1. Christ the Life
CHAPTER 1
Christ the Life
The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. (1 John 1:2)
He is the true God and eternal life. (1 John 5:20)
This significant word “LIFE” is the keynote of the two profoundest books in the New Testament, the Gospel of John and the First Epistle of John. The other New Testament books tell of truth, character and righteousness but these tell us of life. The others tell the believer what to do and be, but John tells the believer the secret of becoming and accomplishing the things set before him. The mystery of nature is life. The one thing short of which all man’s wisdom and resources reach is life. Science can give us the principles of things and can even reconstruct the forces of nature, but only God can give this strange and subtle thrill which sets all in spontaneous motion and gives it life.
The Sermon on the Mount tells what an ideal life should be but the Gospel of John tells how that ideal may become a reality. It starts with the mysterious secret of the new birth, where life begins, and it leads up to the highest developments of the sanctified and glorified life in the ages to come. The First Epistle of John still more fully unfolds the source, the evolution and the outflow of divine life.
Before a planet rolled, an insect hummed or an angel sang, Christ was Himself the eternal life. In the original First John 1:2 is given a stronger emphasis than the Authorized Version expresses and it reads literally thus: “We show unto you that life, the eternal, which was with the Father and was manifested unto us.” First John 5:20 more fully expresses this thought, “He is the true God, and the life eternal.” Jesus is the Life and from Him all life has come. The life of nature is the outflow of His creating power. The life of mind and thought and intellect is but a radiation from His infinite mind. The power that moves the universe from the mightiest sphere to the minutest spray is His personal life, for “By him all things consist” (Colossians 1:17), and “in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). The tint of the Easter lily, the fragrance of the hyacinth, the teeming life of the vegetable world all come from Him.
Every new born soul is begotten of His life. The Church of every age and clime is the new creation of His life and power. Every saint is sustained by the life of the living Head. It is so good, therefore, to know that His life is life eternal and that in Him there is a fountain of life that never can be dry, a sufficiency that never can fail. The word “eternal” here does not merely convey the idea of existence that has neither beginning nor ending but speaks of a higher sphere of life. It is life that belongs to a loftier plane than the things that are seen and temporal. It is life that is as infinite in its scope as it is enduring in its length, a great unfathomable ocean of boundless fullness and glorious all-sufficiency.
Let us adore the Prince of Life, the Living One, the Glorious Son of God who stands before us in His radiant and eternal life proclaiming, “I am the Living One; I was dead, and behold I am alive for ever and ever…” (Revelation 1:18a).
The Life Manifested
“The life was manifested.” This includes the whole story of the incarnation and earthly life of the Lord Jesus. This also covers the meaning of the phrase so often used by John in his Gospel and Epistle, “The Word of Life.” In the original it says, “The Word of the Life.” Just as a word is the expression of a human thought so He is the expression of God’s thought and will, the manifestation of what was already there but unrevealed. Instead of giving man the written word alone, He sent a living Person to exhibit in the actual details of His earthly life the character of God and His purposes of love to the human race.
The story is told of a missionary who, having failed to bring conviction to the nationals in the Congo by years of preaching, at last stopped in the midst of a course of lessons on the Sermon on the Mount, and announced to the Africans that he was going to live this sermon himself among them. Before the day was over, they gave him ample opportunities of doing so by claiming all his worldly goods, and he unresistingly, gave “to him that asked, and from him that would borrow turned not away.”
At nightfall the missionary’s wife was in dismay, for her home was stripped, and starvation stared them in the face. But that was only the first act in the drama. Before the night was over, the Africans began to reflect upon the strange example they had witnessed. “This man,” they said, “is not like the traders. He does not ask us for things, but he gives us all he has. He must be God’s man, and we had better be careful how we treat him.” And so the following day witnessed the scene of yesterday reversed and everything brought back with compound interest. This was the second act of the drama. The third act was a great revival, the conversion of a thousand souls and the organization of the largest church in the Congo. “The life was manifested,” and they saw it, and it was an object lesson more mighty than words.
So Christ has manifested in His life the message of the Father and the meaning of the Gospel. His earthly life was a complete pattern of all that God expects a true human life to be. For the first time in the history of the race the Father beheld man of whom He could say, “In him I am well pleased.”
Christ’s human life covered every side of our earthly relationships that we are called to sustain. The life was manifested in every tint and shade and in every minute detail of typical human experience, so that there is no situation which can arise to which we may not apply the simple watchword. “What would Jesus do?” In our zeal for the great doctrines connected with His death, let us never depreciate the value of His life and the importance of His perfect example, both as a revelation of God and as an ideal for humanity.
The Life Crucified
While we must not undervalue the life of Christ we cannot overestimate the significance of His death.
There is a school of teachers who say much about Christian socialism and the application of Christ’s example to the practical details of all our social and secular questions. But these men stop short of Calvary and leave out of view that great event which is the key of all Scripture and all Christian hope and experience. And so very soon in this deeply spiritual epistle, John introduces that expression which bids men pause with a hush of holy awe and tenderness—“The Blood.”
John had hardly started his letter before two deep crimson shades had covered all the page: the one the dark stain of sin, the other the precious blood of Christ. “[T]he blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from sin” (1 John 1:7). This is the great fact back of the cross of Calvary and the resurrection. The death of Jesus Christ, the life so divine, so human, so beautiful, laid down in sacrifice and self-surrender, was not only as an example of submission, teaching us how to die; but a ransom for the guilty and a satisfaction to the righteousness of God for the sins of men.
With all his deep insight into the spirit and life of Jesus, John, above all the disciples, recognized the sacrificial meaning of His blood. “Behold the Lamb of God” seems to ring out as the undertone of his beautiful Gospel. “The blood of Jesus Christ” is the background of his epistles. “To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood” is the keynote of the oft-repeated redemption song of his sublime Apocalypse. The blood of Jesus Christ just means His life, with all its infinite value, given as a substitute and ransom for our forfeited life.
Now it is not enough to appreciate in a sentimental way the sufferings of our Lord, and weep in sympathy over His shame and agony. One may weep over some pathetic story of human sorrow or under the spell of moving eloquence, and yet know nothing of the power of Christ’s blood. The death of Christ stands for a great and potential fact, and is of no value until faith enters into partnership with Him in that fact, and knows by personal appropriation “the fellowship of his sufferings.” The death of Christ simply means for me that when He died I died, and in God’s view I am now as if I had been executed for my own sin and was now recognized as another person who has risen with Christ and is justified from his former sins because he has been executed for them, because anyone who has died has been freed from sin” (Romans 6:7). Not only so it is the secret of my sanctification, for on that cross of Calvary I, the sinful self, was put to death; and when I lay myself over with Him upon that cross and reckon myself dead, Christ’s risen life passes into me and it is no longer my struggling, my goodness or my badness, but my Lord who lives in me. Therefore while I abide in Him I am counted even as He, and enabled to walk even as He walked.
Beloved, have you entered into the death of Christ and counted it yours, and through it are you now alive unto Him in the “power of His resurrection”?
The Life Risen
It is just as wrong to stop at the cross as it is to stop before the cross. It is just as wrong to have merely a dead Christ as to eliminate the death of Christ from our theology. Christ’s death is only the background for His resurrection. The life that was laid down was taken up again and now He stands before us saying, “I am he that liveth, and was dead.” It is not the cross with the Savior hanging on it, but it is the cross on which He hung but where He hangs no longer, the grave in which He lay but open now, and the very gateway of life immortal. And so this passage is full of suggestions of the risen Lord. “… and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of Life” brings to mind the morning when He stood among them and said, “Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have” (Luke 24:39). There is something infinitely touching in language like this from the pen of John, for he had leaned upon the Master’s breast, and doubtless he had proved the reality of his Master’s resurrection and claimed once more the familiar place and touch of love.
And this leads us to notice that this expression—the Blood of Christ—has a higher and deeper meaning in connection with the resurrection, for “the blood is the life” and it is the life of Jesus Christ, His risen life as well as His atoning death, which cleanses us from all sin. We are “saved by His life” quite as truly as by death.
In one of the ancient types of Exodus we read of an occasion when Moses, having sacrificed certain bullocks at the foot of the mount and shed their blood upon the altar, took part of the blood in basins and sprinkled it upon the people and took it up with him into the mount where they met with God and were accepted because of the blood. The second action of the blood seems to denote the resurrection life of Christ, the life taken back again after it had been once laid down. And so with grateful love we celebrate the victory of our risen Lord and hail Him as the Prince of Life and the Living One, living now as the Conqueror of death, as the Possessor of a new life for all who are united to Him in His death and resurrection.
For this life is not for Himself but for us; having risen from the dead He now comes to relive His life in us. This is the secret of sanctification as it is unfolded in the First Epistle of John, and it is the solution of every puzzling problem in connection with that epistle. Perhaps no portion of the New Testament has so many seeming contradictions on the subject of holiness as this epistle. For example we are told in the first chapter, “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). And yet a little later we are told with equal emphasis, “No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in him; he cannot go on sinning, because he has been born of God” (1 John 3:9). Now how can these be reconciled?
It is all very simple. First, it is true that we—that is the human “we”—have sin and have sinned. There is no good in us and we have renounced ourselves as worthless and helpless; but, on the other hand, we have taken Him to be our life and His life is a sinless one. The seed that He plants is as spotless as that beautiful bulb which, when planted in the unclean soil, grows up as pure as an angel’s wing, unstained by the soil around it. It belongs to another element and is in its own nature essentially and inherently pure.
The key to this whole mystery is supplied by two verses in this epistle. “No one who lives in him keeps on sinning” (1 John 3:6). Here is the secret of holiness, not our holiness but His. There is no account made here of our perfection, but it is only as we cling to Him and draw our life each moment from Him that we are kept from sin. It is the indwelling life.
Again, “We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin; the one who was born of God keeps him safe, and the evil one cannot harm him” (1 John 5:18). Here again the same truth is expressed in a different way. The only begotten Son of God dwelling in us keeps us from the power of sin and the assaults of Satan; and although the devil often strikes, yet we are like the little insect with the pane of glass between it and the bird of prey, and “that wicked one toucheth us not.”
There is one more passage which belongs to this connection. “He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life” (1 John 5:12). Here it is union with the Person of the Lord Jesus that constitutes the source of spiritual life. The secret, therefore, which Paul had found, “Christ in you the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27), is the secret also of the disciple who leaned on the Master’s breast. God grant that we may know Christ, the secret of life in all His fullness, the Life Eternal, the Life Manifested, the Life Crucified, the Resurrection Life, the Life Indwelling through Jesus Christ our Lord to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.