Doctrine of the Christian's Walk
Galatians 5:16
We are studying one of the most important metaphors in scripture for understanding the entire spiritual life: how a believer grows from spiritual infancy to spiritual maturity. Real life, in the spiritual life, doesn't begin until we begin to get some spiritual maturity under our belt. The same way it happens in life. The goal in life if you talk to a ten or twelve year old is to be treated like an adult and to live like an adult, they recognize that. The same thing is true in the spiritual life. And yet I am amazed at how many believers I run into who seem to just be happy with the fact that they are going to go to heaven and have no concept of what it means to grow or advance to spiritual maturity so that you can really begin to live, operate, and benefit from all the incredible assets God has given us for living the spiritual life. And I am amazed at how many pastors don't understand this and teach it as well.
It is not easy to try to tear apart some of these passages in scripture and to understand how these things work together and what the dynamics are, so we are taking time in our study of Galatians to really get a handle on this subject in Galatians 5 starting at verse 16, which is the spiritual walk.
Walking by means of the Spirit is the command at the beginning of Galatians 5:16. It is a present active imperative which means this is to be the standard operating procedure for the believer's life. Sometimes people get the idea that the key issue in the spiritual life is rebound. You get that idea as a young believer, that the key issue is confession and forgiveness, because you are living out of fellowship so much and carnality tends to be the rule of the day for the baby believer. You are just so glad that you have confession and can get back into fellowship, and five minutes later you need to use it again. We are all thankful for that. But making sure you are in fellowship is not the goal of the spiritual life. The goal of the spiritual life, according to this passage in Galatians 5, is to maintain that fellowship. And that is expressed by the metaphor, walking by means of the Spirit. It is the day by day, step by step, moment by moment dependence upon God the Holy Spirit as the energizing power and enabler in the spiritual life.
We are taking a look at all the passages related to walking and I want to review a couple of things.
We started off by saying that walking by the Spirit is related to the doctrine of sanctification. Sanctification is based on the Greek word HAGGIOSMOSwhich means to be set apart, from the verb HAGGIAZO. Sanctification is used in three senses in scripture and we need to keep these distinctions. The phase one, phase two, phase three concept is so important for understanding different aspects of the spiritual life. We are saved from the penalty of sin in phase one. That is also called positional sanctification. Because at the moment of faith alone in Christ alone we are identified with Jesus Christ in His death, burial and resurrection. According to Romans 6:1-4, we are indeed positionally separated from the power of the sin nature, which is the basis for phase two.
Phase two: We are no longer slaves to the sin nature. That means that as a believer you now have the option of not living under the power of the sin nature.
Every unbeliever lives under the power of the sin nature. They have no other option. They are either producing from the area of weakness in terms of sin, personal sin, overt sin, sins of the tongue, mental attitude sins, or they are producing from the area of strength in terms of human good. But they can only produce from the sin nature because there is no other option, no matter how moral they are, no matter how establishment oriented they are, no matter how wonderful they are, no matter what nice personalities they have, no matter how much fun they might be to be around, they are still operating exclusively from the sin nature and they have no other options. As a believer you have an option and the mandate is not to exercise the option of living under the power of the sin nature. It is not until phase three that we are saved from the presence of the sin nature and this is called ultimate sanctification.
So we have three phases of sanctification. We have positional sanctification in phase one. Phase two is experiential or progressive sanctification. Sometimes we wonder how progressive that is in our lives. But ultimately, when we are face to face with the Lord we have ultimate sanctification in phase 3.
Then we saw that the metaphor of walking operates on a couple of different principles in terms of Greek grammar. They are expressed by the preposition EN, and the grammatical category is that EN takes the dative of sphere. Another word that might help you understand this is realm. We are to walk in a certain realm. And there a various passages that talk about the realm in which the believer is supposed to walk. We are to walk in the realm or in the sphere of light, not in darkness. This is covered in Romans 13:13, Ephesians 5:8, and 1 John 1:6. We are not to walk in the realm, or sphere of darkness. We are to walk in newness of life, in the sphere of this new life we have as a result of our identification with Christ. All of these spheres, terms, en plus the dative of sphere, relate to the bottom circle, this is our experiential reality. These categories are based on the ultimate reality of the top circle, which is our positional reality. We are to walk in the sphere of love. We are to walk in the sphere of good works. We are to walk in the sphere of wisdom. We are to walk in the sphere or realm of truth.
Another way in which this same Greek preposition is used is to indicate the instrument or means by which this walk is accomplished. There are two means. We have by means of faith and faith is directed toward the word of God. Faith is not faith in itself. Faith is the trust, the application of reliance upon the principles and promises of the word of God known as bible doctrine. 2 Corinthians 5:7, "we are to walk by means of faith and not by means of sight". And Galatians 5:16-25, "we are to walk by means of God the Holy Spirit".
And then there is another Greek preposition. Now when I emphasize this, I had Greek professors who used to say that the most important words in the Greek are the prepositions and the particles, because that gives the flow and very crucial information in the scriptures. KATA indicates a norm or standard, which is to govern the believer's life. This is very similar to the concept of realm. We are to walk according to the norm and standard of the Holy Spirit. Walk according to the norm or standard love and not according to the norms and standards of the sin nature.
The basis for the believer's walk, as we saw last time in or study of Romans 6, is our positional identification with Jesus Christ which we covered in Romans 6:1-4. Ephesians 5:8 says the believer is to walk in the sphere of light. What exactly does that mean? We began to look at that last week and this is crucial to understand. I want to summarize it and review it again because it is so important to understand where we are going. We didn't quite get there last time, I spent most of the hour setting us up for understanding 1John 1, and then when we got there we ran out of time. So I want to go back there and bring you up to that position in terms of a reminder.
Ephesians 5:8 says: "you were formerly darkness".There we have the imperfect tense. You were continuously, in your former life as an unbeliever, darkness. This is talking about the fact that as unbelievers we are born in darkness and we live in darkness. This is our position. This is so important to understand. If we don't understand the distinctions between positional reality and experiential reality we are going to get very confused when we get into some passages of scripture. That is why I am belaboring the point. Because I know and I have friends and seminary classmates who confuse the two continuously. So we have to make sure we make this distinction. And see that the scriptures make this distinction, that is the important thing, what does the scripture say. "You were formerly darkness and now", now in this present life, "you are light in the Lord". We don't have a verb here, it is ellipsized, but the emphasis is on the present reality, "you are light in the Lord", present active imperative, "walk as children of light".
This is our identification, because of our son ship in Christ we are children of light and we are commanded to walk like that. That seems to imply that you can take the option not to walk as a child of light, you can take the option to walk as a child of darkness and we need to see if that is true. Light represents absolute perfection in scripture, the holiness of God. We saw last time in 1Timothy 6:16 we are told that "God dwells in unapproachable light" and in 1John 1:5 that "God is light and in Him there is no darkness at all".When we look at what scripture describes as what happens to us at salvation, we are told that we become sons of light. This phrase is a Hebraism, a Hebrew idiom that is brought over into the Greek, sons of light.
In Hebrew, if you were describing someone's character you would use a phrase that they were the son of something. If they were a deceitful person you would say they were a son of deception. If they were an encouraging person as Barnabas was, you would call them a son of encouragement. If they were an honest person they would be a son of honesty. It does not indicate derivation, the emphasis is on the final noun in the phrase, the object of the preposition because that describes the character of the person. If someone was a destructive person or if you were going to indicate the perversion of their character they were the son of Belial.
In John 12:36 Jesus says "While you have the Light believe in the Light". He is referring to Himself as absolute perfection, as absolute righteousness. "In order that you may become sons of light. These things Jesus spoke and He departed."
We believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and at that moment we become sons of light. We are transferred positionally into light according to 1 Peter 2:9, "you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God's own possession that you may be proclaimed the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light". Once again it is positional. We have been called from one status, darkness, into another status, light. Acts 26:18: "to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the dominion of Satan to the dominion of God." This is a salvation context so it is talking about moving from one realm into another realm. "In order that they may receive forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among those who have been sanctified by faith in Me".
And then Colossians 1:13: "for He delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son." We are born in the domain of darkness and at the moment of salvation we are transferred into the kingdom of light where we receive the title sons of light. But that doesn't mean we live consistent with that position. That becomes clear from looking at Romans 13:12 where Paul says: "The night is almost gone",a reference to the imminency of the rapture, he thought it would be at any moment, that Christ would come back, so he says, "the night is almost gone and the day at hand. Let us therefore",conclusion, if the Lord could come back at any moment then we ought to change the way we live, "let us therefore lay aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light."
What is the implication here? The implication is that we are still producing the deeds of darkness and there needs to be a transformation. Let's look at this in a little more detail. Paul says: let us lay aside and here we have the aorist middle subjunctive of the verb APOTITHEMI. This word is used sometimes as removing clothing, it means to put away, put out of the way, to remove, to take off. The imagery here is of someone changing clothes, taking off one set of clothes and putting on a set of armor. It is in the subjunctive mood, the mood of potentiality. It is sometimes used in certain constructions to emphasize a certain type of command and this is called a hortatory subjunctive. Hortatory refers to the fact that it is an exhortation or a mandate and the subjunctive mood is used in order to emphasize that it is a potential. And that potential is going to be activated by your volition. Your volition is what determines whether or not this action takes place. God is not going to make the decisions for you, the Holy Spirit is not going to override your volition, you have to make decisions regarding the application of doctrine in your life. It is not just automatic, it is not just 'let go and let God'.
The Christian life is not a passive life, it is an active life in terms of your volition. It is passive in the sense that you are going to allow God to work in your life, but you have to make certain decisions and applications, God is not going to override your decisions. That is the emphasis of the subjunctive, and it functions as an imperative. The middle voice indicates that the believer participates in the results of the action. He is not only the performer of the action but participates in its results. Remember, in English there are two voices, the active voice and the passive voice. Active means the subject performs the action of the verb. In the passive voice, the subject receives the action of the verb. In Greek you have something quite different. The middle voice not only means the subject performs the action but benefits from the results of the action. Sometimes it is called a reflexive voice. It doesn't always have that implication but that is its primary implication. So the middle voice here indicates that not only do you make the decision to take off, remove the deeds of darkness, but you benefit from the results. This word is used in a number of passages some of which we have already studied and is, in some sense, tantamount to the whole concept of confession, but it moves beyond confession to post confession application of doctrine.
Ephesians 4:22 says: "in reference to your former manner of life",that is your life as an unbeliever operating under the power of the sin nature, "lay aside the old self."This is a mandate now to take off, remove, this is the same word, APOTIHEMI, lay aside or remove the old self, that which characterizes your former manner of life as an unbeliever, "which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit." This also implies something we are going to be dealing with. And that is that as an unbeliever you had one nature. By nature we mean a capacity to sin, and that capacity to sin we call the sin nature. But as a believer you now have two natures. You have the capacity to sin, which is called the old self, the old man, and then you have the new man, which is all that you are in Jesus Christ based on the assets God has given you.
Sometimes the conflict between the old man and the new is characterized as the battle between the flesh and the spirit as we will see in our passage in Galatians 5. There is a continuous conflict between the sin nature and the new man. The issue is that you have to make decisions to not live according to the old man and to lay aside those activities, which calls for active, proactive choices on the part of the believer.
Ephesians 4:25 "Therefore, laying aside falsehood",it is the same idea, removing falsehood from the life, "speak truth each one of you with his neighbor, for we are members of one another'.APOTITHEMI means to lay aside, remove, take off falsehood.
Colossians 3:8: "But now you also, put them all aside":it is the same word, APOTITHEMI, and then we have a list of various sins and the first three are mental attitude sins, "anger, wrath, malice."These are clearly representative, it is not an exhaustive list it includes everything from bitterness to jealousy, to envy to revenge motivation. I am amazed at how many people give themselves over to mental attitude sins which become the dictate of their lives and the prime motivator of their lives and over the course of time, if you do this, it will destroy your soul. It will destroy everything in your life and you will end up being miserable, and it is self-induced misery because you have made the choice to let your mind dwell on these mental attitude sins.
The second two sins in the verse, "slander, and abusive speech from your mouth", represent sins of the tongue which we will take up in James more detail when we return after the conference.
Hebrews 12:1"Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us", that is a reference to the fact that we have a testimony in the angelic conflict and historically in terms of the Old Testament heroes, "let us also lay aside [APOTITHEMI] remove, every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us".Every encumbrance refers to any distraction, not necessarily sin, but anything in your life, no matter how great it is, no matter how wonderful it might be, no matter how good it might be in some context.
If there is something in your life that is preventing you from getting doctrine on a regular basis, it is a distraction from your spiritual life, and you need to remove it. That is what is meant by every encumbrance. The imagery here is that of a track runner running a race and he wants to remove anything and everything that hinders him from running the race as quickly as he can. "Lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us".Not only the distractions which may or may not be good, they may be very enjoyable activities in life, or hobbies, but yet, they distract us from the spiritual life. And secondly, sin, those favorite wonderful sins that we like to indulge in where our area of weakness really finds its forte and we are very comfortable with those sins. We are to lay aside those sins because they easily entangle us and then: "let us run with endurance", [HUPOMONE—persistence] "the race that is set before us",moving from the imagery of walking to the imagery of running.
Then James 1:21 uses APOTITHEMI again, "Therefore, putting aside",removing, taking off that layer of clothes, the carnality, "putting aside",the New American Standard translates is all filthiness, but we saw in our study of James it should be translated "the wickedness that sin is and in humility receive the word implanted, which is able to save your souls".And that is phase two salvation, not phase one salvation, talking about the fact in the course of the believers life he is to be removing the act and deeds of the sin nature from his life. This is not done through the power of the flesh, it is not done as an act of morality, but it is done in the power of God the Holy Spirit. Remember, anything the unbeliever can do is not part of the spiritual life. The unbeliever can be ethical, moral and have great integrity so that is not simply what the spiritual life is. The spiritual life is uniquely the product of the Holy Spirit. It is a supernatural way of life demanding a supernatural way of execution.
And finally, to understand APOTITHEMI,1 Peter 2:1: "Therefore, putting aside, or removing, all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander." Now the interesting thing is that just as James 1 sets it up as a prerequisite, there it is used as a participle of intended circumstances which gives you the prerequisite for fulfilling the mandate, the mandate in James 1:21 was to receive the word, so you have to lay aside the sin in order to receive the word. If you are operating in carnality under the power of the sin nature then you are just going to be engaged in an academic exercise and there is not going to be any spiritual reception of truth. Peter 2:1 is saying the same thing. Therefore first put aside all the malice, hypocrisy, envy and slander, that begins with confession. But it means staying in fellowship afterwards and then, as "newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word".So this is a prerequisite. It doesn't mean you have to reach sinless perfection, or stop sinning in your life, before you can take in the word. That is not what it is saying. It is saying that at the time you are taking in the word you need to get into fellowship and stay in fellowship.
From all of this we have seen that there are two absolute states that are defined in scripture. One is light and the other is darkness. They are given other terms: the Holy Spirit is in one realm, the flesh is in another realm. Grace is in one realm, law is in another realm. Faith is in one realm, works is in another realm. You are in one or the other, not both. You can't be a little bit spiritual and a little bit carnal. You can't operate on a little bit of works and a little bit of grace. You are either operating on one or the other. Light and darkness are absolutes, you are in one or the other. Part of the issue here is fellowship. In 2 Corinthians 6:14 Paul asks the question, "what fellowship has light with darkness?" The implication is none. And the member of the Trinity specifically related to fellowship is God the Holy Spirit. 2 Corinthians 13:14: "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with you all."
Then we have to ask the question, what effect does sin have on the Holy Spirit? If God is light and in Him no darkness can dwell, and there can be no fellowship between darkness and light, then whenever we commit a sin of any category, no matter how great, no matter how small, it still violates the righteousness of God. Remember, God is +R, absolute righteousness. What the righteousness of God rejects, the justice of God must condemn. The definition of sin is any infraction, anything that violates the character of God. Some people, when they think of sin, they think of the most heinous awful acts they can imagine. But the bible says that a sin is any act or thought that violates the revealed will of God or character of God. This includes mental attitude sins, sins of the tongue, and various overt sins, and many things people think aren't quite so bad. Remember all it took in the garden was to eat a piece of fruit, a fairly innocuous act but it violated the mandate of God and that caused the entire human race and creation to fall under the curse of sin.
What the righteousness of God rejects the justice of God condemns. At the cross God the Father, in justice, poured out all the sins of humanity on Jesus Christ. So that Jesus Christ paid the penalty for sin and God's justice and righteousness were satisfied which provided the basis for the salvation of the human race. So, at the point of salvation, when you exercise faith alone in Christ alone, the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ is then imputed, or credited to the account of the believer. He is still experientially –R, but he has positional +R. He is in the light but he may not be living in the light. As soon as he sins he is going to violate God's righteousness which is going to have an impact on his fellowship with God because God cannot have fellowship with darkness. And it is going to impact his relationship with God the Holy Spirit. It is called quenching the Holy Spirit in 1 Thessalonians 5:19.
The word quench means to suppress. In the immediate context it was written in the time before the New Testament was completed and believers were warned not to suppress the Holy Spirit and not to treat prophecy lightly. Well, nobody is a prophet today and nobody is prophesying today. What we have is the entire Canon of Scripture, Bible doctrine. Today you begin to suppress the Holy Spirit when you reject or treat doctrine lightly. In other words, when you decide not to apply doctrine and to live in the power of the sin nature you are suppressing the Holy Spirit. Let's look at the parallel. You have a sin nature, it is not the source of sin. It is the source of temptation. It presents the temptation to your volition and you can chose positively toward the sin nature and decide to yield to the temptation or you can chose negatively to reject the sin nature. The source of sin is your volition. On the other hand, if you are under the filling of God the Holy Spirit He is going to be reminding you of the doctrine in your soul. Assuming you have learned doctrine and there is doctrine stored in your soul, then there is something for the Holy Spirit to work with. He is going to be continually bringing doctrine to our minds, to encourage us to apply it, and once again the issue is our volition.
The Holy Spirit does not override our volition, He influences us in the same way that the sin nature tempts us. One of the problems we have left over from an older generation is that the filling of the Holy Spirit was sometimes referred to as the control of the Holy Spirit. Control is a bad word because what is He controlling? Is He controlling your volition? No. This idea has its roots in the Higher Life Movement, the Victorious Life Movement, that came out of the late nineteenth century as it led to the concept, let go and let God. And even today you hear that, I saw it on a bumper sticker the other day. It is the idea that somehow, if I become totally passive God is going to work through me. And of course, that never works and people end up becoming very frustrated, constantly trying to find some gimmick to get them into that emotional state where they feel like they are having a relationship with God. The issue is our volition, whether or not we are choosing to obey God and apply doctrine or reject God and choose to yield to the testing of the sin nature. When we say no to the Holy Spirit we are suppressing the Holy Spirit.
Ephesians 4:30 uses an anthropopathism to describe how the Holy Spirit responds to this: "we grieve the Holy Spirit."An anthropopathism is a compound word, ANTHRO meaning man and PATHOS, a Greek word meaning emotion. It is attributing to God a human emotion which He does not actually possess, in order to understand the purposes, policies and acts of God. Remember, God is not a man that He should lie, or repent. The same thing happens in terms of physical attributes and those are called anthropomorphisms. MORPHE means form. When scripture talks about the hand of God, the eye of God goes to and fro continually throughout the earth that is using anthropomorphism. The Jews had a very visual, physical way of expressing anger. Literally it means the nose burns. So when the bible says that God is wrathful, sometimes it uses the imagery of the nose burning but that does not mean that God has a physical nose. It is an anthropomorphism. We grieve the Holy Spirit and this term is used to teach us that we have violated the perfect righteousness of God and our relationship with God the Holy Spirit has now been abrogated temporarily until that violation is dealt with.
This sets us up for understanding 1 John 1 and the importance there. Turn your Bibles to 1 John and we will have a summary treatment of 1 John 1 and see how it relates to the doctrine of walking. Remember our subject, we are walking by means of God the Holy Spirit. We saw in Ephesians 5 that walking by means of the Holy Spirit is walking in the light. That is the background for getting into 1 John 1. Walking in the light is tantamount to walking by means of the Holy Spirit according to Ephesians 5. We are not done with Ephesians 5 and I hope to get back there this morning.
1 John 1:1: "What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of Life". John is emphasizing the fact that they are giving personal, accurate testimony regarding the life and work and witness of Jesus Christ.
1 John 1:2: "and the life was manifested, and we have seen and testify and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was manifested to us". He wants us to get the point that this is an eyewitness account.
1 John 1:3: "what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you also, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ".Part of his theme in the epistle is fellowship.
1 John 1:4: "These things we write, so that our joy may be made complete".Joy is part of our relationship and specifically our fellowship with God the Father. That is why when David sinned and then he confessed his sin in Psalm 51, after confessing his sin he prays to the Father, "restore to me the joy of my salvation".When you are in carnality you do not have the inner happiness of God, you do not have the joy of your salvation and you can only have that when you are in fellowship and walking by means of God the Holy Spirit.
1 John 1:5: "This is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all".This starts off with what we have already seen, that God is perfect righteousness and cannot have fellowship with darkness at all. John is going to use three conditional clauses to represent different responses to God in the life of believers. This is a third class condition which emphasizes potentiality, maybe it is, maybe it isn't.
In 1 John 1:6 the third class condition presents the condition as uncertain of fulfillment. In other words, you might say this, or you might not say this. It treats this as though it is a likely happening.
1 John 1:6 "If we say that we have fellowship with Him", so here is the claim, somebody comes along and claims to have fellowship with God. They claim to be walking with the Lord and John says, "If we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth".
What is he saying here? First of all, we have seen that we are positionally in the light. We become a son of light at the moment of salvation. So walking in the light has to do with a step-by-step process and progress. It is different from a status which is in the light. There are those who teach that walking in the light or walking in darkness are terms for the believer or unbeliever. But we have seen that that is completely erroneous. Walking in the light and walking in darkness are terms that have to do with the moment by moment life of the believer in terms of his spiritual life.
"If we say on the one hand that we have fellowship with Him and yet we walk," that is we conduct activity in carnality, operating in the power of the flesh, we are in darkness, "we lie and do not practice the truth." The word for practicing the truth here is the Greek word POIEOand it means to do, to make, to practice, to apply. This is the word that we say over and again in James 1:21 – 2:26, and there we translated it apply because it had to do with the application of doctrine.
The second word of this phrase, "do not practice truth",is the Greek word ALETHEIA, meaning truth, absolute truth, not relative truth. This is comparable to doctrine; this is John's terminology. When John uses that word he is talking about absolute truth. We are going to see this more and more in our study the gospel of John. Walking in the truth is tantamount to walking in accordance with divine mandates. What we call bible doctrine. In essence, what John is saying here is what James is saying in James 1-2. "If we say that we have fellowship with Him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not apply doctrine".In other words, we are out of fellowship.
There is a contrast in 1 John 1:7: "but if we walk in the light", a clear indication that the believer can either walk in darkness or walk in the light. "But if we walk in the light as He Himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus His son cleanses us from all sin".
There are two observations I want to make here. We have studied the doctrine of the blood so we know, number one, that blood is an analogy or metaphor for the spiritual death of Jesus Christ on the cross. Remember, when God told Adam, "the day you eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will die",they did not die physically. They died spiritually. When Jesus died on the cross as our substitute, it had to be a death in kind. There are two penalties for sin. Penalty number one for sin is spiritual death, eternal separation from God the Father. Separation from God the Father in time, if not dealt with by response to the gospel "believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved", results in eternal condemnation. Penalty two has to do with the consequences in time. This falls under the category, "whatsoever a man sows, this he shall also reap".It is the negative consequences in time that are the result of sin. When Adam and Eve sinned they died spiritually, penalty one, but everything in life was cursed and they lived in a fallen environment from that point on suffering the curse of sin and that was penalty two, two different realms. This is important to understand and if you don't understand this you will get lost in 1 John 1.
As a result of this God is going to deal with this in two different ways. The spiritual death of Jesus Christ on the cross is a judicial death. God judged Him judicially on the cross by imputing our sins to Him. Jesus Christ remained sinless. "He who knew no sin was made sinless for us".Jesus Christ never sinned. He never became a sinner. He always maintained His perfect righteousness on the cross, but our sins were imputed to Him on the cross so they are not His experientially but they are His judicially. The word used to describe this by theologians is not only judicial but forensic. Forensic is that which has to do with judiciary criminality. His punishment is called a forensic punishment.
There are two kinds of punishment going on here, the judicial forensic punishment at the cross which dealt with spiritual death and the experiential consequences or penalties in time. 1 John 1:7 says, "If we walk in the light as He Himself is in the light we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanses us from all sin".There we have a present active indicative of the verb KATHARIZOwhich means to purify or to cleanse. It is the word that is used in the Septuagint to relate to all the cleansing that took place in the temple before the priest could go into the presence of God. Because this is in the present tense some people will come along and say that this is the standard operating procedure and if you are a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ you will always be cleansed from sin so you don't ever have to do anything about it. Whenever you sin just realize and have faith that God is going to cleanse you, that the blood of Christ cleanses you continuously and you don't have to do anything else. In other words, you never have to confess your sins. That is what they are saying.
But what about 1 John 1:9? That is two verses later. So John would be contradicting himself if he meant in verse 7 that you don't have to confess your sin anymore. Why would he say in two verses later that you need to confess your sin? What we realize here is that 1 John 1:7 is dealing with spiritual death consequences, phase one consequences. This means that when you receive positional sanctification and are in a positional reality with Jesus Christ, that is an eternal relationship and you can never lose it.
Paul said in Romans 8:38-39, "For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, 39 nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord". We have an eternal relationship with Christ which cannot be broken. Yet we sin. Five seconds after you put your faith alone in Christ alone, you looked across the congregation and you saw someone who had insulted you, and immediately you became angry again and you sinned. Did you die spiritually? No, you don't die spiritually because spiritual death has been taken care of on the cross. You do not die spiritually again, Jesus Christ's blood continuously cleanses you so that forensic application of the blood of Christ, meaning His spiritual substitutionary death on the cross continually cleanses you from the moment of faith alone in Christ alone until you are absent from the body and face to face with the Lord and minus the sin nature. 1 John 1:7 is talking about the continual effect of the death of Christ in terms of never having to deal with consequences of spiritual death ever again. That cannot happen to you as a believer, you cannot lose your salvation. Once saved, always saved.
Verse 8, "if we say",maybe we will, maybe we won't, "that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves".In other words, there is no such thing as perfection in the spiritual life, every believer is going to continue to sin, to some degree or another, and if you are saying you have no sin you are operating on arrogance and self-deception and the truth, bible doctrine, is not in you. You are not operating on doctrine, you are operating outside the bottom circle. Truth is not in you, you are in carnality, denying the fact that you are a sinner.
In contrast, "if we confess", HOMOLOGEO, which means to admit or to acknowledge your sins, it doesn't mean to feel sorry for your sins, it is a legal term. When you go into court it does not matter how you feel about whether or not you should have gotten that ticket or whether or not you killed that person. It doesn't matter whether you regret it or whether you are glad you did it and you would kill them again it you had the opportunity, when you stand before the bar of justice and the judge says guilty or not guilty, and you say guilty, whether you are glad or sad you have made the same statement. Your attitude may affect the penalty, it may affect your punishment and a number of other things. In the spiritual life, if you are glad about it, a millisecond later you are probably rehearsing it in your mind again with joy so you haven't been in fellowship very long and it hasn't done you much good. But the idea of confession is not that you have to feel guilty about it, feel sorry for it, that you have to impress God with how you feel about it, that is nothing more than works. It simply means to admit, acknowledge your sin and God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins. This means there are two categories of forgiveness. One category of forgiveness has to do with what happens at the cross, there is judicial or forensic forgiveness that is ours continuously because we are in union with Christ, we have positional truth, we cannot lose that.
But then there is experiential forgiveness, related to phase two and the use of 1 John 1:9 and is related to phase two consequences. Those consequences, in time related to the sins we commit. The believer cannot sin with impunity. Just because we are saved does not mean there are no consequences in time. If you commit murder you can be found guilty in a court of law and you can be sentenced to death, and the bible teaches capital punishment as part of the Noahic covenant and as long as you see a rainbow in the sky after it rains, then the mandate that whoever sheds man's blood, By man his blood shall be shed. That is still in effect. In other words, capital punishment goes when the rainbow goes. But until then we are to carry out capital punishment. God, in His omniscience, did indeed know that men were fallible and would make mistakes in judicial procedure and that human beings would imprison and find guilty and execute innocent people. But that did not stop God from mandating that we are to carry out the procedure. So the people that are a little too soft and a little too scared that people might make a mistake have absolutely no ground to stand on without committing blasphemy. Because if they think, God wouldn't do that, then they are forcing God into their concept of God and that is blasphemy. Scripture says we have to have capital punishment.
So even if you are a believer and you commit murder, you are subject to all the consequences of that sin. But ten seconds after you commit that murder, you can exercise 1 John 1:9 and you are forgiven, and in terms of spiritual consequences, now you are going to have a certain amount of suffering but that suffering is going to be converted into suffering for blessing instead of suffering for discipline. This is what happened with David. When David sinned with Bathsheba, you have adultery, the cover up, all kinds of mental attitude sins and arrogance, a conspiracy to get Uriah murdered, this whole complex of sins that were part of that. Even though God commuted the death penalty because David committed a couple of sins that were punishable by death according to the Mosaic Law, God intervened. Not a human judge, God intervened and said, we will not apply the death penalty this time. It was God's law, therefore He had the right to make that decision. God said, the sentence is commuted, but David, you will pay for it four fold. And David paid for it for the rest of his life. He went through horrible events in his family. The child that was the product of the adulterous relationship died, one of his sons committed incest with one of his daughters. Another son, in order to execute vengeance for that, killed the incestuous brother. Later, his favorite son Absalom lead a rebellion against David and in the process Absalom was killed. David did not get off scot free.
But because he confessed his sin, in Psalm 51 and was back in fellowship, suffering for discipline was converted into suffering for blessing. He was able to handle all that discipline on the basis of doctrine and the faith rest drill so he could convert discipline into blessing and advance spiritually on the that basis. Even though you still have consequences you are forgiven spiritually and discipline is converted to suffering for blessing. Don't confuse these two: phase one penalty and phase two penalty are forgiveness one and forgiveness two. Forgiveness one has to do with verse 7, and forgiveness two is experiential forgiveness on a day to day basis in terms of our spiritual walk with the Lord Jesus Christ. This has to happen because we are to walk in the light and when we walk in the darkness something has to take place in order to transfer us back from that experiential walking in darkness to walking in the light. That is done through 1John 1:9.
Let's go back to our passage in Ephesians 5 and start tying some of these things together. We saw last time that there are various absolute states mentioned here. We have the mandate in Ephesians 5:8 to "live as children of light". Ephesians 5:9 gives the consequences of walking in the light "for the fruit light consists in all goodness,righteousness". The result is: "light produces every kind of good". The goal of all of this is the transformation of character. It is designed to produce in us the character of Jesus Christ. That is the end result. The fruit of the light is comparable to the fruit of the Holy Spirit as we will see in this parallel between Ephesians 5 and Galatians 5.
Then we see a reminder of rebound or confession in Ephesians 5:14, "awake sleeper and rise from the dead",that is temporal death or carnality. Ephesians 5:15 "Therefore be careful how you walk, not as unwise men but as wise". The unwise is the fool in carnality, the wise is the believer operating on doctrine.
Ephesians 5:16 "making the most of your time, because the days are evil."
Ephesians 5:17 "So then do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is".It is either one or the other. It is not a little bit of one and a little bit of the other.
Culminating in Ephesians 5:18 "And do not get drunk with wine, for that is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit".
So here we see that once we see that there are these two states, light and darkness, and we have wisdom and foolishness, we have walking by means of the Spirit and the works of the flesh, we have grace and law. We have walking by means of faith and works.
Now we have a new concept. The new concept called filling, the filling of the Holy Spirit. What exactly is this? And how do we understand this? The term in the Greek uses the instrumental dative of means. We are to be filled by means of the God the Holy Spirit. The verb here is PLEROO. It means to fill up a deficiency. Well, what is that deficiency? The deficiency is the vacuum in our souls caused by a lack of doctrine. What are we filled with? The phrase, "filled with the spirit", is somewhat ambiguous. Does that mean that the Spirit Himself fills us up, that He is the content of the filling? That would have to be expressed in the Greek with the genitive because the genitive expresses content. The dative expresses means. The Holy Spirit is the dynamic that fills us with something.
We are going to have to take a little more time on this and I am going to hit the high point right now. We are filled by means of the Spirit and the content of the filling is doctrine. This is found in Colossians 3:16 "Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you".
So the Holy Spirit is the means and the content is doctrine. And the result is going to be given by a descriptive genitive using the Greek adjective PLERES. You can see there is a similarity in the root, it comes from the same root as PLEROO. And there is another Greek word that comes in here, the verb PIMPLEMI. This word also has to do with being filled and they are translated the same way in the English, yet they are two different word in the Greek and they refer to two different kinds of filling. Failure to recognize that has lead to some real problems and confusion in different points and so we are going to have to come back next time, in two weeks and we will finish this aspect of our study of walking by the Spirit by understanding what it means to be filled by means of God the Holy Spirit.