Book of 1 John - Ch. 5, Vs. 1-8 (09/08/2002)

1 John chapter 5, sorry about that, okay let's read down at least through verse 8, follow along with me if you would.

Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God and everyone that loveth him that begat loveth him also that is begotten of him.

By this we know that we love the children of God when we love God and keep his commandments.

For this is the love of God that we keep his commandments and his commandments are not grievous. For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world and this is the victory that overcometh the world even our faith.

Who is he that overcometh the world but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God. This is he that came by water and blood even

Jesus Christ. Not by water only but by water and blood and it is the

Spirit that beareth witness because the Spirit is truth. For there are three that bear record in heaven the

Father the Word and the Holy Ghost and these three are one. Let's stop there and probably gonna spend most time on the last two verses but whosoever believeth that Jesus is the

Christ is born of God everyone that loveth him that begat loveth him also that is begotten of him.

That verse to me has always seemed like it was written to the Jew to a Jew because it's trying to convince the

Jew that you say you love the Father but you can't if you don't love the Son and then by this we know that we love the children of God.

I've always found this a fascinating verse because it's interesting because when you think of loving one another you usually tend to focus on loving one another and this verse takes the focus completely off that and says loving one another has nothing to do with loving one another.

Loving one another has to do with if you love God or not and so it's very different than any anyone out in the world would think and probably different than most

Christians in churches around us would think if they hadn't really studied this particular verse but this is how you can have assurance that you love each other not by how you treat each other or what you do for each other or how much you have feelings for each other at all but what it says is when we love

God then we know that we love each other isn't that strange strangely worded but it's the truth it's just not how we would look at it but it is absolutely the way it is and how do we know when we love

God when we keep his commandments so it puts it both in the same thought and says here's how you know that you love each other if you love

God and you're keeping his commandments then you love each other for this is the love of God that we keep his commandments and his commandments are not grievous now you see to a legalist the commandments are grievous they're very hard to keep in fact they're impossible to keep but they strive at it day in and day out and they have not had a good day if they hadn't gotten you under conviction about something you're doing wrong to some law that you're not keeping the only thing that can deflect their thoughts from their own sin is trying to focus on yours and the fact that you can't keep the laws as well as they do that's how the legalist thinks and that's how he lives but this verse says that a person who truly loves

God keeps his commandments in a way that is not grievous why is that because it comes from the inside out comes from the heart and God has changed the heart and given us the divine nature so it's not difficult for the child of God to keep the commandments of God and showing the love of God that's in his heart for whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world and this is the victory that overcometh the world even our faith who is he that overcometh the world but he that believeth that Jesus is the

Son of God one of the outstanding traits that God is building or working into us on in this life is that when we get to heaven we will have arrived as overcomers it'll be a characteristic of overcomers we will have endured to the end so to speak true trait of a born -again child of God is he can't quit he can't lose his salvation he can't quit he just keeps going because it's his nature because he loves

God and it's not grievous to keep keep the commandments and he just keeps on going until that valley of the shadow of death comes and he goes right through that seated with the

Lord at the table and is ushered right into the heavenlies where he's sitting in the heavenlies in the courts of God forever and so this trait of having overcome every one of us will have this trait when we're in heaven and a lot of it was worked into our lives while we were here number six this is he that came now look at these these next verses because there's some real contention in modern circles today about whether these verses are even in the

Bible or not this is he that came by water and blood even

Jesus Christ not by water only but by water and blood and it is the spirit that beareth witness because the spirit is truth and all of your modern versions will skip the next verse entirely verse seven will be gone and it will go to verse eight and it'll call verse eight verse seven if I remember right it just renumbers them and leaves verse seven out and it says and there are three that bear witness in earth the spirit and the water and the blood and these three three in one and they leave out verse seven well it's interesting that verse seven is probably as far as I can tell it is the only straightforward clear verse of Scripture in the entire

Bible that teaches the triune nature of God now there are other places that imply it there are several places we can go and it's implied very strongly such as the time when

Jesus was baptized and you hear the voice from heaven and you see the dove is descending the

Holy Spirit as a dove I should say and then you see the Son of God in the water being baptized but still it doesn't just out and out say how

God exists as a triune being not three gods but one

God as three distinct persons and this verse just out now says it so isn't it interesting that this verse verse has been removed from all of the modern versions who do you think would remove a verse such as this perhaps a person who doesn't believe in the

Trinity perhaps an Aryan but there's some kind of interesting things about this let me give you let's let me read it first let's let's go back up to verse six it's really verses seven and eight they're part of this problem but verse six this is he that came by water and blood even

Jesus Christ now that's kind of an interesting verse to put some thought into what that means

I mean we read it we just read it we keep moving keep on moving because this one's difficult to figure out what does it mean that he came by water and blood well

I my opinion is and all I can do is give you an opinion because you can read different commentaries a lot of them just won't you know they won't discuss it because they don't think they know what it means but there are some obvious things we can look at number one is that when

Jesus was on the cross do you remember what happened when they peer after he was already dead and they pierced his side with the sword what came out water and blood now that would be the physical reference that it makes if this is a historic reference this is saying that the historical

Jesus Christ when he was killed water and blood came out and I don't know that there's any incident like that recorded in history but it was very specifically recorded in detail in the

Gospels now the other thing is this when we see the symbolism of water in the in the

Word of God it always either symbolizes the written scriptures or the

Holy Spirit so I think as we look at Jesus as a prophet or a great teacher as the rich young ruler wanted to call him we see that there have been many who came by water many who came by way of preaching the word many who came filled with the

Holy Spirit preaching the word but he is the only one who came by water and blood in other words he he not only preached the word but he died on the cross and gave his blood for our sins so he came not by water only not only by the power of the

Holy Spirit not only with a vast understanding of the Word of God but by water and blood and it is the

Spirit that bears witness of this because the Spirit is true now we come to these interesting two verses number seven is left out so let's read it for there are three that bear record in heaven you see how the previous verse just got through talking about that is the

Spirit that bears witness of the fact that Jesus is the

Christ and that he died on this cross for our sins and then it says there are three that bear record in heaven the

Father the Word and the Holy Ghost and these three are one and there's really no better more specific teaching of the

Trinity than that one verse so if you remove that verse then you can really muddle up the teaching a lot and really make it where it could go either of three different ways historically we've had about three different beliefs or you can put them all in three major topics one is that some have believed that these were three gods and kind of like the

Greeks thought that when they were talking about the Holy Spirit it was like a female God or something when Paul was talking about the

Holy Spirit and then the Catholics of course believe in Mary and make they create a fourth

God I suppose but the the heresy that that there is the heresy of Arianism that teaches that Jesus is not

God that he is just a man and that there's only one God and that's the

Father and then then there's the heresy of with the modern term for it is oneness and the

I don't remember which Pentecostal group it is whether it's United Pentecostal denomination it's one of the

Pentecostal denominations that has many thousands of churches in this country they believe the oneness doctrine which means they believe

Jesus is all there is that there is no father there is no Holy Spirit it's just Jesus it's all

Jesus and they call it oneness and when they baptize they baptize in the name of Jesus not in the name of the

Father Son Holy Spirit they only baptize the name of Jesus and you'll find them they're around and they're very zealous in their belief they'll challenge you

I had one of them challenged me in a Dairy Queen one day when we were there with years ago young people in the youth group he said he walked up to me and he knew we were a youth group and he knew

I was the leader and he said you baptized in the name of Jesus only and I knew right then he was a Jesus only person he's you know

I said nope no he first he said you baptize the name of Jesus I said we sure do now

I'm just gonna leave it right there cuz I knew where he wanted to go with it I was gonna leave it yes we do but he said what do you baptize the name of Jesus only well

I couldn't couldn't go with that so we got into the discussion so you have these different heresies now this verse in fact

I showed him this verse in my little pocket New Testament and read it to him and I said how can you explain your view when it says right here these three

I said now how many does that say there are he said three I said right it says these three are what he said yeah but it says there one okay you got me there but it says these three are one and it names them how can you believe what you believe and so we had a nice discussion but what if I hadn't had that verse to use you know

I wouldn't what would you show him what other verse would you bring and so they've tried to remove this now there's some interesting tidbits of history about that that I won't go into specifically but you can go back as far as 150

AD and a man named Tertullian who spoke very eloquently about the doctrine of the

Trinity and I won't read it today we're we're going to get out early today I'll read it some other time however however the reason

I mentioned Tertullian is because there are people that's the only amen I got all day there there are people who who believe that the

Trinity came forth from Constantine the

Roman ruler because he hated Jews and so forth and so he invented this idea of the Trinity the problem is that Tertullian predates

Constantine by 100 years at least maybe more and and he was teaching the

Trinity very clearly at that time one of the early church fathers so we've got all that but let me show you something interesting about this since you amen

I'm gonna keep going a little bit here so yes yes with Westcott and Hort when we studied that remember about a year ago when we were into the manuscript evidence

Westcott and Hort were the ones who really strongly popularized removing it along with oh six thousand other verses and parts of verses and things that they've removed so this was one of the key ones they left out they tried to say that that it's not in any of the

Greek manuscripts and so forth well that's not true this is known as the Johannine comma by the way among the theologians and it is in fact found in two

Greek manuscripts one is called Kodak's Ravianus and the other one is simply called number 61 ancient

Greek manuscript it does in fact have this verse so there are two ancient Greek manuscripts that have it it was also quoted this verse was quoted by Cyprian more than 60 years before the

Vaticanus and Sinaticus came about and those are the two that Westcott and Hort used and they say well it doesn't have a many of the most ancient two verses well

I mean Bibles don't have it but the interesting thing is the church father Cyprian was quoting it from a

Bible you know several hundred years before the Vaticanus and Sinaticus came into being so it was there or he couldn't have quoted it and it was also cited in AD 380 by a

Spanish bishop named Priscillian and two of them actually and then from several

African church fathers between 430 and 534 quoted this verse so their

Bibles had it in there very early on but let me show you the most important thing about it and then we'll stop but I think you'll find this very interesting if you look at this grammatically and you say okay let's remove verse 7 as if it never was there a lot of people won't tell you this but it creates a grammatical error which

God doesn't make if you look at verse 8 you see there in verse 8 where it mentions the spirit the water and the blood these three agree in one now if you go back to verse 6 where it says the water you see the words water and blood and spirit in verse 6 those are all in the neuter form now

Greek is kind of like Spanish in English you know we we have well in Spanish every everything every noun is going to be either masculine or feminine and we don't attach that to in English but in Greek it's kind of similar to that so when you look at this this word water the

Greek word who door water is always given in the neuter form in Greek wherever you find it because it's a thing it's not a person and when you see which is blood it's neuter it's not masculine or feminine it's always neuter in the and when you see the word the two words that are translated the

Holy Spirit hagios holy and Yuma which is spirit that's neuter so we find all that is is all normal in verse 6 and correct grammatically however if there is no verse 7 and you drop down in the next verse you would have is verse 8 we find very interesting in these modern versions that in verse 8 and there are three that bear witness in the earth the spirit and the water and the blood and all of a sudden you find that those three are listed as masculine which they are not and it's a it's literally a grammatical error if you leave it that way however if verse 7 was always in the

Bible and it was in fact in the most ancient manuscripts and then later someone for some reason removed it that reason being to try to remove the

Trinity from the Bible then all of a sudden they created unknowingly at the time created a grammatical error with the

Bible and the reason is those three in verse 8 cannot be masculine unless there is something that they refer to that is masculine prior to it well you only have that if you have verse 7 verse 7 says for there are three that bear record in heaven the father the word father is always a masculine the word and where this refers to Jesus Christ with a capital it is masculine and the

Holy Ghost which is always neuter these three are one now if you have that verse that comes first and it sets the scene that hey we are talking about the father which is masculine and the word which is masculine and then you can come into verse 8 and these are referencing the same thing then all of a sudden it is not incorrect grammatically for them to carry on the masculine form gender that they had in verse 7 and there are three that bear witness in the earth the spirit the water which normally would be neuter we now find it to be masculine because now it's a reference to the father and I'm sorry to the

Holy Spirit actually and to the blood which is a reference to the word who shed the blood and it makes it grammatically correct for them to be masculine so if you remove verse 7 you've created a grammatical error in God's holy perfect Bible that slipped the scribe who first removed it he didn't think about that but we now can look back at that so you don't have to even know the fact that there are two ancient

Greek manuscripts that contained it and it's Cyprian and and several church fathers quoted from the verse long before Constantine ever was even alive you don't have to know that to know that this verse has to be in the

Bible because it creates a grammatical hole if you remove it so people start playing with the

Word of God they the Word of God will outlast them and so it does teach very clearly a teaching of triune existence of God I like to call it a tri unity rather than a

Trinity by the way a tri unity because Trinity the way it's worded in many of the old

Catholic and Protestant documents it almost does make it sound like three gods

God has never been three gods he is one God so he is he is a tri unity not a

Trinity I like that better I learned that little phrase from a Jewish believer who wrote a little book on the

Trinity and he said you know I think I'm gonna call it the tri unity of God throughout this book because it's more accurate well

I like it that's a good practice well let's stand and we'll have prayer together and I'll be sure you leave verse 7 in your

Bibles please father we thank you for your word and how powerful it is may you protect it we know you've promised to guard it may you protect us and keep us from trying to add to it or take away from it days that we're here on this earth help us to defend it while we're here and we ask it in Jesus name