1 John is possibly the last or close to the last book of the Bible written.
It was probably written somewhere between 90 and 95 AD.
And this very well may have been John's final piece of writing to his church before he passed away.
And what we're going to do is look at the final verses of this book.
And what we see is pretty interesting.
John leaves us, he leaves his church with this one simple command.
Little ones, keep yourselves from idols.
Now an idol is a false god.
It's anything in our lives that takes the place of God.
And last week we spent our entire time talking about all of the ways that idols play a role in who we are and how we live.
We talked about the way that idols shape the culture around us.
And we said that all human beings, even non-religious people, have something at the center of their lives that they cannot live without.
Some ultimate thing.
And that's essentially what an idol is.
And the same is true of cultures.
All cultures have idols at their center.
But this passage is different.
Because in this passage, John is speaking to Christians.
He's talking to his people.
And he is warning Christians about the danger of idols.
And that's interesting because these are people who, by definition, we would expect should have rejected the worship of idols and who, by definition, were worshipers of God in Jesus Christ.
But the truth is, the biggest threat to the spiritual vitality of the church, the biggest deterrent to non-Christians coming into the church who may be open to the truth of the gospel,
And the biggest reason why your faith may feel dead or inert or empty, the biggest reason for all of these things is that idols in the surrounding culture are always seeping into the church like water seeps into a basement.
And when that happens, they begin to cause all kinds of rot and mold and spiritual decay.
Idols are always seeping into the church.
And so as a part of our series on gospel and cultural renewal, we're going to spend our time this week focusing on idolatry in the church.
Because before Christians have any hope of confronting idols in the culture, we first have to confront the idols in our own house, in the church.
And so that's why we're looking at 1 John 5, verses 19 through 21.
This passage shows us two things.
It shows us why idols are dangerous, and it shows us how to guard against them, which is John's command.
So let's pray, and then we'll open God's word together.
Lord, we thank you for your word.
We thank you for your ability to minister to us through your word.
And we pray that you would do that in the power of your Holy Spirit for the glory and the sake of Jesus Christ.
Amen.
So why are idols so dangerous?
You know, growing up, my family watched a lot of scary movies.
And in a typical scary movie, even if it's not clear at the beginning of the movie, by the end of the film, evil has been clearly identified.
Evil is always some other thing.
It's a monster, or it's an alien, or it's a maniacal killer trying to kill the protagonist.
And the protagonist in some movies is able to overcome that evil, or at least to escape that evil.
And so I think that most people prefer to think of evil this way.
Evil is something other.
It's something different.
And so when it comes to the greatest acts of evil ever committed in real life, such as the Holocaust, I think most people assume that the people behind an evil such as the Holocaust must be monsters.
They must be other.
They must be maniacal killers.
And that's precisely what Hannah Arendt thought.
She's the great political philosopher who went to report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who's the, or many people referred to him as the architect of the Holocaust.
And if you think about somebody like that, the architect of the Holocaust, you would expect, and this is what she expected, she expected to see a monster.
She expected to meet a creature of pure evil.
And yet Eichmann completely defied her expectations.
Eichmann, it turns out, was no monster.
He was no maniacal killer.
Eichmann was, in fact, a boring bureaucrat.
She was shocked to realize that he was not motivated by some deep-seated extreme anti-Semitism or malevolence.
He was motivated by the same things that tend to motivate most of us.
He was motivated by careerism.
He was motivated by conformity.
He was motivated by obedience to his superiors.
He was motivated by the desire to be thought well of and respected by people whom he respected.
And what we see in Eichmann and what Hannah Arendt learned through this encounter is something incredibly important.
And that is that most of the time, evil doesn't look like a monster.
Evil can simply be a person living an unexamined life, going about their daily tasks, never really pausing to consider the meaning or the consequences of their actions.
As Hannah Arendt said in her last book before she passed away,
the sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be good or evil.
Now, this is not to say that there is no such thing as spiritual evil.
John, in verse 19, says the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.
But here's the thing that I want you to notice about this.
According to John, there's no struggle.
There's no epic battle between good versus evil, which is what so many movies depict and what so many human beings assume is true of the world.
There is no epic battle between good and evil.
He says the world lies in the power of the evil one.
The world is sedate.
The world is spiritually asleep.
The world is inert.
The world is slumbering peacefully in the arms of the evil one.
And you ask, well, how could this be true?
And the answer is idols.
The anesthetizing power of idols.
When we allow something in our lives other than God to become ultimate, whether it's wealth or career or power or something else,
we may not know it.
But we are actually giving our allegiance to the evil one.
This is why in other places in Paul's writing, when he writes about idols, he says,
On one level, they're deaf and dumb and mute.
They're nothing.
But on another level, they have a spiritual evil behind them.
When we give our allegiance to idols, we are in league with demons.
And so there is a true spiritual evil.
This is what John refers to as the evil one.
But what we need to understand is it operates behind the scenes.
It's not like horror movies.
It operates through idols.
And so you can live your entire life with good intentions.
You can try to do right.
You can have worthy goals that you're pursuing.
And yet at the same time, you can be spiritually asleep in the arms of evil.
And this is the crucial point we need to see.
There is no such thing as neutrality when it comes to idols.
When it comes to idols, we only have two options.
Active resistance or passive surrender.
If we are not actively resisting, actively fighting against idols,
that means that we have already passively surrendered.
In other words, idolatry is our default factory setting.
And so what John is saying is that Christians are not immune to this danger.
When you give your life to Jesus in faith and when you become a follower of Jesus,
it sets you free from sin.
It sets you free from the penalty of sin.
It sets you free from death.
It restores your relationship with God.
But it does not make you immune to the anesthetizing power of idols.
Gerhard Cattel was one of the greatest biblical scholars in his day.
He was an expert in Judaism.
And any serious theological library you go to,
you will find a copy of his theological dictionary of the New Testament.
And yet at the same time, this biblical expert was also an enthusiastic member of the Nazi party.
And at one point, he was finally arrested for war crimes.
And you ask, well, how could this possibly be?
Well, just like Adolf Eichmann, Cattel, along with many other Christians, was seduced.
He was anesthetized.
He was sedated by the cultural idols of the day.
And Scott McKnight writes, for Christians, the temptation in 1930s Germany was to become a German Christian,
a form of Lutheranism that was engulfed by race and nation and blood and land.
And this is the reason that idols are so dangerous, the reason they're so insidious,
and in particular, cultural idols.
Because we don't even know that they're there.
We don't even know that they're there.
They're simply the water that we swim in.
In 1930s Germany, the cultural water was saturated with the idols of nationalism and ethnocentrism.
And that idol-saturated water seeped into the church like water into the basement of a house.
And so many Christians, people like Cattel, were seduced by them without even knowing it was happening.
And so here we have John's final warning in its context to the church.
Little children, keep yourselves from idols.
In other words, guard vigilantly against idols seeping in to the church.
Now, how do we do this?
How do we go about guarding against idols in the church?
Well, it takes a couple of things.
Number one, in order to guard against idols, we have to be able to identify cultural idols.
And the only way to see idols, which are essentially false gods, for what they are,
is by knowing and seeing clearly the true God.
And when you know the true God, then you have a basis of comparison,
and you're able to see false gods for what they really are.
And so John says in verse 20, we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding
so that we may know Him who is true.
And then a little bit later, he refers to God as the true God.
So Jesus came to give us understanding.
Jesus came to free us from idols.
Jesus came so that we could know the true God and thereby identify the false gods in the world.
And so then the question comes, how do we know Jesus?
And this points us back to the opening of 1 John.
The first thing John says in his letter is this.
He says, starting in verse 3,
So here John is talking about the testimony of the apostles.
He's talking about the scriptures.
He's talking about that which we have seen and heard we now proclaim.
So in other words, the only way to see false gods is to know the true God.
The only way to know the true God is through Jesus Christ.
And the only way to know Jesus Christ is through the testimony of the apostles,
the scriptures that were written by John and the other apostles
about what they had seen and heard firsthand.
So the point is this.
In order to guard against idols seeping into our spiritual life, seeping into the church,
we have to be able to identify them.
And that means that our relationship with scripture has to be profound.
Scripture has to be so deeply in us that it becomes the lens through which we view culture
and we view it critically.
So scripture becomes the critical lens through which we view the culture around us.
It's almost as though when you use scripture this way, if you'll forgive the metaphor,
it's almost as though you're putting on a pair of spiritual augmented reality glasses
that allow you to see things that you would otherwise not be able to see,
but it allows you to see things as they really are.
And this is very important because most of the time Christians are tempted to do the exact opposite of this.
Instead of viewing culture through the lens of scripture,
we're very tempted to view scripture through the lens of culture.
And so there are always and have always been churches and denominations
that make the decision to reinterpret or altogether ignore certain parts of scripture.
And they're tempted to revise their theology to fit better
with the most popular social and cultural views of the day.
That's always a temptation.
But as we said last week, when you do that,
you open the floodgates of idolatry.
You open the floodgates and idols pour into the church.
And this is why, as we said a couple of weeks ago,
the churches and denominations and Christian groups
that have revised and diluted their theology are all either dead or dying.
And so we have to resist this temptation.
Scripture must be the lens through which we view culture,
not the other way around.
To return to the German illustration for just a moment,
unlike Cattell, there were Christians who did resist the Nazis.
There were people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth.
And you ask, well, what made the difference?
What was the difference between these people?
All of these men studied scripture
and had a deep theological understanding of scripture.
But for Cattell, his study remained largely academic.
It never penetrated his heart.
The culture essentially shaped his approach
and interpretation of scripture
rather than the scripture shaping his approach to culture.
And so he remained more or less blind
to the way that idols had seeped into his spiritual life.
Contrast that with Bonhoeffer and Barth,
who were clearly shaped by scripture.
They led in the drafting of the Barman Declaration,
which used scripture to justify opposition to Nazism.
It provided the doctrinal foundation for Christians to oppose the Nazis.
And here's what it says in that declaration.
Jesus Christ, as he has attested for us in holy scripture,
is the one word of God which we have to hear
and which we have to obey in life and in death.
So they're clearly looking at their culture through the lens of scripture.
Their sense of allegiance is crystal clear.
Our allegiance is to Jesus in the scriptures,
not to the culture around us.
And that's what made it possible for them to identify
the way these idols of nationalism and ethnocentrism
were creeping into the church and to take a stand against it.
Right, so the first thing in order to guard against idols
is we need a way to see idols.
And that means scripture has to become the lens
through which we view the culture around us.
The second thing we need is a lifestyle of ongoing repentance.
It's not enough to see the idols in our midst
if we're not willing to repent,
if we're not willing to leave those idols
and go back to our first love, Jesus Christ.
So even as Christians work to bring renewal,
we're also always seeking to be renewed ourselves
again and again and again.
The church is always needing to repent,
always needing to come back to Christ
again and again and again in every age.
And this means our posture toward culture
is not one of finger-wagging
where we're sanctimoniously speaking down to the secular world.
Rather, we are like fellow inmates
who have just had the fortune of being set free
from our idols for this moment.
And we are desperately trying to set
as many other people free as we possibly can
in the time that we have.
So our posture toward culture
is very much one of humility.
It's very much one of a shared struggle
against the true common enemy,
which is the evil one and the idolatry
through which he works.
And it can be very hard to admit
when we look at the past
that Christians have been complicit
in something like Nazi Germany
or with slavery
or Jim Crow
or any of the other myriad historical examples
that we could name.
But one of our greatest strengths
as the church
lies in our capacity for self-correction.
That is one of our greatest strengths
throughout history
is our capacity for self-correction.
And the more often we repent of idols
in the church,
the more we grow in our faith,
the more effective we become
in the ministry that Jesus calls to.
As one of my friends
who's a pastor likes to say,
Christians should be trigger happy
when it comes to repentance.
We should be eager to repent
as often as we can.
And so as we look at the church today
in our society,
as we look at ourselves,
the question arises,
what do we need to repent of?
What are some of the idols
that we see creeping
into the basement of the church?
And, you know,
on a national level,
as we look at the church
in the U.S.
across the last half a century,
I think for many,
there's a need to repent
of the idols of nationalism and power.
Now, you know,
I want to make it clear
that nationalism
is not the same thing
as patriotism.
And I actually think
that patriotism
is a very good thing.
And I think that we,
it's right to be patriotic
and to love our country
and to be for our country.
But when Christians
begin to merge
their Christian identity
with their American identity,
when we begin to forget
that our primary citizenship
is in the kingdom of God
and not in the United States
of America,
when we begin to forget
that we are sojourners
and exiles
and that this world
is not ultimately our home
until Jesus Christ renews it,
that's when it starts
to become idolatry.
Likewise,
when we think about power,
I think that it's clear
that evangelicals
in particular
have sacrificed
a lot of integrity
in the quest
for political
and cultural power.
And what you see
are many Christians
who are seeking power
so that they can exert
greater and greater control
over the culture.
Instead of using the power
and the privilege
that we have
to build a more just society
for everyone,
especially the people
with whom we may disagree.
So these are issues
in the church at large
for sure.
But I also want to say this.
I don't actually think
that those are the biggest challenges
in our church.
I think our church
is maybe a little different.
Most of the people
in our community
would probably not refer
to themselves
as evangelical.
I know for a fact
from talking to people
that some people
come to our church
because they're trying
to figure out
how to be a Christian
without having
that demographic label
of evangelical on them.
Now, regardless
of what you think
about that
or how you feel about it,
it's simply something
that is true
of our community.
But what we need
to realize is
that with that separation,
there can often be
a sense of smugness,
a smug feeling
of superiority
over those other Christians.
And I think
that our idols
probably more fall
into the categories
of respectability
and security.
We like to think
of ourselves
as the educated Christians,
the urban Christians,
the culturally savvy
and sophisticated Christians,
the kind of Christians
who might go
to a racial justice rally
but wouldn't be caught dead
at a pro-life rally.
And what's interesting
about this
is that theologically
both issues
matter a great deal
and Christians
should care about
both issues
for the same reason
because of our
theology of personhood.
But the truth is
is that one cause
is far more
socially acceptable
in a place
like Washington, D.C.
than the other cause is.
So for many
in our community
our worst fear
is being accused
of being hateful
or intolerant
or being called a bigot.
And so I think
that for many
in our community
the biggest temptation
is to simply fly
under the radar.
It's to blend in
as much as possible.
It's to be theological
conservatives
in liberal clothing.
To remain
perpetually uncertain
about any doctrine
that might be found
offensive by others.
And essentially
to minimize the chances
that we might lose
people's respect
because of our faith.
You know,
these are certainly
some of my biggest temptations
if I'm totally honest
about my heart.
And so what we really
need to see
and I think that
what John's warning
says to us
is that when we do this
that we're actually
no different
than someone like
Gerhard Cattel.
Right?
We're allowing
the culture
to dictate
our faith.
We're allowing
the culture
to shape
our relationship
with Jesus
and the scriptures
rather than
the other way around.
And so
to the extent
to which we
are doing these things
we need to repent.
We need to return
to our first love.
We need to let go
of our idols
whether they be
nationalism
or power
or respectability
or security
or any of the other things
that they might be.
And the good news is
we can repent
as often
as it takes
because our identity
in Christ
is secure.
Jesus is not waiting
for us to get it right
before he embraces us.
He has embraced us
and it is in his arms
that we learn
how to live
set free
from the arms
of the evil one.
He has awakened us
spiritually
and the call now
is to stay awake
to stay vigilant
to stay watchful
until Jesus comes again.
As John says
in verse 19
we know
that we're from God.
We know that.
That is the one thing
that is true
and unshakably true.
Right?
So even when we try
to let go of God
and even when we're tempted
to run
and to take hold
of idols
the good news
of the gospel
is this
is that God
is the kind of God
who will never
let us go.
Let's pray.
Lord we thank you
and we know
that the core of this
the core message
is that we have
no hope apart from you.
And not only
do we need you
to set us free
from idols
and to restore us
to relationship
with you
in Jesus Christ.
But we need
the spiritual power
of the Holy Spirit
to keep us free
from idols
to help us
be vigilant
in our struggle
against the evil one
and the anesthetizing power
of the idols
that surround us
in our culture.
That we might be salt
and light
in the ways
that you have called us
to be Lord
and ultimately
that we might speak
and live in ways
that point
not to ourselves
but to your glory
Lord.
And it's in the name
of that glory
and of your son
Jesus Christ
that we pray.
Amen.