Notes in the margin

Here and there in my Bible I have written in the margin the initials D.A.P., a friend of mine whose memory the verse evokes. It is a remarkable thing when this happens --- that a passage one has read numerous times, to no particular profit, is elucidated by the recollection of a person's example.

Today it was 1 John 2:14: "I write to you, young men, because you are strong, and the word of God lives in you, and you have overcome the evil one."

I do not know if you have had the privilege of knowing someone who has "overcome the evil one" or someone who is genuinely "strong" in the Lord or in whom "the word of God lives." If you have not, you may gloss over the verse as I have always done. It is easy enough to do because the mind has many subterfuges. We tell ourselves the meaning of the text is simply that we are Christians, pure and simple; we have overcome the evil one in the sense that we have been converted.

Blessed is the person to whom God sends living, breathing illustrations of His Word. I think we have had no idea of the power of a faithful life in the building up of the saints --- and oppositely, of the harm done to our brothers and sisters when we fail to live a life in the power in which we were meant to live it. For some reason too deep for me to understand, God is pleased to more fully open our understanding of His Word when we see it fleshed out in another human being. There is much more afoot in hermeneutics than science.