Even better than the real thing
1 John 5:13-21
Our eleventh and final post in our series on 1 John.
5:13 I wrote these things to you, in order that you know that you have life eternal, to you that believe in the name of the Son of God. 14. And this is the confidence which we have in relation to him, that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. 15 And if we know that he hears us, whatever we should ask, we know that we have those requests which we requested from him.
16 If anyone sees their fellow Christian believer sinning sin that isn’t unto death, they [the person seeing, that is] will ask, and he [God] will give life to them, to those sinning [a sin] that isn’t unto death.
There is sin unto death; I’m not saying that you should ask about that kind of sin [that it be forgiven]. 17 Every unjust deed is sin, and there is sin that is not unto death.
18 We know that every person born of God, does not sin; but the Born of God, guards them, and the Evil One does not lay a finger on them. 19 We know that we are of God, and that the entire cosmos lies [in the power of] the Evil One. 20 We know that the Son of God has come and gave us understanding that we might recognise the True One, and we are in the True One, in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the True God, and Life Eternal. 21 Children: guard yourselves from Simulacra.
Before we get into some of the details of this passage, just note how often John says ‘you know’ and more often ‘we know’. This passage just rings with confidence affirmations of the things we know, which is a theme that runs right through the letter but then comes to a packed climax in this final section. Here, above all, we have a confident, grounded conviction of these truths.
The second thing that leaps out at me is the way v13 functions as a kind of summary statement looking back on the whole epistle, and declaring John’s purpose, the same way his gospel has its purpose statement in John 20:31, these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. No lesser purpose informs his epistle: that the addresses, insofar as they continue to be believers in Jesus, have eternal life in him.
The shift to prayer, at least in the context of this letter, strikes me as a little abrupt. John’s epistle has had little to say thus far about prayer, but the statement here accords entirely with the teaching on prayer in the gospel. I found this comment from Schlatter very perceptive though:
Since prayer is that act by which we turn our will to God, prayer is of the very essence of religion.… Prayer is the most direct expression of faith, because prayerfully turning our thoughts and will to God is the initial step from thought about God to full assurance of God. By the same token prayer is the most direct expression of love. It is an offering of highest priority, since the first thing we owe God is our thinking and willing.1
The confidence of prayer is confidence ‘in relation to him’. Which I think is a particularly Johannine way of expressing coram Deo. It’s a confidence that flows out of the teaching of the whole epistle. And it’s grounded in Jesus’ own teaching on prayer, which leads us into a mystery – extreme audacity to ask anything of God, and yet this conditioned by according to his will, or in the gospel in Jesus’ name. Prayer cannot be used as a divine vending machine to fulfil our whimsical cravings. Ps 37:4 is very helpful here: delight yourself in YHWH, and he will grant you the desires of your heart. It’s the heart that finds its desires satisfied in God, that in turn finds those desires fulfilled. It’s the will that becomes more and more attuned to the Father, that finds itself saying “thy will be done” more and more, and praying those very things that God is delighted to answer. We often do not know God’s will, so we should ask boldly, happy to be wrong in our prayers in the knowledge that his answers are better than our mistaken requests. I’m not generally a fan of reading verses in a way that seems to land you with a meaning apparently contradictory to their face-value, but v15 has to be read against a broad backdrop of biblical teaching on prayer, and Scripture is divine restrictions on prayer and its ‘positive outcomes’. The very fact that God hears us means that we are in communication with the divine, in conversation with God, in his presence, and that communion is by faith, the same faith that trusts that God hears our prayers, and declines to answer those that do not bring about his kingdom and his will.
What on earth is ‘sin unto death’? Don’t worry: commentators have been fighting this one out for centuries with pools of ink. I don’t have any profound answers of my own either. On the surface, these two verses are relatively straightforward. John categorises sin into two ‘types’, one leading to death, and one not. The responsibility of a Christian when they become aware of another believer committing sin, is that they should pray for them. This accords with John’s own teaching about the reality of sin in Christian lives, and the necessity of confession and repentance, alongside the promise of divine forgiveness. It’s likewise on the same page as other New Testament teachings which affirm our responsibility to lovingly and forgivingly minister to other believers caught in sin, as well as practice forgiveness within the body of Christ.
I find Yarborough’s proposal persuasive, if only because of confirmation bias – it agrees with my broader thinking about this topic in the New Testament. Saving knowledge of God is tri-dimensional in this letter: what one believes, what one does, and how one loves. Sin unto death, sin that Christians cannot commit, is sin that fundamentally, usually chronically and consistently, violates the basis of Christian faith. It’s sin that renders faith a lie. Sin that reveals that one isn’t a believer after all. Sin unto death is, put another way, to act in a way that reveals that one isn’t a Christian at all, even if one says that they are.
Why not pray for such people? In short, I think John’s counsel is elusive, but it’s also permissive. It’s permission not to pray, not a command not to pray. One is not required, and may sometimes find it wise, to cease praying for unrepentant and unrelenting sinners. And yet not all sin is like this, and we should not give up hope or be too quick to condemn either.
You can’t read v16-17 without some trepidation. Which is why v18 pivots to confident knowledge and assurance. The person born of God, who has experienced the new birth, trusts in Jesus, can be confident that their life does not consist and result in [this kind of] sin, that is ‘sin unto Death’. Why? Because the ‘Born of God’ guards them. It’s so interesting the way John utilised his Greek here, because I’m pretty sure that the second reference is subtly but decisively referring to Jesus in a way that the first reference is to any believer. Just like the son/child distinction, John uses his language to portray a distinction that is so important. Jesus, through his entire life, ministry, death, and resurrection, is the one who keeps, preserves, and protects a believer, so that the Evil One does not touch them.2 This is the Johannine version of Romans 8:35-39. It is the fulfilment of John 17.15. It is the answer to ‘deliver us from the Evil One’ of the Lord’s Prayer. And though he is the Prince of this world, and all lies in his dominion. And yet, at the end of his letter John reminds us that we have been giving to know the True One. The real, true, authentic, only God, who is Jesus Christ, is also Life Eternal.
John’s letter seems to end with a non-sequitur, abruptly, and without the usual formulae. But the more you ponder it, the more perfect is seems. It might be a reference and echo of Zechariah 13.2 But I think it comes down to this: John’s whole work is concerned with the True God, and his true Son. What he writes to warn his children about is each and every form of idol. Of things made to look like ‘the real thing’; whether they are the ancient statues and symbols of various deities, to the sophisticated modern ‘idols’, i.e. abstract things that we treat like gods and worship in our hearts; they are all substitutes, all hyperreal fakes, all to be rejected by embracing the real.
Cited in Robert W. Yarbrough, 1–3 John, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), 298. To be fair, Yarbrough translated Neuer’s biography of Schlatter into English, so he deserves to get some credit here.
‘touch’ I have rendered with the creative ‘lay a finger on’, because the sense is ‘harm occasioning death’.