light? In the Bible, light, as applied to God, commonly refers to two things. First, God’s self-disclosure, his revelation. He shows himself. Secondly, his purity, his integrity, his holiness. Both themes are strong in the Bible.

For example, we are told God’s Word is light. That is, it is God’s self-disclosure, it is revelation, it is the way he is showing himself to us, but at the same time, we are told in Isaiah, chapter 5, that some people are so perverse they call evil good and good evil. They put light for darkness and darkness for light. At that point, light is tied up with morality, with good, with integrity.

These two themes come together, and here we are told, “God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.” Why does John begin there? That is what the metaphor means. Why does he begin there? We need to back off just a little. At the risk of caricature, there are various ways in which people have tried to think about what the universe is like. They fit into certain slots.

One is monism. In a view of monism, all that is belongs to the same essence. God, the material world, and spirits … We’re all part of the same thing. That’s a monistic worldview. Good and evil are all part of that one world. That is at the heart of Hinduism. It is at the heart of much Buddhism. In a monistic worldview, God and ourselves and all that is belong to the same spectrum, good and evil alike.

The alternative to that worldview is dualism. Over here you have all the good things, and over here you have all the bad things. Sometimes, as in Gnosticism, the good things are spiritual and the bad things are material, but they don’t have to be. You can have all the good over here (God and material things that are good) and over here devils and evil spirits and all the bad things that are material on this side of the ledger, and the two are in conflict all the time. Then you can’t quite be sure how they all come out in the end.

What John does is put down a plank that shows Christianity isn’t quite like either of them. He says, first of all, “God is light; in him is no darkness at all.” That’s unlike monism. Monism says God embraces good and evil; all that is embraces good and evil. It’s all on the same plane, but that’s not the kind of God we have.

This God is only good. He is only light. There is no evil in God, and that’s an important truth to get hold of because there are times when Christians face problems of evil and suffering and disease and disappointment and decay, and they say, “What is God doing? Maybe God is evil. Maybe some mad scientist was just playing with me. Maybe I’m only an experiment. Maybe God is sovereign and powerful but not good!” John won’t have it. “God is light; in him is no darkness at all.”

On the other hand, there is a lot of evil around. That means the question has to be raised … How is this light to be related to all that is? On the one hand, we insist he is only good and on the other hand, there is evil here, so how do we understand this world? Let me tell you frankly, Christians have struggled with this one again and again and again. So did the ancient Jews. So did the biblical writers.

If you want to see pain and suffering struggled with, read Job, read Habakkuk, read Psalm 78. We’re not the first generation to ask these questions this side of Auschwitz, this side of Yugoslavia, or this side of Vietnam, but the Bible still insists that God, although he is sovereign and transcendent, is perfectly and unreservedly good.

It gives some answers toward explaining where evil comes from, but it sees it first and foremost in terms of rebellion. John is not interested in answering a philosophical question; he’s interested in answering these questions: How do we get into fellowship with such a God? How do we know such a God? Not how do we explain evil but how do we stop doing it? Not how do we think of a God in relationship to evil but how do we know him? [Audio cuts off] … is at issue in Christianity. An old hymn writer put it this way:

Eternal light

Eternal light

How pure the soul must be

When placed within thy searching sight

It shrinks not

But with calm delight

Can live and look on Thee

The spirits that surround Thy throne

May bear this burning bliss

But that is surely theirs alone

Since they have never, never known

A fallen world like this

O how shall I

Whose native’s fear is dark

Whose mind is dim

Before the inefitable appear

And on my naked spirit bare

That uncreated being

“God is light; in him is no darkness at all.” Then in the next verses what John does is set up three false responses to that claim and the Christian response to that false reaction. There is a pair in verses 6 and 7 (a false claim and a Christian response), another in verses 8 and 9, and a third in verses 10 to 2:2. Let us run through those very quickly.

First of all, some people simply claim you can know God and still walk in the darkness. In other words, you can make all the claims of being spiritual, but it has no bearing on your ethical life. John says, “If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth.” He’s now simply taking the light metaphor a little further. If God is light and there is no darkness in him, then to know this God is to walk in the light. That is, to walk in ways that are pleasing to him (that are consummate with his purity and his revelation).

If we claim to know this God, to have fellowship with him, to be linked with him, while instead we cherish sin and everything that is dark, then we’re lying. We’re not living by the truth. We’re not really being honest. This is a fundamental principle of biblical religion. Religious experience and daily conduct, mysticism and morality, faith and ethics? These are tied together, and “What God has joined, let no man put asunder.”

It is a common theme in the Scriptures. For example, Psalm 5: “The boastful shall not stand in before you; you hate all those who do iniquity.” Psalm 66: “If I regard wickedness in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.” Isaiah 59: “Your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he does not hear.” Second Corinthians 6: “What fellowship is light with darkness?”

How then should a Christian respond to the darkness we find in our own lives and elsewhere? “If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth. But 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 from all sin.”

What is the alternative then? Walking according to God’s pattern, walking according to God’s revelation, walking according to God’s light, so we may have genuine fellowship with him. “But,” someone says, “I still sin!” John says, “Yes! I know! But if we walk in the light and yet still sin, the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.”

The language is, again, exquisitely accurate and directed toward the heresies of the day. “The blood of Jesus, his Son …” That is, this one person, the man Jesus, God’s Son. His blood, it purifies us from sin. Of course, in biblical perspective it’s not as if a liquid called blood actually purifies us. That’s not the point.

Blood is a symbol for life violently and sacrificially ended. Jesus offered his blood. He shed his blood. He gave his life as a sacrifice, the just dying for the unjust, that we might be forgiven. That is the way we deal with sin. How did you first become a Christian? Did you not have to come to terms with your sin and say, “God, have mercy on me a sinner; I accept by faith that Jesus died for me”?

How then will you deal with your sins now? The same way. You go to the same Savior again and again and again and say, “Lord, have mercy on me. I am a sinner. Have mercy on me.” It is not that God is beginning a new work in you all over again and you’re getting saved again, but the only remedy we have for sins is the one God gave us in the first place, his own Son. Claiming that our sin doesn’t matter is no solution. We’re just lying. No. We learn to live by God’s light. We live in his light, and where we do sin (and we will) we remember it is the blood of God’s dear Son, Jesus Christ, who purifies us from every sin.

The second false claim is found in verse 8. “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.” The first claim was that it doesn’t matter if we sin; this claim is that there is no sin in us. We have transcended those categories. It’s hard to talk about sin at the end of the twentieth century. Have you noticed that?

Sin has become a sort of dirty word, a cute dirty word. You tell jokes about sin. Nobody takes it seriously. A friend of mine at a church in Chicago was trying to witness to a businessman in his area, and he said, “The Bible says we’re all sinners.” “Oh, go on. I’m not a sinner. I’ve done some bad things, but I’m not a sinner.” He said, “How long have you been married?”

“Well, I’ve been married 20 years.”

“You’re a salesman, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So you’re on the road quite a lot.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Have you ever, ever cheated on your wife? Ever once?”

“Are you going to go back and tell her this?”

“No, no, no. I just want to know. This won’t get beyond me. Have you ever cheated on your wife?”

“Well, yes. I have cheated on my wife.”

“Tell me … When you fill out your income tax forms (Inland Revenue), have you ever, ever padded expenses just a wee bit?”

“Well, yes. Nothing bad. Everybody does that. Nothing I’d go to jail for. It’s all right.”

“Tell me … When you come home and you tell stories of what takes place in the office, do you tell the stories in such a way that you are almost always the winner? Every argument you had you sure told him or you sure told her off? Do you ever present yourself really systematically as a loser as often as you are?”

“Well, everybody talks like that. It’s the way we get on in society.” My friend said, “So you just confessed yourself an adulterer, a liar, and a cheat, and you tell me you’re not a sinner?” John is just as blunt. “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.” John is saying, “Come on! Quit kidding.”

In the last century, it was very popular in some parts of this country to believe in what was called sinless perfection. Certain Christians thought they had achieved it. They were so sanctified that already they were without sin. At one particular conference of ministers, a famous London preacher, Spurgeon, hearing a preacher the day before pronounce himself sinlessly perfect, came up behind him at breakfast and poured a pitcher of milk all over him. The dear brother’s sinless perfection disappeared in the curds and whey.

I don’t recommend this as a technique, but if you ever find somebody who claims to be sinlessly perfect and who can’t be talked out of kidding himself or herself, go and talk to their mates or their friends or the people they live with on their staircase. No. What do we do about it? Do we pretend that we have no sin? Is that the way we go through life? Is that how Christians live? Is that how you live? Do you just pretend you have no sin? “Quit kidding yourself,” John says. What do you do about it?

“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” We don’t hide them. We admit them. We confess them. We bring them out in the open. We look at them. We dare to do that. We look at the secret things in our lives, the things we wouldn’t talk about in public, the shameful things, the lies, the petty deceits.

We dare to live examined lives. We do not pretend. That is just more games. We dare to look at all the things that show us how sinful our hearts can be and we confess them. Why? Because we know he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins. Notice carefully it does not say because God is a sentimental softy and he is bound to forgive us. It doesn’t say that.

Twenty years ago when I was studying in Germany, when I got tired of talking German, which seemed to be pretty often, I reverted to my mother tongue, which was French. I was brought up in French Canada. There was a French West African there with whom, therefore, I became very friendly because at least we could talk French.

It became pretty clear early on this chap at least once a week would go down to the red-light district of town and pay his money and get his reward. As I got to know him a little better I said to him, “You tell me you’re married and your wife is in London pursuing advanced studies there. You’re here trying to learn German to pursue advanced studies here. What would you say if you discovered your wife was shacked up with people once a week the way you’re trying to live here?” He said, “I’d kill her.”

“Isn’t that a bit of a double standard?”

“Oh, you don’t understand. From my tribe that’s the way it is. Men have these freedoms and women don’t. That’s acceptable in our tribe.”

“Yes, but you tell me you have some Christian roots and training. Do you think God plays double standards like that?”

“Ah, le bon Dieu; il doit nous pardonner; c’est son mÈtier. God is good. He’s bound to forgive us. That’s his job.” That’s not what this text says. He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and will purify us. Faithful and just. Faithful and just? How can that be? The assumption again is the death of Christ introduced in the preceding verse.

If God did send his Son as a sacrifice for me, if his Son has paid my debt, if Jesus died for me, then surely as God’s own child I can go and say, “Lord God, if you provided that sacrifice for my sins, will you now not forgive this sin because he died for me?” God is faithful to the promises he made in his Son. He is just. He will not punish me for what Jesus has borne on my behalf.

All of this stems from an understanding that on the cross it was Jesus the God-man who died. We are not talking, therefore, merely about some sort of esoteric christological dispute at the end of the first century with little bearing on our lives. We are talking about whether or not we can deal with our sins. John says we can, not by denying we have them but by confessing our sins and remembering God is faithful and just and purifies us from all unrighteousness.

There is still one more false claim and it is, “If we claim we have not sinned …” I suspect this claim varies just a bit from the previous one. The language is only a little bit different, but I think the context suggests here someone is claiming not to have eradicated any sin principle within himself or herself, but rather the person is claiming, “I have now conquered so that I do not, in fact, sin. I do not experimentally in the real plane of life sin.”

He’s not dealing with some esoteric principle about whether sin is possible within me. He simply says, “I don’t do it. I don’t sin.” “If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word has no place in our lives.” That is, the Bible is full of places that say we do sin, so if the Bible tells us again and again we do sin and we claim we don’t, then not only are we deceiving ourselves, but we’re saying the Bible is not telling the truth. God is lying!

“All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned every one to his own way,” we read. “There is none righteous; no, not one,” we read. We read through Psalm 14 and 1 Kings 8 and Ecclesiastes 7. Again and again and again, the Bible insists we are a generation of sinners, and then we come along and say, “That’s for other people. I don’t sin myself.” At that point, God says, “You’re calling me a liar.”

At this point, John understands he has a problem because, you see, you can keep saying again and again and again that people sin, and eventually, people say, “All right, all right. I sinned. There’s not much I can do about it then, is there? I guess I will sin.” But John says (chapter 2), “My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin.”

John is not insisting again and again that people sin so as to make an excuse for sin. In fact, later on he’s going to say some strong things about Christians not sinning. “I write this so you will not sin, not to make an excuse if you do, but if anybody does, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One.” He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.

Let me end by explaining what this atoning sacrifice is. The word in older English Bibles is propitiation. He is the propitiation for our sins. What does that mean? Well, what it means is he is the one who makes God propitious. He makes God favorable. Propitiation is the act of making God propitious.

This was understood almost universally in the Western church until about 60 years ago, and the way it was understood was God was angry with us and our sin, but in his mercy he, nevertheless, sent along his dear Son, and the Son, by dying for us, taking our place, bearing our guilt, made God propitious, made God favorable toward us, and that act was called propitiation. In this view, what Christ does on the cross is not simply take away our sin but does something with respect to the Father. He makes God propitious toward us.

Then in 1931 someone wrote an article … In fact, he was a chap who later became Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge. His name was Dodd. Someone wrote an article saying, “Surely this sounds much too much like paganism. In paganism you’re always trying to make the tree gods pleased with you. You want the stone gods pleased with you, the rain gods pleased with you. You want the gods who give your wife a baby … You want to have a fat baby so you try and please those gods. You’re trying to make the gods propitious.

In paganism you offer sacrifices and you call it propitiation, but the essence of Christianity is not like that. It is God who so loved the world that he gave his Son, so how can we speak of the Son making God propitious? He’s already so propitious that he gave the Son. So he wanted to speak instead of expiate.” Some of you, I’m sure, have versions of the New Testament that have that word here.

What happens is the Son cancels the sin. It’s not that he makes God propitious. Then some people started replying and said, “No, that’s not quite right. After all, the Bible does speak of the wrath of God against us.” Where does that fit into things? The wrath of God … Not just the wrath of God with our sins but with us?

Have you heard the old clichÈ, “God hates the sin but loves the sinner”? Read through the first 50 psalms. Fourteen times in the first 50 psalms you’ll find expressions like, “God hates the sinner. The one who sins his souls abhors.” Strong language. If God is really wrathful, then isn’t there something in this propitiation after all?

“Ah,” the reply came back. “Yes, but although he’s wrathful, that’s really only a way of saying sin has a kind of invariable outworking. You know how it is. You do something wrong and it works out nastily in your life. You tell enough lies, and eventually you become a liar. You’re not believed, and you don’t believe others.

It works out. That’s the outworking of God’s wrath. It’s kind of an immutable principle. You reap what you sow, but it’s not anger. God doesn’t have a bad temper. You can’t deny the fact God loved us so much he sent his Son. How can you speak of propitiation?” What shall we say about all of this? I am persuaded the answer is this. Propitiation is the best word, all right, but it’s not like pagan propitiation at all. The Bible simultaneously insists, because he is holy he is angry with us for our sin. God’s anger is a personal anger.

At the risk of sounding like an old man, I have to say most of you are not parents, but I am, and I think I have at least some little glimpse about how you can be angry and loving at the same time. I have two reasons: one is a girl and one is a boy. There are times when I’d gladly wring their scrawny necks, but I don’t think I’ve ever stopped loving them.

If God is perfectly holy, he must hate our sin. He must be repulsed with us as sinners. That’s what the Bible says again and again and again. He is angry with us. Isaiah actually goes so far as to say he is angry with us all day long. Yet, at the same time, he’s not bad-tempered. He’s not whimsical. He’s not arbitrary. It is his character to love. That is the kind of God he is.

Despite his principled, righteous anger with us (this anger which is a function of his holiness), he loves us so much he sends his Son. Do you see what that does? In paganism, we offer the sacrifices and the gods are propitiated. They are made propitious. In biblical Christianity, God sends the sacrifice and he propitiates himself.

God, in Christianity, is both the subject and the object of propitiation. He is the one who is angry with us. He is the one who loves us enough to send his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. He turns aside his own wrath, because as it were, his own righteous indignation flames out in judgment on his Son as a kind of marker for all that he thinks of sin, for the fact that sin must be punished, that we cannot escape from it.

He says, “If anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense. He is Jesus Christ, he is righteous, and he is the propitiation for our sins.” The best commentary I think ever written on that truth is this hymn:

Arise, my soul, arise

Shake off thy guilty fears

The bleeding sacrifice

In my behalf appears

Before the throne my surety stands

My name is written on His hands

Five bleeding wounds He bears

Received on Calvary

They pour effectual prayers

They strongly plead for me

Forgive him, O forgive, they cry

Nor let that ransomed sinner die

The Father hears Him pray

His dear anointed One

He cannot turn away

The presence of His Son

His Spirit answers to the blood

And tells me I am born of God

My God is reconciled

His pardoning voice I hear

He owns me for His child

I can no longer fear

With confidence I now draw nigh

And Father, Abba, Father, cry

Brothers and sisters in Christ, these are the elementary truths of biblical Christianity. These are the basics. These are the foundation stones. All of our thinking about God and how his truth relates to us and our lives in society around us begins from these building blocks. God was in the world reconciling us to himself. Let us pray.

Grant us clarity of thought and mind, Lord God, so we may learn to think your thoughts after you, to hide your Word in our hearts that we may learn not to sin against you. Give us a passionate desire to be holy, as holy as pardoned sinners can be this side of your dear Son’s return, and help us to take it in what it meant for him to die for our sin. We ask these mercies for the glory of the Lord Christ and for the good of us, his needy, blood-bought people. In Jesus’ name, amen.