Third Presbyterian Sunday Morning Bible Study - April 26, 2020

Below is the Bible Study written by Jim Rudiger for his Sunday School Class which meets at Third Presbyterian Church, Norfolk, Virginia. It's based on 1 John 2:7-11;15-17.

Prayer

If it's new, it must be better.  Do you believe that?  To tell you the truth, the older I get the more scared I get of new stuff.  I panic when my computer has to be replaced and I have to buy one with a new operating system.  I just know that there will be programs that I depend on that won’t work with the new system. 

Every thing new seems so much more complicated.  My first car was a 1938 Plymouth.  When you opened the hood there was an engine, radiator, starter, battery and generator and that was about all.  There was enough room under the hood for all of those things with room left over for several people.  Television was a big box with a screen and a pair of rabbit ears.  Now a television has to have a entertainment center, cable box, a CD and a DVD player connected to it.  There are so many wires behind my entertainment center. It looks like I”m launching a satellite in orbit.

It’s bad enough when a new smart phone comes out and I have to have my five year old great granddaughter show me how to use it.  But, I really get stressed out with new approaches to worship.  You have modern worship, contemporary worship, charismatic worship and the one I personally prefer, OFW - Old Fogey Worship.  That’s worship where we sing only hymns I know, sermons about us being sinners and needing salvation, only organs and pianos allowed, quiet music as we enter the sanctuary and flip flops are forbidden.

In today’s study, John is dealing with a new approach to Christianity.  An approach that was being touted as being more sophisticated and in tune with the needs of younger Christians. After all, the church has to change if it wants to attract young people.  But, these changes were at odds with the church John helped spread.  Does John have a point or he just longing for an old fogey service?  Let’s see what our scripture has to tell us today.

Last week I told you that the year is about 100 AD and John is an old man living in Ephesus. His job is to oversee the churches in and around Ephesus which was located in present day Turkey.  All of the other Apostles have died and he is the last person to have actually been taught by Jesus.  Can you imagine?  Here was a person who had intimate conversations with the Son of God.  Had been there when Christ performed his miracles.  Was one of the first people to look into the empty tomb after the resurrection.  I remember back in the early fifties, Norfolk hosted the last living veterans of the Civil War or, as I was taught, the War Between the States.  I remember marveling at what these men had experienced.  It was almost like seeing history in person.  Now, we are seeing the same wonder over veterans of the First and Second World War as each year there are fewer and fewer left.

It has been nearly seventy years since John last saw Jesus, but, the words Jesus spoke and the things he did are as fresh in his mind as if they had happened yesterday.  Some things had changed though.  Jerusalem wasn’t the same city that welcomed Jesus on that Palm Sunday with cheers.  The echos of those cheers have long faded.  The walls of the city are broken and falling down.  Thirty years ago, the Romans had left the Temple a pile a rubble.  Through the center of town, you can still see the furrow left by the Romans when they ran a plow through the city to demonstrate that the city was gone and was now only a barren field. 

A lot had changed in the Christian church, too. Eye witnesses to the church’s beginnings were almost all gone. Second and third generation Christians were in the leadership of the church. Some of the excitement and fire of the early days were gone. There probably wasn’t as much persecution so there was freedom to question and make the religion more relevant to this new day. What better way to bring the religion into the new century than to become more sophisticated and by that I mean more intellectual.
       

And that is what had happened. Heresies developed, not to replace Christian beliefs, but to make them more up to date and interesting to the younger generation. Last week we talked about the most persuasive heresy, Gnosticism. Basically, it believed that all matter was evil and only the spirit was pure or holy.  To be a Gnostic, you had to have  special training and secret creeds. And that training came from other Gnostics who had gotten their doctorate from Heresy University.  The idea was that the only way you could understand God and Jesus was for you to possess a special knowledge that the common ordinary Christian didn't have.  It all boiled down to if you wanted to be a "real" Christian you had to belong to a secrete club, Gnosticism,  with passwords and coded beliefs.

When John sat down to write this book, Gnostics were just beginning to make head way in the church.  Their major problem was in explaining how God can fit in a belief that the spirit was pure and good and all matter  including our human bodies and the universe were evil.  If God was the pure and perfect Spirit, how could he have created the universe from matter which by their definition was 100% evil.  In all the creating in Genesis, the handling of evil matter would have corrupted God.  So, how could God create without touching?  Good question.  Here is how they explained it.  In creating God didn't work alone.  He would say, "I'm going to create a tree." He would tell a being working under God to make a tree.  By involving another being, God had reduced his exposure to matter by 50%.  The guy God told to make a tree then went and told a being working under him to make a tree.  Now God's possible corruption was reduced to 33%.  Each being when told to make a tree went to a being under him and told him to make a tree and with each new being, God's involvement was reduced.  If there ended up with one million beings in the chain between God and the tree, then God's chance of being corrupted would be one millionth of exposure which for all practical purposes is zero.  As far as the Gnostics were concerned, that solved the touching matter problem.

Jesus Christ presented a bigger problem since Christ was defined as Spirit and human.  Gnostics created a branch of Gnosticism called Docetism which comes from a Greek word meaning "seems like."  Docetism taught that Christ only seemed to have a body.  There was a member of the church in Ephesus named Cerinthus who concocted a theory based on Docetism that was really bazaar and out in left field.  John couldn’t stand Cerinthus.  A book on the history of the early church written in the second century tells the story of John going to a public bath house and being told the Cerinthus was inside.  John refused to enter the building and told the people with him that they better run as fast as they could before God caused the building to collapse on Cerinthus. 

Here is Cerinthus’ theory that so ticked off John.  Cerinthus separated Jesus from Christ.  Jesus was just another man, although he was a very good man and was obedient to God.  But, there was nothing special about him or miraculous about his birth.  No stable with a star in the sky.  No three wise men.  No virgin birth. He was born like any other man and was raised by simple hard working parents.  One day he went down to the Jordan where John the Baptist was baptizing people and waited in line to be baptized. Like trying to get in Walmart now-a-days.  As he stood in the water with John, a dove came down from heaven.  So far so good, right?  But, here’s how Cerinthus interprets what happened.  He said that this dove was really the spirit of Christ coming down from heaven and entering the body of Jesus. 

From that moment on, Christ represented the spirit from heaven and Jesus represented a human being controlled but not touched by the Spirit.  Jesus was only a human puppet with Christ pulling the strings.  At the end of Jesus’ life when he was about to be crucified, Christ said, “I’m out of here.” leaving Jesus to suffer the trial and crucifixion alone.  According to Cerinthus, when Jesus said, “My God, my God.  Why has thou forsaken me?”  He was really talking about the sprit of Christ leaving his body.  What this meant was that Christ, the spirit, never suffered anything leading up to and including the cross.  Our belief is centered around Christ suffering for our sins saving us from suffering.  If Christ, the Spiirit, never suffered anything, how would that effect our belief?  Without the suffering, our sins are still with us.  So, actually Cerinthus was removing the corner stone of Christianity and John wasn’t going to take that lying down.

A lot of people bought into Cerinthus’ theory.  A book called the Acts of John, which wasn’t written by John bother way, even tells us that at the time Jesus was being crucified, Christ was actually sitting in a cave with John discussing the event.  Christ is quoted as saying to John, “John, to the multitude down below in Jerusalem I am being crucified, and pierced with lances and given gall and vinegar to drink.  But it can’t be happening, because I am here talking to you, right?  So, listen to what I'm going to tell you.  None of the things they say I suffered ever happened to me.”
   
With this background in mind let’s see what our study has to say.

1 John 2:7 Beloved, I am writing you no new commandment, but an old commandment that you have had from the beginning; the old is the word that you have heard.  8 Yet, I am writing you a new commandment that is true in him and in you, because the the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining.

John wanted to set the record straight and counter the claims of the Gnostics.  John starts off calling them “Beloved”.  “Beloved” is a favorite term that John uses when he is speaking to people he knows. But, John isn’t going to sugar coat what he has to say.  A lot of this book contains warnings for his people.  When you fuss with somebody are you upset?  When we warn somebody or fuss with somebody, sometimes we can get pretty worked up.  My father could never fire somebody unless he worked himself up into a rage.  If he couldn’t develop an anger toward the guy he was going to fire, he just couldn’t go through with it.   That is why I was given the job of firing people.  When you let your anger show, you get feed back from the other person. They aren’t sure if you hate them enough to slug them. 

When John fussed with the people, he was different.  Even when he was telling them they were wrong, it was done with love.  His voice showed that love.  He had mastered the ability to speak the truth with love.

John speaks of the commandment that is both old and new.  Sounds a little weird, doesn’t it?  How can something be old and new at the same time?  It was old in the sense that Leviticus said that the Jews should love their neighbor as themselves.  So, it wasn’t the first time that John’s readers had heard this commandment.  In fact who else said that?  Jesus.  Ever since they became Christians they had been taught that their lives should be focused on love.  But, it is also new because Jesus had raised the stakes on this love your neighbor commandment.  In Leviticus your neighbor was another member of your clan - another Jew.  Jesus' neighbor was no longer a member of your tribe or the person who lived next door to you.  Your neighbor had expanded to include the whole world.

It is possible for something to be old in the sense that it has been around a long time.  Yet can become new and refreshing when performed in a completely new way.  For instance, we have heard the national anthem all of our life, but, some people sing it with such heart that it touches our soul and we get all teary. Food can be like that too.  I have eaten crab cakes all my life at local restaurants, but, when I eat a crab cake at the Surfrider, it is a new experience.  An old thing can become a new experience in the hands of a master.  With Jesus, love became new in two ways.

1. It became new in the extent of it’s reach.  The love of Jesus had reached out to sinners.  To the Jewish Rabbi, a sinner was the person God wanted to destroy.  Rabbis used to say that there was joy in heaven when one sinner is obliterated from the face of the earth.  Jesus reached out to the people that society refused to touch.  And this led to reaching out to Gentiles.  For Rabbis, Gentiles were worst than just sinners.  They felt that Gentiles were created by God to be fuel for the fires of Hell.  But, love became new with Jesus because he widened the boundaries until it encompassed the sinners, Gentiles and the whole world.
2. It became new in the lengths it would go.  There was nothing that a person could do to stop Jesus’ love.  No lack of response to his invitation, would cause Jesus to give up on us.  There was nothing that we said or did that could turn Christ’s love for us into hate.  Even on the cross, that love lead him to pray for God’s mercy on the very people who nailed him to the cross.

John says that the light is shining and the darkness is passing away.  By the end if the first century, men’s ideas about the Second Coming of Christ were changing.  In the early days of the church, they thought the Second Coming was only a few days away.  And, it would come as a shattering event.  Days, months and years went by and no Second Coming, but, it didn’t cause them to abandon hope.  They looked at where they were and redefined their ideas about the Second Coming.  For John the Second Coming wasn’t going to be a sudden dramatic event but a process in which darkness is steadily being defeated by the light.  What he means by darkness is hate and what he means by the light is love.  So the Second Coming happens when love totally conquers hate and hate doesn’t exist anymore.  So the Second Coming is depended on all of us living by the commandment to truly love our neighbor and when everybody is doing that, there won’t be any room for hate in our lives.

1 John 2:9 Whoever says, "I am in the light," while hating a brother or sister, is still in the darkness.  10 Whoever loves his brother or sister lives in the light, and in such a person there is no cause for stumbling.  11 But whoever hates another believer is in the darkness, walks in the darkness, and does not know the way to go, because the darkness has brought on blindness.

Look at how John states love and hate.  It’s black and white for him.  There aren’t any grey areas.  You cannot have the love he's talking about and still allow a little kernel of hate to stick to the back of your mind.  When it comes to our fellow human beings, it is a matter of a commitment to either love them or hate them.  We can’t be neutral in our relationships.  So what controls whether we love somebody or not?  It all boils down to our attitude.  You know, we have Minutes for Missions and fliers in our bulletin that enthusiastically encourages us to love people in other countries.  Maybe it is time to have that same enthusiasm applied to loving our next door neighbors, or loving members of our family or loving people that just plain annoy us.  Above all, John insists on us loving those we are in contact with every day.

John is right when he draws sharp distinctions between light and dark, love and hate.  There is no room for shades and halfway approaches.  Look at it this way.  Everybody we come in contact with every day is part of our landscape.  We can no more ignore them as we can not to breathe.  I guess the question isn’t about if they are there, because they sure are, but, in how we regard them?

1. We could regard our fellow man as negligible.  We can operate as if our plans are none of his business whether they effect him or not.  We can live on the assumption that his needs and his sorrows and his welfare and his salvation aren’t our concern.  That, it's up to him. We can be so self-centered that in this world no body matters but us.
2. We may regard our fellow man with contempt.  We might treat him as if he didn’t have good sense or that he wasn’t as bright as we are.  We might recognize that he performs a service that we use but that only makes him a necessary evil.  He is just there, but he isn’t as valuable as we are.
3. We may regard our fellow man as a nuisance.  We may feel that society has allowed him to have a claim on us, but, that claim is nothing but an unfortunate necessity.  The guys who repair our streets are doing something that is going to benefit us all, but, at the time, they are a nuisance.  People with this mind set might consider having to donate to a charity or even having to drop a dollar in the collection plate is a regrettable nuisance.  In their heart of hearts, they might even think that people who are sick, poor or under-privileged are nuisances that distract them from what is more important - what I want to do.
4. We may regard our fellow man as an enemy.  We live in a culture where competition is everything.  Television is full of competitive events from ice hockey which I have no understanding of, to the World Series of Poker and Dancing with the Stars.  Sometimes this leads us to see the guy working with us as a threat to our future. When we view somebody as a threat, we are viewing him as a potential enemy.
5. We may regard our fellow man as our brother.  When we do that we consider his needs as our needs, his interests as our interests and to just hang out with him as being the most joy that we could imagine.  He is as important, as bright and as interesting as we are.  The bottom line is that a love that regards our fellow man as a brother enables a person to walk in the light; hatred leaves a person in the dark, even if he doesn’t realize that he is in the dark.

The point John is making is that as Christians we have to love all of God's children.  Gnostics limit their love and associations to only guys with degrees from Harvard.

1 John 2:15 Do not love the world or the things in the world. The love of the Father is not in those who love the world;  16 for all that is in the world --- the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches --- comes not from the Father but from the world.  17 And the world and its desire are passing away, but those who do the will of God live forever.

Jews in those days believed that all time was divided into two ages. This present age which is totally evil, and the age to come which would be that age when God takes over.  So it would be totally good.  For Christians, the age to come has in reality come already.  It exists right now.  Christianity recognizes that good and evil can exist at the same time.  This is not to say that Christians hate the world.  After all, the world was created by God.  He made all things and Jesus loved the beauty found in the world.  He could say that the scarlet anemones which bloom for one day and die are more beautiful than clothes that Solomon wore.  This isn’t Satan’s world although it sure looks like it sometimes.  Being locked alone in your house.  Being unable to hug a loved one.  Being taught that it is unhealthy to go to church on Sunday.  To wash our hands like Pilate did.

Folks, this is still God’s world. John would condemn what is happening today.   But what we have now  isn’t the world of God’s creation. It would be easy to hate those who brought this virus to flower.  It would be easy to feel sorry for ourselves and wonder where God is.  Maybe this is our flood and we have to learn to be patient and wait for God to bring us a new Noah - not with an Ark but with a vaccine.  One thing we can still do is pray even with a mask on our face.

If it’s new, it must be better.  Well, the coronavirus sure kicked that one in the head. But we aren't sliding into darkness.  God has given us an exciting new light - the electronic worship service.  Can't you just hear old Satan muttering, "Shucks!  Lost again."  So, it’s time for all you old fogeys sitting all alone to rise up in love, rip that mask off your face and shout as loud as you can, “Stick it in your ear, Satan.”

Prayer: Father, help us to live in love, so that we may expose this new light and dispel our world’s darkness.   In Jesus Christ’s name we pray.  Amen.