Knowledge of the Christian Life; 1 John 5:18a
1 John 5:18-21 NASB "We know that no one who is born of God sins; but He who was born of God keeps him, and the evil one does not touch him. [19] We know that we are of God, and that the whole world lies in {the power of} the evil one. [20] And we know that the Son of God has come, and has given us understanding so that we may know Him who is true; and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life. [21] Little children, guard yourselves from idols."
There are three things the apostle wants us to remember that he has discussed in the body of this epistle and which he is driving home in the conclusion with the phrase "we know." There are three things that we should know as believers in the Lord Jesus Christ as a result of the study of this epistle, three things John has emphasised that are realities for every single believer, so that we can advance in the spiritual life.
Before we get into these three things we need to review the key principles he has talked about in this epistle. First of all we have to remember the distinction between positional truth and experiential truth. Positional truth has to do with what happens at the point of salvation when we put our faith alone in Christ alone. We describe this in two categories: the eternal realities and the temporal realities. The tempora realities have to do with what happens positionally, legally, at the instant of salvation. But the fact that we are saved and we have a new nature, that we are a child of God, is not always evidenced by our day-to-day experience. In fact, there are many believers who because of their disobedience to the Word of God live their lives the same as unbelievers. So we have to maintain our understanding of these two categories. The eternal reality is described by the apostle Paul with the phrase "in Christ." At the instant of salvation we are identified with Christ in His death, burial and resurrection, and this is called the baptism by means of God the Holy Spirit. It is that reality, according to Romans 6:3-5, that is the foundation for the spiritual life. His argument in Roman 6 is basically this. If we realise that at salvation we were set free from the dominion of sin because we have been identified with the death, burial and resurrection of Christ, we are set free from bondage to sin, and now we can live the spiritual life. That doesn't mean that now we will live the spiritual life, that we will automatically live the spiritual life, it means that we have the potential to live the spiritual life because the tyranny of the sin nature has been broken at salvation. We still have the sin nature and we will still sin but the tyranny has been broken. Before we were saved we could only live according to the sin nature, we didn't have any alternative. So this describes the second arena we are concerned with, the temporal reality of our spiritual life. Jesus referred to this as abiding.
John has picked up that word "abide" in 1st John to describe the ongoing relationship of the believer who is walking by means of the Spirit, filled by the Spirit, and applying the Word on a day-to-day basis. When we are abiding in Him we are manifesting His character. That doesn't mean that when we are a baby believer we are going to be manifesting His character as fully as we are when we are mature; there is a growth process. But when we are abiding in Him that is where growth takes place. Paul calls it walking by the Holy Spirit and it is the mechanic of being filled by the Spirit, Ephesians 5:18. What happens, though, is we often sin. The only way to recover is to use 1 John 1:9, to confess our sins, and when we do we are back in fellowship, walking in the light, walking by the Spirit, filled by the Spirit.
To stay in the light, to keep walking by the Spirit, the Scriptures give us various mechanics or skills that we use to keep us inside the sphere of fellowship. As long as we handle the problems and difficulties and decisions in life by one or more of these spiritual skills then we stay in fellowship and we not ejected into darkness where we are under the control of the sin nature. The ten stress-busters or problem-solving devices we have studied relate to the three stages of spiritual growth: spiritual childhood, spiritual adolescence and spiritual adulthood. These terms are terms we have seen in 1 John 2:12-22 where John has given instruction to the different maturity levels in the spiritual life: little children, young men, and fathers. We have to master certain basic skills before we can go on to the next level, and that is true in every area of life.
John is going to remind us of this and tie things together through these three "we know" statements in 1 John 5:18-21. Three things he emphasises. First, we know that the believer is eternally secure and cannot be harmed or touched by Satan, v. 18. Second, we know that we manifest our new birth as believers in that we do not have to operate on Satan's system of human viewpoint thinking called the cosmos, worldliness, v.19. Third, this is ultimately based on the fact that we know who know who Jesus Christ is, we understand that the hypostatic union is crucial for understanding the precedent set by Him during the incarnation, during the dispensation of the Messiah. It is an understanding of the hypostatic union, that Jesus in His humanity did not rely on His deity to solve the problems with which He was faced. He was tested in every area as we are. It may not be exactly the area that we are tested in but it is in every category, e.g. rejection, financial difficulty, the loss of a loved one, personal problems and testings. Jesus Christ went through that category and applied doctrine in that category. He handled this through doctrine and under the filling ministry of the Holy Spirit as a pioneer of the spiritual life. So it is the hypostatic union that is crucial as far as John is concerned for understanding the precedent that Jesus Christ set at the first advent. That is why this heresy that he is dealing with that apparently has come into the church in the area of Ephesus, that Jesus of Nazareth really wasn't the Messiah or He wasn't fully God, that it was just the appearance of God, and that this has had its influence; and he is countering that through everything that he has been demonstrating in the epistle.
1 John 5:18-21 NASB "We know that no one who is born of God sins; but He who was born of God keeps him, and the evil one does not touch him." If we look at this structurally in the Greek there are actually two statements. They are combined through a coordinating conjunction kai [kai], but they are two distinct statements. The phrase "we know" is followed by a hoti [o(ti] clause which indicates the content of the knowledge. In English we might write this: "We know," colon, point 1. First of all, "no one who is born of God sins, but alla [a)lla]…" alla is the contrasting conjunction and is contrasting two things. "… but He who was born of God keeps himself" is the other side of it. Here are two statements that relate to and explain one another. Then there is another conjunction, the Greek kai which normally means "and" and is usually used to join two independent clauses or thoughts. So we have one though expressed in the first two clauses and then a second thought expressed in the final clause, "and the evil one does not touch him." This tells us that this last clause is not related to the first clause. He is making two statements about what we know. We know first of all that a person who is born of God doesn't sin, but he keeps himself. Second, we know that the evil one doesn't touch him. That is the basic structure.
What does he mean by "We know that no one who is born of God sins"? The "we know" that is used in each of these three verses is the perfect active indicative of the verb for knowledge, oida [o)ida]. This word is different from ginosko [ginwskw] which emphasises perceived knowledge. oida emphasises intuitive knowledge—already perceived and is now a part of the knowledge bank in the soul. John is using oida because this is knowledge that has already been perceived. It is a perfect tense emphasising a completed action. Here the emphasis is on the present results of a past action. These believers have gone through a process; they have been studying the Word. It is stored knowledge; they know it and they have to apply it. So the emphasis here is on the application of the stored knowledge in the soul.
This concept of knowledge is a key word in 1 John. 1 John 2:20 NASB "But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and you all know [all things]." The context indicates the "all things" relates to their understanding of Christology; they have been taught about the person of Jesus Christ. It is John's terminology for the operation of the Holy Spirit in helping us to understand the Word of God. There is a connection between the anointing and knowledge. The indwelling of the Holy Spirit isn't related to knowledge, it is related to making our body the temple of the Holy Spirit. Anointing is related to knowledge in this passage so therefore the filling ministry of the Holy Spirit—Ephesians 5:18 cf. Colossians 3:16—is related to letting the Word of Christ richly dwell within us. Because of the operation of the Holy Spirit in the learning process John says, "you know all things," i.e. all things related to who Jesus Christ is in hypostatic union. [2:21] "I have not written to you because you do not know the truth, but because you do know it, and because no lie is of the truth."
The interesting things is that this understanding of Jesus Christ, His undiminished deity and true humanity, continued to be a problem for early Christianity for the next four hundred years. Part of the reason was that they had a very naïve or primitive understanding of the person of Christ. We have a much more technical understanding of the person of Christ because in the course of the early church history we developed the terminology to understand what the Scripture says. That is the process of doing theology.
John goes on to say some other things about "we know." 1 John 2:29 NASB "If you know that He is righteous, you know that everyone also who practices righteousness is born of Him." There we have to remember the statement that the person who is born of God does righteousness. This is fundamental to understanding 1 John 5:18 that whoever is born of God doesn't sin. It goes back to the same concept that Paul articulates in Ephesians 4:24; Colossians 3:10: "and put on the new self, which in {the likeness of} God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth." At salvation we are a new creature positionally, but we are not living it experientially. The command is to put on this new man experientially. The reality is that it was created when we were regenerated in true righteousness or holiness. So we have a new nature that is holy and righteous and when we are operating in fellowship that new nature is manifesting itself, and that new nature can't sin. It is only when we decide to stop walking, to stop abiding, to stop being filled with the Spirit, that we are ejected from fellowship, from the light, and into the darkness, and we start operating according to our sin nature. We have this new nature that can't sin. That is why John says that a person who is born of God (our new nature) can't sin. When we are operating as a child of God, abiding in fellowship, walking by the Holy Spirit, we can't sin. We choose to stop walking and we are out of fellowship. That is what Paul says in Galatians 5:16: "Walk by means of the Spirit and it will be impossible for you to fulfil the lusts of the flesh."
So with the phrase "you know" John is reminding them that they know who Christ is, that when they are a child of God they partake of His nature, and when they are living according to that nature they don't sin and they do righteousness. 1 John 3:2 NASB "Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is… [5] You know that He appeared in order to take away sins; and in Him there is no sin… [14, 15] We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren. He who does not love abides in death. Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer; and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him." 1 John 5:13 NASB "These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life… [15] And if we know that He hears us {in} whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests which we have asked from Him."