Word of Salvation – Vol. 28 No. 12 – May 1983
Koinonia
Sermon by Rev. J. W. Deenick, v.d.m. on 1John 1:3,4
Scripture Reading: John 20:24-31; 1John 1
Liturgy: BoW 11:1,2,5; PsH 275; 276; 411:1,2,5; BoW 702
Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ,
Four times the apostle John uses the word fellowship in this first chapter of his first letter. The Greek word for it is ‘koinonia’. In South Australia we use that word for the name of our Classical Church Paper; we call it Koinonia.
In the N.T. it is not always translated in the same way. Sometimes it is translated as fellowship, as here in this chapter. But it is also translated as communion or as participation. For instance when Paul says in 1Cor.10: “The bread which we break, is it not a communion with (or a participation in) the body of Christ?” The bread and the wine of the Supper represent a communion with the body and blood of Jesus. In that sense it is correct to speak of the Holy Supper as a Holy Communion, a Holy Koinonia.
John is obviously deeply interested in that aspect of the Christian life. We should have fellowship first of all with God our Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ, and then also in that way we should have fellowship with one another.
But what do we really mean with the N.T. word fellowship? It is not the same as companionship. Unless you are very much a loner, you will be keen on company. Most people seem to need company of some kind, but we seek it in different directions. Some indeed seek it in the church; but others prefer the company they find in the casino and the hotel. But what the N.T. means with fellowship is something radically different from companionship or even friendship.
For one thing companionship and friendship are based on compatibility or congeniality. We like to be friends with people whose company we enjoy, people we like; pleasant people and our type of people. And then we have a great time together, so long as we find each other agreeable company.
But that is not what the N.T. means with koinonia. God keeps koinonia with even the most disagreeable people, because the fellowship He keeps is based on mercy and forgiving love. We see that in the Lord Jesus. He kept company with impossible characters and he established real fellowship with them. It is this kind of fellowship that we should have in church. The question whether people are nice or not so nice, your type or my type and enjoyable company, should not come into it at all. In the church I have fellowship with people some of whom are really quite strange, because of their personality, because of their background, because of their idiosyncrasies, but that does not worry me at all. I may well be one of these abnormal cases myself. Yet, I believe that within the church of Jesus Christ we have koinonia, because we all need one Saviour and we have found him in Jesus Christ.
As a matter of fact in the church I have a deep and very intimate communion with all who know their own sins and silliness and find the forgiveness for it in the atoning work of Christ, in His suffering and death. At the cross we discover our unity and we celebrate it at the Supper. Now, John speaks about this with great power here in this first chapter, and as we listen to him we hear the Word of God concerning the one and only avenue to real fellowship. For real fellowship, he says, we must hold on to the apostolic witness concerning Jesus Christ; that will give us fellowship with the Father and the Son, and with one another; and it will make our joy complete.
First this: we cannot understand John’s writings very well, his letters, his Revelation or his Gospel, unless we realise that John wrote all of his much later than e.g. Paul wrote his letters or Luke wrote his gospel. Much later, and under totally different circumstances. After the day of Pentecost John stayed on at Jerusalem and worked there in that (then very large) church for a good many years; possibly until the year 50. Then he started travelling, evangelising among Jews and gentiles. He worked in Asia Minor and possibly in Rome where he may have been at the time when Paul and Peter died there as martyrs for their Lord. After that he returned to Asia Minor where he settled in the city of Ephesus. Paul had worked there, and there was a large church at Ephesus; but it was the apostle John who became the recognised spiritual leader in that city and in that region. For a little while he was kept in exile on the island of Patmos, where he saw the visions of the Apocalypse; but later he returned to Ephesus and to the other six churches in that province of which we read in Revelation 2 and 3, Laodicea, Smyrna, Philadelphia and the others.
In those 30 years since Paul’s death many things had changed in the church. There were still problems, but different problems now. For example: the Judaisers who had caused so much division in the church in Paul’s days weren’t as much of a problem anymore. They had tried to re-introduce the whole of the Mosaic Law and the traditions of the rabbis in the church. But that was past history. John’s problems were different. He wasn’t confronted with Jewish but with pagan ideas and pagan philosophy entering the church.
John saw the danger of that. In the Ephesian church there was a man called Cerinthus. He said: John is a good man and we should respect him, but he and the other apostles have misunderstood Jesus Christ. They never properly distinguished between the man Jesus and the Christ, the Son of God. It was only when Jesus of Nazareth was baptised by John in the Jordan that the Son of God entered the man Jesus and took hold of him. The Son of God is a spiritual being and the N.T. teaches that the Spirit of the Son of God entered Jesus then and there, and stayed with Him until the time of His suffering and death. When Jesus taught His disciples and did His miracles He did that through the Spirit of the Son in Him. But the Son being a spiritual being cannot suffer or die; the Son left the person of Jesus before His actual passion began.
Now these doctrines, when they began to penetrate the church, had very serious consequences also for the life of the church. Cerinthus and his followers believed that since the body was really more of a hindrance than of a help in our Christian life and since the body was destined to die anyway, it did not really matter that much how we lived in the body as long as we were spiritually advancing. How do you live at the spiritual level? that was the question.
When John heard of all that and saw it upsetting the church he found it necessary to speak out against it with all the strength he still had. We see that in the book of Revelation; we see it here in his letters and we find it back again in his gospel. He says: this is a false gospel and if you follow these teachings you cannot have fellowship with the Father or with the Son. We find this not just in this text; we find it even more clearly in the chapters 2 and 4. “Who is the liar? It is the man who denies that Jesus is the Christ.” “Every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus (that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh) is not from God,” (2:22 and 4:3,4).
Now, that may come as quite a surprise. We often refer to John as the apostle of love. Paul is the man of doctrine; John the man of love. But here it is John who raises a point of doctrine and says: unless you have your doctrine right, unless you believe rightly concerning Jesus Christ, unless you believe what we have always told you, you cannot have fellowship with either the Father or the Son, and that means that you cannot be saved. No wonder that in the early church they did not call John the apostle of love, they called him the Theologian.
Well, we should not be so amazed that John sounded the warning signal. The very heart of the gospel was at stake.
John says here: we proclaim to you what we have seen and heard. He says: we know what we are talking about. We have heard Him, we have seen Him, we have touched Him with our hands. We have travelled with Him throughout Palestine; we have touched His body after the resurrection. In Jesus Christ the Son of God was with us; eternal life was with us. That has been our message to you, and it still is. We proclaim it to you that you too should have fellowship with the Father and the Son; and with us.
It is of great importance that we see clearly what John means.
You and I, we cannot have fellowship with God or with Christ except by listening to, and by believing, the apostolic testimony concerning Jesus Christ. We cannot even properly know God or know Jesus Christ except by listening to and by believing what they have told us of their experiences.
What they have seen, we believe.
What they have heard, we rely on.
What they have touched, we hold on to by faith.
This is the only way for us to have koinonia, intimate association, with God and with Jesus Christ.
It is through their eyes as it were that we see, and through their ears that we hear. Jesus Christ enters my heart, and lives in my heart, through their testimony. God speaks to me through their words.
There is no communion with God for any sinner but through the apostolic witness.
It is important that we see that clearly, because there are still always people who like Cerinthus, are not satisfied with it.
A man from Murray Bridge (South Australia) who had heard me speak on the radio about the Bible as the Word of God wrote me a few long letters. He said: I do not need the Bible. I have a direct relationship with God. He speaks to me wonderful things directly. He gives me peace and joy and insight in the deepest questions of life directly; and I see His glory, quite apart from the Bible. The Bible is for dullards, for the unenlightened, for the carnal Christian. We do not need the Bible anymore. Some of us aren’t even Christians, but we still have this direct relationship, this intimate koinonia with God.
So, there you are: in 1983, right there in Murray Bridge, Cerinthus still has his followers. And there are many more, people who cannot be satisfied with what Jesus said to Thomas: Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed what has been revealed to the apostles on their behalf.
It was the apostle John who remembered and reported these words of Jesus spoken to Thomas; and it was John who remembered that Jesus once prayed: Father, I pray for those who through their word will believe in Me.
We better take note of that. John says: through our apostolic word you believe and you have koinonia with God the Father and with Jesus Christ His Son, and in that way also with us.
Even at the Lord’s Table that is true. Through the bread and the wine we have communion with God and with Christ, but not without the medium of the apostolic message. We take, eat, remember and believe. Remember what, and believe what? What the apostles have told us about Christ and His cross and His resurrection. Only in that way are we able to meet God, also at the table of the holy communion. We hear God the Father say to our soul: my son, my daughter, I have received you; I have forgiven you; I give you eternal life. And we hear the Son say: I died for you and I live for you and I give you my Holy Spirit. I will not forsake you and in the hour of death I will be there right next to you, to lead you to paradise. But we hear all this through the Word of the apostles and prophets, which is most sure.
But finally, through this apostolic witness we also have fellowship with one another in the church. It is important that we remember that. Apart from the apostolic witness we could have companionship with one another in all sorts of ways. We could be friends, we could be partners in marriage even, and yet not have this kind of fellowship at the highest and the deepest level. This fellowship we have only round the cross and round the risen Lord as we have come to know Him through the apostolic witnesses. This fellowship we have in the church.
Quite frequently I have heard people say: I am disappointed with the fellowship that I find in this or that church and I have heard people compare one church with another: there is great fellowship here but not there; people are nice and friendly here but not there. I have heard people say: I cannot celebrate the Lord’s Supper there; I cannot sit at the communion table with people I have no communion, nothing in common, with. I have heard things like that over and over again. Sometimes it becomes very personal: I cannot sit at the same Lord’s Supper with him or her.
How strange that precisely Christian people should say things like that. What are we looking for in the church of Jesus? A company of nice and lovable people? God’s people have never been that way. The church is the community of all those who have come to believe the apostolic witness, and so have taken shelter in God’s grace in Christ; who hide in the shadow of the cross and so have communion with the Father and the Son. Some of these people are extremely nice, but others have a most unpleasant temper. They fight against it and they gain a measure of victory but they still have a temper. Some have a weak, wishy-washy sort of a nature and some may seem to me to be totally impossible. Yet, they all are my brothers and sisters in Christ and I should have no trouble seeing them that way. In fact I feel infinitely closer to a person I cannot get close to, but who needs Christ for the forgiveness of his sins, than to the nicest possible person who has no need for a Saviour.
This is how we should have koinonia with one another (also at the Lord’s table). This is how we should know ourselves to be very close to one another even if we cannot always understand each other’s temperament or attitudes. Do we not all need the same forgiving grace and the same Holy Spirit to renew us?
Believing the apostolic witness we have fellowship with God and with Jesus Christ, His Son, and with that whole worldwide company of some of the strangest characters (some pleasing, some not) which we call the Una Sancta, the Holy Koinonia of the people of God.
Our joy will never be full unless we seek it in that apostolic communion.
Amen