On what basis can we have real fellowship with God and our brother? Here I John 1:7 has come afresh to us. ” I f we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the Blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin.” What is meant by light and darkness is that light reveals, darkness hides. When anything reproves us, shows us up as we really are - that is light. ” Whatsoever doth make manifest is light.”(Eph.5:13) But whenever we do anything or say anything (or don’t say anything) to hide what we are or what we’ve done - that is darkness.
Now the first effect of sin in our lives is always to make us try and hide what we are. Sin made our first parents hide behind the trees of the garden and it has had the same effect on us ever since. Sin always involves us in being unreal, pretending, duplicity, window dressing, excusing ourselves and blaming others - and we can do all that as much by our silence as by saying or doing something. This is what the previous verse calls ” walking in darkness.” With some of us, the sin in question may be nothing more than self-consciousness (anything with ” I ” in it is sin) and the hiding, nothing more than an assumed heartiness to cover that self-consciousness; but it is walking in darkness none the less.
In contrast to all this in us, verse 5 of this chapter tells us that ” God is light,” that is, God is the All-revealing One, who shows up every man as he really is. And it goes on to say, ” In Him is no darkness at all,” that is, there is absolutely nothing in God which can be one with the tiniest bit of darkness or hiding in us.
Quite obviously, then, it is utterly impossible for us to be walking in any degree of darkness and have fellowship with God. While we are in that condition of darkness, we cannot have true fellowship with our brother either - for we are not real with him, and no one can have fellowship with an unreal person. A wall of reserve separates him and us.
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