Previously we looked at "ALL IN in the Family…" John is writing to a spiritual family. We are a family. And John's writing - being Scripture - is inerrant. To begin with, it's true. It's also not in the wrong order. It’s in exactly the order which God intended. Every letter, every last jot and tittle, and none of it will ever pass away without being fully accomplished. It will never fade into irrelevance. It is totally true, completely trustworthy - you and I can bank on it, and base our entire life on it - and should. But the numbering and groupings have been determined by man. So if you think verse 5 here goes better with verses 1-4 than with verses 6-10, then you go right ahead and group them up. Or if you think verse 10 here goes better with the thoughts of the first verses of chapter 2, then regroup.
Truth can be a dicey proposition in our world today. A bit of a moving target. Esp with the advent of things like “Virtual Reality”. Computer imaging. Photoshop. How can we even know what is real anymore?
[photoshopped vs real images]
Today we look at verses 5-10 of chapter 1. Let’s read them together…
1John 1:5 This is the message we have heard from Him and are messaging to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.
6 If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth;
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.
9 If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
10 If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar and His word is not in us.
We heard from Jesus, John says. We saw, we heard, we touched, we saw, we heard. This is the message, HIS message, this is what we heard - and we are messaging it to you. We’re hitting that share button, and forwarding it on to you.
We HAVE heard, John says - let’s not miss this. It is the perfect tense - which means a completed action in the past which has continuing results in the present. In other words, we DID hear, and it is still making a difference in our lives. No forgetful hearers here. We heard it, not simply with our ears, but with our hearts. We listened. We paid attention. Parents - you know what I’m talking about. Kids who profess to be listening but aren’t paying attention at all? Teachers, you can also relate. We would all do well to pay attention to this message…!
-light and darkness - here we have the first of several motifs john begins to take up in this letter. God is light. let’s consider this for a moment. for the pre-edisononian world, light was/is fire. think about that - even the sun - it’s fire. as far as a consistent source of illumination - and so we would be excepting lightning and bioluminescence (fireflies), there is basically one natural source of light, and that is fire. so fire illuminates, yes, and fire is hot, yes. and it purifies. it consumes. it is no coincidence that fire was an integral part of the mosaic law and operation of the tabernacle. fire, consuming and purifying the sacrifices. fire on the golden lamp stand, representing the constant presence of God. and of course there was the shekinah glory, blazing above the mercy seat in the holy of holies. God is light, and He dwells in unapproachable light, light so blindingly bright that human eyes cannot gaze at it directly and even the backside of it will light up your face like the sun. He is an all-consuming fire. Only fire can give even a remote conception of God’s incomparable holiness. In fire He appeared at the burning bush; in the pillar of fire He dwelt through all the long wilderness journey; the fire that glowed between the wings of the cherubim in the holy place was called the Shekinah, the Presence, through the years of Israel’s glory; and when the old had given place to the new, the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost in a fiery flame and rested upon each disciple. Fire. Besides fire, God Himself is the other source of light in Scripture. in the beginning, the first thing God said was, ‘let there be light’. He had made the heavens and the earth, but the earth was formless and void and darkness was over the surface of the earth. the eternal God spoke into the darkness and created the light with a word. and light is the first thing mentioned in all of Scripture which was good. light is good - maybe unless you need to sleep?, but here it is good, breathtakingly so. and in this sense, darkness is bad. light and darkness are completely antithetical - they cannot coexist. think about it -darkness is the absence of light. it is the concealment of light, where the God of light and His holy truth and righteousness are suppressed and where i can (try to) hide and do those things of which i am (or should be) ashamed. where light goes, it dispels darkness. and as you get closer to God, and approach all the way to Him, you will find that there is not even a single bit of darkness. no hiding. no concealing. nothing but light. blazing, blinding, purifying brilliance. truth, justice, and the heavenly way. and so we observe that john is beginning with the character of God, reminding us of Who God is and what He is like. this is the God with Whom we have to do. This is our Father, and Light is a family trait. Light dispels darkness - the two do not and cannot coexist.
-now from a certain perspective, darkness - or night - is a necessary concession to the physical constraints of life on our planet. living things need to sleep - and the darkness of night certainly seems more conducive to that. but a 24-day - let’s say for the sake of conjecture that the earth did not rotate around its axis once every 24 hours but simply went around the sun with one side constantly facing towards it. that side would be total desert. the other side would be a massive ice cap. it is difficult to imagine how life as we know it could exist without a period of darkness. nevertheless, we are told that one day - when the children of the Light find themselves in the new heavenly jerusalem, with a new heavens and a new earth - that there will be no longer any night, nor even any need for a sun. God Himself will be present in that realm, and the Light of His glory will illuminate the entire place such that somehow there is no longer any night. what a(n unending) day of brilliant blindingly breathtaking goodness that will be...!
And so, to be sure, There is no darkness in our heavenly Father. God is Light. He is in the Light. He is Light. An all-consuming fire is our God. He consumes the darkness by His very nature. No darkness. Not even a hint of it. And again - what is darkness? Absence of Light. Light exposes. Light highlights. Light illuminates what is real. Reality. Truth. Light exposes. What you get with God - and those in His family - is Truth. It’s a family trait. In the family of God, you are gonna get truth. Truth about God. Truth about His Son. Truth about us, and about sin. The question is, what do we say about what God says? What do we say about the truth, and can you and I handle the truth?
In the movie "A Few Good Men", Tom Cruise as the Navy lawyer says he wants the truth, and Jack Nicholson as Marine Col. Nathan Jessup shouts, "you can’t handle the truth!" He is saying that there is a grotesque and incomprehensible reality which most civilians would rather just ignore. The truth about what he feels he has to do at Guantanamo Bay. And for us there is a real grotesque reality, an uncomfortable, inconvenient truth which most of us are default wired to do our darnedest to try and sweep under the rug. To hide from the light of day and from our consciousness. We prefer to walk in darkness. Jesus said it - Light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than the light, because their deeds were evil. We humans like to say that we are all basically good, and like to ignore or deny the fact of the depravity of man.
But the inconvenient and grotesque truth is, all have sinned. That’s what God says. All of us were born in sin. We were born separated from God and living for self. Instinctively choosing what I want over God and what He wants. As sons of Adam and daughters of Eve it is our default position, from the start. We can do no other, apart from His gracious intervention.
If we say we have not sinned, we deceive ourselves, John says. And we are calling God a liar. Darkness walking. Lying. We are not practicing/doing/working/making/producing the truth. It is about outcome. Truth is the outcome. Out comes truth. Truth comes out. Those in God’s family produce truth. And what is the truth? God, and His Word. It is precisely what John heard from Jesus. The words of Jesus. I am the Truth, He said.
What is truth? It is not a new question. Pilate asked that question of Jesus. But we are living in the so-called post-truth age. An age where facts no longer seem to matter, not as much as feelings. Don’t confuse me with facts - I just want to feel good. I want to feel good about myself, and about life, about those around me. An age where lies create a false view of reality and serve to reinforce prejudices. Biases. We are all biased towards something - and our greatest bias is towards self. And against the truth that I am broken, and the world is broken. We are wired for paradise, for perfection, but the grotesque truth is that I am not perfect - far from it. I am not ok, nor is my neighbor. I am sinful, and separated from God, from the One Who is Light. And inside of me, in my flesh, I am desperate to maintain and reinforce the bias, the illusion that I am ok. To hide my sin and my shortcomings and my brokenness. I don’t need help, or forgiveness - or a Savior. I am not accountable to the Creator of the universe. I just need to hide. Or blame someone else - live in denial. Lies as old as the garden. So I have two choices. I can do my darnedest to try and continue hiding from Him and from the truth about who I am and what I do/have done - or I can come to the Light. I can come into the Light, walk in the Light, and be honest about who I am. I can embrace the Truth, and follow the Truth. The truth about Who God is and what He is like, and the truth about who I am and what I am like. This is the family trait. Those who have God as their Father can handle the truth. They prefer it. They insist on it, in fact. They share this family trait of walking in the Light, of living lives which are honest, full of integrity, doing what is right, and making it right when we don’t. We are those who CAN handle the truth. We admit our guilt. You find it throughout the pages of Scripture:
Lev. 5:1 “If you are called to testify about something you have seen or that you know about, it is sinful to refuse to testify, and you will be punished for your sin.
Lev. 5:2 “Or suppose you unknowingly touch something that is ceremonially unclean, such as the carcass of an unclean animal. When you realize what you have done, you must admit your defilement and your guilt. This is true whether it is a wild animal, a domestic animal, or an animal that scurries along the ground.
Lev. 5:3 “Or suppose you unknowingly touch something that makes a person unclean. When you realize what you have done, you must admit your guilt.
Lev. 5:4 “Or suppose you make a foolish vow of any kind, whether its purpose is for good or for bad. When you realize its foolishness, you must admit your guilt.
Lev. 5:5 “When you become aware of your guilt in any of these ways, you must confess your sin.
We admit our guilt - to Jesus - and He takes care of it.
“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
Thus begins the Narnian adventure of the Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The two younger Pevensies - along with their spoiled, bratty cousin, Eustace, find themselves on a boat traveling the eastern seas of Narnia.
On one of the islands the crew lands on, Eustace finds a dragon's lair and is very greedy for the treasure. He puts on a gold bracelet and falls asleep, and when he wakes up, he has been turned into a huge dragon, with the bracelet now cutting deep into his huge dragony arm. Lewis writes, "Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself." Eustace has fleeting thoughts of relief at being the biggest thing around, but he quickly realizes he is cut off from his companions, and all of humanity, and the weight of loneliness begins to show him how odious his behavior had been. He desperately wants to change.
That night, Aslan comes to Eustace and leads him to a large well "like a very big round bath with marble steps going down into it." with water so clear, and he thought if he could get in there and bathe it would ease the pain in his arm. But Aslan tells him he has to undress first. And doesn't God ask this of us? As Lewis wrote in Letters to Malcolm: "We must lay before him [God] what is in us; not what ought to be in us.”
Eustace finds that no matter how many layers of dragon skins he manages to peel off of himself, he is still a dragon.
“Then the lion said - but I don't know if it spoke – ‘You will have to let me undress you.’ I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it.
“The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I've ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off.”
“Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off ... And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me - I didn't like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I'd no skin on - and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw why. I'd turned into a boy again..." - C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
God/Aslan had to go to extreme measures to help Eustace realize that in his heart he was a beast. He needed the proverbial light to go on. The Lord of Light shines the light on our beastliness, so that we will admit to it to the point where we turn to Him and trust Him to take care of it. We cannot peel off the dragon skin by ourselves. The process is by no means easy or pain-free. But our first and most critical step is simply realizing that we are a dragon. Step 1. Isn’t that the first step, 12-steppers? Admitting that we have a problem? A big scaly ugly one. Huge. Unmanageable. Houston, we have a problem.
The family traits of Light and Truth show up in the lives of those who profess to follow Jesus. He faithfully shines the light on our sinfulness. On our desperate need for a Savior, for Jesus. And to trust Him - not only for forgiveness but also for cleansing. Forgiveness is primarily positional - when we trust in Jesus, in the truth about His death and the blood He shed on the cross for our sin, God forgives the guilt of our sin and removes it as far as the east is from the west. Gone. Real gone. All the way. Forever. Our position in God’s eyes is as if we had never sinned. When we are in Jesus, in God’s eyes we’ve done everything right. And of course we struggle to believe that truth because in our experience we still struggle with sin. We still mess up. We still fall short of loving God with all our heart and we still choose what we want over what He wants and we still put other things in His rightful place in our hearts. And so we need the Light of His Truth to cleanse us, to give us that delicious sense of being clean and righteous in His sight. Justified. Just as if we never sinned. That place of perfect peace where I know that I know that I know that in His eyes I have done everything right. Not because of anything I have done - other than trusting in Jesus. Coming to Him, into the light, and admitting that I am not perfect. I am a sinner. Which still leaves us with the same two choices - every moment of every day. We can choose to the path of Light, or the path of darkness. We can choose to be honest about our sin, about our mistakes, and find grace and forgiveness and cleansing in Jesus, or we can hide. We can try to cover it up. We can lie about it, deny it, and pretend that we haven’t sinned. We can call God a liar, in other words.
And when we do this, John says God’s Word is not in us. One of the core issues of our time, of all time, in fact - God’s Word. Is it true? Is it still true? Is it all true? How can we trust what the Bible says - is it trustworthy? Is it binding on all people at all times everywhere? Is it binding on me, in other words? Did God really say that? A question - an accusation, really - as old as the garden itself. Has God really said that (Gen 3.1)? If God said it, it’s "probably" true, but how do we know if He said that? A tiny seed of doubt, a little leaven of rebellion, and if left unanswered, left to fester, it will produce a crop of unbelief which will spring up to a fountain of godlessness and death. Is there a good answer to that question? Many - including myself - say, yes, yes! We believe that God’s people - including John the Witness - were moved by His Spirit to write down His Words, and the rest of those who were truly His received this Word and obeyed it - saw it confirmed by transformed lives and societies and by fulfilled prophecies and miracles and by the empty tomb of Christ Himself - and they faithfully preserved and handed it down to us so that we too could believe and receive and enter into eternal life. If you hear His word today, do not harden your heart, simply believe...
So the question is - can I handle the truth? Can you handle the truth? Can you admit that you have blown it? That you have sinned, that in your heart of hearts you're an ugly scaly beast and you need to be rescued? You need to be forgiven? You need Jesus. The blood of Jesus is the only way God has made for us to be forgiven. John is saying, if we confess our sins, if we admit to them, if we agree with Him that we have blown it, that He will forgive us. You can tell Him that right now.
And for those of us who have already put our trust in Jesus for the forgiveness of our sins, this then becomes truth which we practice and cultivate every day. We don’t need God’s forgiveness again - His forgiveness in Christ covers all our sins - past, present, and future. Jesus’ death on the cross paid for all my sins. But we daily remind ourselves of our deep need for Jesus, and we live in this place of honesty, of being honest with God and ourselves when we mess up. Because we still do struggle and blow it from time to time. So we agree with God when we sin, and we remind ourselves that He has already forgiven it. That’s what confession is - we agree with what God says. We agree with God about our sin - it is sin, and it is forgiven. We leave the guilt behind, and press on. Clean. Washed whiter than.
What’s the whitest thing you can think of? We’re not talking about ethnicity or skin color…
[white things - hyams beach, cyphochilus beetle, titanium dioxide, snow]
White shows up quite a bit in heaven. White throne. White cloud. White horse - all places where the Lord is seated. White hair. White garments and robes - washed white by the blood of the Lamb (Rev 7.14). Don’t get me wrong - God created all the colors to be enjoyed. But white. White is the color of clean - but it is technically not a color, is it? That which is most white is that which most perfectly reflects the entire spectrum of light, is it not? God is Light, and we are washed white so as to more perfectly reflect a broader spectrum of Who He is and what He is like. We exhibit family traits.
So yes, we still do sin, We still blow it. But admitting our sin. Owning our mistakes. Bringing those into the light. This is a family trait, a distinguishing characteristic of the family of God. It’s something we share in common - and this kind of open honesty helps foster a deeper level of sharing between us. We are kindred spirits, because we share this sense of overwhelming gratitude for the magnitude of God’s grace and forgiveness, for all He has done in sending His Son to purchase our forgiveness on that cruel Roman cross. We’re okay with our brokenness and with one another’s brokenness, we accept one another, because God has accepted us, thru Jesus. No more pretense. No more pretending. No airs. No need to fake it. We don’t need to try and put on a good face and make like we have it all together. It is the blessed beauty of being able to relax and be ourselves. Like we tend to do in our home. Family. Because that is what family does - we accept and love and commit to one another, in spite of our faults. Because we are family.
So, how about it - can you and I handle the truth?
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