'If they had belonged to us...'
1 John 2:18-27 October 15, 1989 (Series on 1 John: No. 8)
TEXT COMMENTS:
V. 18: John is the only writer in the NT to speak of an Anti-Christ or of anti-Christs,
but the idea is found elsewhere. Paul also speaks both of one figure at the end of history
who, Paul says in 2 Thessalonians 2, 'will oppose and will exalt himself over everything
that is called God or is worshipped, so that he sets himself up in God's temple,
proclaiming himself to be God. And Paul also, as John here, acknowledges that the spirit
of that eschatological anti-Christ is already in the world and that he has many
forerunners. John, in 4:3, says it again: 'This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you
heard is coming and even now is already in the world.
It is clear as John's argument unfolds, and as he explicitly says in 4:1-3, that these
lesser antichrists are these false teachers and those like them who subvert the truth
about Jesus Christ.
In the section we just read from 1 John 2, the Apostle returns to the main thread of
his argument. He had, earlier in the chapter, introduced the first two tests by which to
measure the genuineness of anyone's profession of Christianity and of life in Christ--the
tests of obedience and of love. Now, following a digression in vv. 12-17--which we
examined over the last two Lord's Days--he returns to his main theme and offers us the
third and last of these great 'tests of life.' But, in introducing this last test, the
doctrinal test, he makes a remark so important that we must stop this morning to pay some
attention to it.
John reminds them that those who embraced and especially those who taught the
falsehoods John is now exposing have left the church. They have, in effect, excommunicated
themselves. It was made clear to them that they could not win the day and, failing to win
the day, it was clear to them that they did not belong in a genuinely Christian church,
and so they left--perhaps to found a religious society of their own.
And then he makes this most important statement in v. 19: 'they went out from us, but
they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained
with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us.'
John, with these words, gives expression to a very important teaching of the Bible,
viz. that those who are truly saved, those who are, indeed, born again, justified, and in
whom the Spirit of God dwells, will surely continue in faith and in the Christian life. So
that, John can say, that if a person who was once numbered a member of the church and
counted a Christian, defects and deserts the gospel and the church, his defection is
proof that he was never really a Christian in the first place. The true Christian
stays the course.
This is the doctrine of 'the perseverance of the saints' and John gives the most
emphatic and explicit expression to it here. If a man bails out of the Christian faith
after a time, we are to conclude that he never really belonged, that he was never
really a Christian in the first place, appearances to the contrary. Because, genuine
Christians endure!
This doctrine is based upon four items of biblical truth, four facts the Bible is at
pains to teach, to illustrate and to apply:
I. The first is that all who begin in the Christian faith do not last.
This is a very distressing fact, but it is a fact and fact that almost every Christian
congregation has had to face in her own experience. We have certainly had to face it here
and we will no doubt have to face it again.
People we thought Christians, we counted as Christians; people who worshipped with us
and worked with us, finally deserted the church and the way of the Lord and went back to
the world from which they had come.
As painful as that is to experience, it is not as if the Bible has not prepared us for
it. Judas was a most advanced Christian if you will; a preacher of the gospel, a member of
the Lord's inner circle; a witness to the most breathtaking miracles; yet, at the last he
left the Lord for 30 pieces of silver.
As Paul concludes his letter to the Colossians, he adds the greetings of his co-workers
among whom is Demas. But only a few years later, the great Apostle must tell Timothy, 2
Timothy 4, 'Demas has deserted me, having loved this present world.'
And more than a few times Christ and the apostles warn the church that 'the love of
many will grow cold.' These are the Christians which the English Puritans called
'Temporaries.' They are the ones Bunyan describes as 'promising well at the Wicket Gate
and having run safely past many snares, at last sell all -- body and soul and Savior, in
Vanity Fair.'
II. The second fact is this: that it is quite possible and quite common for people
who are not, in fact, objects of God's saving work, to appear at least for awhile as if
they were.
Jesus was at pains to make this point in his great parables of the kingdom, which we
find in Matthew 13. In his parable of the sower he teaches us that the seed when it is
sown in shallow ground, or stony ground, or ground infested with thorns, can spring up
quickly only to be withered by the sun or choked by thorns. This is a picture, Jesus says,
of people who respond to the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ, even respond with
great joy, but, lacking roots, they last just a short time, when trouble comes or when the
worries of life return or when the deceitfulness of wealth tempts that soul, he or she
falls back into the old ways and no longer cares for Christ and his church.
In his parable of the wheat and the weeds he says the same thing.
And in his parable of the net, he tells us that as the kingdom of God is preached, the
net draws in all kind of fish, and it isn't until later, when the fisherman bring their
boat to shore that they can distinguish and separate the good fish from the bad.
And you have those parables illustrated time and again in the NT and in the history of
the church.
It was so in the preaching of the apostles in Samaria, which received a positive
response from many, including some who were much more interested in the razzle-dazzle of
the apostles' miracles than they were in the word of Jesus Christ and did not last. And,
it was so in the preaching of Jonathan Edwards during the Great Awakening in New England
in 1742, to which many responded in apparent faith in Christ. But, by 1746, four years
later, many of those had lost their spiritual interest and were no longer following
Christ. It was in that year, 1746, that Edwards published his immortal Treatise on the
Religious Affections--a book written to address these very questions: How can the true
believer be distinguished from the false and how is it that some who begin so well do not
continue? And Edwards, like his Master before him carefully distinguished between those
who appear to be saved and those who really are:
It is with professors of religion, especially such as become so in a time of outpouring
of the Spirit of God, as it is with blossoms in the spring; there are vast numbers of them
upon the trees, which all look fair and promising; but yet many of them never come to
anything... It is the mature fruit which comes afterwards, and not the beautiful colours
and smell of the blossoms, that we must judge by!
III. The third fact upon which John's and the Bible's doctrine of the perseverance
of the saints is built is the emphatic assurance from God that those he is saving will be
saved to the end, to the uttermost, will not and cannot be lost.
This assurance is given in so many places in Holy Scripture and in so many ways and
with such emphasis that it simply boggles my mind that earnest Christians have in the past
and some still today deny that it is so. Some of the most magnificent passages in the
Bible, such as the 10th chapter of the Gospel of John and the last half of the 8th chapter
of Romans are devoted to this assertion that nothing can separate those whom God
has chosen and whom he is saving from his love which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
In Scripture there are at least five major pillars upon which this conviction of the
everlasting security of the people of God rests.
First, the efficacy of Christ's sacrifice. Jesus said, I give eternal life to them and
they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand.' And Paul said, 'Who will
bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. Who is he that condemns?
Christ Jesus who died, more than that, who was raised to life--is at the right hand of God
and is also interceding for us.' And he also said that 'there is no condemnation for the
man who is in Christ Jesus.'
If Christ died for your sins, your sins have been paid for and it is absolutely
impossible that a God of such justice as our God, will require you to pay for them again!
If Thou my pardon hast secured,
And freely in my place endured
The whole of wrath divine.
Payment God cannot twice demand
First from my bleeding Surety's hand,
And then again from mine.
Or as Charles Spurgeon put it with his characteristic vigor: 'We say Christ so died that
he infallibly secured the salvation of a multitude that no man can number, who through
Christ's death not only may be saved, but are saved must be saved and cannot by any
possibility run the hazard of being anything but saved.'
The second pillar is that of the enduring power of Christ's intercession. He says that
he prays not for the world, but that he ever lives to make intercession for his people; an
intercession backed up by and made all powerful by his perfect completion of the work his
Father sent him into the world to perform. His prayer, the prayer of the Son of God and
Son of Man, cannot fail to achieve its intended result. What Jesus said to Simon Peter he
says to everyone of us who are his true children: Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift
you as wheat. But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail. And his
prayer was heard and it always must be.
The third pillar is that of the power and government of Christ at the Right Hand. God,
the Bible teaches, has placed everything under Christ's feet and appointed him to be head
over everything, for the church. Christ is the King, and as King he rules over his
people to bring them to salvation, and no one can resist the will of the King of Kings. As
he himself says: 'My sheep hear my voice and they follow me.' And, as King, he protects
his people from all the enemies of their souls.
The fourth pillar, and perhaps the widest and the most deeply sunk into the earth, is
the eternal and immutable electing love of God. The Bible everywhere teaches that the
whole of salvation flows from the love of God for his people, his chosen ones; and that
love cannot fail or change. It was that love that sent Christ to redeem us; the same love
that sent the Holy Spirit to renew us; and that love will see every one of God's children
to the eternal city; not one of them, as Jesus said, will be lost. Or as Paul put it in
what has been called the 'acropolis of the whole Bible' 'if God is for us; who can be
against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all, how will he not
also, along with him, graciously give us all things?' And then, at the end of that great
section in Romans 8: 'For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor
demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth nor
anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in
Christ Jesus our Lord.'
The fifth pillar is that of the immutability of regeneration. When we were born again,
our very natures were changed, and from that time we have begun to think, to feel, to
choose, and to live according to that new nature God has given us. All men live according
to their natures, the Bible says. The reason the world rejects God and rebels against him
is because they have a fallen and sin-corrupted nature; we did as well; but God has now
given us a new nature and it will never change.
Man cannot change his nature, even if he wanted to. And the gifts of God are
irrevocable, says Holy Scripture. John himself says the same thing in 1 John 3:9: 'No one
who is born of God will continue to live in sin because God's seed remains in him; he
cannot go on sinning, because he has been born of God.'
So far we have said then that the Bible's doctrine of the perseverance of the saints,
that the true believer will stay the course, is built upon the fact that some who begin do
not continue; but that it is possible to appear to be a Christian when you are not; and
that God assures us emphatically in his Word that those he is saving will be saved to the
uttermost. There is one more argument, a fourth, required to complete the doctrine as John
as summarized it for us in 2:19.
IV. In the fourth place, God uses means to ensure the final salvation of those whom
Christ has redeemed and the Spirit of God has reborn and whom he has called to himself;
and especially the means of a continuing and active faith.
This is, of course, the burden of John's remark. Real Christians, he says, continue to
practice their faith, continue to walk the straight and narrow way that leads to life,
continue to take their place in the church of God, continue their whole-souled assent to
the articles of the Christian faith, and continue to trust the Lord Jesus and follow him
as their Lord and Savior. When someone stops doing these things as did these false
teachers and their party, says John, it is proof that he was not genuinely saved in the
first place.
It is not as if God simply guarantees that all of his true people will be saved, no
matter what. No, what he guarantees is that he will see to their continued faithfulness to
him, to their growth in his grace, and to their walking in his ways. And by this
continuance in faith they will be kept safely in salvation. That is, God determines
not only their safe arrival in heaven, but the way by which they will get their--the way
of persevering faith in Christ and obedience to him.
As Paul put it: I am confident that he who began a good work in you, will perform it--i.e.,
will continue that work in you, until the day of Jesus Christ. And Peter says the same in
1 Peter 1:5: that we have an inheritance that can never perish, spoil, or fade--kept in
heaven for us, who through faith are kept by God's power until the coming of
salvation.
God's people will all be kept in their salvation to the end because God will keep them
in faith, love, hope, and obedience to the end, and so keep them joined fast to Christ
their Savior to the end. Now this doctrine of the perseverance of the saints has been
challenged in the history of the church from both sides. There have been those who claim
that real Christians, born again, justified, new creatures in Christ, whose citizenship
was in heaven, can and do lose that salvation and return from it back to sin and to death.
It is a large question and I don't mean to do it injustice; but I must say, that how
anyone can read those numerous passages and such magnificent passages which seem to
unmistakably and passionately to state that those truly in Christ will never be let go by
him--I say, how anyone can read those passages and believe that a born again and justified
man or woman can lose his or her salvation beggars my imagination. If true, Paul could not
say that nothing in all the world can separate us from the love of God which is in Christ.
The most dangerous enemy of your soul--your own sinful heart--in fact could ruin
everything. And, if that is true, how can Jesus say that not one of his sheep will perish
and that no one can snatch them out of his hand or his Father's hand and that he will
raise everyone of them up at the last day. In any case, that doctrine is contradicted by
John here--who does not say that their leaving meant they had lost their salvation,
but that their leaving meant they never really belonged at all.
No, good men have held it possible for a genuine Christian to lose his salvation, but
that view is, I judge, an outrage against the plain meaning of the Bible.
On the other side, many Christians have held to a doctrine--which they usually call
'eternal security'--by which it is taught that anyone who starts down the Christian road
will surely be saved. This conviction requires the further teaching that it is possible to
stop living the life of faith, to drift away or to walk away from the church of Jesus
Christ, to return to the world and still, all the while, hold title to eternal life
because of a profession of faith in Christ made long ago.
This is the doctrine of the 'carnal Christian' popularized in some circles of American
Christianity by the Schofield Reference Bible and more recently by other published works.
Here it is believed that there are two roads to heaven--the low road taken by those who
have once professed Christ as their Savior but whose lives bear no marks of the new
creation nor any fruit for the kingdom of God; and the high road, taken by those for whom
Christ is not only their Savior but their Lord and who actually live for Him.
But it is just such a doctrine as this that John explodes in this verse 19. He says, if
you do not continue to live the Christian life--it means you were never a Christian at
all; because real Christians, those God is really saving by his power and Spirit--those
people put on Christ and walk with him. He is only saying what Jesus himself said in so
many ways: 'not everyone who says to me Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but
only the one who does the will of my father in heaven.' Carnal Christians are not real
Christians, they are only the apparent Christians that the Scripture warns us to watch out
for, whose counterfeit character is manifest when they cease to walk with the Lord Christ
and to serve him in his church.
So then, true, genuine Christians last! God keeps his true people in faith and in
salvation until he has them safely in heaven. Those who fall away were never really
Christians at all.
Now, let me conclude with some brief applications of this great truth.
First, we ought to learn from Scripture and from experience to be measured and careful
in our judgment of the salvation of others. I do not mean that we should suspect everyone
of being counterfeit; the Bible teaches us no such thing. But we ought at least to
remember that the only true test of the genuineness of any person's salvation is his or
her faithfulness to the Lord over time.
The greatest of the church's evangelists were careful about that. They didn't carve the
notch on the handle of their gun until the converts of their preaching showed some
God-given staying power. And they certainly did not make the mistake, so often made today,
of giving prominence to celebrities as soon as they professed faith in Christ, who would
later embarrass the church by defecting. I'm thinking of such folks as Charlie Schultz the
cartoonist and Eldridge Cleaver and Bob Dylan.
Second, and this is a paradox, we ought to be grateful as well as terribly sad when
false professors show their true colors. This is John's point when he says that 'their
going showed they didn't belong.' It is a dangerous thing for a church to have harbored in
her membership a number of people who are not really and everlastingly sincere in their
allegiance to the Lord and his church. Those people will drag a church down, they will
spoil the witness born to the church's children, they will dampen the zeal for the Lord's
work, and so on. If they are not genuine, as terrible as that news may be, it is better
for that to be known than for it to be kept a secret.
Third, this doctrine of John's and of the whole Bible ought to set every one of us
after that constancy of faith and love that is the real measure of eternal life. We ought
to agree with God's way of salvation, and knowing that only those who continue to love and
serve the Lord, continue to trust in Jesus Christ and to take him at his Word, that only
those are saved to the end; we ought, therefore, to set ourselves to be and remain just
such people and ought to stand guard over our hearts against the entrance of anything that
would weaken our resolve to follow the Lord to the last. As Augustine warned long ago: 'If
once you say, it is enough, I've followed the Lord far enough, you are undone!'
And, finally, we who know the Lord, ought to worship God for this aspect, this part,
this dimension of his grace as much as for the rest. What good, after all, would all the
earlier works of God's grace do us, if it could all be lost and squandered at the end. And
each one of us knows that, left to us, we could no more continue in the faith than we
could have begun to believe in the first place:
If ever it should come to pass,
That sheep of Christ might fall away,
My fickle, feeble soul, alas!
Would fall a thousand times a day.
Worship God for loving you from before the foundation of the world; worship and love
God for sending his Son and the Son for suffering and dying for you; Worship the Holy
Spirit for your new birth and your new nature by which you first saw the light and
believed in Jesus Christ. But do not forget to worship God also for keeping you in that
holy faith until you have both feet firmly planted in the heavenly country. Worship God
and thank him daily for this: that he has promised his people: Never will I leave you;
never will I forsake you. He will never permit the righteous to fall. The Lord will fulfil
his purpose for me: your love, O Lord, endures forever.
Robert Bruce the great Scottish reformer, on his deathbed asked that his Bible be
brought; and unable to see anymore; he asked that his finger be put on the words at Romans
8: 'For I am persuaded that neither death nor life nor anything else can separate me from
the love of God which is in Christ Jesus my Lord.' 'Now, is my finger upon those words?'
he asked. And when they assured him that it was, he said to his family gathered round: 'I
have breakfasted with you and shall sup with my Lord Jesus Christ this night.' and so he
gave up his spirit.
It is a good way to die, with your finger and your heart on such a promise of God's
immutable, eternal, and sovereign love for his chosen people; and it is a very good way,
and happy way, and strong way to live with your finger always on that same promise and
that truth always lively in your heart.
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