The Word of Life

The purpose of our faith is life. God created life to flourish in God's presence. God will accomplish what God set out to create. And, in doing so, God will be glorified.

Read: Deuteronomy 30:15-20 and 1 John 1:1-2:6

A lot of the stuff that happened during Jesus’ ministry didn’t make much sense to the disciples, at that time. It wasn’t until later on, after the resurrection and with the help of the Holy Spirit, that they could look back at what had happened and the pieces started to come together. Once these disciples had the cross and resurrection in hand (as the interpretive key to aid their understanding), they could look back and make sense out of what made no sense at the time. And that’s one way to read 1^st John. 1^st John is a disciple looking back and revealing to us the deeper meaning of our Lord’s death and resurrection. In fact, some scholars have argued (and I tend to agree with them on this) that 1^st John was originally meant to be a commentary, or maybe a companion piece, to the gospel of John. So, perhaps, if you were an early Christian and someone brought the gospel of John to your church, they would also give you 1^st John as a kind of commentary to help give you a deeper understanding of what you were reading in the gospel.

Now why would someone think 1^st John and the gospel of John go together. Well, they share many of the same themes, themes that predominate in John’s writings. Consider the opening line of 1 John, “We declare to you what was from the beginning…” Now, compare that to the opening line in John’s gospel, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.” So already we see a connection. In 1 John we’re told, “We declare to you what was from the beginning…” And what was from the beginning? This Word that is the life and light of all people.

Again,1 John opens with, “We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of life…” Just as in the gospel when he says this Word that was with God from the very beginning was the source of life and the light of all people. Here John calls him the “Word of life.” Jesus Christ, and gospel about Jesus Christ, is the Word of life.

If we ask the question, “What is the overall purpose of our faith?” The answer is simply: life. All the other things about our faith work towards this very simple goal: that the life God intended to create is realized through Jesus Christ and thereby God is glorified. Towards the end of the gospel of John (20:31) we are told why that gospel was written. It says, “… (this is) written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.” The goal of the gospel is life. Or, as Jesus put it, “I came so that you might have life and have it abundantly.” Right? The thief comes only to kill and destroy, but he came so that we might have life (John 10:10).

If you were to take the wide view of the Old Testament history from Genesis to the prophets, it is unmistakable that the goal from the very beginning has always been life. That is, life lived in the presence of a good Creator. Think back to Genesis. God creates humanity. God creates humanity in a garden. The garden is an image of flourishing life. There is fellowship in the garden between humanity and God as they walk together in the cool of the day. This is God’s creative intention. When God created, this is what God wanted.

But, and you know how the story goes, once sin enters the picture humanity is barred from life, removed from the flourishing life of the garden. Sin, by its very nature is destructive. The thief comes only to kill and destroy. Sin by its very nature works against life. Here’s the thing, we humans put God in an awkward position. We want to live forever, but we don’t want to live according to the conditions that God set up for life. Lying, cheating, stealing, slander, enmity, greed, hatred, violence, murder…life was not made for these things. Life and sin cannot persist together forever. At some point, one of the two has to give. So, what is God supposed to do with that kind of situation?

Skip forward from the opening chapters in Genesis and we find that God chooses one person, Abram. From this one person God will create a people who will be called to live life as God intended. And, through these people God will bless all the families on earth. So, God creates these people, a people of his own choosing, and gives them the law. The goal of this law is life, flourishing life. “…I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you…” (Deut. 30:19-20). Just as before, life is the goal. Nonetheless, as with all humans, their sin prevented them from the flourishing life that God intended for them. So, God sends the prophets to remind them, to call them back to God and to the life God intended for them, and to proclaim to them the hope that one day God will do for them what they are unable to do for themselves.

So, from Genesis to the prophets, the problem is always the same. God creates humans for life and humans destroy that life through sin. Again, what’s God supposed to do with that? If God allows sin to persist forever there will be no life. So, in order for God to secure life, sin must be eliminated. But, and here is the root of the problem, how does God eliminate sin without at the same time eliminating the creature who sins? How does God eliminate sin and yet save the creature who sins? That’s the predicament.

God’s answer to this predicament is simply John 3:16. To wit, God so loved the creature God created that God took upon God’s self, in the person of the Son, the destructive nature, guilt, and consequences of sin, so that we, in turn, might have the never-ending life in God’s presence that God created us to have. That, my friends, is the good news of Jesus Christ. Or, as it says in our 1 John passage, “God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; but if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.”

Everything hinges on Christ. This “Word of life” that came into the world is the key to life. John says, “We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of life.” John says, "We saw this Word of life. We heard him, we touched him. He was here with us.”

When I worked telephone construction and was given my first crew, the owner of the company came to me and said, “If you want your crew to work well with you, this is what you need to do. On the first day you are with this crew, when y'all pull up on the job, I want you to jump out of the truck and start to do the most difficult aspect of that particular job. If you have to set a pole and it’s too close to other utilities so that you have to hand-dig it, then jump out of the truck, grab the shovel and post-hole diggers, and start digging. If you do that, they’ll see what you are willing to do and they’ll do whatever else you ask.” I considered that to be sage advice.

Our Lord came into this world and he went the distance. He didn’t just come into the world and say, “This is the commandment, this is how you are supposed to live. Now, go do it.” He didn't just say it, lived it. He was obedient to the conditions set up for life, even to the point of death on the cross. He went the distance. And so, John says at the end of our passage, “By this we may be sure that we are in him: whoever says, ‘I abide in him’, ought to walk just as he walked.”

I sometimes get the impression that people think the Christians faith is mostly about sin and forgiveness. It is true that sin is the problem and forgiveness through Jesus Christ is the solution. But, neither one of those is the goal. That’s like saying the goal of my truck is to have an engine. It is true that without an engine my truck won’t run, but that’s not the goal of my truck. The goal is to get me from point A to point B and hopefully haul some stuff in the process. In the same way, we can’t have life without forgiveness for sin and freedom from sin's destructive nature and power. But the goal is not the issue of sin and forgiveness. The goal is life.

John says, “We declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.” I’ve been saying that the goal is life. But, that’s not quite the right way to put it. As John points out, the goal is not just life, but life in fellowship with God and one another. This is what we were created for: life in fellowship with God and with one another.

Here’s the thing, the church is not the building into which Christians gather for worship. The church is anywhere you find a group of people who are living in fellowship with God and with one another, on account of Jesus Christ. The church is any group of people who are living life as God intended because of Jesus Christ. Anytime the church succeeds at being the church, then as our Lord put it, we will shine like a city on a hill.

Now, it is common, especially these days, to hear people say that the world is just getting worse and worse. I am not inclined to disagree. However, if that is the case, then the church shining on that hill should be getting brighter and brighter. The contrast between the Light in which the church lives and the darkness in which the world lives should be getting clearer and clearer. And when that happens, more and more people will be drawn into our fellowship because they will be able to clearly see that our fellowship is truly with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ. 

(All quotes from scripture are from the NRSV)