[AI translation] Yesterday, when I read this Word in the morning silence, as the next passage, I said to those who leaned over the Bible with me: this is a statement of immense magnitude, one almost becomes dizzy if one wants to take seriously what is written here, that "the victory that has overcome the world is our faith!" (5,4) There is something so pure and sublime in this statement, the air of freedom rising above all the dirt, the cares and the sorrows of the world, that one almost sighs: How good it would be to ascend here, to breathe in this pure, heavenly, lofty air, to fill our tired, weary, worried, sad souls with it! How good it would be to live with such triumphant faith in this wretched world!Is not what we are saying here an exaggeration? Is there such victory over the world? For that is what every human soul longs for, consciously or unconsciously! It is what a patient somewhere in a hospital bed longs for when he sighs to himself on sleepless nights: oh, that I could be healthy again and not always have to see the fever chart and the doctor's worried look! This is what the woman who suffers from an unsolvable marital tragedy longs for, and wonders: why can't I be happy like so many other people? This is what many souls are looking for, suffering from themselves, tormented by problems, crushed under the burden of their sins. They want to be free, but they don't know how. Or who wrestle with the big questions of our time and see no way out, only more and more entanglement. In a thousand forms, but always with the same desire: if only there were some kind of solution, some way out, some way out, some way of liberation, some way of victory!
And behold, God declares: "the victory that has overcome the world is our faith." So let us understand it well: faith triumphs over the world! Faith, then, has a lot to do with the world and all its problems. So faith is not something that lives in a spiritual sphere far removed from earthly life and its needs. It is not, therefore, a Sunday faith or a church faith, which has nothing to do with what occupies man from day to day, from hour to hour. Of course, there are such beliefs, detached from earthly life, and the trouble is that most people separate their life of faith from their life in the world. He thinks that faith is only necessary for the affairs of the hereafter, but when it comes to earthly matters, to the problems of everyday life: it is not faith that is needed, but reflection, intelligence, skill, cunning or money!
If there is such faith, as, alas, there very much is, that is not what the apostle says, that it will overcome the world. The apostle's faith is a faith that really has to do with the world, that is, with all that oppresses and torments men in the depths of life. The apostle's faith does not leave this world. It does not say that I am happy in the heights, that I am only interested in the eternity to come, and that I have nothing to do with the world and its miseries down there in the depths! The faith of which the apostle speaks sees its battlefield in this world, and knows that it is here that it must fight its battle and win its victory. It is not outside the world, but in the world that true faith lives.
Then the apostle further defines the true faith that overcomes the world. The apostle knows very well the terrible misery in which this world and we ourselves are caught up. The apostle knows very well how the poison of sin and death has entered into the body of the world, how it has permeated every fibre and every particle of its fabric. That is why he does not say that faith is victory, not just any faith is victory, but our faith! And he immediately explains what he means by that. "Who is he who overcomes the world?" he asks, and answers, "He who believes that Jesus is the Son of God! So that is the crucial point. So, once again, it is not just any respectable faith that triumphs over the miseries of the world, but only the faith that can say that Jesus is the Son of God, that is, Jesus is the Saviour, Jesus is the Redeemer! This is our faith, the condensed content of the Christian faith.
A strong faith in a God who creates and governs the world, who answers prayers and cares for it, is no different from the pagan faith of primitive peoples, or the faith of the Mohammedans and Jews. Specifically, your faith becomes Christian when you recognize in Jesus the Son of God, the Saviour! Precisely for your faith, how you think about Jesus is not irrelevant, but crucial. What, or rather who you think of Him as, and what your relationship is with Him. Not with God in general, but with the Lord God who revealed Himself in the person of Jesus.
For many churchgoers, their relationship to Jesus is an unresolved issue. In fact, I have heard complaints more than once as to why priests today talk so much about Jesus. They are always putting him before the faithful and completely neglecting the Lord God! Our fathers did not preach like that in the old days! Does it make any difference whether one considers Jesus of Nazareth to be the Son of God or not? One can still be a very good Christian! Deciding who Jesus was, what difference does it make to a person's life, their real life, their everyday life? The main thing is to believe in God!
Well, isn't that "our faith" the apostle is talking about! Such faith really has little to do with real life! For faith is victory over the world only if it is faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and Son of God! Son of God! - Let us not imagine this relationship as that between father and son on earth! We are not talking about two deities, but one! Jesus is the Son of God, that is, the image, the appearance, the personification of God, the visible manifestation of the Holy Spirit-God speaking in human language, the entry of God from the world of eternity above space and time into the world of earth in space and time. The Son of God is the One in Whom dwelt "all the fullness of the Godhead bodily" (Colossians 2:9), as the Scriptures say. So God Himself, God in person, in the way God is approachable to man at all, and in the way God approached man.
And this means that God is therefore not a distant, unknown person enthroned on an unknown height, as we often think, still less some idea or philosophical concept that can be taken out and put aside, but a living person, a power in action, present here and now! The person of Jesus is God's intervention in the world, God's saving action here on earth, God's love and grace in heaven on earth. Jesus of Nazareth is the helping hand of the heavenly Father on earth, through whom He seeks and keeps that which is lost.
Perhaps this is how we understand the immense significance of this Jesus sharing with us all forms of our earthly destiny, from birth to suffering to death. And it is in this way that he has filled every conceivable turn, stage, condition of human destiny, from birth to death, with the presence of God! There is therefore no tribulation in which God is not present, no sin that He cannot and will not forgive, no suffering that He Himself has not experienced, no temptation that He has not known, no death that He has not conquered!
For Jesus not only took upon Himself all our afflictions, bore all our sicknesses, suffered for all our sins, but in all this He remained victorious, and filled it all with His divine victory. So in Jesus, His Son, God has made all the problems of our lives, all our human affairs, His own. This is the victory that the apostle speaks of when he says that our faith in Jesus His Son is the victory that has overcome the world! Faith in the victorious Jesus is itself a victory over the world, because it is the assurance that God is alive and I am His child! He has adopted me, accepted me: in life and in death I am His!
Let us now think again of the hospital patient, the woman in agony, the one struggling with her sins, the one seeking a way out, the burdened and weary! If Jesus is indeed the Son of God, then one thing is certain: all these people are not alone, forgotten and abandoned in their bitter plight, but the hand of God reaching out to them long ago in the person of Jesus Christ. In Jesus, the mighty God has become their brother, and the eyes of this divine brother, this divine comrade in arms, are upon them! He has seen them and accepted them as they are in their misery! The need, the sickness, the problem, the death they are struggling with is not indifferent to God. Even in the most desperate situation, they can say with confidence that God has taken them up into His eternal plan and mind. He, my Lord and Father, wants good for me, I can trust Him with my destiny! And this faith itself is already full of blessed, precious victory, because suffering and misery itself, my whole destiny, is saturated with God's loving care and grace!
Yes, the victory that conquers the world is our faith. Our faith that Jesus is the Son of God! Jesus Christ has overcome the world. In Him, in His life, death and resurrection, it was made clear that God's plan and omnipotence could not be disturbed by sin, could not be thwarted by Satan. In the person of Jesus was the miracle that God made the deadly poison of this world harmless and harmless. I read somewhere about a little girl who, when she was playing in the garden, was surrounded by a large hornet. Her mother picked the frightened child up and held her in her arms. The wasp continued to buzz around them, but her mother encouraged her: 'Don't be afraid, my little girl, it won't hurt you, it won't hurt you. The wasp finally stung her mother instead of the little girl, injecting its venom into her. It really didn't hurt the little girl, she really didn't have to be afraid of it anymore.
This world too injected its deadly poison into the Lord Jesus on the cross. Whoever flees into the embracing arms of the Lord Jesus is no longer hurt, has nothing to fear. A wonderful consolation! How true is the Scripture, "Death, where is your sting? Hell, where is your victory?" (1 Corinthians 15:55) He has no power, no might! It is lost! For Jesus Christ suffered the death-blow for us! In His body the poison was deadly! And in doing so, He broke the power of sin. He has no more fangs of poison. Even if this world still surrounds and frightens us with its problems, its torments, its temptations, its terrors, it can no longer harm those who flee into the open arms of Jesus! No, for the power of the poison was taken up by His body on the cross. Jesus was victorious by taking upon Himself and suffering the judgment of this world. And that means that anyone who believes in the Son of God can live in peace in a world already defeated, detoxified, rendered harmless and safe by Jesus!
Do you see why it is so crucial to believe in Jesus Christ? Faith is precisely to look to Jesus, taking our eyes off ourselves and our own miseries, weaknesses and problems! This is how our faith becomes a victory that has already conquered the world! Now let the word of Jesus penetrate to your heart: 'Soul, I am your Saviour! Believe! Trust, I have conquered the world! No one can snatch my sheep out of my hand! Nor you! Fear not the world! Look not to the perils, but to me, crucified and risen. In me you will find rest.
Look to Him, your Savior. For you know Him from the Scriptures. Dare to say to Him now, 'Since You have come to be the comfort and salvation of all the poor and needy, You are my comfort and salvation. Since You call to Yourself all who are weary and burdened, behold, I come to You. Here I am, I am yours, I know you accept me, thank you for accepting me as I am!
Amen
Date: 26 May 1948.
Lesson
1Jn 5,1-5