Something that was not given to anybody else,
who was not initiated into their little group.
So that the key to an understanding of
the universe and its meaning of God and
religious matters is to be found.
Join our group.
Be initiated into our community and we will
share with you this esoteric knowledge that we
ourselves have.
The other thread is this.
They believed that matter was essentially evil.
The universe is evil, the world, all material
things, the body is evil, essentially evil.
Everything that is material is tinged and shot
through with evil.
Therefore, you can only be perfect, using that
word perfection not in its absolute form now.
That you can only have a semblance of
perfection in the mind, in the thought, in
what you believe.
And on that account they said that behavior
doesn't matter, you can behave very much as
you like, provided you believe the right things.
You will see that in the body of
his epistle, John tackles the whole thing positively.
He doesn't divulge, he doesn't dissect all this,
but he answers the problems they raise.
He says that if you're a Christian man,
you will believe certain things that God has
revealed.
And among the things you will believe will
be this, that Jesus is the Christ, the
Son of God.
But not only will you believe, you will
also obey the commandments.
You will do, you will live as God
requires of you.
And what is more, says John, you will
love, especially the people of God.
Now, I can summarize all that up by
saying this, putting it in this way.
Whatever this Gnosticism stood for, it had first
of all attacked the basis of Christian belief.
And then it had attacked the subjective experience
of Christians.
The objective facts and the subjective experience.
You can't shake the facts, or men's faith
in the facts, without shaking their faith in
due course.
They attacked the facts, of course, primarily at
this point.
If matter is essentially evil, then how could
the eternal Son of God ever have come
to live in a body?
The thing is impossible.
If that presupposition is right, that matter is
altogether and essentially evil, it is incomprehensible that
the eternal God, the God who is light
and in whom is no darkness at all,
that He or His co-equal Son, Jesus
Christ, should come and live in, and tabernacle
in, as John says in his Gospel, a
body of human flesh.
Therefore, you see, this Gnosticism attacked the main
artery of our Christian faith.
It raised a question mark concerning the real
incarnation of the unseen and invisible and eternal
God.
If this is right, we still don't know
who God is or what He is.
There could have been no incarnation.
And if there was no incarnation, there was
no Calvary of any significance.
And if there was no Calvary, there can
be no forgiveness of sins for us.
There can be no hope of the resurrection
for us.
Our faith is vain.
We are yet in our sins, as Paul,
in a different context, tells the Corinthian people.
Now, John faces all this.
And I trust that as we think some
of the apostles' inspired thoughts after him, that
the Lord will help us to see again
how firm a foundation is laid for us
in the Word of God and in what
God has done in His Son, and made
known to us by chosen witnesses of the
life and death and resurrection of our Lord
and by His inspired Word.
Now, this morning, we can only take one
strand of thought from the opening words of
this delightful epistle.
I want to speak this morning about the
foundational fact.
Against the background which we have very briefly
referred to now, I want to read verses
1 and 2 again, and then to extract
two main thoughts, two very relevant points from
here.
That which was from the beginning, which we
have heard.
John is referring, of course, to the apostles
now.
Which we have heard, which we have seen
with our eyes, which we have looked upon
and our hands have handled of the Word
of life.
For the life was manifested, and we have
seen it and bear witness and show unto
you that eternal life which was with the
Father and was manifested unto us.
Now, I said I wanted to turn to
two strands of thought there.
There are two counterparts, two sides of the
one coin.
It is evident from the reading of my
text this morning that John doesn't think exactly
as other writers of the New Testament think.
That is, the process of thinking is not
quite the same.
The apostle Paul, generally, not always, he has
a lot of diversions, a lot of things
said in parentheses.
But Paul generally takes a subject and he
proceeds to expound it logically, leading from one
point to another.
And if you are a logician and you
are a Christian, you may almost know in
advance which way Paul is going.
Because he is so logical, so reasonable, and
when he has established his first principles, you
know the way he is going.
You don't know which way John is going.
John's habit is quite different.
John will take one little thought and then
he'll say something about it, and then he'll
leave it, and he'll go on to something
else.
But he'll take up that same thought again
and he'll say something more about it, and
then he'll drop it.
And then he'll go on and say something
again, something different, and he'll come back to
the same original thought the third time, as
he does with the tests of faith here.
And he will enlarge and he will have
said different things about it in the first
context, in the second context, in the third
context.
Now that's why coming to these first two
verses is not easy, and we've got to
extract the main threads for our prophet this
morning.
Two things here.
First of all, the fact in relation to
the fact that lies at the basis of
our Christian faith.
The first is, there has been a divine
action, which John calls a manifestation or a
revelation, Secondly, what God has manifested or disclosed
or revealed, John says, we have apprehended.
We have seen, we have heard, we have
touched.
Now this may sound very elementary, but I
want to assure you this morning it is
very fundamental.
Our Christian faith is grounded upon the fact
that God has done something.
And the thing that John says God has
done here is to manifest something that was
eternal, and which we would never have known
about had not God revealed it or disclosed
it.
Now let me just take three threads out
of this passage, and you'll see what John
is referring to.
He begins by saying, or rather by referring
to, that which was from the beginning.
Then later on he says, the life was
manifested.
And then at the end of verse two
he says, the eternal life which was with
the Father and was manifested to us, so
and so.
Now, what is he referring to?
Well, he's referring to something very special.
He speaks of it here as the eternal
life, which was with the Father.
Now, what does he have in mind?
John may have in mind, first of all,
just life itself, but particularly as it was
embodied in the person of God's Son, who
said, I am the way, the truth, and
the life.
Who said that he had life in himself
and is the author of life.
The gospel starts by saying in him was
life, and the life was the light of
men.
The same gospel says that by him all
things were made, and without him there was
nothing made that was made.
All things were made by him.
You see, life was in him, and eternal
life was in him.
Now, whether we think of the person of
Jesus Christ, or the provision of eternal life
that comes to us only through him, what
John wants to say is this.
It, or he, existed before time began.
Now, this is challenging to our thoughts, but
let's grasp it because it's so important.
That which was from the beginning, when creation
came into existence, this was already there.
When the sons of God danced and sang
for joy at the creation of the universe,
this was already there.
What is it?
The Son was in the bosom of the
Father, and eternal life was in the Son,
but no man, no creature knew about it.
Eternal life was in God, Father and Son,
in eternity, but no man knew anything about
it.
We didn't know what the life of God
was like.
We couldn't see, we couldn't hear, we couldn't
perish that, even if we were there.
But now, says John, that which was from
the very beginning of things has been manifested.
It has been revealed.
There has been a great apocalypse and a
manifestation.
The unseen God and the unseen Son of
God, the eternal, has come right into this
scene of space and of time, and He
has revealed to us the life which was
in God from the very beginning, and the
kind of life that the gospel offers to
sinners.
Now, John will go on, of course, later
in this very chapter to talk about that.
He will say that God is light and
in Him is no darkness at all, and
the kind of life that we must have
if we are to have fellowship with God
is a life that has a kinship with
His.
And how do we know the life of
God?
Well, it's been manifested.
It's been manifested.
Now, the event, of course, to which John
is referring here is the event of the
incarnation.
There is no need to enlarge upon that.
It is that which took place when, conceived
of the Holy Ghost, Jesus became a babe
of Bethlehem, or in Bethlehem.
When Jesus of Nazareth was born, the unseen
God assumed our humanity to His deity and
became visible.
But He said, they that have seen Me
have seen the Father.
Have you ever pondered over that?
They that have seen Me, says Jesus of
Nazareth, they have seen the Father, for the
Father is in Me.
I and the Father are one.
Now, that then is the event.
Paul puts his response in terms of a
sense of wonder in these words.
He corrects as far as the mystery of
godliness.
One of the elements is this God manifest
in the flesh.
All right, there it is in principle.
There is the dogmatic statement.
He's been revealed.
The Word, the eternal life was manifest.
And then, please don't miss this, the end
of verse 2, and was manifested to us.
God was manifested generally to all those who
were around, but very particularly, says the apostle
John, to us.
Who is he referring to?
I believe he's referring very especially there to
the apostles, the twelve who were called.
What a privilege this was.
You know, we may treat it as commonplace.
Jesus of Nazareth going to the Sea of
Galilee and seeing two men about their boats
and saying, come and follow me and I
will make you to become fishers of men.
A very simple thing.
Don't you believe it?
When he summoned them to be with him,
he was inviting them to become the chosen
witnesses of what God would be like in
the flesh.
Of what he would say, and of what
he would do, and of what he would
be, and of what he would promise.
He's asking them, and he's asking every other
fellow that he's going to gather around himself
in due course, to come and at close
hand, to behold him, to see him, to
listen to him, to hear him, and to
feel the touch of his hand, and to
know what it is for God to come
near.
In a way which, of course, is wholly
unique, for the incarnation is unrepeatable.
So he was manifested generally, says John, but
he was manifested particularly to us.
That's why, you see, we've always got to
go back to the writings of the apostles.
Oh, you read modern literature.
I try to do it myself.
Read everything that is good.
But ultimately, you and I have got to
get back to the rock bottom of things.
To the sources, the real, the ultimate sources
of our Christian faith.
Who are they?
The men who were with the Master.
Those that walked with him.
Those that talked with him.
Those that lived with him.
Those that saw him.
Those that were there.
You can never dispense with the gospels.
If your faith is getting a little slack
and a little weak, I suggest to you,
my dear friend, put everything else aside for
a couple of weeks and just read the
gospels and hear what these witnesses are saying
about their Master.
The eternal life which was eternal in God
and in his Son has been manifested and
manifested unto us.
We depend upon that manifestation or revelation.
But now, the other thread.
Now let's turn the coin around.
You will ask, I'm sure, as anybody else
will ask, how could John be so sure?
How could he be so sure that the
Son of God was the person he claimed
to be?
How can you be so sure that the
God who did these remarkable things to which
you refer, the God who is holy, the
God who is light and the God who
is life and the God who is love,
how can you be so sure that he
lived?
It's incomprehensible.
We can't believe it.
Now John comes to it.
Listen to what he says.
And now, this first verse has new meaning
for us.
That which was from the beginning, which we
have heard, which we have seen with our
eyes, which we have looked upon and touched
with our own hands, the apostles' apprehension of
that which God has done in the revelation
of his own eternal life.
Corresponding to the divine act and the manifestation
of the word of life, then, we note
this clear, unequivocal apprehension of that by John
and his fellow apostles.
You see, Christianity is no bare philosophy.
It isn't just a belief in mid-air.
It isn't anything of that kind.
Not just a few threads of thought held
together as an idea.
Christianity says that God has done something.
And it invites us to come and believe
that and to rest upon that and then
to know the fruit of it in our
own lives.
Therefore, it is so important that what God
has done should be seen by us to
be full proof.
That the witnesses bearing their testimony should be
seen to be genuine.
And the question that we want to pose
to John is this.
Are you sure that this person who spoke
as he did, who acted as he did,
as Jesus did, are you sure that he
was a real person?
Was he no phantom?
Some of the Gnostics said that Jesus was
but an ordinary child of Joseph and Mary.
And though it is true that the Logos
came upon him for a little time and
between his baptism and between his death made
something out of him, he was not divine.
He was not God incarnate.
The question we want to put to John
is this.
Having testified in your gospel to the Lord
Jesus Christ and given the signs that point
to his deity, the gospel was written that
men may believe.
Now, are you yourself sure that you were
dealing with a real person in flesh?
John assures us.
The incarnation was real and it was historical.
He's not talking about a dream.
He's not talking about a hallucination.
He's talking about a real event in history.
And he says, I'm so sure of it,
I want to tell you how I was
listening to him or we were listening to
him, how we saw him, and how we
touched him.
What John is doing here, you see, is
this.
He is saying that the three cardinal senses,
the sense of hearing, the sense of sight,
and the sense of touch, were all involved
in the assurance that he is now passing
on.
To quote a word from Peter, we did
not follow cunningly devised fables when we made
known unto you the power and coming of
our Lord Jesus Christ.
We were eyewitnesses.
We lived with him.
Or, coming back to John, we heard, we
saw, and we touched.
Now let's look at this for a moment.
Let's look at the first.
That which we have heard.
It's so difficult for us from this vantage
point in the 20th century to get the
thrill of this.
All that you read in the Gospels and
much else, John tells us that if everything
was written that could be written, well, the
libraries of the world would not be able
to contain the whole.
To hear what they heard was something of
a stupendous order.
And John says we actually heard him.
Disclaiming, therefore, any sort of dreamy hallucination or
wishful thinking, he says that in a myriad
life situations over a prolonged period of time
for nearly three and a half years or
so, we were listening to him.
We heard him.
And, of course, the disciples were not the
only people to hear him.
In passing, can I only refer to one
incident?
Do you remember how soldiers were sent to
arrest him on one occasion?
When they listened to his teaching, they couldn't
lay hands on him.
They returned to their masters and they said,
Never a man spake like this man.
Who are we to arrest a man like
this?
There's no one that's ever spoken like this.
They heard him.
The thing I want to get across is
this.
You see that Jesus spoke.
He talked.
He taught as one having authority.
And they heard him with these very ears.
They're not dreaming.
That which we have heard, that which we
have seen, which our eyes have looked upon.
Now John is very keen to get this
across.
Which we have seen, which our eyes have
looked upon.
And he uses two words here.
Two words.
Because he just wants it to be known
that they're not talking about something dreamy, something
that happened in the imagination.
Jesus is no pigment of the imagination.
He's historical.
We have seen him, he says, and we've
looked upon him.
We've seen him.
Now this is a simple word.
I saw an airplane flying through the sky
and making towards the airport and coming down.
And I knew that it was a 747.
I saw it.
I could tell you the color.
I can't tell you anything about the engine.
I can't tell you how many were in
it.
I wasn't able to penetrate everything.
But I saw the thing in the air
and I saw it coming down in the
airport.
Then the next word that John uses is
a different one.
Notice.
That which we have seen with our eyes,
which we have looked upon.
Which we've examined.
Which we've beheld with intelligence.
Which we've perceived.
Which we've scrutinized.
Now there's a history behind this.
I can't tell you what it is, but
I can guess.
It's the disciples, almost bewildered by the character
and the grace and the power and the
wisdom of their master.
Just looking at him.
Gazing intently at him.
Asking themselves, can all this be real?
We've looked.
We've gazed at him, says John.
We've looked into this matter.
We've perceived.
We've intelligently scrutinized.
We haven't just come to tell you we
saw something which might have been with the
eye of the imagination.
No, no, no.
With these physical eyes, we've watched him.
And then, says John, and we've touched him
with our hands.
The eternal word of life, the gospel, the
eternal life, which was hid in God from
all eternity and was manifested.
Now, we have touched him in whom that
life was embodied.
We've touched him.
Without going into the details, there is good
reason to believe that this language is reminiscent
of what happened in the upper room just
after the resurrection of our Lord.
There can be no doubt, says Bishop Westcott
in his commentary, that the exact word is
used with a distinct reference to the invitation
of the Lord after his resurrection.
Now, you remember that invitation?
That was an unforgettable occasion when the risen
Lord said to Doubting Thomas, when Thomas said,
I simply can't believe that he's risen, says
the Lord to Thomas, behold, my hands and
my feet, that it is I myself.
Handle me.
And see.
For a spirit hath not flesh and bones,
as ye see me have.
And when Thomas had put his hand into
the wounded hand of his Lord and thrust
it into his side, he said, my Lord
and my God, the unseen has come before
the eyes of men and has been handled
in the flesh.
Men and women, we're dealing with realities here.
There is no event of history which is
substantiated in this way.
I can't prove that Julius Caesar lived in
this way.
But our Lord Jesus was seen, he was
heard, he was handled in a myriad of
situations over and over again.
This is the testimony of men who are
known to be reputable and trustworthy and obedient.
What then does this mean?
It means that our faith is built upon
the revelation of the unseen God in the
person of his Son.
I want to close this morning doing something
which I don't often do, but I think
it's so important to do it.
I have found reading literature that comes out
of the press nowadays, and there's a glut
of it, which suggests in a somewhat sinister
way that really the life of the Lord
Jesus is not all that historical.
And therefore, if we can't be sure of
that, we can't be sure of anything.
Now, they're right, of course, in that.
If we can't be sure of that, we
can't be sure of anything.
And I want you good people to know
that our Lord Jesus did come in the
flesh.
We do not build our faith upon a
fable.
And I want to turn now not to
the New Testament, but outside of the New
Testament.
And I want to read to you very
quickly, but I trust that the Lord will
enable us to do so in a manner
that will help confirm your faith and mine
in this basic, this cardinal fact of history
upon which the whole superstructure of our Christian
faith rests, that God the Unseen has come
into this world and lived and tabernacled among
men in Jesus of Nazareth.
Now, let me read first of all from
the testimony of Pliny, who was a Roman
proconsul in Bithynia, in Asia Minor.
Now, he was a pagan.
He's not a Christian.
And he's writing to the Emperor Trajan in
A.D. 110.
And he's writing about the way in which
he had been reacting to the Christians in
his province.
Now, all this is pagan.
But I want you to notice the testimony
to the historicity of the incarnation of Jesus
Christ.
There is the course, sorry, this is the
course that I have adopted in the case
of those brought before me as Christians.
I ask them if they are Christians.
If they admit it, I repeat the question
a second time and a third time, threatening
capital punishment.
If they persist, I sentence them to death.
For I do not doubt that whatever kind
of crime it may be to which they
have confessed, their pertinacity and inflexible obstinacy should
certainly be punished.
There were others who displayed the like madness
and whom I reserved to be sent to
Rome since they were Roman citizens.
Thereupon, the usual result followed.
The very fact of my dealing with the
question led to a wider spread of the
charge.
And a great variety of cases were brought
before me.
An anonymous pamphlet was issued containing many names.
All who denied that they were or had
been Christians I considered should be discharged because
they called upon the names of the gods
at my dictation and they did reverence with
incense and wine to your image, which I
had ordered to be brought forward for this
purpose, together with the statutes of the deities,
and especially because they cursed Christ, a thing
which, it is said, genuine Christians cannot be
induced to do.
Others, named by the informer, first said they
were Christians and then denied it, declaring that
they had been, but were so no longer,
some having recanted three years or more before
and one or two as long ago as
twenty years.
They all worshipped your image and the statutes
of the gods and they cursed Christ.
But they declared that the sum of their
guilt or error amounted only to this, that
on an appointed day they had been accustomed
to meet before daybreak and recite a hymn
antiphonally to Christ as to a god, and
to bind themselves to an oath, not for
the commission of any crime, but to abstain
from theft, robbery, adultery and breach of faith,
and not to deny a deposit when it
was claimed.
Now the point I want you to get
across, my friends, is this.
Here is a pagan man writing to the
emperor, asking for advice.
What can I do with these people?
Because the more I discipline them and the
more I persecute them on account of their
faith, the thing is growing more and more.
And it's all because of Christ.
We're dealing with real history now.
Let me give you another one.
Tacitus, the Roman historian who wrote about A
.D. 115, concerning Nero's persecution of Christians in
Rome in the year A.D. 64, following
the great fire of Rome.
But all the endeavors of men, all the
emperor's largesse and the propitiations of the gods,
did not suffice to allay the scandal or
banish the belief that the fire had been
ordered.
In other words, it was alleged that Nero
himself was the cause of that fire, but
he's trying to get out of it and
pin the blame on someone else.
I go on with the quote.
And so, to get rid of this rumor,
Nero set up as the culprits and punished
with the utmost refinement of cruelty a class
hated by their abominations who are commonly called
Christians.
Christus, Christ, from whom their name is derived,
was executed at the hand of the procurator
Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius.
Checked for the moment, the pernicious superstition again
broke out, not only in Judea, a source
of the evil, but even in Rome.
We're dealing with Roman history as well as
biblical history.
Can I give you another one or two?
Suetonius, the Roman historian, writing somewhere around A
.D. 120, in his book entitled The Life
of Claudius, Emperor from 41 to 54, he
says this very simply.
It's a short one.
Since the Jews were continually making disturbances at
the instigation of Christus, Christ, he, that is
Claudius, expelled them from Rome.
Now, I could go on and quote to
you.
I have them here from Lucian and Josephus
and Tertullian and Thallus and many others, all
of which say this.
They're referring to the man Christ Jesus.
So that the testimony is clear.
When we say that Jesus of Nazareth lived,
we are not simply talking about a name
which appears in the New Testament.
We're talking about one who came into history
and who, whether we are believers or unbelievers,
whether we like it or not, has divided
time into B.C. and A.D. This
is what John says.
To those of you in Asia, to those
of you around Ephesus or to those of
you here in Knox this morning, you have
a quasi-doubt as to whether the incarnate
God ever became visible in human flesh.
I want to say that we saw him
in whom he appeared, manifesting his deity as
well as humanity.
We saw him.
We scrutinized.
We heard him.
We touched him.
Now, we shall proceed, God willing, next Sunday
morning on the basis of this, to speak
of the fellowship that can be based and
has been based upon it.
John says, I'm writing to you, that on
the basis of the fact that he has
come and lived and taught and died and
is risen again and ascended on the basis
of what he, the historical Christ, has done,
I bid you and I urge you to
live and to believe and to act in
such a manner that you may have the
fellowship which we have not only with one
another and with the Son, but with the
Father.
How firm a foundation, ye saints of the
Lord, except for your faith in his excellent
Word.
God grant us today, as never before, to
feel the rock beneath our feet in a
day when so much is crumbling to the
glory of our ever-blessed Savior.
Amen.
Let us pray.
Father in heaven, we bow adoringly, gratefully, rejoicingly
now, as we have been thinking this morning
of the fact that the testimony borne by
these chosen witnesses to thy Son, our Lord
Jesus Christ, is also confirmed even by secular
historians who unwittingly are thine instruments for our
benefit.
We bless thee that thou hast caused the
very wrath of man to praise thee.
We thank thee that some of the very
Roman emperors who persecuted the saints of old
have some facts written into their histories that
can feed the abiding faith of those who
rest in Christ crucified, risen and reigning.
Bless each one of us according to our
need this morning.
Make us strong, perhaps in order to believe.
Give to us a realization of the firm
foundation that is laid for our faith.
Then to others of us who are finding
our faith weak or in the process of
being weakened by circumstances, come, our God, come
and feed the flame within our hearts and
quench the yearnings of our intellect.
We ask it in the name of thy
Son, our Savior.
Amen.