Whosoever transgresseth, and abideth not in the doctrine of Christ.
The doctrine of Christ
The words “doctrine of Christ” may signify either that doctrine which Christ taught when He was here on earth, or that doctrine of which Christ is the subject--the doctrine which sets forth the truth concerning Him. I believe it is in the latter sense that the phrase is used here. By “doctrine” here we are not to understand what that term commonly means as used in the present day, viz., a dogmatic or speculative affirmation of truth. The original word means simply teaching, and it embraces all kinds and matters of teaching--the assertion of facts, the elucidation of beliefs, as well as the affirmation and proof of dogmatic propositions. The doctrine of or concerning Christ, then, here referred to, is the whole body of truth made known to us by Christ and His apostles concerning Him. Now, you will observe that to this the apostle here assigns a supremely important place. A real religion must have a basis in real beliefs. As a fountain which is itself poisoned will not send forth waters that are wholesome, as little will beliefs that are false or erroneous conduct to a religion that is true and beneficent. From this it follows that, as Christianity is offered to men as the only true religion, its teachers are shut up to the necessity of requiring the belief of the facts and truths upon which it is founded as the indispensable condition of a man’s receiving the benefits of this religion or being recognised as a true professor of it. “Whosoever transgresseth, and abideth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God.” The apostle regards the doctrine of Christ as coming to us under Divine authority, as a command to which we are bound to submit, and consequently he speaks of all departures from the truth thus binding on us as “transgressions.”
I. The grand fundamental fact of Christianity is The incarnation, the assumption by the Second Person of the Trinity of human nature into personal union with the Divine, the manifestation of God in the flesh of man. This is a great mystery which we cannot comprehend or explain. The fact transcends human reason, and therefore never could have been discovered by human reason, which can no more rise above itself than the eagle can outsoar the atmosphere in which it floats. But, though reason cannot discover this, the history of man’s efforts after a religion give ample proof that this is a felt necessity of the human soul. How can the weak and sinful come before the All-perfect? How can the finite enter into relation with the Infinite? How can the weak voice of man be heard across that tremendous gulf which yawns between him, the creature of a day, and the Eternal? Who shall bring God nigh to him? His soul cries out after a Living, a Personal, an Incarnate God. This shows that the fact of an Incarnation is not foreign to our nature; nay, that it is felt by the human consciousness to be essential to religion. And this great want the “doctrine of Christ” alone supplies. God “manifest in the flesh” is the solution of man’s sorest difficulty as a religious being, the grand accomplished fact on which he can securely rest in his approaches to God.
II. Another fundamental truth of Christianity is the Atonement. That in some sense it is only through Christ that we can come unto God so as to be accepted of Him, is admitted on all hands by those who profess to be Christians. Now, no attentive reader of the New Testament can fail to see that that on which stress is everywhere laid in this respect is Christ’s offering Himself as a ransom and sacrifice for men. He has taken our sins upon Him, and by His obedience unto death hath removed the obstacle which our sin placed in the way of our acceptance with the Father. And thus has He made atonement for us. Now, this also meets an acknowledged and widely felt want of man. Everywhere, and in all ages, man is seen acting upon the principle that some satisfaction must be rendered to the Divine justice before man can be accepted by God. Man, conscious of guilt, condemned at the bar of his own conscience, has asked himself the question, “How shall man be just before God? … Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the high God?” That it is with something he must appear is a settled point; the only question is, What shall that be? And the only answer he has been able to find to this is that which tradition has handed down from the earliest times, namely, sacrifice--in which the offering up of an animal to the Deity was an acknowledgment that the sin of man deserved death, and a petition that a substitute might be accepted for him. Now, what all men thus feel they want, the Scriptures tell us Christ has supplied. He offered for us a real and all-sufficient atonement when He offered up Himself. He took on Him our sins, He bore them away, made “an end of sins,” made “reconciliation for iniquity,” and brought in “everlasting righteousness.” Man, with his conscious weakness and his deep wants, finds here at length that which meets his wants, satisfies his conviction and gives peace to his conscience, so that he is filled with a joy which is “unspeakable and full of glory.” (W.L. Alexander, D. D.)
“Whosoever goeth onward”
(R.V.) may be interpreted in two ways--
(1) Every one who sets himself up as a leader;
(2) Every one who goes on beyond the gospel. The latter is, perhaps, better. These anti-Christian gnostics were advanced thinkers; the gospel was all very well for the unenlightened, but they knew something higher. (Cambridge Bible for Schools.)
The law of self-restraint
This ninth verse appears to contain one of the counsels that occurred to the apostle, as he thought on the one hand of youthful impulsiveness and love of novelty, and on the other of the fascinations that are wont to attach to dubious doctrines and to evil deeds. Its real meaning may be seen in the rendering of the Revised Version. St. John wrote, not “whosoever transgresseth” (for he was not thinking of general breaches of the law of God), but specifically “whosoever goeth onward, and abideth not in the teaching of Christ, hath not God.” If that be taken in connection with the preceding verse, where a man is represented as through half-heartedness, losing whatever he has gained, the unexpected but important lesson is obtained, that “to advance over-eagerly and to hang back are alike violations of duty.”
I. The first thing to avoid is over-eagerness. “Whosoever goeth onward” (at too great a rate, it means, or impelled by a hot fancy that has broken away from every restraint) “hath not God.” It is possible to imagine that the phrase might be interpreted in a different way, as denoting that all progress in the statement or application of religious truths is for ever barred, and that the incapacity or the refusal to see in them any other bearings than have been found in the past must be classed amongst the virtues. But with such teaching no sympathy can be found in the Bible. The body of revealed truth is not a dictionary, and when Christ teaches, He teaches free men, providing them not with endless minute rules which they must mechanically follow, but with great principles which they must use their own wits in interpreting and their own responsible skill in applying. The germs of religious truth will be perpetually unfolding themselves, expanding into new conceptions of the glory of God and of the spiritual privileges possible to man; and through all the future, one of the rewards of loyalty to Christ is to be that the loyal will be continually advancing in Christian thought, ever more completely knowing as they are known. To make this or similar paragraphs, therefore, an old man’s protest against progress, or an apology for intolerance, is to sin against the entire Scripture. The warning is against needless progress, a progress that is suicidal and unworthy the name, the impulsiveness and the haste that ignore all the restraints of reason. It is more than doubtful whether any Christian can get to know much about God, unless he be stirred by an ambition to know, or can make much progress in personal religion, unless he be taken possession of by the ambition to be made like his Saviour. The mistake is in allowing the ambition to separate itself from Christ, and, as men say, to run away with them, so that no influence from above or from within can withhold them from extravagance, but the force of every reasonable restraint is broken. Of the serious mistakes, in matters of opinion and in matters of practice, to which this over-eagerness leads, the disposition that sweeps onwards under the dominancy of a single idea, and consents neither to look back upon the point from which it started, nor to glance around at the facts with which relations should be maintained, there are instances enough. One man, for instance, is led to no good result by his own investigations into God’s existence, and quickly pronounces that all such investigations must prove sterile, and founds an entire system upon the alleged impossibility of attaining any certainty in certain branches of knowledge.
II. At the other extreme there is the equal, perhaps the more common fault of hanging back, and so, as the apostle teaches, gradually letting slip and losing every beneficent truth and every holy privilege we have gained. It is a fault that goes by many names--half-heartedness, colourlessness, lack of principle, of decision, of earnestness; but there can he no doubt that it is one of the most prevalent defects in the modern Church, tending throughout the Christian world to destroy the force and very vitality of personal religion. The fashion is to hold opinions and views that are as colourless as possible, and carefully to refrain from committing oneself to anything; to remember that every question has “so many sides that life is not long enough for men to examine them all,” and that therefore a man should not venture to be positive about anything. Accordingly men compromise with obligation, hesitate in their allegiance to truth, and make a disposition to hang back, and a lack of thoroughness in opinion and in practice, the most prominent feature of their lives. There can be no question as to the effect. The man who hangs back, permitting his convictions to become indefinite, and his sense of duty to die down into silent weakness, must in reason hold himself responsible for so much of the evil in the world as is done, because he provides the opportunity, or at least removes the hindrance. But that is not all. Let a man try to discover the reason why his progress in religion is slow, why he does not throw off evil habits that have disturbed him for years, why his influence for good in his own neighbourhood is so limited and uncertain; and he will generally, though not always, find that the secret of it all is his own half-heartedness, the superficiality of his religion.
III. Those being the faults at either extreme against which the apostle warns us, The conclusion is obvious, that the best and most perfect Christian life is one in which both are avoided, and the path midway between the two is trodden. The ideal Christian life, according to this old apostle, is one in which the progress of the fancy in regard to religious truth or duty is restrained by the reins of a sanctified reason, in which all backwardness is for ever prevented by thorough religious earnestness. There is a tendency at times to imagine that such matters are merely a question of temperament; that the vivacious man will be certain to go forward, and the languid man to hang back; and that neither can be held responsible for faults that arise from the peculiarities of their very natures. But that is not the way in which the Bible looks at the matter. To plead personal temperament in excuse for the habit of over-eagerness or of backwardness, is to overlook the grace of God. But it is well to look a little more closely at the reasonableness and advantage of maintaining this intermediate position between the two extremes. That it avoids on the one hand presumptuous positiveness concerning everything, and on the other the faltering that turns religious conviction and obligation into matters for compromise, is in itself a sufficient, but far from the only, commendation. It is also the course that should be adopted, the state of mind that is most defensible and helpful, in relation to the fluctuations of religious opinion and the controversies that periodically shake the kingdom of God. In the department of Christian service similarly, most men will agree that the best human qualifications for doing it well are not over-eagerness, still less backwardness, but steady earnestness or well-controlled zeal. The man who in his work hangs back, never manages to get much done; and the man who is always apt to go a little too far forward, is also always apt to miss his mark, and to awaken in others suspicions of his discretion that seriously weaken his influence. The strongest man is he whose enthusiasm is disciplined by self-control, whose devotion to Christ is whole-hearted and well-nigh incapable of increase, but yet is closely regulated by a sanctified reason, and thus made provident of its resources and unalterable in its purposes. In all associated warfare or service, the perfect heart of devotion is good, but waste and failure follow unless there is also the power to keep rank. But the teaching of the verse applies quite as much to personal religious life as it does to service or to opinions; and what it urges as the condition of swift progress to the highest spiritual attainments, is that the spirit and the life should be, as it were, ringed round with the teaching of Christ, never advancing far forward from the neighbourhood of Him, never drifting far behind, but keeping day by day as closely as possible within the circle which His influence fills. If he be tempted to advance beyond the Saviour, the master-passion of love for Him will hold him back; or if he be tempted to linger behind, the love will draw him on. A more blessed kind of life no man can conceive; and that becomes our kind of life, according as we crush out the disposition to regulate our ways in independence of Christ, and pour our hearts upon Him in continuous trustfulness. (R. W. Moss.)
Doctrine and character
Some one may say, “Oh, I do not want doctrines, I look at doctrines as so many dry bones.” True, we may compare doctrines to bones, but they are like the bones in your body, and they need not be dry. The skeleton is not a live body, it is true, but what would that body be without the skeleton? In the natural world there are living creatures that have no vertebrae, and they consist of a soft gelatinous mass, very yielding and compressible. And in the moral world there are those whose religion is of the same sentimental kind. They are accommodating, because it has no backbone. How different is that religion from the robust Christianity that we see exemplified in the Apostle Paul! He taught that the framework of definite truth or doctrine was essentially the strength and stability of the Christian character. (E. H. Hopkins, B. A.)
Error affects conduct
As a small mistake in levelling an arrow at the hand makes a great difference at the mark, so a small mistake in the notion of truth makes a wide difference in the practice of the ungodly. (E. H. Hopkins, B. A.)
Abide in the doctrine of Christ
The text itself consists of two general parts, a negative and an affirmative. We begin with the first, viz., the negative, “Whosoever transgresseth and abideth,” etc., which is a censure of all such persons as do withdraw from the doctrine of Christ. First, no knowledge of God without Christ, because it is He that manifests Him (Job 1:18). Secondly, no knowledge of God neither out of Christ, because it is He that represents Him: as we cannot look upon the sun directly. So that those who deny the doctrine of Christ, they have not God. First, in point of knowledge. Secondly, they have not God neither in point of worship. God out of Christ is an idol, as to any true adoration of Him, or religious service exhibited to Him. This is true both in regard of the object of worship, as also in regard of the medium. Thirdly, they have not God in point of interest, they have not that relation to God as is desirable for them. They have God indeed in the common relation of a Creator. But they have not God as a God in covenant. Those that think to come to God upon the terms of nature and common providence they will have little comfort in such approaches; for God considered out of Christ He is a consuming fire. Lastly, they have not God, i.e., they have Him not in point of influence. And that according to all these kind of influences which are to be desired, and those benefits which are of the greatest concernment. As first, of grace and holiness; they have not God to sanctify them and to communicate His Holy Spirit unto them. God is the God of all grace, but it is God in Christ; He is the channel of the grace of God unto us in all the several kinds and particulars of it wherein it is communicated. We must rightly understand this method and order which God has set for the conveying of saving grace unto us. We have not grace from the Spirit immediately but from the Spirit in reference to Christ. Secondly, as not to the influences of grace so neither to the influences of comfort; no true comfort or peace of conscience but from God in Christ; He is our peace, both in the thing itself as also in the discovery and manifestation of it. The spirit of comfort, it is of His sending and comes from Him. He that hath not Christ and His Spirit, he hath not God to comfort him. Thirdly, as to matter of salvation, not God to save him. There is no salvation out of Christ (Acts 4:12). And thus we have the point in the several explications of it, wherein it holds good unto us, that he that transgresseth, that is, rejects the doctrine of Christ, he hath not God. The use and improvement of this point by way of application: First, it comes home to sundry sorts of persons who are hence concluded in a very sad condition. This is so much the more grievous as it is the less thought of and expected; for these persons which we have now mentioned, they make a full account they have God whatever they have else. At least they have Him not in that way and to that purpose for which they would have Him. They have God to judge them, but they have not God to save them. Therefore we see what cause we have to pity and to bewail such persons as these are. Here is the misery of all unregenerate persons; these come under this censure likewise, who though they should hold this doctrine in judgment, yet deny it in affection and practice; forasmuch as they do not submit to the power and efficacy of it. Therefore in the second place, let us make this use of the point, even to acknowledge Christ and His doctrine and the grace of God which is revealed in it. First, this conveyance of all good to us in the covenant of grace and in the name of Christ, it is the safest and surest dispensation. We are now upon very good terms which we may rest upon. If salvation with the appurtenances of it had been in any other hands besides we had not been so sure of it. Secondly, there is the sweetness of it also; there is a great deal of delightfulness also in it if we were capable of it; to see everything coming to us, strained through the love of God in Christ; it is wonderful pleasing and satisfying, and the heart of a true believer does exceedingly rejoice in it. The second is of unworthy recession in apostacy or departure from it, and abideth not in the doctrine of Christ. He that abides not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God. First, as to matter of judgment: here is a censure upon declining in this; for any that have formerly embraced Christ and His doctrine to depart from it thus, it is a business of great danger to them and does exclude them from interest in God Himself. But secondly, as this may be extended to matter of judgment, so likewise to matter of practice. A man may in some sort abide in Christ’s doctrine so as to give assent and credence to it, and yet not abide in it so as to improve it and to live answerable to it. Therefore this must be taken in likewise together with the other; then do we indeed abide in it when it abides in us and has an influence and efficacy upon us. The second is laid down in the affirmative, “He that abideth in the doctrine of Christ, he hath both the Father and the Son.” The sum of all is this, that he that hath not both, hath neither; and he that hath one, hath both. This having may admit of a threefold interpretation. First, hath them in him, by way of abode and habitation. Secondly, hath them with him, by way of society and communion. Thirdly, hath them for him, by way of assistance and approbation. ( T. Horton, D. D.)