Little children, keep yourselves from idols.
Parallel Translations
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Little children, keep yourselves from idols.
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Babes kepe youre selves from ymages. Amen.
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Litle children, keepe your selues from idoles, Amen.
Cross-references (10)
Passages linked to 1 John 5:21 in the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge, ordered by reader-vote popularity; verse text shown in World English Bible.
- 1 Corinthians 10:14 Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry.
- 1 Corinthians 10:7 Don’t be idolaters, as some of them were. As it is written, “The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play.”
- Exodus 20:3-4 “You shall have no other gods before me. “You shall not make for yourselves an idol, nor any image of anything that is in the heavens above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth:
- 2 Corinthians 6:16-17 What agreement does a temple of God have with idols? For you are a temple of the living God. Even as God said, “I will dwell in them and walk in them. I will be their God and they will be my people.” Therefore “ ‘Come out from among them, and be separate,’ says the Lord. ‘Touch no unclean thing. I will receive you.
- Matthew 6:13 Bring us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For yours is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory forever. Amen.’
- 1 Thessalonians 1:9 For they themselves report concerning us what kind of a reception we had from you, and how you turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God,
- 1 John 2:1 My little children, I write these things to you so that you may not sin. If anyone sins, we have a Counselor with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous.
- Revelation 9:20 The rest of mankind, who were not killed with these plagues, didn’t repent of the works of their hands, that they wouldn’t worship demons, and the idols of gold, and of silver, and of brass, and of stone, and of wood; which can’t see, hear, or walk.
- Revelation 13:14-15 He deceives my own people who dwell on the earth because of the signs he was granted to do in front of the beast, saying to those who dwell on the earth that they should make an image to the beast who had the sword wound and lived. It was given to him to give breath to it, to the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause as many as wouldn’t worship the image of the beast to be killed.
- Revelation 14:11 The smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever. They have no rest day and night, those who worship the beast and his image, and whoever receives the mark of his name.
Cross-references from openbible.info (CC BY 4.0)
Explain this verse (18 sources)
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John Calvin 1540 · Public Domain 21 Keep yourselves from idols Though this be a…
21 Keep yourselves from idols Though this be a separate sentence, yet it is as it were an appendix to the preceding doctrine. For the vivifying light of the Gospel ought to scatter and dissipate, not only darkness, but also all mists, from the minds of the godly. The Apostle not only condemns idolatry, but commands us to beware of all images and idols; by which he intimates, that the worship of God cannot continue uncorrupted and pure whenever men begin to be in love with idols or images. For so innate in us is superstition, that the least occasion will infect us with its contagion. Dry wood will not so easily burn when coals are put under it, as idolatry will lay hold on and engross the minds of men, when an occasion is given to them. And who does not see that images are the sparks? What sparks do I say? nay, rather torches, which are sufficient to set the whole world on fire.
The Apostle at the same time does not only speak of statues, but also of altars, and includes all the instruments of superstitions. Moreover, the Papists are ridiculous, who pervert this passage and apply it to the statues of Jupiter and Mercury and the like, as though the Apostle did not teach generally, that there is a corruption of religion whenever a corporeal form is ascribed to God, or whenever statues and pictures form a part of his worship. Let us then remember that we ought carefully to continue in the spiritual worship of God, so as to banish far from us everything that may turn us aside to gross and carnal superstitions.
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end of the first epistle of John
John Calvin's Commentaries (1540-1563) — public domain. Text from the Calvin Translation Society English edition (1840s-50s) via the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (ccel.org). Calvin's coverage is partial (roughly two-thirds of the Bible); uncommented books and verses are honest gaps, never fabricated. The 19th-century editor's footnotes and remarks are omitted so the notes are faithfully Calvin's own voice.
Geneva Bible translators 1599 · Public Domain He expresseth a plain precept of taking heed of…
He expresseth a plain precept of taking heed of idols: which he setteth against the only true God, that with this seal as it were he might seal up all the former doctrine.
Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain.
John Trapp 1656 · Public Domain 21 Little children, keep yourselves from idols. Amen.
21 Little children, keep yourselves from idols. Amen.
Ver. 21. Keep yourselves from idols] Negatively at least (as those 7000 in Israel, that had not bowed their knees to Baal), if not positively, by open declaration of your utter dislike, as did Daniel and his associates. Irenaeus reproveth the heretics called Gnostici, for that they carried about the image of Christ in Pilate’s time, after his own proportion; using also for declaration of their affection towards it, to set garlands upon the head of it; so soon crept this cursed sin into the primitive Church. Soon after the Council of Nice, arose a sharp contention between Irene the empress and her son Constantine VI, who destroyed images; for the which she unnaturally put out his eyes. About which time, as Eutropius writeth, the sun was darkened most terribly for 17 days together; God showing by that, how much he disliked those proceedings. Letters were sent by Queen Mary and her council, to examine Mr Flower why he wore about his neck written, Deum time, idolum fuge; Fear God and flee idolatry, to stir up Bishop Bonner to proceed against all that did the like. Arguments and authorities alleged by Bishop Ridley against images in churches may be read, Acts and Mon. fol. 1928, &c. Martin was much grieved that this sentence of St John was set in our churches, in the place where the rood loft {a} formerly stood.
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{a} The cross upon which Christ suffered; the cross as the symbol of the Christian faith. Now only arch. ŒD
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole 1685 · Public Domain i.e. From those idolatrous communions with the Gentiles in…
i.e. From those idolatrous communions with the Gentiles in their worship and festivals in their temples, which these pseudo-christians had latitude enough for, as appears by the apostle St. Paul’s discourses, 1Co 8:1-13; 10:14 (especially if any danger did urge); wherein, instead of that communion with the Father and the Son, which {1Jo 1:3} he was inviting them to, they should have
fellowship with devils, as that other apostle tells his Corinthians, 1Co 10:20,21. And he might also have reference to the peculiar idolatries, which this sort of men are noted to have been guilty of towards their great sect master.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
John Gill 1763 · Public Domain Little children, keep yourselves from idols, Amen. From Heathen…
Little children, keep yourselves from idols, Amen. From Heathen idols and idolatry, into which the saints in those times might be liable to be drawn, by reason of their dwelling among Heathen idolaters, and being related to them, and by the too great freedom used in eating things sacrificed to idols in their temples; and from all other idols that might be introduced by some who went by the name of Christians, as the Gnostics, who worshipped the images of Simon and Helena; and the passage may be an antidote against the worshipping of images, afterwards introduced by the Papists. Moreover, errors and false doctrines, which are the figments of men's minds, and what they are fond of, may be called idols, and should be guarded against, and abstained from; as also the lusts of men's hearts, and all the evil things that are in the world, which are adored by the men of it; and even every creature that is loved too much is an idol; hence covetousness is called idolatry; nor should any creature or thing be loved more than God or Christ: the one only living and true God, Father, Son, and Spirit, he is only to be worshipped, feared, and loved.
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Wesley 1765 · Public Domain Keep yourselves from idols - From all worship of…
Keep yourselves from idols - From all worship of false gods, from all worship of images or of any creature, and from every inward idol; from loving, desiring, fearing anything more than God. Seek all help and defense from evil, all happiness in the true God alone.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke 1810 · Public Domain Verse 21. Little children] τεκνια. Beloved children; he concludes…
Verse 21. Little children] τεκνια. Beloved children; he concludes with the same affectionate feeling with which he commenced.
Keep yourselves from idols.] Avoid the idolatry of the heathens; not only have no false gods, but have the true God. Have no idols in your houses, none in your churches, none in your hearts. Have no object of idolatrous worship; no pictures, relics, consecrated tapers, wafers, crosses, c., by attending to which your minds may be divided, and prevented from worshipping the infinite Spirit in spirit and in truth.
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The apostle, says Dr. Macknight cautioned his disciples against going with the heathens into the temple of their idol gods, to eat of their feasts upon the sacrifices they had offered to these gods and against being present at any act of worship which they paid them; because, by being present, they participated of that worship, as is plain from what St. Paul has written on the subject, 1Co 8:10, where see the notes.
That is a man's idol or god from which he seeks his happiness; no matter whether it be Jupiter, Juno, Apollo, Minerva, Venus, or Diana; or pleasure, wealth, fame, a fine house, superb furniture, splendid equipage, medals, curiosities, books, titles, human friendships, or any earthly or heavenly thing, God, the supreme good, only excepted. That is a man's idol which prevents him from seeking and finding his ALL in God.
Wiclif ends his epistle thus: My little sones, kepe ye you fro mawmitis, i.e. puppets, dolls, and such like; for thus Wiclif esteemed all images employed in religious worship. They are the dolls of a spurious Christianity, and the drivellings of religion in nonage and dotage. Protestants, keep yourselves from such mawmets!
Amen.] So be it! So let it be! And so it shall be, God being our helper, for ever and ever!
Subscriptions in the VERSIONS: -
The end of the Epistle of the Apostle John. - SYRIAC.
The First Epistle of John the apostle is ended. - SYR. Philoxenian.
Nothing in either the COPTIC or VULGATE.
Continual and eternal praise be to God! - ARABIC.
The end. - AETHIOPIC;
In this version the epistle is thus introduced: -
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, one God, the Epistle of John, the son of Zebedee, the evangelist and apostle of our Lord Jesus Christ; may his intercession be with us for ever and ever! Amen.
In the MANUSCRIPTS: -
The First of John. - AB.
The First Epistle of John the evangelist.
The First catholic Epistle of St. John the divine, written from Ephesus.
The Epistle to the Parthians. - See several Latin MSS.
The word amen is wanting in all the best MSS. and in most of the versions.
For other matters relative to the epistle itself see the preface: and for its heavenly doctrine and unction read the text, in the original if you can; if not, in our own excellent translation.
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Albert Barnes 1834 · Public Domain Little children - This is a favorite mode of…
Little children - This is a favorite mode of address with John, (see the notes at 1Jo 2:1), and it was proper to use it in giving his parting counsel; embracing, in fact, all that he had to say - that they should keep themselves from idols, and suffer nothing to alienate their affections from the true God. His great object had been to lead them to the knowledge and love of God, and all his counsels would be practically followed, if, amidst the temptations of idolatry, and the allurements of sin, nothing were allowed to estrange their hearts from him.
Keep yourselves from idols - From worshipping them; from all that would imply communion with them or their devotees. Compare the notes at 1Co 10:14. The word rendered “idols” here (εἰδώλων eidōlōn) means, properly, an image, specter, shade - as of the dead; then any image or figure which would represent anything, particularly anything invisible; and hence anything designed to represent God, and that was set up with a view to be acknowledged as representing him, or to bring, him, or his perfections, more vividly before the mind. The word is applicable to idol-gods - pagan deities, 1Co 8:4, 1Co 8:7; 1Co 10:19; Rom 2:22; 2Co 6:16; 1Th 1:9; but it would, also, be applicable to any “image” designed to represent the true God, and through or by which the true God was to be adored. The essential things in the word seem to be:
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(a)An image or representation of the Deity, and,
(b)The making of that an object of adoration instead of the true God.
Since one of these things would be likely to lead to the other, both are forbidden in the prohibitions of idolatry, Exo 20:4-5. This would forbid all attempts to represent God by paintings or statuary; all idol-worship, or worship of pagan gods; all images and pictures that would be substituted in the place of God as objects of devotion, or that might transfer the homage from God to the image; and all giving of those affections to other beings or objects which are due to God. why the apostle closed this Epistle with this injunction he has not stated, and it may not be easy to determine. It may have been for such reasons as these:
Those to whom he wrote were surrounded by idolaters, and there was danger that they might fall into the prevailing sin, or in some way so act as to be understood to lend their sanction to idolatry.
(2)In a world full of alluring objects, there was danger then, as there is at all times, that the affections should be fixed on other objects than the supreme God, and that what is due to him should be withheld.
It may be added, in the conclusion of the exposition of this Epistle, that the same caution is as needful for us as it was for those to whom John wrote. We are not in danger, indeed, of bowing down to idols, or of engaging in the grosser forms of idol-worship. But we may be in no less danger than they to whom John wrote were, of substituting other things in our affections in the place of the true God, and of devoting to them the time and the affection which are due to him. Our children it is possible to love with such an attachment as shall effectually exclude the true God from the heart. The world - “its wealth, and pleasures, and honors - we may love with a degree of attachment such as even an idolater would hardly shew to his idol-gods; and all the time which he would take in performing his devotions in an idol-temple, we may devote with equal fervor to the service of the world. There is practical idolatry all over the world; in nominally Christian lands as well as among the pagan; in families that acknowledge no God but wealth and fashion; in the hearts of multitudes of individuals who would scorn the thought of worshipping at a pagan altar; and it is even to be found in the heart of many a one who professes to be acquainted with the true God, and to be an heir of heaven. God should have the supreme place in our affections. The love of everything else should be held in strict subordination to the love of him.
He should reign in our hearts; be acknowledged in our closets, our families, and in the place of public worship; be submitted to at all times as having a right to command and control us; be obeyed in all the expressions of his will, by his word, by his providence, and by his Spirit; be so loved that we shall be willing to part without a complaint with the dearest object of affection when he takes it from us; and so that, with joy and triumph, we shall welcome his messenger, “the angel of death,” when he shall come to summon us into his presence. To all who may read these illustrations of the Epistle of the “beloved disciple,” may God grant this inestimable blessing and honor. Amen.
Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary 1859 · Public Domain Keep yourselves from idols. An admonition to the new…
Keep yourselves from idols. An admonition to the new converted Christians, lest, conversing with heathens and idolaters, they might fall back into the sin of idolatry, which may be the sin unto death here mentioned by St. John. (Witham)
George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset & David Brown 1871 · Public Domain Affectionate parting caution.
Affectionate parting caution.
from idols--Christians were then everywhere surrounded by idolaters, with whom it was impossible to avoid intercourse. Hence the need of being on their guard against any even indirect compromise or act of communion with idolatry. Some at Pergamos, in the region whence John wrote, fell into the snare of eating things sacrificed to idols. The moment we cease to abide "in Him that is true (by abiding) in Jesus Christ," we become part of "the world that lieth in the wicked one," given up to spiritual, if not in all places literal, idolatry (Eph 5:5; Col 3:5).
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Next: 2 John Introduction
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
Daniel D. Whedon 1874 · Public Domain 21. Idols—As above remarked, John’s immediate readers were probably…
21. Idols—As above remarked, John’s immediate readers were probably expected to be mostly Gentiles brought by Christ to an understanding of the true One. They were surrounded on every hand with idols in Ephesus and in all Asia Minor. In Ephesus the temple of Artemis (Diana) was still standing in pride and power. Hence it became the little body of Christians, one and all, to beware of idols. It is the last tender warning of the venerable apostle to his little children at this same Ephesus, to keep themselves from Artemis and her images, and adhere to the true God in his Son Jesus Christ. John closes with as emphatic an abruptness as he commences this epistle. Note on 1Jn_1:1. But there was a special danger arising from the seductions of the errorists condemned in this epistle; who, in fact, advocated the participating in the sacrificial banquets of the pagan temples. An idol is an image, a pretence, a phantom, an unreality, in opposition to the true God, (1Jn_5:20,) who is the infinite reality.
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges 1878 · Public Domain 21. Farewell Warning
21. Farewell Warning
Little children] As usual (1Jn_2:1; 1Jn_2:12; 1Jn_2:28, 1Jn_3:7; 1Jn_3:18, 1Jn_4:4), this refers to all his readers.
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keep yourselves] Better, as R. V., guard yourselves. It is not the verb used in 1Jn_5:18 (τηρεῖν) but that used 2Th_3:3 (φυλάσσειν); ‘shall guard you from the evil one’. Both verbs occur Joh_17:12 : comp. Joh_12:25; Joh_12:47. Here the verb is in the aorist imperative; ‘once for all be on your guard and have nothing to do with’. The use of the reflexive pronoun instead of the middle voice intensifies the command to personal care and exertion (φυλάξατε ἑαυτά). This construction is frequent in S. John: Joh_1:8; Joh_3:3; Joh_7:4; Joh_11:33; Joh_11:55; Joh_13:4; Joh_21:1; Rev_6:15; Rev_8:6; Rev_19:7.
from idols] Or perhaps, from the idols; those with which Ephesus abounded: or again, from your idols; those which have been, or may become, a snare to you. This is the last of the contrasts of which the Epistle is so full. We have had light and darkness, truth and falsehood, love and hate, God and the world, Christ and Antichrist, life and death, doing righteousness and doing sin, the children of God and the children of the devil, the spirit of truth and the spirit of error, the believer untouched by the evil one and the world lying in the evil one; and now at the close we have what in that age was the ever present and pressing contrast between the true God and the idols. There is no need to seek far-fetched figurative explanations of ‘the idols’ when the literal meaning lies close at hand, is suggested by the context, and is in harmony with the known circumstances of the time. Is it reasonable to suppose that S. John was warning his readers against “systematising inferences of scholastic theology; theories of self-vaunting orthodoxy … tyrannous shibboleths of aggressive systems”, or against superstitious honour paid to the “Madonna, or saints, or pope, or priesthood”, when every street through which his readers walked, and every heathen house they visited, swarmed with idols in the literal sense; above all when it was its magnificent temples and groves and seductive idolatrous rites which constituted some of the chief attractions at Ephesus? Act_19:27; Act_19:35; Tac. Ann. iii. 61, iv. 55. Ephesian coins with idolatrous figures on them are common. ‘Ephesian letters’ (Ἐφέσια γράμματα) were celebrated in the history of magic, and to magic the ‘curious arts’ of Act_19:19 point. Of the strictness which was necessary in order to preserve Christians from these dangers the history of the first four centuries is full. Elsewhere in N. T. the word is invariably used literally: Act_7:41; Act_15:20; Rom_2:22; 1Co_8:4; 1Co_8:7; 1Co_10:19; 1Co_12:2; 2Co_6:16; 1Th_1:9; Rev_9:20. Moreover, if we interpret this warning literally, we have another point of contact between the Epistle and the Apocalypse (Rev_9:20; Rev_21:8). Again, as we have seen, some of the Gnostic teachers maintained that idolatry was harmless, or that at any rate there was no need to suffer martyrdom in order to avoid it. This verse is a final protest against such doctrine. Lastly, this emphatic warning against the worship of creatures intensifies the whole teaching of this Epistle; the main purpose of which is to establish the truth that the Son of God has come in the flesh in the Man Jesus. Such a Being was worthy of worship. But if, as Ebionites and Cerinthians taught, Jesus was a creature, the son of Joseph and Mary, then worship of such an one would be only one more of those idolatries from which S. John in his farewell injunction bids Christians once and for ever to guard themselves.
Amen] Here, as at the end of the Gospel and the Second Epistle, ‘Amen’ is the addition of a copyist. אAB and most Versions omit it. Such conclusions, borrowed from liturgies, have been freely added throughout N. T. Perhaps that in Gal_6:18 is the only final ‘Amen’ that is genuine; but that in 2Pe_3:8 is well supported.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary 1880 · Public Domain Keep yourselves from idols; or, guard yourselves from the…
Keep yourselves from idols; or, guard yourselves from the idols. In verse 18 we had threi; here the verb is fulaxate. The aorist, rather than the present imperative, is used to make the command more forcible, although the guarding is not momentary, but will have to continue (Compare meinate ejn ejmoi, Joh_15:4; tav ejntolav tav ejmasate. Joh_14:15) What is the meaning of "the idols" twn eijdwlwn here? In answering this question it will be well to hold fast to the common canon of exegesis, that where the literal interpretation makes good sense, the literal interpretation is probably right. Here the literal interpretation makes excellent sense. Ephesus was famous for its idols. To be "temple-keeper of the great Artemis" (Act_19:35) was its pride. The moral evils which had resulted from the abuse of the right of sanctuary had caused the Roman senate to cite the Ephesians and other states to submit their charters to the government for inspection. Ephesus had been the first to answer to the summons, and bad strenuously defended its claims. It was famous, moreover, for its charms and incantations; and folly of this kind had found its way into the Christian Church. (Act_19:13-20) As so often happens with converts from a religion full of gross superstition, a good many of the superstitious observances survived the adoption of Christianity. With facts such as these before us, we can hardly be wrong in interpreting "the idols" quite literally. The apostle"s "little children" could not live in Ephesus without coming constantly in contact with these polluting but attractive influences. They must have absolutely nothing to do with them: "Guard yourselves and abjure ajpo them." Of course, this literal interpretation places no limit on the application of the text. To a Christian anything is an idol which usurps the place of God in the heart, whether this be a person, or a system, or a project, or wealth, or what not. All such usurpations come within the sweep of the apostle"s injunction, "Guard yourselves from your idols.
Beware of the idols!
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Closing warning. By how much the evidence is clear that in Christ we have the true God, and eternal life, by so much should we be sternly jealous over ourselves that we suffer naught to take the place in our regard which he alone should fill. Hence it is not unnatural that a sentence like this should come from the apostle"s pen ere he closes the letter. It is easy to detect an undertone of deep emotion, as the apostle, having discharged his responsibilities in unfolding the truth, now reminds his readers most tenderly of theirs, in cleaving to it and rejecting all besides. TopicA warning against the idolatry of cleaving to any but Christ.
I WE ARE UNIFORMLY TAUGHT IN SCRIPTURE TO CHERISH AN ABHORRENCE OF IDOLS. The second commandment forbids any worship to them. Isaiah poured scorn on idol-worship. "Idols" (ei]dwla, simulacra) images, dead representations of the Living One. Anything which fills the place in the understanding, the heart, the life, which is due to God alone, is an idol. Note: None have ever been more noted for horror of idolatry than those who have paid the most reverent worship to the Lord Jesus Christ as the Son of God. It is, in fact, in connection with the most distinct avowal of him as "the true God and eternal life," that this warning against all idolatry is found. But the verse is not general and indefinite, for observe
II THE APOSTLE HAS BEFORE HIS EYE THE VARIOUS "IDOLS" WITH WHICH HIS LEADERS WOULD BE SURROUNDED. "Guard yourselves from the idols ajpolwn." It is absolutely necessary to study with close attention the actual surroundings of John and the Churches of his care, if we would rightly apprehend and expound the caution here recorded. There appears to be no reason to doubt that the apostle wrote this Epistle at Ephesus. The worship of the great goddess Diana had its seat there. The temple of Ephesus was a wonder of the world. And, over and above the dark black mass of people who cared not either for religion or morals, Gnosticism and Dualism were prominent there. The doctrine of the Nicolaitanes was taught there, and there too a spurious and magic spiritualism had its seat (see Act_19:19, Act_19:26, Act_19:35; Rev_2:6) There was both a denial of the true and a presentation of the false claim to the regard of men.
III WITH ALL THESE FORMS OF ERROR BEFORE HIM, THE APOSTLE HAD CALLED THEM BY THE ONE NAME ANTICHRIST. With this one word he indicates the one feature they all have in common. They so mar the representation of Christ that he is no longer the Christ; and set up in his place a substitute of their own, which is no better than an antichrist. There were many of them; but their huge denials of the truth were not to be tolerated (1Jn_2:22, 23 4:1-3; 2Jn_1:7) If the Incarnation were denied, along therewith must be the denial of the Propitiation, the Redemption, the cleansing, the fellowship, the life. All goes if the Christ goes. And inasmuch as men will have a faith of some kind, so that when they have dethroned the true, they will enthrone the false, there will at once come to be some antichrist some rival to the Son of God. It may appear in the form of some worldly attachment, eliciting a false affection (chapter 2:15-18); or in the disguise of some intellectual subtlety, leading to or from a false philosophy; (1Jn_4:1-3) or in some manifest depravity of morals denying the need of an atonement or of cleansing grace, through denying the fact of sin. (1Jn_1:8, 1Jn_1:10) The "many antichrists" which John espied were but so many ei]dwla, and whoever followed them would be, in fact, an idolater.
IV FROM ALL THESE FORMS OF IDOLATRY IT IS NECESSARY FOR BELIEVERS TO GUARD THEMSELVES. The preposition ajpo is significant here. They must keep away from them. From everything that
(1) denies, or
(2) lowers, or
(3) opposes, or
(4) dishonours, or
(5) supplements the Christ.
yourselves, guard yourselves, the word is as in a watch-tower fulaxate. But what is the fortress? Can we be wrong in saying:
1. The truth is the stronghold in which they were to remain, while keeping a vigilant watch on the foe? The Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Saviour of men, the Propitiation for sins, the final Judge of men, the true Object of a devout and adoring worship, the Life, the Mediator, the Model, the Leader, the Lord.
2. They were to ensure remaining in this stronghold of truth by cultivating fellowship in him who is the Truth. (1Jn_2:28; cf. also the analogous phrase in Philippians
3. Frourhsei taav uJmwn kai tamata uJmwn Communion with God will ensure a holy peace that will guard the heart from restlessness and the thinkings from error.
V THIS KEEPING OF THEMSELVES IN GUARD AGAINST THE IDOLS IS HERE THROWN ON THEIR OWN PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY. "Guard yourselves. It is as if the apostle had said, "I have done what I can in writing down the truth and in warning you against the errors of the day. Now, where my responsibility ends, yours begins." Compare the parting words of Moses (Deu_29:9-29 Deu_31:2-13) and of Paul. (Act_20:28-31)
VI THIS REMINDER OF THEIR PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY IS GIVEN WITH THE UTMOST TENDERNESS OF PASTORAL SOLICITUDE. The last stroke of the pen reminds the apostle of his own inability to do more than he has done. He cannot always be with the Churches. And as if the thoughts that they and he must soon part, and that he, the last surviving apostle, must leave the Churches "as sheep in the midst of wolves," as their Lord had said, were almost overwhelming, his tone at parting is that of the utmost tenderness: "Little children, hold yourselves aloof from all the idols.
VII THE PRECEPT, THOUGH IT HAS A LOCAL AND TEMPORAL REFERENCE, IS OF WORLD-WIDE AND PERMANENT SIGNIFICANCE. Forms of antichrist still abound, and there is as much need for vigilant watchfulness on the part of believers now as there was in the apostle"s time. Can we think of pantheism, agnosticism, positivism, materialism, rationalism, anti-supernaturalism, without seeing how many forms of error would supplant the Christ, and put a rival in his place? Can we think of sacerdotalism, rampant and wild, without seeing how many there are who would put a priest between the soul and the Saviour; who teach that the Church is to be our bulwark, by remaining in which we shall keep from idols; who would make an idol of the sacramental bread, as if it would nourish the spiritual life, and even of the baptismal water, as if it could initiate it? And we venture to think that these sacerdotal ei]dwla are more perilous to many than those of the unbelieving world. They are more specious, and therefore more deceptive. May the Holy Ghost grant us his enlightening unction, that we may discern and detect error with a glance of the eye! Amen.
Self-guardianship against idolatry.
children, keep yourselves from idols." The connection of this verse with the preceding seems to be in the antithesis between the" true God" and "idols." Loyalty to the "true God" demands separation from all false gods. Notice
I THE AFFECTIONATE APPELLATION BY WHICH THE APOSTLE ADDRESSES HIS READERS, "Little children." "He parts from them with his warmest and most affectionate word of address." This form of address suggests:
1. The spiritual paternity of the apostle. Probably many of those to whom he was writing were his children in the Lord, begotten by his ministry by his preaching, his prayers, and his faith. Very tender and sacred is this relationship. (cf chapter 2:1; 1Co_4:14, 1Co_4:15; Gal_4:19; Phm_1:10)
2. The spiritual affection of the apostle. This is delicately yet clearly indicated by the use of the diminutive.
3. The spiritual authority of the apostle. His relation to them, his affection for them, and his large and ripe experience, combined to invest him with sacred and commanding influence. And, as "little children," his readers needed guidance, and owed to him obedience.
II THE IMPORTANT EXHORTATION WHICH THE APOSTLE ADDRESSES TO HIS READERS. "Keep yourselves from idols." Consider:
1. The nature of the sin to be guarded against. Idolatry. Originally it seems to have comprised two things:
(1) the attempt to represent the Divine Being by visible and material forms;
(2) the offering to these forms the worship which belongs only to God. Some are in danger to-day of falling into idolatry of this kind through the use in worship of pictures and statues designed to represent the Saviour.
But the essence of idolatry is giving to another the love and reverence and devotion which are rightly due to God alone. Many make an idol of riches. Money is their god, and they devote all their powers and opportunities to the eager pursuit of it. "Covetousness is idolatry." Others worship pleasure. They live but for amusement, and endeavour to subordinate everything to their personal gratification. And others make honour, or fame, or power, their god. We may make an idol of some beloved relative or friend wife, husband, or child. Or, and this is in some respects worst of all, a man may make a god of himself may think first and chiefly of himself, study his own interests and happiness, and love himself supremely. It has been well said, "Wooden idols are easily avoided, but take heed of the idols of gold. It is no difficult matter to keep from dead idols, but take heed that thou worship not the living ones, and especially thyself; for as soon as thou arrogatest to thyself either honour, or praise, or knowledge, or power, thou settest thyself in the place of God, and he has declared that he "will not give his glory to another. And this sin offers the greatest dishonour and wrong and insult to God.
2. The damager of the sin to be guarded against. This may be seen from the following considerations.
(1) The worship of anything less than God cannot satisfy our spiritual nature. God has made us for himself, and our souls cannot rest until they rest in him.
(2) The worship of anything less than God dwarfs and degrades man"s spiritual nature. The exercise of real worship transforms the worshipper into likeness to the object worshipped; e.g., the idolatry of riches will gradually mould man into a groveling, grasping miser; of power, into a ruthless, despotic tyrant, etc.
(3) The worship of anything less than God will lead to bitter disappointment and irretrievable loss. Sooner or later, the idolater will be awakened from his delusions, and then he will find that his god is a poor sham, and that, as for himself, he has "forsaken the Fountain of living waters, and hewed him out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water." And how terrible is death to the idolater! Death may take from him the wife whom he loves more than he loves God, or the child, etc. And when he dies he must leave his idols behind him his money, etc. "We brought nothing into the world, neither can we carry anything out." "When he dieth he shall carry nothing away; his glory shall not descend after him.
And then will arise the bitter cry, "Ye have taken away my gods; and what have I more?
3. The method of guarding against this sin. The most effective preservative against idolatry is growing fidelity to God. He who assiduously cultivates reverent attachment and hearty devotion to him cannot fall into idolatry. "The Lord our God is one Lord: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength." "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." "Little children, keep yourselves from idols. W.J.
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Biblical Illustrator 1887 · Public Domain Little children, keep yourselves from idols
1Jn_5:21
Little children, keep yourselves from idols
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The sin of idolising
I.
What is the right notion of idolatry, as it still prevails even among nominal Christians? I answer generally; whatever is so desired and loved, so trusted in or honoured, as to displace God from His preeminence is an idol. Accordingly the objects of human idolatry are exceedingly numerous; and one individual is far from being constant to the same. We see the idol of yesterday cast to the moles and bats today; and that which is deified today may probably be trampled in the mire tomorrow. This multiplicity of idols, this unsteadiness of taste and affection appeared among the heathen polytheists. It is the proper curse and punishment of forsaking the Creator that the heart roam from creature to creature with a sickly capriciousness, and never know where to settle. Consider, then, whether or not you are immoderately attached to any earthly object; to any friend or relation; to money, power, learning, reputation, pleasure, popularity.
II. The way of detecting these idolatrous propensities in ourselves.
1. What is their effect in filling your mind, and memory, and imagination? What do your thoughts chiefly run upon? To what do they naturally tend--God or Mammon? Your memory too, what scenes and discourses does it most fondly review? Those of a spiritual and devout, or those of a worldly cast? Tell me, also, which way your fancy flies when it makes excursions. To airy castles of augumented wealth and importance in this world; to higher distinctions, and finer houses, and more abundant comforts; or to scenes of heavenly holiness and bliss? Try yourselves, again, as to the influence of temporal things upon your religious exercises.
2. Is your sensibility to sin as lively as ever? If you have lost ground in this respect, and are less particular than once you were, what has so sadly altered you? Has it not been too warm an attachment to this or that person; too keen a solicitude for this or the other acquisition?
3. Are you greatly elated by gain, and greatly dejected by loss in your worldly affairs and connections? In thought survey your possessions and still more your friends. Now, which of all these is dearest to you? Have you ascertained? Then I ask whether you could bear to part with that possession by the stroke of misfortune; with that friend by the stroke of death? Ah, you exclaim, it would break my heart to be deprived of such a blessing. Would that indeed be the ease? Then tremble lest that blessing turn into a curse by proving your idol.
III. Some of Gods methods of dealing with such idolaters; for He is a jealous God. The idols He will utterly abolish. Sometimes He sweeps them away as with a whirlwind. They are smitten to the ground and disappear in a moment. Health, strength, beauty, knowledge, fame, wealth, just now they were flourishing like a flower; and like a flower they have faded away. Sometimes the cup of idolatrous happiness is not dashed from our lips, but wormwood is mingled with it. God embitters to us our darling enjoyments, so that where we looked for peace and comfort we find nothing but misery. Was it the husband you loved more than God? That husband becomes faithless and unkind. Was it the wife? She grows sickly and fretful. The child? He turns out wild; or is lost to you in some other way. Be assured that the over-eager pursuit of any worldly good is full of mischief and peril. And this dreadful consummation occurs when God leaves us to our idols; when he suffers them to take and keep possession of our souls. Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone. Leave him to his fatal infatuation. Let him take his fill of carnal delights till the day of repentance is closed and judgment bursts upon him. Merciful God, sever us from our idols by whatever visitation thou mayest see fit; only leave us not bound up with them to perish in the day of Thy coming!
IV. The means of keeping ourselves from idols.
1. Exercise a sleepless vigilance, kept awake by a sense of your proneness to fall into this evil; and be much in prayer for Divine help, conscious that you are too weak to preserve yourselves without assistance from above. Understand, however, that what you have mainly to guard against is not any particular object, but the turning of that object into an idol.
2. Do not heedlessly form such connections and acquaintances, whether by marriage or partnership in business or domestic service, as threaten to absorb the heart and alienate the affections from God. Recollect that it is easier to abstain from making idols than afterwards to put them away.
3. Think much of the vanity of human things; what they really are and of what account. Often the dearest idol gives birth to the greatest sorrow. How common the remark upon something of which high expectations were conceived, It has turned out quite the reverse. Oh, truly, it is most unwise to set our heart upon a gourd which may wither away at any moment and leave us more painfully sensible than ever of the scorching sunbeams.
4. Never forget that it is the prime end of the gospel to unbind your heart from the creature in order to its being reunited to your Father in heaven. Are you not to be temples of the Holy Ghost; to be sanctified into an habitation of God through the Spirit? What then have you to do any more with idols? (J. N. Pearson, M. A.)
The true God and shadows
By the true God St. John means the God not only truth speaking, but true in essence, genuine, real; by shadows or idols he means the false principles which take possession of the senses--the unreal reflections of the only Real. There was in deed plenty of need for this warning in St. Johns day and in the Churches under his care. Perhaps the antithesis of Christianity and the world is not now so sharply apparent. But the contrast still exists. Although the twilight realm may be vast, yet broad and deep are the shadows which men take for realities, and live in them, and worship them, and believe in them. Can there be a more evident example of shadow worship than the devotion of the world to the material--which in reality is the immaterial? In every form of matter there is indeed the hint of God, but it is a hint only, the pledge of the reality, not the great Reality Itself. It is from heedlessness of this great truth that the First Commandment of the Decalogue, which some imagine completely needless for themselves, is perhaps really more necessary than any of the other nine. For all around us is a world worshipping sham gods of its own deification. How then does Christ teach us the eternal distinction between shadows and realities? In His temptation we have exhibited to us the whole matter in a nutshell. Temptation is the battle of alternatives, the choice between the high and the low, the real and the shadowy. Alexander, conqueror of the world, wept for worlds beyond to conquer: Caesar, with his hand grasping Satans gift of the world empire, dreamed of something more real when he told the Egyptian priest he would give up all, even Cleopatra herself, to discover the mysterious sources of the Nile. It is this reality, this wider con quest, this source of eternal life, which has been mans search in all his philosophies and religious systems. Napoleon, beset with quagmires in Egypt, bade his officers ride out in all directions, the first to find firm ground to return and lead the way for the rest. So mans heart has bidden him ride out in every direction to seek the Real, and St. John comes back from his fellowship with Jesus, and cries, This is the real God and the life which is eternal. Little children, guard yourselves from the sham gods. (H. H. Gowen.)
Idolatry
If an idol is a thing which draws the heathen away from the living God, anything which does this for us may be named an idol.
I. Self. Love of self is born in us, and if not early checked will be our master. It feeds upon falsehood, unkindness, greediness, and pride. You must gratify it at whatever cost, and then it demands more and more. Self is a dreadful idol. Beware of it.
II. Dress. You may forget the pearl in anxiety about its setting.
III. Pleasure. Do not children encourage the passion for exciting amusements till they are miserable without them, though so many innocent recreations remain to them? We have known children whose Sundays were a weariness to them, and their studies a punishment. Their pleasures were their idols. (British Weekly Pulpit.)
The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Expositor's Bible 1887 · Public Domain Chapter 1 Part 1
Chapter 1 Part 1
1 John
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THE SURROUNDINGS OF THE FIRST EPISTLE OF ST. JOHN.
1Jn_5:21
AFTER the example of a writer of genius, preachers and essayists for the last forty years have constantly applied-or misapplied-some lines from one of the greatest of Christian poems. Dante writes of St. John-
"As he, who looks intent,
And strives with searching ken, how he may see
The sun in his eclipse, and, through decline
Of seeing, loseth power of sight: so I Gazed on that last resplendence."
The poet meant to be understood of the Apostles spiritual splendour of soul, of the absorption of his intellect and heart in his conception of the Person of Christ and of the dogma of the Holy Trinity. By these expositors of Dante the image is transferred to the style and structure of his writings. But confusion of thought is not magnificence, and mere obscurity is never sunlike. A blurred sphere and undecided outline is not characteristic of the sun even in eclipse. Dante never intended us to understand that St. John as a writer was distinguished by a beautiful vagueness of sentiment, by bright but tremulously drawn lines of dogmatic creed. It is indeed certain that round St. John himself, at the time when he wrote, there were many minds affected by this vague mysticism. For them, beyond the scanty region of the known, there was a world of darkness whose shadows they desired to penetrate. For them this little island of life was surrounded by waters into whose depths they affected to gaze. They were drawn by a mystic attraction to things which they themselves called the "shadows," the "depths," the "silences." But for St. John these shadows were a negation of the message which he delivered that "God is light, and darkness in Him is none." These silences were the contradiction of the Word who has once for all interpreted God. These depths were "depths of Satan." For the men who were thus enamoured of indefiniteness, of shifting sentiments and flexible creeds, were Gnostic heretics. Now St. Johns style, as such, has not the artful variety, the perfect balance in the masses of composition, the finished logical cohesion of the Greek classical writers. Yet it can be loftily or pathetically impressive. It can touch the problems and processes of the moral and spiritual world with a pencil tip of deathless light, or compress them into symbols which are solemnly or awfully picturesque. Above all St. John has the faculty of enshrining dogma in forms of statement which are firm and precise-accurate enough to be envied by philosophers, subtle enough to defy the passage of heresy through their finely drawn yet powerful lines. Thus in the beginning of his Gospel all false thought upon the Person of Him who is the living theology of His Church is refuted by anticipation that which in itself or in its certain consequences unhumanises or undeifies the God Man; that which denies the singularity of the One Person who was Incarnate, or the reality and entireness of the manhood of Him who fixed His Tabernacle of humanity in us.
It is therefore a mistake to look upon the First Epistle of St. John as a creedless composite of miscellaneous sweetnesses, a disconnected rhapsody upon philanthropy. And it will be well to enter upon a serious perusal of it, with the conviction that it did not drop from the sky upon an unknown place, at an unknown time, with an unknown purpose. We can arrive at some definite conclusions as to the circumstances from which it arose, and the sphere in which it was written-at least if we are entitled to say that we have done so in the case of almost any other ancient document of the same nature.
Our simplest plan will be, in the first instance, to trace in the briefest outline the career of St. John after the Ascension of our Lord, so far as it can be followed certainly by Scripture, or with the highest probability from early Church history. We shall then be better able to estimate the degree in which the Epistle fits into the framework of local thought and circumstances in which we desire to place it.
Much of this biography can best be drawn out by tracing the contrast between St. John and St. Peter, which is conveyed with such subtle and exquisite beauty in the closing chapter of the fourth Gospel.
The contrast between the two Apostles is one of history and of character.
Historically, the work done by each of them for the Church differs in a remarkable way from the other.
We might have anticipated for one so dear to our Lord a distinguished part in spreading the Gospel among the nations of the world. The tone of thought revealed in parts of his Gospel might even have seemed to indicate a remarkable aptitude for such a task. St. Johns peculiar appreciation of the visit of the Greeks to Jesus, and his preservation of words which show such deep insight into Greek religious ideas, would apparently promise a great missionary, at least to men of lofty speculative thought. But in the Acts of the Apostles St. John is first overshadowed, then effaced, by the heroes of the missionary epic, St. Peter and St. Paul. After the close of the Gospels he is mentioned five times only. Once his name occurs in a list of the Apostles. Thrice he passes before us with Peter. Once again (the first and last time when we hear of St. John in personal relation with St. Paul) he appears in the Epistle to the Galatians with two others, James and Cephas, as reputed to be pillars of the Church. But whilst we read in the Acts of his taking a certain part in miracles, in preaching, in confirmation; while his boldness is acknowledged by adversaries of the faith; not a line of his individual teaching is recorded. He walks in silence by the side of the Apostle who was more fitted to be a missionary pioneer.
With the materials at our command, it is difficult to say how St. John was employed whilst the first great advance of the cross was in progress. We know for certain that he was at Jerusalem during the second visit of St. Paul. But there is no reason for conjecturing that he was in that city when it was visited by St. Paul on his last voyage (A.D. 60); while we shall presently have occasion to show how markedly the Church tradition connects St. John with Ephesus.
We have next to point out that this contrast in the history of the Apostles is the result of a contrast in their characters. This contrast is brought out with a marvellous prophetic symbolism in the miraculous draught of fishes after the Resurrection.
First as regards St. Peter.
"When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he girt his fishers coat unto him (for he was naked), and did cast himself into the sea." His was the warm energy, the forward impulse of young life, the free bold plunge of an impetuous and chivalrous nature into the waters which are nations and peoples. In he must; on he will. The prophecy which follows the thrice renewed restitution of the fallen Apostle is as follows: "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, When thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee where thou wouldest not. This spake He, signifying by what death He should glorify God, and when He had spoken this, He saith unto him, Follow Me." This, we are told, is obscure; but it is obscure only as to details. To St. Peter it could have conveyed no other impression than that it foretold his martyrdom. "When thou wast young," points to the tract of years up to old age. It has been said that forty is the old age of youth, fifty the youth of old age. But our Lord does not actually define old age by any precise date. He takes what has occurred as a type of Peters youthfulness of heart and frame-"girding himself," with rapid action, as he had done shortly before; "walking," as he had walked on the white beach of the lake in the early dawn; "whither thou wouldest," as when he had cried with impetuous, half-defiant independence, "I go a-fishing," invited by the auguries of the morning, and of the water. The form of expression seems to indicate that Simon Peter was not to go far into the dark and frozen land; that he was to be growing old, rather than absolutely old. Then should he stretch forth his hands, with the dignified resignation of one who yields manfully to that from which nature would willingly escape. "This spake He," adds the evangelist, "signifying by what death He shall glorify God." What fatal temptation leads so many commentators to minimise such a prediction as this? If the prophecy were the product of a later hand, added after the martyrdom of St. Peter, it certainly would have wanted its present inimitable impress of distance and reserve.
It is in the context of this passage that we read most fully and truly the contrast of our Apostles nature with that of St. Peter. St. John, as Chrysostom has told us in deathless words, was loftier, saw more deeply, pierced right into and through spiritual truths, was more the lover of Jesus than of Christ, as Peter was more the lover of Christ than of Jesus. Below the different work of the two men, and determining it, was this essential difference of nature, which they carried with them into the region of grace. St. John was not so much the great missionary with his sacred restlessness; not so much the oratorical expositor of prophecy with his pointed proofs of correspondence between prediction and fulfilment, and his passionate declamation driving in the conviction of guilt like a sting that pricked the conscience. He was the theologian; the quiet master of the secrets of the spiritual life; the calm, strong controversialist who excludes error by constructing truth. The work of such a spirit as his was rather like the finest product of venerable and long established Churches. One gentle word of Jesus sums up the biography of long years which apparently were without the crowded vicissitudes to which other Apostles were exposed. If the old Church history is true, St. John was either not called upon to die for Jesus, or escaped from that death by a miracle. That one word of the Lord was to become a sort of motto of St. John. It occurs some twenty-six times in the brief pages of these Epistles. "If I will that he abide"-abide in the bark, in the Church, in one spot, in life, in spiritual communion with Me. It is to be remembered finally, that not only spiritual, but ecclesiastical consolidation is attributed to St. John by the voice of history. He occupied himself with the visitation of his Churches and the development of Episcopacy. So in the sunset of the Apostolic age stands before us the mitred form of John the Divine. Early Christianity had three successive capitals-Jerusalem, Antioch, Ephesus. Surely, so long as St. John lived, men looked for a Primate of Christendom not at Rome but at Ephesus.
How different were the two deaths! It was as if in His words our Lord allowed His two Apostles to look into a magic glass, wherein one saw dimly the hurrying feet, the prelude to execution which even the saint wills not; the other the calm life, the gathered disciples, the quiet sinking to rest. In the clear obscure of that prophecy we may discern the outline of Peters cross, the bowed figure of the saintly old man. Let us be thankful that John "tarried." He has left the Churches three pictures that can never fade-in the gospel the picture of Christ, in the Epistles the picture of his own soul, in the Apocalypse the picture of Heaven.
So far we have relied almost exclusively upon indications supplied by Scripture. We now turn to Church history to fill in some particulars of interest.
Ancient tradition unhesitatingly believed that the latter years of St. Johns prolonged life were spent in the city of Ephesus, or province of Asia Minor, with the Virgin Mother, the sacred legacy from the cross, under his fostering care for a longer or shorter portion of those years. Manifestly he would not have gone to Ephesus during the lifetime of St. Paul. Various circumstances point to the period of his abode there as beginning a little after the fall of Jerusalem (A.D. 67). He lived on until towards the close of the first century of the Christian era, possibly two years later (A.D. 102). With the date of the Apocalypse we are not directly concerned, though we refer it to a very late period in St. Johns career, believing that the Apostle did not return from Patmos until just after Domitians death. The date of the Gospel may be placed between A.D. 80 and 90. And the First Epistle accompanied the Gospel, as we shall see in a subsequent chapter.
The Epistle then, like the Gospel, and contemporaneously with it, saw the light in Ephesus, or in its vicinity. This is proved by three pieces of evidence of the most unquestionable solidity.
(1) The opening chapters of the Apocalypse contain an argument which cannot be explained away for the connection of St. John with Asia Minor and with Ephesus. And the argument is independent of the authorship of that wonderful book. Whoever wrote the Book of the Revelation must have felt the most absolute conviction of St. Johns abode in Ephesus and temporary exile to Patmos. To have written with a special view of acquiring a hold upon the Churches of Asia Minor, while assuming from the very first as fact what they, more than any other Churches in the world, must have known to be fiction, would have been to invite immediate and contemptuous rejection. The three earliest chapters of the Revelation are unintelligible, except as the real or assumed utterance of a Primate (in later language) of the Churches of Asia Minor. To the inhabitants of the barren and remote isle of Patmos, Rome and Ephesus almost represented the world; their rocky nest among the waters was scarcely visited except as a brief resting place for those who sailed from one of those great cities to the other, or for occasional traders from Corinth.
(2) The second evidence is the fragment of the Epistle of Irenaeus to Florinus preserved in the fifth book of the "Ecclesiastical History" of Eusebius. Irenaeus mentions no dim tradition, appeals to no past which was never present. He has but to question his own recollections of Polycarp, whom he remembered in early life. "Where he sat to talk, his way, his manner of life, his personal appearance, how he used to tell of his intimacy with John, and with the others who had seen the Lord." Irenaeus elsewhere distinctly says that "John himself issued the Gospel while living at Ephesus in Asia Minor, and that he survived in that city until Trajans time."
(3) The third great historical evidence which connects St. John with Ephesus is that of Polycrates, Bishop of Ephesus, who wrote a synodical epistle to Victor and the Roman Church on the Quartodeciman question, toward the close of the second century. Polycrates speaks of the great ashes which sleep in Asia Minor until the Advent of the Lord, when He shall raise up His saints. He proceeds to mention Philip who sleeps in Hierapolis; two of his daughters; a third who takes her rest in Ephesus, and "John moreover, who leaned upon the breast of Jesus, who was a high priest bearing the radiant plate of gold upon his forehead."
This threefold evidence would seem to tender the sojourn of St. John at Ephesus for many years one of the most solidly attested facts of earlier Church history.
It will be necessary for our purpose to sketch the general condition of Ephesus in St. Johns time.
A traveller coming from Antioch of Pisidia (as St. Paul did A.D. 54) descended from the mountain chain which separates the Meander from the Cayster. He passed down by a narrow ravine to the "Asian meadow" celebrated by Homer. There, rising from the valley, partly running up the slope of Mount Coressus, and again higher along the shoulder of Mount Prion, the traveller saw the great city of Ephesus towering upon the hills, with widely scattered suburbs. In the first century the population was immense, and included a strange mixture of races and religions. Large numbers of Jews were settled there, and seems to have possessed a full religious organisation under a High priest or Chief Rabbi. But the prevailing superstition was the worship of the Ephesian Artemis. The great temple, the priesthood whose chief seems to have enjoyed a royal or quasi-royal rank, the affluence of pilgrims at certain seasons of the year, the industries connected with objects of devotion, supported a swarm of devotees, whose fanaticism was intensified by their material interest in a vast religious establishment. Ephesus boasted of being a theocratic city, the possessor and keeper of a temple glorified by art as well as by devotion. It had a civic calendar marked by a round of splendid festivities associated with the cultus of the goddess. Yet the moral reputation of the city stood at the lowest point, even in the estimation of Greeks. The Greek character was effeminated in Ionia by Asiatic manners, and Ephesus was the most dissolute city of Ionia. Its once superb schools of art became infected by the ostentatious vulgarity of an ever-increasing parvenu opulence. The place was chiefly divided between dissipation and a degrading form of literature. Dancing and music were heard day and night; a protracted revel was visible in the streets. Lascivious romances whose infamy was proverbial were largely sold and passed from hand to hand. Yet there were not a few of a different character. In that divine climate, the very lassitude, which was the reaction from excessive amusement and perpetual sunshine, disposed many minds to seek for refuge in the shadows of a visionary world. Some who had received or inherited Christianity from Aquila and Priscilla, or from St. Paul himself, thirty or forty years before, had contaminated the purity of the faith with inferior elements derived from the contagion of local heresy, or from the infiltration of pagan thought. The Ionian intellect seems to have delighted in imaginative metaphysics; and for minds undisciplined by true logic or the training of severe science imaginative metaphysics is a dangerous form of mental recreation. The adept becomes the slave of his own formulae, and drifts into partial insanity by a process which seems to himself to be one of indisputable reasoning. Other influences outside Christianity ran in the same direction. Amulets were bought by trembling believers. Astrological calculations were received with the irresistible fascination of terror. Systems of magic, incantations, forms of exorcism, traditions of theosophy, communications with demons-all that we should now sum up under the head of spiritualism-laid their spell upon thousands. No Christian reader of the nineteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles will be inclined to doubt that beneath all this mass of superstition and imposture there lay some dark reality of evil power. At all events the extent of these practices, these "curious arts" in Ephesus at the time of St. Pauls visit, is clearly proved by the extent of the local literature which spiritualism put forth. The value of the books of magic which were burned by penitents of this class, is estimated by St. Luke at fifty thousand pieces of silver-probably about thirteen hundred and fifty pounds of our money!
Let us now consider what ideas or allusions in the Epistles of St. John coincide with, and fit into, this Ephesian contexture of life thought.
We shall have occasion in the third chapter to refer to forms of Christian heresy or of semi-Christian speculation indisputably pointed to by St. John, and prevalent in Asia Minor when the Apostle wrote. But besides this, several other points of contact with Ephesus can be detected in the Epistles before us.
(1) The first Epistle closes with a sharp decisive warning, expressed in a form which could only have been employed when those who were addressed habitually lived in an atmosphere saturated with idolatry, where the social temptations to come to terms with idolatrous practices were powerful and ubiquitous. This was no doubt true of many other places at the time, but it was preeminently true of Ephesus. Certain of the Gnostic Christian sects in Ionia held lax views about "eating things sacrificed unto idols," although fornication was a general accompaniment of such a compliance. Two of the angels of the Seven Churches of Asia within the Ephesian group-the angels of Pergamum and of Thyatira-receive special admonition from the Lord upon this subject. These considerations prove that the command, "Children, guard yourselves from the idols," had a very special suitability to the conditions of life in Ephesus.
(2) The population of Ephesus was of a very composite kind. Many were attracted to the capital of Ionia by its reputation as the capital of the pleasures of the world, It was also the centre of an enormous trade by land and sea. Ephesus, Alexandria, Antioch, and Corinth were the four cities where at that period all races and all religions of civilised men were most largely represented. Now the First Epistle of St. John has a peculiar breadth in its representation of the purpose of God. Christ is not merely the fulfilment of the hopes of one particular people. The Church is not merely destined to be the home of a handful of spiritual citizens. The Atonement is as wide as the race of man. "He is the propitiation for the whole world; we have seen, and bear witness that the Father sent the Son as Saviour of the world." A cosmopolitan population is addressed in a cosmopolitan epistle.
(3) We have seen that the gaiety and sunshine of Ephesus was sometimes darkened by the shadows of a world of magic; that for some natures Ionia was a land haunted by spiritual terrors. He must be a hasty student who fails to connect the extraordinary narrative in the nineteenth chapter of the Acts with the ample and awful recognition in the Epistle to the Ephesians of the mysterious conflict in the Christian life against evil intelligences, real, though unseen. The brilliant rationalist may dispose of such things by the convenient and compendious method of a sneer. "Such narratives as that" (of St. Pauls struggle with the exorcists at Ephesus) "are disagreeable little spots in everything that is done by the people. Though we cannot do a thousandth part of what St. Paul did, we have a system of physiology and of medicine very superior to his." Perhaps he had a system of spiritual diagnosis very superior to ours. In the epistle to the Angel of the Church of Thyatira, mention is made of "the woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess," who led astray the servants of Christ. St. John surely addresses himself to a community where influences precisely of this kind exist, and are recognised when he writes, - "Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world every spirit that confesseth not Jesus is not of God." The Church or Churches, which the First Epistle directly contemplates, did not consist of men just converted. Its whole language supposes Christians, some of whom had grown old and were "fathers" in the faith, while others who were younger enjoyed the privilege of having been born and brought up in a Christian atmosphere. They are reminded again and again, with a reiteration which would be unaccountable if it had no special significance, that the commandment "that which they heard," "the word," "the message," is the same which they had "from the beginning." Now this will exactly suit the circumstances of a Church like the Ephesian, to which another Apostle had originally preached the Gospel many years before. On the whole, we have in favour of assigning these Epistles to Ionian and Ephesian surroundings a considerable amount of external evidence. The general characteristics of the First Epistle consonant with the view of their origin which we have advocated are briefly these:
(1) It is addressed to readers who were encompassed by peculiar temptations to make a compromise with idolatry.
(2) It has an amplitude and generality of tone which befitted one who wrote to a Church which embraced members from many countries, and was thus in contact with men of many races and religions.
(3) It has a peculiar solemnity of reference to the invisible world of spiritual evil and to its terrible influence upon the human mind.
(4) The Epistle is pervaded by a desire to have it recognised that the creed and law of practice which it asserts is absolutely one with that which had been proclaimed by earlier heralds of the cross to the same community.
Every one of these characteristics is consistent with the destination of the Epistle for the Christians of Ephesus in the first instance. Its polemical element, which we are presently to discuss, adds to an accumulation of coincidences which no ingenuity can volatilise away. The Epistle meets Ephesian circumstances; it also strikes at Ionian heresies. Aia-so-Louk, the modern name of Ephesus, appears to be derived from two Greek words, which speak of St. John the Divine, the theologian of the Church. As the memory of the Apostle haunts the city where he so long lived, even in its fall and long decay under its Turkish conquerors, -and the fatal spread of the malaria from the marshes of the Cayster-so a memory of the place seems to rest in turn upon the Epistle, and we read it more satisfactorily while we assign to it the origin attributed to it by Christian antiquity, and keep that memory before our minds.
William Robertson Nicoll, ed., The Expositor's Bible (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1887–1910) — public domain. 65 of 66 books (1 Corinthians is not separately keyed, as that volume carries no machine-parseable verse references); section-level commentary keyed to the opening verse. Introductory and overview sections not keyed to a specific passage are excluded.
B. W. Johnson 1891 · Public Domain 21. Keep yourselves from idols. Flee from idolatry, the…
21. Keep yourselves from idols. Flee from idolatry, the besetting sin of that age. So too we need to flee from the idols of our age. Whatever takes our worship from God is an idol.
Note. —Sin in the First Epistle of John. A comparison of passages will show that an extreme and false doctrine might be reached by pressing one class to the exclusion of another class. I give a list:
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I. If we say that we have no sin we deceive ourselves, 1:8. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive our sins, 1:9. If we say we have not sinned we make him a liar, 1:10. If any man sin (man is not in the Greek), we have an Advocate with the Father, 2:1. I write these things that you may sin not, 2:1. If any man see his brother sinning a sin not unto death, 5:16. There is a sin not unto death, 5:17.
These passages all refer to Christians; they teach their liability to sin; show how they may obtain pardon, and show how also they should labor to save an erring brother. One the other hand there is another class which teaches that the Christian is freed from sin.
II. The blood of Jesus his Son cleanses from all sin, 1:7. Whosoever abideth in him sinneth not, 3:6. He cannot sin because he is begotten of God, 3:9. Whosoever is begotten of God sinneth not, 5:18.
If this second class of passages was alone considered they would teach apparently the absolute holiness of the saint. The two classes are to be interpreted in the light of each other. They teach that the germ of sin, dormant, perhaps, remains in us as long as we are in the flesh. “The flesh lusteth against the Spirit.” We “may be overtaken in a fault,” the dormant germ waken, and we be betrayed into sin for the moment. The sin is due to the temporary revival of the old nature. The new nature, the spiritual being born of the new birth, is not disposed to sin, and will be destroyed if the sin is wilful and continued. One born of God cannot engage in willful sin. Nor can he who abides in Christ. He who becomes a wilful sinner does not abide in Christ, nor remain a child of God.
B. W. Johnson's The People's New Testament with Notes (1889–1891) — public domain. Electronic text from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL) ThML edition.
Alexander MacLaren 1905 · Public Domain 1 John
1 John
THE LAST WORDS OF THE LAST APOSTLE
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1Jn 5:20-21
So the Apostle ends his letter. These words are probably not only the close of this epistle, but the last words, chronologically, of Scripture. The old man gathers together his ebbing force to sum up his life’s work in a sentence, which might be remembered though much else was forgotten. Last words stick. Perhaps, too, some thought of future generations, to whom his witness might come, passed across his mind. At all events, some thought that we are here listening to the last words of the last Apostle may well be in ours. You will observe that, in this final utterance, the Apostle drops the triumphant ‘we know,’ which we have found in previous sermons reiterated with such emphasis. He does so, not because he doubted that all his brethren would gladly attest and confirm what he was about to say, but because it was fitting that his last words should be his very own; the utterance of personal experience, and weighty with it, and with apostolic authority. So he smelts all that he had learned from Christ, and had been teaching for fifty years, into that one sentence. The feeble voice rings out clear and strong; and then softens into tremulous tones of earnest exhortation, and almost of entreaty. The dying light leaps up in one bright flash: the lamp is broken, but the flash remains. And if we will let it shine into our lives, we shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.
I. Here we have the sum of all that we need to know about God.
‘This is the true God.’ The first question is, What or whom does John mean by ‘this’?
Grammatically, we may refer the word to the immediately preceding name, Jesus Christ. But it is extremely improbable that the Apostle should so suddenly shift his point of view, as he would do if, having just drawn a clear distinction between ‘Him that is true,’ and the Christ who reveals Him, he immediately proceeded to apply the former designation to Jesus Christ Himself. It is far more in accordance with his teaching, and with the whole scope of the passage, if by ‘ this’ we understand the Father of whom he has just been speaking. It is no tautology that he reiterates in this connection that He is ‘ true.’ For he has separated now his own final attestation from the common consciousness of the Christian community with which he has previously been dealing. And when he says, ‘This is the true God’ he means to say, ‘ This God of whom I have been affirming that Jesus Christ is His sole Revealer, and of whom I have been declaring that through Jesus Christ we may know Him and dwell abidingly in Him,’’ this’-and none else-’ is the true God.’
Then the second question that I have to answer briefly is, what does John mean by ‘true’? I had occasion, in a previous sermon on the foregoing words, to point out that by that expression he means, whenever he uses it, some person or thing whose nature and character correspond to his or its name, and who is essentially and perfectly that which the name expresses. If we take that as the signification of the word, we just come to this, that the final assertion into which the old Apostle flings all his force, and which he wishes to stand out prominent as his last word to his brethren and to the world, is that the God revealed in Jesus Christ, and with whom a man through Jesus Christ may have fellowship of knowledge and friendship-that He and none but He answers to all that men mean when they speak of a God; that He, if I might use such an expression, fully fills the part.
Brethren, if we but think that, however it comes {no matter about that}, every man has in him a capacity of conceiving of a perfect Being, of righteousness, power, purity, and love, and that all through the ages of the world’s yearnings there has never been presented to it the realization of that dim conception, but that all idolatry, all worship, has failed in bodying out a Person who would answer to the requirements of a man’s spirit, then we come to the position in which these final words of the old fisherman go down to a deeper depth than all the world’s wisdom, and carry a message of consolation and a true gospel to be found nowhere besides.
Whatsoever embodiments men may have tried to give to their dim conception of a God, these have been always limitations, and often corruptions, of it. And to limit or to separate is, in this case, to destroy. No pantheon can ever satisfy the soul of man who yearns for One Person in whom all that he can dream of beauty, truth, and goodness shall be ensphered. A galaxy of stars, white as the whitest spot in the Milky Way, can never be a substitute for the sun. ‘This is the true God’; and all others are corruptions, or limitations, or divisions, of the indissoluble unity.
Then, are men to go for ever and ever with ‘the blank misgivings of a creature, moving about in worlds not realized’? Is it true that I can fancy some one far greater than is? Is it true that my imagination can paint a nobler form than reality acknowledges? It is so, alas! unless we take John’s swan-song and last testimony as true, and say:-This God, manifest in Jesus Christ, on whose heart I can lay my head, and into whose undying and unstained light I can gaze, and in whose righteousness I can participate, this God is the real God; no dream, no projection from my own nature, magnified and cleansed, and thrown up first from the earth that it may come down from heaven, but the reality, of whom all human imaginations are but the faint transcripts, though they be the faithful prophets.
For, consider what it is that the world owes to Jesus Christ, in its knowledge of God. Remember that to us orphaned men He has come and said, as none ever said, and showed as none ever showed: ‘Ye are not fatherless; there is a Father in the heavens.’ Consider that to the world, sunk in sense and flesh, and blotting its most radiant imaginations of the Divine by some veil and hindrance, of corporeity and materialism, He comes, and has said, ‘God is a Spirit.’ Consider that, taught of Him, this Apostle, to whom was committed the great distinction of in monosyllables preaching central truths and in words that a child can apprehend, setting forth the depths that eternity and angels cannot comprehend, has said, ‘God is Light, and in Him is no darkness at all.’ And consider that he has set the apex on the shining pyramid, and spoken the last word when he has told us, ‘God is Love.’ And put these four revelations together, the Father; Spirit; unsullied Light; absolutely Love; and then let us bow down and say, ‘Thou hast said the truth, O aged Seer. This is our God; we have waited for Him, and He will save us. This-and none beside-is the true God,’ I know not what the modern world is to do for a God if it drifts away from Jesus Christ and His revelations. I know that it is always a dangerous way of arguing to try to force people upon alternatives, one of which is so repellent as to compel them to cling to the other. But it does seem to me that the whole progress of modern thought, with the advancement of modern physical science, and other branches of knowledge which perhaps are not yet to be called science, are all steadily converging on forcing us to this choice -will you have God in Christ, or, will you wander about in a Godless world, and for your highest certitude have to say,’ Perhaps’? ‘This is the true God,’ and if we go away from Him I do not know where we are to go.
II. Here we have the sum of His gifts to us.
‘This is the true God, and eternal life.’ Now, let us distinctly and emphatically put first that what is here declared is primarily something about God, and not about His gift to men; and that the two clauses, ‘the true God,’ and ‘eternal life,’ stand in precisely the same relation to the preceding words, ‘This is.’ That is to say, the revelation which John would lay upon our hearts, that from it there may spring up in them a wondrous hope, is that, in His own essential self, the God revealed in Jesus Christ, and brought into living fellowship with us by Him, is ‘eternal life.’ By ‘eternal life’ he means something a great deal more august than endless existence. He means a life which not only is not ended by time, but which is above time, and not subject to its conditions at all. Eternity is not time spun out for ever. And so we are not lifted up into a region where there is little light, but where the very darkness is light, just as the curtain was the picture, in the old story of the painter,
That seems to part us utterly from God. He is ‘eternal life’; then, we poor creatures down here, whose being is all ‘cribbed, cabined, and confined’ by succession, and duration, and the partitions of time, what can we have in common with Him? John answers for us. For, remember that in the earlier part of this epistle he writes that ‘the life was manifested, and we shew unto you that eternal life which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us,’ and ‘we declare it unto you; that ye also may have fellowship with us; and our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son.’ So, then, strange as it is, and beyond our thoughts as it is, there may pass into creatures that very eternal life which is in God, and was manifested in Jesus. We have to think of Him because we know Him to be love, as in essence self-communicating, and whatsoever a creature can receive, a loving Father, the true God, will surely give.
But we are not left to wander about in regions of mysticism and darkness. For we know this, that however strange and difficult the thought of eternal life as possessed by a creature may be, to give it was the very purpose for which Jesus Christ came on earth. ‘I am that Bread of Life.’ ‘I am come that they might have life, and have it more abundantly.’ And we are not left to grope in doubt as to what that eternal life consists in; for He has said:’ This is life eternal, that they might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent.’ Nor are we left in any more doubt as to that bond by which the whole fullness of this Divine gift may flow into a man’s spirit. For over and over again the Master Himself has declared, ‘He that believeth hath everlasting life.’
Thus, then, there is a life which belongs to God on His throne, a life lifted above the limitations of time, a life communicated by Jesus Christ, as the waters of some land-locked lake may flow down through a sparkling river, a life which consists in fellowship with God, a life which may be, and is, ours, on the simple condition of trusting Him who gives it, and a life which, eternal as it is, and destined to a glory all undreamed of, in that future beyond the grave, is now the possession of every man that puts forth the faith which is its condition. ‘He that believeth hath’-not shall have, in some distant future, but has to-day-’everlasting life,’ verily here and now. And so John lays this upon our hearts, as the ripe fruit of all his experience, and the meaning of all his message to the world, that God revealed in Christ ‘is the true God,’ and as Himself the possessor, is the source for us all, of life eternal.
III. Lastly, we have here the consequent sum of Christian effort.
‘Little children, keep yourselves from idols,’ seeing that ‘this is the true God,’ the only One that answers to your requirements, and will satisfy your desires. Do not go rushing to these shrines of false deities that crowd every corner of Ephesus-ay, and every corner of Manchester. For what does John mean by an idol? Does he mean that barbarous figure of Diana that stood in the great temple, hideous and monstrous? No! He means anything, or any person, that comes into the heart and takes the place which ought to be filled by God, and by Him only. What I prize most, what I trust most utterly, what I should be most forlorn if I lost; what is the working aim of my life, and the hunger of my heart-that is my idol. We all know that.
Is the exhortation not needed, my brother? In Ephesus it was hard to have nothing to do with heathenism. In that ancient world their religion, though it was a superficial thing, was intertwined with daily life in a fashion that puts us to shame. Every meal had its libation, and almost every act was knit by some ceremony or other to a god. So that Christian men and women had almost to go out of the world, in order to be free from complicity in the all-pervading idol-worship. Now, although the form has changed, and the fascinations of old idolatry belong only to a certain stage in the world’s culture and history, the temptation to idolatry remains just as subtle, just as all-pervasive, and the yielding to it just as absurd. You and I call ourselves Christians. We say we believe that there is nothing else, and nobody else, in the whole sweep of the universe that can satisfy our hearts, or be what our imagination can conceive, but God only. Having said that on the Sunday, what about Monday? They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living water, and hewed to themselves broken cisterns that can hold no water.’ ‘Little children’-for we are scarcely more mature than that-’little children, keep yourselves from idols.’
And how is it to be done? ‘Keep yourselves.’ Then you can do it, and you have to make a dead lift of effort, or be sure of this-that the subtle seduction will slide into your heart, and before you know it, you will be out of God’s sanctuary, and groveling in Diana’s temple. But it is not only our own effort that is needed, for just a sentence or two before, the Apostle had said: ‘He that is born of God ‘-that is, Christ- ‘keepeth us.’ So our keeping of ourselves is essentially our letting Him keep us. Stay inside the walls of the citadel, and you need not be afraid of the besiegers; go outside by letting your faith flag, and you will be captured or killed. Keep yourselves by clinging ‘to Him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless.’ Make experience by fellowship with Him who is the only true God, and able to satisfy your whole nature, mind, heart, will, and these false deities, the whole rabble of them, will have no power to tempt you to bow the knee.
Brethren! Here is the sum of the whole matter. There is one truth on which we can stay our hearts, one God in whom we can utterly trust, the God revealed in Jesus Christ. If we do not see Him in Christ, we shall not see Him at all, but wander about all our days in a world empty of solid reality. There is one gift which will satisfy all our needs, the gift of eternal life in Jesus Christ. There is one practical injunction which will save us from many a heartache, and which our weakness can never afford to neglect, and that is to keep ourselves from all false worship. These golden words of my text, in their simplicity, in their depth, in their certainty, in their comprehensiveness, are worthy to be the last words of Revelation; and to stand to all the world, through all ages, as the shining apex, or the solid foundation, or the central core of Christianity. ‘This’-this, and none else- ‘is the true God and eternal life. Little children, keep yourselves from idols.’
Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture (1904–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Tyndale Open Study Notes 2022 · CC BY-SA 4.0 5:21 In closing, John exhorts his flock to keep…
5:21 In closing, John exhorts his flock to keep away from anything that might take God’s place in your hearts (literally keep yourselves from idols). In the context of 1 John, the primary idol would be any false teaching that takes people away from Jesus Christ, who is at once fully man and fully God.
Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.