Themes in 1 John 1 (4): Gnosticism

"Gnosticism." 

It's name is Grecian (gnosis), but its origin is Asiatic. It is difficult to define this heresy. It is a conglomerate. Arising in the East, it rolled westward, incorporating into itself both Hebrew and Grecian elements. 

It is not a proper philosophy, a patient collection and study of facts. It ignores facts when, after the manner of all the Greek philosophies, it assumes a theory by an effort of the imagination and in a priori style arrives at fanciful conclusions, instead of patiently accumulating and studying facts and reasoning backward a posteriori to the fundamental principles.

The Believer's Anointing

"Now he that stablisheth us with you in Christ, and anointed us, is God who also sealed us, and gave [us] the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts." 2 Corinthians 1:21, 22 RV

Anointing in the holy Scriptures is either material, with oil, or spiritual, with the Holy Spirit.

At his baptism Jesus was baptized with the Spirit, the first person in human history to receive this highest honor possible for men to receive or for heaven to bestow. For in the Old Testament, anointing was the official inauguration into three of the highest offices of the Hebrew nation — king and prophet (1 Kings 19:16), high priest (Lev. 16:32), and king (1 Sam. 9:16). These three offices were typical of a great personality to come in the latter days, called the Messiah, the Christ, or the Anointed One (Psa. 2:2; Dan. 9:25, 26; Luke 4:18). The nature of this anointing is foretold as spiritual: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me: because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings to the meek." Jesus of Nazareth appropriated this prophecy when he said, "This day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears." This spiritual anointing being one of his chief credentials, the fact is recorded in John 1:32, 33; Acts 4:27; 10:38.

The Power to Comprehend

"I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth...." (Ephesians 3:18 NRSV)

"In order that ye may be fully able [Alford] to apprehend [R. V.] with all saints." The tense of the verb "apprehend," Ellicott suggests, implies the singleness of the act, as if through the instantaneous perfecting of love, there comes a sudden revelation of God to the soul, in the face of his adorable Son revealed by the Holy Spirit.

This is the highest and most precious knowledge, for the excellency of which Paul counts all things to be loss, prefacing his declaration with a "yea, verily," as if he thought he had made a splendid bargain. This knowledge, which is so personal that Paul seems in the words, "My Lord," to be its exclusive possessor, he now desires only as the common property of "all saints," because he has found out that Christ can give himself entire and undivided to every perfect believer. Blessed paradox! I do not wonder that an old saint in Wales declared that "Jesus Christ was a Welshman, because he always speaks Welsh to me."

Undoubted Knowledge of Spiritual Realities

We are promised a knowledge of salvation by the remission of sins. Paul speaks in emphatic condemnation of those who are never able to come to a knowledge of the truth. He is speaking not of an intellectual grasp of the truth, but of its spiritual realization. The English reader of the Pauline Epistles fails to discover the fullness and certainty of the knowledge of spiritual realities on which the apostle insists.

In his struggle of mind and strain of style to express the Christian's privilege of full and undoubted knowledge of spiritual realities he accumulates epithets which burden his sentences as in Col. ii. 2: "That their hearts might be comforted being knit together in love, and unto all riches of the full assurance of understanding, to the acknowledgment of the mystery of God and of the Father, and of Christ."

He employs the compound word ἐπίγνωσις (epignosis), full knowledge, when he wishes to be emphatic, instead of γνῶσις (gnosis), knowledge. Bishop Ellicott and Dean Alford authorize this strengthened translation in the following passages: Eph. i.17, "That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the full knowledge of Him;" Eph. iv. 13, "till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the (full) knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ;" "perfect knowledge of the Son of God;" Col. iii. 10, "renewed unto perfect knowledge after the image of Him that created him;" 1 Tim. ii. 4, "who willeth all men to be saved and come to the certain knowledge of the truth;" 2 Tim. iii. 7, "ever learning, and never yet able to come to the full knowledge of the truth." Peter uses the strengthened form in his Second. Epistle i. 8, "toward the perfect knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ."

— Mile-Stone Papers (1878) Part 1, Chapter 22.

Grace First, Then Knowledge

We are exhorted to grow in grace and in the knowledge of Jesus Christ.

Some tell us that we find the true philosophy of Christian growth by reversing this order, and putting the knowledge of Christ first, as the means of increasing in grace. But the order of the apostle — grace first and knowledge second — is the most philosophical. We grow in the knowledge of Christ through the heart, and not through the head.

We do not know Jesus till we love him, and the more we love the more intimate our knowledge of him.

The more we familiarize ourselves with the perfect character of Jesus, the more we shall admire him, just as by studying the works of Angelo we come to admire him the more. But admiration is not love. It kindles no furnace-glow in the affections; it impels the soul onward through no losses and labors, self-denials and persecutions, to the martyr's stake. As the character of Christ folds its splendors beneath the long and earnest gaze of the student, he may be growing esthetically by familiarity with so many moral beauties, and he may become more perfectly grounded in his theological beliefs respecting the Divinity of the man of Nazareth, and yet he may, in his own heart, be refusing to receive and enthrone him as his rightful king.

— Love Enthroned, Chapter 18.

The Only Salvation of Orthodoxy

Not only does the natural man, devoid of spiritual illumination, strongly drift toward Unitarian views of Christ; but the Christian Church, under high intellectual culture and low spirituality, tends in the same direction. Hence the only salvation of orthodoxy is in the baptism of the Holy Spirit — the anointing that abideth and teacheth — poured by the Divine hand upon the mass of believers. What the world needs is not a mere teacher to communicate something about God, but to know God himself by his own personal manifestation to each heart.