Fellowship With God
FELLOWSHIP WITH GOD
1 JOHN 1:5-10
God is light and true Christians love what is pure and right and want to live that way.
We saw that fellowship with our fellow Christians depended on our fellowship with God. If there is in us what God cannot share, there can be no true fellowship with him. For the opposites light and darkness, see Revelation 21:25; 22:5. To understand 1:5 we should think of the effects of a car’s headlights, or even more, of a searchlight beam; with them we have either light or darkness; there is no intermediate zone. People may hesitate to judge another person, but for God the issue is clear-cut; a person is either in the dark or in the light. Because God is light, we can know him and his will, but it involves our laying ourselves bare to the revealing light as well.
We have here a darkness-light parallelism, each on an ascending scale; on the dark side are 1:6,8,10; on the light side 1:7,9; 2:1. First, we have the person who does not recognize the darkness, ie the lack of fellowship with God in which they live (1:6). This is followed by the person claiming perfection at any given moment (1:8), and finally, in 1:10 there is the one who denies that they have ever sinned or show any of its imperfections (the perfect tense in Greek). It is probable, however, that John is not thinking merely of those people who have persuaded themselves that darkness is light and that they are mysteriously right and all others wrong, but also of those people who in any given position claim complete rightness. With the ascending darkness of sin there is also the increasing power of Christ. In 1:9 we have the need of definite confession of the sin. Finally, in 2:1 we have awakened sinners calling on Christ to deal with the serious situation in which they find themselves.
The way to fellowship with our brothers and sisters is through fellowship with God, but lack of fellowship with our brothers and sisters will reveal that we are out of fellowship with God (1:7). This verse also encourages us to avoid an undue preoccupation with our sins. Unless it is something serious we have persisted in, it is sufficient to walk in the light.