For
many people today, the phrase “broken record” really has no actual experiential
knowledge connected to it. They have never heard an actual record player, let
alone had a piece of dust or a scratch cause the record to reply a short
portion of a song repeatedly. As someone who is old enough to have experienced
records for themselves, it can be annoying when the skip happens in the middle
of a favorite song. You stop the replay, remove the record from the player,
inspect the record to see if there are scratches, carefully clean the record
and then try to replay it, hoping the skip is gone.
There
is another kind of repetition that many of us wish we could forget. Sometimes
our parents would tell us the same thing over and over again. We got so tired
of “pick up your clothes.” And yet there was such an easy solution. All we
needed to do was pick up our clothes!
Some
repetition happens to help fill in all the blanks, see something from many
different angles. Art museums place statues in the middle of the room so that
you can walk around it and see it from all sides. Seeing something from
multiple angles helps enhance our experience of that work of art. We even look
at paintings from different angles, and paintings are fairly flat.
We
study debate in High School and College to learn to think about multiple issues
surrounding a single topic. We come at the topic from these different
perspectives in order to more fully understand it. We repeat the same position
during the debate in multiple ways in order to try to convince the debate judge
that we have the better position, that our debate skills are superior.
John
keeps emphasizing the connection of loving one another and the genuineness of
our faith profession. If we don’t love, we don’t have a genuine faith in
Christ. He has repeated this Truth over and over again in this letter. And a
key part of our faith profession is the essential character and nature of the
person of Jesus. He is nothing less than fully God and fully man. He fulfills
the unique position in the Godhead. He is the bridge between the Holy God and
sinful man. As only God could, He provided a way of reconciliation without
compromising justice. He provided for us what we could never provide for
ourselves.
The
problem for John is that there were false teachers who were teaching that you
could have a “God in me” kind of life without accepting this unique
God-in-flesh understanding of Jesus. They wanted the power without the person.
They wanted the prestige without the Passion on the Cross. They want the
benefits without paying the membership dues.