Love at War (Rewritten)

As long as sin exists in the world, love cannot remain passive. Love must fight. Christ himself came out of the Father’s love not merely to soothe the world, but to confront it — to bring a sword against sin. The cross stands at the center of this conflict, a rallying point for forces hostile to evil. The sinful soul is like a fortified stronghold, crowded with enemies opposed to Christ. Love advances on that stronghold step by step, determined to conquer and fully possess it.

1. Pardon through Christ’s Atoning Blood

The first move of love is the offer of forgiveness through the atoning blood of Jesus Christ.

John Against the Gnostics.

 SUPPLEMENTARY STUDIES IN THE FIRST EPISTLE OF JOHN - Part 1.

It is said in the Encyclopædia Britannica that the persons addressed in this Epistle are "the instructed," and that the author's aim is "a deepening of the spiritual life and a confirmation of faith." To contribute something to this worthy aim I have deemed it a fitting occupation for the sunset hour of my life to voice to the whole company of believers "the message" of St. John, the aged, respecting the reciprocal indwelling of God in the soul, and of the soul in God as a result of love made perfect. It is also appropriate to the purpose of this book to divest the message of those misinterpretations which make it discordant and self-contradictory, and to set in a clear light the testimony of the last surviving eyewitness of our Lord to the utmost extent of salvation from sin under the dispensation of the Holy Spirit. Hence should this series of exegetical studies be occasionally polemical, it will not be from choice, but from necessity in vindicating vital truth and banishing deadly error.

Concluding Notes on 1 John: Seven Attestations of Atonement

The last seven scriptural attestations to the atonement are found in this Epistle. It is the opinion of the most scholarly experts that the so-called First Epistle of John is the final document of Divine Revelation. This fact enhances the value of the seven clear and emphatic testimonies to the atonement, the central doctrine of the Gospel and the keystone of the arch of Christian theology. Three of these are found in the third chapter and one in each of the other four, making seven in all. 

It has been beautifully said that this Epistle is a prism which gives all the seven colors that make up the one white light of redemptive truth. Each of these testimonies is really distinct from every other, and from all others in the Holy Scriptures. 

1 John 3:1-3 - The Children of God

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ii. 29-v. 12. GOD IS LOVE.

c. ii. 29-iii. 24.The Evidence of Sonship: Deeds of Righteousness before God.

• The Children of God and the Children of the Devil (ii. 29-iii. 12).
• Love and Hate: Life and Death (iii. 13-24).

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The third chapter should begin with the last verse of the second, which speaks of being begotten of God. Then naturally the author describes the present character and future position of the children of God when their real glory, now unappreciated by the world, shall be outwardly manifested.

1 Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called children of God: and [such] we are. For this cause the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not

1. "Behold." This is not a mere interjection of surprise, but a verb in the plural number calling on all to gaze upon something actually visible now to eyes anointed by the Holy Spirit, and destined to be transcendently glorious hereafter.

"What manner of love." Love is the very essence of Christianity distinguishing it from all false religions. Its origin is not earthly, but heavenly. It is a spark dropped from the skies, not to consume sinners, but to illumine and purify believers.

Leviticus 12 - Purification After Childbirth

"1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 2 Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, If a woman have conceived seed, and born a man child: then she shall be unclean seven days; according to the days of the separation for her infirmity shall she be unclean. 3 And in the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised. 4 And she shall then continue in the blood of her purifying three and thirty days; she shall touch no hallowed thing, nor come into the sanctuary, until the days of her purifying be fulfilled. 5 But if she bear a maid child, then she shall be unclean two weeks, as in her separation: and she shall continue in the blood of her purifying threescore and six days. 6 And when the days of her purifying are fulfilled, for a son, or for a daughter, she shall bring a lamb of the first year for a burnt offering, and a young pigeon, or a turtledove, for a sin offering, unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, unto the priest: 7 Who shall offer it before the LORD, and make an atonement for her; and she shall be cleansed from the issue of her blood. This is the law for her that hath born a male or a female. 8 And if she be not able to bring a lamb, then she shall bring two turtles, or two young pigeons; the one for the burnt offering, and the other for a sin offering: and the priest shall make an atonement for her, and she shall be clean."  — Leviticus 12:1-8 KJV.

PURITY AND IMPURITY IN PERSONS.

The code of ceremonial purity now advances from animals to persons, and sets forth the causes of their ceremonial defilement. These causes are suggestive of moral pollutions staining and disfiguring the soul. They arise from childbirth, leprosy, and certain secretions, to which is added, in Numbers 19:11-16, the pollution of touching a human corpse. There are other sources of sanitary impurity and moral defilement, the omission of which argues that those here prohibited are forbidden not for the promotion of cleanliness merely, or even for good morals, but to inculcate a higher symbolical meaning, and to lead the people up to the conception of spiritual purity. This chapter relates to women after childbirth.

2. She shall be unclean — It is a mystery that marriage, a sacrament of love, prefiguring the oneness of Christ and the Church, should attain its divinely appointed end only by entailing ceremonial impurity. But nothing more impressively teaches the depravity of the human race than the early announcement that both conception (Leviticus 15:16-18) and birth are inevitably attended by pollutions which imperatively demand purgation before the person of the parent can be acceptable to the holy Jehovah. This suggests the strong assertion of David respecting the moral corruption of his nature while in embryo, Psalm 51:5. When Richard Watson was asked for the strongest proof text of inherited depravity, or original sin, he quoted John 3:6. Seven days — This number of days makes the period of uncleanness the same length with the menstrual days of the separation. See Leviticus 15:19.

Leviticus: Driving the Guilty to the Blood

"And the LORD called unto Moses, and spake unto him out of the tabernacle of the congregation, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, If any man of you bring an offering unto the LORD, ye shall bring your offering of the cattle, even of the herd, and of the flock." —  — Leviticus 1:1, 2 KJV.

 

In the unfolding of the Divine purposes Abraham has been isolated from his polytheistic kindred, and called to sojourn in the Land of Promise. His seed have been cast into the furnace of Egypt, and, by centuries of oppression, have been fused into a homogeneous mass now ready to be poured into the divinely prepared mould for the formation of a nationality unique and wonderful. Through a highway miraculously thrown up they have been led forth from Egypt to the foot of Sinai. Here, amid the display of all that is terrific in the elements, they have received two revelations the holiness of Jehovah and the expression of his will, in the most sublime and comprehensive code of moral laws that had ever been given to man. The purpose of both these revelations is to sanctify and elevate the nation. Both convince of sin. 

The Divine purity is a mirror wherein man may discover his moral defilements. The decalogue, by clearly drawing a fiery boundary between right and wrong by quickening the conscience and thrusting upon the unwilling soul a sense of guilt for its evil deeds, under the government of a holy God is now extorting the despairing cry, “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” The imperative demand of the hour through all that multitudinous host is a purgatory for their sins. For the law has entered disclosing their abounding offences. Romans 5:10.  That purgatory the merciful Lawgiver now prepares. 

An expiatory quality is now clearly developed in one of the familiar sacrifices, and others wholly propitiatory are to be instituted. The law drives the guilty to the blood. 

— Commentary on Leviticus.

Is Spirit Baptism for Purity?

QUESTION: What right have we to teach that Spirit-baptism is for purity? Where in his Gospel did Jesus declare this?

ANSWER: I wish everybody who desires to have his New Testament illuminated with an arc light would study Bernard's Progress of Doctrine, in which it is shown that the great practical, experimental truths are left in the Gospel as tiny seeds to be fully developed. after Christ's ascension, such as the atonement, justification and sanctification, and the purifying work of the Holy Spirit. He said very little about the gift of the Holy Spirit as a Person till the day before his death when he confined his remarks to the positive works of the spirit, witnessing, teaching, illumining, strengthening, gladdening and giving to the believer a manifestation of his bodily absent Master. He omitted the negative and smallest part of his work in the heart, the subtraction of depravity. Sanctification is to the fruits of the Spirit what house-cleaning is to house-furnishing. It is requisite to comfort and health, but is by no means ornamental. Moreover, before Pentecost the best of the apostles were not prepared to receive this negative office of the Spirit. They were so saturated with ceremonialism that they deemed themselves holy if they observed the Levitical Code. The Spirit himself must create in their minds the idea of inward holiness as necessary to Christian discipleship. Before such preparation the prediction of the purifying work of the Spirit would have puzzled and perplexed the disciples. May not this have been one of "the many things" Jesus did not tell them because they were not able to bear them, but which the Paraclete would unfold to them? This he did chiefly through St. Paul. See Rom. 6:6, 18:22, I Cor. 1:30, II Cor. 7:1, Gal. 2:20 Am. R. V., 5:24, Zph. 4:22-24, Col. 3:9, I Thess. 5:23, 3:11.

— Steele's Answers pp. 201, 202.

Irreproachable, Unblamable, Unmovable

In his first epistle to Timothy, Paul three times employs another adjective expressive of purity, found nowhere else in sacred Greek. It is ἀνεπίλημπτος (anepilaptos), "irreproachable," or "irreprehensible," applied first to candidates for sacred orders (3:2), then to Timothy himself (6:14), and finally to the believing widows (5:7) and, by implication, to all Christians. It is a strong ethical term, implying that one is not worthy of reprehension, even if he should be reprehended by his fellow-men.

We come now to ἀμώμητος (amomatos), "without rebuke," found only twice in the New Testament (Phil. 2:15), "that ye may be children of God without rebuke," and (2 Pet. 3:14) a text already quoted, "that ye may be found in him without spot and blameless," or without rebuke.

There is another word for unblamable, ἄμωμος (amomios), used by Paul three times in portraying perfect Christians. Eph. 1:4, "According as he hath chosen us [believers] in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy, and without blame before him in love." Love is always the sphere in which holiness and blamelessness are found. Eph. 5:27, "That it [the church] should be holy and without blemish." Col. 1: 22, "Unblamable and unreprovable in his sight": not merely in man's sight. who is incapable of penetrating the invisible springs of action wherein real character lies. Jude 24, R. V., "And to set you before the presence of his glory, without blemish in exceeding joy." We are not to be found faultless in some dark corner of the universe, where flaws and flecks would be unnoticed, but faultless amid the splendors of his ineffable glory. This is what divine grace as mediated by the Holy Spirit, the Sanctifier, is able to do for the weakest saint who perseveringly trusts in Jesus Christ, the adorable Son of God and Savior of men.

Another once-used word, ἀμετακίνητος (ametakinatos), "unmovable," occurs in 1 Cor. 15:58, " that ye may be unmovable," like the granite cliff unshaken by the tornado and the tidal wave. Such vertebrate Christian men and women dwelling in houses of clay may become when "strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man."

— Half-Hours With St. Paul, Chapter 18.

Church Entertainments

QUESTION: Is it wrong for a person entirely sanctified to attend. church entertainments; if so, why?

ANSWER: The phrase "church entertainment" is a solecism, an impropriety of speech, a contradiction in terms — suggesting the idea of a conglomerate of the church and the theater, or the ball-room, or the card party. A pure heart desires a holy place for worship dissociated from fun and frolic. He wants to take his children on the Lord's day to a temple consecrated to God., where the very place will inspire reverence. This cannot be in the edifice where the children and youth often assemble for amusement. There seems to be an incongruity between purity of heart and the frivolities of the so-called church entertainments. Many of the public readings in them are so low as to awaken disgust in a person of refined taste, to say nothing of a holy heart. For these reasons the writer gives them a tremendous letting alone. They lead downward. and not upward. Right-down Christian earnestness eschews them. They prevent the coming of a revival and they kill the revival that has holcome.

— Steele's Answers pp. 125, 126.

Purgatory?

QUESTION: What do you think of the following: "If a man will not let the Holy Spirit burn his selfishness out of him in this life, it will have to be done in the next"?

ANSWER: This is the doctrine of the Roman Catholics, who have borrowed from Grecian paganism purgatorial fires for curable sinful souls. It is also the teaching of modern Universalism that all the souls unfit for heaven when they leave the body will be purified by a limited punishment and will then be admitted to the life everlasting. The Scriptural basis for this doctrine is lack­ing. There is not the remotest hint that the work of the Holy Spirit in the sanctification of believers can be done after death, nor is there anywhere in the Bible any intimation that saving faith in Christ, followed by the new birth, is possible after the spirit becomes disem­bodied. There is positive proof that the sentences on the day of judgment are final and irreversible. It is equally certain that repentance and regeneration do not take place between death and the resurrection, for Christ says, "they that have done evil shall come forth unto the resurrection of damnation." The idea that good men will arise from bad men's graves implies the possibility that wicked men may arise from graves in which righteous men were buried! This is preposterous. The extension of probation till the day of judgment might solve some theological difficulties, but it would greatly weaken, if not destroy, the motive to repentance in the present life. Nothing that we have here said con­tradicts the possibility of a believer aspiring after perfect purity finding on his death-bed. All persevering believers belong to the new covenant which insures not only heaven but a fitness for heaven as the gift of God in probation.

— Steele's Answers pp. 122, 123.

Repression or Purification?

It is a remarkable fact that while the Greek language richly abounds in words signifying repression, a half score of which occur in the New Testament, and are translated by to bind, bruise, cast down, conquer, bring into bondage, let, repress, hold fast, hinder, restrain, subdue, put down, and take by the throat, yet not one of these, συνέχω, κατέχω, κωλύω, συγκλείω, καταπαύω, is used of inbred sin; but such verbs as signify to cleanse, to purify, to mortify or kill, to crucify, and to destroy. When St. Paul says that he keeps under his body and brings it into subjection, he makes no allusion to the σάρξ, the flesh, the carnal mind, but to his innocent bodily appetites. In Pauline usage body is different from flesh. 

We have diligently sought in both the Old Testament and the New for exhortations to seek the repression of sin. The uniform command is to put away sin, to purify the heart, to purge out the old leaven, and to seek to be sanctified throughout spirit, soul, and body. Repressive power is nowhere ascribed to the blood of Christ, but rather purifying efficacy. Now, if these verbs, which signify to cleanse, wash, crucify, mortify, or make dead, and to destroy, are all used in a tropical or metaphorical sense, it is very evident that the literal truth signified is something far stronger than repression. It is eradication, extinction of being, destruction.

— Mile-Stone Papers, Part 1, Chapter 13.

Preaching Entire Sanctification

QUESTION: Will not an entirely sanctified preacher preach perfected holiness as a distinct blessing?

ANSWER: Yes, whenever he addresses believers who are panting after God. A wise fisher of men adapts his bait to the kind of fish he wishes to catch; to sinners and backsliders he preaches repentance, to hungry believers he preaches purity of heart inwrought by the Holy Spirit. In one of Wesley's conferences he raises this question, "In what manner should we preach sanctification?" His answer is, "Scarce at all to those who are not pressing forward; to those who are, always by way of promise; always drawing rather than driving." Jesus adapted his preaching to his hearers, holding back doctrines which his disciples could not then bear. Dr. C. G. Finney, writing at the close of his life, says: 

"I have never found that more than a few people appreciated and received those views of God and Christ and the fullness of his free salvation upon which my own soul still delights to feed. In every place where I have preached for many year I have found the churches in so low a state as to be utterly incapable of understanding and appreciating what I regard as the most precious truths of the whole Gospel. They are ignorant of the power of these truths. It is only now and then that I find it really profitable to the people of God to pour out to them the fulness that my own soul sees in Christ." 

Tactful preachers "give to each a portion in due season."

— Steele's Answers pp. 88, 89.

A Damaged Reciever

QUESTION: How would you treat a truly converted and wholly consecrated man who has so long been seeking purity of heart as to become a painfully chronic seeker? It should be noted that he is not in a perfect physical condition.

ANSWER: The last fact noted may be the cause of this difficulty. In reference to chronic cases of lack of assurance, Wesley says: "I believe this is usually owing either to disorder of body, or ignorance of the gospel promises." I have seen a case of despair because of ill health. At Clifton Springs Sanitarium my attention was directed to a Christian woman in total spiritual darkness and great distress of mind because she had no communion with her Saviour [as] in former years. Said I to her: "Why are you here?" "Because," she replied, "the plastering fell from the ceiling of my schoolroom where I was teaching and struck my head."I then told her that her Savior was still speaking to her, but that her telephone receiver was damaged by the concussion and that restored health would bring back her lost communion with the skies. Years afterwards she assured me that this was her experience. Such cases are to be treated with great tenderness and sympathy. It is comforting to know that "God knoweth our frame."

— from Steele's Answers pp. 48, 49.

The Communion of the Holy Spirit

It is not by accident that, in the apostolic benediction, "the communion of the Holy Ghost" comes last. It is the crowning blessing of the Triune God. Without it the "grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God," could not be satisfactorily and joyfully known. These might exist as a matter of inference from the gracious dispositions and holy aspirations of the soul. They cannot be immediately known by a knowledge excluding all doubt, except as they are uncovered by the Holy Ghost. "He shall receive of mine and show it unto you." "He shall testify of me."