FAITH IS THE VICTORY By PROFESSOR E M BLAIKLOCK MA LITT D
OUR FREEDOM:
Two verses remain—27 and 28.
In the first John returns to his confidence in his readers.
They need rather reminding than teaching. Let none think that this is an excuse for anti-intellectualism. Liberal theology, in the first generation of this unhappy century and at the end of the last, took root and devastated the Church, because evangelical Christianity, pre-occupied with preaching, neg lected scholarship, and bred too many who despised real learning, and consecrated thinking, because so much learning and thinking had gone woefully astray. In Christ there is wisdo and insight available for common men, a benediction of the mind which flows from the presence of Him who was the truth, but let no one imagine that reading and study are unnecessary for those who would know the Word, or that intellgence and learning are not useful in His service. The whole of John's letter indeed indicates, as did the Gospel he had written, that instruction in Christian truth is necessary. It is false intellectualism that v. 27 has in mind.
Verse 28 is a practical conclusion. Somewhere, sometime we shall all meet the Lord. And in what spirit shall we meet Him? Let it be with the fearless trust with which a child meets his father, not 'shamed from His presence.’ The phrase contains a picture of shrinking form and averted face. We have met the the word 'boldness' before. It literally
'freedom of speech,' and then, by implication, the calm confidence which is unabashed, able to speak openly, and free
from all dissembling, reticence, or deceit.
Phillips' translation underlines the essential meaning well.
It runs: "So that, if He were suddenly to reveal Himself, we should know exactly where we stand, and should not have to shrink away from His presence." Set in its historical context the verse is astonishing. There is a notion abroad that God is automatically accessible. Those who make no profession of loyalty to Christ, but retain a vague theism, commonly treat God as a refuge in need, a Being with whom to fraternise.
The ancient world would have found the notion incomprehensible.
Paul, for example, spoke in Athens before the Epicureans and Stoics. The two schools claimed the allegiance of the world's best minds. The Epicureans were prepared, with some reluctance, to admit the existence of deities, but they were remote from man because they were uninterested in him.
Tennyson caught the Epicurean picture of the gods in The Lotus Eaters:
... they smile in secret looking over wasted lands, Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps,
and fiery sands,
Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and
praying hands.
The Stoics worshipped a god so impersonal that the mind could not conceive the image, remote because unreal.
Lesser minds had been dominated in their thoughts of deity by the image of the tyrant king. Read the fifth chapter of Esther, and see King Ahasuerus extend his golden sceptre towards his favourite queen, who had dared to enter unbidden the royal presence. Without such grace the penalty of such presumption was death. This image was transferred to God, and multitudes went in fear of deities remote because they were royal, and that word implied cruel, capricious, lustful, and unapproachable.
In the Old Testament, God's true progressive revelation, deity was remote because deity was holy, and man sinful unfit for the pure presence. This was a necessary phase in the preparation for Christ. Sinai was fenced around, and no unholy
foot of man or beast was permitted to approach the holy place. In the lovely Tabernacle, built to teach men that God's presence was real, but pure and unseen, the Holy of Holies was divided from the rest, a sacred and an awesome meeting place, where the high priest alone could go after the most solemn preparation and for the purposes of atonement, but once a year.
It is the theme of the New Testament that God was "made nigh" in Christ, not only comprehensible (John 1: 18), but accessible. At history's consummation, when the work of redemption and atonement was finished on Calvary, the veil of the Temple was torn from top to bottom to signify that God was no longer remote but near, open to the coming and supplication of man—and it is this truth which, utterly new and strange to ancient thinking though it was, has been presumptuously taken for granted in the modern world.
Let it be noted that it is the Christian's profound privilege.
"I am the Way," said the Lord, "no man cometh to the Father but by me." Through Him alone the suppliant must come, and cannot thus come without surrender and repentance.
Granted that surrender, that abandonment of self-will and rebellion, that repentance for sin, it is the suppliant's right, the penitent's undoubted privilege, to approach God without fear, without shame, without shrinking, and without other preparation and intermediary. "He is faithful and just," we have already observed, "to forgive us our sin."
The pagan past was wrong in imagining gods remote because uninterested. The God of the Bible and of Christ loves man, and in Christ suffered for him. The corrupt image of a tyrant god was equally wrong. The God who was holy and therefore remote was a reality, but it is that God which a Christian, made holy in his Lord, may hourly approach.
The spirit shrinks from claiming such holiness, but it is not our own achievement that we boast, but Christ's. No purgatory, no penance, precedes our coming, only the sacrifice once made. This is the amazing privilege John invites us to take up without trembling. We should know "exactly where we stand," and sense no shrinking in His presence. Thomas
Binney put it well a century and a half ago:
“Oh how shall I whose native sphere Is dark, whose mind is dim,
Before the Ineffable appear, And on my naked spirit bear,
The uncreated beam?
He answers his own question:
There is a way for man to rise, To that sublime abode, An offering and a sacrifice, A Holy Spirit's energies,
An Advocate with God.
It was said of Brother Lawrence "that when he had failed in his duty, he only confessed his fault, saying to God: 'I shall never do otherwise if you leave me to myself. 'Tis you must hinder my falling and mend what is amiss.' After that he gave himself no more uneasiness about it. He thought that we ought to act with God in the greatest simplicity, speaking to Him frankly and plainly, and imploring His assistance in our affairs just as they happen." Such is our boldness before God.
In it is health of mind, for fear is a poison, which maddens and corrupts. Therein is our full stature as men and women, for fearful souls are something less than a whole. There is peace.
PRAYER: Help us, Lord and Saviour, to abide in Thee, consciously, hour by hour, to lay aside all that which we might draw from our own strength and draw all from Thee by faith. Help us to walk as free men, unabashed in Thy presence, not because we have aught in ourselves to commend us, but because we are bold in faith, and confident in the trust we cherish in Christ, our righteousness. We thank Thee for our advocate, and pray that we may, in quietness of spirit, commit our whole case to Him.