God is Light

 SUPPLEMENTARY STUDIES IN THE FIRST EPISTLE OF JOHN - Part 2. 

But John's most effectual refutation of error is in the bold statement of the truth as verified by experience. We call the especial attention of preachers of the Gospel to this peculiarity of John. Christians, if genuine, not nominal, cannot be reminded too often that their religious life is "a matter of positive, demonstrable, realized facts," the witness of the Spirit crying in their hearts, Abba, Father, the transition from death to life consciously realized, which is the beginning of life eternal in the persevering believer who knows that he is in Christ and Christ in him, and "that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in His Son," and is conscious of the indwelling of the Comforter and Sanctifier, making him a "habitation of God through the Spirit."

John's message to the world is "God is light." The basal truth of Revelation next to the unity of God is His holiness, diffusive as sunlight. Men cannot be transformed from sin to holiness while adoring impure deities. For worship assimilates. We invariably become like the object of our worship. Vile, indeed, became the Greeks, because their gods were impersonations of human lusts and passions enthroned on Mount Olympus. Their depravity created their gods, and their gods in turn intensified their depravity. This is the origin and this is the effect of every form of polytheism. But an intellectual people cannot always be contented with many gods. Reason, in striving to understand and explain the world, tends towards monotheism. Dualism cannot be a philosophic finality. Reason unaided by Revelation, recognizing nature as a whole cosmos, cannot but form a conception of it which will be pantheistic, since it acknowledges only the unity of substance, law and evolution, without the unity of rational plan and ethical purpose and a final cause. The mind cannot recognize the unity of God until it has harmonized the discords of nature. It discovers goodness in the adaptations of the natural world to the happiness of sentient beings, but it also finds a seeming malevolence in those elements which are destructive of such happiness, the earthquake, the tornado, the pestilence, serpents created with deadly fangs and insects with poisonous stings, and animals with teeth adapted to tear and devour other animals and with appetites prompting to destroy life. It finds death as universal as life. How can one God be the author of these warring elements of good and of evil? He must be a double-headed monstrosity, partly good and partly evil, if he is a personality, or he must be impersonal and destitute of a moral nature. In other words he must be pantheistic, a nondescript force — not "making for righteousness " — for this is a plagiarism from Revelation, but indifferent to moral distinctions, acting alike through both the assassin who slays the President and the patriot who pours out his blood for his country.

Hence, the concept of God in the minds of both pagans and philosophers involved sin. John's first message is to give the true concept: "God is light and there is not in Him any darkness at all, no, not even one speck." (Alford.) In the Old Testament light is used to signify prosperity and happiness; in the New Testament it indicates clearness, beauty and glory, all expressed by the word, "holiness." Darkness is the absence of this quality, and the absence of happiness also. It is sin and misery. John's message is only a repetition of his Master's message to the world. "The only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him." (Westcott and Hort's text.) "Being the effulgence of His glory and the very image of His substance." (R. V.) The Son of God in His essential majesty was the sole expression of the Divine Light in His words and whole life on earth and in the testimony of the Spirit sent through His mediation. He who professes "fellowship with Him," or "similarity of character, hating what He hates and loving what He loves " (Joseph Cook), must be Christlike in moral character. If, instead of this, be walks in the darkness of sin, he lies; he is consciously and wilfully false, and not merely self-deceived. So glaring is the contrast between such a man's dark life and the whiteness of God's character, as imported into knowledge by His incarnate Son, that no term softer than liar properly describes him. He actively affirms what he knows to be false when he professes to combine fellowship with God and the choice of darkness or sin as the sphere of his life.

The central doctrine of the message, the fundamental truth on which the practical duties rest, is the Person of our Lord. There was an environment of error about the church. On the Jewish side was Ebionism which, like modern Unitarianism, regarded Christ as a mere man. On the philosophic side Docetism made him a mere phantom. A third party combined these two opinions in the doctrine of Cerinthus, who taught that the Divinity descended upon Jesus at His baptism and forsook Him before His death. In the presence of these errors John sets forth the truth more in the form of announcement than of argument, that Jesus has come in the flesh and that the denial of this is the denial of the Father, that there is no logical ground to stand on between the veritable incarnation and blank atheism. The history of modern liberalism abundantly justifies John's declaration. Hence the environment of those to whom he delivered this address is strikingly like our own in the closing decade of the nineteenth century. John's words need no accommodation to fit modern orthodoxy in its conflict with Christological errors. While right opinions alone, apart from holy living, are treated as worthless, the historical manifestation of the Son of God "who laid down His life for us" is urged as the sufficient motive to godlike conduct. Simple profession without action is a fatal delusion.

With John love is generally love of the brethren. Human weakness and aspiration are wonderfully helped by reason not only of Christ come in the flesh suffering our ills, but also of the glorification of this our Elder Brother, the pledge of our future transfiguration into His glorified image to stand at last "a row of glorified brothers with Jesus at the head." There can be no other destiny for those of whose moral character in probation it was said, "As He is so are we in this world."

"In Him is no darkness at all." Here we note that the difference between right and wrong is not merely a question of degree, the one shading off into the other, but fundamental, absolute, immutable and eternal. A clear perception of this truth by all moral agents would greatly fortify ethical foundations, strengthen conscience and prepare the way for the reception of that solemn doctrine which superficial thinkers and soft sentimentalists are prone to reject — everlasting rewards and punishments. On this contrast between wickedness and holiness, suggested by John and sharply exhibited in the life and teachings of Christ, depends the whole doctrine of sin. It is not a mere imperfection, a disguised form of good, like a bittersweet medicine, ending in a cure, the stumbling of an infant just learning to walk, but it is enmity against God. Between right and wrong there can be no midway step, even so small as a demisemiquaver in music. "Good and evil may be mixed in an individual for a short time while in a transition state;" in themselves they are contrary, and hence forever in capable of union. Yet many men, restive under the threatened eternal punishment of the incorrigibly wicked, are endeavoring to bind up sin and holiness into a unity of character and identity of destiny. Some embrace agnosticism for this reason: If God is unknown and unknowable it may be that His moral character is utterly unlike that portrayed in Revelation. It may be that the distinction which conscience makes between evil and good and the feeling of guilt for sin are all illusions, and that the doctrine of Mansell, in his "Limits of Religious Thought," is true, that "the infinite goodness of God is not explained on the supposition that its sole and sufficient type is to be found in the finite goodness of man." This is an implied denial that man at his best estate reflects the image of God.

As well deny that mathematical truth is not the same with God as it is with men, that the multiplication table is different with God, as to deny that ethical distinctions, universal as the human race and immutable as reason itself, are not the same with God as they are in man's conscience. Yet this denial is the secret hope of the agnostic tormented with a consciousness of sin. His very remorse is a credential of two realities, his own immortal personality, and the eternal identity of God's moral sense with his own moral reason. Another fashionable way of uniting sin and holiness in one character and of destroying both is found in Pantheism, which denies both the personality of God and of man, both being merged in the great soul of the world, a soul composed of blind forces, devoid of freedom and of moral action. There is no place for either sin or holiness in this view, that God and the universe are identical. This is the theology which Boston liberalists are borrowing from the Brahmins of India. It affords an anodyne to guilt, but no incentive to holiness. Its advocates candidly confess that it never has lifted a wretch out of the slums and planted his feet in the upward path, and that it is utterly unable to achieve such rescue.

There is still another conception of God which affords soft and broad theology — soft enough to lull sinners asleep, as on a downy couch, and broad enough to save all sinners who die in their sins. It magnifies the love of God to the entire exclusion of His justice. It is forever preaching to sinners that they are children of God, who is too fatherly ever to shut one of His impenitent children out of heaven. It teaches that God is light, the light of love, without the rays of holiness and justice, and that in this light all sin will ultimately evanesce.

The safeguard against these plausible and seductive errors is found in the Scriptural conception of God's moral attributes, held by believers "who are of full age (Greek, perfect), even those who by reason of use (habit) have their (spiritual) senses exercised to discern (distinguish between) good and evil." The cause of Christian holiness would receive an instantaneous and permanent upward impulse, should the conviction be inwrought in all believers that holiness in man is an obligation arising from the Divine nature, and that only the holy can be eternally happy in the presence of a holy God.

Elective studies are now quite in vogue in our colleges, but perfect holiness it not optional in God's university. Holiness is required in order to graduation. This requirement is not a by-law, easily suspended in an emergency, but constitutional and immutable because it is grounded not only in the Founder's will, but in His very nature — "in Him is no darkness at all." Hence there should be no darkness in us. For the moral character of God, the Creator, is a pattern after which the creature must create his own moral character. God has left this most valuable part of us for ourselves to construct after the model supplied by Himself: "Be ye holy, for I am holy." The Greek reader notes a shade of meaning in the Received Text not translated into English: "Become ye yourselves holy." It impresses upon us, probationers for an eternal existence of happiness or of woe, a special sense of responsibility to realize that we must carry out of this world something which we did not bring into it, and that something we must ourselves create, as a first cause. God is the first cause of my existence, but I am the first cause of my character and hence of my destiny. Otherwise God is the author of all the sin in the world.