My dog died yesterday.  Sunshine was a good dog, part lab, part pit bull.  Full of energy, wonderful around children and always ready for some affection.  She was a member of our family since the day before my wife and I married.  My children were greeted by her cold, wet nose when they came home for the first time. 

Last Fall, around Thanksgiving, she started limping.  She would stumble, and occasionally fall down, with all the grace of a drunken bison.  We thought she had perhaps broken a bone or sprained a joint, so we treated her for that.  Her limp didn’t get any better, and by the first of the year, walking was a real chore for her.  Shortly thereafter we learned she had cancer. 

Yesterday, she fell down three or four times in the space of an hour, she was disoriented, and we think her kidneys were shutting down, because, despite tremndous fluid intake, nothing came out.  We took the boys out of school and had her put down.  My youngest son was with her as she breathed her last breath, my oldest sat in the waiting area trying not to cry.  Yesterday afternoon was unusually quiet in our home.  There is a hole in our home and it is shaped like a dog.

But this post is not really about Sunshine, but rather, it is about the depths of the human mind. 

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The words of introduction convey so much more than a cursory reading would lead us to believe.  The openning greeting by Jude conveys the entire gospel, a bit of the early church history, and the promise of God.  All this in one sentence.

First, and foremost Jude comes to us as a servant.  The status of servanthood denotes his faith.  He has abandoned his own will, subjugated himself completely to the will of Christ.  The call of every believer is to do this very thing.  There are only two wills in all of creation, the will of Christ and the ego. 

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So much for hospitality. 

One of the social cornerstones of ancient culture was hospitality to travelers.  At the time of the early church, most communities did not have equivalents to hotels, but rather, travelers would go to the town center to try to secure accomodations at someone’s home.  Travelers had much to offer their hosts, such as gifts from abroad, stories from foreign places, news from other parts of the empire, philisophical or spiritual teaching, etc.  In a time before the printing press, television, radio, or the Internet, this was a major opportunity for entertainment and learning.  Naturally, your standing in the community and the accomodations you had to offer would determine the quality of traveler you could attract.  Many times travelers would stay for weeks or months.

John cautioned the church to not entertain those that came teaching a message that differed from the doctrine of “…Christ in you, the hope of glory” - Colossians 1:27

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In our humanity, we are always looking for a way for us to work our way to righteousness.  As we learned in the previous passage, there is no work that we can do without Christ that will be sufficient to God.  There is no part of our being that wants to believe we are totally dependent on someone or something else for our salvation.  Think about the anxiety you feel when some project or task must be completely turned over to someone else before it can be completed. 

A simple example is flying on a commercial flight.  The vast majority of us would not have a clue as to how to control the plane, yet fear of flying is quite common, especially with those that don’t fly very often.  We are not in control, we get anxious.  People like my father would rather spend three days in an automobile than four hours in a commercial jetliner because of that feeling.

This anxiety comes from not having the peace of Christ. 

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“And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” - Genesis 2:16-17

There are numerous acts carried out in the Bible that would be considered horrendously evil by modern standards: little things, like genocide, murder, rape, incest, polygamy, theft, etc. Many times God Himself commanded that these things be done. Our minds and our culture tell us that these things are evil. But God commanded them, so they must be good. These acts cannot be good and evil at the same time. Either my sense of good and evil is correct or God’s sense of good and evil is correct. For anyone that believes in a Supreme Being, this is an untenable position.

The account of the Fall can shed some insight on this apparent contradiction. 

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It seems for every law, man is never satisfied.  We require clarification of even the simplest laws.  My children provide me with a perfect example of this principle.  I set a rule that they should only eat in the kitchen.  Then I find them with a drink in the living room.  So then I set another rule, no eating or drinking in the living room.  Next I find one of kids eating or drinking in the kitchen while all the kids in the neighborhood are outside playing.  I ask why he is in the kitchen, and I am told, “Well you said I could only eat in the kitchen.”  So I clarify the rule once again to encourage them to eat or drink outside when their friends are playing outside.  They are always looking for an exception or a loophole to the orignial law or rule.

The relationship between God and man has been and is much the same way. 

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There is all sorts of specultation of who the dear lady might be that John is addressing, but based on the perspective John provided in his first letter, the dear lady can only be the church, the earthly shadow of the New Jerusalem that now is. 

“But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all.” - Galatians 4:26

Just like a human mother, the spiritual mother is there to nurture us, teach us and care for us. That is the function of the church. When the church functions properly, it is our spiritual mother. When the church is not functioning this way, it nutures itself, it teaches lies, and it cannot care for us.

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John just taught, “If any man see his brother sin…,” and now he says, “whosoever is born of God sinneth not….”  Could this be a contradiction?  I don’t think so, but rather I think it is a problem of translation and context.  The word translated as “sinneth” is the Greek word hamartano.  This word, like many words in modern languages, has multiple closely related meanings.  Hamartano, can mean the following:

1. to be without a share in
2. to miss the mark
3. to err, be mistaken
4. to miss or wander from the path of uprightness and honour, to do or go wrong
5. to wander from the law of God, violate God’s law, sin

So, “If any man see his brother wander from the law of God…,” does not necessarily contradict with, “whosoever is born of God is not without a share in….”

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What is a mortal sin, a sin unto death?  The answer has to come from our understanding of life.  John has reminded us repeatedly in this letter that life is Christ in us.  Death, therefore, is the absence of Christ in us.  Death is something occupying the seat of Christ, instead of Christ.  Recall that antichrist, antichristos, means instead of Christ.  Death comes from the spirit of antichrist.  So sin unto death is not having the spirit of Christ within, but the spirit of antichrist.  A sin cannot be mortal for one that has confidence in the life within, Jesus Christ.  A sin can only be mortal for one who does not recognize the life within.

So as a brother or sister in Christ, when we see another trapped in sin, we have love.  We confront the person exhibiting sin, we inquire, we get to know them, intimately.  Jesus outlined a loving rebuke,

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Believing on Christ is living His life and not our own. John has reminded us of this fact over and over. And since a believer has Christ dwelling within, we have a witness to the truth. With Christ in us, we become a walking testament to the gospel of God. Paul tells us a little bit about this:

“Ye are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read of all men: Forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart. And such trust have we through Christ to God-ward: Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God;” - 2 Corinthians 3:2-5

If we are not a testament to the glory of God, then by definition, we are a lie, because we cannot serve two masters; we are either a testament to God or we are a testament to self.

How perfect is Jesus’ sacrifice?  John tells us that He came by water and by blood.  Sin is removed by the blood.  In Leviticus 6:24-30, we can see a description of the sin offering, and in a previous commentary we can begin to understand the picture this paints for the Christian.  The sin offering described in this passage describes, in part, how Jesus came by the blood. 

He also came by the water.  Numbers 19 describes an elaborate ceremony to sacrifice a red heiffer without imperfection to make the waters of separation: a purification for sin. 

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As mentioned in an earlier installment of this study, to believe, is to place one’s confidence in. To believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the anointed one, is to be born of God. How is belief that Jesus is the Christ manifest itself in us? What does that mean?

The Temple in Jerusalem had no place for the High Priest to sit down. The High Priest had no need for a chair because his work was never completed. He offered sacrifices, first for his own sin, and then for the people’s, but the Messiah has completed the sacrifice.

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What are you afraid of?  Is it something horrible, like monsters or ghosts or public speaking?  Are you afraid of some debilitating injury?  Maybe you fear not living up to some standard that you or someone else has set.  Perhaps you are afraid of being found out for the fraud and hypocrite you really are - deep, deep inside.

Fear is a driving force in our lives.  We earn money for the fear of being poor.  We are polite for fear of confrontation.  Everything we do is motivated by fear.  Every action we take is a reaction to fear - unless the love of Christ dwells in us.

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The title of this post is a quote from Jon Stewart of The Daily Show this week.  Ted Haggard is now cured of his homosexuality. 

Many people laugh at the idea that a person can be cured of homosexuality.  Our culture does not view homosexuality as aberrant.  Scripture is clear, homosexuality is sin. 

“For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.” - Romans 1:26-27

So is cured the right word?

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We are called to love, yet it is not possible for love to come from the heart of man.  Jesus told His disciples,

“Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.” - John 8:44

Your spouse can’t love, your mother can’t love, your father can’t love, your girlfriend or boyfriend can’t love, your teacher can’t love.  Unless they have been reborn in Christ.  Every relationship we have is not based on unconditional love, but rather is transactional.  For many, even their love of Christ or of God is transactional. 

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