The Children; the Youths; the Old Men.
I. "I write unto you, little children, because your sins are forgiven you for His name's sake. Many interpreters are careful to tell us that the Apostle does not mean actual children, but only children in faith and knowledge, young converts. I do not think the distinction is necessary. To both the same language was suitable. Trust is the great necessity of a child. St. John tells us that the first lesson of all to be learnt concerning God is that He remits or sends away sins, for that is the force of the word. He would have all Christian children know this; he would tell it to the heathen, who had been dreaming of gods altogether different, gods that had no delight in remitting sins at all.
II. Why does St. John pass at once from these children to those who appear farthest from them? "I write unto you, fathers, because ye have known Him that is from the beginning." I do not think that aged men are those who are least able to sympathise with children, or who most discard the love of children. I think that the sight of the human as well as the natural spring is a special delight to those who are feeling the winter, frosty but kindly. St. John may have felt something of this himself. There seems to me a great beauty in his way of connecting the child's belief in forgiveness with the aged man's knowledge of Him who was in the beginning, as if each lay beneath the other and as if the experience of each new year had been drawing it forth.
III. And now he comes to a class which we know better than either of these, though perhaps it may not have the same charm for us: "I write unto you, young men." St. John could say to these young men in the midst of all the toil and war of the world, "Ye have overcome the evil one." Treat him as one that is overcome. Refuse him homage, and he will flee from you. All young men of this day, all that are struggling against their own enemies and God's, have a right to this same confidence. It is only dangerous when it becomes confidence in themselves.
F. D. Maurice, The Epistles of St. John,p. 101.
I. St. John means his epistle, or, as it is rather, his pastoral address, for all alike. He has no separate teaching for separate ages, but he wishes all to listen to him; and so in addressing them he distinguishes them, as you have heard: "I write unto you, little children," "to you, fathers," "to you, young men." And he assigns to each a reason a reason why he should write, and be sure that they would listen in a beautiful trait and characteristic of each several age. He repeats these twice, as he repeats the address twice. He does this as we repeat a name twice, lingering over it fondly or wishing to put special gravity and earnestness into an entreaty. The reasons are varied slightly, as are even the addresses themselves, the second adding some touch or different side to the first. Notice what they are. The first gives two characteristics of Christian childhood: "I write unto you, little children, because your sins are forgiven you for His name's sake.... I write unto you, little children, because ye have known the Father." What are these characteristics? First, innocence, not the innocence of a spotless nature, but the innocence of a pardoned child, fresh from the font of forgiveness; secondly, the child's knowledge of God, again, not inborn knowledge, but yet a knowledge to which, when it is given to it, the pure and simple heart makes immediate response. Next comes in both cases Christian old age: "I write unto you, fathers" with this the reason given is one and the same in the two addresses "because ye have known Him that was from the beginning." The characteristic of Christian age is, should be, is ideally, completeness of Christian knowledge, a knowledge complete and satisfying of Jesus Christ, of Him as the soul of life, in whose hands are all things.
II. The last address is to the age which comes between: "I have written unto you, young men." Why do they come out of their order? Possibly, probably, because of the three classes they are the one to whom St. John's heart goes out most in sympathy, yearning, hope. They are those who even more than the others are in his immediate thoughts; they are those to whom he has need to give the warning which immediately follows: "Love not the world, nor the things of the world"; they are those on whose brave hearts he most trusts for the triumph for which he looks: "This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith." For the characteristic of Christian manhood is strength. "I have written unto you, young men, because ye are strong," a strength not their own, but coming from the presence of Christ's Spirit, of Christ Himself, within them "because ye are strong, and the word of God abideth in you, and ye have overcome the wicked one." Such, then, is the picture of Christian life which St. John draws from the innocence and clear-eyed faith of childhood, through the conflicts, strength, and victories of manhood, to the faith, not less clear, but resting now on experience, of a calm old age. It is an ideal picture, but it is one true in its measure of any Christian life. He does not set it before his children as one they may gaze at from afar, but not dream of realising; he assumes it to be real, to be true, of them; he makes it the very ground of his appeals to them: "I have written unto you because," not in the hope that you may become, but "because you are." Could he have said the same of us with the happy confidence that all in a degree answered to his description?
E. C. Wickham, Wellington College Sermons,p. 224.
The Age of Nature and the Age of Grace.
I. St. John divides the readers of his epistle into three great classes. Does he speak of childhood, of youth, of old age, as each having upon it a special mark of condition or attainment in the life of grace? It is quite possible that in those days of trial and persecution for the truth's sake there may have been a much closer approximation than we now dream of within the Christian community between the natural age and the spiritual. By the time when St. John wrote, there must have been a large infusion into the Church of the family element of human life. Converts from Judaism, converts from idolatry, made so by one of those violent wrenches and convulsions of the moral being which are described to us in the Acts and in the earlier epistles, must now for thirty or forty or fifty years past have settled down into regular worshippers, regular communicants, with children around them brought up from infancy in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, now forming in their turn the hope and the strength of a rising and a risen generation, never having known what it was to relapse into a practical ungodliness from which there could be no other awakening than that of a second conversion and a second regeneration. In large part, in a proportion so large as not to be an exception to the rule, the children of Christian parents were in those days Christian children, and the young men of Christian homes were in those days consistent, Christian young men. Can we now say that every child is in all probability a child indeed in grace, as St. John here describes that condition, and that each step in human life has been marked in the individual members of our congregations by a corresponding step in grace and Christian knowledge? The Church has lost sadly the love of her espousals. When shall she reach the second love of the presentation and the marriage? This is the first lesson of the text.
II. And the second lesson is not to acquiesce in this divorce in the Christian community between the nominal and the spiritual. Let the spirit of our Church's baptism be carried into the nursery, into the schoolroom, into the family circle. Let there be no sitting still and holding the hands and counting the days until, by some separate, some uncovenanted surprise of grace, it shall please God to bring out of the darkness that soul which already He has inserted in the holy temple of Christ's body. Bring him up from the first as a child of God, as a member of Christ, as an heir of the kingdom. Treat the child as a Christian child; treat the young man within your doors as a Christian young man. Suppose of each, and expect in each, and encourage in each, that spirit, that language, that conduct, which has Christ for a pattern. When they are fallen, restore them; when they faint, revive them; when they sin, heal them, under God, as in Christ, as His redeemed, His accepted, His chosen; and, be assured, the blessing of an almighty Lord will attend the effort.
C. J. Vaughan, Penny Pulpit,New Series, No. 623.
References: 1 John 2:13. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxix., No. 1711; C. Kingsley, Village Sermons,p. 106; A. Mursell, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxii., p. 116; Clergyman's Magazine,vol. i., p. 210. 1 John 2:13; 1 John 2:14. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxix., Nos. 1715, 1751. 1 John 2:14. Ibid.,vol. xiv., No. 811; T. Thain Davidson, Sure to Succeed,p. 265; R. Balgarnie, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxvii., p. 204.