Hope Motivates Virtue; 1 John 3:2, 3
1 John
3:2 NASB “Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not
appeared as yet what we will be.
We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just
as He is.
The key word for
understanding what John is talking about in this verse is the word “hope.” This
word is the word that moves us from spiritual childhood to spiritual adulthood.
Hope is a confident expectation, a confidence of where we are going, what our destiny
is. We are confident at salvation that we are going to go to heaven, but when
we get to spiritual adolescence and a personal sense of our eternal destiny we
begin to move that confidence of our eternal destiny in heaven to a confidence
at the judgment seat of Christ that we will not experience shame a His coming. So
the focus here is on hope, and hope is the mental attitude related to coming to
a personal sense of our eternal destiny. It is not hope in the sense that we
normally use the word which is the sense of an optimistic wish. That is not a
very confident hope, it is just an optimistic wish
that is not what we see in the Scripture. When the Scripture uses the word hope
it is a confident expectation, a certainty of knowledge that something is going
to take place. So this is the key word here that the interpretation of this
passage is going to revolve because it emphasises for us the advance through
spiritual adolescence to spiritual adulthood. We are children of God in a
training ground right now, being trained to handle the tests of life. That is
what James wrote his epistle about and there are many similarities between
James and 1 John. The problem we have is the sin nature.
The sin nature is the
source of temptation. The source of temptation is not our external circumstances, it is what is going on inside our sin nature.
The occasion for the temptation is the circumstance but the temptation has its
source in the sin nature. But sin doesn’t come from the sin nature, it comes
from our volition.
In verse two John begins with
the vocative of address from agapetos
[a)gaphtoj], beloved,
which is a term of endearment. Notice he doesn’t use the word teknion [teknion] that he has been using in terms of young children. We
are beloved because we are the objects of God’s eternal love. He sent His Son
to die on the cross for us and by putting our faith alone in Christ alone we
become the special objects of God’s love in the royal family. This whole
phrase, “Beloved, now we are the children of God,” emphasises for us God’s
provision of everything that we will need to live the Christian life. We are
children; God is training us. He has given us everything we need to pass the
test, to make it through the various stages of training that we go through. God
has given us spiritual skills and when we put them together we have protection
for the soul—the soul fortress.
“and it has not appeared as yet what we will be.” The verb
here, appeared, is the aorist passive indicative of phaneroo [fanerow]
which means to make visible, to appear or to reveal. It is the same word that
we find back in
The
dynamics at death. There are two groups
of people: believers who died physically and those who are the raptured generation. At the instant of physical death we
are absent from the body and face to face with the Lord. At this point we have
an interim body. We don’t know what the nature of that body will be but the
reality of it is clear from Luke 16 which is not a parable. Those who advance
before the Rapture go to the third heaven, the throne room of God, and they
return with the Lord Jesus Christ to the clouds, and will receive their
resurrection body. That resurrection body, if the analogy from the Lord Jesus
Christ’s resurrection body holds true, is going to be made up from the
molecules that made up the original mortal body, except that it is going to be
transformed into an immortal body. In the case of members of the raptured generation, what happens is that the dead in
Christ shall rise first then they who are alive and remain will be caught up
together in the clouds.
Then in verse 2 we have a
second sentence, something we know, the perfect active indicative of horao [o(raw]. This is a perfect tense used with a present tense meaning and
emphasises a present reality, that right now we know something for sure: “that
when [3rd class condition because we don’t know when it will be] He
appears [Rapture]…” The subjunctive mood emphasises the uncertainty of when the
Rapture will occur. “…we will be like Him [transformation of our mortal bodies],
because we will see [perceive] Him just as He is.
Colossians 3:4, 5 NASB
“When Christ, who is our life, is revealed [fanerow], then you also will be revealed with Him in glory.
1 John 3:3 NASB
“and everyone who has this hope {fixed} on Him purifies himself, just as He is
pure.” This is the hope of our appearing at the judgment seat of Christ, the
hope that is not related to shame. Because we are confident that we will appear
without shame we purify ourselves. This is the same idea as Colossians 3:5. Paul
uses the same type of argument in 2 Corinthians 3:18 NASB “But we
all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are
being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the
Lord, the Spirit.” There is an ongoing transformation taking place into the
image of Jesus Christ. Part of that is based on purification in phase two, the
spiritual life. 1 John 3:3 begins with the adjective pas [paj], i.e.
every believer, and then it is qualified with a relative participle, the
present active participle of echo
[e)xw], which
means everyone who has something, who has a certain possession, a certain
mental attitude. That mental attitude is expressed in hope.
There is a question we
need to ask here. “…everyone who has this hope {fixed} on Him purifies himself…”
Is that phase one purification where we are all purified at the instant of
salvation—positional purification? Or, is it ongoing purification that takes place
in the spiritual life? We have already seen from Colossians 3:4, 5 that it
would seem that this is phase two purification, and indeed it is. The word “hope”
is from the Greek word elpis [e)lpij] which
means confident expectation. This is a key concept. It is certainty,
confidence, an absolute level of knowledge based on the promise of God.
The doctrine of hope (Confident
expectation)
1. This is an absolute confidence regarding something in
the future. It is anticipatory, something that hasn’t happened yet but is
guaranteed to happen by the Word of God.
2. It is linked to the assurance of our salvation—Hope1.
But this confidence goes to the next level: confidence at the judgment seat of
Christ. It is a confidence that is more real than our circumstances or our
emotions.
3. It is arrived at only on the basis of advanced knowledge
of the Scripture. It is not just confidence in a vacuum.
4. This confidence is at the judgment seat of Christ
which is converted to motivation for the judgment seat of Christ—motivation to
be ready for the judgment seat of Christ.
5. So this shows that this hope/confidence in v. 3 is
related to phase two of the spiritual life, to our
advance in the spiritual life; it is not related to phase one/justification.
6. This hope anticipates divine blessing in eternity, and
divine blessing in eternity is based on grace and the understanding of grace,
and the imputation of God’s perfect righteousness.
This hope is motivational,
and that is the point of 1 John 3:3 NASB “and everyone who has this
hope {fixed} on Him purifies himself, just as He is pure.” We have to recognise
that at the judgment seat of Christ there are going to be differences. Some are
going to be failures; some are going to be successes. True freedom means that
there are going to be differences. The difference is how they used whatever
they were given. It is up to volition. In the spiritual life everyone is given
the same thing. It is not like here on earth where some were born into families
with more, some with less, and where circumstances differ. In God’s plan in the
spiritual life everybody is given the same privileges, the same assets, the same access to God, and the only thing that makes the
difference between the loser believer and the believer who is a success is how they
use their volition.
The word “purify” here is
an interesting word. It is not the word katharizo
[kaqarizw] that we find in 1 John 1:9, it is hagnizo [a(gnizw] and it means to purify. In the Old Testament and in
John and Acts this is related to ritual purification. But that doesn’t help us
a whole lot in understanding its meaning here. There are three times, including
this passage, where this word is used in the epistles, and how it is used in
the epistles is informative. James 4:6 NASB “But He gives a greater
grace. Therefore {it} says, “GOD IS
OPPOSED TO THE PROUD, BUT GIVES GRACE TO THE HUMBLE.” Then verses 7-10 give a picture through ten
mandates, imperatives, of what humility looks like, of what grace orientation
is going to look like in a believer. The first is v.7, “Submit therefore to
God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.” By submitting to God we
resist the devil. In v. 8, “Draw near to God and He will draw near to you…” How
do we draw near to God? “…Cleanse [kaqarizw] your hands, you sinners; and purify [a(gnizw] your hearts, you double-minded.” katharizo has to do with confession of
sin; hagnizo relates to learning
doctrine. So we are to purify, and we do that through confession of sin and
then doctrinal orientation.
1 Peter