How do you know you’re following God? Use your brain.

1 John 3.19-22.

More than once, the apostles talk about how we gotta follow our personal convictions. “Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind.” Ro 14.5 KJV Don’t just follow the crowd; or in the context of 1 John, don’t just follow the dictates of society; don’t just succumb to peer pressure. Decide for yourself.

Skeptical pagans like to claim that’s the very opposite of what Christians do. Unfortunately these pagans ain’t wrong. There is so much conformity in Christendom. It’s even encouraged.

Peer pressure, as I discovered back when I was teaching middle school, is such a useful way to get the kids to behave! Get the popular kids to do as you want, and most of the rest will fall in line, which is way easier than working on all of ’em individually. Thing is, are the kids who are doing as I want, doing the right thing? I certainly hoped and believed so… but I know I’m hardly infallible; I know better than to not second-guess myself. Other Christians never second-guess themselves. Too many Christians in leadership never second-guess themselves. They could be—and occasionally are—woefully wrong. But, like me, they’re trying to use peer pressure to make their flocks behave as they want, and the sheep are following right along.

And that’s actually not what God wants in his kingdom. He wants us to follow Jesus, not some wolf in sheep’s clothing who’s manipulating us for fun and profit. And how do we know they’re secretly wolves? Well, if you talk to your average Christian, they’re gonna know better because they “felt a check in my spirit”—their gut told them something was amiss, and they know to follow their gut. But if you talk to Jesus, he’s gonna tell us to use our brains, and look at their fruit.

Matthew 7.16-20 KJV

16Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? 17Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. 18A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. 19Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. 20Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

Following your gut isn’t as effective as you imagine. Your gut usually consists of your emotions, and your emotions are easily manipulated. If an unscrupulous church leader realizes you’re getting wise to him, he’ll quickly pivot to things that’ll trigger your emotions. Fear, usually. Fear’s easy to invoke, and automatically shuts most people down, ’cause they’re too afraid to think, and run on instinct instead—either fight, flight, or freeze, and an unscrupulous leader prefers any of those things to an actual reckoning.

In any event, God didn’t give us our guts so we’d be led by them. He gave us an organ to actually think with. We know it as our brain, though in biblical times people believed it was the heart, which is why I sometimes gotta translate καρδία/kardía, “heart,” as “mind.” He expects us to use our minds—to be wise—and figure out whether something’s legitimately a God-thing, or isn’t. Is it fruitful? Then it’s probably God. Is it fleshly? Then it’s likely not. Does it feel good? Doesn’t matter; that’s your gut, and your gut’s part of your flesh, and stop following your flesh and pretending it’s your spirit. Or worse, the Holy Spirit—you realize that’s skirting blasphemy, right?

John advises likewise. Are you not sure you’re actually following God? Well, use your head. That is why God put a brain in your body. It’s not just to memorize pop songs.

1 John 3.19-22 KWL

19This is how we’ll know

we’re acting out of truth;

how we’ll be persuaded in our mind

before God:

20When the mind condemns us.

God is greater than our mind,

and knows everything.

21Beloved, when our mind doesn’t condemn us,

we should be bold for God.

22Whatever we might ask,

we should receive from God,

for we keep his commands

and we do pleasing things before him.

If you don’t love fellow Christians you’re a murderer.

1 John 3.13-18.

True, that’s a clickbaity kind of title. But it’s exactly what the apostle John wrote in his first letter. To quote the King James: “Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer, and ye know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him.” 1Jn 3.15 KJV I also coulda titled this piece, “If you don’t love fellow Christians you’re going to hell.” Just as valid.

Now yes, the word I keep translating as “fellow Christians” is ἀδελφοί/adelfí, “brothers, siblings.” In context it means sister and brother Christians; fellow adoptive children of God; fellow Christians. John’s addressing Christians. And also addressing the way Christians behave towards fellow Christians—right after he told ’em to reject society because society’s rejected God. And if society encourages us to reject our fellow Christians, we should all the more reject society.

This includes “Christian” society. Really, Christianist society—it pretends to be Christian, pretends to love Jesus, but it has its own set of values which have more to do with prestige and wealth and prejudices and nationalism—and way too often, white supremacy. It’ll encourage Christians to reject and shun and disavow their fellow Christians who are poor, who are “sinning” (whether they’re legitimately sinning or not), who have different politics, who do anything they might disapprove of for the pettiest of reasons. Christianists, like hypocrites, only care about how things look. Not about the sort of grace we need to extend to everybody—and fellow Christians especially.

In John’s day, in the Roman Empire, not helping out somebody who’s in a bind might have dire consequences. Results which might lead to their death. Your fellow Christian might be deathly ill, or starving and have no way to get food, or their debts were gonna get them sold into slavery and you never know what sort of slaveowners they’d get—and there’s a good chance they’d be awful people who worked their slaves to death. Little acts of compassion might save a life. Big acts would definitely save a life. But apathy? It’s still true that apathy kills.

So nope, it’s not hyperbole when John says hating your fellow Christian makes you a murderer. And it’s totally valid to wonder whether Christians who lack compassion are even Christian, are even destined for eternal life. That lack of grace in ’em? That suggests they never accepted the grace of God. They’ve nothing to pay forward.

1 John 3.13-18 KWL

13Fellow Christians, don’t be amazed

if society hates you².

14We knew we passed over from death to life,

for we love our fellow Christians.

One who doesn’t love fellow Christians

remains in death.

15Everyone who hates their¹ fellow Christian

is a murderer,

and you² knew no murderer has life in the age to come

remaining within them.¹

16This is how we knew love:

That man Jesus laid down his soul for us.

So we’re obliged to lay down our souls

for our fellow Christians.

17Whenever one might have a life in society,

and might see one’s fellow Christian having need,

and might shut off one’s compassion towards them:¹

How does God’s love remain in that person?

18Children, we ought not love in word nor speech,

but in work and truth.

Pentecost.

Our word Pentecost comes from the Greek τὴν ἡμέραν τῆς πεντηκοστῆς/tin iméran tis pentikostís, “the 50th day” Ac 2.1 —the Greek term for שָׁבֻעֹת֙/Šavuót, which falls 50 days after Passover. It’s also called the Feast of Weeks; it’s when the ancient Hebrews harvested their wheat. Ex 34.22 On 6 Sivan in the Hebrew calendar, they were expected to come to temple and present a grain offering to the LORD. Dt 16.9-12 Oh, and tithe a tenth of it to celebrate with—and every third year, put that tithe in the community granary.

Why do Christians celebrate a Hebrew harvest festival? (And have separate “harvest parties” in October?) Well we don’t celebrate it Hebrew-style: We consider it the last day of Easter, and we celebrate it for a whole other reason. In the year 33—the year Jesus died, rose, and was raptured—the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus’s new church on Pentecost. Happened like so:

Acts 2.1-4 NRSVue

1When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. 2And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

The speaking-in-tongues part is why the 20th century Christian movement which has a lot of tongues-speaking in it, is called Pentecostalism. Weirdly, a lot of us Pentecostals never bother to keep track of when Pentecost rolls around. I don’t get it. I blame anti-Catholicism a little. Anyway, Luke goes on:

Acts 2.5-13 NRSVue

5Now there were devout Jews from every people under heaven living in Jerusalem. 6And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. 7Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? 8And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? 9Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, 11Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” 12All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” 13But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

Christians like to call this “the first Pentecost.” Obviously it wasn’t; the first Pentecost, or Šavuót, or Feast of Weeks, was after the Exodus. It’s when every devout Jew on earth was bringing their grain offerings to temple on that very day, 25 May 33. And suddenly a house full of Galileans broke out in every language they knew—spoken to as if to them personally.

Got their attention.

Satan’s excuses precede lawless Christians.

1 John 3.7-12.

Many of the verses from today’s passage tend to be yanked out of context.

• “Let no one deceive you” 1Jn 3.7 —used to refer to anything which might trick or mislead Christians, from heresy to the latest internet conspiracy theories.
• “The Son of God came to destroy the works of the devil” 1Jn 3.8 —treated as though it’s the only reason Jesus came to earth, so certain dark Christians use it to justify their fixation on demonology instead of good news.
• “Everyone borne of God doesn’t sin” 1Jn 3.9 —used to condemn Christians who do sin, instead of encouraging them (really, all of us) to go back into the light.
• And of course those folks who wanna interpret the Cain and Abel story to make Cain an irredeemably evil person… instead of recognizing the LORD and Cain had a conversational relationship, Ge 4.9-15 and God obviously wanted to redeem Cain, not destroy him. (Otherwise he’d have destroyed him!)

All right, best I jump into the text before unpacking it.

1 John 3.7-12 KWL

7Children, let no one deceive you:²

Doing what’s proper is right,

just like Christ is right.

8Doing sin is of the devil,

because the devil sins from the very start.

This is why God’s Son appeared:

To undo the devil’s works.

9Everyone reborn by God doesn’t do sin,

for God’s seed remains in them.¹

They¹ can’t sin,

because they’ve¹ been reborn by God.

10This is how God’s children

and the devil’s children are identified:

Everyone who doesn’t act properly,

who doesn’t love their fellow Christian, isn’t of God.

11This is the message you² heard from the beginning:

We should love one another.

12Not like Cain,

who murdered his brother Abel out of evil.

Why did Cain murder him?

Because Cain’s works were evil.

The works of his brother Abel were proper.

John wrote this right after he defined sin as violating the Law. Parts of the Law are still totally valid. (The ritual sacrifice and ritual cleanliness parts are redundant, and the rules for native Israelis and Israel’s descendants don’t apply to nonresidents and gentiles.) Following those valid parts is still what God expects of a saved people: Now that we belong to Jesus, be like Jesus. He didn’t sin; we shouldn’t sin.

So John went on to say his readers shouldn’t let themselves get tricked into thinking otherwise. ’Cause plenty of us have been deceiving ourselves for years. Like the Christians who are anti-Law, who think Jesus nullified God’s Old Testament commands and therefore nothing’s a sin anymore. John cuts right through this rubbish: If you don’t resist sin, if you don’t behave as God’s children ought, you’re not one of his children. “Everyone reborn by God doesn’t do sin.” 1Jn 3.9 He doesn’t, so we shouldn’t.

No, this doesn’t mean Christians never ever sin. Of course we do. Hence grace. The proper idea, reflected in some translations, is N.T. Wright’s “Everyone who is fathered by God does not go on sinning.” 1Jn 3.8 NTE We don’t continue in a lifestyle of sin; we don’t wanna live that way. We want to follow Jesus!

And people who legitimately wanna follow Jesus, crack open their bibles and find out what Jesus taught so we can follow him. What they’ll invariably find is Jesus took the Law, expounded upon it, and closed all the Pharisee loopholes. We’re not to follow the letter of the Law, like any lawyer, politician, or activist judge; we don’t twist it till it suits us. We’re to follow the original intent of the Law, “the spirit of the Law,” the will of the One who gave it. How does Jesus interpret it? ’Cause we do that.

Those who don’t really wanna follow Jesus, but only look like they do: They prefer loopholes. The bigger the better. They like to quote “Christ is the end of the Law,” Ro 10.4 but they don’t mean, as Paul does, that Christ expresses it better than the Law does itself; they mean Christ ended it. Or “He taketh away the first [Law], that he may establish the second [Law],” He 10.9 not just updating the old covenant with the new, but abolishing it altogether, so that breaking the Law is no longer sin, 1 John 3.4—

1 John 3.4 KWL

Everyone who commits sin also violates the Law.

Sin’s against the Law.

—notwithstanding.

No, this passage isn’t about perfectionism either. John isn’t claiming Christians don’t sin anymore. He already objected to that idea in chapter 1. What he’s stating, is real Christians try not to sin. We no longer consider a lifestyle of sin to be acceptable. “Not perfect, just forgiven” simply isn’t good enough! We have God’s seed in us, the Holy Spirit within us, leading us away from sin and selfishness, and towards Jesus. If we’re following him, we recognize sin is the opposite direction. We don’t make excuses for it any longer!

And if we do make excuses for it… well we’re not God’s children. Really we’re Satan’s.

If you think it’s okay to dismiss the Law, you clearly don’t know Jesus.

1 John 3.4-6.

And now we get to the parts of 1 John which really bug Christians.

1 John 3.4-6 KWL

4Everyone who commits sin also violates the Law.

Sin’s against the Law.

5You² knew Jesus was revealed

so he could take away our sins,

and there’s no sin in him.

6Everyone who remains in Jesus doesn’t sin:

Everyone who sins has neither seen him, nor knows him.

“Violates the Law” is my translation of τὴν ἀνομίαν ποιεῖ/tin anomían piheí, literally “does the anti-Law.” (KJV has “transgresseth… the law”; NIV “breaks the law.”) I capitalize Law because John wasn’t writing about Roman law; plenty of Roman laws encouraged if not committed sin. John meant the Law of Moses, the Hebrew Law, the תּוֹרָה/Toráh. The stuff God commanded the Hebrews at Sinai and thereafter. It’s the formal part of the relationship between the LORD and Israel, the backbone of Hebrew culture, the foundation of the Old Testament, the basis of the commands and interpretations Jesus himself presented to his students, and the backdrop of the Christian religion we practice to facilitate our own relationship with the LORD through Jesus.

The Law warned the Hebrews if they didn’t stick to it, the LORD would remove his hand and their enemies would have at ’em. And history has recorded they really didn’t stick to it. Time and again the LORD had to let Israel’s enemies crap all over them; then when they finally returned to him, he rescued them. The whole point of the Pharisee denomination was to break this cycle once and for all: Create schools which taught the Law to every Hebrew in every generation, make ’em experts in it, and they’d never break it again.

Problem is, some Pharisees missed the point, and thought following the Law saved them. After all, it broke the cycle and kept their enemies back! But that’s not how salvation works. The LORD already saved his people; that’s what the Exodus is about. And now that you’re a saved people, how ought you live? Good question; the Law is the LORD’s answer. Live like this.

But I should point out, same as other comparative religion scholars have pointed out, most Pharisees knew better. Paul was a Pharisee, Pp 3.5, Ac 23.6 and properly articulated the Pharisee view: Nobody’s saved by the Law. That’s not its purpose. That makes people think we’re saved by good deeds and good karma—and unsaved by bad deeds and bad karma. The Law doesn’t save; God does. His grace does. And grace forgives when we slip up and break the Law from time to time. Don’t break the Law; but when we do, we have Jesus. 1Jn 2.1 Our relationship with the LORD is more than merely the Law. It’s not contractual obligations: “I did such-and-so, and now you owe me salvation.” No he doesn’t. But he wants to save us.

So what was Jesus’s beef with Pharisees? Cherry-picking which commands they wanted to enforce, and which ones they’d create loopholes to slip through. Inconsistency. Hypocrisy. You know, all the stuff we Christians commit too.

And contrary to what the scriptures teach, many a Christian claims a giant loophole in the Law: They claim Jesus did away with it. The New Covenant wholly cancels out the old one. Because we’re saved by grace not Law, it’s okay to ignore the Law; even willfully break it.

So when John writes stuff like “Sin’s against the Law,” such Christians’ visceral reaction is to ignore John. Or explain him away, till he means nothing—same as they figure the Law means. They don’t wanna follow the Law. They don’t wanna quit sinning. Much easier to claim nothing’s a sin, or claim God’s reduced all the commands to the ten… plus abortion, homosexuality, and anything else which bugs them personally. Funny how their idea of God only hates the things they do.

Making Christians like us, like God.

1 John 3.2-3.

Elsewhere in the New Testament, Paul, Silas, and Timothy wrote that we’re gonna get raptured at Jesus’s second coming: Dead Christians will be resurrected, living Christians will be transformed into our resurrected selves, and all of us will meet Jesus in the air. 1Th 4.15-18

These sinful sacks of meat we currently carry around: They get swapped for something eternal, to match the eternal life God always meant for us to have. They no longer have the same self-preservation instincts we currently do, ’cause they last forever… and therefore these instincts won’t go overboard and become self-centered and depraved. Our first impulse won’t be to do the selfish, sinful thing; it’ll be to do as Jesus does. Christians call this “the new nature.” Human nature is considered selfish and fallible, but this’ll become the new human nature: Selfless and Spirit-led.

Plus we can finally see Jesus as he really is. Without freaking out, Mk 9.2-8 passing out, Rv 1.17 or going blind. Ac 9.4-9

This is what John refers to in today’s 1 John snippet:

1 John 3.2-3 KWL

2Beloved, we’re now God’s children—

and God’s not yet revealed what we will be.

We’ve known once he reveals it, we will be like God:

We will see him as he is.

3Everyone who has this hope in God:

He cleans them like he is clean.

Now the bit about becoming like God: This tends to weird out certain Christians. Partly ’cause a number of us misinterpret it and think we’re gonna become gods. Lowercase-G gods; we certainly won’t be the God, like Jesus is. But uppercase or lowercase, the idea of us having any form of divinity strikes em as disturbing.

Society doesn’t know what to make of Christ-followers.

1 John 3.1.

John didn’t write any of his books and letters with chapters and verses. Medieval Christians added them. They gave every line in the bible an address, so we could more easily find it. It’s so useful! But every so often, it splits a sentence, paragraph, or train of thought, right where it ought not. As a result Christians tend to lose the train of thought, if not miss it altogether.

• Don’t love society, which is passing away. 1Jn 2.15-17
• Don’t be misled by antichrists; you know better. 1Jn 2.18-23
• Hold on to what you learned in the beginning. 1Jn 2.24-29
• After all, society doesn’t understand us, or God, anyway. 1Jn 3.1
• Meanwhile clean yourselves up. Jesus is coming! 1Jn 3.2-3
• And stop sinning, wouldya? 1Jn 3.4-6

And so on. But today’s bit is gonna zero in on that bit about society not understanding us Christians.

The word from 1 John I translate “society” is κόσμος/kósmos, which the KJV and other bibles translate “world.” That’s imprecise. In context, John means the social order of the world, which is why I’m translating it that way, as I’ve explained elsewhere. Ideally, our social order should be harmonious like God intended, but people are inherently selfish and ruin that order. You’ve seen it aplenty.

1 John 3.1 KWL

Look at the kind of love the Father gives us:

We can be called God’s children!

And we are!

This is why society doesn’t understand us:

It doesn’t understand God.

The Textus Receptus deleted καί ἐσμεν/ké ésmen, “and we are.” John Wycliffe (who translated his bible from the Vulgate) somehow learned these words oughta be included it, but he rendered them “and be [his] sons.” 1Jn 3.1 WYC But the Geneva Bible, following the Textus, dropped ’em—as did the King James.) John included it ’cause it makes clear we’re not merely called God’s kids, as if it’s an honorary title: He adopted us. We legitimately are his kids. And he’s legitimately our Father.

Yeah. We are. Us scumbags. Many a Christian is in utter denial about being scumbags, but the cold hard truth is we totally don’t merit adoption by God; we merit hell. But God loves us so much, he graciously offers us a route out of hell, a place in his family, a room in his kingdom, his presence (he himself!) to live within us and empower us to do mighty things in his name. It’s a hugely disproportionate response to humanity. It’s a massive act of love.

And society doesn’t get this at all. Because society doesn’t do grace. It does karma.

Whenever we get anything resembling grace from our fellow human beings and our governments, society insists there be some level of merit and reciprocity as part of the package. If you’re getting food stamps you darned well better deserve to get food stamps, and how dare you buy “luxuries” with those food stamps, like beef and soda and name-brand breakfast cereals. Meanwhile billionaires get all their taxes forgiven: We should only give freebees to deserving people.

The only exception society recognizes, is inheritance: If a billionaire begets a kid, the kid inherits the billions. Doesn’t matter how utterly useless and stupid this kid might grow up to be, and European royal history (and, for people who don’t know squat about history, reality TV shows) has shown us time and again they can be profoundly stupid and useless. Doesn’t matter how dangerous it can be to put a mighty estate into the hands of a moron. He might hire immoral managers for his companies, and create poisonous products instead of healthy ones. She might implode her newly inherited companies, destroy jobs, and ruin lives. Even so, inheritance is largely accepted by society; if a rich mother wishes to indulge her prodigal daughter, people shrug and say, “Well it’s her money.” But if that same woman wishes to adopt some ill-behaved stranger, make her a daughter, and enrich her? Society will figure she’s lost her mind.

Well, our heavenly Father is lost-his-mind gracious to us. And likewise, society doesn’t get this. They think any religion with sense should make us earn our spots in God’s kingdom, not just get ’em for free. (And the gnostic groups of John’s day didn’t just make their followers earn heaven: They had to pay out the yin-yang for it too.) Free, unlimited grace?—you gotta be nuts. Buncha liberals.