Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Sanctification and Growth in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
It is an enormous privilege for me to join you at this first Yorkshire assembly. I cannot resist saying that in my own family I do have a north of England connection, after a fashion. Both my parents were born in the United Kingdom, my father in Northern Ireland and my mother was a Londoner, but after World War I, after she had lost her father, she was shipped north to Hull for four years because her widowed mother couldn’t handle four children back in London.
So between the ages of 10 and 14 she was a northerner herself, and then they emigrated to Canada, and I was born there, so I’ve always felt at least some sort of vague connection with the north, and it’s an enormous privilege to be here. We lived for nine years in England, and many, many times my family and I spent our holidays walking through parts of northern England, through the dales and through the moors and so forth, so I feel as if I have some connections with you, even if they are perhaps not as intimate as I would like them to be.
Now, I would like to direct your attention to Psalm 1. I hope you’ll keep your Bible open at that passage for a while, and then from Psalm 1 we’re going to stretch out a little farther. Transparently, Psalm 1 presents a contrast between the just person and the unjust person, between the righteous person and the unrighteous person. In verses 1–3, the righteous person is described; in verses 4 and 5, the unrighteous person; and then there’s a final summarizing contrast in verse 6. That’s the way this psalm is put together, right on the surface of things.
Now if we focus on the first three verses, how the righteous person is described, that person is described negatively in verse 1. “Blessed is the man who does not walk according to the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers.” This is what such a person is not like. In fact, you can almost feel the text grinding to a halt.
There is a danger that someone begins to walk according to the counsel of wicked people. They’re picking up the advice, the perspective, the frame of reference, the worldview of wicked people, and then, if they walk along that path far enough, eventually, we’re told, they “stand in the way of sinners.”
Now I know that’s what the Hebrew says; it’s still a bad translation, because in English to stand in someone’s way suggests a hindrance. For those of us of an older generation, who were brought up on things like Robin Hood and Little John, then Robin Hood and Little John stand in each other’s way on the bridge, and one of them falls in the drink.
But to stand in someone’s way in Hebrew does not mean to hinder somebody, to get in their way; it means to stand where they stand, to do what they do, to adopt their lifestyle, to be indifferentiable from them in conduct. In North America we say, “They have put on their moccasins.”
You begin by picking up the bad advice of wicked people, and pretty soon you’ve adopted the lifestyle that is indifferentiable from those who are, in fact, ungodly. If that continues long enough, you may get to the third line and find yourself in the seat of mockers. Now you look down your long, self-righteous nose at those twittering idiots, those foolish fundamentalists, those narrow-minded bigots, and you can only speak in sneering condescension.
“At this point,” Spurgeon writes, “a person has received his Master’s in worthlessness and his doctorate in damnation.” Now the whole book of Psalms begins with this blessing. “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, who does not stand in the way of sinners, who does not sit in the seat of mockers.” Now you know as well as I do that there are different kinds of poetry. Poetry works in different ways. Some works on the basis of beat. A lot of African-American poetry works that way:
anyone lived in a little how town
(with up so many floating balls down)
It takes awhile to get used to, figuring out what it means, but it’s got a great beat. That’s very different from the sort of sonorous tones of a Shakespearean sonnet:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
Or the blank verse of Robert Frost. I’m a Canadian. I like this one.
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay
Ice-storms do that.
That’s exactly right. If you’ve ever seen an ice storm on birch trees, that’s just exactly right. Poetry, itself, has many different ways of producing its rhetorical effect. Now what kind of poetry is biblical poetry? How does it work? It doesn’t really work primarily on rhyme. It doesn’t work primarily on beat. It’s not quite blank verse, either.
It tends to work on parallelism. That is, you say something and then you say it a bit differently, and then you put in the opposite as a sort of contrast. Everything works on these progressive forms of parallelism. Do you see? That’s the way Hebrew poetry works, and when you see that a lot of the psalms leap to life, how lines are put in sometimes in a step fashion; you make a point and then you extend it a bit further, then you extend it a bit further, and then you might even have a line to summarize the whole thing.
With that in view, what you would expect in verse 2 is something like this. “Blessed, rather, is the man who walks in the counsel of the righteous, and who stands in the way of the just, and who sits in the seat of the praising.” Because then, you see, you would have verse 2 being the kind of foil of verse 1. The righteous man is then described negatively in verse 1, he’s described positively in verse 2. It’s great poetry, don’t you think? Maybe I should start writing psalms.
But in fact the psalmist breaks the obvious parallelism to make a point. The righteous person is described positively in verse 2 all right, negatively in verse 1 and now positively in verse 2, and yet the formal parallelism is broken to make a point. “His delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.”
In other words, that is the one sufficient positive criterion, because you see, if his counsel is coming from the Word of God and not from the wicked, then eventually that counsel does shape how he lives, and ultimately transforms his heart, so that he is among the thankful and the praising rather than the whining, complaining, and the sneeringly condescending.
When I first started teaching at Trinity 28 years ago, we had an old man there who taught homiletics, this business of preaching, and he was one of these men who had endless one-line sayings that you never forget. One of his one-line sayings was, “You’re not what you think you are, but what you think, you are.”
That, of course, is just biblical wisdom, isn’t it? “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.” You’re not what you say, because what you say can actually hide an awful lot of what you’re really thinking. We do it all the time, don’t we? Nice little courtesies, when inside we hate somebody’s guts. Nice pious platitudes, when inside we’re nurturing resentment. No, you are not what you think you are, but what you think, you are.
When I was growing up in French Canada, we lived on the dirtiest river in Quebec, la Riviere Saint-Francois. In those days there was much less concern for ecology, and we had three or four paper mills upstream, and in the summer months when the water was low, quite frankly the river stank. The only way we could drink it was endless tons of chlorine dumped in there. It either stank from the chlorine or it stank from the paper mill, but it was, in any case, the dirtiest river in Quebec.
Eventually bottled water moved into the area when I was just a lad, and one of the slogans that came out in English and French was, “You are what you drink.” And considering the percentage of body weight that was made up water, there was some truth to that, but the Bible is more profound. “You are what you think.”
Hence, when Joshua takes over he is told, “This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth. You shall meditate on it day and night. Then you shall make your way prosperous, and then you shall have good success.” “How shall a young man cleanse his way, except by taking heed according to your word?”
On the night that he is betrayed the Lord Jesus says, “Sanctify them through your truth. Your Word is truth.” What does Paul say? “Don’t be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Moreover, this is not some verse a day to keep the Devil away sort of syndrome, as if the Bible is a magic book, you know? Write it on a little piece of paper, keep it in your pocket, and it will guard your heart.
No, that’s not the idea at all. It’s delighting on the Word of the Lord, the text says, meditating on it, thinking about it, hiding it in our hearts, not so that we can say, “I’ve memorized more verses than you have,” but because we like to think about it. It shapes our mind and our relationships, calls us to repentance and faith, to worship, to adoration, to praise, to renewal, to transformation, living with eternity’s values in view, all coming from the Word of God, shaping how we think, how we act, and our attitudes toward others.
So the righteous person is described, then, negatively in verse 1 and positively in verse 2. The righteous person is then described metaphorically in verse 3. It’s a pretty common metaphor in the Old Testament. “He is like a tree planted by streams of water which yields its fruit in season, and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers.”
Now, as I’m sure many know, Israel is a semi-arid land. Much of the year there is no water at all, so there are all kinds of dry streambeds in the dry season. The early rains fall and everything is lush and green with endless wildflowers, and then the first rains end and everything is dry, and all these streambeds become dry wadis. In the southwest of the United States, where it’s equally dry, the Spanish called them the arroyos, but in Israel they’re called wadis.
Then the second rains come and you get some signs of life again, but that means that for much of the year it seems as if all the vegetation has died. But this tree has been carefully planted, we’re told, by a confluence of streams, in the plural, so that there is always a fresh water supply. No matter what happens, there is always plenty of water, and so there are always signs of life.
We’re told the leaf does not wither. That is, no matter how dry things are, do you see, this plant shows signs of life. No matter how desperate the summer, still there are signs of life, and within that framework, when the appropriate season comes around this tree brings forth fruit. It brings forth fruit in its season.
The text ends up, “Whatever it does, it prospers.” This is not teaching some sort of prosperity gospel, this is the prosperity within the world of the metaphor, itself. That is, no matter what the conditions outside, it doesn’t matter. There is water on which to draw, and this tree brims with life and brings forth fruit in due season. It’s a prosperous tree.
As I’ve said, that metaphor is seen pretty often in the Old Testament. Here’s Jeremiah 17, with a very similar use. Listen to the contrast. On the one hand, Jeremiah 17:5, “This is what the Lord says, ‘Cursed is the one who trusts in man, who depends on flesh for his strength and whose heart turns away from the Lord. He will be like a bush in the wastelands. He will not see prosperity when it comes.’ ” There’s prosperity again in the world of the agricultural metaphor.
“He will dwell in the parched places of the desert, in a salt land where no one lives …” And then the contrast, “… but blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. He will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes. Its leaves are always green. It has no worries in the year of drought, and never fails to bear fruit.”
In other words, the righteous person, drinking from the wellsprings of God (and probably, if there’s a connection with the previous verse, the wellsprings of God is mediated by the Word), produces fruit unto eternal life. They are always showing signs of life and vitality. It’s a wonderful picture, isn’t it, in a semi-arid land? So here’s the righteous person, then in verses 4 and 5, the unrighteous person.
It begins with a very strong negative. You might render it, “Not so the ungodly, not so. Not so the wicked, not so.” A very strong negative, as if everything of significance that you might say of the righteous person, you have to deny to the unrighteous person. Does the righteous person turn aside from the counsel of the wicked? Well, not so the wicked, not so. That’s where they are. That’s what they love.
Does the righteous person avoid standing in the way of sinners, of the ungodly, of adopting their lifestyle? Not so the wicked, not so. Do the righteous avoid sneering condescension, especially toward God’s people? No so the wicked, not so. Are the righteous those who meditate on the Word of God day and night and delight in it? Not so the wicked, not so. Are the righteous like trees planted by streams of water, that bring forth fruit in their season, whose leaf does not wither? Not so the wicked, not so.
Well, what are they like then? The psalmist tells us. They’re like chaff that the wind blows away. The picture, of course, was common in ancient Israel. Small farmers, with winnowing shovels in their hand, taking the heads of grain, tossing them up in the air and beating them on the way down, tossing them up in the air and beating them on the way down, and the chaff, the outside part, would just be blown away in the near eastern wind, until you had a little pile of seeds, which you would then allow to dry out, from which you got your flour and so forth.
So by contrast with the tree in verse 3, the chaff is rootless, lifeless, fruitless, worthless, and in case we don’t get the point, it’s spelled out for us in verse 5, “Therefore the wicked will not stand in the congregation of the righteous.” Then in verse 6, there is a final summarizing contrast. Strictly speaking, it’s not a contrast between the just and the unjust, between the righteous and the unrighteous. Strictly speaking, it’s between the way of the righteous and the way of the unrighteous.
Have you noticed how it’s worded? “For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.” In other words, the Lord watches over, that is he owns as his and thus protects and nourishes and blesses, the way of the righteous. But the way of the wicked? It’s not just that the wicked will perish, but their way will perish, as significant as the tracks one makes along the seashore when the tide is out.
The tide rolls in and the tide rolls out, and there are no tracks. Fifty billion years from now, no one will be sitting around talking about Hitler, but every cup of cold water given in the name of the Lord will be celebrated, because you see, “The Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.”
All the wicked things in which we sometimes engage, because we think that they somehow connect us with the world around us, which things are genuinely wicked, they have no eternal significance. They may puff us up here, gain us a few brownie points, earn us a few extra quid, but on the eternal scale of things.… But the Lord watches over the way of the righteous.
This is Psalm 1. Two ways to live, and there is no third. Yet wait a minute. Isn’t there a part of us, when we read a psalm like this, that says, “Don, I hear that that’s what the text says, but there’s a part of me that wants to say, ‘It’s a mite unrealistic.’ Doesn’t the Bible itself paint a more nuanced picture? There’s David, a man after God’s own heart. Righteous, right? And he commits adultery and murder. One shudders to think what he would have been like if he hadn’t been a man after God’s own heart.
Then there’s Jacob, one of the patriarchs, in many ways a good man, but nevertheless a bit two-faced, wouldn’t you say? Then there’s some people so compromised it’s hard to figure out which side they’re on. What do you do with a prophet like Balaam? What do you do with Jeremiah? A great man in many ways, but a bit of a whiner, wouldn’t you say?
Then you work through the Old Testament characters. There are only two or three of them, and you don’t have all that many details about them, that come out smelling like roses. Ruth, apparently. Daniel. Not many. You work through the great characters of Scripture. You come to the New Testament, and there’s Peter, mighty man of God, “Blessed are you, Simon, son of John, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.”
And a few verses later earning the retort, “Get behind me, Satan! You don’t understand the things of God.” The same man, the same chapter, the same Lord, the same city, the same text, the same context! Two ways to live? Give me a break! It sounds like a slurred over job to me, somewhere along the spectrum.” Don’t you feel that way sometimes?
So what do we do with this? What do we do with the fact that the Bible can present things in these utter absolutes, and yet at the same time, many of the narrative texts of Scripture present a far more nuanced and subtle picture? What do we do with that? How do we handle that? How do we put it together?
Well let me suggest some ways ahead, so we can think about these things aright, because I am persuaded that if you understand them aright within their biblical context, if you understand Psalm 2 aright within its biblical context, you pretty soon come brushing up against the gospel itself. Now let’s think about this one pretty carefully. First, we need to …
1. Recognize our own cultural biases in discussions of this sort.
Inevitably, we bring our own baggage to the text when we start talking about these things, don’t we? So what films get academy awards? What books are praised? When I was a boy there were a whole lot of Westerns where the hero always wore a white hat and whoever was the blaggard wore a black hat. That’s just the way it was. You didn’t need to know who was the hero before going into it. You just looked at their hats.
Of course, it wasn’t very realistic. The heroes were wonderful, super-duper, and never did anything dishonorable, and the scumbags were just scumbags. What can I say? They were just pure, unadulterated scumbags. You couldn’t say anything good about them. There was no nuance. There was no flexibility. Everything was just absolute. I’m not suggesting that’s better or more realistic, but today our pendulum has gotten to the point now where Spiderman has to be conflicted.
Even a cartoon figure, you see, has to be conflicted, or somehow he’s not really believable, and today we delight in films and productions in which, oh you might begin with a good person and a bad person, but then as the narrative progresses along, pretty soon the bad person turns out to be not quite all that bad, and the good person turns out to be, well, a lot better than you thought.
Did you see the film Crash that won the final Best Picture Award? It’s exactly like that. All of your categories are turned on their heads, and it gets an Academy Award, of course. Now isn’t that more realistic? Isn’t that what the Bible itself acknowledges in the narrative lines, the picture of people, warts and all?
No, not quite. It’s important to understand the difference. The Bible, in the narrative parts of Scripture, carefully delineates people, warts and all. That’s correct. The Bible does not gloss over sins and inconsistencies and failures, but it doesn’t glory in them. Our culture thinks that this intermingling of goods and evils in one person is an end in itself. The Bible acknowledges the failures and the inconsistencies, but it doesn’t see it as an end in itself, but as part of the moral frailty and failure of human beings this side of the fall.
We press, finally, to a new heaven and a new earth, don’t we, the home of righteousness? There the people most praised, most admired, are not going to be those who are essentially flawed individuals through and through. We’re going to see and praise and delight in absolute goodness, aren’t we? So that although the Bible is as realistic as any contemporary film, it doesn’t leave you with the moral mingling, the moral alleged sophistication as an end in itself, but rather wants you to see that good and evil are still distinguishable and not to be praised when they are confused.
We need to be aware of the kind of culture we bring to our own reading of the text. A number of years ago I was writing something on the book of Job, and in that connection I started doing a whole lot of reading on authors who have worked on Job recently. You know how the book of Job works. There is Job, whom God himself describes as a righteous man, a perfect man, the text says, tam in Hebrew, a thoroughly mature man. He is so godly, he even prays preemptively for his children.
He’s so godly that he says he made a vow with his eyes that he would not ever look on a woman with lust. This man is a righteous and a godly man. Then, of course, everything is stripped away. He doesn’t know that it’s by God’s sanction, at the Devil’s request, because the Devil just doesn’t believe that a man like Job could be good.
He loses his wealth, and then he loses his health, and then his wife says, “Curse God and die.” He loses her support, and he’s sitting there in the ash heap, the rubble of his life, picking away at his scabs with a piece of broken pottery, and these wonderful friends come in to give him comfort. “Job, do you believe that God is good?”
“Yes, of course I believe that God is good.”
“Do you believe that God is sovereign?”
“Well, yes, of course I believe that God is sovereign.”
“Do you believe that God is just?”
“Yes, of course I believe that God is just.”
“So if God is good, he’s just, and he’s sovereign, and he has seen fit in his sovereignty to give you all these punishments, what does that say about you?”
“Listen guys, I know that God is good, and I know that he’s sovereign, he does all things well, but quite frankly, what I’m suffering isn’t fair. I mean I don’t deserve this. I’m not more wicked than other people. In fact, I don’t want to boast, but I really have lived a righteous life. This suffering really isn’t fair.”
“Job, don’t you hear what you’re saying? This is scandalous, because if you say it’s not fair, you’re really suggesting that God is unfair.”
“No, no, no. I don’t want to do that. God is righteous. He’s just, he’s forgotten more than I’ll ever know. There’s no way that I want to accuse him, but at the same time I wish I had a lawyer so that I could sort of interview him, because quite frankly, what I’m facing here is not quite fair.”
And gradually the debate builds up and builds up and builds up and builds up; oh it’s marvelous stuff, isn’t it, all this moral ambiguity? The critics love it, and eventually God speaks out of the whirlwind. He says, “Job, stand on your feet. Have you ever designed a snowflake? Hmm? Where were you when I cast the constellation Orion into the heavens? Hmm? Did you ever make a hippopotamus? Are you around when the sun comes up in the morning? Hmm?”
After two or three chapters of this, Job gets the point, and he says, “I spoke to soon. There are a lot of things I don’t know. I repent and I’m sorry …” Then God says, “Stand up on your feet. I haven’t finished asking questions yet.” Then he asks him two more chapters of rhetorical questions. Oh, it’s wonderful stuff, isn’t it? It’s wonderful stuff.
Then in the very last chapter, he gets twice as many cows, twice as many sheep, twice as many camels as he had the first time around, and his wife has 10 more children. We’re not told what she thought of that, but she has another 10 children. So the story has a happy ending, and the critics tear out their hair.
“Obviously this couldn’t have been written by the original author. This is a person without sophistication. This was written by an international-class editorial twit. He’s ruined the entire book. All the moral ambiguity, all shot with that happy ending. A cowboy comes in in a white hat at the end.” Yet that’s not quite right either, is it, because you see, in some ways the last chapter of Job is like the last two chapters of the book of Revelation.
God does win. Justice is done and will be seen to be done. In this fallen, broken world there are all kinds of ambiguities, but they are never the last word. It is a huge mistake to think that they are. We press toward the end. Chapter 41 of Job is necessary if there is a moral universe. We need to be aware of our own cultural biases, don’t we, as we bring these things to the table? This second thing that we need to be aware of is …
2. God, in his mercy, has not given us a volume that we call the Bible, made up of abstract systematic theology.
God, in his wisdom, has given us this wonderful book, the Bible, made up of many, many different literary genres, many different literary forms, each making their own kind of rhetorical appeal. We know that, don’t we? I mean, there are oracles here, there are letters here, there are laments here, there is historical narrative here, there is genealogy here, and there are parables here.
You can turn to Judges 9 and read a fable, Jotham’s fable. There are psalms here. There’s apocalyptic literature, it’s in the book of Revelation, all these different kinds of forms. Then there are one-liners, there are proverbs, there are maxims, there are many different kinds of forms, and each form has to make its own kind of appeal.
Now one of the forms in Scripture is called Wisdom Literature. One of the things that wisdom literature does is simply set things out in stark alternatives. So in the Proverbs, which is one form of wisdom literature, there are two women in the book of Proverbs, Lady Wisdom and Dame Folly, just two, and you’re following one or the other.
In other words you get these polarities. Do you see? You get a lot of proverbs of the sort: “Better is this than that,” an absolute polarity. Do you see? Wisdom Literature tends to think in terms of these polarities for us, and Psalm 1 is sometimes called a wisdom psalm. That is, it simply sets out the polarity. This is what the righteous person looks like. It doesn’t say how you become a Christian. It doesn’t say how you become righteous. It just says, “This is what a righteous person looks like, and this is what an unrighteous person looks like.”
It doesn’t reflect with a whole lot of footnotes on the possibilities of mingling the two. It simply sets out the polarities. That’s one of the things that wisdom literature does. Do you see? In the New Testament, you know who is one of the greatest wisdom preachers? Jesus. Think how the Sermon on the Mount ends, in Matthew 5, 6 and 7.
You come to the end of the Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus says, “In the light of all I’ve said, make sure that you enter into the narrow gate, for narrow is the gate and straight is the way that leads to eternal life, but broad is the gate, wide is the path that leads to destruction. Many go there.” You can’t come along and say, “Well quite frankly, I’d rather like an in-between sized gate.” Because you see, in wisdom preaching you’re offered one or the other. That’s it. Those are the polarities.
You build your house on the rock or you build your house on the sand, and then the storms come in, and the house that’s properly built on the rock withstands the storms. The house that’s built on the sand, well it’s washed away, and you think, “Oh no, no, well frankly I’d like to go for hardpan clay myself.” That’s not the way it works, you see?
Then there’s the tree, the good tree that brings forth good fruit, the bad tree that brings forth bad fruit. How about an in-between tree that brings some mediocre fruit? Isn’t that what we want morally of ourselves? We don’t want to be quite as good as all that. We don’t want to be quite so bad as some people are. We’d like to be sort of in-between. Wisdom won’t let you get away with that. It demands that you make a choice, because there are only two ways.
That’s one of the things that Wisdom Literature does for us, and it’s one of the things that God himself has put in the Bible. But God, in his mercy, has also put in all of these wonderful stories where the failures and the warts and the inconsistencies, even the blasphemies of a man like Peter, are all carefully recorded. What do we do with that? How shall we understand these things?
Let me tell you how we should not understand them. You’re not supposed to read the account of Peter or the account of David and say, “Well, you know, even these great giants of the faith sinned. Who am I? I mean I’m bound to do it too, so I shouldn’t feel too badly about it, because if David was a man after God’s own heart and he slept around, well if I sleep around it can’t be all that bad. I mean, he continued as king, and God could forgive me too, can’t he?
So that you start reading the accounts as if they become, in their purpose or point, a kind of excuse for sin? You know intrinsically that can’t be their purpose. What’s their function? What are they doing there? That brings me to the last set of texts I want you to think about. The book in the Bible that puts these things together most dramatically in short compass is 1 John. The book in the Bible that puts these things dramatically together in short compass is 1 John. It’s extraordinarily important that we understand it.
You must remember that this short book, five short chapters, was written to Christians, and in this connection John, writing to Christians, says in the first chapter, verse 5, “This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness we lie and do not live by the truth.” So we have to live according to the light.
Then we’re told, in verse 8, “If we claim to be without sin we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” In other words, if you go around, then, claiming that you really do walk consistently in the light, the kindest thing that can be said about you is that you’re self-deceived, but there’s a worse thing that can be said. It’s found in verse 10. “If we claim we have not sinned, we make God out to be a liar, and his word has no place in our heart.”
After all, the Bible itself does declare again and again and again that we’re born in sin, that we do sin, that we have sinned, that we will sin. We still live in the flesh. We’re not yet transformed, the new heaven and the new earth haven’t dawned, and so we cannot go through life expecting to be sinlessly perfect. Isn’t that pretty clear? It’s made very strong. The proper solution to sin in our life, then, is given to us.
Verse 8: “If we claim to be without sin we deceive ourselves.” What are we to do with sin, then? “If we confess our sins he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” Well, well, supposing we claim that we haven’t sinned? Well my dear children, I’m not writing this so that you’ll make excuses for yourself and so that you will sin. No, no, no, no, no, if anybody does sin, what’s the solution?
Chapter 2, verse 2: “We have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous One, and he’s the propitiation for our sins.” So this part of 1 John is very clear about the fact that we are sinners, isn’t it? If we try to pretend otherwise we’re self-deceived, and finally, we’re calling God himself a liar. Now if that’s all 1 John said, then there would be a danger of suggesting that John goes a bit easy on sinners. He sort of gives us an out. We can make excuses for ourselves.
But then, from 2:3 on, John goes on to lay out three broad assertions about what genuine righteousness looks like. What he says is that those who are really Christians, those who are really God’s, those who have been born again, he says, “Well for a start, they obey Christ, and moreover they love the saints, and on top of all of that, they believe certain essential truths.” So there’s a truth claim, and there’s a moral claim, and there’s a love claim, and it’s not best two out of three.
They all have to be present, or else, quite frankly, you’ve got no ground whatsoever for calling yourself a Christian. John’s writing is very clear in this respect. The most terrifying part of all of this is found in chapter 3. Listen to these words. Chapter 3, verse 7, “Dear children, do not let anyone lead you astray. He who does what is righteous is righteous, just as he is righteous. He who does what is sinful is of the Devil, because the Devil has been sinning from the beginning.
Now the reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the Devil’s work. No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in them. He cannot go on sinning, because he has been born of God.” Do you hear how strong that language is? It’s probably even stronger than this translation. He cannot go on sinning.
The text simply says, “He cannot sin.” It’s just that he uses the present tense and to try to catch something of the force of the present tense, the author puts in, “He cannot go on sinning.” But then it sounds like, “Well he cannot practice sin. He cannot go on and on and on, but he does it sometimes. That’s okay.”
Well that’s not quite what the text is saying. It’s really strong. He cannot sin, “because God’s seed is in him.” That little expression could be understood one of two ways, but both ways are powerful. It might be that the seed in him is the seed of regeneration, this new life from God. The seed from God that comes in us when we are born again. It remains in him, that is, in the believer.
Or it could be that God’s seed is a way of referring to all Christians. At the end Galatians, chapter 3, all Christians are called God’s seed, God’s offspring, and in that sense God’s seed, all of God’s seed remain in him, that is, in Christ. That also makes sense. Either way, the text says we cannot sin. We cannot practice sin. We cannot go on sinning. And you say to yourself, “Boy, does that mean maybe that I’m not a Christian?”
Or how do you put this together with chapter 1, which says that if we claim we haven’t sinned, we’re kidding ourselves. We’re calling God a liar. Now this text is saying, “We mustn’t sin. We cannot sin.” How do you understand this? Let me come at this one through the side door, if I may, and then you’ll see how it comes together. When I went to school, in grade seven, year seven, I was taught by a man. He has since gone to his reward, so I can tell you his name, Mr. Cooper.
Mr. Cooper was a World War II vet in the Canadian Army, and had to leave the army early because he had been wounded, but clearly he would have liked to have remained in the army all his life, and sometimes thought that he was still in it, and as a result tried to run year-seven boys as if they belonged to a parade square, which is usually not the best form of discipline and instruction in a classroom. He really had no clue.
Even I, at that tender age, I’m sure as full of mischief as the next one, sometimes actually felt sorry for the poor chap. When the class noise was getting a bit out of hand, running toward 140 decibels or thereabouts, you could sometimes see him standing behind that heavy, heavy, heavy wooden desk, and he would put his fingers under the lip and lift it up so that it was six inches off the ground, and then crash it down.
All of us would look up startled, and he would say, “That’s only one-tenth of my strength!” I mean that’s really impressive to 13-year-old boys, isn’t it? It was really painful. Now if there’s one thing that dear old Mr. Cooper hated with a passion, it was gum chewing. He hated it with a passion. It’s not done in the drill square, is it? So why should it be done in my classroom. Loathed it.
Anytime he caught some poor boy chewing gum in his class, he always did the same thing. He’d step to the side of his desk and pick up the dustbin, and then he’d walk down the aisle to that student, and he’d hold the dustbin under his nose, and he’d glare at them, and he’d recite, “ ‘A gum-chewing boy and a cud-chewing cow look so much alike, yet different somehow. What is the difference? Ah, I see it now: ‘Tis the thoughtful look in the face of the cow.’ SPIT!” You see, and that was his standard procedure.
Now if you analyze carefully what he is doing, rhetoric aside, what is Mr. Cooper saying? Isn’t Mr. Cooper saying, “You cannot chew gum here”? And it would have quite missed the point if I, sitting in the third row, had put up my hand and said, “Mr. Cooper, ontologically speaking, you’re mistaken. I’m doing it.” Because you see, when Mr. Cooper is saying you cannot chew gum here, he’s not saying it is an ontological impossibility that any human being could chew gum here.
Some cannots in Scripture, using exactly this verb, about a third of them, some cannots in Scripture are not talking about what is possible, but what is morally required or demanded. When Mr. Cooper says, “You cannot chew gum here,” he’s making a moral claim, an ethical claim. He’s not making an ontological claim. That is, the claim of what is absolutely possibly or impossible at the very level of being.
Similarly, when God comes along and says, “You cannot sin here,” it quite misses the point for one of us to put up our hands and say, “Ontologically speaking, God, you’re mistaken. I’m doing it.” Because don’t you see? This is the church of the living God. You cannot sin here. Every single sin in the church of the living God, amongst the redeemed community, is without a shred of excuse, because you see, we have been born again.
God’s seed remains with us, in us. Every single sin is without excuse. You cannot sin here. But the tragedy is, we all do it anyway, and John is realistic enough to tell us that in our brokendown, inconsistent, sin-laden lives, no matter how renewed we have been by the Holy Spirit, this side of the new creation, don’t go around saying that you can’t sin, or that you haven’t sinned. You’re kidding yourself, and you’re making God himself out to be a liar.
So what’s the solution of this intolerable tension? There is only one, isn’t there? John has already told us what it is. “My dear children,” he says at the beginning of chapter 2, “I’m not writing this to sanction sin; I’m writing this so that you won’t sin, but if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous One.” He is the propitiation for our sins. He is the one that sets aside God’s wrath.
He is the expiation for our sins. He is the one who cancels sin. Our hope, finally, not only at the moment of our conversion, but for all of this life and right to the pearly gates, is always, always, always, always Jesus Christ and him crucified. But never, ever, ever does that give us permission, does that give us sanction to say, “Well then, let us do evil, that good may come.” What Paul says about that is those who say such things, their damnation is just, because you see, this is the church of the living God. Sinning is not done here.
You cannot sin here, and all of Scripture has these absolute polarities. Without these absolute polarities we would start making endless excuses. If we only had the narratives of David, and the narratives of Peter, and the narratives of all the other inconsistent moral failures, we would go away quite happily.
We would be like modern sophisticates who think that moral ambiguity and moral compromise are not only sophisticated, but an intrinsic good. But if instead we had only the absolutes, if we had only Psalm 1, then either we will go away crushed beneath the burden of this psalm, because we just do not live up to its high standards, or we may think that we do, and we’ll go away with self-promoting legalism.
“Well I’m not like those rotten people over there, you know, and all the people described in the not so category. I mean, I do read my Bible and I delight in it sometimes.” Pretty soon now you have a new category for self-righteous effrontery. You have to have Psalm 1, or you slide toward moral indolence.
You must have more than Psalm 1, or you slide toward legalism and hypocrisy, and God in his mercy has given us this rich, rich Book that drives people to Jesus Christ, and sometimes in his wisdom he gives us not only the different kinds of literature, the different kinds of writing, the different kinds of themes that make up the Bible; he then actually brings them together in certain books and passages like 1 John, so that we can see that, on the one hand, in the church of the living God we will love one another.
In the church of the living God there will be truth. In the church of the living God there will be obedience. And in the church of the living God, God have mercy on us, we will be a generation of pardoned sinners, struggling, inconsistent, failing, needing forgiveness, not only from one another but from God himself, and our final hope, our final plea, our final glory, our final delight is still what Paul calls, “Christ and him crucified.”
We have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous One. We plead his death. We plead his blood. We plead his merit. His merit is our merit; our sins are his sins. We have no other argument. We need no other plea. We sing, “It is enough that Jesus died, and that he died for me.”
If we ever lose, for one moment, the richness of this biblical polarity, in all of its wealth and strength running from one end of the Bible to the other, then either we will toddle off on one side toward hypocrisy and legalism and think that somehow we’re the rich people, we’re the bright people, we’re the good people, we’re the righteous people in a society that’s going to hell; or we’ll toddle off on the other side and make excuses for our sin and be satisfied with mediocrity and moral compromise.
Do you want the church of Jesus Christ to go forward in power here in Yorkshire? Then may the Lord God himself raise up church after church after church after church that is passionate about holiness but understands that we’re never more than poor beggars telling other poor beggars where there is bread.
We point people to Jesus. That is our only hope, so that we never, ever will come across with superciliousness or condescension, and yet at the same time we’ll be frightened at moral compromise. We must have it all, because when we have it all, we come back to the cross, again and again and again and delight in Christ, our righteousness. Let us pray.
Our Father, we thank you for the perfections of your Word. We thank you for how your Word probes our conscience and exposes our inconsistencies, how it instructs us in the way of righteousness, how it corrects us and offers reproof and rebuke and encouragement and hope. We thank you, above all, that it depicts your dear Son and placards before all of our eyes his incarnation, his death and resurrection on our behalf, his priestly ministry at your sovereign, majestic right hand. Herein we have hope.
So forgive us our sins yet again, we pray, and draw us in the way of righteousness. Make us as holy on earth as pardoned sinners can be, this side of the consummation, and fill us full of gospel hope. For Jesus’ sake, amen.
