When you cook a pot of soup you can stare at it for many long minutes at low temperatures, and although you can know that it’s warm, you still might not know what’s in it. But if you turn up the heat and get it going into a rolling boil, you will see all the ingredients come flying off the bottom of the pan and churn around and around in the broth so that you can soon say that you know just about everything that’s there.
The Apostle John turns up the heat on Christian doctrine throughout this letter, and here at the beginning of chapter 3 we see some important chunks whiz by. But John’s short sentences aren’t disconnected thoughts; they are all part of the same thought, and yet each idea can stand on its own like a masterpiece given its own room in a gallery.
3 How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!
About the same time that John was writing this, another Christian wrote to the Corinthians saying that the perfection of God’s love “is beyond interpretation.”1 To be a child of God is to be loved by him completely: God does not love by half-measures. Jesus himself assured us that he would acknowledge us “before the angels of God” (Luke 12:8).
The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. 2 Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.
What will it be like to see God in person? Blasphemers sometimes grouse that they will begin their time in heaven by asking the Almighty some questions about wrongs they have undergone in this lifetime. Such things sound like a mass murderer shouting at his mother because she didn’t make his bed for him. When we finally find ourselves standing before God, we will fall down and worship him.
In fact, as we contemplate standing before God, it’s hard for me to forget what so many men in the Bible said or did when they spoke to God. Jeremiah’s lips quivered as he said that he was too young. Isaiah’s knees knocked because he was too sinful. Moses wanted God to think twice about picking him. We are all too sinful to face God, and that’s part of what John is saying: We will not be sinful any longer. Our sins have been atoned for. An angel flew to the altar in Isaiah’s vision and touched his sinful lips with a live coal, and said “Your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for” (Isaiah 6:7). For the whole world, the blood of Jesus has rescued us from our sins. Because of Christ, we are children of God. We shall be like him, which means that the image of God, lost by Adam and Eve, will be restored to us again.
3 Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as he is pure.
In this verse, John says exactly the same thing that Paul says again and again in his Epistles: The hope, which is the faith we have in Jesus, is what purifies us. And we are just as pure as God is by faith in Christ. Another way of saying this is that we are saved by our faith alone. There is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved (thanks for putting it that way, Peter)—and our faith rests in Jesus and only in Jesus.
Anyone who says anything different is an antichrist. Anyone who says anything different is dragging people back under the condemnation of the Law, and no one can be saved by keeping the law, because apart from Jesus we all stand condemned by the law.
4 Everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is lawlessness. 5 But you know that he appeared so that he might take away our sins. And in him is no sin. 6 No one who lives in him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him. (NIV)
John continues that same thought with the reminder that sin damns. And the reason that sin damns is that it pulls the sinner back under the law by showing that the sinner cannot keep the law. The law shows us our sins; only the gospel of forgiveness in Christ saves. And the gospel of Christ covers every sin.
John reminds us that the freedom we now have does mean that we have a license to sin. “No one who lives in him keeps on sinning.” That would be like saying that an unfaithful spouse who has been forgiven would assume that they are now free to be unfaithful again, “since they are forgiven.” Of course not. What we do in response to Christ’s forgiveness is point the way to Christ to the world. We do it with our own words when we can; we do it with our combined efforts (offerings that work toward mission work) when we can’t go in person, and we do it with our lives every waking moment. We never know who might be watching what we say and do. The way we behave may very well lead someone to say, “Why is he different? Maybe I should try his church, too.”
God’s forgiveness and his indescribable love are gifts we want to share with the world. There’s plenty for everyone. It will never run out. Keep passing the word, the whole nourishing, boiling soup of Christian doctrine. Who can you reach with it today?
1 1 Clement 50:1. Pastors and students of Greek might be either amazed or amused to find that Clement’s Greek says οὐκ ἔστιν ἐξήγησις, “is not (subject to) exegesis.”
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. His wife, Kathryn, attended Chapel from 1987-1990 while studying Secondary Education (Theater and Math) at UW-Madison. Kathryn’s father, John Meyer, was also the first man to serve as a Vicar at Chapel.
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