CRITICAL AND EXEGETICAL NOTES
1 John 3:7. Little children.—τεκνία; not infants, but young and immature disciples. Doeth righteousness.—Emphasis lies on “doeth”; habitually does. Doing is opposed to mere profession, mere sentiment, and the moral licence of false doctrine. “There is only one way of proving our enlightenment, of proving our parentage from Him who is the light, and that is by doing the righteousness which is characteristic of Him and His Son.”
1 John 3:8. Of the devil.—Compare John 8:44-49. Dr. Plummer quotes the following suggestive note from St. Augustine: “The devil made no man, begat no man, created no man; but whoso imitates the devil becomes a child of the devil, as if begotten of him. In what sense art thou a child of Abraham? Not that Abraham begat thee. In the same sense as that in which the Jews, the children of Abraham, by not imitating the faith of Abraham, are become children of the devil.” The demonology of the Jews must be taken into due account in explaining the New Testament references to the devil. From the beginning.—A way of saying “always sins.” It is just the one thing he does, and always has been doing. His specific sin is bringing accusations against God, and trying to make men doubt and distrust Him. When there is neither love nor fear of God, sinning becomes easy work. Destroy the works.—This is done by perfecting the reasons for trusting God.
1 John 3:9. Seed remaineth in him.—The germ of new life from God. “Every one that has been made, and that remains, a child of God.” For “born” R.V. reads “begotten” (John 1:13). “The whole analogy refers to human generation.” Cannot sin.—Not if the new life is alive in him. The new life wants submission and obedience; it never wants wilfulness.
1 John 3:10. Loveth not his brother.—The new life in Christ as naturally finds expression in service to the brethren as it does in obedience to the Father. The new birth is birth into a family, and a family life and duty.
1 John 3:11. Message.—Commandment (John 15:12).
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— 1 John 3:7-12
Doing Righteousness.—This appears to be the expression of a sudden thought that came to St. John. We have often to notice how the apostolic writers are turned aside from their main line of argument by some sudden thought which seizes them. This indeed is a common peculiarity of what we properly call “uneducated,” “untrained” writers and preachers. Some of their best things come as “asides.” St. John has been dealing with high sentiment. Perhaps he feared that what he had said belonged to too high a range, and therefore might be misconceived, misrepresented, and misused. Religion has both its mystical and its practical side. The mystical may be most pleasing and satisfying to ourselves; the practical is the most important, and the most honouring, to Christ. Emotions do not glorify our Divine Lord as righteousness does. Sometimes the religion of Christ is represented as being doctrinal and sentimental. And so it is. But it is also, and even yet more truly, ethical, and practical, and social. Its key-note no one need misapprehend: “He that doeth righteousness is righteous.” Christ’s own teachings were distinctly ethical. Apostolic teachings were very largely practical. In the dark ages Christianity was the humanising force. The gospel of Christ is civilising heathendom. Back of literature, and philanthropy, and sociology, to-day, lie the great Christian truths and principles. What God provides for the redemption of the world is—
(1) the salt of Christian character;
(2) the leaven of Christian principle;
(3) the inspiration of the Christian motive. Christ has a sociology, but it is a set of living principles, not an elaborated system. Each age must make its own elaboration.
I. A mistake often made by the early Christian disciples.—It concerned righteousness. This surprises us, because Christ’s teachings about righteousness seem to us so clear. Trace the rise of the Antinomian spirit in—
(1) the misuse of the doctrine of election;
(2) of present salvation;
(3) of the new life. The truth is that the Church has always to guard against this evil. There is ever creeping in a subtle idea of a difference between a Christian’s sins and other people’s sins. To live up to the full expression of Christian principle in their old heathen surroundings must have been difficult for the early Christians, and we may pity them. We need not wonder that some of them said, “Why should we try?” or that some of them easily found reasons why they should not try. It was easy to urge that the new life was a spiritual thing, and therefore entirely independent of its material surroundings. Even nowaday—
(1) feeling is regarded as more satisfying than righteousness;
(2) knowledge is regarded as more important than righteousness;
(3) morality is confused with righteousness;
(4) ceremonial is put instead of righteousness. Indeed, the mistake is wont to take such subtle forms that it may have found out how to master even us. We may be sure of this: righteousness is rightness, in view of—
(1) God’s claims;
(2) Christ’s example;
(3) the possibilities of service to our fellows.
II. The apostolic correction of the mistake.—It was the aged apostle’s most anxious fear that the religion of his disciples might evaporate in sentiment. Therefore he lays so much stress on doing righteousness. Righteousness is the expression of right feeling. And right feeling can never exist without wanting to get expression. Quickened germs in the soil are sure to show blades above the soil. Righteousness toward God is doing. Righteousness toward man is doing. Good feeling wants expression. Knowledge wants service. Resolve wants sphere of operation. And none of these are righteousness so long as they stand alone. Does then the Divine acceptance rest upon the doing? No; let us never make that mistake. It rests on the righteousness which finds expression in the doing. Understand what righteousness is. It is the objective of faith; it is the operative of the new life; it is its activity in its relations. Everything that lives does something. Life escapes you. You can see what life does. A Christian lives: then he does righteousness. Where then is the place for Christian sentiment and feeling? It is the inspiration, and the tone, of the doing.
III. The basis on which the apostolic correction rests.—God the Father, or Christ the Song of Song of Solomon 1. Essential to the thought of God is activity. God’s righteousness is doing. Conceive of God as non-operating goodness, and He is but a silent, mysterious Brahm—nothing really, nothing helpfully, to you.
2. Christ’s righteousness is doing. Conceive Christ as only cherishing good sentiments, never “going about doing good,” and He becomes nothing helpfully to you—only, in some sense, a hermit Antony, or a St. Simeon Stylites. Our models of righteousness are distinctly practical.
Apply in our several spheres:
(1) Righteousness as our personal characteristic;
(2) as the life of our home relations;
(3) as the life of our business scenes;
(4) as the life of our Church fellowships;
(5) as the life of our social intercourse. Everywhere we want “righteousness”; and everywhere, “he that doeth righteousness is righteous,” even as God is righteous, even as Christ is righteous.
SUGGESTIVE NOTES AND SERMON SKETCHES
1 John 3:7. The Practical Character of Righteousness.—“He that doeth righteousness is righteous, even as He is righteous.” It is clear that emphasis is to be placed on doing, as contrasted with professing, or with talking. A man is according to what he does, because in a genuine man the doing is the natural sign and expression of himself. William Jay used to say, “Do not tell me what a man said when he lay on his dying-bed: tell me how he lived.” And it is equally clear that fearless appeal can be made to the practical character of the human righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ. There is no possibility of imagining that Christ’s righteousness was mere sentimentality or profession. Nor can a righteousness of talk gain any support from our Lord’s teachings, the key-note of which is this, “If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them.” And there is another point suggested by the form of the original word translated “doeth.” It means, “he who habitually does righteousness.” And precisely in that we have the inspiring example of Christ.
1 John 3:8. Christ’s Work on the Devil’s Works.—“That He might destroy the works of the devil.” The works of the devil are here described as “doing sin.” The work of the devil in man is making him do sin. The “devil sinneth”—that is his characteristic work. “He that doeth sin is of the devil,” belongs to the same class, has the same characteristic. The contrast is with the “doing righteousness” of 1 John 3:7. To put the distinction in language more familiar to us, we may say: He that pleases himself, and serves his own ends, is of the devil; he belongs to the devil-class. He that denies himself, and serves his conviction of what is right, is of God, and belongs to the Christ-class of obedient, and loyal, and loving sons. Then we can readily perceive how Christ’s work must destroy the devil’s work. Let Christ bring us into obedient sonship, and we shall only want to do righteousness.
1 John 3:9. The Divine Seed in Man.—The Greek father, Justin Martyr, seems to have found the figure in this text specially suggestive, and his elaboration of it may help our apprehension. He says that “the truths in the utterances of heathen philosophy and poetry are due, to the fact that a seed of the Word is implanted, or rather, inborn, ἔμφυτον, in every race of men. Those who grasped the truth lived according to “a part of the seminal Word,” even as Christians live “according to the knowledge and contemplation of the whole Word, that is Christ.” They “nobly uttered what they saw akin to the part of the Divine seminal Word which they had received.”
“His seed remaineth in him.”—The following Bible writers suggest explanations of this very difficult expression:—Bengel: “In eo, qui genitus est ex Deo, manet semen Dei, i.e. verbum, cum sua virtute (1 Peter 1:23; James 1:18). Quamvis peccatum sæpe furioso impetu conetur prosternere renatum. Vel potius sic: Semen Dei, i.e. is, qui natus est ex Deo, manet in Deo.” Webster and Wilkinson: “σπέρμα is understood to be the Word of God (1 Peter 1:23; James 1:18), or the Holy Spirit (John 3:8). We may explain it of the principle of Divine life implanted in the soul, which renders us θείας κοινωνοὺς φύσεως (2 Peter 1:4). That which originates also maintains (μένει) his filial relation to God; and he who is in this relation to God cannot lead a sinful life.” Alford: “Because that new principle of life from which his new life has unfolded, which was God’s seed deposited in him, abides growing there, and precludes the development of the old sinful nature.” By the seed Alford understands the word, the utterance of God, dropped into the soul of man. Matthew Henry calls the seed the “spiritual seminal principle remaining in him.” Fausset calls the seed “the living word of God, made by the Holy Spirit the seed in us of a new life.” Sinclair says: “The seed is the Holy Spirit—that influence proceeding from God, imbued with Divine vitality, regenerating, renewing, refreshing, causing the nature of holiness to spring, to grow, to bloom, to bear fruit.”
“Ver.
12. Cain, the Unloving Brother.—The reference to Cain is singularly appropriate, because the controlling thought in St. John’s mind is, that if a man really loves God, he will be sure to love his brother also; and if a man is found not to be loving his brother, we may be confidently sure that he does not love God. There are two distinct phases of conduct manifest in the record concerning Cain. We see what he was toward God, and find no sign of any inspiration of personal love to God. We see what he was toward his brother, and find no sign of that self-denying brotherly love which alone sanctifies family life, and expresses the common love of the father. That the unrighteousness of Cain is here exhibited as the ground of his hatred to his brother is altogether in harmony with the Old Testament record. For there we see that the motive of his hatred to Abel was his envy, because Abel was more acceptable to God, but this latter was founded in the “good work” of Abel, which was wanting in Cain. St. John does not speak of the μισεῖν of Cain, but of the σφάζειν in which that hatred found expression; for he is treating generally of the outward evidence of the internal disposition, through which outward evidence the internal disposition appears manifestly and uncontrovertibly to the man himself. But St. John does not present the fratricide of Cain only as one individual result of the general unrighteousness of his works, but rather as specifically evoked by the opposite character of the works of Abel. As everywhere, so here also evil is brought to its full maturity by means of juxtaposition with the light, which reveals its character, and makes it truly dark. The wicked man, who feels himself miserable at heart, grudges the good man the blessedness he has in his righteousness, and therefore has the disposition to rob him of it by annihilating the good himself. As it is in the nature of the devil, so it is in the nature of the child of the devil; they are alike ἀνθρωποκτόνοι. And the mention here of envy as the cause of the murder accords with the record of Genesis: Cain was urged to his sinful act by knowing that his offering was not acceptable to God, while his brother’s was acceptable.—Eric Haupt.
ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER 3
1 John 3:7. Christian Righteousness.—Do not fancy that Christian righteousness is different from ordinary “goodness,” except as being broader and deeper, more thorough-going, more imperative. The precepts of the one, like some rock-hewn inscriptions by forgotten kings, are weathered and indistinct, often illegible, often misread, often neglected. The other is written in living characters in a perfect life.—A. Maclaren, D.D.