What is it in your life that makes you feel significant or gives you purpose? What aspect of who you are, what you do, produce, or create, if taken away, would leave you feeling completely void of value?
I didn’t get this from reading the Greek Septuagint and you might not find this in any commentary, but I think I finally understand why John’s seemingly out of place or cut-off thought at the end of 1 John is there.
“Children, keep yourselves from idols.”
John had been persuading the reader that Jesus is the Son of God, that God is love, that we are to love God and love others, and then for the climactic finish – “Children, keep yourselves from idols.” Really John? What’s going on here?
D.A. Carson defines idolatry this way: “Instead of wanting God, you want the thing which de-gods, God.”
John spends all this time talking about Jesus as the Son of God, what it looks like to follow Him, and the abundance of life that comes from having Jesus in our lives. And not like a dashboard Jesus that we sprinkle on our lives for good luck, but an all-encompassing Jesus that shines light on everything in our lives and changes and reorders EVERYTHING. HE, is our everything.
That is why it’s so offensive to God and so dangerous, when anything besides Jesus becomes the center, or becomes God.
While most of us probably don’t have Buddhas in our home that we worship, idolatry is much, much more discrete than this and thus, all the more deadly.
How many of us can’t put down our work when we get home because it’s what drives us and gives us value? How many of us, when working a job that’s “below” what we feel like we’re capable of, want to wear a sign that boasts of our accolades or find a way to make sure people know that we’re “better” than the other under-achievers working here? How many of us derive our value from our children and trying to raise them up right? Write my name next to most of these things.
Carson puts this more subtle kind of idolatry this way. “We find our self identity NOT in being God’s creature, but in any other person, institution, value system, ritual” – job, ministry, ability – “anything so that God cannot be heard, cannot be allowed to make his ultimate claim as our Creator and Judge.”
I used to think that I had this down, but I’ve realized lately that, most days, my identity, my significance – my hope, is in anything but Jesus Christ. My job, my social standing, my abilities, my knowledge – all of these things compete for my attention and to be what gives me value. And when that doesn’t lead to pride, it ends in a kind of depression because of my perceived shortcomings in those areas.
John knows the deception of these things, but he also points us toward the solution.
Jesus.
Just Jesus.
“Blessed are we that we might be called children of God.”
God has chosen us, rescued us in the person of Jesus Christ, and adopted us as sons. John is trying to magnify this and show us that this is where real identity, value, significance and life are found.
After this description of God that should grip our hearts, John simply closes with a plea to put our focus here and rid ourselves of every idol and ruinous thought or idea that will only distract us from loving Jesus Christ, finding our identity in Him alone and being freed to love and serve others as He has us.
And thank God for this truth, for apart from Him I am absolutely worthless. This, more than anything else, I desire to be true of me and make part of the very fabric of who I am. -CK
*D.A. Carson quotes taken from his recent book, Scandalous.
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