Dennis Tuuri

We continue this morning a series of talks going through the confessional statement and covenant of Reformation Covenant Church. We want to spend the bulk of the time as we go through this document on this second portion of that, the actual covenant statement. And so we’ll cover a lot of areas in there that are of great concern to us as we continue to build the church here that God has given us. However, we thought that prior to that covenant statement, it would be good to go through several of the unique teachings of the confessional statement that is unique to our church.

Certainly not unique to the church of Jesus Christ through the ages. Along that line, two weeks ago, we talked about the salvation of God being of his electness, of his sovereign decree. We talked about the sovereignty of God in relationship to salvation or election. Today, we’ll be talking about the sovereignty of God as applied to ethics and its relationship to God’s law. And then next week we’ll talk about the sovereignty of God applied to history dealing with the optimistic view of the future—the reasons we can have an optimistic view of the future.

The portions of the confessional statement are four really that we’re talking about today. And so I thought I’d just read them summarily here. We believe that Old Testament standing laws continue to be morally binding unless they are rescinded or modified by further revelation in the holy scriptures. We believe that the civil precepts of the Old Testament are a model for perfect social justice for all cultures, even in the punishment of criminals.

We believe that obedience to God’s law is commanded for heathen and Christian alike. The former having the wrath of God abiding on him as a rebel. The latter having the spirit of God abiding in him, working conformance to and joy in God’s law. We believe that all civil magistrates are under obligation to keep God’s law and are judged by God on how they perform this duty. I’ve decided this morning, as is obvious, to use 1 John 5, first five verses for our text this morning.

Now, the title of our talk, I guess, is “God’s law, the evidence for salvation, the vehicle for victory.” First John is a very interesting epistle. I looked back at some of the materials we used to use at the school of the Bible and survey courses and saw how they characterized this book and, for instance, very common way to characterize the book is found in “Exploring the Scriptures” by John Phillips where he talks about the emphasis of the apostle John including in this epistle being light, life and love.

And of course John is often referred to as the apostle of love. Now love is extremely important of course in the Christian walk. It’s really our primary duty to love God and to love our neighbor. And so it’s good that we can characterize John as an apostle of love. That’s not a bad thing. It’s a very good thing to emphasize the necessity we have for love in our lives toward our God and toward our fellow man as well.

Love can be said to be the mark of the true Christian and that’s certainly true. Without love, as is evidenced by these three words—light, life and love—without love you can see that there is no light really. The person abides in darkness. Without love there is really no life. There is death. And so love is extremely important. But First John is interesting if you read through it and look at the words that are common in it.

Certainly love is a common occurrence in this epistle of First John. It occurs over 24 times. Light occurs five times that I found and life occurs 12 times. But it’s interesting to me that the word for commandment or commandments occurs 14 times. And so if we’re going to characterize the book of First John, maybe rather than saying light, life and love, maybe saying love and the commandments might be a little better in terms of just a numerical count of the sort of words that characterize the epistle.

I think though that is again with good reason of course that we can see the relationship between the commandments of God and the love of God. Those things are seen synonymously in this epistle as we’ll attempt to show here in a few minutes. Those things both then characterize true light and true life. And hopefully by the end of this little exposition of these five verses, we’ll see that to say that one loves and doesn’t walk in obedience to the commandments of God demonstrates that person remains in darkness and that person remains in death.

I have four basic points to this talk. The first point will be that obedience to God’s law is our love for God. Second point will be that obedience to God’s law is our love for our fellow man. The third point will be that obedience to God’s law should not be seen as grievous but should be a delight to us. And the fourth point is that obedience to God’s law spells victory. Now the first three points it must be said are not really anything new in the history of the church.

Really the fourth point is neither. It’s new to a lot of us, a lot of us though who sit in this hall today. Maybe not new today, but it’s been new in the last few years to us because we’ve been raised in churches that would shrink in horror from these sort of proclamations. And yet it seems to be the clear teaching of the verses that we just read and we’ll go through other verses as well. And so I think it is a good idea to spend a little bit of time considering these points and to make sure that we understand the necessity of our obedience as an evidence of love for God, love for our fellow man.

**First point: Obedience to God is our love for God.**

Now, we start with love for God because that’s really where the scriptures start. And in verses 1 and 2, there is talk there about the love of the children of God, love for the brethren, and then love also for God. And we know that love for God precedes love for the brethren. And this is the point that he makes in verse one that if you love him that begat, you also will love him that’s begotten of him.

And so, if we love the father, we love of the son. And if we love the son, we will love all the children of God that have been adopted into the household of God. So it’s important to recognize that our love for our fellow man comes forth from our love for God. And of course, that’s what it says in verse two. By this we know that we love his—the children of God—when we love God and keep his commandments.

The primary thing to remember is the love of God. Now these verses are not necessarily unique in the New Testament. The call to love of God. And of course, it’s not unique in the Old Testament either. Love for God is a consistent theme of the entire scriptures. There’s basic continuity in the scriptures between the old and new covenants, old and new testament on the command for love for God. After all, Deuteronomy 6, the great Shema, the summation of the faith of the covenant was to hear, “O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy might.”

The great summation of the old covenant was to love God with all our heart, soul, and might, all our strength. And of course, in the New Testament, it’s also stressed. Jesus in Mark 12 verse 29 quotes from that great Shema or hear, “O Israel.” That’s what the word Shema means, to hear, O Israel. Jesus Christ quotes from that and says the same thing. This is the greatest commandment to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and might.

Love for God is obviously contained, or the commandment to do that is obviously contained in both covenants. There’s continuity. There’s also continuity or consistency, however, between the covenants and defining what that love is. And this is of course the area where we begin to have a little bit of trouble with some contemporary churches.

I was as I was preparing for this talk, I remember—I don’t remember which if it was in “Godspell” or “Jesus Christ Superstar,” both you primarily forgettable films. I don’t remember which one it was in, but there was this song, “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.” Maybe some of you remember that. And I kept thinking about that song as I was preparing these talks because it seems to be a plight of modern Christianity—they don’t know how to love God.

They don’t know because they reject the clear teachings by and large and what the scriptures tell us in terms of loving God. They don’t know how to love God though. And so they come up with various vehicles through which to try to engender some sort of love for God or demonstrate that love. The attempt at a long prayer life for instance is seen as an indication of our love for God. The attempt to feel that perhaps in getting together for worship and having an emotional spiritual experience during our corporate worship time and singing praises to God is the true epitome of our love for God and the highest expression of it.

And so you go to church once a week hopefully to generate that love again and hopefully it’ll be enough love generated to carry you throughout the week or if that isn’t good enough perhaps you rely on spiritual experiences in your home and so there’s been a great deal of emphasis in the last few years in the neo-Pentecostal movements where love for God is evidenced through personal emotional experiences again of a type toward God.

Now there’s nothing wrong of course with emotional experiences toward God and I think that biblical faith is characterized by that as well, but to make that the determiner of love, I think is in violation of what these passages clearly teach us. It must be said here that the premise obviously we’re using in this church, we’ve talked about this several times. The premise we’ll use as we look at these verses and we’ll examine as we look through them is that we will assume that there will be continuity or consistency between the old and the new covenant just as there was the love of God also in describing what that love is.

We’ll look at a few verses that talk very clearly about that. But I think it’s important, however, to recognize that should be the presumptive view of a person as he comes to the New Testament. Anybody who has read the Old Testament, anybody who’s converted to the faith and begins to read the Bible at page one and gets to two-thirds of the book, two-thirds of the way through the book, begins to read the New Testament, I don’t think would begin to think, “Now I guess all that stuff is disregarded. We’ll look for what God is going to tell us now.”

He will build his understanding of the word of God upon what he’s already read. And that’s why God revealed it in that manner for us. After all, in many people that stress the discontinuousness of the two covenants, there is almost a latent idea of two different gods. We have not two revelations of the person of God. We have one revelation. That’s what the scriptures are, right? A revelation of who God is and who we are in response to God, what he requires of us.

And so if we’re going to have a change in the basic nature of that revelation from one covenant to the other covenant, a basic change, a different set of laws, a different revelation, we’re talking about two different gods. And many people, not overtly of course, but many people seem to implicitly believe that. They seem to believe that Jesus came to give a new law without recognizing that Jesus was of course with the father from the beginning. Jesus’s affairs did not begin with his birth here on earth. Jesus was pre-existent with the father and is identified with the father. We have one God existing in three persons. And so to pit Jesus against the father or the spirit against the father is in basic disharmony with the scriptures.

Now it’s—I just want to mention briefly this would be good for your own study later on perhaps. I mentioned to you, several of you, that as we were going through some of the things we went through the last few weeks in terms of going through the scriptures and talking about the nature of covenants in Galatians 3 there’s a very interesting statement by Paul. Paul says that even in merely terms with men’s terms if anybody has a covenant they can’t unilaterally add to it or rescind it.

Okay. And what he’s saying and then he goes on to talk about the covenant that God made with Abraham and the relationship of the law to that covenant. And the whole point that Paul is making there is that it’s not as if God unilaterally disbanded that original covenant and brought in the law and now begins another covenant. No, what Paul is saying is there’s basic continuity here. The covenant once ratified as it was done in the Old Testament is of a perpetual nature.

And we stressed that we talked about the nature of covenants. They’re perpetual. And so God says through the Apostle Paul, “What I was doing with the law—law was added because of trespasses. Law was added, the Mosaic law specifically, after the covenant was made with Abram, not as an additional term to that covenant, but as being an implicit part of that covenant all along. You see, God didn’t change the terms of the covenant when it came around to the deliverance of the people of Israel from Egypt, bringing them into the promised land, and giving of the law.

No, he made clear to them in very overt terms through the ordination of angels, the giving of the law to Moses, what the terms of that covenant were all along. And that’s the point that Paul is making in Galatians 3. And of course, we know that covenant with Abraham is exactly the covenant that we’re in. The sign given to Abraham of that covenant was the sign of justification by faith.

So, law was never intended to set aside justification by faith given to his covenant people and signed and sealed in the covenant with Abraham. The law was an indication to the people of the terms of that covenant, what that covenant keeper to come would be, what he would accomplish, and what the people of God were to live like in relationship to covenant faithfulness to God. You understand that?

He says, first of all, covenants can’t be changed unilaterally. He says, second of all, God made a covenant with Abraham. He says, third of all, God added a law to that covenant. And so, what he’s saying is he didn’t add a law by adding new terms. He explained the covenant relationship as it always should have been. And then finally he says you’re part of that covenant and so the clear teaching to the Galatians is that the law was not intended as a mechanism for justification but neither can the law be set aside and so in Galatians 5 there’s a tremendous emphasis upon the correct keeping of that law.

So there’s basic continuity in the scriptures and in the context of the covenant now as to the obedience that God requires of his people to the law—not to attain salvation but as a demonstration of salvation.

Now, it’s obvious that in the Old Testament that love for God is defined in the context of the great Shema or Deuteronomy 6 as obedience to commandments. Following the command that these things that hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one and that you should love God. Following that is the specific command that these words that I command you this day shall be in your heart. You’re going to do them. You’re going to write them on your doorpost. You’re going to teach them to your kids.

The context of the love for God and the great Shema continues on to be shown as obedience to God’s commandments. That’s loving God. To take these things I’m going to give you now. He says to bind them upon your heads. Every thought that yours should be directed by my law. Everything you put your hand to do should be directed by my law. And that is love for me. Real obvious.

And in the New Testament, we have it just as obvious. Verse three, this is the love of God that we keep his commandments. What could be clearer? What could be plainer? What could be a stronger statement for the abiding validity of God’s law and the very words of God that tell us, “If you love me, that love is to keep my commandments.” There’s an equation there.

Now, in John 15 verses 10-12, Jesus said the same thing. If you keep my commandments, you shall abide in my love as I have kept my father’s commandments and abide in his love. Christ gave us an example. He obeyed the commandments and then he calls on us to obey those same commandments. John 14 verse 15 same apostle writing these things. If you love me Jesus said keep my commandments. One who says he loves but doesn’t keep God’s commandments is obviously not in a correct relationship to God.

And in 2 John verse 6, this is love that we walk after his commandments. Okay, there’s an obvious relationship, a synonymous relationship between love and the keeping of God’s commandments. First of all, we saw in the Old Testament, the great Shema, and now in the New Testament as well. And we understand all that because we see it all in the context of the continuity of the covenant and of God’s giving the law to his covenant people and is told to us in Galatians 3.

Now we see from this then that love for our savior will result in a great deal of reverence and obedience to his commandments. That don’t—that be the characterization of it. It won’t be characterized by some kind of big brother relationship. I think believe it was Reverend Rushdoony or somebody who talked about the history of art. Art demonstrates the faith of the people. And if you look at a lot of the paintings of the time of the Reformation, Christ was depicted with a crown on his head as a reigning king.

This is an orthodox position. And as the faith in the last 100 years in this country or longer than that has gone into declension, then you can see the manifestation of that through the pictures that people use to portray Jesus and his relationship to us. He has become the big brother now, the nice friend who can give us some help when we get in trouble instead of a commanding Lord and Savior. That’s why, by the way, with our sign out front that Steve Nelson did—and again, we have to change the colors on it—but that was why on our sign and on the flyers that we made up for our church, we have a crown to reemphasize that importance of seeing Jesus Christ as King of Kings and Lord of Lords, including our King, not just of government, but our king and magistrate.

After all, this same apostle, the apostle of love, when shown a vision of Jesus Christ, as recorded in the book of Revelation, he didn’t walk up to Jesus then and put his arm around his shoulder and say, “Gosh, I’m glad to see you, big brother.” The Apostle John, when he saw a revelation of Jesus Christ, fell to his knees as though dead.

See, we should have a tremendous sense of awe and reverence at Jesus Christ. That awe and reverence should yield itself into or become as a result of it obedience to the king’s law. Now, we know that Jesus Christ has shown us great love. But if we understand the nature of that love, the nature of his sacrifice and the nature of what we’re to do on the basis of that, we’ll understand that our Lord commands us to do these things.

And if we don’t do them, he says, “You don’t love me. I don’t care how much emotional feelings or pious gush you might have toward me. If you don’t obey my commandments, you don’t love me. And if you don’t fall down at your knees before me in awe and reverence and obedience, then it’s an indication that you have no love for me.”

Now, it’s important, of course, to remember that although we’re going to be stressing continuity, there is certainly some changes in the covenant relationship. There are some things that have obviously altered. And that’s why in our confessional statement, we say that God’s standing laws, unless rescinded by him, continue to be binding upon us. But it’s important to recognize some of the nature of those changes. And one of the important parts of the change from the old covenant to the new covenant is the giving of the Holy Spirit.

And in fact, the new covenant is characterized in the Old Testament as being one in which God would write his law upon the hearts of the people. He would internalize that law now and give his people power to walk in obedience to it through the power of the Holy Spirit given on the basis of Christ’s resurrection. So rather than seeing the change in the covenant administration as being one that does away with the law, what the scriptures say is that one of the ways the new covenant is new is the fact that the law is now internalized in us.

He writes it on our hearts and the Holy Spirit gives us power to walk in obedience to it. So the discontinuous nature of the covenant in terms of the development of historical redemptive history is yet a further indication to us that we must walk in obedience to the commandments of our king.

Now there’s a corollary to this first point that love for God is the keeping of God’s commandments. A rather obvious corollary. We want to be careful how we state it. We want to be careful how we understand it because we live in a time when the people of God have been taught by false shepherds who have said that God says this and he never said it all along.

But it is an obvious corollary that to declare a dichotomous relationship between love for God and the keeping of the commandments is wrong and demonstrates that person is not in light. Now, we said that commentators have correctly said the Apostle John in this epistle says that if we don’t have love, we’re not in the light. And if we don’t have love, we don’t have life. And so, if we understand that God tells us clearly in verse three, this is love, that we keep God’s commandments, then we can say that if we don’t keep God’s commandments, we’re not in the light.

And if we don’t keep God’s commandments, we don’t have life. There’s really no way around that.

**Second point: Obedience to the law of God is our love for our fellow Christians.**

Verse two, by this we know that we love the children of God when we love God and keep his commandments. Again, there’s a corollary relationship here to loving God or loving our brethren and the keeping of God’s commandments. Now, this is of course obviously—we quoted from Mark 12 verse 29.

And Jesus goes on to talk about the greatest commandment. After he talks about the greatest commandment being to love God with all your heart, soul, and might, he says there’s a second commandment. It’s like unto it to love your neighbor as yourself. And this is the second half of that. And this is what the Apostle John is telling us here in this epistle. The same thing that Jesus told the people in Mark 12 that the second commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself.

So it’s obvious that Christians are called upon to love their fellow brothers from this verse. But that is also a continuous event with the old covenant because when Jesus says that there’s a second commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves and what he’s doing is he’s quoting from Leviticus 19:18. Leviticus 19:18 says, “Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. I am the Lord.”

Jesus says that Christians are called upon to love their brothers. And he says that the old covenant people were also called upon to love their brothers. So there’s basic continuity. Just as there was a command to love God in both the old and new covenant, so is there also in the old and new covenant a command to love our brother as ourselves. It’s not right to think about the Old Testament as being characterized by wrath and these kind of things, the New Testament be characterized by love.

Jesus when replying to this question quotes from the old covenant to show the responsibilities there also of loving one’s brother. So there’s basic continuity in the command to love. There’s also continuity in what that love means. Just as there was continuity in how what the love of God was to be understood as, there’s also continuity into what the love of the brethren is.

After all, the second table of the Ten Commandments obviously contain references to how we treat each other. And it’s important to understand that the context of Leviticus—this very verse here in Leviticus 19:18 that says to love your brothers yourself—is a whole list of specific laws or commandments by God, case laws that demonstrate how we’re not to steal from our brother, how we’re not to murder our brother, how we’re to treat him. Specific commands of God are the context of that verse, that verse in Leviticus 19:18 about the need to love our brother.

And so we see the same thing in the New Testament. Love for the brother is explained in verse two. By this we know that we love we keep God’s commandments. Also in 1 John 3:23 we have a similar citation. This is his commandment that we should believe on the name of his son Jesus Christ and love one another as he gave us commandment. How are we to love one another? As he gave us commandment that defines what the love is. Love is not to be seen as something other than the commandments of Jesus Christ.

Now this is also not peculiar to the apostle John or this epistle. In Romans chapter 13 we have the same commands from Paul. Paul says Romans 13:1, that we’ve talked about a lot, the first half of this verse, “Owe no man anything.” Talked about that a lot. But it goes on to say quite a bit more. “But to love one another. We always have a continual debt to love our brother. Just as in the new in the old covenant, and just as in the old covenant, it’s defined for us.

For he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law. For this, thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness. Thou shalt not covet. And if there be any other commandments, it is briefly comprehended in the saying, namely, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Love worketh no ill to his neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”

Love is defined by the Apostle Paul, the epistle to the Romans as obeying the law of God as it relates to our fellow brothers. Real clear. Couldn’t be clearer. Well, I suppose some people say it could be clearer because after all, he does see that love is the fulfillment of the law. That’s what he says here. Love is the fulfilling of the law. In verse 8, he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law. Therefore, maybe it’s done away with now.

Well, on the face of it, that’s rather ludicrous, isn’t it? I mean, if you say that something sums up everything else you’ve told somebody, you don’t mean by that that person can take that thing that sums it up and get rid of all the particulars on what it means. For instance, baptism sums up a lot about what God does with us, how he engrafts us into his household, how he cleanses us, how our identification with Jesus Christ. That doesn’t mean though because baptism sums that stuff up that those things aren’t important or aren’t applicable or are no longer important for us to meditate on.

No, just the reverse. What he’s saying is if you’re going to understand this thing, baptism, look at the particulars. He’s saying if you’re going to understand love for your brother, look at the particulars that God has given us. There’s basic continuity in the old and new covenant then a relationship to what love is as well as the command to love one another.

Now, if the modern day church is confused over how to love God, they’re certainly going to be confused over how to love one another. And they can sing that same song, “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” but about the guy sitting next to him in the pew. And a lot of them do. Maybe not in those words, but they think about it that way.

And I suppose that you know, you hear a lot about how uh maybe some of those people aren’t all that lovable to begin with. What does that mean, though? What that means is you’re looking for some kind of emotional reaction again to the guy sitting next to you in the pew. If your love for God is characterized by that kind of thing, certainly your love for your fellow brethren is going to be that way as well. You’re going to let your conduct toward your brother be guided and directed by your emotions.

But the scriptures say not by your emotions to your fellow man. That’s not love. Love is action of the commandments. Scriptures say that love for your fellow man is not feeling good or a lot of pious gush or gushing over him sentimentally. No. Scriptures say that love for your fellow brethren is to work with him and work for his good by acting in obedience to the commandments and helping him to do the same thing. Love for your fellow brethren isn’t characterized by what we think is best, but rather love for our brethren is characterized by what God tells us is best for that person.

You know, you get a million examples of this. I suppose we were talking to uh some friends who go to a different church in the area and other people going to this church have had marital problems for a long time, husband running around with other women, this kind of thing. And there’s never any thought, not even any thought or consideration or rejection of what the church should do in relationship to that man who sins and yet calls himself a believer.

The scriptures are clear what should be done. And the scriptures are also clear as we tried to point out last week that the reasons for those actions are primarily in the first place corrective. And we say, well, it wouldn’t really help somebody to confront him with their sin. It wouldn’t really help to go over and convince somebody from the word of God that he is wrong. What we really need is to understand the basic problems here, you know, get down to whatever psychological problems are and then counsel him away from those things. A direct rejection of the law of God and how he commands us to behave toward one another.

And what will be the result of that? And again, we tried to point this out last week. The result of that will be the man won’t be able to overcome his sin. If nobody applies the biblical injunctions against him, if nobody shows him, “This is the command of God, walk ye therein,” and he has already rejected the command to walk in the word of God, then how have you loved your brother?

You leave him right where you put him. And in fact, you probably give him put him in worse position because you give him a whole list of rationalizations for what he’s done. And you reinforce his own rejection of God’s law when you reject God’s law and how you deal with them. Love for the brethren is characterized by obedience to God’s commandments.