v. 13-21. CONCLUSION.
- Intercessory Love the Fruit of Faith (v. 13-17).
- The Sum of the Christian's Knowledge (v. 18-20).
- Final Injunction (v. 21).
21. "Little children." This is a term of endearment addressed to all readers, irrespective of age.
"Guard yourself from idols." Contrast is one of the laws of the suggestion of thought. In this Epistle we have had light and darkness, truth and falsehood, love and hate, Christ and antichrist, life and death, righteousness and sin, the children of God and the children of the devil, the spirit of truth and the spirit of error, the believer protected against sin by the Only Begotten Son, and the world in the coils of the old serpent, the devil; and now we come to a fitting, practical, climacteric conclusion, "Worship the true God and eschew idols." We must bear in mind the environment of idolatry in which Christians in John's day lived, when every street and every house literally swarmed with idols, and magnificent temples and groves and seductive idolatrous rites constituted the chief attraction of Ephesus, the city of great Diana. Some of the Gnostic teachers were giving occasion for this warning against idols, by their sophistry that idolatry was harmless, or that there was no need to suffer martyrdom in order to avoid it. If it were sinful, it had no power to defile the spirit with the body, but the material envelope only. Says Bishop Westcott, "This comprehensive warning is probably the latest voice of Scripture."
"If there was one thing for which the metropolis of Asia was more celebrated than another in the apostolic age, it was for the magnificence of its idolatrous worship. The temple of Artemis (Diana) its tutelary deity, which crowned the head of its harbor, was one of the seven wonders of the world. Its one hundred and twenty-seven columns, sixty feet high, were each a gift of a people or a prince. In area it was nearly as large as St. Paul's Cathedral in London; and its magnificence had become a proverb. 'The gods had one house on earth, and that was at Ephesus.' The architectural imagery of St. Paul in 1 Cor. iii. 9-17, which was written at Ephesus, and in the Epistles to the Ephesians (ii. 19- 22), and to Timothy (1 Tim. iii. 15, vi. 19; 2 Tim. ii. 19, 20), may well have been suggested by it. The city was proud of the title, 'Temple-keeper of the great Artemis' (Acts xix. 35), and the wealthy vied with one another in lavishing gifts upon the shrine. The temple thus became a vast treasure house of gold and silver vessels and works of art. It was served by a college of priestesses and of priests. 'Besides these there was a vast throng of dependents, who lived by the temple and its services — theologi, who may have expounded sacred legends; hymnodi, who composed hymns in honor of the deity and others, together with a great crowd of hieroduler, who performed more menial offices. The making of shrines and images of the goddess occupied many hands. But perhaps the most important of all the privileges possessed by the goddess and her priests was that of asylum. Fugitives from justice or vengeance who reached her precincts were perfectly safe from all pursuit and arrest. The boundaries of the space possessing such virtue were from time to time enlarged. Mark Antony imprudently allowed them to take in part of the city, which part thus became free of all law, and a haunt of thieves and villains. Besides being a place of worship, a museum and a sanctuary, the Ephesian temple was a great bank. Nowhere in Asia could money be more safely deposited than here." (Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges.)
Well did Tacitus remark, "No authority was strong enough to keep in check the turbulence of a people which protected the crimes of men in honor and worship of the gods." We have only to read the first chapter of Romans, or Gal. v. 19-21, and Col. iii. 5-8, to know enough of the kind of morality which commonly accompanied Greek and Roman idolatry in the first century of the Christian era, especially in Ephesus, where architecture and art and poetry appealed to the sense of the beautiful, where the mechanical arts devoted to paganism promoted thrift, where the vaults of Diana's temple afforded avarice a safe-deposit, where a host of priestesses ministered to lust, and the right of asylum shielded crime.
Where pagan religion is thus linked with art and business and pleasure, we do not wonder that John, the venerated Christian teacher, utters his final exhortation, "Little children, keep yourselves from idols." Nor are we surprised to learn that Heraclitus of Ephesus was called "the weeping philosopher," in view of the monstrous idiocy and protected criminality of the people among whom "there was not a man who did not deserve hanging." But the bottom of the depravity of this idol-worshipping city is not reached till we have passed down through the successive strata of magic, astrology, sorcery, incantations, amulets, exorcism, and every form of rascally imposture, all engendered by its heathen mythology.
"Facts such as these, " says Dr. A. Plummer, "place in a very vivid light St. John's stern insistence upon the necessity of holding steadfastly the true faith in the Father and the incarnate Son, of keeping one's self pure, of avoiding the world and the things of the world, of being on one's guard against lying spirits, and especially the sharp final admonition, 'Guard yourselves from idols.'"
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