1 John 1:1-5

Beginnings

1Jn 1:1-5

IN beginning his Gospel the Apostle John says, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." In writing this Epistle he says, "That which was from the beginning." The Apostle was a man who took in a whole horizon. A clever man only takes in points; a clever man can, therefore, be dogmatic and impudent. The inspired man is filled with a sense of inexpressibleness, and, therefore, he must be sometimes apparently indefinite, but always he must be reverent. A fluent theology is a contradiction in terms; a stumbling, hesitant, groping, wondering theology may end in great certitude and reverent and tender worship. Always be on your guard against glib spiritual directors; the men who can hand you out what you want, as if it were all compact and ready for delivery. There is no such theology, blessed be God, in Holy Scripture. The Apostle John will not have the mere incident, he will have the atmosphere. It is the atmosphere that is so often left out in men's thinking, and men's pictures; there is a want of open air. The thing that is set forth may within narrow limits be most accurate, it may even be painfully accurate: we do not want mechanical accuracy, we want suggestion, air, atmosphere, that subtle interplay of unnameable forces which ends in a challenge, before which the whole imagination bows as before a new and sacred presence. Hence the man of facts is always making a fool of himself. Nothing can be so misleading as facts. We should look upon facts as only pointing to the truth. The truth was before the fact, and will be after it, and the fact itself will be sponged out as something no longer needed. We are going on to truth; that great dream, that eternal satisfaction, which is only an unbeginning beginning, only an endless end. What foolish talk this must be to the man of facts. I do not know that a piece of cabinet-work, as chair or table, needs much atmosphere, but a tree needs the whole air, and all the sky above it, to give it fit forth-setting. What the tree owes to the sky behind! That fine umbrageous tree is nothing at midnight. It is still there; in a sense it is still where you left it, but only in a very little, superficial, and useless sense. The tree is not there until the sky is there; you must have them both together before you can have the one. So it is with the great trees of righteousness, trees of truth, trees of history; we want the background we need the atmosphere, we wait for the shining sky, that everything may be coloured and set forth in significant emphasis.

So this Apostle will have everything from the beginning. He will have nothing new but conduct. There he will be as novel as you expect the very highest genius to be; when he comes to press home the utilisation of his gospel, he will have your conduct to be as new as the dew of the morning, as fresh and sparkling and beauteous as those pearls or diamonds of heaven. As to truth, thought, theology, he will have all things from genesis, origin, protoplasm, unnamed infinities, uncalculated eternities. This is the great object which religion has to work out in the worlds to make men feel that they themselves are of yesterday, and know nothing, and to give them to feel that though only of yesterday, yet by so much they are looped on to the everlasting duration. It is apparently a frail loop, but it cannot easily be broken. Why not begin at a given point in history? Because you cannot. You must begin where God began, or you can know nothing in its completeness. A momentary hunger can be satisfied by momentary bread. You can steal bread enough to appease the hunger of the body, but the hunger of the soul is an inexhaustible desire; it grows by what it feeds on, it cries for more, its delight is in its own pangs. Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled, only in order to increase their capacity for reception. Have faith in those great teachers who speak out of the tabernacles of eternity. It would be much easier to speak about facts that come and go, little specks upon the hand, and small flashes that dazzle the eye for a moment, but there is no abiding in such bubble-talk. The men who come up from eternity are the messengers of God. Many have spoiled the religion they meant to teach by treating it as if it were in a box, foursquare, and could be handed out in morsels or in packages as the momentary occasion might call for. Who can cut the sky into inches, and give it away with finger and thumb? Who can snip a bit out of the wind, and say, That is a sample of the tempest we had? So with this heaven-filling, eternity-filling religious thought; it breaks up the vessels of words and overflows into the larger capacities of dream and imagination, feeling and aspiration; words fall back like exploded vessels, and say, We have not room enough for this visitation. So many men have found in music what they could never find in words, and some have found in dreams what was to them the beginning of the higher heaven. You do not know one tree unless you know all trees: you do not know one science unless you know all sciences. No man understands the law of his own country who only knows special cases, and nisi prius pleadings. He is a little contemptible person who stuffs the unworthy sack, which he calls himself, with the shavings and sawdust of particular cases. A painter cannot paint the glacier until he has studied geography and astronomy and chemistry: what a botchy sketch he can take of it! he is but a sign-painter: pay him his wages! you can pay such a man to the full, and get his worthless "thank-ye" in return. The glacier, the mountain, was never painted until a man came into England who anticipated science, and painted things that at first frightened men, but things so associated with the eternal thought, the beginning, that men grew up to them, and said, Turner is the only English painter that ever represented the genius of glacial construction and mountain history. Only a man here and there has eyes that can see. The New Testament without John would have been without its greatest character, its finest genius. He did not fall so readily into argumentative form as some others, but he lived in a region beyond formal argument, he lived with God; that man, with the shining celestial face, apparently never lifted his head from the bosom of his Lord.

If we could enter more into this thought we should read the Bible correctly, because we should come upon it, not as something that either begins or ends, but as something that runs into every other thing that is true, and that consequently belongs to the whole economy which we designate by the mysterious word, "eternity." The Bible does not begin with Genesis, the Bible does not end with the Revelation of John the Divine; the Bible begins when God begins, and Revelation goes on until God ceases to be God, which is never. Do not regard the Bible as a little book that has a beginning and an ending: it never ends, because it never begins, in any mechanical sense. It is as a voice overheard; it has been going on, in its soft musical murmur, in its impressive, soul-enthralling whisper all the time; but, hark! there is something now you can take down in plain letters; write it, quickly, write it all; if you are too much hurried, write the principal words: what have you got? This! Blessed be God. This much we seem to have overheard. As to what went before and what shall come after, no man may now know. But do not regard the Bible as a separate, independent, and self-complete publication; think of it as something that has been overheard, and stenographically caught by prophets and minstrels and evangelists who had the seeing eye, the hearing ear, and the skilled hand.

The Apostle, having put all this right, namely, that there was an unbeginning beginning "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" now comes down in what may be called concrete history, that is to say, history shaped into facts and accidents and measurable movements the lower, smaller kind of history; the chatter and the talk of men who but imperfectly know the lesson which they wish to teach. Coming into this region, what is John's own personal testimony? He will not speak in the first person singular, he will speak in the first person plural, because the revelation was given, not to one only, but to several, and through several to many: therefore the Apostle says, "That which" not "He who," but "That which," a neuter, nay, not a neuter, a common gender; that is better: it includes all other thought, life, personality, and action: "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life." Literally, That which we have eaten bushels of salt with. The familiarity was perfect. Not a God we saw walking out now and then by himself, not a God that we whispered to one another about as a kind of ghost that came to make night hideous, and that was reported to some Hamlet who went out to see the airy thing: but that which we have eaten bushels of salt with; and to eat salt with a man in the olden time was to have companionship with him, to trust him and make covenants with him. When men laid salt upon the sword, and dipped their fingers in it, that dipping dissolved the sword; it was no longer a symbol of war, but a symbol of peace. The Apostle says, We have eaten salt with Christ; we have heard him, touched him, looked at him, talked to him, why, we perfectly know him. It will be interesting, therefore, to hear what this man has to say upon the higher subjects. He has not only heard of Christ, but has sat down with him, talked with him, and taken hold of his hand; has been melted into tears under his talk, has looked at him as a man might look at God.

Now the Apostle says something worth listening to of a personal kind: "That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you." That is what we want to know. We do not want to know what you have imagined and speculated and doubted; we do not want a history of your mental wrigglings and turmoils and tumults and terrors; we have enough of that kind of literature of our own; it you can tell us what you saw and what you heard, let us hear it. "This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you." Now listen: what is it? Oh, tell us in our mother tongue, tell us in little words that we cannot forget; if there be any large words in the message, break them up into little child-words, into little baby-terms; we want to hear it in such simple speech that the very poorest and most stupid of us can catch the meaning in a moment: what is it? This is it "God is light." This man must be great. Never were little words called upon to say so much before. "Light" what is light? No man can tell. Science itself says it cannot describe perfectly the frame of a soap-bubble. Light is distance. There is no distance in darkness. Darkness is limitation, darkness is imprisonment; there is no gaol with walls so thick and impenetrable as darkness. You may stand upon a moor forty miles in diameter, and it can be so dark there that you dare not stir. You can thrust your arm through the darkness, but not your feet take care! Light is distance, amplitude, vastness, infinity. Light is creative. The light is not passive, the light is working all the time; a curious actinism is proceeding, changing even it may be essence, certainly changing colour and form and uses and possibilities. The ministry of light is an eternal ministry. God is light. Light is another name for morning, midday, summer, heaven. "God is light." How do we know that? Through Jesus Christ his Son. What did Jesus Christ say of himself? Jesus Christ said, "I am the light of the world." "God is love." In such consistencies find the deity of the Son of God.

Prayer

Hear thou our prayer in heaven thy dwelling-place, and when thou hearest, Lord, forgive. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us; but if we confess our sins, which we now do, heartily and unfeignedly, before the Cross, they shall, by the power of the love of Christ, be all forgiven, gone from out of the memory of God, and be as if they never had been. This is the miracle of the Cross, this is the triumph of eternal grace; this lies not within our power, but with God all things are possible. Lord Jesus, it is still lawful for thee to heal on the Sabbath day: behold the sick, the impotent, the halt, the blind, the helpless of every name, and work out amongst us and upon us thy miracles of love. Thou dost not cast men down, thou dost always bring them up; thou dost not bring the cloud into the sky, but the sunshine: thy smile is morning, thy look is resurrection, thy blessing is heaven. Lord Jesus, make the Sabbath day still more Sabbatic, fill it with a deeper peace, breathe into it a mysterious calm, and let the soul feel how near the Lord is when the soul is in the sanctuary. We bless thee for every spiritual touch; we thank thee for every flash of light that falls upon our darkness, and gives us hope of a land beyond: without such light we should sink into despair, but with such lights we hold all time and space as nothing, we are so near the Living One, the Eternal God. Give us such uplifting of soul that we shall have no more fear, or sorrow, or pain, or death; so fill us with the Spirit that we shall know nothing of the body; take us up into thine opening heavens, O Lord God of light, and show us the wonders which time has never seen; give us one moment's release from this body-prison, and let us see enough of heaven to make all our after-days days of the Son of Man upon the earth. Oh, for one look of heaven, for one over-hearing of its music, for one touch of its reality; then the grave would be the most beautiful part of the garden, then the river that separates us from the land of Canaan would be so narrow that we could step over it. Deliver us from all darkness, fear, narrowness of mind, selfishness, worldliness, and lead us into that upper life, all light, all peace; the way to that life lies by the Cross of Christ. Show thy saints that in Christ Jesus life and incorruptibleness are brought to light. Help the busy man to do his work, because it must be done; it is trifling with the soul in its higher aspects, yet the body must for a year or two be fed: but whilst men care for the body may they not be careless about the soul, the mystery divine that makes them men. Be with all our loved ones who are sick; the chamber is too familiar to those weary eyes, the sufferers have lain there so long that they wonder whether God's creation is being narrowed down to their four walls: send thine angels into the little church, and make it glad with new brightness this very day. Amen.