Lecture 15.docx

One of the things we've gone through already is in Chapter 2, and it's in the part that's a bit repetitious. But I'll just call attention to this verse 14C. I suppose you could call it 14A, 14B, 14C. I have written to you, young men. Hati iskyroi este. You are, you're strong, you're capable, you're...

One of the things we've gone through already is in Chapter 2, and it's in the part that's a bit repetitious. But I'll just call attention to this verse 14C. I suppose you could call it 14A, 14B, 14C. I have written to you, young men. Hati iskyroi este. You are, you're strong, you're capable, you're able. Kai halagas tuteu enhumin mene. The word of God abides with you, abides in you, abides among you, remains, stays, has taken up residence. Kai nenekesate tan paniran. And you have conquered the evil one. One of the people that by this time John could very well have in mind, whose name we know from history, is Polycarp. Eusebius, centuries later, when he's doing research in these areas, he eventually wrote a history, as many of you know. And before he wrote a history, he wrote what we call the Chronicon. And the Chronicon was a series of columns in which he had basically the framework for his history. And he had what for him would have been empirical data in Roman history, in Egyptian history, in the history of the Greeks, and in the history of the Bible. And this work, the Chronicon, in Eusebius' Greek hand is lost to us. It doesn't exist in Greek. But Jerome made a translation of it into Latin. And we have Jerome's Chronicon, which is Eusebius' Chronicon, in Latin. And under the column of both church history and Roman history, but this is where they kind of combine, because by the end of the first century, Rome and Christianity are starting to sort of come into close interaction. At the beginning of the reign of Trajan, so he's got an entry, Trajan, 97 through 110, excuse me, through 100. Those two, three year period when Trajan is being installed and getting going. So that's the Roman datum. Trajan becomes emperor in AD 97. But in the Christian column, it says in this order, Papius, Ignatius, Polycarp, hearers of the Apostle John. Here's of the Apostle John. And Polycarp was martyred sometime around AD 156. And he died when he was about 86 years old. That's when he was martyred. So he would have been a Neoniscos, if John writes this in the AD 90s. He would have been one of these young men who received the instruction that put him into the believing community. And then words of admonition, like we see in the Epistle of First John. Now there are some letters, and especially one letter in particular, that's an epistle that Polycarp wrote. And I'm not going to talk about that letter, but I am going to talk about something from the Epistle to Diagnetus. And if I have time today, I'll read you a review of a book by Charles Hill where he talks about this Epistle to Diagnetus, dated perhaps AD 140. Traditionally felt to be anonymous, but increasingly there's good evidence that this could have been written by Polycarp. So I'm moving now from the Word of God and the commendation of the Neoniscoi to somebody who we know was a Neoniscos that John taught. And that was faithful enough in Christian service that eventually he was martyred. You know, when you stay faithful from your late teens or 20s to the time you're in your 80s, that's a well done, good and faithful servant ministry. So kind of midway in his ministry, if he did write this Epistle to Diagnetus, this is only chapter five, and you can go online and Google Diagnetus. I'm not saying do it right now, but you can do it and you can read the whole Epistle. And it's interesting to see a testimony to Christian pastoral work and Christian counsel to people that comes out of this, we call it the subapostolic era. But just to read chapter five, this is a great account of a disciple of John who's where you are. I mean, this week you've become a disciple of John. And you know, he said things about loving not the world and how to carry out our lives as Christians. So here's a specimen of what a disciple of John says maybe 40, 50 years after 1 John is written. Christians are distinguished from other men, neither by country nor language, nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity. The course of conduct which they follow has not been devised by any speculation or deliberation of inquisitive men, nor do they like some proclaim themselves the advocates of any merely human doctrines. But inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, and by barbarian here he would simply mean non-Greek speaking, according as a lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessively striking method of life. Now, later on when I read the review that I'll read from Charles Hill, he points out that there's evidence we also know who this was written to. This is a commendation of Christian faith to a ruler, a pagan ruler in an area where there are Christian churches, and he's trying to explain to this ruler who's not necessarily friendly to this increasing Christian presence who these Christians are. He's explaining it here. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. I love this. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. They marry, as do all others. They begat children, but they do not destroy their offspring. You know, in our day we talk about abortion. They had means of abortion then. They had abortifacients. And they also had medical means of taking fetuses out of pregnant women. Now, this was often fatal to the women. If you want to read a little bit about this, read Rodney Stark's book, The Rise of Christianity. Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity. He's got a couple chapters on women in the first couple centuries after the founding of the church. And he's got some nice photographic plates of the medical tools that the Roman gynecologists used to destroy the unborn in the womb and to get them out. They're pretty scary looking. You know, hooks and rods and snippers and all kinds of stuff. And he also describes some of the medical strategies and rates of mortality and all this sort of thing. Also, what they did on unwanted children, especially girls, were simply exposed. There were places in cities where it was known. You know, you could go in, one writer talks about this bridge over the Tiber River in Rome, where you could look down in the river and you could see the remains of babies, because this was a place where people threw the babies off into the river that they didn't want. Or sometimes they just left them exposed. Odd chance maybe somebody would pick one of them up and adopt it or take care of it. But more often, it was basically dog food. And so this issue of the unwanted unborn or newly born, it's not a new issue in our time. And the early Christians were known for refusing to destroy their offspring. In other words, the unborn and life in the womb was sacred and holy. And when you read Rodney Stark's book, he says this was one of the reasons for the rise of Christianity. It's because in the general population, and of course we see this in Western societies, in Western societies that have lost their Christian sense, population rates are declining. And part of it is the destruction of life, new life. There was the same problem in Rome, the Roman population, the native Romans, the Italians. It was decreasing at a frightening rate. And the Roman Senate was doing everything it could to increase the birth rate, especially the male birth rate of its own citizenry. But the problem they had was that husbands and wives wouldn't stay together. The husbands would try to have one or two heirs, male children, by their Roman wife. And once they got those two or three sons, then they had concubines and prostitutes. And you know something? The Roman wives didn't like that. And they had their own means of protesting. And there was sort of what we would have called in the 70s a women's liberation movement. It's called the new wives phenomenon in classical studies. And it was sort of ways that they could protest how they were treated by their husbands. Actually, a lot of scholars think this explains those enigmatic references in 1 Corinthians 11 to men and women in worship and covering their heads and not covering their heads and what was going on there. There's a very good reason to think that this is, because Corinth was a Roman colony. It's a Roman city. Good reason to think that this is part of what's going on in that particular setting. So marriage problems. And what do you do with kids? Kill them. That's what you do. They have a common table, but not a common bed. Different other translators say they share their food, but not their wives. You know, in the pagan world, at least women swapping was pretty much a done thing. Not Christians. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven. They obey the prescribed laws and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives. They love all men and are persecuted by all. They are known and condemned. They are put to death and restored to life. Actually, this could be adversative chies. This translator said and and. But you could say they love but are persecuted. They are unknown but condemned. They are put to death but restored to life. Yet they are poor, yet make many rich. They are in lack of all things and yet abound in all. They are dishonored and yet in their very dishonor are glorified. They are evil spoken of and are yet justified. They are reviled and blessed. They are insulted and repay the insult with honor. They do good, yet are punished as evildoers. When punished, they rejoice as if quickened into life. They are assailed by the Jews as foreigners and are persecuted by the Greeks. Yet those who hate them are unable to assign any reason for their hatred. So that's just chapter five. And there is a chapter one through four and then there's a chapter six and following. So I come in and there's a site. I commend the epistle of Diagnetus to you for your own edification and imagination. If you read Diagnetus and if you were to read Rodney Stark's book, The Rise of Christianity, and then one other book that you could read that would really give you a fresh sense of life in that day and time, just get the little penguin paper back. Has anybody read Suetonius, the Twelve Caesars? Yeah. I mean it's a fun book to read and it gives you, I mean this is primary source information. Suetonius was, we can call him a scholar. He was a secretary to the Emperor Hadrian around AD 120 or so. And he had access to all the Roman archives and he wrote short histories of the Roman emperors, going back at least to Julius Caesar. And the Twelve Caesars is an addition of what he wrote in various translations. But if you want to read about Nero, read about Augustus, read about Tiberius, read about Caligula, Boots, the soldiers called him because even when he was a kid, he was trying to be like a soldier and he wore big boots. So that's what they called him. But it really makes the world of the New Testament come alive because you see how brutal it was, you see how the people's views of God were, you see everybody believed in gods and supernatural things. And there's just so many of the prejudices and sort of default worldview indicators that you read in Suetonius. And it's like going back to AD 120 and then from that point somebody taking you back to the time of Julius Caesar or Caesar Augustus and just talking about the news and politics and military history and social views or Nero and his love for gambling and how he came home one night and he'd been out at the racetrack pretty late and who knows, maybe he had a few too many and he got back to his house and his wife was letting him have it. And so he just beat her up and she was pregnant and he kicked her to death. That's how she and her baby met there and Nero kicked her to death. So this is just part of, you know, this is, we can buy biographies of our presidents and find out things about their lives, find out about the Bushes, find out about the Clintons, well find out about the Roman emperors, find out what life was like at that time. But with what Diagonetus and Suetonius and maybe a book or two, Rise of Christianity, I don't know where your feel of the world, of the New Testament is, what you read here in your education, but it doesn't take, I mean it's not going to make us an expert to read these few books, but it can certainly kind of give us fresh eyes for what's going on in the New Testament world and kind of revive and stimulate our curiosity to know more about the tip of the iceberg. First John is the tip of an iceberg of a whole bunch of stuff that's going on, some of which we'll never know, but we can, I think, have a more, we can have a better informed imagination about what's happening and what's probably not happening. Let us pray. Heavenly Father, thank you again for these great chapters of First John that we have to study this week. Thank you for Jesus' ministry to sinners in the first century in such a way that the body of Christ was called forth. And thank you for John's ministry to people like Polycarp and for his faithfulness even unto death. For we know that it is through the faithfulness of our forebears that we were privileged to hear the Gospel and that we in our short lives on this earth have the opportunity to live in your light and as your witnesses. Lord, stir us up to learn all we can and treasure these things in our hearts here during our seminary time. Make our thoughts fruitful even now in our ministries. And Lord, continue to do your work of laying a foundation in all of our lives that we will be able to draw on and bring honor and glory to you in the ministries to which you have called us. And we pray that we ourselves and those that we lead might be able to reflect the commitment to the Lord's ministry and the commitment to you and your eternal kingdom, but also to reaching out to our world that we see reflected in these words of Polycarp to diagnose us. We pray for your church in every corner of the world in this hour this morning. We thank you for the gift of this new day you've given us and help us to honor you in it. In Jesus' name, Amen. All right, numbers. Four, two, five, three, ten, one, four, two, nine, one, two, five, ten, four, one, and then that would be a two. It would be a six. Oh, that's a, two for six. Nine, one, two, five, ten, five, one, two. Now, if you want to read your summary verse, the cross references, that's the main thing that we're interested in. The summary that I have is down at the bottom. The preceding verses excluding John 3, 7, Acts, and the assuring mark of the regenerate. All of those refer to that which is born of God, except for 3, 7, which is our Lord speaking to Nicodemus about being born from above. Commentary interaction. Luke points out, here the formulae first person plural subjunctive, here translated, let us love, serves to embrace the author and readers in a common cause. The inclusive we continues emphatically through the rest of the chapter, and the author does not address his readers again as you until the letter draws to a close in 513. According to Stott, since God is the source and origin of love, and all true love is derived from him, it stand to reason that everyone who loves, that is, loves either God or neighbor, with that selfless devotion which alone is true love according to John's teaching, has been born of God and knows God. And I had a couple of corrections that are pointed out to me. Final translation. Beloved, let us love one another because love is from God and everyone who loves has been born from God and knows God. Grounded insight. The most common attribute that marks a follower of Jesus Christ is his love. John urges his readers to join with him in communal love and affection. The world today, like John's day, sees love predominantly as a quid pro exercise, but John's love, yet God's love, is unconditional. And that's the reference of John's love. And I'm sure he has the same desire as to have that selfless love. Let's go to the next verse. I think this will come up at some point later and I'll wait for it to come up later. Alright. John, verse John 4, 8, numbers 1, 11, 6, 11, 5, 1, 2, 10, 1, 2, 2, 5. Cross-reference analysis, verse John 4, 16. We're not going to read cross-reference. If there is some quick observation. Commentary interaction. Lou observes these words have frequently been seen as the pinnacle of the letter and even of the New Testament and as such rarely have been abstracted from their context. But the author is not engaged in abstract definitions of God or of God's love internal life. Still less is he concerned with idealizing love. He does not say love is God. Love is not an abstract idea, but is known through what God has done toward women and men. It finds its shared love of those who are formed by what God has done and who defines themselves in relation to God. You wrote there, it finds its in shared love. It finds itself. You got a word left out and I'm wondering, did anybody write that quote down? It finds its, and unfortunately we don't have a page number. 157, 158. When somebody gets that raise your hand so we can put in the fill in the gap. It finds its something. Identity, existence, whatever. Go ahead. Okay. My analysis is although an argument from silence does not win the day, it does shed light on how many will ultimately apply this verse. Final translation. The one who loves not knows not God because God is love. Grounded insights. Without relational love, no one should claim heredity from God let alone allegiance to him because he is the very fountainhead of love. Everybody yet? Goal after each. Its goal. It finds its goal in shared love of those who are formed by what God has done. If you go back to the previous verse, put your previous final translation up there. Let us love one another because love is from God and everyone who loves has been born from God and knows God. This is kind of self evident but I just want to point it out because she says in the next verse what you quoted that people abstract this out. Notice let us love one another. Okay, that's John and Christians. So there's a context to this. These are people of faith. And we know from earlier passages people who claim to know God, people who have trusted in Christ and therefore know God, they should be walking in the light as he is in the light. So he's already established repeatedly faith definitions and ethic definitions for Christian identity. Now in this section of 1 John he's talking more about love. He's already talked about faith and ethics. So when he says everyone who loves has been born from God, he's assuming faith and behavior. He's not either forgetting about that or saying, you know, this is chapter 4 now and I know I was kind of into faith and ethics in 1, 2, and 3 but now I see it's all about love. Everybody who loves has been born of God because that's how it gets used. The love test now suddenly trumps the faith and the ethics test. So if you think John was senile or if you like to read the Bible out of context then you can approach it this way and a lot of people will approach it this way. I mean I've heard many people over the years in all kinds of even Christian contexts say in the end what matters is how we treat each other. What matters is if we love. And then you can quote the Bible to prove that. But I think, I hope we would want to say that's real bad hermeneutics because it reads John against himself. It contradicts what John has clearly said later on. And I think there's some significance to his prioritizing of things. He does prioritize faith. Because it's, you've heard me say this before, I'll say it again, faith comes by hearing the first thing through which, the first thing that's transformed in the ordo salutis experientially is our understanding. You know we hear that Christ died for our sins or maybe we hear we're sinners. You know the gospel message is presented and different people would say well I heard different things. But we're not saved by ethics. And we're also not saved by loving God enough that he says wow you love me so much I'm going to make you my child. We're saved by grace through faith. We trust the work of God that's been done on our behalf that is presented to us in the gospel message. Now once we can talk about our identity as people who have believed in the gospel message, now we can say everyone who loves has been born from God. But that's assuming Christian community. Everyone in the Christian community who loves does love not because they're loving people or they're good people, but because they've been born from God. You know that's one of the fruits, it's one of the outcomes of the work of the light of God. It transforms people's affections. So I just wanted to give us a chance that there will be other verses that come up that can serve reductionistic applications. But it's one of the benefits of studying a book in its context is that you immediately get a guilty conscience. If you never really study all of 1 John, then it's easy to take a verse out of context and not realize it's almost what I was talking about with the Roman doctors and the pregnant woman. It's kind of brutal. I mean that fetus is part of her body and it is itself a body. Well this verse is part of a body and you can't just rip it out and say, and say, you know, yeah, it says this apart from the whole organism of what John has to say. Alright, the numbers I have. 9, 3. Good. My preliminary translation in this, the love of God was made manifest in us that God has sent his only begotten son into the world in order that we may live through him. One significant cross reference is just 1 John 1, 2. The life that was manifested is connected with the love that was manifested. Let's begin with Christ. For commentary interaction, Lou on this passage said, 1 John is not committed to any particular understanding, but what would elsewhere be called atonement. Here it is the sending of the son that is effective, not his death in itself. Contrast that with what Stott says, not the incarnation, but the atonement is the preeminent manifestation of love. By the way, this is a major difference between the Greek Orthodox Church and the Western Church. The Eastern Orthodox traditions really stress incarnation as how the world is saved. Go ahead. Stott continues, it is true that no explicit reference is made in these verses to the son's death, but that it was in John's mind is certain from his theology of salvation. The contrast is obvious between Lou and Stott. Lou, as earlier in her commentary, avoids John's clear references to Christ's atonement sacrifice and instead explains away what is self-evident. Stott is correct in his declaration as Calvary explains Bethlehem and thus is the preeminent manifestation of God's love. Go ahead, push your sheet up please. My final translation. By this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God has sent his only begotten son into the world in order that we may live through him. The grounded insight. How humbling to consider that the father sent the greatest gift, his son, for the most unworthy recipients, sinners. This must never become commonplace. And with this verse and some of the ones to follow, they're very basic in what John's saying, but the meaning is so rich and a lot of it we're so familiar with, but we can't let that, we can't become numb to it. And our hearts need to be affected by the reality of what he's stating. So that's first time. Very rich. A quick comment. What is the best way to translate monogamy? Probably one and only. If you're preaching at a church, probably the New King James uses only begotten, am I right? Somebody use New King James? I would guess it uses that. But I don't know of any lexicographers today that would say monogamy should be translated only begotten. And if I can find it, I wrote a short study on that and I'll try to present it, but the idea is utterly unique. Mono, singular, again ace having to do with species or genus. So there's nothing else in his category as far as his link with God. He's unique in that. Okay, next verse. The numbers I have are 9, 3, 5, 1, 2. 11-8. Let's say 10, 3, 5, 1, 2. 10, 10, 3, 5, 3, 10, 5, 1, 2, 3, 2, 9, 1, 2, 1. 3, 3. Thank you. 3. Preliminary translation. In this is love, not that we ourselves loved God, but that he himself loved us and sent his Son to be the proficiation concerning our sins. The cross references counts once you would connect with the news verse. For commentary interaction, Lou says, The formula was probably drawn from the community's tradition and no specific understanding of how sins are forgiven is implied. Lou conveniently proposes what is nonverifiable, yet dismisses what is amply supported. And then, I thought this was a choice. It is not our love that is primary, the God's, free, uncaused, and spontaneous. And all our love is but a reflection of his and a response to it. Final translation. In this is love, not that we ourselves loved God, but that he himself loved us and sent his Son to be the proficiation concerning our sins. And in my grounded insight, love and its fundamental character is others oriented and self-given, not self-centered and self-taken. If you wanted to do something with that perfect tense, agape come in, especially at the current state of verbal aspect understanding, It would probably be something like, not that we have come to love God, that would be, I think, a way to render what people who are doing work on tenses now think that the feel of that was. Not that we have arrived at a state of a loving relationship with God. And to say we loved God, that's safe. If you put that we have loved God, that's what you learn in first year Greek, and there's nothing wrong with that. But if you're wondering what's the effect of the perfect tense, it's probably along the line of the settled state of implied movement toward love of God. Yes? I was just going to point out that the trigellus has a very long time. Agape come in? Which would be first heiress. So in that sense it's just not that we loved. You don't have this problem. And I'm sure I discussed the variant in the commentary. Okay, go ahead. I have a question about verse 9 and 10. What was it? The question is, why does John use the perfect tense, apestalken, in verse 9, and uses the heiress tense in verse 10, apestalen? What's the difference? Why does John shift his tenses between verses 9 and 10 about God sending his son? We've seen verse 9 that it says God sent his one and only son, and this is love not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent. Of course there's a variant in verse 10, and Codex Ollif has apestalken. I would say it's a stylistic variation that he's avoiding sounding pedantic, and he's saying roughly the same thing using two different phraseologies. And when you combine them, you might want to say there's a certain fullness and finality in his understanding to the sending of the son by the father. It is a perfect tense sending with permanent ramifications, but it also just happened. God did it. So whatever all the perfect could convey and whatever the heiress could convey, he uses both of those tenses to talk about the sending. There's a fullness there and a completion. Alright, verse 11. Preliminary translation. Beloved, if God so loved us, we ourselves also love one another. And I just want to point out one cross-reference, the Matthew 18, 32 to 35. It's a negative example of the wicked unforgiving slave. It's interesting because it contrasts with what's said here as God, And here it's speaking of God loving us with reference to him forgiving our sin. And that passage is the slave not loving and not forgiving the dead. So it's interesting how it connects it with the forgiveness part. Tell you what, hang on just a minute. You real quick give us your commentary insights and then Jason you start with your commentary insights on the same verses and we'll see who's wrong. Stop said no one who has been to the cross and seen God's immeasurable and unmerited love displayed there can go back to a life of selfishness. This is an important point powerfully stated by Stop. He is right as though there is no room for selfishness. Okay Jason, start right there. I had it once before that historical manifestation of God's love in Christ not only assures us of his love for us but lays upon us the obligation of our whole life. My final quote. The love of God is so loved us we ourselves owe one another love. Insightly direct tie from God's love to ours is crystal clear. God's love not only gives us an example of the kind of love we ought to have but actually puts us in a debt to love and becomes the very reason that we love. That's where the Romans 13, 8 cross references almost exactly the same. Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another. It shows the same idea of indebtedness to love because of the way that God has loved us. Okay. Numbers on first John 4, 12, 2, 4, 4. Now, 8. Ever. At any time. It's a when word. A time word. And if somebody wants to say a 3 for Udase, I won't quibble. So you can go either 3 or 4 on Udase. Okay. I'm going to take a time 5, 10, 5, 3, 1, 2, 9, 3, 5, 10, 1, 2, 3, 9, 3, 6, 5. My preliminary translation which I call the Swiss cheese version. I was kind of wrestling with those first couple of words just as unfamiliar with vocab. And then you said you wanted us to skip over our cross references? Yes. The voluntary, Scott had this great quote, the unseen God who once revealed himself in his son now reveals himself in his people and when they love one another. He kind of talks about, you know, like you were saying the other day, the prepositional phrase, in Canaan, it's often translated in you or in us. And how we see that a lot of the times is Paul is referring to us as individual Christians. Scott talks about us. You know, corporately John is talking about how God's love is among us. So my final translation, no one has ever seen God. We love one another. God abides in us and his love is being perfected in us. Probably that perfect construction, which is paraphrastic, it's a form of a me with the perfect participle. Whatever that means, it probably doesn't mean is being perfected. It either means is perfected, done and over with, or has been perfected. It stands in a state of perfectedness. And this relates to his doctrine of the atonement, the work of Christ is finished. Now, our application and appropriation of it is ongoing, but he's talking about from God's side. God's love here, he's not talking about it's being perfected. He's saying it has been perfected. That's the effect of the perfect. So I agree with you, theologically it's true, his love is being perfected. But you wouldn't want to translate the perfect participle with a me as is being. So has been would be a much safer translation. So go ahead with your, you don't have to change it. I just want to make a note for myself. I love to hang out with guys from the commentaries. So my ground insight, while at first the phrase no one has ever seen God seems strangely out of place, I think it's a proper understanding of the concept of this verse, the staggered reality about God's manifestation of himself and his love among us and through us as believers. And notice how part of what's strange here is how he fronts the clause with the word God. That's just odd Greek. And kind of what he's saying is, look, God is as good as invisible. Except in the believing community, we see him because he's present among us through the love we have for each other. By the work of Christ and by the work of the spirit in the believing community. No one's ever seen God, but everybody in the believing community sees him all the time. Because God is present as a function of our love for one another. So it's a very important way, it's a proof for the existence of God, if I may put it that way. And it's much more undeniable than the rational proofs for God. Which I love, which have their place, but rational proofs probably have not brought that many people into the kingdom. But the relational proof is the one that it's very, very hard to deny. I asked a professor one time upon hearing that a student had left the faith. And over the years, the older you get, the more you see people leaving the faith. And people you went to school with, they'll leave the ministry, they may end up denying the faith. And I asked my professor, have you ever seen anybody come back? And he thought for a minute, and he said, well yes, I have. And I said, is there any factor that you could sort of isolate that might help explain, or might have been present when people came back? And he thought for a minute. And he said, well, he said, in the cases that I can recall off the top of my head, it would be because there was somebody in that person's life whose love they couldn't deny. That is, whose Christian love. Not his love generically, but a Christian who continued to love them. And even though they had ditched it, that on the surface, human reaching out to them and that human refusal to turn their back on them and write them off, or maybe, who knows, denounce them, or shut the door behind them, or say good riddance or something. Somebody just stuck with them. That's how it was. And I think that's what my professor observed made the difference in the cases that he was aware of. So here you've got to bring in 1 Corinthians 13. Love never fails. You've just got to remember that it's a characteristic of Christian love that it strives with. Those that are unlovable and unloving. While we were young, the sinner's Christ died for us. So that's what brought us around. And then it gets pushed, it's very popular now, to almost demonize people. So that when we look in each other's eyes, we're seeing Christ. And I don't think that's a helpful way to think of it. It really comes out of an overinterpretation of, inasmuch as you've done it to the least of these, you've done it unto me. And then interpreting that to mean all people, really, in the end, are children of God, and we should see Christ in everybody. I do believe people are made in God's image, and so I think we should have a love for all people. But I don't find it helpful to say we should love all people because Christ is in them. Because I don't think Christ is in everybody. I think Christ is not in very many people on the street, and that's the problem in the world. And we minister the Gospel so that Christ will indwell people. So you've got to be careful here, you don't get taken to the cleaners, and suddenly everybody is a Christ image, and we see Christ in each other. We have this mystical experience when we go to church because everybody is Christ. But I'm telling you, even in the church there are people that just think we're children of God. And Jesus was a child of God. We're all like Jesus. And they don't understand the difference between Jesus and them. I've run into plenty of college students who grew up in the church, and that was their understanding. Because what they heard in church was, be like Jesus. That's how you atone for your sin, is you be like Jesus. And this is very popular today, the idea of imitating Jesus. Imitate Jesus and care for the poor. That's pretty much the Gospel in a lot of Bible-believing churches now. Maybe it's not that weird in California, but in other parts of the country that's what it's coming down to. And this is why John's teaching, which is so Christological and so heightened, it so elevates the status of the Son of God, it's critical. Because otherwise we lose the distinction between God and us. In our zeal, somehow to, I'm not sure what all the zeal is, but to somehow dignify people because of how much God loves us. And we become children of God, and we are, and then we lose sight of the fact that we can only be adopted as children of God because there is a child par excellence who is monogonese, totally unlike us at a very critical point. Was that your last verse? All right, give us another one. Then we're going to take a break. All right, first John, 413, and the numbers are 9, 4... I thought that would be 3. 5, 10, 9, 3, 5, 10, 3, 9, 3, 10, 9, 1, 2, 4... 3. Because that's a chroma. Ditto Ken is 5 and 4. 3. This program loves me. By the end of the week we start to forget what we knew at the beginning. My preliminary translation is, by this we know that in Him we abide and Him in us, because out of His Spirit, He has given to us. I think the keynote on Romans 5, 5 was just talking about the Holy Spirit being poured into us. In context, that's why John can say the things that he does about love and about God being manifested among us. Our love for one another because it's really a fruit of the Spirit. The commentary, Stock says the Spirit enables us both 1. to believe and 2. to love. In our fallen and unredeemed state we are both blind, unable to believe, and selfish, unable to love. It is only by the grace of the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of truth and whose first fruit is love, that we ever come to believe in Christ and to love others. My final translation, by this we know that we abide in Him and He in us because He has given us of His Spirit. I kind of wrestled with how to translate the ec to numitas. You know, out of His Spirit, from His Spirit. Can you give me an idea of what's the best way to think of, it almost sounds weird to say out of His Spirit. And yeah, I don't know if from is the best translation of ec. From works, out of is a little awkward, of is a little archaic. There may not be an ideal solution. Whatever translation you venture, you might say is less than ideal. I think English translations struggle to do that justice. Especially working through Romans 5.5. This is where in preaching, this is where your cross reference is helpful. Because if your translation, first thing I ask if I'm going to preach in a church, I say, okay, what translation does your congregation use? Because I want to preach from that translation. I never say this is a bad translation if I don't like that translation. I always say, you know, I get along and say, you know, other translations render this and maybe say it that way. Or say an even stronger rendering might be. So I always want to affirm the translation that they use. But use positive language if I want to suggest a better approach to a verse. And if your translation of the congregation says because he has given us of his spirit, what does that mean? Of his spirit. Then maybe say, well, you know, Paul puts it this way. And talk about how he pours out his love in us by his Holy Spirit which he has given to us. Very similar language. You know, so without belaboring it, you can just go to another place. This is the principle, interpret the less clear by the more clear. You don't have to say, let's talk about the preposition. Right. You don't have to go into a grammar lesson for people that don't know that language. But it's one reason why I'm highlighting these cross references this week. Not that every one of them is right or the best. But generally speaking, these cross references are references that in decades if not centuries, people working on this project have sort of crystallized certain key verses that often the cross references contain Greek connections. Connections of Greek words with other contexts. And you may or might not get them in your Thompson chain reference Bible or your New American Standard or your NIV cross references. They might be there. They might not be there. And a lot of those references, sometimes they'll take you everywhere. You know, I did the cross references for the NIV in the book of Job. If you have an NIV Bible, look at the cross references. I did that when I was a grad student. Now they might have changed a few of them. But the last I saw they're still using those cross references. You know, Zonderman said, you know, we're going to kind of do this from scratch and get a fresh take on cross references. Of course, those of us who got hired, we were grad students. So we looked at our older Bibles to get ideas. You know, and then I was making $7 an hour, which was a lot of money then. So I wanted to find as many cross references as I could find. You know, so my supervisor, Herb Wolf, who's now with the Lord, he was amazed. You know, back then you filled out hard copy sheets and then it got entered into a computer somewhere. So I just had like a doctoral dissertation, references for Job, connections that nobody had ever thought of before. You know, because it's like $7 an hour. But, you know, for preaching, you might waste a lot of time like, I don't see the connection here. But you don't have a lot of those cross references in the Nessi Allant text. They kind of go to the point. So it can help you with, you know, with the task of explaining the text to people. And people really need help with both hermeneutical principles. One, explain the less clear by the more clear. If you do that week after week after week as a pastor, people will start to get the idea. This is one way to understand the Bible. When it's a little fuzzy, go to a place where it's not so fuzzy on that point. Second principle, and more broadly, interpret scripture by scripture. If you can't, don't first of all go to a commentary to explain it. Go somewhere else in the Word of God where it talks about that thing maybe from a little different angle. Now, this assumes, hermeneutically something, that we see, for example, Lou isn't too high on. Lou's not too high on scripture interpreting scripture. She wants to cut 1 John off and interpret it in and of itself. Almost as if anything the writer doesn't explicitly affirm, like a certain doctrine of the atonement, he doesn't even care about. He's not interested in Jesus. That's kind of the principle she's working with in that commentary. But that's probably not a principle we want to instill in people. If we think that John was serving along with Peter, along with James, and was a follower of Jesus, and so on and so forth, we probably think that there's a pretty strong connection between Paul and John and Peter and James and what these guys taught and would have agreed on that they may not have time to unpack in a little letter like 1 John. So we don't think it's illegitimate to go to Romans 5 to shed light on the doctrine of the spirit that seems to be at work in what John's writing here. Yeah? Do you see the Hati clause at the end to be a reason for the abiding or as some translations have it, I can explain it to where he's in us, that is, we can see that in that he's given us his spirit. In other words, further describing the being in us. It depends if you take the Hati as a continuative or explanatory or you take it as causal. And you took it as causal, right, Jason? Yes, sir. So that's a judgment call that the translator has to make. And probably either one is conceivable. But it'll be a point where translators have to take a vote in their committee and decide, well, we're going to go with this or we're going to go with the other. All right. Grounded insight. Did you give that a read? Grounded insight. I'm reminded of what Paul said about the Galatians having begun by the spirit and now being perfected by the flesh. The Romans 5 and the stock commentary just kind of brought out the idea that just as our justification come through the spirit, so to our sanctification, misperception of love comes through the spirit. All right. Let's give Jason a hand.