God is love, and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God.' Now, to
begin with, let us distinctly understand that the New Testament answer,
represented by John's great words, entirely endorses Isaiah's; and that
the difference between the two is not that the Old Testament, as
represented by psalmist and prophet, said, 'You must be righteous in
order to dwell with God,' and that the New Testament says, 'You need
not be.' Not at all! John is just as vehement in saying that nothing
but purity can bind a man in thoroughly friendly and familiar
conjunction with God as David or Isaiah was. He insists as much as
anybody can insist upon this great principle, that if we are to dwell
with God we must be like God, and that we are like God when we are like
Him in righteousness and love.
'He that saith he hath fellowship with Him, and walketh in darkness, is
a liar!' That is John's short way of gathering it all up. Righteousness
is as essential in the gospel scheme for all communion and fellowship
with God as ever it was declared to be by the most rigid of legalists;
and if any of you have the notion that Christianity has any other terms
to lay down than the old terms--that righteousness is essential to
communion--you do not understand Christianity. If any of you are
building upon the notion that a man can come into loving and familiar
friendship with God as long as he loves and cleaves to any sin, you
have got hold of a delusion that will wreck your souls yet,--is,
indeed, harming, wrecking them now, and will finally destroy them if
you do not got rid of it. Let us always remember that the declaration
of my first text lies at the very foundation of the declaration of my
second.
What, then, is the difference between them? Why, for one thing it is
this--ISAIAH tells us that we must be righteous, John tells us how we
may be. The one says, 'There are the conditions,' the other says, 'Here
are the means by which you can have the conditions.' Love is the
productive germ of all righteousness; it is the fulfilling of the law.
Get that into your hearts, and all these relative and personal duties
will come. If the deepest, inmost life is right, all the surface of
life will come right. Conduct will follow character, character will
follow love.
The efforts of men to make themselves pure, and so to come into the
position of holding fellowship with God, are like the wise efforts of
children in their gardens. They stick in their little bits of rootless
flowers, and they water them; but, being rootless, the flowers are all
withered to-morrow and flung over the hedge the day after. But if we
have the love of God in our hearts, we have not rootless flowers, but
the seed which will spring up and bear fruit of holiness.
But that is not all. Isaiah says 'Righteousness,' John says 'Love,'
which makes righteousness. And then he tells us how we may get love,
having first told us how we may get righteousness: 'We love Him because
He first loved us.' It is just as impossible for a man to work himself
into loving God as it is for a man to work himself into righteous
actions. There is no difference in the degree of impossibility in the
two cases. But what we can do is, we can go and gaze at the thing that
kindles the love; we can contemplate the Cross on which the great Lover
of our souls died, and thereby we can come to love Him. John's answer
goes down to the depths, for his notion of love is the response of the
believing soul to the love of God which was manifested on the Cross of
Calvary. To have righteousness we must have love; to have love we must
look to the love that God has to us; to look rightly to the love that
God has to us we must have faith. Now you have gone down to the very
bottom of the matter. Faith is the first step of the ladder, and the
second step is love and the third step is righteousness.
And so the New Testament, in its highest and most blessed declarations,
rests itself firmly upon these rigid requirements of the old law. You
and I, dear brethren, have but one way by which we can walk in the
midst of that fire, rejoicing and unconsumed, namely that we shall know
and believe the love which God hath to us, love Him back again 'with
pure hearts fervently,' and in the might of that receptive faith and
productive love, become like Him in holiness, and ourselves be
'baptized with the Holy Ghost and with fire.' Thus, fire-born and
fiery, we shall dwell as in our native home, in God Himself.