Robert S. Candlish · 1 John 2:12–14
“I write unto you, little children, because your sins are forgiven you for his name’s sake. I write unto you, fathers, because ye have known him that is from the beginning. I write unto you, young men, because ye have overcome the wicked one. I write [have written] unto you, little children, because ye have known the Father. I have written unto you, fathers, because ye have known him that is from the beginning. I have written unto you, young men, because ye are strong, and the word of God abideth in you, and ye have overcome the wicked one.”—1 JOHN 2:12– 14.
THESE verses form, I think, a break or interruption in the apostle’s line of argument. There is, as it were, a pause. John calls upon those to whom he writes to consider, not only what he is writing to them, but what they themselves are to whom he is writing; what is their character and standing; what he is entitled to assume in and about them as likely to ensure a favourable reception of his message. This is a common apostolic method. It is a courteous and complimentary way of insinuating advice; taking for granted the attainments to be enforced. But it is far more than that; and it is so emphatically here. It is a trumpet-call, summoning all the faithful to a recognition of their real and true position before God; and that with a view to their receiving aright what his servant is now writing to them—or, it may be, before this letter reaches them, has written to them—of the divine fellowship of light and love.
How then does John address us here? As “little children,” “fathers,” “young men.” These triads or triplets come in twice. There are two sets of propositions or statements, each of them three in number, and evidently corresponding and parallel to one another. The one set of three is introduced by the verb in the present tense, “I write;” the other set of three by the verb in the past tense, “I have written.” For the authority of manuscripts, critically weighed, as well as the whole structure and symmetry of the passage, requires us so far to amend our present text as to make the last clause of the thirteenth verse consistent with the fourteenth, “I have written unto you, little children.”
Clearly there are two parallel lines running thus:—
I. “I write unto you, little children, because your sins are forgiven you for his name’s sake.”
“I have written unto you, little children, because ye have known the Father.”
II. “I write unto you, fathers, because ye have known him that is from the beginning.”
“I have written unto you, fathers, because ye have known him that is from the beginning.”
III. “I write unto you, young men, because ye have overcome the wicked one.”
“I have written unto you, young men, because ye are strong, and the word of God abideth in you, and ye have overcome the wicked one.”
In either series, in each of the two, “little children” is the endearing term first employed. It is not indeed the same word in the original in both instances; but the words are of the same import, and can scarcely be rendered differently. They are the words usually employed by John, and employed by him indiscriminately, when he is tenderly and affectionately addressing believers. They are, both of them, his common and customary words of love;—“little children,” or babes, “children,” or boys. Children, little children, they all are; all alike to whom, as he says, he writes or has written. As such, as little children, he first addresses them all, and appeals to them all collectively. But then, secondly, he separates them into two classes, —“fathers “and “young men,”—old and spiritually exercised Christians on the one hand, and on the other hand, those who are in the fresh and vigorous prime of recent but yet manly Christian experience. All alike are “little children;” but some are “fathers,” ripe for glory; others are “young men,” strong for work. Such, as I apprehend, is the real primary meaning of this threefold appeal of John.
But what of the repetition of it?—and the repetition of it with a change of the tense from the present to the past?
It is a very emphatic reiteration; having in it a pathos that should be very affecting. The apostle first realises his own position as he is writing now, “I write.” Then he realises what may be the position of those to whom he writes when they receive what he is writing now. To you it may come as what “I have written;” the writer having himself been taken home. I am now writing to you as “little children;” to all of you alike I am writing thus lovingly. To some of you, however, I write as to “fathers;” to others of you I write as to “young men.” Let all that be marked and felt when you come to read what I am now writing. All the more because you may have to read it as what I have written; as my parting words to you. The present tense answers well enough now, when I am writing. But I am an old man; and the past tense may be the right one very soon, even before you can be reading what I am now writing. In any view receive it as what I solemnly and deliberately write; or, if I am gone, as what I have solemnly and deliberately written; my last legacy, my dying charge. Receive it as my full and final testimony to you, on the subject of what you ought to know, and to be and to do, as “little children,” as “fathers,” as “young men.” It is all I have to write: and I write it with all the earnestness of one who, before you read it, may have passed away. I write it as my farewell word.
Thus viewed, the appeal in these verses is surely very impressive and affecting. Let us look at it, first in itself, and secondly in the connection in which it stands.
I. Considered in itself, the appeal recognises, on the one hand, a common character in all believers, that of “little children,” and on the other hand a distinction between “fathers” and “young men.”
1. In addressing us all as little children, John makes a distinction between his first and his second appeal. In the first it is “because your sins are forgiven you for his name’s sake;” in the second it is “because ye have known the Father.” In addressing us as separated into two classes,—as fathers and youths respectively,—he merely repeats in the second appeal almost literally what he had said in the first. But in addressing us all as his beloved little ones, he varies the thought. The variation, however, is slight. It is the same thought in reality, only put in somewhat different lights. For the Father is truly known, only in the forgiveness of our sins for his Son’s name sake. It is when we suffer the Son to take us by the hand and lead us home to the Father, and when we discover, in our experience, how the Father deals with us when the Son presents us to him, saying, “Behold I and the little ones whom thou hast given me,”—it is then, and then only, that we begin to know the Father. Up till that time we have not known him; we have worshipped him perhaps, but it has been ignorantly; we have misunderstood him, and done him great injustice in our esteem of him. We have had hard thoughts of him; of his character and government and law; of his treatment of us and his requirements from us; of his ways and his commandments; nay, even of his very mercy itself. But we are moved to trust in the name of Jesus, and to make trial of the power of that name with the Father. And what a gushing tide of forgiveness and fatherly love does it cause to rush in upon our souls! How rich and free is the measure and manner of the Father’s pardoning grace! We do thus really know the Father; for we know him through our sense and experience of his fatherly love in the forgiveness of our sins for his Son’s name’s sake.
2. The appeal is next made to the two classes or companies into which we may be divided; those who are fathers in Israel; and those who are young men.
Ye fathers in Israel! the argument with you is, that “ye have known him that is from the beginning.” You have reached a higher, deeper, more satisfying knowledge of Christ, as “him that is from the beginning,” than that which is common to all the household of faith, all the little ones given to him by the father. Your clear and calm insight into the glorious person of him for whose name’s sake your sins are forgiven, and who thus introduces you to the knowledge of the Father; your mature acquaintance with him, in his eternal relation to the Father and oneness with the Father from the beginning;—should move you to give the more earnest heed to this writing or epistle of mine both now and when I am gone.
Ye youths, ye young men, the flower of the army of the Lord of Hosts! I have a hold on you also. You I summon, “for ye have overcome the wicked one” (ver. 13); “ye are strong, and the word of God abideth in you, and ye have overcome the wicked one” (ver. 14). As good soldiers of Christ, I would remind you of your high vocation; of what is committed to you; of what is expected of you. Your sphere is the field of battle. The quiet of contemplative study may best suit aged saints, advanced disciples, “fathers;” who may best serve the cause by enlarging, under the Spirit’s teaching, their own and the Church’s knowledge of the Eternal Word; elevating their own and the Church’s views of the Son in the bosom of the Father. But the vigour of spiritual youth points to the never-ending conflict between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, as your special department. For you are called to wage war with the wicked one. And you have every encouragement to do so. You have overcome him already in Christ, for he has overcome him. You have but to follow up and follow out the conquest. You are strong, and the word of God abideth in you. And through that word which testifies of Christ’s victory abiding in you, the foe is already vanquished. You have overcome the wicked one.
To believers of all ages, to Christians in every stage of advancement, the apostle thus appeals. He first urges arguments and considerations applicable to all alike as little children; and then such as are proper to fathers, and such as are proper to young men. By these various and accumulated motives, he conjures us to give heed to his teaching in this epistle. It is a very solemn, as well as a very full and comprehensive appeal. And the place in which it stands in the epistle renders it still more emphatic.
II. It stands between two opposite precepts; the one positive; the other negative; “Love the brotherhood” (vers. 9–11); “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world” (ver. 15). To love the Father, and the brethren as the Father’s family;—not to love the world lying in the wicked one;—these are the contrasted commands between which the apostle’s earnest and affectionate appeals occur. Doubtless these appeals cover the whole epistle; all that John is writing; all that they to whom he writes are to regard him as having written, when the writing reaches them, perhaps after the writer is no more. But they bear immediately on loving the brethren, and not loving the world.
The distinction is created by what John has just been dwelling upon; the “thing which is true in Christ and in you, that the darkness is passing, and the true light is now shining.” For light is a divider. It was so at the first creation (Gen. 1:3, 4): “God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness;” he divided between the light and the darkness. It is so in the new creation. The entrance of the light into the world: its entrance into the hearts of as many as are in Christ; necessarily causes a division. It unites by a new bond of brotherhood the children of the light among themselves. And it separates between them and the world. The separation, or distinction, is not of their own making, but of God’s. He is in the light. He is himself the light. It is he who is the divider, and not they. Nor is the distinction of such a sort as to feed or nurse vaingloriousness on our part, or to be invidious as regards the world. Far otherwise. It is fitted to humble us in the very dust, as often as we think,—and when do we not think?—of what we are in ourselves, and but for sovereign mercy must ever have been; of what many, very many, around us are; less guilty, by many degrees, than we; and more likely than we to win, not only earth’s approval, but, one would almost say, even heaven’s favourable regard too. What am I? And what are they?
Ah! it is in no spirit of supercilious self-complacency, or self-congratulation, that we associate together as brethren in the Lord, if indeed the true light is shining in us as in Christ, so as to show us the blackness of the darkness that is passing, and in its passing is hurrying to a fatal shipwreck so much that is fair and generous and lovely. No! nor is it with cool indifference that we look on and see its victims struggling in its fierce tide, or sinking lethargic in its quieter and deadlier eddies—feeling, as we do, that there is not one among them who deserves the horrid doom so much as we; and knowing as we do that there is not one whom grace may not make, as grace alone makes any one of us, a member of the brotherhood of light. The division which the light occasions assuredly affords no ground of boasting or of disdain. Nevertheless, it is to be recognised and realised; we must apprehend and feel it. One great design of John, in this whole epistle, is to bring us to a full apprehension and feeling of it; of what it is; and of all that it implies. The line is sharp; the preference must be decided. We have to choose whom we are to love and like, the brethren, or the world.
Now it is for the enforcing of a firm choice and a decided preference on the right side, that John makes his double, and doubly emphatic, appeal to us, as little children, fathers, young men. It is not for our consolation merely, our personal satisfaction and comfortable assurance, that he reminds us of the exceeding great privileges which, as little children, as fathers, as young men, we possess; as little children, having our sins forgiven for the Son’s name’s sake, and in that way knowing the Father; as fathers, knowing him that is from the beginning; as young men, having overcome the wicked one. These are all high and blessed attainments, and the consciousness of our right to them in Christ is doubtless a legitimate source of humble, holy, thankful joy. But it is not merely in order that our joy may be full that John dwells so earnestly on these elements of our oneness with Christ in the light. It is for a more practical purpose; that we may be roused to some adequate sense of the duty of love which we owe to every brother in whom, as in Christ and in us, the darkness is passing and the true light is now shining; and of the attitude which it is best for us to maintain towards the world; best with a view to our own consistency and safety; best also in the view of what is true kindness and faithfulness to the world itself.
Let us look then again at these appeals, in the light in which John’s practical design or object in introducing them may seem to place them. In so looking at them, it is not necessary now to consider the apostle as formally classifying us, according to our different stages of advancement, either in the life natural, or in the life spiritual. We all are, we all should be, little children, fathers, young men;—all three together;—little children, in respect of our having our sins forgiven for the Son’s name’s sake, and so knowing the Father; fathers, in respect of our loving insight into the mystery of the Son’s being from the beginning; young men, in respect of our overcoming the wicked one. By what we are, in all these three aspects of our spiritual history and experience, John solicits our attention to this letter of his and to its teaching; specially that we may love our brother, and not love the world.
I. We are little children, and it is the instinct of little children to cling to home, and shrink from the strange world outside. What makes us little children? What but our being moved and made willing to accept the forgiveness of our sins for the Son’s name’s sake, and our coming, in that way, to know the Father? The Lord says, “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven.” Our conversion therefore makes us little children. For in our conversion the Spirit takes out of us the proud, cold, hard heart of manhood: and creates in us the meek heart of childhood, of “the holy child Jesus.” For manhood’s heart in me, hackneyed in suspicion and selfishness, recoils from subjection to God, and resents the idea of dependence and indebtedness. I must needs justify myself; I will do something to put myself right. Even when I arise to go to my father, it is with the purpose of asking a hired servant’s food in recompense of a hired servant’s work. I am only thoroughly subdued when I suffer my Father to forgive me freely, and take me more lovingly to his bosom than he would have done if I had never gone astray.
Then I am indeed a little child. All the pride of manhood’s self-righteousness, all the stubbornness of manhood’s self-will, is gone out of me. I am fain, as when I was an infant at my mother’s knee, to have my burdened and broken heart relieved by a flood of penitential tears, as I confess all, and am clasped in an embrace that assures me, oh how feelingly! that all is pardoned. Then, at last, I know the Father,—what sort of Father he is,—when thus, for his Son’s name’s sake, who has got me, ah with what difficulty! to let him relieve me of my load of guilt and grief, and bring me home to his Father and mine,—that Father pardons all my iniquities.
Is it so with me? Then where now will my heart be? A little child’s heart is in the home of loving parents, and brothers, and sisters; away from that home he is uneasy and unsatisfied. Houses of rarest splendour, scenes of fairest beauty, will not reconcile him to prolonged absence from home, and prolonged residence elsewhere. He pines for his father’s well-known smile, and for the companionship of those who share that smile with him. As to all else on earth, he is a stranger among strangers. You are little children—are you not?—converted and become as little children; suffering Jesus to bring you to the Father, to receive his forgiveness and to know his love. You are all of you little children; for such treatment cannot but make you little children. And it is as little children that you are exhorted to love your brother, and not to love the world.
II. You are fathers. Babes in Christ, new-born babes at first, and in a sense always so, for you are always renewing the experience in respect of which you are little children,—yet, “as new-born babes, you desire the sincere milk of the word that you may grow thereby.” Continuing to be children always in respect of malice, the malice of self-conceit and self-seeking, you yet in understanding are men. Nay, you are fathers; you attain to the wisdom and insight proper to those who are of full age, as you grow in grace and in the knowledge of your Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
What makes you fathers is your knowing him that is from the beginning; knowing what we, his apostles, declare to you of that eternal life which was with the Father, and was manifested to us (1:1–3). It is your being taught and enabled, by the Spirit, to trace up what you experience in time,—when as little children you receive forgiveness of your sins for the Son’s name’s sake and so know the Father,—to its source in the eternal counsels of the Godhead; in what the Son is to the Father from everlasting. For now you not merely look to Jesus as accomplishing for you a great work, effecting on your behalf a great deliverance, and ministering to you a great benefit. You delight to connect all this with his being from the beginning; with the love with which the Father has from the beginning loved him; and “the glory which the Father giveth him because he loved him before the foundation of the world.” You rise to a believing apprehension of the ultimate ground and reason of the whole vast economy of redemption in the deep, unfathomable, unchangeable nature of Jehovah; in the purpose of the Father’s good pleasure to constitute the Son heir of all things; in the covenant securing from of old to the Son, in requital of his humiliation and obedience and death, a people in whom he is to see of the travail of his soul and be satisfied, and for whom as his body he is to be head over all things. It is such knowledge as that, of him who is from the beginning, that should make you fathers in Israel. It is when you rise, by the Spirit’s teaching, to views like these of Christ and his salvation; contemplating the gospel plan, not as a mere afterthought and expedient, to meet an emergency and serve a purpose in time, but as the bright and blessed unfolding to all eternity of what from all eternity the Son is to the Father; dwelling in his bosom; declaring his name; glorifying the Father as the Father glorifies him: it is then, and in that way, that your Christian character acquires a certain ripe and mellow fulness, and your Christian standing comes to partake of the very stability of the Son’s own position, as being from the beginning. You enter into the very mind and heart of God; Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. You are no more little children merely; apt to be tossed about, and to be unstable. You are fathers.
The fresh feelings of childhood, it is true, must ever continue; for its experiences are ever freshly revived. But along with these there is now the staid fixedness that should distinguish those who have a sort of fatherly place in the house, and take a sort of fatherly view of its inmates and its affairs. And so literally you do, when you know him who is from the beginning. You look at the family, the whole family in heaven and earth named of him, not now merely from a little child’s standing-ground or point of view, but from a father’s standing-ground or point of view; even from the standing-ground or point of view of the great Father himself. Yes! you come to see Christ the Son as the Father sees him; not as it were from before only; from the front; from where your foot is at this moment planted; but from behind, from where the Father sits enthroned in his eternal majesty. Your fatherhood is thus, in a sense, your participation, or at least your sympathy, with the Father in his. You are fathers when, knowing him who is from the beginning, you contemplate the whole of his mighty undertaking, with its results and issues, not merely in the aspect presented to poor sinners on earth, but in the aspect presented to the Eternal Father in heaven. As little children, you let the Son lead you up to the Father, that you may receive forgiveness for his name’s sake, and so may know the Father. As fathers, able now to sympathise with the Father, you find him giving you new knowledge of the Son, as being with him from the beginning. For as “no man knoweth the Father but the Son and he to whom the Son will reveal him,” so “no man knoweth the Son but the Father.” And you, when as fathers you know him who is from the beginning, become truly sharers of the Father’s knowledge of the Son. This, I repeat, is your fatherhood. It is your entering in a sense into the fatherhood of God.
Need I take any pains to show how such a fatherhood as this may well be appealed to as a reason why every one of the family should be to you a brother beloved, and you should not love the world that knows not either the Father or the Son? A father’s intelligent interest, as well as a child’s loving instinct, must keep your affections always at home.
III. You are young men. As such, you are strong. The vigour of manly prime is yours. And you need it all. For the home of brotherhood which you are to love, and the world which you are not to love, are not far apart; at least not yet. They shall be one day, when there shall be a great impassable gulf between them. But they are near one another now. They meet; in my heart within, as well as everywhere without and around me, they meet. Hence, for myself, I have a constant battle to fight, to keep the world out of my heart. Ah! how may that be? How but by the word of God abiding in me? Let that word dwell in me richly. Let it so richly dwell in me that the world when it comes to solicit admittance, or to challenge surrender, or to make a breach, or to spring a mine, shall find no access, no open door, no weak defence, no treacherous longings and lingering likings for some of its good things, ready to betray the citadel, and capitulate to the foe.
But alas for me! The world is so strong; so apt to draw me away from loving my brother and his fellowship; to draw me into conformity to its own still too congenial ways!
Shall I then faint and grow weary and cease to resist? Nay, let me be strong, and quit me like a strong young man: the word of God abiding in me. For, let me remember, I have overcome the wicked one. He is the prince of this world; it lies in his arms; it is he who, by means of it, is strong to overcome me. But I have overcome him.
So I am assured by that word of God which abideth in me. He has nothing in me now, any more than he has in Christ. He cannot accuse me now; he has no right to rule me now. I am not now at his mercy, fain to comply with his terms; to win a delusive peace by some poor compromise with him; to be dependent on his lies for a wretched respite from the stings of conscience. I stand now in God’s favour, and may bid defiance to the charges and assaults of the wicked one. And therefore I can afford and venture to break all terms of truce or amity with the world which lieth in him, and to avow henceforth that I love the Father and the Son and the brethren, in the Holy Spirit. By my youth and manhood, I am summoned to maintain this attitude always. And that not for myself only; that the home of my childhood and fatherhood may be kept from the invasion of the world; but for the sake of other little children, who are still such as I once was, and who are struggling in the dark flood, as I once did. The wicked one would claim them as his own. Let me claim them for my Father. And in stretching out to them a helping hand, let me hear John exhorting me, as a young man, to do so resolutely, because, as he reminds me, “I am strong, and the word of God abideth in me, and I have overcome the wicked one.”
To sum up all, I can imagine John, at the point at which he has arrived in the composing of this letter,—the point of enforcing the brotherhood of believers and its antagonism to the world,—pausing to ask himself, Will these counsels of mine be understood and obeyed? Will those to whom they are addressed receive them as they are given, in faithfulness and affection? He is moved to make an earnest, and what may be a last appeal to them.
What I am writing to you, I write in the fulness of my heart. I know that you believe in Jesus; I give you all credit for being Christians indeed. I appeal to you, by all the motives and considerations that should weigh with you as such. I appeal to you in every view of your Christianity, as little children, fathers, young men. And by all that is implied in your being little children, fathers, young men, I beseech you to hear me. So “I write unto you.” Take kindly what I write unto you, as little children, fathers, young men.
But, it occurs to him to think, I am old, John the aged. Before the ink I am now using is dry I may have been summoned to my rest. Be it so. Then take it, O my beloved, as what “I have written;” as my last legacy to you. Take it as what I wrote when I felt as if I was bidding you adieu. Take it as my final parting testimony and prayer.
As little children, knowing the Father by ever-fresh experience of his rich and free love in forgiving you for his Son’s name’s sake; as fathers, entering intelligently and sympathisingly into the Father’s knowledge of the Son as being from the beginning in his bosom; as young men, strong in him who is the Lord your righteousness, and therefore the Lord your strength; fortified by his word always abiding in you richly; bold and brave in asserting the victory over the wicked one that is already yours as it is Christ’s; by all that is simple in your childhood, by all that is godlike in your fatherhood, by all that is divinely strong in your manhood; be persuaded to give heed to what I write or have written; to love the brotherhood; and not to love the world.
