The Fiat of the Foundational Christian Commandment

No, we’re not talking about a little car from Italy. A fiat is a command or act of will that creates something without or as if without further effort. An authoritative determination, an authoritative order.

In the previous paragraph (1 John 2:3–6), John has been talking about keeping the Lord’s commandments, if we know Him and if we love Him then we will obey Him. Now he focuses on “The Commandment,” the identifying commandment of the New Testament believer and disciple, the commandment that Jesus said was His new commandment. This new commandment is the foundation upon which all the New Testament is based. This command took Christ to the cross, forgave our sin, and now extends the Gospel to the entire world. This commandment supersedes all the Old Testament law that we could not keep and replaces it with just one command that we can keep because it has been given to us in our union with Christ.

That commandment is love and specifically that we love one another. At the end of his earthly ministry as He is preparing his disciples to carry on the work of the Gospel without His physical presence, Jesus tells his disciples, John 13:34-35 A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.

And He repeats it again John 15:12 This is My commandment, that ye love one another, as I have loved you”

John begins by telling the Christian, “I’m not giving you a new commandment.” The Gnostics were trying to convince the Christians of how exciting their new knowledge and way of seeing religion was, but John says you don’t need something new. You already have something greater than new knowledge, you have an old commandment, given to you from the beginning of your walk with the Lord, and it goes back to the time the Lord walked upon earth. Then he says in vs. 8 “Again, a new commandment I write to you, which thing is true in him and in you, because the darkness is past and the true light now shines.”

What John is emphasizing is that this command is not new in the sense of never heard before but it is new because of the change it has brought and will always bring, “the darkness is past and the true light now shines.” The newness of Christ’s command to love was just as fresh and powerful as it was when Jesus first uttered it. John says, it is yet still  new because it changed and renewed everything about us and relationship to God and our relationship to one another.

This commandment overpowers and supersedes all others because it was meant to be the fulfillment of all that had gone before. Love is the fulfillment of God’s Law, the finality of all previous commands.

Romans 13:8–10 Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law. For this, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt not covet; and if there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.

“Love one another” is forever new because it supersedes and replaces the old. Paul’s great chapter on Agape love ends with this truth, “1 Corinthians 13:13 And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

So foundational to the life of the church and the life of the believer was this old but always new command that John says 1 John 2:9–11 9 He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness even until now. 10 He that loveth his brother abideth in the light, and there is none occasion of stumbling in him. 11 But he that hateth his brother is in darkness, and walketh in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because that darkness hath blinded his eyes.

The Power of Loving One Another

The “new commandment” of Christ is vital to our walk as followers of Christ, if we can’t obey it then John says we are in stumbling in the darkness and don’t know where we are going.

Loving one another is vital within the church and in our own life, but its effect is not limited to just the family of God. It is not only vital for our own ability to stay and walk in the light, but it is also essential if we are to show a lost world the light of Jesus’ love. The love of Christ is just four words to the lost until they can experience it and often the first way they experience it is by seeing it in us, in the church, between brothers and sister in the Lord’s family.

This should be the easiest command to keep for us who have known the love of the Lord and yet it is often neglected and ignored. You don’t have to be a Christian very long before you realize, Christians can be unloving, unforgiving and even vicious toward one another. Nor is this reality something new.

Paul talking about the same thing we are talking about this morning told the Galatians 5:14 For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another.

Now let me be honest with you as my church, you folks are easy to love. You really are and we all know I am probably one of the most lovable people you’ll ever meet. My wife has made sure of that by getting rid of all my negative characteristics over the years. And though you and I find it easy to love one another right now, at other times it can be heartbreakingly difficult. Nothing has left me more devastated as a pastor than seeing church members I loved walk away in hate, of me or of someone else in the church they once loved. It is easier to let them go, to ignore and disobey the Lord’s command, but it is His foundational, New Testament command, “Love one another.”

We must obey it, no matter how difficult, because our Lord has commanded us, His love compels us and because we will cease to walk in the light if we quit loving one another. And because the world will never believe that God loves them, if they don’t believe we love them, and they won’t believe we love them if they don’t see that we truly love one another.

Illustration: Gandhi rejects Christianity because of what he saw in Christians

Gandhi, the hero of India's independence when he was being educated in England, was exposed to the teachings of Jesus. Upon reading the words of Christ he was greatly attracted to Christianity. Yet in the end he rejected Christianity and stayed in the darkness of Hinduism. In his writings he said that he would have turned to Christianity except for the contradictions to the teachings of Jesus he saw in the lives of the people who claimed to follow him. Instead of the love for one another that should have shown the truth, he found the same hatred, pettiness and jealousy of all humanity.