1 John5chapter 5

1 John 5:1-3

The letter's three tests meet in one sentence: whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, faith the birthmark, and every one that loveth him that begat loveth him also that is begotten of him, the family's love following the family's life. The tests then interlock the other way about, we know we love the children of God when we love God and keep his commandments, so love of God and love of the brethren verify each other. His commandments are not grievous, not burdensome, the yoke easy as the Lord said, because the new birth supplies what it demands.

1 John 5:4-5

Whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world states victory as the birthright of the birth itself, and the victory that overcometh, nikesasa, the aorist looking at a conquest already won, is our faith. The question and answer of verse 5 name the conqueror's creed: he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God, faith's power lying wholly in its object. The world the letter warned against at 2:15-17 is here a beaten enemy, not merely a forbidden one.

1 John 5:6

by water and blood: This is he that came by water and blood answers the secession's teaching directly: Cerinthus's line had the Christ-spirit descend at the baptism and depart before the cross, and John insists, not by water only, but by water and blood, the same Jesus Christ in Jordan and on Golgotha. The readings on the pair are old, the baptism and the death carrying most teachers, with the water and blood of John 19:34 and the sacraments as further senses named where held. The Spirit beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth, the living third testimony alongside the two historical ones.

1 John 5:7-8

The three heavenly witnesses of verse 7 stand in the KJV floor and the reader should know their history: the words are absent from every Greek manuscript before the late middle ages, absent from the early versions and from the fathers' trinitarian debates where they would have been decisive, entering the printed Greek text with Erasmus's third edition, and defenders from Gill's day to now are a named minority against the broad judgment that the clause grew from a Latin gloss. The doctrine of the Trinity does not lean on the disputed words; it stands on Matthew 28:19, the baptismal scenes, and this letter's own Father, Son, and Spirit grammar, which is why the question can be told honestly. The undisputed verse 8 gives the letter's own triad, the spirit, and the water, and the blood, three witnesses agreeing in one testimony, the law's two-or-three-witness standard met for the Son.

1 John 5:9-10

The argument is from the courtroom's own practice: if we receive the witness of men, and the law did, the witness of God is greater, and this is God's testimony concerning his Son. The believer carries the deposition inside, he that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself, the Spirit's inward confirmation of the outward record. Unbelief is then named at its true weight, he that believeth not God hath made him a liar, refusal of testimony as an insult to the witness.

1 John 5:11-13

this life is in his Son: The record's content is stated in full: God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son, given already, located in a person, so that he that hath the Son hath life, and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life, the letter's starkest sentence and its kindest. Verse 13 is the letter's own purpose statement, these things have I written unto you that believe, that ye may KNOW that ye have eternal life, assurance not as presumption but as the stated design of an apostolic book. The whole assurance vocabulary of the letter, its dozen hereby-we-knows, lands on this verse.

1 John 5:14-15

according to his will: Assurance breeds boldness at the throne: this is the confidence, parresia, free speech, that if we ask any thing according to his will, he heareth us. The condition is the prayer's alignment, not its eloquence, and the logic of verse 15 is complete: if we know that he hear us, we know that we have the petitions, possession counted from the hearing rather than the delivery date. The teachers keep both truths, prayer's certainty inside the will of God and the will of God as prayer's boundary.

1 John 5:16-17

The prayer just promised is put to work for a brother seen sinning a sin not unto death, he shall ask, and he shall give him life, intercession as the family's first response to a stumbling member. There is a sin unto death, and the readings are named with their holders: the final apostasy of the letter's own seceders, denying the Son with eyes open; the blasphemy the Lord named; and a sin God judges with bodily death as at Corinth. I do not say that he shall pray for it stops short of forbidding, and where the letter declines to define the sin, the exposition names the silence rather than filling it; the verse is never turned against the assurance the chapter exists to give.

1 John 5:18-19

Whosoever is born of God sinneth not repeats 3:9's present tense, the settled practice of sin foreign to the born-of-God life, beside the letter's own provision for sins committed at 1:9 and 2:1. He that is begotten of God keepeth himself carries a variant the oldest copies sharpen, he that was begotten of God keepeth him, the Son keeping the believer, and on either reading that wicked one toucheth him not, haptetai, no fastening grip. The two spheres are then mapped without a middle zone, we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness, or in the wicked one, cradled in his lap as the old versions put it.

1 John 5:20-21

The letter's last we-know gathers the whole: the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we may know him that is true, and we are in him that is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life is read by most of the old teachers as spoken of the Son just named, the letter closing where the gospel closed, my Lord and my God, and the antecedent question is stated with its holders. The abrupt farewell follows, little children, keep yourselves from idols, the true God just confessed making every substitute an idol, and the exposition leaves the last word as sharp as John left it.