In This Is Love (part 2)

So we have the term “righteousness,” or “covenant faithfulness,” connected to the children of God. Righteousness is ascribed to Jesus, so we know that He is faithful to the covenant. The Son of God, who presumably also operates in righteousness, is revealed and sent to destroy the works of the devil, and this seems to be roughly equated, by the author, with being an atoning sacrifice for sins as part of the activity of the love of God. As has been said, the devil has been operating outside the bounds of the covenant---in covenant unfaithfulness---since the beginning. This necessitated the revelation of the Son of God, so that such work could be destroyed. This is the mission of the Son of God. Inevitably, proper consideration of authorial intent drives us back to the beginning (since the beginning is mentioned), so for the purpose of gaining a more in-depth understanding, we are forced to look to the book of Genesis (the beginning), and to the first revelation of the Son of God. In his Gospel, Luke, as he recounts the genealogy of Jesus, traces that lineage back to Adam, wherein Adam is referred to as the son of God. If Adam is the son of God, then he was placed in this world, or revealed, to destroy the works of the devil.

This forces us into the realm of cosmology, as we look at the beginning of the beginning, and find that God created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1). Somehow and for some reason, without going to deeply into this and thereby getting dramatically off-topic, the earth became “without shape and empty” (1:2), or traditionally, “without form, and void.” The Hebrew words used in this passage, “tohu” and “bohu,” are often taken to imply that this is a new situation far afield from the way that God had intended when He created. Though we do not like to hunt and peck through the Scriptures for isolated proof texts to support positions, “tohu” and “bohu” stand in stark contrast to that which is insisted upon in Isaiah, which is that the Creator God “formed the earth and made it; He established it, He did not create it without order, He formed it to be inhabited” (45:18b). Though this can have the appearance of proof-texting as part of our Scriptural exegesis, it actually falls well in line with our grasp of the overall narrative-based structure of the Word that reveals God, pointing us to God’s long-held plan to redeem a fallen creation into which disorder was introduced. This seems to be well within the line of thought suggested by God’s creation becoming “without shape and empty,” which also suggests some type of catastrophic activity that produced such a state.

Is it proper to here insert an idea of the devil sinning from the beginning? Do we here posit the fall of Lucifer and his cohorts, as they entered into a violation of their covenants with God (sin), with the result being a world subjected to tohu and bohu? Is it possible that the author of John views the world through this type of cosmology? We dare not become dogmatic in this area, but this could very well account for the insistence that the devil had been sinning from the beginning. If so, then the creation account of Genesis is the restoration of the world to that which had been previously established by God, but had been marred by the first act of covenant unfaithfulness, with this carried out by the one now referred to as the devil. If this is so, then we can gain an even better understanding of the role that is given to Adam. Why is Adam created? Why is the one that is called the son of God revealed? First and foremost, it is to bear the image of God in and to and for His creation, in proper and loving stewardship of the world. That was the part and parcel of the covenant that God made with Adam, with the mark of that covenant being Adam’s obedience in regards to the trees from which he could and could not partake. Secondly, it is to be in a position to come against and destroy the works of the devil, who we know from the Genesis account of the activities in the garden, is present in the world.

If this is a reasonable position, then we can see that the author of the letter goes on to write about an ideal situation, in which “Everyone who has been fathered by God does not practice sin” (3:9a). Sin, as we have to remember as we constantly steer ourselves away from thinking about sin as “the bad stuff that I do,” is “being unfaithful to the covenant that is designed to bring glory to God, and thereby falling short of God’s intention for me as His image-bearer in and to and for this world.” He goes on to write that the reason those fathered by God do not practice sin is “because God’s seed resides in him, and thus he is not able to sin, because he has been fathered by God” (3:9b). This hardly describes Adam, so we reiterate that this is an ideal representation, which appears to be hyperbolic usage that is designed to point his readers to the uniqueness of the one that is most properly looked to as the Son of God, and to His unbroken faithfulness to God’s covenant.