Robert S. Candlish · 1 John 2:9–11
“He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness even until now. He that loveth his brother abideth in the light, and there is none occasion of stumbling in him: but he that hateth his brother is in darkness, and walketh in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because that darkness hath blinded his eyes.”—1 JOHN 2:9–11.
“HE that saith he is in the light” is one who professes to obey the “new commandment;” to realise in himself, personally, the new position or state of things implied in its being “true in Christ and in him,”—in him as in Christ,—“that the darkness is passing and the true light is now shining.” He says he is in the light which is now shining and chasing the darkness away. But he hateth his brother; one who says the same thing; one in whom, as in Christ and in him, the same thing is true. He refuses to recognise him as a brother, or to regard him with brotherly love. And that is enough to prove that he cannot really be himself one of those in whom, as in Christ, “this thing is true, that the darkness is passing and the true light is now shining.”
On the other hand, “he that loveth his brother,”—he that loves as his brother one in whom, as in Christ and in himself, “this thing is true, that the darkness is passing and the true light is now shining,”—not only shows thereby that he speaks truth when he says he is in the light, but takes, moreover, the most effectual means for securing his continuing in the light; so abiding in the light that there shall be in him nothing to occasion stumbling.
But let him be warned. If he is destitute of this brotherly love, he cannot be in the light, the true light which is now shining. He is in darkness; the darkness which, in all that are Christ’s, as in Christ himself, is passing. And according to the darkness in which he is, must his walk be. It cannot be the walk of one in whom there is no occasion of stumbling. It must be the walk of one who is darkly groping his way, not knowing whither he is going. Nor is this his misfortune; it is his fault. There is light enough, but he refuses to see it; he allows the darkness to blind his eyes.
This cursory analysis of these verses may suggest for consideration the following particulars respecting brotherly love:—I. Its nature as being a brotherhood of light; II. The reasonableness of its being made a test of being in the light; and III. The fitness of its continued exercise to ensure continued abiding in the light.
I. Brotherly love consists in this, that they in whom, as in Christ, this thing is true, that the darkness is passing and the true light is shining, recognise one another as, in that character, and on that account, brethren. That is the first aspect of brotherly love suggested in this Epistle.
Look again, in this connection, at “this thing which is true.”
See the vast cauldron or wide ocean of darkness; restless, tumultuous, angry. It is the chaos of moral evil; the wild anarchy of ungodliness; in which, God being shut out, spirits made in his image “wander up and down for meat, and grudge if they are not satisfied” (Ps. 59:15). Into this darkness, into the thick of it, one plunges himself, who has no affinity with it, and over whom it has no power. But he is in it; acquainting himself with all its terrors and sounding its utmost depths. He ransacks the chambers of the darkness. Its powers and principalities he defies; its works and ways, its poor expedients of relief, its miserable comforters, its refuges of lies, he remorselessly lays bare. But more than that he does. He marches straight up to the fountain-head of the horrid stream that has made so vast a desolation. That shutting out of God, which is the real blackness of this darkness, he deals with. To make reconciliation, to make peace, he takes upon himself my dark death, in order that the Holy Ghost, the Spirit of life and light, may quicken and gladden me in him.
Yes! the darkness is upon him. Its death is upon him; the death in which there is sin’s dark sting and God’s dark curse.
But it is passing; and already the true light is shining. The eclipse is over; and lo! a bright cloud! a glorious Shechinah! The righteous God glorified! The loving Father well pleased! The Son himself,—yet not for himself, but as “seeing his seed,”—rejoicing and giving thanks!
Now it is with us as with Christ, when in us, as in Christ, “this thing is true, that the darkness is passing, and the true light is shining.”
For, first, in Christ, our position with reference to that darkness is changed from what it naturally is. It is reversed. The terrible flood is not now carrying us away; we stem it holding him—he holding us. We see it passing.
Yesterday it was hurrying me along in its strong deep tide, to what ocean I knew not, and scarcely cared, or did not venture, to ask. Shutting my eyes, I was content to follow the stream. Or if at times some rude shock or some eddying whirl gave me pause, and a momentary alarm seized me as I saw signs of wreck and ruin on every side, I could but catch convulsively some frail stem or slippery rock; or desperately toss and struggle like some “strong swimmer in his agony.”
Now all is changed. By grace in Christ, I am in a new way. My head is turned up the stream, and against it.
At first it is a fearful struggle. What waves and billows go over me. No breath, no life is in me. I am lost, I perish!
But lo! Christ is with me; he who “liveth and was dead, and is alive for evermore.” He grasps me, and I grasp him. Together we rise, through such a death as I never thought I could survive, to such a life as—how shall I describe it? How but in inspired words, “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.”
“The things which God hath prepared for them that love him?” Yes! For they are prepared in order to their being presently realised. “The true light now shineth.” As my head is raised, leaning on his shoulder and his bosom; as my feet begin to touch the rock on which, though fierce floods may still try to drown me, my goings are to be established; as I feebly open my heavy eyes in the upper atmosphere I am now beginning to breathe; what bright warm beam is that which lightens up the face of him in whose arms I am, and lightens up my heart as I look and gaze on him, and cling and grow to him! It is the Father loving me as he loveth him. It is “the darkness passing and the true light now shining.”
Then, as the first confused and rapturous joy of my own narrow escape becomes collected and calm, I look around. And I see him—for he multiplies himself and is everywhere—I see him doing the same kind office to one, and another, and another still, that he is doing to me. Here, close beside me,—there, a little farther off,—is a man like myself, in whom as in me;—because in his Lord and mine; —“the darkness is passing and the true light is shining.” I look still, and my sight grows clearer as the light grows brighter. Here and there, all over, the surface of the dark ocean-stream is studded with miracles of saving mercy, as stupendous as I am myself; I, the chief of sinners, saved by special and as it were chiefest grace. At first I feel as if all around were still thick impenetrable gloom; and I alone were in the fond embrace of one who “loved me, and gave himself for me.” But he tells me that he has others; and I see that he has. I see him embracing them because he loved them, and gave himself for them. Shall I not hail them as my brethren? Can I hate, or refuse to love, one who is my brother on such a footing as that? Can any cause of coldness or estrangement have more power than the tie that should thus unite?
II. Hence it is that the existence of this brotherly love is a fitting test of our being “in the light.” At all events, the absence of it is conclusive proof that we are not.
For, consider what this hating, or not loving, our brother is; and what it involves.
Here is one who but yesterday was, as we once were, carried helplessly on in the darkness that, as it passes, sweeps so many to destruction. But he has been arrested, and has got a footing. In his experience “the darkness is passing,” but he is not now himself passing along with it. He stands against it and stems it. His head being raised above it, catches the cheering beams of heaven’s light. And yet we who say that this is exactly our case, as we admit it to be his, hate that man; look coldly or cruelly on him; refuse to count him a brother!
I do not ask if this is consistent. The question is rather—Is it possible? The apostle says it is not. But why not?
It does not always follow that experience of a common danger and a common deliverance makes men brothers. Perhaps it should; where it does not, there is probably something wrong. The bitterest enemies, rescued in their strife from Niagara’s Falls, will scarcely have the heart or the hardihood instantly to renew the fight. If they do, all around will cry shame on them. But there is really nothing in what they have undergone together that has any power, in its own nature, to alter their relations to one another, or their feelings towards one another. They are the same men that they were before; and no one has made peace between them. Here, however, there is a peacemaker. First, I find myself individually and personally embraced by him, lifted up by him out of the darkness of my deep estrangement from God, into the light of God’s reconciled countenance; the light of the love of his Father and my Father, his God and my God. Next, I see him dealing with you, my late companion in the darkness,—my late antagonist, if you will, in some of the darkness’s deadly strifes,—exactly as he deals with me. I see him embracing you as he embraces me; lifting you up, as he lifts me, out of the same dark dread and dislike of God into the same light of his love. Do I love him who has me in his arms; keeping me so that it continues to be ever “true in him and in me that the darkness is passing, and the true light is shining?” And do I still hate you whom he has in his arms as he has me, and whom he keeps out of the darkness and in the light as he keeps me? It cannot be. I can no more hate you than I can hate him. I may say that I am in the light; but if I hate you who also are in the light, I am “in darkness even until now.”
Light is in itself—in its very nature and bare Shining—a great extinguisher of hatred; especially of hatred among those who should be brethren. It is in the darkness that mistakes occur, and misunderstandings arise. It is in the darkness that injuries are brooded over, and angry passions nursed. If you, brother, and I, are at variance, it is almost certain to be because there is some darkness about us that hinders us from seeing one another clearly. Hence we imagine evil of one another, and impute evil to one another. Let in the light. Let us see one another clearly. Differences between us may still remain; our views of many things may be wide as the poles asunder. But we see that we are men of like passions and like affections with one another. The light shows us that we are true brethren in spite of all.
The light here is the light which God is (1:5), the light in which God is (1:7). It is the light which is at once his nature and his dwelling-place.
First, the light is the divine nature; “God is light.” If I am in the light, I am a partaker of the divine nature; my moral nature becomes the same with that of God. This identity is very specially realised in the department of the affections, in the region of the heart. I cannot be in the light—meaning by the light the nature of God, or what God is—without my heart being like his. To be in the light is to be in a high sense Godlike in our preferences, as Christ showed himself Godlike in his preferences when he was here. We know what his preferences were; they were the same as his Father’s. Could it have been said truly of him that he was in the light, if they had been otherwise? Can I say truly that I am in the light if mine are otherwise? What then are my preferences? Whom do I prefer and choose? Is it they whom Christ would have preferred and chosen? Is it they whom his Father and mine prefers and chooses? Are the same persons, and the same qualities in persons, likeable and lovely to me that would have been likeable and lovely to Christ,—that are likeable and lovely to God? If not, let me beware lest, though I say I am in the light, I may be in darkness even until now.
Again, secondly, the light is God’s dwelling-place; “God is in the light.” If therefore I am in the light, then I have the same medium of vision, as well as the same nature, with God. Objects appear to me as they appear to God. And so also do persons. This world’s darkness obscures features and confounds distinctions. The “ruler of its darkness,” the “prince of the power of its air,” makes that air of such a dense thickness and of such an artificial hue, that men and things look different from what they are: softened, shaded, subdued; or else distorted and discoloured. If I am in the light, that darkness is passing. I am as Christ was, in whom, even when he was in the midst of that darkness, it was passing, and the true light was shining, showing him men and things in the light in which his Father sees them. Is it so with me? Does that poor God-fearing man appear to me as he would have appeared to Christ, as he appears to God? Do I look at the same things in him that Christ and his Father look at? Do I fasten upon the same characteristics of the man that Christ, if he were in my place, would fasten upon, that his Father and mine is fastening upon? Do the same qualities or adjuncts of the man bulk in my eyes that bulk in theirs? His rags, his unwashed limbs, his sores, as I see him lying a beggar at the rich man’s door; or his ungainly aspect and uncouth manners, as he, a clownish rustic, meets me in my dainty path; things in him and about him that are repulsive or annoying; causes of irritation and offence, for which, right or wrong, I hold him responsible: these I dwell on, and single out for contemplation, and magnify and exaggerate. Counterbalancing excellencies, redeeming virtues; graces flourishing in circumstances in which mine would languish; exercises of patience, meekness, self-denial, charity, that might put all my easy goodness to shame; escape my notice. They are overlooked, or perhaps disparaged and depreciated. These things ought not so to be. They would not be so with him who is the light of men, if he were in my place. They cannot be so with me, if I am really abiding in the light.
III. The exercise of brotherly love is fitted to be the means of our continuing in the light, so as to avoid the risk of falling (ver. 10). Two benefits are here.
First, positively, by means of brotherly love we abide in the light. The law of action and reaction is here very noticeable. Being in the light begets brotherly love, and brotherly love secures abiding in the light. For this brotherly love is simply love to the true light, as I see it shining in my brother as it shines in Christ. And such love to the true light, wherever and in whomsoever it is seen shining as it shines in Christ, must needs cause me to grow up more and more into the true light myself; to grow up into Christ, and God in Christ.
There is a well-known principle in ethics that may furnish an illustration here. It is that of sympathy; according to which it is found that our moral instincts, judgments, and emotions, are largely developed by our putting ourselves in our neighbour’s place, so as to see with his eye and feel with his heart. It is a most wholesome corrective of our sentiments on all questions of duty that is thus obtained. But it is more. It is a stimulus and incentive impulse also. If I wrap myself up in myself, becoming a sort of isolated being, bent chiefly or exclusively on the preservation of my own virtue and the cultivation of my own character; my sense of obligation, however sound and alert originally, will be apt to get warped or to grow torpid. Keeping thus aloof from my fellows—self-studious, self-contained,—not only is my conscience towards man dwarfed and dimmed, but my conscience also towards God. I am by no means so sensitively alive to what he claims and what I owe, as when, even in imagination, I associate with myself a brother, and make his mind and soul, as well as my own, my standing-point.
Within the domain of spiritual light and love, a similar fact is to be noted; a similar law or principle holds good. A selfish religionist is sure to become either morbid or stupid. It is by sympathy and brotherhood that the fire of personal Christianity is fanned. For one thing, it is always refreshing to see how the gospel works in others after it has been working, say for years, in us. To observe the process of fresh conversion or quickening, simply as a spectacle,—to watch it as an experiment,—is both interesting and edifying.
We look on, in a time of general and remarkable awakening. We read or listen to the details of some well-marked missionary movements. Here are new and fresh specimens of people born of the Spirit; men and women created anew in Christ Jesus the Lord. Surely it is good for us to have such specimens presented to us; especially if at any time we have been beginning to lapse into a low and languid apprehension of what living Christianity is, and almost to forget the power of a first sense of sin, and a first sight of Christ;—a first prayer and a first love. And here brotherly love is all in all. Without it, the brightest and most vivid displays of grace, passing before our very eyes, will be all in vain. If we coldly gaze, or curiously inquire,—to criticise, to speculate, to theorise or systematise; we simply become frozen up in our apathy more and more. Let it be assumed, however, that where God’s work is hopefully going on, there our heart is; that it is there, as a brother’s heart, in full brotherly sympathy with all who are engaged in it, and with all whom they are instrumental in saving;—that our fraternal fellow-feeling goes along with the evangelist, even in that warmth and enthusiastic zeal which may occasionally transgress the bounds of prudence or of etiquette;—and that the young converts and newly-enlisted recruits, even in the extremes of their grief and joy, touch a chord within us that awakens the melody of heaven’s home. In a word, let brotherly love be in exercise where brethren are seeking brethren, in the Lord, from among the crowd of the ungodly in the world. Let a lively interest be felt. Let reports be earnestly pondered. Let individual cases be made the subjects of special prayer, and let individual souls be embraced as old familiar faces. We catch the contagion of the excitement into the midst of which we throw ourselves. We get a new and fresh idea of what the Spirit’s movement is. The light in which these apostles and disciples of a new Pentecost dwell becomes the light in which we also dwell. Its “clear shining after rain “dispels a world of mists and vapours in our otherwise too still and stagnant firmament. Our abiding in the light is thus more vividly realised, the more our brotherly love is exercised.
It is so, even when from necessity we are listeners and spectators merely. Many a disabled child of God, lying wakeful upon his bed in the night season, feels himself to be all the more sensibly, consciously, rejoicingly, abiding in the light, for the brotherly thought and brotherly prayer he sends far across the ocean;—to yonder missionary with burning lips, preaching Jesus to some stricken soul,—or to some saved sinner, full of a newly-found Saviour, and shouting aloud for joy.
Much more may this be the effect when we are permitted personally to take part, as fellow-workers and fellow-helpers with the Son, in what he is doing on the earth for the scattering of hell’s darkness and the spreading of heaven’s light. My own soul prospers as I care for the souls of others. My abiding in the light myself is more and more to me a matter of actual joyous experience and assurance, for every brother into whose being in the light and abiding in the light I, as a brother, enter. It is as if his abiding in the light were added to mine. I appropriate his soul-exercise and make it mine. All different ways of abiding in the light may thus become mine, and I may have the good of them all. How wide and potent is the spell which my brotherly love may thus wield! It lays its hand on the dead; and I have brotherhood with Paul, and John, and Peter; and a whole host of worthies; and a dear cherished friend or two, but yesterday called home. They all abode in the light; in them all the true light shone, as in Christ. But no one of them was in this exactly as any other. They are all, however, available to enhance and intensify my abiding in the light. The sympathy of brotherly love gives me an insight into all their frames, and a fellowship with them in all their feelings. But “the living, the living, they praise God!” Let my brotherly love carry me out to living Christians, and lay me alongside of them, and win for me entrance into their hearts. Let me share their abiding in the light as they may share mine. Let me be helpful to my brother as regards his abiding in the light. Let me, with a brother’s tender hand, remove whatever trouble or sorrow or want may interfere with the bright clearness of the light in which he abides. Let me, with a brother’s wise affection, win him more and more into the light’s meridian glory. Let me do him all brotherly offices by which his abiding in the light may become less embarrassed and more free and joyous. The whole good is mine as much as his. Thus “he that loveth his brother abideth in the light.” This is a positive benefit to himself. And it implies another benefit.
For, secondly, “there is none occasion of stumbling in him.” This is a negative advantage; but it is great. Its greatness will appear if we consider the case of him who is described as wanting it. “He that hateth his brother is in darkness, and walketh in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because that darkness hath blinded his eyes” (ver. 11).
The case put must be viewed as that of one who is so far in earnest as to be really aiming heavenward. He may be even a most painstaking seeker of the heavenward way, and a plodding walker in whatever way he takes to be it. Such was many a Pharisee, like Paul in his days of elaborate self-righteousness. Such was many a Gnostic, or knowing one, among those whom John, I doubt not, had in his view when he was writing this verse. Take a devotee of that sort, engrossed in some self-purifying and self-perfecting spiritual discipline. “He hateth his brother.” That means, in John’s phraseology, he is destitute of brotherly love. He has no warm brotherly sympathy with other believers. He may have no positive ill-will to any man; on the contrary, in a sort of vague and general way he may think he wishes all men well. But he has no special affection for godly men as such, for children of the light. He is taken up with the care of his own soul, and his preparation for serving and enjoying God now and afterwards. I purposely state the case in its most favourable aspect. Now how does such a man really walk? One might suppose that, having nothing to do but to mind his own steps, he must walk very wisely and surely. But alas! the dreary, dismal records of ascetic and monastic piety prove that its walk is a terrible groping in the dark. Was ever the path of any of these recluses, even the holiest, “like the shining light that shineth more and more unto the perfect day?” Is it not rather a desperate plunging and floundering through mire and filth, amid stones and pitfalls, in the face of grisly phantoms of sin and hell? The man is bent on righting himself; ridding himself of lust; leaving behind him the world, the devil, and the flesh; working himself up into a state of serene and passionless equanimity, like that transcendental quiescence and repose in which he supposes God to dwell. It is a high though a visionary aim. For the attainment of it what efforts will he not put forth! what sacrifices will he not make! to what self-flagellation, self-laceration, bodily and spiritual, will he not submit! And yet what is it all but wandering as in a starless night? Incessant failure; disappointment after disappointment; new expedients resorted to in vain; now, for a moment, a supernatural trance, an ecstatic rapture, to be followed instantly by a fierce gust of unhallowed passion, or some horrid St. Anthony’s temptation! Truly the man knoweth not whither he goeth. His eyes become so blinded that the very light is to him as darkness. The light of the glorious gospel itself fails to illuminate and enlarge his soul. The absence of sympathy; brotherly sympathy; first with the elder brother, and then with the little ones in him, explains it all.
For now let brotherly love abound. Try the more excellent way, not of working in upon yourselves that you may be perfect, but of going out after Christ the Shepherd, and going forth by “the footsteps of the flock.” Leave the cell, the cloister. Quit even the too exclusive use of the study, the closet. Or at least learn to make the study as wide, the closet as capacious, as the great heart of him with whom you commune in the study, to whom you pray in the closet. For that is brotherly love. It is your loving whom your Father loves; and loving as he loves. It is the elevating, sanctifying, expanding of your heart, till it becomes, in a sense, of the same character and compass with the holy, loving heart of your Father in heaven. You are not shut up in self, any more than he is. You are abroad among men as he is. There is no longer in you that painful spirit of bondage which is for ever causing offences and the fear of them; occasioning stumbling-blocks at every turn; making every step nervous and uneasy. Saved yourselves by grace, gratuitous and rich and full; loved with an everlasting love; grasped in the arms, in the bosom, of him in whom and in you, as now one, “the darkness is passing and the true light is now shining,”—your spirit is free; your heart enlarged. Being loved, you love. The scales of selfishness fall from off your eyes. Christ sends you to his brethren: “Go tell my brethren.” And as you go to them with Christ’s message and on Christ’s errand, and make them more and more your brethren as they are his, you clearly see your way. He makes it clear. And you walk at liberty when you have respect to all his commandments; “loving your brother, and so abiding in the light.”
One thought may be allowed, in closing, as to the peculiar blessedness of there being no occasion of stumbling in you. Occasions of stumbling there will be, enough and to spare, till the end of your course on earth. “It must needs be that offences come.” Even Jesus had his stumbling-blocks, his occasions of stumbling, in his path. Peter was one of these when he withstood his going up to Jerusalem. Even the brother you love may be an offence, an occasion of stumbling, to you by the way. But it is something to have none occasion of stumbling within; to be purged of malice and partial counsel; to have the narrowing and blinding influence of the love of sin and the love of self exchanged for the broad, clear, free vision and action of the love of God, and Christ, and the brethren, and all men; to have “the eye single” and “the whole body” therefore “full of light.”
