Pursuit of wisdom for today from the Ancient of Days
1 John 1:5-10
A dazzling and demanding goodness
It seems that John’s readers were in some doubt as to whether the gospel of the Lord Jesus really does give a correct picture of evil and provide the actual remedy. The falsehoods that were spreading claimed that both the Father and the Son were tainted by evil because they had engaged with the physical world, supposedly the root of all evil.
John wrote to clear up the confusion, to settle the hearts of his readers into the reality of forgiveness in Christ and the rescue He brings.
Right thinking about good and evil is the continual companion of eternal life. In fact, an open admission of our own sinful failure and its unacceptability is the doorway to trusting God to carry us out of death into life. Our brokenness collides with His wholeness, and a solution must be found in His grace.
John opened his letter with an emphatic assurance that this fellowship has been made ours by the Lord Jesus. These are not secrets for an elite cabal but a feast available for any who are willing.
Front and center, God is light with perfect purity. He has no evil, cruelty, or badness in the least shadow of either action or impulse. Goodness is perfect and universal in His nature. Holiness is His whole being.
God’s agenda for His people is that they would walk with Him in fellowship, and this requires that they be made clean. We should be under no illusions about the mixing of good and evil.
John is emphatic by mentioning three ways that we might think wrongly about evil and characterizes all of them as involving deception.
If we claim that we are in fellowship with God but our path is in darkness, then our claim is hypocritical. If we claim that we have no sin by nature, then we are also liars and self-deluded if we actually believe it. If we claim that we have never acted out a sin, then we are contradicting God and making Him out to be a liar.
What is wonderful about this picture is that we can admit our sin and walk in the light — fellowship with a holy God because the blood of Christ is continually making us clean.
Calvary covers all of our sins: past, present, and future. It’s a settled matter, once for all. The discussion here concerns daily, on-going fellowship with God. Confession and cleansing are a continual process applied as necessary. The blood of the Savior is adequate to the task of enabling our walk in the light.
The light of God’s holiness is dazzling. If you are close to Him, it will shine all around you and all through you. There will be no escape from its searching rays and no lack of its healing powers. As we look at Him, the Holy Spirit changes us from glory to glory into that same image of godliness that we observe. (2 Corinthians 3:18)
On the other hand, you cannot be close to Him and shelter a life of shadow. If you think that’s what you’re doing, then you’re kidding yourself.
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Pursuit of wisdom for today from the Ancient of Days
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