By Professor E M Blaiklock MA., Litt.D.

3 THE DEBT OF LOVE: "Everyone who has this hope in him," says John "purifies himself." Upright conduct and clean living must seek to demonstrate such a faith. The sectaries who were perpetually stirring John's indignation were blandly claiming exemption from the moral law. "Let there be no mistake," says John,
"continuing in sin marks the absence of genuine Christian experience.
." Verse 6 in the King James Version appears, but only on the surface, to contradict the earlier teaching of the Epistle (I: 8; 2: 2). It runs: "Whosoever abideth in Him sinneth not. Whosoever sinneth hath not seen Him, neither known Him."
The verse, of course, must be read in the context of the whole letter. The present tense in the Greek verb implied habit, continuity, unbroken sequence. A Christian is quite capable of sinning. That is a sad fact of common experience, and John has named the remedy while admitting the fact.
Nevertheless, opposition to sin, and hatred of it, is the ruling principle of life. A Christian may fail and fall, but the Enemy has but brief triumph. The fallen rises again, confesses his fault, and presses on. The habitual sinner does none of these things. Just as the apostates who had left the Church proved, in John's view, that they had never belonged to it, so the one who "continues in sin," who covets no change, and seeks no victory, proves in the act that he had never known Christ.
The true Christian echoes Paul: "Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. . .”
There is a sharp enough distinction between the two types.
"In this," says v. 10, "the children of God, and the children of the devil, are revealed." We have several times had occasion to note in reading this letter that the accompanying Gospel throws light upon both its thought and its language. In Ch. 8 of his Gospel (vv. 37-47) John told of an incident which appears to have been again in his mind when he penned the words we are now considering. It is a typical exhibition of the world's hatred, with the Jews of Jerusalem snarling hostility before Christ, and proceeding even to the ultimate wickedness of attempted murder. They claim in the midst of it all, to be
"Abraham's children". Forgetting the long history of Israel, they have, they say, never been "in bondage to any man"; indeed they have "one father, even God." With language hard to parallel in trenchant scorn, the Lord lays bare the hollowness of their pretensions. "If you are Abraham's children, act as Abraham did; but you seek to kill me. If God were indeed your Father, you would love me. Rather you belong to your father the devil, and seek to do his desires—he who was a murderer from the beginning."
It may be imagined that as John wrote of the two worlds, the world or realm of death from which the Christian "has passed over"
', and the world of life into which by faith he has moved, he saw with some vividness in the mirror of memory the scene in Jerusalem almost a lifetime earlier. Here they stood, the two races, the children of God, and the children of the devil. Life and death, light and darkness, love and hatred, such were the antitheses. Cain was a murderer because he was of "his father the devil," seeking the fulfilment of his father's lusts. The Jews, ranged against their rejected Messiah, were of the same fell ancestry, recognisable by their deeds. All history is the record of the twain, of those whose breath and touch is death, who strew the years with their million million slain, and of those whose vibrant life begets its like, whose ministration heals the bodies and souls of men, the salt of whose living preserves the world from corruption. John thus prepares the way for v. 13.