'Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that
we should be called the sons of God....'--1 John iii. 1.
One or two points of an expository character will serve to introduce
what else I have to say on these words.
The text is, I suppose, generally understood as if it pointed to the
fact that we are called the sons of God as the great exemplification of
the wonderfulness of His love. That is a perfectly possible view of the
connection and meaning of the text. But if we are to translate with
perfect accuracy we must render, not 'that we should be called,' but
'_in order that_ we should be called the sons of God.' The meaning then
is that the love bestowed is the means by which the design that we
should be called His sons is accomplished. What John calls us to
contemplate with wonder and gratitude is not only the fact of this
marvellous love, but also the glorious end to which it has been given to
us and works. There seems no reason for slurring over this meaning in
favour of the more vague 'that' of our version. God gives His great and
wonderful love in Jesus Christ, and all the gifts and powers which live
in Him like fragrance in the rose. All this lavish bestowal of love,
unspeakable as it is, may be regarded as having one great end, which God
deems worthy of even such expenditure, namely, that men should become,
in the deepest sense, His children. It is not so much to the
contemplation of our blessedness in being sons, as to the devout gaze on
the love which, by its wonderful process, has made it possible for us to
be sons, that we are summoned here.
Again, you will find a remarkable addition to our text in the Revised
Version--namely, 'and such we are.' Now these words come with a very
great weight of manuscript authority, and of internal evidence. They are
parenthetical, a kind of rapid 'aside' of the writer's, expressing his
joyful confidence that he and his brethren are sons of God, not only in
name, but in reality. They are the voice of personal assurance, the
voice of the spirit 'by which we cry Abba, Father,' breaking in for a
moment on the flow of the sentence, like an irrepressible, glad answer
to the Father's call. With these explanations let us look at the words.