T. Austin-Sparks · 1 of 3

Eternal Life

I am going to ask you to look with me at quite a number of fragments in the first Letter of John.

"And this is the message which we have heard from Him, and announce unto you" (1 John 1:5).

"And this is the promise which He promised us, even the life eternal" (1 John 2:25).

"And this is His commandment, that we should believe in the name of His Son Jesus Christ" (1 John 3:23).

"If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater; for the witness of God is this, that he hath borne witness concerning His Son. He that believeth on the Son hath the witness in him; that believeth not God hath made Him a liar, because he hath not believed in the witness that God hath borne concerning His Son. And the witness is this, that God gave unto us eternal life, and this life is in His Son" (1 John 5:9-11)

"For whatsoever is begotten of God overcometh the world; and this is the victory that hath overcome the world, even our faith" (1 John 5:4).

"And this is the boldness which we have toward Him" (1 John 5:14).

"And every spirit which confesseth not Jesus is not of God; and this is the spirit of the antichrist" (1 John 4:3).

"This is He that came by water and blood, even Jesus Christ" (1 John 5:6).

"And we know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we know Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life" (1 John 5:20).

Let us put all those fragments together:

"This is the message... this is the promise... this is the commandment... this is the record... this is the love of God... this is the victory... this is the confidence... this is the spirit of antichrist... this is He that came... this is the true God".

I do not know what that conveys to you. In a very brief letter, a letter which you can read through in about ten minutes, you have this tenfold reiteration: "This is...". Surely it very clearly indicates that the writer, the apostle John, was wanting and intending really to pinpoint the great factors of the Christian life and the Christian faith. It is impressive; it is instructive; it is very challenging.

It all comes out of the first words in the letter: "That which was from the beginning, that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld, and our hands handled, concerning the Word of life" (1 John 1:1). Everything springs out of that. That is the sum of all that the apostle is going to say: "That which we heard from Him".

So John is here in this letter recapitulating what came with Christ and which he with other apostles had seen and heard and beheld and handled. He has very serious business on hand. Indeed, John in all his writings had a burden, a burden which amounted to a passion. You will have noted perhaps that in every one of these ten "pinpointings", as we have called them, there is in some way one governing issue. There is one governing issue to the whole ten of these "This is..." statements. And that governing issue, related to every one, is:-

Life.

Take note of that. Go and look at it again. The issue bound up with "this" is Life. And "this is..." and the issue bound up with "this" is Life. And so it continues right the way through, to the final summary: "This is the true God and eternal life" (1 John 5:20).

And it is in repeating that so strongly, emphasising that, that John brings us to the issue of the whole battle of Christianity. For true spiritual Christianity is a terrific battle. When you come into this kind of relationship with the Lord Jesus, which is in Life, which is living, you are precipitated into a tremendous conflict. You discover that sooner or later.

And it was in that very context that John wrote: he wrote his Gospel; he wrote his three letters; and he wrote the Book of the Revelation. He wrote them all very much about the same time and no one who knows anything about these writings of John has any doubt whatever that they are set in the realm of a tremendous spiritual battle.

Can you recall his Gospel and all that we have there about the Lord Jesus, in teaching and in work, is compassed by an atmosphere of intense antagonism. How many times did the Jewish rulers counsel together to kill Him because of the things which He said? Until at last they did it. But all the way through that Gospel, if you look again, you will find that He is moving in this atmosphere of intense spiritual antagonism. And John wrote the Gospel with that clearly in view. We will come back to that.

Of these three letters, the first is for the Lord's people in general, the second is for a church, and the third is for a spiritual leader in the church, but they are only three aspects of one thing. And if you read carefully you cannot fail to detect that what John is writing is because of the existence of a positive antagonism and hostility to the spiritual life. And if you have not recognised that in these two sections, you have not missed it in the book of the Revelation. For if there is one thing about that book, it is that it is a book of warfare. We know how the first three chapters gather around "to him that overcometh... to him that overcometh", seven times repeated. And from then onwards it is warfare.

It would be good always if you would remember that, although there is some meaning and value in the position which these books occupy as bound together, that arrangement can be misleading, or can mean that you lose something or miss something. It would be a good thing if you could get hold of these books separately and bind together the Gospel, Letters and Revelation as one continuous narrative, each part having its own particular purpose. But you must remember that John's Gospel was not written away back there, just at the end of the life of the Lord Jesus, to give an account of His earthly life. That is historically where it is put, but it was written right at the end of the first Christian century, after the destruction of Jerusalem. And so were these Letters, and so, probably, was the Revelation. They all come right at the end of that first Christian era or century, when all the other apostles had gone to the Lord, and John, the old, old man, was writing at that very critical turning-point in the history of Christianity.