Life and Love (1 Jn 3:11–18) from South Woods Baptist Church on Vimeo.

 

Most websites get clicked on and then get clicked off. However, some of them hold your attention. One that stopped me in my tracks about a year ago was The Commercial Appeal’s Memphis Homicide Tracker.[1] On this site are balloons dotting a Google map where murders have occurred in the Memphis–metro area. There are all kinds of other stats on this page.

But statistics don’t always grab our attention. However, if you click on those balloons, there are biographical details of those who died. Some have smiling pictures of the deceased. And that’s where it’s tough to escape the horror. They had life; someone took it away.

Why talk about this? Because John’s talking about love in our passage. But to do so he brings up a murder, its motive, and its opposite. In this text, love is inextricably tied to life, both it’s giving and it’s taking away.

Note first,

If you take life, you do not love

That’s fairly obvious, right? If you murder people, you don’t love them. We’re all agreed.

In v. 11, John writes, For this is the message that you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. But to talk about this love, he goes to its antithesis. If you wanted to illustrate hate by bringing up someone from human history, a few names might go through your mind. Jewish history had its own examples, to which John turns in v. 12, We should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother.

So, while we might think of Pol Pot, Stalin, or Hitler as the antithesis of love, John goes to Genesis 4. If we’ll set the flannel–graphs aside for a moment, we’ll grasp something of Cain’s hatred. The word here for murder meant Cain slaughtered his brother.[2] It wasn’t an accident. It was premeditated and violent.

Not unlike the local investigator, or Dateline NBC, John turns to motive. Verse 12 continues, And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous.

I like how John Stott writes about John the Apostle’s writing, “As he now fills in his preliminary sketch, he uses no colours but black and white.”[3] No need for a jury; no one confused Cain and Abel’s deeds.

Of course, deeds proceed from disposition, as Pastor Phil mentioned last week. So, here’s a follow–up question: Why were Cain’s deeds evil? The beginning of verse 12 answers, We should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one . . .”

Their deeds were in stark contrast, because so was their origin. Pastor Phil mentioned chapter 3:8 last week, whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil. Then the next verse, No one born of God makes a practice of sinning. The closing verse of chapter 2 mentioned that everyone who practices righteousness has been born of him. Again, this is black and white. One birth results in one set of deeds. Rebirth results in the practice of another.

John brings up Cain to illustrate what love is not, but also to contrast these followers of Jesus with the world. The antagonism between the two is not a recent development. In verse 11, he tells them, “You heard from the beginning to love one another.” But longer than we’ve been telling you to love one another, evil has hated good. And that division has had relational consequences, some if not most of them, violent. The good ol’ days ended in Genesis 2.

If this division is true, and it’s been going on for a long time, then v. 13 Do not be surprised, brothers, that the world hates you. John must’ve assumed we’d be surprised. In John 2:15, he’s already made clear the tension, Do not love the world. . . . All that is in the world is not from the Father. Then just a few verses earlier in chapter 3: The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Yet he reminds the readers once again of the difference. He knew we inevitably ease back in, and then get comfortable to such a degree that opposition surprises us. But John makes things black and white to remind[...]