Saturday, October 29, 2016

The Epistles of John, Part 21: On the Witness Stand Part 2

Continuing our exposition of 1st John 5:6-12 and jumping immediately right back into the text.  John has shown us already the incredible testimonial power of water and blood as they relate to Christ.  These two elements stand as silent testaments to His ministry and work.  They work together as advertisements of God’s favor toward His Perfect Son.  The water at Jesus’s baptism, when the skies opened and the Spirit of God descended like a dove to rest upon Him, immediately catalyzing the testimony of John the Baptist which was borne on the wings of personal prophecy, previously delivered to him by the Holy Spirit.  
And the blood at the follow-up to the crucifixion, when God was pleased to raise His Son from the dead and exalt Him to the highest position over all that exists.  Likewise, the water and blood relate to the Jewish sacrificial system implemented by Moses at God’s command.  Both water and blood held strong cleansing properties and uses for the nation of Israel, causing readers of John’s epistle to immediately grasp the significance of his statement in the very first chapter that the blood of Christ covers our sins.  Furthermore, John is very clear that neither element, water and blood, stand alone as a witness.  They both function together to point the way to Christ as the Son of God and the complete rationality of belief and trust in Him.

We have also seen that the water and the blood are completely useless to us by themselves.  They are truth.  But that truth is meaningless until the Spirit Himself appears and bears witness to their veracity.  When that happens the water and the blood suddenly transform supernaturally into powerful witnesses that join the Spirit in an unceasing trumpet blast and timeless advertisement of the power of Christ to those who are alienated from God.  And these three witnesses do not merely agree with each other.  That is not strong enough of a word for what happens when they come together.  Rather, they merge into a single, harmonious, unified voice of testimony that weaves seamlessly into a coherent argument for and defense of the man Jesus as the Christ and the Son of God.

Finally, we have discussed how every detail of the Bible is of massive and exceeding importance.  Even an innocuous little note from John about blood and water issuing from Jesus’s side, following His death, when He was pierced with a Roman spear.  Such a small thing might be easily glossed over as an extraneous detail or nothing more than a historical fact to lend credibility to the Biblical record.  But as John makes clear, this tiny little aspect of the Crucifixion is so much more and is a part of the foundation of the entire process of redemption itself.  Details are critically important because God is a god of meticulous planning and exacting precision.  He does nothing by accident and the Scriptures are no exception to this.

All of this we have looked at before.  Now we will continue to read and attempt to comprehend John’s argument, starting with verse 9: If we receive the testimony of men, the testimony of God is greater; for the testimony of God is this, that He has testified concerning His Son.  John is drawing a comparison between competing testimonies in this verse.  This is the Father’s “marturia”, or the testimony that He has given.  His agents, the water, the blood, and the Spirit, are His “martureo” or His witnesses.  Now John is going to inform us more deeply about the “marturia” they have given concerning Jesus.  And in John’s estimation, this testimony is of far greater worth than the testimony of men, for two reasons.

The first reason God’s testimony is greater than man’s is the very existence of the Christ Himself.  There is an implicit assumption of the truth of who Jesus is in John’s statement.  Notice that he says “God has testified concerning His Son.”  A confirmation from God regarding the Son-ship of Jesus must necessarily also confirm the deity of Jesus.  John has already touched on this point with a rhetorical question just a short time ago, in verse 5: Who is the one who overcomes the world, but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?  In the Jewish culture of Jesus’s day son-ship was a very special thing.  The son of an official was considered equal in stature to the father, if not equal in authority.  More to the point, the offspring of a ruler was viewed as having the same blood as the father and therefore the same royal essence.  If people were expected to treat the king with reverence and respect you can be sure the same treatment was expected for the prince.

The Jews understood this well, which is why they became so incensed when Jesus claimed that He was God’s Son.  A clear view of this animosity can be seen in John 5:16-18.  Jesus had just healed a man who had been ill for 38 years.  It happened to be on the Sabbath that the healing was performed.  So, the Scripture says: For this reason the Jews were persecuting Jesus, because He was doing these things on the Sabbath.  But He answered them, “My Father is working until now, and I Myself am working.”  For this reason therefore the Jews were seeking all the more to kill Him, because He not only was breaking the Sabbath, but also was calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with God.

There is an imperial authority inherent in the son of a god that unmistakably trumps the worth and value of the son of merely a man.  Even secular cultures understand this.  Greek mythology, to take one example, is filled with stories about demi-human men such as Hercules and Perseus.  These heroes were the offspring of a union between a male god and a female human.  As such they were endowed with superhuman abilities as well as divine gifts to aid them in their various quests to defeat the forces of evil.  The implication of grandeur over and above ordinary men is clear and unambiguous.  Such a concept is not difficult or troublesome to understand for anyone, and these are fictitious characters.  So when it comes to a divine father and son relationship that is truth rather than fiction it is easily perceived how much worth is to be extended to the son.

The second reason that God’s testimony is greater than man’s is frankly rather shocking.  John says that the reason God’s testimony is greater is that He has testified.  This is what lawyers call a self-authenticating document (in this case a statement).  This is an item of evidence that is admissible in court with no extrinsic evidence of authenticity required.  An example would be a domestic public document that is signed and sealed.  The idea is a bit like saying “the best evidence for the existence of life is that life exists.”

To our overly rational and rabidly proof driven modern western minds this may very well sound like a weak and ineffective argument.  There is no real evidence given.  All that exists is a statement of divine authority.  God says, in effect, My witness trumps your witness simply because I have witnessed.  If we do take issue to such a declaration, we need to understand that our reticence is neither new or noteworthy.  In Exodus chapter 3 Moses has an encounter with a bush on Mount Horeb.  This particular bush was burning with a flame that never consumed it.  It must have been a simply astonishing sight.  Imagine the man’s surprise and amazement when the bush spoke to him.

The voice from within the fire introduced itself in verse 6 in this way: “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”  Notice that prior to this statement Moses was cautious but apparently unafraid.  Verse 3 records his internal dialogue with himself: “I must turn aside now and see this marvelous sight, why the bush is not burned up.”  There does not appear to be any fear but simply curiosity or fascination.  But after being advised to remove his sandals and being informed of who this really was, Moses immediately changes his attitude in the latter part of verse 6: Then Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.

Many of us know the account well.  God gives Moses his mission for the last 40 years of his life, to travel to Egypt, confront the most powerful ruler on the planet with nothing but a staff, and lead an entire nation back to this same mountain so that they might come to know and worship the God of their fathers.

Moses is understandably pole-axed by this assignment.  Everything within him wants to balk and run away.  He responds in verse 13: “Behold, I am going to the sons of Israel, and I will say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you.’  Now they may say to me, ‘What is His name?’  What shall I say to them?”  Do you see what Moses is doing here?  God has already told him who He is.  He clearly identified Himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  Yet Moses is asking for His name?  He is dithering and avoiding the issue is what he is doing.  He does not want to take on this herculean task.  His flesh is recoiling from the responsibility and is telling him to go find a nice big hole to hide in somewhere, jump in it, and pull the dirt in on top of him.

The particularly relevant point here is God’s immediate response in verse 14.  You probably know the verse well: God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM”; and He said, “Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”  God knew exactly what His reluctant servant was attempting to do.  And the perfectly considered response was not to provide logic, rhetoric, evidence or any other such forms of placation to help Moses to feel better.  The Lord simply and with supreme finality affirms that He exists as the best evidence of who He is.  Moses, the offspring of Jacob, Pharaoh, and everyone else under the sun has no need of any further proof of the existence of God.  That God states His existence is enough.

Now to be sure, He goes on to give Moses additional information regarding what to say and how to say it.  He gives him inside information about both what the people are experiencing, what they are pleading for, and prophetic glimpses of what God is planning to do.  But this is all ancillary material.  The manner in which the Almighty chose to shut down the objections of His child was to self-authenticate Himself.

We can see a similar line of reasoning in one of Jesus’s parables; of the rich man and Lazarus.  It is found in Luke chapter 16, verses 19 to 31.  The rich man lived a life of ease and comfort while Lazarus lay outside his gates covered with sores and starving to death.  After both men died, Lazarus was brought to heaven but the rich man was sent to hell.  In his torment the rich man asks for just a drop of water to ease his suffering.  This is refused him.  He then asks that Lazarus be sent back to warn his brothers of their impending doom if they do not change their sinful ways.  It is this conversation in verses 27 to 31 that is pertinent to our point.

And he said, ‘Then I beg you, father, that you send him to my father’s house—for I have five brothers—in order that he may warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’  But Abraham said, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them.’  But he said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent!’ But he said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be persuaded even if someone rises from the dead.’”

The point is the same as in the case of Moses and the bush.  Requests for additional evidence are unnecessary.  In fact, they are pointless.  The only reason for a man to ask for more proof from God is to delay the inevitable admission that he does not believe.  And that lack of belief will not be altered by any further show and tell on God’s part.  The reason is quite simple.  God is the one who gives out the capacity for faith, at His whim.  If He has not seen fit to do this for someone then no amount of argumentation on the planet is going to convince them of anything.

The Apostle Paul knew this well, having witnessed it firsthand.  In his first letter to his beloved son in the faith, Timothy, he writes in chapter 1 verses 12 to 14: I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because He considered me faithful, putting me into service, even though I was formerly a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent aggressor.  Yet I was shown mercy because I acted ignorantly in unbelief; and the grace of our Lord was more than abundant, with the faith and love which are found in Christ Jesus.  It was God’s grace toward Paul that overflowed abundantly and was evidenced by both faith and love.  God was the possessor of these attributes, and He parceled them out to Paul at the time and place of His own choosing, not Paul’s.

A further point to be made about 1st John 5:9 is this.  Who in their right mind would be such an ignorant buffoon anyway as to believe the testimony of a man over the testimony of God?  Even with sin clouded perception that prevents us from seeing our own faults, it is immediately apparent to any sane human being that other human beings are unreliable at best and untrustworthy at worst.  Give a newborn baby with siblings just a few months of life.  Even before they can walk or talk they can see and assess that their brothers or sisters are looking out for their own interests, and when those interests run contrary to the interests of their younger brother there is blood to be paid, in intent if nothing else.  Solomon saw this and wrote about it in Proverbs 22:15 when he said “foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child.”

We see the reality of man’s sick, twisted, and fallen nature all around us.  A recent Open Doors story highlighted the experiences of a young girl from Uganda named Susan.  She was born into a Muslim family.  But after hearing the gospel she placed her faith and trust in Jesus for her salvation.  Susan's father, enraged about this, locked her in a room with a mattress and told her she could not leave the mattress until she was ready to renounce Jesus.  Then he left.  He did not return for three months.  Susan only survived through the help of her brother who slid food and dug channels of water under the door for her.  She was finally freed through the intervention of neighbors.

The point is this.  If even one’s own family members, given the right circumstances and motivations, cannot be trusted, then how much warier should we be of everyone else on the planet?  Are they not more to be distrusted than our “loved ones”?  King David, a man who knew painfully well the betrayal of those closest to him, wrote the following in Psalm 41:9: Even my close friend in whom I trusted, who ate my bread, has lifted up his heel against me.  Such experiences prompted the king to write Psalm 118, verses 8-9: It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in man.  It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in princes.

Such is the madness of the human race contaminated with sin and determined to pursue unrighteousness at all costs that we would go against our own common sense and the evidence right in front of our faces to pursue anything and everything other than God.
Continuing on with 1st John chapter 5, we come to verse 10: The one who believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself; the one who does not believe God has made Him a liar, because he has not believed in the testimony that God has given concerning His Son.

This is a fascinating verse.  We can see once again John bringing out the point of testimonies, or “marturio”.  God has given us witnesses who proclaim the deity of Jesus as the Son of God.  Their proclamation stands as a written confirmation of this truth, existing long after the events that inspired them.  This we already know.  But now John ups the ante by explaining that when we come to believe in what the witnesses claim, we take the testimony into ourselves.

This is an important point and we dare not miss it.  The Greek for “has” in this verse is “echo”.  It is one of the three words we examined at the beginning of this passage.  It means to have, to hold, or to possess.  It is a common word with over 500 occurrences in the New Testament.  In 1st John alone “echo” shows up 23 times.  Because of that we have looked at it before in this series.  But I want to focus in on it again because it lends a very specific and powerful point to what John is saying.

To “echo” something is to possess it.  It is to gain and/or hold ownership of it.  It is the eternal inheritance “have” of John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”  It is the marriage union “has” of John 3:29: “He who has the bride is the bridegroom; but the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly because of the bridegroom's voice. So this joy of mine has been made full.”  And it is the divine character “has” and “have” of John 5:26: “For just as the Father has life in Himself, even so He gave to the Son also to have life in Himself.”

This is the way John uses “echo” in his writings.  And it should tell us something about his meaning here in 1st John.  He chose the present active form of the word to express his thought in verse 10.  This means that when we are granted the gift of faith and are persuaded to put our trust in Christ it constitutes an immediate and present possession of the testimony about Him.  In other words, we enter into, with our bodies, minds, and lives the multi-faceted witnessing testimony of Jesus that God has orchestrated.  We become a part of the testimony by owning it within ourselves.

But what exactly is this testimony that we come to possess?  John tells us, but he does it down in verse 11.  So I’m going to skip around a bit in order to flesh this out.  Verse 11 reads: And the testimony is this, that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son.  The witness we are expected to give to the world stems from the foundation of the life we have been given in Christ.  It is a gift of matchless splendor, awe-inspiring benefits, and unfading glory. 

Peter spoke of it this way in 1st Peter 1:3-4: Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to obtain an inheritance which is imperishable and undefiled and will not fade away, reserved in heaven for you. 

Here’s the thing.  John has already specified exactly what our Christian conduct should look like.  We should walk as Jesus walked (1 Jn. 2:6).  We should hate the world system and the “stuff” in it (1 Jn. 2:15).  We should love one another unto poverty and even death (1 Jn. 3:11, 16-17).  And we should carefully guard against all false teachers who have forsaken the truth of Scripture (1 Jn. 4:1).  In other words, our pursuit of Christ should be a total body, total lifestyle, total energy, all-in commitment.

But even if John hadn’t written any of those things.  Just by considering the extent of the inheritance we have been granted that Peter speaks of in his letter, should we not be driven to heights of joy, gratitude, and passion?  Should not our zealous desire to love our God back, as much as we possibly can, so as to in some small way measure up to the love which He has granted to us, overwhelm our senses and all other concerns in life?  Shouldn’t our personal testimony be absolutely drenched and dripping with a soul encompassing satisfaction in God and God alone?  I think it should and I think John would agree if he were in the flesh with us.

Now then, let’s back up a moment to what we read in verse 10 and ask a question.  Namely, what does all of this business about eternal witnesses and possession of the testimony actually mean to you on a daily basis?  To answer that I would like you to consider the following.  This conduct I’m talking about is not about you alone.  Your reputation is not all that is at stake.  In Christian circles we often state that God’s reputation is also on the line.  And that is true.  But I think what John is getting at here is a fuller and deeper exploration of that theme.  Rather than simply tossing a blanket “God’s reputation” he is explaining in detail how thousands of years, hundreds of prophecies, and the perfect unified fulfillment of those prophecies alongside the infinite Spirit of God have come together to coalesce in the man, Jesus, who is the Christ of God.  Furthermore, every single person since the day of Pentecost who has placed their faith and trust in this Christ has joined the harmony being sung by the witnesses who came before them.

That is the living organism of the church that you have entered into if you accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior.  Is it any wonder then that the author of Hebrews phrases his point at the beginning of chapter 12 like this: Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us?  Because of this great cloud or living organism we have been joined to, we have absolutely no excuse for apathy, debilitating sorrow, or fleshly pursuits.  You had better believe it’s not all about you.  That is a massive understatement!

And we are still not done on this point.  Because even though each individual Christian is only one tiny piece of a larger whole, one individual cog in a labyrinthine system of gears, one unique witness amongst thousands or hundreds of thousands.  Even though all that is true, yet at the same time there is a delightful importance to every one of us as well.  We are sons and daughters of the king (2 Cor. 6:18)!  We are a royal priesthood of believers (1 Pet. 2:9)!  We are the saints of the living God (Acts 9:13)!  We will rule and reign with Christ on high, judging angels and nations (Rev. 5:10; 1 Cor. 6:3)!

All of this presents to the Christian an incredible dichotomy of understanding in which we are at once humble yet exalted.  We are both insignificant and majestic at the same time.  Reflecting on these truths causes me to echo the prophet Isaiah in 55:8-9 when he wrote: “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways,” declares the Lord.  “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.”  Hundreds of years later Paul was similarly awestruck by the revelation he had been given.  In Romans 11:33 he wrote: Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!  How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways!  Truly these writers of Scripture had the right of it.

However, there is a terrifying flip side to this coin.  The witnesses that God has put in place are eternal witnesses.  As we have seen, they consist of the undying and unchanging Holy Spirit and the unalterable historical events of the water and the blood as well as the historical record of Christian belief that has come down to us through the centuries.  Because all these elements testify eternally of the truth of Christ, when that truth is rejected, the effect is a continual, unceasing statement of belief that God is a liar.  This is why John uses the perfect tense of both “poieo”, or to make and “martureo”, or to bear witness.  He wants us to understand the weight of seriousness attached to the concept of disbelieving the testimony God has given us.

Think of it.  Every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every week of every month of every year of every decade.  The life of a man or woman who rejects the testimony that God has given concerning His Son stands as a blazing beacon of offense, slander, and opposition to God.  Our culture would have us believe that God is a god to be scorned for His judgment.  They would teach our children that truth comes from within them and no one, not any other human being or even a god in the heavens, has the right to tell them differently.  But the reality is that God’s grievance against humanity surpasses our ability to comprehend such things.

We must endeavor to wrap our minds around the enormity of transgression that God has endured at the hands of sinful men.  Otherwise, when we come to a passage such as Deuteronomy 20:16-18 we will not be able to deal with or understand the rationale behind such a seemingly murderous rampage: Only in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes.  But you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite, as the Lord your God has commanded you, so that they may not teach you to do according to all their detestable things which they have done for their gods, so that you would sin against the Lord your God.

Of course it goes without saying that any judgment which falls upon mankind here on earth pales in comparison to what awaits the unbeliever who dies in their hatred of God.  And on that note, John closes this passage of Scripture with verse 12: He who has the Son has the life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have the life.  The opposite or absence of life is obviously death.  This is the prescription and prognosis for all those who do not possess the Son of God.  Wait a minute; what?  Possess the Son of God?  Doesn’t that sound a little… sacrilegious?  It may sound that way but I urge you to think again on John’s usage pattern of “echo”, the word he uses once more to indicate our relationship with the Son and the life.

John very clearly uses “echo” in the sense of ownership or possession.  We have already looked at this.  But here in verse 12 when it is applied to the Son, what does that look like?  How are we to understand this idea of possession or ownership when it is applied to God?  The first thing to wrap our minds around is that this is not the same as going down to the corner grocery store, choosing of our own volition an item, purchasing it with money, and thus coming into possession of it.  If we attempted to apply that paradigm to God it very much would be sacrilege.

Rather, it must be understood that whatever form this “having the Son” takes it is completely and totally done at His own motivation, not ours.  Titus 3:4-6 is instructive here: But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior.  At God’s own choosing and at God’s own timing and at God’s own good pleasure He did this for us.  He washed us clean with the baptism of the Holy Spirit which was poured on us through Christ.

Understand that this idea of pouring is to be seen as not just a small trickle or even a controlled and measured flow.  It is an overwhelming flood of whatever is being poured.  In Matthew 9:17 Jesus is teaching.  He is describing a believer’s new relationship with Him and how it differs from the Law of Moses.  To accomplish this, He uses a parable of wine and wineskins, as follows: Nor do people put new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the wineskins burst, and the wine pours out and the wineskins are ruined.  The pouring of the wine out of the split wineskins is nothing less than an eruption of liquid that spews out and drenches whatever it falls upon.

So it is with the Christian when God saves them.  He drenches them with the Holy Spirit through the atonement of Christ.  What is drenched in this way is forever changed.  The “liquid” in the metaphor soaks into clothing, pores, hair, eyes, and mouth.  Even after being cleaned up the shirt is probably stained and the alcohol has been ingested to some degree into the person’s digestive system where it is processed and very literally becomes a part of them.

That is the picture I think John is giving us here of the “possession” of the Son and the life.  It is essentially the same kind of image we see from Jesus Himself in His high priestly prayer.  John 17:22-23 reads: The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one; I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me.  There is an incomprehensible unity and oneness between the believer and his Christ that defies logic and explanation.  Paul says in Ephesians chapter 5 that the marriage relationship images this union in part.  And in God’s design of biblical marriage no human relationship is as close and intimate as that one.  But even with that metaphor in our minds we still come up short in attempting to provide a bonafide logical explanation for what Jesus is talking about.

So I don’t claim to have an inside track on exactly how this unity works.  But I think John is adding to our understanding here in 1st John by referring to it as a possession or an ownership.  It is at God’s whim yes.  But once He has chosen us we are bonded to the tri-une God with an adhesive more powerful than anything else in the universe. 

This should at the very least cause us to stop and re-evaluate our Christian conduct and character.  This salvation we have entered into, this faith in the Christ, this belief and trust in Jesus of Nazareth, is not, to use a crude phrase, a “one-night stand”.  I am afraid many Christians view it that way.  They are oblivious to the reality of what they have entered into when they became a follower of Christ.  They think of Christianity as something they did, rather than something they do.  They perceive it as an event that occurred in their past rather than an ever present all-encompassing all-consuming daily reality.  They think of darkening the doors of a church as the extent of their current investment in Christ.  They view the passionate zeal that we see in Scripture as something reserved for the clergy. 

Is what I have just written true of you?  Ray Vanderlaan, a Jewish historian and Bible teacher, puts it this way.  In the first century, when someone was chosen as the disciple of a Rabbi, that young man was required to demonstrate a hunger to be like their master in every way.  The student had to watch how the teacher walked, how he ate, how he studied, how he taught.  They had to want to be like their Rabbi more badly than anything else in the world.  How badly do you want to be like your Rabbi?  The truth of the multi-faceted and eternal testimony we have been ushered into should cause us to look beyond and outside of ourselves to our divine Rabbi Jesus rather than within to our own pitiful broken souls.  And the wonder of it all should cause us to overflow with love and devotion and passion for the God who made it possible for us to follow Him.

No comments:

Post a Comment