Lesson 178 – Kenosis: Four Applications; Review: Doctrines of Impeccability & Pentecost

© Charles A. Clough 2001

Charles A. Clough
Biblical Framework Series 1995–2003

Part 6: New Truths of the Kingdom Aristocracy
Chapter 2 – The Earthy Origin of the Church

Lesson 178 – Kenosis: Four Applications; Review: Doctrines of Impeccability & Pentecost

08 Nov 2001
Fellowship Chapel, Jarrettsville, MD
www.bibleframework.org

We’re going to move from the life of Christ to the notes that we left off with last spring. Just so we can kind of get the big picture, we’ve looked at the life of Christ; last week we went over the doctrines of kenosis and impeccability. We want to recall what some of those doctrines say and what the implications are for us as believers. The first one, kenosis, is the Greek word to humble, to be humble. It comes from Philippians 2:5–8 and the meaning of kenosis is that the Lord Jesus Christ gave up the voluntary use of His divine attributes. In other words, before He would exercise any of His divine attributes while on earth, He would have to ask the Father’s permission to do that. So there’s a subordination within the Trinity, from the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And it was revealed during the earthly ministry of Jesus through kenosis, through the doctrine of kenosis.

You want to remember that the word “kenosis” has had in some chapters of church history a bad connotation. Sometimes I hesitate to use the word because liberals have argued that kenosis means something else. They have argued that kenosis means Jesus Christ wasn’t fully God, and that’s not what we’re saying. We’re saying He’s like a lamp with a lampshade on, and before you could take the lampshade off so you could see the glory of the bulb, He would have to have the Father’s permission to do that. He also could not do that in His trials with Satan. Jesus Christ had to meet the trials of Satan as a man, with only the assets of His humanity as that humanity was empowered by the Holy Spirit. So in effect, Jesus becomes the “tester” of the Christian way of life. He, as it were, put the Christian modus operandi, filling of the Holy Spirit, under severe combat conditions; He put it under pressure far exceeding any pressure that we would ever encounter. So in that sense you can look upon Jesus as a test pilot or a tester, an engineer who tests the endurance of products. The kenosis doctrine spells out the fact that the Lord Jesus Christ fulfilled the role of Adam perfectly.

We said there were four applications of kenosis. Number one, it shows the basic virtue in Christianity, which is not love, it is not power, [and] it is not courage. Those may be there, but those aren’t the basic; the basic virtue in Christianity is humility before God, a respect for Him. The second application is that the subordination of the Son to the Father proves that subordination of roles does not imply inferiority of essence. Let me run that by again: subordination of roles does not imply inferiority of essence. When you look at that statement carefully, you realize that the only way you can counter it is to deny the Trinity. Subordination of roles does not imply inferiority of essence; if it did, then Jesus wasn’t God.

This has important ramifications because the Trinity now becomes the archetype, the source, the origin, the pattern, of all authority, whether it’s authority of roles in the home, whether it’s authority of roles in the state. Just because, with all due respect to the feminists, just because God has invested the man as the head of the home, and not the woman, does not mean that the woman is inferior in value, scope, or any way else to the man, because if she is, then the Trinity is upset again. In the civil environment we obey leaders. Does that mean that the President is worth more in his humanity than any of you are? No, it means that under God you have a role and he has a role, and that’s the way it is, and we live out the implications of that. That’s the second application of the doctrine of kenosis.

The third one is that kenosis is the basis of Christ’s Melchizedekian priesthood. That’s Hebrews 4:15,

We have not a high priest who cannot be affected with the feelings of our infirmities, touched in that way. [Hebrews 4:15, KJV, “For we have not an high priest who cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.”] Jesus Christ qualifies as our priest, as our representative before God to plead our case with the Father because He has personally walked the path we are walking. If you think in terms of Christianity’s contrast with Islam, Allah never walked our path. He is so utterly transcendent, so utterly “other” that an incarnation of Allan would be inconceivable. This is why, therefore, Allah can’t really be personal to human beings.

The fourth application of kenosis is that it is the basis of Christ’s judgeship. John 5:22, [For not even the Father judges any one, but He has given all judgment to the Son.”] all judgment has been committed to the hands of the Son. Why? For the same reason we have trial in courtrooms by peers, jury of peers, lawyers try to get the jury arranged (or it used to be that way) so that the jury is peers, it’s equal in rank, stature, experience to the person being accused. These are important implications. We will be judged by a peer, in that sense.

The second doctrine we reviewed was the doctrine of impeccability; that had the two sentences that we talked about, Jesus was able not to sin, and He was not able to sin. He was able not to sin, refers to His humanity, and He is not able to sin refers to His deity, but since His deity and His humanity are united in one person, that means that the Lord Jesus Christ could not sin but was tempted. How you put all those together is like putting together sovereignty and free will. By the way, that’s another one, Jesus Christ in His humanity had free will; human responsibility, Jesus Christ is God and was sovereign. How do the two get together in one person. The fact that they got together in one person shows you they’re rationally coherent. It shows you they’re not schizophrenic qualities that can’t settle down and be at peace one with another.

Some applications of impeccability, I just gave one, it shows you how sovereignty and human responsibility can be united in one person in this area of evil, etc. It also shows you that you can have genuine human choice without sinning. You hear the expression, “to err is human,” that’s not true. That does not apply to the Lord Jesus Christ. He was genuine human so He is the one exception that disproves that role. And a third application of impeccability is that His fixed nature is communicated to us through regeneration.

We’re going to spend some time dealing with that, we’re going to move into 1 John because I want to show you some things about the text in 1 John. We’ll get into some questions of exegesis, more than we usually do tonight, but before we get there, I want to put into perspective what happened after the Lord Jesus Christ died, after He rose from the dead. We are back to the problem of Jesus Christ dies on the cross, He ascends, He sits down at the Father’s right hand, and then He’s going to come back again. The career of Jesus has been interrupted. So between the First and Second Advents there’s something we call the inter-advent history. That inter-advent history was not clear in the Old Testament because the pictures of the prophecies of the Messiah included a suffering Messiah, Isaiah 53, and it included a glorious Messiah, the Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. So you have these two pictures of the Messiah. You also had in Old Testament prophecy that the Holy Spirit would be poured out. Remember in Acts 2 the Holy Spirit comes down from the throne of God.

Turn to Acts 2; we want to notice Peter’s commentary on that event. In Acts 2:32 Peter concludes his address to the people who were amazed when they heard people speaking in other languages. This is not gobbledy-gook stuff, these people aren’t going lal lah laul laal lall, and they’re not trying to laugh and fall over with holy laughter or whatever the latest fad is in that kind of circles. This is a genuine speaking [of] known human languages. It shows you, by the way, this phenomenon doesn’t continue throughout the Church Age. If it did, Wycliffe would not be needed.

Acts 2:32, “This Jesus God raised up again, to which we are all witnesses.” Notice history, what do we keep emphasizing in this series? History and doctrine, history and doctrine, history and doctrine. You can’t separate one from the other. If you try to separate and throw away the history your doctrine becomes an illusion, it becomes just a sweet story. If you try to throw away the doctrine and you just keep your history, now you’ve got marbles, not going anywhere. So you keep the two together. God raised Him up again, a miraculous event, whereof we are all witnesses, we saw it with our eyes, it was bona fide. We could have videotaped it had they had video tapes then.

Verse 33 tells what happened after the resurrection, “Therefore having been exalted to the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, He has poured forth this which you both see and here.” Notice Jesus is pouring the Spirit out, not just the Father. If you remember, when we dealt with that, we dealt with the Filioque clause in church history. In the great creed it says the Holy Spirit who proceedeth from the Father and the Son, who together with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified. It’s both the Father and the Son. So the Father and the Son here send the Holy Spirit. Here’s the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit comes down on Pentecost and He does some miracles. And Peter quotes Old Testament prophecy that spoke of the coming of the Spirit prior to the Kingdom. Some people, amillennialists, say that because Peter quoted a verse that actually refers to the precursors of the coming of the Kingdom, that the Kingdom must have been coming in Acts 2. What did we say?

We said that in Acts 2 and Acts 3 the Kingdom was imminent, because at that point Israel was given a second chance nationally to respond to the message of Jesus. Jesus Himself told us in Luke 22, there’s the parable, the king sent messengers twice and it was the second set of messengers that were killed, not the first set. So that’s a prophecy of the fact that the first set was Jesus Christ and the immediate apostles. The second set were the apostles after Jesus rose from the dead doing the same thing that Peter was doing in Acts 2–3, offering the Kingdom to the nation. But the nation said no, and this is why in Acts 1, if you turn to Acts 1:7, Jesus very care­fully separated the coming of the Kingdom from the coming of the Spirit. Notice what He says.

Verse 6, the question was, are you going to restore the Kingdom? The question isn’t here of the Spirit, the question here is the Kingdom, are you going to restore the Kingdom to Israel?

Verse 7, “He said to them, ‘It is not for you to know times or epochs which the Father has fixed by His own authority; [8] But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you,” so notice in verse 7 he says “it’s not for you to know the times or epochs” of the coming of the Kingdom, but in verse 8 He introduces that you will, apparently shortly, receive the Spirit. So this is the first inkling you have in the book of Acts that there’s a split between the Holy Spirit coming and the Kingdom coming. That split is analogous to the career of Christ. Just as Jesus has the First Advent and the Second Advent so now we are introduced …, actually there are two advents of the Spirit. There’s the advent at Pentecost and there’s going to be another advent when the Spirit comes to establish the Kingdom on earth. You have that dualism, so to speak, of both the Son and the Spirit.

Then we had Pentecost and little mini-Pentecosts in Acts 8, Acts 10, and Acts 19, just to show that this Pentecost thing was very important to include all peoples. You have the Pentecost, capital “P”, then you have a little one in chapter 8, a little one in chapter 10, and another one in chapter 19. Anybody remember what groups of people were involved? Who was the new group of people introduced to the church in Acts 8? The Samaritans. Up to this point the church is 100% Jewish, now in Acts 8 we add Jews and Samaritans. The significance of non-Jews entering the church as bona fide on an equal basis with the Jews had to be emphasized, otherwise the Jews didn’t have a  church consciousness, so they’d say well they’re there and we’re here. But when they came in, the Holy Spirit indwelt them just like He indwelt the Jews. So in Acts 8 is a signal event to signal to the church that the church is going to be all nations, all races, all linguistic groups.

Then in Acts 10 what other group is now added to the church beside the Jews and the Samaritans. Cornelius, Gentiles. So now we have J + S + G. And when the Gentiles first come in, the signal is sounded again. There is a second mini-Pentecost to alert the church that the Gentiles are going to be indwelt just like the Samaritans and just like the Jews. Then along comes Acts 19, and what group is integrated in the church? Those are the disciples of John the Baptist; that would be equivalent to Old Testament saints wherever they may be. So you have Jews, Samaritans, Gentiles, plus Old Testament believers in the Diaspora, all through the rest of the world. Every major group now is represented; every major group experienced Pentecost. So the unity of the church now begins to solidify.

We go through the book of Acts and the diagram of Acts; the way you want to think about it is on page 40 in the notes. This is a rough diagram of the book of Acts. The theme of Acts changes as you go through the book. At the beginning Acts is all talking about Israel, Israel this, Israel that, talking about Jerusalem, talking about issues that are very Jewish. Where were the first Christians in Acts 2–3 worshiping? In Jerusalem. Where did they go every day? To the temple. Nobody told them not to go to the temple. They were still part of the Jewish cultists, i.e. the Jewish religious center. They had not separated from Judaism. There was no schism in Acts 2, socially speaking. The church was one with Judaism.

Later, after you get these events in 8, 10 and 19, and you begin to get non-Jews, now you’ve got a problem. That’s going to be our next chapter in the notes, is how the church becomes separate from Israel. The church and Israel become separate, because as non-Jews are integrated into the church, the rest of the Jews are standing there. Wait a minute! This is no longer a Jewish community; it’s made up of Jews and Samaritans. We don’t want Samaritans, we don’t want Gentiles–they’re unclean people. So the church then begins to become its own, it begins to take on a new identity.

That’s why Acts is a book in transition, and the conclusion of figure 2 is that that’s why you can’t build doctrine from the book of Acts, as certain elements in church history have done. They’ve tried to take either Acts 8, Acts 10 or Acts 2 as normative examples of whether the Holy Spirit comes after salvation, or at salvation. People say you need the baptism of the Spirit experience after you’re saved, it doesn’t come with salvation, you got to add on, and they’ll go to some of these passages in Acts. Wrong! You can’t normalize transitions; transitions by definition are not normalized events. The book of Acts is transitory, so you can’t build doctrine from Acts. You can build a lot of examples from Acts; you can build doctrine in the sense of God’s sovereignty over history.

Now we come to what the Holy Spirit does. We’ve talked about two events, the ascension and session of Jesus Christ, and we brought in Pentecost. We were looking at Pentecost and we’re going to deal with Pentecost like we’ve done with all the other events, we’re going to link some doctrines to it. One of the doctrines was the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, who He was, the fact that the Holy Spirit is not an “it,” the Holy Spirit is a person. And He is a person as much as the Son and the Father. He’s not a cloud, He’s not spooky, He is as much God as the other two Persons of the Trinity.

The Holy Spirit does things, and if you can remember this, it’s an easy memory device, that’s the doctrines we’re going to look at, RIBS, and the doctrines are Regeneration, Indwelling, Baptizing and Sealing. There’s two more we’ll add later. You’ll see these in the New Testament over and over. We started the “R”, regeneration. Regeneration is what? We dealt with this on page 46 and that’s where we linked it to the life of Christ. Regeneration is the creation of Christ’s life in the believer. It’s the bestowing of eternal life. What is the basic image? I’d like to give you a picture of each of these four doctrines, so your imagination can work on this. The picture you want to associate with regeneration is Genesis 1, creation, because regeneration is actually a new creation.

It’s the creation of something that didn’t happen before, that wasn’t there. In one sense it’s ex nihilo, because there was nothing perfect about any of us. In another sense it’s really not ex nihilo because it’s derived from the risen Lord Jesus Christ in His humanity; He was the one who had the perfect life, that life is His credentials and it’s that kind of life that is sown as a seed in the human spirit. We don’t share His resurrection body yet, the flesh hasn’t been changed. The flesh still is dying. The fact that the death sentence hasn’t been removed from us, that we all are going to die one day, by one means or another, so since we’re all going to die someday we must still be under the curse as far as our physical bodies are concerned. If we weren’t we wouldn’t die. So whatever regeneration is, it doesn’t have to do with the physical material human body.

What then does it have to do with? It has to do with the human spirit. Regeneration is a recreation of the human spirit, and it doesn’t mean that you change personality. I was indebted to Arthur Custance for this, if you can imagine different kinds of shapes, let’s say these shapes all represent different emphasis, different gifts naturally, you know, some people are gregarious, some people are more quiet, some people are very talented in this area, some couldn’t carry a tune in a basket, etc. Those are our natural gifts and lack thereof. If these represent different kinds of people, regeneration doesn’t change that. What regeneration does, it produces the moral spiritual qualities of the Lord Jesus Christ in the Spirit that indwells these people, and it will be expressed differently in different people. Just as natural human life will be expressed differently in different people, always with the same submission to the authority of Scripture, to the same admonitions in Scripture. But you have to be careful, just because we are all regenerated at the point of salvation doesn’t mean we all have the same personality. John doesn’t have the personality of Peter. Anybody knows that by reading the Bible. So the guys have different personalities but they all share eternal life, they all share this quality of life.

We want to come to grips with the problem that surfaced on pages 47–48. 1 John 3:9 is a problem text. The translation I have takes it upon itself to interpret 1 John 3:9 in the following way (the one I’m using is the New ASV). “No one who is born of God practices sin, because His seed abides in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God.” The tendency has always been in church history to interpret the verb “sin” and “cannot sin” in the present tense, the continuing present, he cannot continually practice sin. [KJV “Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him, and he cannot sin, because he is born of God.”] What does the NIV say? “No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in him; he cannot go on sinning, because he has been born of God.” What does the NIV do with that first verb in verse 9? “Continue to sin.”

Here’s the problem with that interpretation. The problem is that if you’re going to argue that a present tense in 1 John means continuous sinning, sometimes the present tense carries a nuance of that, and that’s why obviously a lot of translators seize upon it. But one of the rules of interpreting the text is you interpret the text meaning in a series of concentric circles, and the first circle that you use to go out and try to get meaning to something that you’re trying to deal with is the immediate context. If you can’t find the meaning in the immediate context, you go out to the end of the doctrine by that author. And if you can’t find the meaning of something in that document, in this case 1 John, you go to other Johannine texts to find out the meaning of how John uses it. You don’t go to Paul first; you go to John and let John teach you how John uses the word.

If you do that, here’s the problem. If you say that it’s continuous, let’s go to 1 John 5:16, if you’re going to argue that the verb “to sin” means continually sinning and the believer does not continually sin in 1 John 3:9, what do you do in 1 John 5:16 when it says “If any one sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he shall ask and God will for him give life to those who commit sin not leading to death. I do not say that he should make request for this.” The point I’m making in verse 16 is that the verb “to sin” is the same one, so now we’ve got a conflict in John’s literature, because John says in verse 16, “If anyone sees his brother continually sinning,” then .… He’s talking about a brother here; clearly the text is talking about another believer. You can’t say this person is an unbeliever—it’s [the word] adelphos here, it’s the word believer, [or] brother.

So now the problem is by doing a mechanical translation like this in 1 John 3:9 we’ve induced a conflict in 1 John 5:16. We also would have a problem in 1 John 1:8, it would be “If we say we have no sin continually,” if we continually have no sin “we’re deceiving ourselves,” which also conflicts with 1 John 3:9 because 1 John 3:9 says we don’t sin. The Word of God can’t have conflicts in it. These people aren’t stupid that wrote it. So what we have to do is back up a minute and say hmm, maybe I don’t really follow John the Apostle’s writings carefully here. If I’m getting different vibes out of different parts, I’ve got a problem. So I’ve got to come around for another pass at this thing and see what’s going on.

Traditionally the epistle of 1 John is one where, if you ever read commentaries on this book they all hit grease right from page one, because they never outline the book. Commentator after commentator will give you something like this: well, it’s not really clear what the details of the argument in 1 John are, it’s kind of a loose epistle. I don’t think John the Apostle is loose. He’s a very profound thinker. What has happened is that people read the Gospel of John and fasten on that text, “these are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Son of God,” etc. and they come to 1 John and they say the purpose of this epistle… and they turn to 1 John 5 and they will take you to verse 13, they’ll say this is the purpose of this book. This is the purpose: “These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, in order that you may know that you have eternal life.” And the way people interpret verse 13, by and large, is these things I have written to you who claim to believe, maybe you’re belief is real, maybe it’s fake, in order that you may know that you have eternal life, and he gives tests for salvation. In other words, tests for the presence of eternal life, that’s what 1 John is all about, tests for the validity of your faith. Are you really a true, true, true believer? Do you REALLY have eternal life?

We beg to differ that verse 13 is the purpose of this epistle. Here’s why? What do we say? When you see something in the text, don’t jump to a hasty conclusion, check it. Do you know what one of the greatest tools of Bible study is besides taking some time to read slowly? Concordance! You notice verse 13 starts out with a phrase, “these things I have written.” It would be wise to check to see if “these things I have written” occurs any other time in this epistle before we conclude that verse 13 is the purpose for the whole epistle. Once you do that, let’s turn back to the first chapter and let’s see how often that expression occurs. Lo and behold, the first time it occurs is in 1 John 1: 4, “And these things we write, so that our joy may be made complete.” And in the best texts it’s “my joy.” 1 John 2:1, “My little children, I am writing these things to you that you may not sin.” 1 John 2:26, “These things I have written to you .…” And of course we have 1 John 5:13.

Now isn’t it a little stretch to say that 5:13 gives you the purpose of the whole book? Let’s look at these; 1 John 1:4; 1 John 2:1; 1 John 2:26. Let’s go back to 2:1, “My son, I am writing these things to you that you might not sin. If anyone does sin,” etc. etc. Now what are the things that he wrote to them that they not sin? The previous text, from 1:5 all the way to the end of chapter 1 is talking about sinning. If you go to 2:26 he says “These things I have written to you concerning those who are trying deceive you.” What has he just got through doing? Talking about people who are deceived, people who deny the antichrist, verse 22–23.

To make a long story short, I want to summarize what you would find. Every time you see these phrases in the Johannine text, they are summary statements of what he has just written. They’re telling you the purpose of the previous context, not the purpose of the whole book. They’re Johannine signals, they’re Johannine expressions for summarizing the points he has just made, “these things.” “These” is a reference to some antecedent thing. It’s a pronoun; pronouns have to have antecedent nouns. Where are the antecedents? The things he just wrote, “these things I have written,” past tense, I’m done writing them now, you’ve got them all, verse, verse, verse, verse, verse, these things I have written you. So right away we find out that the conclusion that 5:13 expresses the meaning of the book is not quite true.

Now let’s go to 1 John 1, there’s something else we have to clarify here. 1 John 1:1–4 is a very interesting structure, and I think if you’ll look in your translations, the end of verse 1 and the end of verse 2 has a dashed line, and translators have correctly noted that verse 2 sticks in the middle of verses 1 and 3 like a sandwich. That means that you can exclude verse 2 without any loss of meaning in verses 1–2. So let’s try that. We’re going to read verse 1, skip to verse 2; we’re going to omit verse 2. “What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we beheld and our hands handled, concerning the Word of life—what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you also, that you also may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ.” Makes perfectly good sense, nothing missing grammatically.

So what then is verse 2 doing there? Verse 2 is set off as though verse 2 is put in there to answer the questions about the “what’s”? Notice how many “what’s” there are. “What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we beheld….” Verse 3, “what we have seen and heard we proclaim.” What is he talking about, that’s the question, what is he talking about? The interesting thing is the “what’s” are neuter, not masculine. So it’s a little hard to say that he has on his mind the person of Jesus Himself at this point. If he had, he would have put “who” was from the beginning, “who” we have heard. So apparently he’s not.

Though obviously Jesus is on his mind, Jesus can’t be the antecedent of the “what’s.” Furthermore, at the end of verse 1 you notice that there is a “what” that’s missing. Notice every clause in that section of verse 1 starts with “what” except the last one. There’s a phrase, “concerning the Word of life,” then, as it were, he sticks in verse 2 to explain what he means, “and the life was manifested, and we have seen and bear witness and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested to us,” obviously we’re talking about the incarnation of Jesus. But the question is, is that the “what?”

To make a long story short, if you do an analysis of this you conclude that it’s the message about Jesus rather than Jesus that John is talking about. It’s the message, “concerning” the message, or “the Word of life,” and what is the message? The message is verse 2. Verse 2 is put in there to explain the content of what he means by “the Word of life.” It’s about Jesus, but we would say it’s doctrine, it’s the doctrine that was from the beginning. Now if you take this to be Jesus then the tendency is to interpret beginning as referring to creation, from the beginning like Genesis 1, like the Gospel of John begins. But again, what is our rule? Our rule is that when we see something in John, how do you find a meaning of a term? Do you skip to the Gospel first or do you check out “beginning” in a concordance and look in the immediate context first? Immediate context! Turn to 1 John 2:7, “Beloved, I am not writing a new commandment to you, but an old commandment which you have had from the beginning,” what’s the meaning of the word “beginning” there? From the time they became Christians, this is not the time of the creation of the universe, it’s the time that they were Christians.

1 John 2:24, “As for you, let that abide in you which you heard from the beginning.” What did they hear from the beginning? From the beginning of the time they heard the gospel. We could go on to chapter 3. In some cases, “from the beginning” does refer to primordial history, for example, 1 John 3:8, “the devil has sinned from the beginning,” there the word “beginning” does refer to the creation. But in 3:11, right in the immediate context of that, what do we see, “For this is the message which you have heard from the beginning,” immediate context. So what are we to conclude? Is the word “beginning” here a technical term that has only one meaning, used for creation of the universe? No, it doesn’t fit. The word “beginning” is not being used here as a technical term, it’s being used as a term, as a tool word that he’s using in whatever context. Sometimes he’s uses it for creation, primordial history, or other times he uses it from the time they became Christians.

So let’s go back and see if we can focus more on the purpose of this book. 1 John 1:1, “That which was from the beginning,” now if we interpret that meaning the doctrine of the incarnation of Christ [blank spot] … “we beheld and our hands handled … [3] which we have seen and heard we proclaim to you also ….” Another interpretive problem here is “we” and “you.” There are two ways those pronouns can be related. One is what we call the inclusive use, i.e., “we,” the whole group, and within that we make a distinction, “you.” Or, we do it exclusively, that “we” and “you” are two different groups. The key is verse 3, “what we have seen and what we heard we proclaim to you also, that you also may have fellowship with us.” Clearly this is the exclusive use of “we” and “us.” Two different groups. The “we” refers to at least John the Apostle, and the “you” refers to believers. So the epistle is addressed to people who are believers. How do we know that? In 2:12 he says, “I am writing to you, little children, because your sins are forgiven.” Does that sound like believers or unbelievers? Believers! Verse 13, “I am writing to you, fathers, because you know Him ….” Believers, or unbelievers? We could go on and on with that.

Now we have the “we” and the “you” defined. The “we” is the circle of the apostles, or at least John; the “you” are believers. So we come back to 1 John 1 and now we’re talking about the purpose of this epistle, verse 3–4, two purposes. Purpose number one, verse 3, “what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you also,” that’s the message, “that you also may have fellowship with us, and our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ.” So the question is, what does fellowship mean then? If they’re already believers and he’s a believer, the fellowship is not talking about salvation. It’s talking about fellowship; it’s talking about relationship between believers, a profound statement here, fellowship really means fellowship.

So the epistle is talking about maintaining this fellowship. Fellowship, then, is the purpose of the book. Everything he’s writing here is to promote fellowship among believers. It’s not a test to see whether you’re saved or not. These are instructions on how to maintain fellowship. Then in verse 4 he gives us another purpose. “These … we write … that.” Here you have to watch the text. The best textual manuscripts …, this gets into a textual criticism problem, let me just summarize it.

There are two schools of thought in Christianity about textual criticism. One school of thought says the best texts are the oldest texts, i.e., I’ve found a manuscript in the Vatican from AD 300, it dates from AD 300–400, and all my other manuscripts are late Greek manuscripts, 900–1000, so this guy, he’s earlier, he’s a better manuscript. That’s what we call the critical text. So you go into a bookstore and you buy a Greek text, and it’ll be the critical text, meaning that the textual apparatus emphasizes the early manuscripts.

There’s another school, however, that argues that it’s not the early manuscripts, it’s the majority of the manuscripts, that the reason these early manuscripts are found in the libraries is because they were never used, they were set aside and they didn’t deteriorate, the papyri stayed in the library because people did not prefer that manuscript, so the precise they reason they were found is because they weren’t used, they’re scraps, they’re discarded manuscripts. And the continuity of the Holy Spirit is that the text really hasn’t changed that much. If you hold to the critical approach then you’re going to have to say gee, after nineteen centuries the Holy Spirit didn’t do too good a job, Tischendorf and a few other guys found some old texts so now we really know what the text says—like we didn’t know before.

The majority text in verse 4 says, “so that our joy,” it’s not “your joy,” it’s “so that our joy may be complete.” Some of you may have that in your translations, it varies in translations. It’s “our joy” meaning that it’s the apostle’s joy, He enjoys it when his children, i.e., believers, have fellowship, there is a joy there. Why are we stressing all this? Because once we know that it was written to believers, once we know the purpose of this book, that it’s written to promote fellowship, now we come back, we go through some of the problems, for example we look at 1 John 1 and we say verse 6, “If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice,” notice he’s talking about himself. “If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth,” we can be out of fellowship.

Verse 7, “but if we walk in the light as He Himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin. [8] If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” Notice it is possible for the truth not to be in a believer. Verse 9, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness,” it’s not referring to salvation; it’s referring to an adjustment that we make when the Holy Spirit convicts us of sin in our conscience. Verse 10, “If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us.” John is fond of using this “in” business.

1 John 2:2, “My little children, I am writing these things to you that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin,” see, he’s not talking about sinless perfection; he’s trying to minimize sin in the congregation by teaching them these truths. He says I hope you don’t sin, but if you do, “we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, [2] and He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world.”

Now come over to 1 John 3:9, the immediate context of that troublesome verse 9, go back up a few verses. Verse 7, “Little children, let no one deceive you; the one who is righteousness,” I’ve got “practices righteousness, is righteous, just as He is righteous; [8] the one who sins is of the devil; for the devil has sinned from the beginning. The Son of God appeared for this purpose, that He might destroy the works of the devil. [9] No one who is born of God practices sin, because His seed abides in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God.”

Look further back in verses 5–6, just before he got to talking about this sinning and those that don’t. “And you know that He appeared in order to take way sins; and in Him there is no sin.” In who? “In Him there is no sin.” There’s the context, “in Him there is no sin. [6] No one who abides in Him sins; no one who sins has seen Him or knows Him.” John is antithetical and these are his words for one who is in fellowship or one who is out of fellowship. “Abiding in Him” is walking in the light; it’s having fellowship with Him. “No one who abides in Him sins,” so what does that teach? That teaches when we sin we get out of fellowship. When we confess our sins, “He is faithful and just to cleanse us” and put us back in fellowship.

So now we have a little tool that John the Apostle gives us to promote fellowship. It’s the issue of personal sin. You’ll notice it’s not blaming circumstances, it’s not blaming what somebody else did, it’s taking personal responsibility and bringing it before the Lord. So we have a tool here, and furthermore, now we can say “No one who is born of God practices sin,” no one sins. He’s saying nothing more in verse 9 than he was saying in verse 7, than he was saying in verse 6. You have to get used to the way this man expresses himself and not confuse his vocabulary with Paul’s.

However, this is a distinction, this business of whatever this “abiding in Christ” [can’t understand phrase] eternal life has its dominion, notice that Paul does much the same thing. I’m going to take you to two verses in conclusion so you can see that this idea, though expressed in a different vocabulary, is not unique to the Apostle John. There are troublesome verses like 1 John 3:9 in Paul. So let’s turn to Galatians 2, look carefully at this text. If 1 John 3:9 is a problem, then Galatians 2:20 is also a problem. And you know if we have a problem it must be we’re misunderstanding these guys and their vocabulary. And it demands our attention.

What does he say in Galatians 2:20? He says, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live,” doesn’t that sound a little bit like John? I’m not living now? What do you mean Paul, you’re not living now, give me a break. No, it’s not me that lives. Huh? You’re not living now? No he says, “it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me, and delivered Himself up for me.” So halfway through verse 20, notice this, there’s an ambiguity here. He says “I now live,” see where he says that? There’s the verb “to live.” What’s the subject of the verb? Christ or Paul? Paul, “I now live.” But then the first part says but I don’t any longer live, “Christ lives in me.” Well if you have a problem with 1 John 3:9 you’re going to have a problem with Galatians 2:20, and you have to really … this is not easy stuff, I’m not making light of this, all I’m doing is pointing out the fact that you can’t come sixty miles an hour and read the Word of God. You’ve got to think about these things, this is not easy stuff.

If that wasn’t bad enough, in conclusion let’s turn to Romans 7:20, “But if I am doing the very thing I do not wish, I am no longer the one doing it,” now if that doesn’t sound like a cop-out, but it’s in the text, that’s the Holy Spirit’s text, “it is no longer I who does it, but sin which dwells in me.” We’ll have to come to more of this as we unfold the pattern of the New Testament truths; however we do it we have to satisfy the constraints of these verses. This is why this is not an easy subject, and this is why somebody with two and a half minutes exposure to any message on this and draws a conclusion that somebody is teaching sinless perfection hasn’t listened too carefully, because sinless perfection is not being taught by Paul, and it is not being taught by the Apostle John, but something else is being taught by these guys, that there is a regenerate nature, that somehow this regenerate nature shares the impeccability of its source, which is the Lord Jesus Christ. Now how you marry those two together is because our souls are a lot more complicated after regeneration than we thought. Our model of our insides, our model of who we are as people, is challenged by these texts, that maybe we have too trivial, too simplified model of what we really are about here, that the Holy Spirit is challenging us, saying you’re a lot more complicated now that you’ve been regenerated than you thought you were.

Question asked: Clough replies: The present tense doesn’t have to always be continuous action. It can refer to a principle, you throw a rock up and it falls down, that would be translated in the Greek as present tense, because I’m giving you what we call a gnomic, it’s a principle, it’s a rule, it’s just a general thing. It doesn’t mean a rock is always falling down, it means when I throw it up it falls down, as a rule that’s always there. If you can think of it as a principle, then what John is simply saying is that he who is born of God has His seed in him. That word “seed” is a key, “has His seed in him.” Every time you see the preposition “in” in John you’ve got to stop because this guy loads that preposition. It’s very difficult … John’s deceptive because John’s epistle looks like it’s so easy to understand. In one sense it is, it’s light and darkness, it’s water, thirsty and not thirsty, sin and righteousness. If you look at John he always writes in polarity.

There’s always a bifurcation here, and why it throws you sometimes is because the great either/or is salvation or not salvation. The minute we see a contrast, we immediately get these categories that set in and the crank turns up here, we salvation or not, and the problem is that when you do that you lose some Johannine subtleties. Because this guy, I don’t think he could approach a meal without an either/or. That’s his style, and you have to read enough of John to feel that style. This is not a class on Johannine exegesis, but the place where he apparently, if you ask yourself, biographically, it’s always good to know the biographies of these guys and how they got started.

I believe that where this duality got started was with the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, and I believe one of the keys was the Upper Room Discourse. Remember that discourse, John was very close to Jesus, you know, they were debating about who was closest. John was very much enraptured with the person of Jesus and what was the theme in John 14–16? Before Jesus went to the cross He basically briefed the disciples, and in the middle of that briefing He brought up the vine and the branches, and He talked about “abiding” in Him, versus not abiding in Him. And that passage has to be interpreted the same way we’re doing 1 John 3, and that is that you either abide or you don’t abide. Now because there’s a bifurcation there, people tend to go into John 15 and say oh, the branches are saved, and the unsaved branches, they’re burned. It’s not quite as simple as that.

The abiding is a state, that verb meno is used in 1 John. In fact, the idea of meno, though not the verb, is right in the context of verse 6 that I showed you where it says “in him is no sin,” the idea there is that John seems to have this picture. I’ve always pictured it from 1 John 1 more than 1 John 3; I always view it as walking out on a stage that’s dark, and there’s a spotlight shining down on the stage, and there’s this big illuminated spot. It’s like the light spot is moving, which would be what the Lord wants to do in your life and the light may be moving, but you’ve got to stay walking in it. And you’re either in the light or you’re not.

So when John’s vocabulary, if you “abide in Him,” if you “walk in the light as He is in the light,” then “we have fellowship with one another.” Now even that statement is an extreme statement. Think about it, “if we walk in the light as He is in the light,” hello! Is that perfection? Surely not, and yet it’s something almost like perfection. So the question is how do you take this strong perfective vocabulary of John and make sense of it when the guy is still talking about sinning? So the way to think about it is through the vine and the branch imagery, who “abides in Him,” the difference there between the real vine and the image is that branches don’t choose to abide, and yet “abide” is an imperative mood, “abide in Me that ye may have life.” That’s where the metaphor doesn’t fully follow. But “abide” there, I believe that sets up this fellowship metaphor. And it carries through the rest of John.

This is why John, it’s quite a challenge if you have been brought up to think in classic Reformed theology categories because his evaluation of what we’ll call salvation, but out of fellowship sort of carnality, is not too flattering. He argues in 1 John 5 that there’s a sin unto death that believers can commit; he argues that branches can be burned, he argues these kind of things that have, if you go to Arminian theologians they will say, see, John’s teaching loss of salvation. But we would say John is teaching a very sobering view of chastening, that the idea the classic Reformed Theology views the Christian life as sort of guaranteed, not only guaranteed in that you stay saved, that we all know, but they have another view that’s embedded in that one, and that is everything is going to come out all right, you’re eventually going to get all your rewards whereas that’s not apparently true when you look at Paul and John carefully. Christians can make wreckage of their lives, and go into the Kingdom bare naked. That’s the burning of 1 Corinthians 3, you know, wood, hay and stubble. The sobering thing is that Christians can lose rewards, can have phony human works burned up, not a pleasant scene. So there’s a degree of unpleasantness that is sharply a function and a consequence of abiding or not abiding, of walking in the light or not walking in the light.

As I say the Arminians will interpret that as loss of salvation; the Calvinists try to interpret it as they were never saved to start with. I think there’s another way of handling that that doesn’t get you in that trouble, and that is to see that John goes back to the Upper Room Discourse, he picks up this theme of “abiding” and you’re either abiding or you’re not abiding. And then he’s giving us the instructions in 1 John how to make sure you’re abiding. By confessing our sins when the Holy Spirit convicts you, respond to it. You can say it’s repentance, you know, the heck with the label, the point is there’s an adjustment there. And if this adjustment is not made, then fruit has not happened. So you go back to these passages, like I pointed out in Paul, these guys have a view of this business of fellowship that I think is very powerful, and I don’t think historically… the Reformation did a great job soteriologically but just as the Reformation never really developed eschatology, for example, I don’t believe that Reformed theology has really delved into the depths of this “abiding.”

When Dr. Chafer, founder of Dallas Seminary, wrote a book in 1911 called He That is Spiritual; he was the one that developed quite a bit of this out of the 19^th century revivals. When he wrote that book, do you know who his most vehement critic was? B.B. Warfield. Do you know what Warfield’s criticism of Dr. Chafer’s book was? Because Dr. Chafer said that you can confess your sin, you respond. Well, that’s human free will; Dr. Chafer has allowed human free will in there. You mean there’s a choice? And I’ll never forget reading Dr. Chafer’s reply to Warfield, it was: when you preach the gospel do you give people a choice? Of course you do. Well then why do you cut the choice out when it comes to the moment-by-moment living in the Christian life?

It’s hard, and I hesitate to get too deeply into this because like I said, this is not a class in exegesis, it’s a framework where we go over these large areas of theology, but I do want to do enough to point out the real thing to take away tonight is that when you come to a book of Scripture you’ve got to interpret it in a local context, and fan out from there. If you don’t get help, go out further. And you can have doctrinal checks, so if you’re coming to a conclusion over here, like I did tonight with 1 John 3, you say wait a minute, am I inventing doctrine or is this really here. Have I been misled?

If I have a wrong conclusion in the text, one of the checks then is, after you’ve concluded from the text, you look around the rest of the Scripture to see if there are any check points, and that’s what we did, because Paul does the same thing, except Paul’s vocabulary doesn’t use “abide.” He’s not talking abiding in Christ or not, he has other terms for that, “let the word of Christ dwell in you richly,” “be filled with the Spirit.” Those are two imperatives. You can’t have an imperative verb without what? A binary response. Every imperative verb requires you either obey it or you disobey it. So there’s an either/or, every imperative demands an either/or. And Paul’s either/or verbs of exhortation are slightly different from that meno of John, “abide” in the vine, “walk in the light.”

Question asked: “Do we know fairly precisely how old John was …:” Clough replies: Teenager, older teens, or young twenties. The only inference of the age of John is that he outlived every other disciple and if he was circulating around at 90 on the island of Patmos and Jesus was AD 30, that’s sixty years from the time that he saw Jesus. Well, if he’s 60 years from the time that he saw Jesus, how old was he? He must have been in his 70s or 80s, so even if he were 70 or 80 it puts him in his late teens or early twenties. That is one reason why people who are conservatives, those of us who believe in an inerrant Bible, that the Bible is not some big redaction out of the church.

That’s how we explain the obvious uniqueness of John’s expressions. John expresses himself a lot differently than Luke, Mark, and Matthew. And liberals have seized on that for years saying aha, see, that was just written after the fact. Precisely the opposite. John’s Gospel was written later, after the other Gospels, but the style of the gospel seems to show that as a young man he was deeply influenced by Jesus’ words, because even Matthew and Mark record that passage where Jesus was talking and He says, Father I thank You that these things You have kept from people and have revealed them to the children, and He uses light and darkness and that kind of vocabulary. Some think, and I tend to agree with them, that what we have in John is actually the way Jesus expressed Himself on a lot of occasions.

Question asked: Clough replies: You can’t tell who’s speaking. You know what the passage is to try that? Here’s an exercise for you to try. Take a piece of paper and start reading in John 3:1, go down through chapter 3. By the time you get to verse 36, it’s John writing; [in] verse 1, it’s Jesus speaking. Now you tell me where it stops and where it starts. Just try it, this is a neat exercise, and you’ll see what I mean. It’s almost impossible to tell where Jesus stops and John starts. These are the quirky little things that the human beings that wrote this … amazing guys. You know, when you stop and think here we are, tackling these verses, after 1900 years of the church chewing this stuff over, and we’re sitting here still scratching our heads, and those guys were fishermen, businessmen, apostles, and they grasped all this. Of course, they were there and they had the perfect teacher.

But if you read your church history and you read Clement and Justin Martyr, you read these guys that lived right after … you can go to the library and pull off these books written by the second and third generation, you just take the Gospel of John or Paul’s letter, and take the letter of Clement to Rome, put Romans and I Clement together and read them, and see if you don’t come away with the fact that Clement is trying to use the words and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s a godly man, he’s a Christian, but he’s lost something, that power that comes from Paul. The guys try to mouth the words, but it’s coming through kind of … they lost it after the first century and we’ve been nineteen centuries because I think the church is being matured, we’ve gone through a lot of theological debate.

The apostles never had to defend the deity of Jesus like the church had to during the second and third century. The apostles never had to identify the means of salvation like the church had to in the 1500s, and the apostles probably never had to defend their eschatology like we’re having to today. So we’re working through these things. We probably won’t get to the end until all of a sudden, bing, end of the game. Oh yeah, well gee, you know, if we had a few more centuries we could have dug into this Lord. That’s all right, you’ve got eternity.

Question asked: Clough replies: That’s another whole part of John’s writings. It’s interesting which apostle was selected by the Holy Spirit to be transported to Heaven and see the vision of all history. So it must say something about this guy John.

Okay, I know I haven’t answered all your questions but it’s just a challenge to look at these texts and think about it because you’ve got to come to a conclusion on those verses like 1 John 3:9 and Galatians 2:20 and you cannot say it’s sinless perfection, but you have to say there’s mighty strong language being used there about being “in Christ.”