1 John part 14 - Final admonitions
Believers pray with confidence
Prayer is not a convenient device for imposing our will upon God, or for bending his will to ours, but the prescribed way of subordinating our will to his. It is by prayer that we seek God’s will, embrace it and align ourselves with it. Every true prayer is a variation on the theme ‘your will be done’.
A specific sin. In the Mosaic law certain sins were listed as capital offences, punishable by death (e.g. Lev. 20:1–27; Num. 18:22; cf. Rom. 1:32). Further, in the Old Testament generally a distinction was drawn between sins of ignorance, committed unwittingly, which could be cleansed through sacrifice, and wanton or ‘presumptuous’ sins (Ps. 19:13), committed ‘with a high hand’, for which there was no forgiveness. The same distinction was ‘common among Rabbinic writers’ (Westcott), and certain early Christian fathers carried it over into the gospel age. Clement of Alexandria and Origen both accepted that a line could be drawn between forgivable and unforgivable sins, but declined to classify them. Tertullian went a stage further and listed the grosser sins (including murder, adultery, blasphemy and idolatry) as beyond pardon, while minor offences could be forgiven. This developed into the familiar, casuistical differentiation between ‘mortal’ and ‘venial’ sins and the specification of the ‘seven deadly sins’. But there is no New Testament warrant for such an arbitrary classification of sins, and certainly ‘it would be an anachronism to try to apply it here’ (Dodd). Indeed, although the rendering is ‘a mortal sin’ in RSV and ‘a deadly sin’ in NEB, it is doubtful whether John is referring to specific ‘sins’ at all, as opposed to ‘sin’ (as in 1:8), that is, ‘a state or habit of sin wilfully chosen and persisted in’ (Plummer).
2. Apostasy. The second suggestion, favoured among modern commentators by Brooke, Law and Dodd, is that the sin that leads to death is neither a specific sin, nor even a ‘backsliding’, but a total apostasy, the denial of Christ and the renunciation of the faith. Those who hold this view usually link these verses with such passages as Hebrews 6:4–6; 10:26ff. and 12:16–17, and apply them to the false teachers who had, in fact, so clearly repudiated the truth as to withdraw from the church (2:19).
But can a Christian, who has been born of God, apostatize? Surely John has taught clearly in this letter that the true Christian cannot sin, that is, persist in sin (3:9), let alone fall away altogether. He is about to repeat it: ‘we know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin; the one who was born of God keeps him safe, and the evil one cannot harm him’ (18). Can he who ‘does not continue to sin’ (18) commit a sin that leads to death (16)? Moreover, John has just written of having life (12) and knowing it (13). Can someone who has received a life which is eternal lose it and ‘sin unto death’ (AV?) It seems clear, unless John’s theology is divided against itself, that he who sins unto death is not a Christian. If so, the sin cannot be apostasy. We are left with the third alternative.
3. The blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. This sin, committed by the Pharisees, was a deliberate, open-eyed rejection of known truth. They ascribed the mighty works of Jesus, evidently done ‘by the Spirit of God’ (Matt. 12:28), to the agency of Beelzebub. Such sin, Jesus said, would never be forgiven either in this age or in the age to come. He who commits it ‘is guilty of an eternal sin’ (Mark 3:29; cf. Matt. 12:22–32). It leads him inexorably into a state of incorrigible moral and spiritual obtuseness, because he has wilfully sinned against his own conscience. In John’s own language he has ‘loved darkness instead of light’ (John 3:18–21), and in consequence he will ‘die in his sins’ (John 8:24). His sin in fact, leads to death. That is, the outcome of his sin will be spiritual ruin, the final separation of the soul from God, which is ‘the second death’, reserved for those whose names are not ‘written in the book of life’ (Rev. 20:15; 21:8).
But, it may be objected, if the ‘sin leading to death’ is the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit committed by a hardened unbeliever, how can John call him a brother? To be exact, he does not. It is the one whose sin does not lead to death who is termed a brother; he whose sin lead to death is neither named nor described. Nevertheless, supposing John thinks of each as a brother, we must still assert that neither can be regarded as a child of God. The reasons for denying that he who sins ‘unto death’ is a Christian have already been given; what can be said about him whose sin does not lead to death? An important point, to which commentators surprisingly give no attention, is that he is given life in answer to prayer. This means that, although his sin does not lead to death, he is in fact dead, since he needs to be given life. For how can you give life to one who is already alive? This person is not a Christian, therefore, for Christians have received life, and do not fall into death when they fall into sin. True, ‘life’ to John means communion with God, and the sinning Christian cannot enjoy fellowship with God (1:5–6), but John would certainly not have said that when the Christian sins he dies and needs to receive eternal life again. The Christian has ‘passed from death to life’ (3:14; cf. John 5:24). Death and judgment are behind him; he ‘has life’ (12) as a present and abiding possession. When he stumbles into sin, which he may (2:1), he has a heavenly Advocate (2:2). He needs to be forgiven and cleansed (1:10), but John never says he needs to be ‘quickened’ ‘made alive’, or ‘given life’ all over again.
If this is so, then neither he whose sin leads to death nor he whose sin does not lead to death is a Christian, possessing eternal life. Both are ‘dead in transgressions and sins’ (Eph. 2:1). Each ‘remains in death’ (3:14). The difference between them is that one may receive life through a Christian’s intercession, while the other will die the second death. Spiritually dead already, he will die eternally. Only such a serious state as this would lead John to say that he does not advise his readers to pray for such.
The question remains: How can someone who (if the above interpretation be correct) is not a Christian be termed a brother? The only answer is that John must here be using the word in a broader sense either of a ‘neighbour’ or of a nominal Christian, a church member who professes to be a ‘brother’. Certainly in 2:9, 11 the word ‘brother’ is not used strictly, for he who hates him is not a Christian at all but ‘in the darkness’. In 3:16–17 also the word seems to have this wider connotation, where we are bidden to lay down our lives ‘for our brothers’ and to supply the material necessities of a ‘brother in need’. Since Christ died for the ungodly and for his enemies, we can scarcely suppose that we are to limit our self-sacrifice and service exclusively to our Christian brothers and sisters, and to have compassion only upon them. Such a wider connotation of the word brother, implied also in the teaching of Jesus (Matt. 5:22–24; 7:3–5), ‘arises not so much out of the character and standing of him whom you call your brother, as out of the nature of the affection with which you regard him’ (Candlish). This suggestion is supported by the somewhat similar passage in the letter of James (5:19–20).
We have a further confirmation of the interpretation argued above if under the description of the sin that leads to death John is alluding, as many commentators believe, to the false teachers. In John’s view they were not apostates; they were counterfeits. They were not true ‘brothers’ who had received eternal life and subsequently forfeited it. They were ‘antichrists’. Denying the Son, they did not possess the Father (2:22–23; 2 John 9). They were children of the devil, not children of God (3:10). True, they had once been members of the visible congregation and had then no doubt passed as ‘brothers’. But they went out, and by their withdrawal it was made evident that they ‘did not really belong to us’ (2:19). Since they rejected the Son, they forfeited life (5:12). Their sin did indeed lead to death.
The reference is to that access to God and fellowship with him which constitute the eternal life of which John has been writing (11–13). Christian confidence belongs not just to the future, to the parousia (2:28) and the judgment day (4:17), but to the here and now.
Prayer is not a convenient device for imposing our will upon God, or for bending his will to ours, but the prescribed way of subordinating our will to his. It is by prayer that we seek God’s will, embrace it and align ourselves with it. Every true prayer is a variation on the theme ‘your will be done’.
Believers intercede for each other
Believers are safe in Jesus
We know that everyone who has been born of God does not keep on sinning, but he who was born of God protects him, and the evil one does not touch him.
to attend to carefully, take care of. 1A to guard