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Monday, September 29, 2014

Pastoral Ponderings ~ The “By This” of Ultimate Assurance

          It all began by considering the beautiful picture of the great multitude of Revelation 7.[1] It is such a picture of comfort to God’s children that I felt an urgent longing to help all the people in my church know for certain that they will be part of that gathering of believers in heaven as represented by this vision.
          That took me to the book of I John where I was captivated by the phrase, “By this we shall know that we are of the truth and reassure our heart before him...”[2]I wanted my church then, and readers now, to know that they are “of the truth”, and to know this with such assurance that all of us can “reassure our heart before him” that this is the case.
          My longing to clarify these things included the awareness that the coming judgment presents only two possibilities for every human being. Either we will hear some variation of, “I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness,”[3] or we will hear something like, “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.”[4]The difference between these two possibilities is so extreme that the opportunity to know now where we will stand then is desperately necessary.
          With that in mind, I set out on a journey of connecting the eleven “by this” phrases from the book of I John. To read them one after the other gave me such a blessing in realizing God’s determination to lead us into this assurance that I immediately wanted everyone to see these eleven phrases in one package. And, I knew I would need to meditate on each one individually in order to draw out as much assurance and encouragement that any one day in the quarry of Scripture would yield.
          Here is what it looks like to read all eleven assurances together. Following that is our first step in meditating further on the wonders of this gift from God.

1.  “And by this we know that we have come to know him” (2:3)
2.  “By this we may know that we are in him” (2:5)
3.  “By this it is evident who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil” (3:10)
4.  “By this we know love” (3:16)
5.  “By this we shall know that we are of the truth and reassure our heart before him” (3:19)
6.  “And by this we know that he abides in us” (3:24)
7.  “By this you know the Spirit of God” (4:2)
8.  “By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error” (4:6)
9.  “By this we know that we abide in him and he in us” (4:13)
10.  “By this is love perfected with us” (4:17)
11.  “By this we know that we love the children of God” (5:2)

1.  “And by this we know that we have come to know him” (I John 2:3)
3 And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments. 4 Whoever says “I know him” but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him, 5 but whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected. (I John 2)
          First, this tells me that God wants his children to know that we have come to know him. After listing all eleven of the “by this” phrases from I John, this is extremely clear, that God wants us to know him, and he wants us to know that we have come to know him.
          In John’s gospel he wrote, “And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”[5] Eternal life is to know God, and I John is God’s gift to us so that we can know that we know him now. We don’t need to wait until the judgment to find out whether we really knew him, or he really knew us. We can know now, and God himself has given us an amazing checklist of spiritual realities to give us the opportunity to know that we know him, and to live the rest of our lives in this assurance of our salvation in Jesus Christ.
          This also connects wonderfully with Paul’s description of the difference between now and then. He writes for our encouragement, “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”[6]
          Paul tells us that, in the present time, we can see those distant realities “dimly,” and, “in part”. In the future, when we stand before Jesus in the judgment, we shall see “face to face,” and we “shall know fully.” In fact, our knowing fully will be consistent with the way that we “have been fully known.”
          These thoughts settle into my soul with a sense of wonder that cannot be contained in mere words. While God is working to assure me that I can “know that we have come to know him,” he also wants me to know that, from his viewpoint, I “have been fully known.” My experience of coming to know that I know him is not the same thing that is taking place from the divine perspective. Mine is a journey to know that I know; God’s is a continuation of what he settled before time began.
          Secondly, the condition of us knowing that we have come to know God is, “if we keep his commandments.” Now, if God is talking about the Ten Commandments, or keeping all the commandments of the Mosaic Law, this takes our hope down a considerable number of notches. It almost sounds like we are back under the hopelessness of good works, where we can only know we have come to know God if we are now keeping that law we could never keep before knowing Christ. 
          The short answer to this (which is the same as the long answer) is that, the “him” is Jesus, and the “his” is Jesus’ commandments, meaning we are not talking about the Mosaic Law.[7]
          John had already indicated what he meant by Jesus’ commandments in his gospel record. On the night before the crucifixion, Jesus had told his disciples, “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love.”[8] He then stated, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you,”[9] and, “I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide,”[10] concluding, “These things I command you, so that you will love one another.”[11]
          The point is simply that, when John talks to us about keeping Jesus’ commandments, he is not speaking of the Ten Commandments, but his command that we are to love one another in the same way that he has loved us. In other words, we can know that we know him if we act like him. We can know that his love has come into us if his love is going out from us.
          Thirdly, to clarify the positive message that when we see ourselves keeping Jesus’ commandments we have assurance that we have come to know him, John states the same thing in a negative way. In the positive, those who keep Jesus’ commandments know that they know Jesus; in the negative, those who do not keep Jesus’ commandments do not know Jesus, and are liars for claiming they do. It is only the one who “keeps his word,” that has the assurance that “in him truly the love of God is perfected.”
          God wants us to know that we have come to know Jesus. He wants us to understand that the evidence that we have come to know Jesus is that we keep Jesus’ commands. He also wants us to understand that Jesus did not save us so that he could help us keep the law, but he saved us through his own keeping of the law so that we could now live by faith,[12] following the law of love.[13]
          This is why Paul would write that the thing that counts is not that we keep the law, but only that we have “faith working through love.”[14] Jesus’ commands are all about how our faith works through love. Instead of us thinking that we show that we know God by how well we keep the Ten Commandments, earning God’s approval with our good works, we walk in the love of our Lord Jesus Christ showing that we really do have his love.
          In a way, when we wonder if our lives show any reality of the finished work of Jesus Christ, we just need to look at what is coming out of us. Is there a growing expression of love that can only be explained by a growing experience of the love of Jesus Christ? Then that is how we know that we have come to know him. If what is becoming stronger in our lives is that we are becoming more loving after the way that Jesus has loved us, that expression of a love we never had in our hearts before meeting Jesus is the evidence that we have met him, and that he is changing us through the renewal of our minds.
          Another way of saying it would be, if we see that the love coming out of us is more like Jesus now than when we started, and that it is changing us into the image of Jesus our Savior “from one degree of glory to another,”[15]and that we find ourselves choosing the loving thing in situations where people are not loving towards us, and we can factor in that we likely aren’t as mature as we would like to think, and that we are still experiencing healing from soul-wounds that have made it difficult for us to show the love we have had difficulty receiving, then the life of love that is happening, immature as it may be, shows us that “God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”[16]
          And, as the apostle Peter wrote, “Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart, since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God.”[17]
          If you have even a mustard seedling of love growing out of a mustard seed of faith, the evidence that you are joining with other believers to love one another as Jesus loved us shows that you have come to know him who is love.
         
© 2014 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8 ~ in2freedom@gmail.com
Unless otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers.)






[1] Revelation 7:9-17
[2] I John 3:19-20
[3] Matthew 7:23
[4] Matthew 25:23
[5] John 17:3
[6] I Corinthians 13:12
[7] II Corinthians 3 is one place that shows that the Ten Commandments are no longer the commandments we live by. The whole book of Galatians is Paul’s argument against any efforts to merge the old covenant law, including the Ten Commandments, with the gospel of grace. This in no way means that we are free to be less righteous than what the Ten Commandments describe, only that our righteous is now by faith, not by law, and so we grow in this righteousness differently under the gospel than people tried to do under the Mosaic law.
[8] John 15:10
[9] John 15:12
[10] John 15:16
[11] John 15:17
[12] Romans 1:17
[13] Romans 13:10
[14] Galatians 5:6
[15] II Corinthians 3:18
[16] Romans 5:5
[17] I Peter 1:22-23

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