Lecture 20.docx

Any new insights you get this week, and the more stunning the new insight you get is, the more gentle and cautious I would be in yakking about it when you get back into your church? Let it season for a little while. And I say this with respect to, like I said, maybe you don't like my doctrine of pra...

Any new insights you get this week, and the more stunning the new insight you get is, the more gentle and cautious I would be in yakking about it when you get back into your church? Let it season for a little while. And I say this with respect to, like I said, maybe you don't like my doctrine of prayer, and that's fine. And I really mean that. But if you think that the essence of prayer is not getting what we ask for, maybe because we persevere long enough that we finally wear him down and he gives it to us, or just for some other reason, be cautious about how you introduce a different idea. Don't just shatter people's illusions. Because I remember before I was called the pastor of my church, who I respected a great deal. He led my wife to the Lord. He's actually retired now, but he's still in Christian work. But he distributed in the church a book, which maybe some of you have in your library. It's called The Power of Positive Praying, or The Power of Positive Prayer, I forget which. It's by John Bassanio, who a couple generations ago was a major leader in the SBC. And it was not written from a Reformed perspective. I mean, I didn't know that. But basically, the book says that, you know, we're talking about positive praying here, right? And he talks about this nemesis of people praying for something. It's really a tragedy. I even think maybe he tells a story or two about being in a meeting where they're praying triumphantly and believingly for something to happen, and then somebody screws all up by saying, if it be thy will. Because as soon as you say, if it be thy will, that if shows you weren't positive praying. Throw that if out of there. You know, that's the theology of prayer that invests more in human will than the view that I just propounded. I assume when I pray that often I'm not going to be praying according to God's will. I mean, it doesn't surprise me. And I understand prayer as communication with God, and prayer is the means God uses for me to come to understand His will. So I'm not afraid to pray, I mean, if I were praying, God, help me to rob this bank and not get caught. You know, then I would be afraid for praying out of God's will. But I'm not afraid to pray for things that, in theory, could be God's will, the salvation of somebody, or, you know, that I'll come out in the black this year. Or that I'll, you know, who knows? I mean, I don't pray for promotions, but who knows? I pray for a promotion. I need a raise, and God, this is how I could get, you know, okay, try it. See, maybe that's God's will. I'm not afraid to go to God with things that He's going to end up saying, no, it's not going to happen. Okay. A lot of other things to pray for that may happen. So we go on from there. But I think the theology of that book is very, very strong at the folk Christian level in North America. I think most people, the way they read the Bible, they believe something they know is not true, because they don't get whatever they ask for in prayer. But they believe that the Bible teaches that, and they believe that the Bible is inerrant, and they believe that if you ask hard enough, long enough, right enough, you'll get whatever you ask for from God, because that's what Jesus said. And it's one reason why they don't read the Bible more seriously, because they know deep down it doesn't work. I mean, prayer is, like I said, one of the main indicators of a walk with God. And if you're not praying, you're not walking with God very much. And most people are not praying a lot, because what good does it do? And you know, if you come from a Reformed point of view, there are a lot of people that they've never had the guts to ask you the question, but I've had a few people, bless their hearts, they have had the guts to ask me the question. If God already knows everything that's going to happen, why pray? That's a good question. And I'm not going to try to answer it here. But I'm just saying there are people that have deficient views of prayer, and the last thing you would want to do is break the bruised reed, or put out the smoldering wick. So if you're going to move them to another view of prayer, be gentle about it. And pray about it. And get your own house in order. Is our prayer life where it needs to be? And then maybe pray for a while, Lord, would you work even now in the hearts of this person, or this group, or this congregation, and help us to renew our identity as people of prayer? Because I'm just afraid that we're not as prayerful as we need to be. And part of it might be because people have a flawed view of it. And you know, the law does kill, and there's no law that kills like the law that says you've got to pray right. And that's going to pray right. And you know, prayer is so important. And the rhetoric of the importance of prayer when there's no real reality there that corresponds to that. But everybody's got to act like prayer is so central. But it's really not. It's really not happening. Except in informal ways. So, you know, if you want to change the game a little bit, don't move too fast. Okay. Commentaries? Petition, according to Staud, now turns into intercession in this verse. Regarding this intercession, he presents findings for either different subjects for the two verbs, aiteze and doze, a brother and first, and God and second, respectively. Or in a case for true efficacy in prayer, perhaps the same subject for both actions, a brother. It's a minor point, but he does bring out that this may be what you see in James 5, where a brother's prayer saves another. So it's quite an active involvement by one brother to another brother. It's not really the main thrust of this section here in his writing or Lou's. So let's look at the Staud, which shows that there is a case where no prayer will be effective in God's eyes. And John addresses it here. Staud arrives at a final conclusion after a lengthy analysis of opposing views, finding that John writes of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. However, let me just say a note. The three different views that he analyzed were, one, that it may be like Mosaic law, a mortal sin that we're dealing with, held by the Catholic Church today. Two, it could be apostasy, where an actual believer has been denounced Christ denying that he is the Son of God. Or three, blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, which ultimately is what he points to as being the correct analysis. And that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit would be by one who is a counterfeit brother, a false teacher in the Church, and from among the Antichrists. Because death is countered by life in the verse, and life as a way is a spiritual life, not bios for perhaps more human life, John must be discussing spiritual death, which is not the awaiting reality of a believer. Staud writes, since they rejected the Son, they forfeited life from verse 12. Their sin indeed led to death. Lou, like Staud, sees that intercession is now in view, rightly noting that John does not consider prayers necessary in the case of irrevocably death-bound sins, though she takes a harder line by stating that the Greek implies such prayers are not permitted by the right. Lou references the Jesus tradition, which draws on the teaching of the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. So her default would have gone to Staud's view if that's what she were really looking at. But she ultimately concludes that since there are no sins which are not inherently death-bound because of the nature of sin, it is impossible to fully distinguish between sins that may or may not lead to death. She departs here from Staud, who appeals to the blasphemy of material in view of spiritual death, and delves into speculation that perhaps the sinner has a certain attitude regarding his sin, which is in contrast to the community of faith, or that the sinner refuses to love the community and then steps away from the community without the possibility of re-entry, demonstrating himself to not be a believer in the first place. He wouldn't want to be there, and they wouldn't want him back in those conditions, or he couldn't go back in those conditions. This presents to Lou a neat solution, though she admits it is not a most natural reason. My final translation would be, if anyone sees his brother sinning a sin not leading toward death, he will ask, he will give life to him, to the ones sinning not toward death. There is a sin leading toward death. I do not say that you should ask concerning that sin. From my insight... You know, you only said sin, that sin there, because... Oh, was it sin? No. But because you said, it says peri ekenes, feminine. And if you just say concerning that, then there's a lot of things that could mean in English. When you say peri ekenes, that can only refer to hamartia in the previous verse, concerning that sin. It's still not clear exactly what that means, but we have to make sure in our translation that the concerning isn't just concerning that. It's going to be concerning that sin, for the English reader to know what that refers to. Okay, grounded insight. As we aim to branch out in prayer for a petition for our needs to... you know, let me skip that first part. Let me just go right to this line. The sin which leads to death is truly the blasphemy which denies Jesus as the Son of God, who came in the flesh as the atoning sacrifice for us sinners. A lifestyle of habitual sin is contrary to that of the believer as described across 1 John. And where it reveals a rejection of Christ, God is under no obligation to give yet another chance to repent. This is a severe indictment on sinners and a clear call to sinning believers, to turn from their sinful deeds and walk in the light of God. As it is, there are already enough counterfeit believers in the church, so self-diagnosis on this point as to our own state before the Lord should not condemn us, but should confirm our identity in Christ. To the true brother in faith, we say we will pray for you, be restored, give God glory. I just want to make an additional note here because it can come off very hard. So first off, we must pray for everyone. He says pray for your enemies too. I have to be a man of prayer across the board. And second, it's God's authority here in these verses, not ours, to determine who is going to give him glory and to reveal who is the false brother. So stay in that prayerful state knowing that he has ultimately to go over how he's going to respond to that prayer. Thank you. The other, or another tweak on the prayer on the sin of death and the one which I try to advance in my commentary is that it's a textual, a contextual understanding that in the context of this letter and not only what we've seen earlier, you know, XYZ, but also in the more proximate context where he's talking about the witness of the spirit and talking about life and death, which he's just done in the verses before. You know, I don't think he can go wrong with the blasphemy of the spirit being a sin unto death. I don't think he can go wrong there. And it is a simple solution, an elegant solution. And it's not impossible if that's the right solution, but my thought in the commentary was the sin that leads to death for John, which death and life he's just talked about, in this letter is just what he's been warning about all along. He's been warning about people who belie their apparent Christian confession by their false faith, by their deficient ethics, or by their bogus affection. Those are ways to blaspheme the Holy Spirit. If you're supposed to be receiving the witness of the spirit, and if the witness of the spirit to Christ is going to move you into the positive zones, XY and Z, then if you want a recipe for spiritual death and if you don't want to enter into the life that he just talked about, but you want to be in death, then just sin in one of these ways. Just don't listen either to the Holy Spirit or to me in this letter. So the sin unto death in this sense, and however I explain it, maybe I don't explain it very well, the sin unto death is a failure to receive the word of God in such a way that you're heading the right direction on the coordinates. But you can summarize that negatively by blaspheming the Holy Spirit, because it's the witness of the Holy Spirit that should cause you to believe, obey, and love. And if you don't let the word do that, then you're blaspheming against the testimony of the Holy Spirit. You're blaspheming against the Holy Spirit. So the Holy Spirit understanding is, I don't obey against it, but to me it makes more sense to relate the sin unto death to the failure to heed what he is exhorting people in this letter to receive. Do you think some commentators go directly there by default because they can support that with other scripture under the title? Sure. You're right. Effectively it's going outside of what we're looking at right now to get an answer for what we're looking at when we have the body of the Holy Spirit. And if you combine the pneumatology of chapter 5 with Jesus' teaching on the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, the pneumatology of chapter 5 is very suggestive cognitively. And what it suggests is that everybody who fails to come to faith in the Lord Jesus blasphemes against the Holy Spirit. Because the Holy Spirit is given a witness. And of course John can't say everything, but that witness also goes into the created order. The heavens declare the glory of God. And the Holy Spirit is ready to move people from what they see and what they're responsible for before God to acknowledge that he is the Lord, to move them from general revelation to special revelation. But most people don't want to go there, as many missionaries have discovered. You go to the Italian Alps and, oh how beautiful, but do people want to be moved from the beauty of the general to the special revelation? No. Well, why not? They won't believe the testimony of God about himself. They won't even believe the testimony of the grandeur of the mountains, which the Holy Spirit could easily make effective to open them up to the special revelation of Christ the Son of God. So in a sense, every unregenerate person is engaged in blaspheming against the Holy Spirit according to the pneumatology of chapter 5. Because if we believe the testimony of one another, and we all do, we sure should believe the testimony of God. So you see what I'm saying? That blasphemy of the Holy Spirit isn't something way over here and individual in particular and only committable by certain people who listen to Jesus. It's something much more pervasive than that. And it would be a category under which you could assume the three big sins of 1 John. Which boil down really to one sin, the failure to care to deal with the light of God, or the love of God. Or the law of God too, you got the commandments in there. So, thank you Chris. One more verse, I got the class. Oh, you got one more verse? Do you want me to? Yeah, do one more verse. Where did somebody else have to say? What's your comment or question? Question about how, just how to practically apply the not praying part. Not praying for someone. In my commentary what I suggest is... How can I word it? I believe that I... I relate it to God telling Jeremiah to quit praying. That there's a time to agonize in prayer over something for a brother and there's a time to move along and leave it in God's hands. So you'd have to read my commentary to get the fine print on it. But it has to do with, I mean there are a number of dimensions to this, but one of them is, you know, when we intercede we're taking up somebody's cause. You know, we're praying for them. And there's always the danger, and I think this was Jeremiah's danger, that by lamenting and by identifying and crying out to God on behalf of Jerusalem, it was possible that he would lose his edge of loyalty to God. Because he was asking God to do something that God wasn't going to do. And in fact it would have been totally unfair and unjust and blasphemous if God had done it. Because these people were irretrievable. So the prophet is sent to love the people and shepherd the people and preach to the people and to pray for the people, but there comes a time when you've got to shut up and leave it in God's hands. And John is setting a limit here to prayer in this situation. He doesn't say quit praying, he says I do not say that you should pray concerning this sin. And some people... Let's just take a case that we see increasingly in our churches. We have churches now that are split on the issue of gay behavior. And maybe not in your churches, but lots of churches now. People are compromised because increasingly it's their own sons and daughters who have become implicated in moral expression that the Bible clearly condemns. And we want to pray for God's energy, we want to pray for sin, we want to pray for the lost. But like the pastoral associate who committed suicide, I don't doubt that he prayed for HIV people, but there probably came a time when he needed to pray for something even more fundamental, which was his own loyalty to God. It's a dangerous thing to pray for people whom you identify with who are rebels against God. Not to say you shouldn't do it, but it's easy to start praying out of the will of God because maybe you start praying basically for God to change his own law. God, would you receive these people? God, would you please find this acceptable? It's kind of like praying for somebody after they die and pray they'll be in heaven. After they die, it's kind of late for that. Although there have been people who've had trouble because they realized their loved one is in hell, according to Christian teaching, and they don't know better than to pray that that would be different. So you have to be careful about praying for things that are outside of God's will if that amounts to a resistance on your part to accept what the will of God is. It's subtle, it's subtle, but that's what I think it is, and you can read in Stott & Lew the right answers. Yes? I have a question. A church that has a lot of debate regarding homosexuality, how do they deal with chapter 18 in Leviticus? Are they concerned about the word of God? Well, it depends on the tradition, but for a lot of them that's Old Testament. That's the Jews. So it's kind of a Marcionite approach to the Bible. So that's one prominent strategy you'll see employed. Another is you count out the references, 7 or 10 or 11, however many times you think the Bible condemns homosexual behavior, and you say, well, the church is not going to be held hostage by 7 passages or 11 passages or whatever. How do they deal with Romans? They would argue that that was a different kind of sexual exploitation, and that we're talking now, this is one reason that it's so important that we legalize gay marriage for some, because it validates we don't view sexuality like they did. In other words, that's a different cultural pattern. We live in a different cultural pattern. We affirm it. If Christ came today... But you use all these little buzz words to argue with that. Well, it's not just buzz words. Actually, it's rather sophisticated hermeneutical strategies and a lot of historical research. There are very, very scholarly books arguing that Romans 1 is something, talking about something bad in that culture, and it would be bad now, but Paul's not talking about committed, monogamous, same-sex relationships. He's talking about exploitative, man-boy relations. Now, I think it's less clear. I think it's harder to deal with the lesbian thing in Romans 1 and find a correlate today to something that's different than that. I agree with you. You can't escape what the Bible teaches. But you asked how do they do it. There are a lot of different strategies they use, but they are quite sophisticated and they are very persuasive for people that don't know better. And your demographic, let's say the average age here is 28, your demographic and below, all the polls say now 60% or more of people believe that gay marriage is the right thing for society to affirm. The only reason that it's been thrown out by a lot of states when it comes to a vote is because there are a lot of people that are still older than your demographic. But every year we go into the future, at least in this country, more and more dinosaurs are dying off, and the school system, the government, everything is indoctrinating people with a moral relativism that is even more virulent than it used to be. I grew up in a moral relativism, so I know what it means to have no right or wrong morally and sexually. But there were things that used to be taboo, and we're moving to a zone where increasingly there are no taboos. And what's happening now is the things that used to be a taboo are now a virtue. And the thing that used to be a virtue, which was to say there are taboos, is becoming a crime. If you say there's a taboo, you're a criminal. So in that intellectual climate, arguments against the Bible's culture and against somebody like Paul the bigot, who also wouldn't let women fulfill their purposes in life, and verses in ancient agrarian societies that practice capital punishment and blood sacrifice, bringing those rules into an enlightened climate like we have, you should lock those people up. These pastors, they've got people in bondage, practically. And that's going to make more and more sense in the real near future. So be ready for it. Yeah? Yeah? Given that the unbothered brother is always considered a fellow believer in John, first John, would it seem strange that he's talking about apostasy here? No. No. I mean, I think that's imputing too much to Adolphos. I think, you know, generally in good faith he's considering everybody who's an Adolphos, an Adolphos. But clearly he's warning the Adolphoi about aligning with the Adolphoi who have left. There were people before that were Adolphoi. But guess what? They were not of us. If they had been, they would have stayed. And part of the reason he's writing is, don't you leave too. Don't you abandon the teaching, the ethics, and the devotion to God. So there are some people for whom the jury is out. That's how I would look at a case like that. For verse 17, just wrapping up this section, we have the following numbers. 4222 10 52892. The esten. What did I do there? The first esten. Type O. Thank you. No problem. Type O. Okay, regarding the commentaries. Lou seems to report this verse as an attempt by the writer to clarify a nearly indistinguishable difference between sins which do or do not lead to death. But she believes that his explanation that all unrighteousness is sin, quote, does little to illuminate, end quote, the definition. The writer's perceived inability to express himself seems to lead Lou to further equivocation as to the right interpretation of this very sin that she struggled with in the last verse. And unfortunately, because she does not employ the analogy of faith principle in her hermeneutic here, she herself does little to illuminate this very difficult passage. Stock rather, sees with clarity that John here means to illuminate heavily the moral code of living in Christ, translating adikia as injustice, where I might go with unrighteousness, which he states represents the violation of, quote, an objective moral standard. Neither commentator makes direct mention of the possibility that chi here is adversitive. Those thoughts argumentation would seem to draw this out. The adversitive chi draws more distinction between the two clauses, purporting the stronger idea that although all wrongdoing is by nature sin, there are those sins which can be overcome in prayer. And so I changed my final, my translation to reflect that adversitive chi and I got all unrighteousness is sin, but there is sin not leading toward death. So we should pray for all brothers and not be quick, you know, not to pray for somebody because we think they're not a brother. You know, we might be tempted sometimes. So just to get down to more essential stuff, it is not uncommon to hear weak believers question their salvation or even to despair in the thought that their sin indicates the kind of rebellion that is unpardonable. John's pastoral heart drives him to an ultimate clarification on the difficult definition in the previous verse, and by it, young believers can know that their sins are forgiven through the blood of Christ and that the brothers' intercession on their behalf is a worthy prayer. All unrighteousness is sin. There are many kinds of sin actions and behaviors, but without Christ, they will all lead unto death. In fact, Luke points that out the most. Yet not all sins that we commit indicate that we do not love God and trample on the grace of the Savior. This is why John concludes as he does that although every act outside of God's will is sin, there are those sins from which we can be restored and renewed to life in Christ. This is indeed the confidence assurance that John intends to bring out from this section. Let us keep praying for the restoration of sinning members of God's family and let us hold to the hope of our salvation that in the righteous one we may be able to overcome our unrighteousness. The prologue starts out with first person plural and sort of a programmatic beginning. And I think we should see 18 with oidoman, 19 oidoman, 20 oidoman. I think that this is somewhat of a formal conclusion, culminating in this last blanket imperative of verse 21. So try to think in almost doxological terms. This is his doxology at the end. That he's sort of blessing them with these last affirmations of what the apostles were given and what he can pass on to them to ground and anchor everything he's told them to this point. 5, 10, 4, 1, 6, 9, 1, 2, 10, 5, 10, 1, 6, 9, 1, 2, 5, 3, 10, 1, 4-2, 8, 5, and 3. Notice the autu, hapto, or haptomai, it's a verb of sensation. And notice that it takes its object in the genitive. A lot of verbs of perception and sensation in Greek take genitive objects. So, any questions on the numbers? Commentary? Commentary. Calming on the assurance and certainty of the we know statements that began verse 18. Scott says, here are no tentative hesitant suggestions but bold dogmatic Christian affirmations which are beyond all dispute. And there's an even similar as truth already introduced in earlier parts of the letter. Final translation. We know that everyone who has been fathered by God does not sin, but the one fathered by God keeps him and the evil one does not harm him. That's the insight. The child of God. Can you go a little down to your, okay. Everyone who has been fathered by God refers to whom? The believers. And then who's the one fathered by God? Okay. Ground on insight. The child of God is kept as a board on the military guard, protected round the clock by the captain of the host of the Yahweh, by Jesus himself, against any wounding from the evil one which would threaten the child's permanent, immodible status as an adopted son, by virtue of the father's elective love consummated through the obedient, flooding, and finished, perforatory order of the son. It's very close to Paul's language. He means a word to the mind. You don't have to scroll back up, but that term in 18, if you're looking at your text, Ha-gen-i-theis, it's a passive participle. So this is begetting language associating God with the one begotten by God, which would be Christ. Just to touch one more time on the monogenath thing. Notice monogenath has one nu in it, which tells you it goes to the gen-e, gen-us word, you know, gene, type, species. And it has nothing to do with gen-a-o, two ends, I begat, I generate. So I just, I don't think I make that explicit in the article that I've sent to some of you and what I read yesterday. The begetting language here is in association with a two nu verb, and monogenath is in association with a one nu noun referring to type or sort or species. The numbers are 5, 10, 9, 1, 2, 5, 10, 1, 2, 4, 9, 4, that's 2, 5. Looks good. I'm sorry. The satanic controlled the world in its willingness to submit to that control. The world according to John here is not of the equal. We are literally of God. Although he has already stated that, or he has already stated this in 3, 8, 10, 12, and John 8, 14, 47, but rather in him, in his grip, under his control, moreover again literally lies there. Not a picture that's struggling vigorously, but, or excuse me, to be free, but is quite a new line, perhaps even unconsciously asleep in the embrace of Satan. How a translation would be noted, the real God of the entire world lies under the control of the equal. Grounded inside the entire world lies numbed and scrawled out in a condition of God's sight by the essence to the owner and children of God of this age. The reason we are not in the same condition is because we are of God. We are his possession, but cured by blood, is impervious, followed and ruled by God, sealed by the Spirit, and kept full of Jesus. Because of the revelation, we know this with supernatural certainty. Shane, could you go back up to your cross references? And the Galatians 1 cross reference. Do you see anything about that? Okay, down right here. So this is? Yeah. So that he might rescue us from the age, the present evil. So this is not an adjective here, ionos. It's a third declension noun, meaning age. Our word eon comes from that word. So this is Paul talking about the present evil age. And Paul also talks about the prince of this age. So you know, you've got a dialectic in Paul, which is clear that it's an eschatological dualism. That on the one hand this world is an evil age. On the other hand, Christ is Lord and he's risen. And so this is the realm of God's sovereignty and God's redemption. So there's an already that we can celebrate, but there's a not yet that we have to acknowledge. And anytime you can sort of bring John and Paul together, it's very helpful. Because a lot of the commentators want to drive them apart. And this is a point where you can clearly see John saying the world lies in the evil one. Well, Paul sees that dimension too. So it's not just something that the Johanian community, you know, this metaphysical dualism or ontological dualism, it's not that simple. And it's not that diabolical. Next verse. Last vitamin. Next verse. Point of the numbers are 5, 10, 10, 1, 2, 1, 2, 5, 10, 5, 3, 2, 10-8, 5, 1, 4, 10, 5, 9, 8. Aleth and An? Yeah, 4-2. You've got the truth, right? On my preliminary, yeah, this is the one who is true. I changed that at the end. At first it was... So you changed it to the one who is true? Yeah. So can you correct your number there? Can you put a dash 2? Yeah. It's not to do with a pen, but just so you all know, that should be Aleth and An. It's a substantival adjective there, so it should be 4-2. Pick up the chi. That's 10, 5, 9, 1, 2, I'm sorry, 4-2 again. 9, 1, 2, 3, 2, 2, 3, 5, 1, 4, 2, 10, 2, and 4. Okay, commentary? Okay. The momentarily stopped drawings out the orange identification. Those are perfect verbs saying, the verbs must be viewed together. The Christian gospel does not concern merely with the truth that Christ has given us certain things, but that He has come. There's another example in the letter of John's emphasis that the Christian religion is both historical and experimental, and not one without the other. Moreover, both verbs are in perfect tense. The benefit of His coming remains. His gift will not be. His gift He will not take away. Final translation. We know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding in order that we may know the One who is true, and we are in the One who is true. The Son, Jesus Christ, He is the true God and eternal life. Okay, so here's one of the 8, 9 verses in the New Testament that clearly, unmistakably does what the Jehovah Witnesses say isn't true. You know, it predicates full divinity of the Son of God. He is the true God. Now, John knows he's not God the Father. He knows no one has ever seen God, and he has seen Jesus. So, he's not God the Father, but the Son is still the true God. So, Jesus is called God here. Just to open up, that's our third title of the recent verse. There's a second one here, toad, elephant, gnome. Is that a feeling? Can't get as a principle? How old are you? Ah, I don't know. I think the elephant gnome, perhaps, will go back to the previous point. He took it as an adjective, in the One who is true. Ento alethano? Kai, yes, indeed, in toad, whatever you know. We are in the truth, or we are in the true One. We are in the One who is true. Yeah, so the One previous to that truth, the Lord of the We may know the truth. No, no, no. It's not know the truth. The true One. The true One, or the One who is true. Yeah, just with that second dated one. It's the same thing. It's not a participle. No, it's not a participle. It's a subtypal adjective. So, you can do that without an adjective. Right. It's the exact same thing. In fact, participles are verbal adjectives. Participles are adjectives. So, anything you can do with an adjective, you can do with a participle and vice versa. So, you stick an article in front of it and inflect it, and now it becomes a thing of whatever, how many, what kind, which one entity that you might think of. Even like say, ten. That's an adjective. How many. She's a ten. Now ten becomes a noun. Okay. And in Greek, you can do that. Even better than you can in English. Grounded inside John's use of the internet, his most critical philosophy is critical. He uses the same pronoun at the beginning of his Gospel. In John 2, he was there to describe the Word that was in the beginning of God and was God. And should leave no doubt in the leader's mind that John's intention is to point his wisdom to Jesus as the true God and eternal life. Noteworthy is the fact that John begins and ends his Gospel deliberately, doxedological emphasis on the deity of Jesus. Which would also support the idea that, beginning with verse 18, we kind of have a bookend that corresponds with 1 through 4. 5.1, numbers are 2, 5, 3, 9, 1, 2. Could you put that down one more time just a little bit? Okay. Counting on the tender misaffection of John's parting invitation, Scott says in his last sentence, in the place of any false form of farewell, John uses again his tender affectionate address of your children, which is not good since 3.8. Scott also comes to clarify the apparent inconsistency of John's exhorting readers to guard themselves from idols after stating in 5.18 that it is Jesus himself who guards the child of God. The charge, keep yourselves from idols, arises naturally from the condition and character of the true Christian, which he has been expounding. The Son of God will keep him, but this does not relieve him of the responsibility to keep himself. Final translation, with children guard themselves from idols. The Spirit's work of regeneration brings with it a heart fixed on Jesus as its exclusive object of divine worship. Until the worshiper, should be however in there, however, until the worshiper sees Christ as he is, idols, whether false doctrines, false prophets, the deification of self or the world, etc., will always threaten his affections and loyalties. The man who is locked in blood-color relationship with Jesus Christ must be determined to guard himself in fortifications of truth against these gods, remembering that Jesus, who is the true God and eternal life, is one and the same with the Yahweh of the Exodus 34.14. His name is Jealous. Salvation is found in him alone, idols only, and the soul. That's probably a better conclusion than is either in Stott or Lew. I think most commentators don't know what to do with that last verse. So most translations, or most commentaries on 1 John end on a very flat note. So that's pretty good. The New Living Translation is very dynamically equivalent to their translation of the last verse of 1 John, because if I remember correctly it says, Children, beware of anything that will take God's place in your hearts. Very interpretive translation of verse 21. My question is, what do you feel about the NLP's interpretation and translation of the last verse? Well, its strength is that it emphasizes how detrimental false loyalties can be to our inner lives. The weakness is that it overloads the translation with a single image, that is, the implications of idols, the one deleterious effect of idols on our inner life. Whereas, guarding against idols has much wider ranging implications than simply our hearts. So that's the downside of paraphrases, is they typically sharpen the meaning by deciding for you what aspect you should camp on in terms of what they're paraphrasing. But you always lose something with the paraphrases too. So it's not going to condemn anybody, but it might interiorize something and make it into an aspect of inner piety. When if John is doing what Shane was laying out there, it's a much broader and more aggressive and direct warning about everything he's been talking about, which has a whole lot more to do just than with our hearts and our interior lives. It has to do with our relationships, it has to do with our conformity ethically to the commands of God, and it also has to do with the integrity of our confession and our understanding of the doctrine of God and of Christ and of the Spirit. And when you think of Israel and when you think of idolatry or when you think of Israel in terms of the sheep without a shepherd, that Jesus came and lamented and tried to teach and tried to talk some sense into their heads. Idolatry is kind of a blanket term for the apostasy of God's people in lots of previous eras where they turned against the Lord. They had some other God before him. And you can see how they went wrong and it wasn't just a thing in their heart. You know, there were, I mean I'm just thinking about Jeremiah today, but I taught a lot of lessons on Jeremiah, but there's an old Simon and Garfunkel song, 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover. And I think Jeremiah talks about 50 ways to leave God. And idolatry would be sort of a blanket category for all of them. So I see idolatry as a blanket category for all the ways that these technia need to guard themselves against. Because just as 1 John is a coach at a break with a pad, laying out a full court press, this is God's full court press on evil that's in the world in your lives. He's going to go against it with a call to faith, he's going to go against it with his commandments, and he's going against it with his love. So, you know, live in conformity, here's the plan. Idolatry is the devil's full court press on the people of God. He's got all these ways that he can cause people to have something alongside of God, or instead of God. So I prefer to teach from a translation. I actually went into a church where their few Bibles were NLT's. And they still are to this day. But I gently suggested that on the weeks I preached, because they always put the Bible passages to be right in the bulletin, I said, you know, I do my study, I just said from the ESV, I didn't want to say from the original language, I said, would you mind when I preach, just print the ESV in the Bible? And so, you know, not a problem, but after maybe a month, the pastor started preaching, he started preaching from the ESV Bible himself. And to this day, that church still has NLT pew Bibles, but they always print the ESV, because that's what the pastors teach from. So, it's okay, but I wouldn't want to preach from it.