First Sunday after Easter, 2004

The barnacle begins life as a free-swimming larva. It swims around like Nemo until it is ready to settle on a hard surface. Some barnacles attach themselves to a turtle shell or the hide of a whale; others grab onto underwater rocks and the bottom of ships. For that reason the submerged portion of a vessel is sometimes covered with colonies of barnacles. Once attached, they never come off.

Could this be an image of our attachment to Christ? A large sea-going boat symbolizes the Church. Though tossed by the stormy waves of persecution, heresy and schism, the presence of the Savior is a positive assurance of safety. Our souls are attached to Christ and we are thus indestructible. It is in this sense that St. Paul asked, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? …We are more than conquerors through Him who loved us” (Romans 8:35 ff.).

This is the idea of our epistle lesson for today. The Apostle John speaks of Christian victory, “And this is the victory that has overcome the world – our faith.” Faith in the Lord Jesus guarantees victory. Victory over what? Victory over the world! It is the world that scorns the actions of Christians and persecutes the Church, the world that holds out false standards of right and wrong, the world that promises satisfaction from the lust of the flesh, the greed of the eye, and the pride of life (1 John 2:16). When the world has persecuted us and even killed the body, and the soul still holds fast to the Savior; that is victory. The devil and his demons can kill the body, but they can never yank loose the soul from Christ. We are attached to Christ’s ship like barnacles. To believe in Christ is complete victory over the world. This alone puts the world under our feet.

On this 1st Sunday after Easter let’s consider these truths and others from our Epistle lesson. The next verses in our text are 1 John 5:6-8.

This passage makes a puzzling comment about the Lord. It says that Jesus Christ came by “water and blood” in verse six. In verse eight it says that three bear witness of our Lord Jesus Christ – the Spirit, the water, and the blood. Clearly the Spirit refers to the Holy Spirit, but what about “water and blood”? What does “water and blood” refer to and how do they bear witness to Jesus Christ?

To answer these questions it is helpful to realize that St. John was struggling to overthrow a heresy of his day. There was a Gnostic sect led by a man named Cerinthus. Gnosticism seeks eternal life by means of escape from matter and time. The Gnosticism of Cerinthus rejected the incarnation and death of deity because it saw the body, material creation, and physicality as too inferior for Godhead to touch. The Gnostics of the Cerinthian stripe falsely separated Jesus the man from Christ the God. They held to an adoptionistic view of the ministry and person of the Lord, that is, that Jesus was a mere man, born of Joseph and Mary in wedlock, and grew up a mere man. At his baptism however the divine Son of God adopted the body of Jesus to inhabit for a while. The divine Christ stayed with Jesus through His ministry but then left just before He died. According to this theory, the Christ came upon Jesus at His baptism, but abandoned Him at His death.

What was the purpose of such a crazy system? The heretics could avoid the most physical aspects of Christianity: the birth of God in a woman’s womb, and the bodily death and resurrection of Jesus. Once you embrace the Gnostic low regard for things physical and material, it makes sense.

Some people have noted that water and blood flowed from the side of Jesus when He hanged on the cross. That is what happened when the soldier pierced the Lord’s side with a spear. Could St. John be referring to this? Probably not. The flow of water and blood from Jesus’ side does little to refute the Gnosticism of Cerinthus.

Other people believe that John’s “water and blood” phrase refers to the Sacraments of Baptism and Lord’s Supper. The Sacraments bear witness to Jesus as the Son of God because the two sacraments represent in a concrete, objective form the extension through time of the actual baptism and real death of Jesus. This is true.

The best interpretation makes “water and blood” refer to the historical facts of the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River, and His death at Calvary. This answers more directly the false teaching of the Gnostics. Though Cerinthus may accept that Jesus the man became Christ at His baptism, Cerinthus couldn’t accept that the divine Son of God died on a cross. It was to refute this fundamental error that St. John stresses Christ’s baptism and crucifixion, as “he who came through water and blood.” What does this arcane disagreement mean for us in the present?

Cerenthus and his followers are long dead and gone yet Gnosticism is still with us. Gnostics regard things physical and material as inherently inferior. When John insists that Jesus came by water and blood he is refuting those who deny the incarnation, or who minimalize the place of the Sacraments. This is no trivial error. To erase the incarnation and the sacraments undermines the foundations of the Church and robs us of true salvation in Christ. If the Son of God did not take to Himself our nature in His birth, and didn’t bear our sins in His death, He cannot reconcile us to God. So John emphasizes not just that He came, but especially that He came by water and blood, that is He was the God-man at His birth, baptism, and death. We move on to 1 John 5:9-10.

These verses have long been interpreted to support direct spiritual experiences with God. “He who believes in the Son of God has the witness [of God] in himself.” The words of St. John seem to speak to the inner life, to mysticism and experiential fellowship with God. What does it mean to have the witness of God in you? It means you have His Holy Spirit. Does the witness of the Spirit in us lead to vivid and vital spiritual experiences with Christ? Yes. Related to Christ and through Christ it is possible and even positively beneficial to receive direct perceptions of God – perceptions of His greatness and goodness, His eternity and infinity, His truth, His love, and His glory. Have you ever had such an experience?

Since our brother Devron has battled cancer he has had communication with other persons dying of cancer. One lady related to him how she experienced the almost palpable presence of Jesus at her bedside. She claims with utmost sincerity that the Lord came over and tucked in her covers. The warmth and comfort she experienced was beyond words. That memory has encouraged her through her pain. Christians don’t scoff at these stories. They happen. When God’s Spirit is in you they happen.

Of course there are dangers with mysticism. What are those dangers? It is easy to value spiritual experience for its own sake, as though it were the purpose of salvation. Gnosticism for example turns into spiritual snobbery. “We are the privileged few of the deep experience. Spirit is all and we are spiritual.” Super-spiritualists don’t say it so blatantly but their attitude communicates it.

Another danger is this: spiritual experiences get confused with Hindu pantheism, New Age nonsense, or the Mormon “burning in the bosom”. There is a big difference between Christian and non-Christian experience. Genuine experience for the Christian deals with a personal God and leads to a greater love for Christ as Lord and Savior. Furthermore, mysticism is sometimes tied to antinomianism or anti-intellectualism. These are warnings to us who believe in the blessing of direct perceptions of God.

Nevertheless, despite these dangers, the saints of old took seriously the inner life, and we should too. When John calls the Spirit “the witness,” literally “the witnessing one,” it is the first of three witnesses. The second and third witnesses are “water and blood.” The water and blood refer to the facts of Jesus’ baptism and death. When John calls the Spirit the first witness he has in view the Spirit’s ministry of making us sure that the apostles’ Christ is real, that we belong to Jesus and He is in us. Study the lives and teachings of Augustine, Bernard, Luther, Calvin, Cranmer, J.C. Ryle, Spurgeon, and many more, including a crowd of hymn writers and you will quickly notice their breathtaking certainty of mind, confidence of manner, and rapture of heart. How did acquire such a close walk and sense of Christ’s presence? The Spirit, the water and the blood bore witness in them that Jesus was the Son of God. We have access to the same Spirit. [See J.I. Packer’s Keep in Step With the Spirit, p. 76; White’s Open Letter to Evangelicals, p. 157 for more insights along these lines.]

Moving on now. Verses 11 and 12 bring out explicitly the exclusivity of Jesus Christ for salvation. That is a fancy way of saying that Jesus is the only way. Verse eleven says, “God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son.” This is the same claim that Jesus made about Himself. He announced, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Me” (John 14:6). “He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life.” One can hardly attain more clarity than that.

In some circles the exclusivity of Jesus for salvation has become an unpopular doctrine. People don’t like it because it makes the other religions look false. Consequently, there is a concerted attempt today to find common ground. We are told that many paths lead to God. Jesus is only one of those paths. We are told that all faiths are valid and everybody is already saved. We are urged to discard our Creeds, and throw out our key doctrines about Jesus Christ’s divinity and grace and everything distinctive about Christianity. Why? So we can focus on those moral principles that harmonize with the other world religions – Hinduism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam. This is the road to peace and love, we are told. This is the high road of enlightenment and tolerance. Well, the argument sounds good but it is fallacious.

Removing the exclusivity of Christ leads to disastrous results. In practice it doesn’t improve peace among the nations nor morality. In one century atheists slaughtered five times more people than all the wars of religion ever did since the beginning of time. Moreover, stripping away the distinctives of Christianity makes people less religious, less fearful of God’s judgment, less loving, which in turn leads to moral decline and cruelty. G.K. Chesterton, had an interesting comment on this subject.

He wrote, “I was duly impressed with this argument in my youth, and I was much drawn towards the doctrine …that creeds divided men; but at least morals united them. The soul might seek the strangest and most remote lands and ages and still find essential ethical common sense. It might find Confucius under Eastern trees, and he would be writing, “Thou shalt not steal.” It might decipher the darkest hieroglyphic on the most primeval desert, and the meaning when deciphered would be “Little boys should tell the truth.” I believed this doctrine of the brotherhood of all men in the possession of a moral sense, and I believe it still – with other things. And I was thoroughly annoyed with Christianity for suggesting (as I supposed) that whole ages and empires of men had utterly escaped this light of justice and reason. But then I found an astonishing thing. I found that the very people who said that mankind was one church from Plato to Emerson were the very people who said that morality had changed altogether, and that what was right in one age was wrong in another.”

At first, the reduction of all religions to a vague moralism impressed G.K. Chesterton. He was held spellbound under its influence until he realized where it led. It leads to a moral relativism that in turn leads to the decline of morality, the enervation of the Church, the collapse of society, and a cruel, selfish world. More than that, the exclusivity of Christ for salvation is such an integral element of the teaching of Jesus, so central to the teaching of the Bible (and all Church history), that to jettison the exclusivity of Christianity is to throw out Christ Himself, it is to cast away the cross of Jesus and His resurrection, and if that happens we are all lost.

The epistle passage for this 1st Sunday after Easter presents you with a choice, a choice for all humanity: either you accept Jesus as the Son of God who came to earth in the flesh to live and die for your sin; or you deny the Son, and reject His incarnation and atonement on the cross. For what? Why? For the sake of some intellectual pride or self-centered habit? That is a bad choice. To accept Jesus is to have life eternal, and the life of God Himself within your soul. To deny Him is to forfeit the great gift of life in Christ and abide in death.

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