1 John 3:1-3:10
We’re now getting a ways in to October, and soon the holiday season will be upon us. It’s a time to start thinking about all those things which either unite or divide our families; a time to reestablish some of those connections, if possible, and reaffirm the impact that our families have upon our soul and who we become later in life.
Being a father, I’ve found that one of the most entertaining parts about raising my son has been the speculation on who he will turn out to be like, who he reminds us of, who he looks like, who he acts like. It can get kind of confusing sometimes. Now, luckily for my son, so far he’s turned out to look more like his mom than his dad, but unluckily for us, he has the energy-levels of his Uncle Kenny rather than the more passive nature of either of his parents. Either way, it’s neat that you can point to different aspects of his behavior and appearance and say “that’s his so-and-so showing up in him.”
Obviously that’s what we call family resemblance. And, in a way, that’s what John has to speak to us about today. The two big themes for John in these letters are loving one another and being children of God. John’s saying, in the spiritual world, there are only two families: the family of God and family of the Devil; and in both families there are certain traits, there’s a family resemblance. Whatever family you’re a part of affects who you are.
He starts out:
1See(A) what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called(B) children of God; and so we are. The reason why(C) the world does not know us is that(D) it did not know him.
When I first started writing this sermon, I was having a bear of a time. Not because this isn’t good material to work with, it is. In fact, as far as I’m concerned this section and the one coming up next week are the climax of First John. Instead, I was having such a difficult time because saying that we are “children of God” has taken on an almost cliché status in Christianity anymore. We all know we are children of God, we here it again and again and again. It’s taken as being one of those “basic core truths” of Christianity.
In our minds, or in our emotions, it has about as much impact as saying “I’m human,” or “I’m from Indiana.” No one gets up, pumps their fist in the air and shouts “YEAH! I’m from the great state of Indiana!” In a similar way, being a child of God doesn’t seem to motivate us very much, probably because we don’t see this as something which has been changed, really, when we come into a relationship with God.
We often hear the phrase “we’re all God’s children.” And that’s true, isn’t it? Well, in a sense, it is. If we were to talk about “family resemblance,” there’s a few ways in which we all share the family resemblance of God- Genesis tells us we are made in His image. God is the Creator and Lord of All. And God, of course, loves the whole world. But I think John is referring to something else, some other means of being a child of God, a way which stands in sharp contrast to everyone else, all of whom presumably in some sense are not children of God.
Otherwise, how could he say “this is why the world does not know us,” that is, recognize us? We look foreign to them, strange, from someplace else, but how could that be if we’re only God’s children in the sense that every other person on the planet is a child of God?
Maybe it would help if we went back to the first chapter of First John, where he says we “proclaim to you the eternal life,(J) which was with the Father and was made manifest to us— 3(K) that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed(L) our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. 4And we are writing these things so(M) that our[a] joy may be complete.”
The difference is a matter of fellowship. In the teachings of Christianity we understand that the Father and the Son have a unique relationship with one another, a unique fellowship, a powerful bond of mutual love. That relationship has existed between them before the beginning of the world, and before the beginning of the world They, God the Father and God the Son, determined that They would bring others into this same fellowship, this same bond of love, this same relationship with Them. Before the foundations of the World, God Himself determined that He would bring YOU into this unique bond of love with Him.
Thus, God created human beings, and you know how the story goes. Our first parents, Adam and Eve, were disobedient, and before that fellowship could be truly sealed, the beginnings of that bond of fellowship between us and God were destroyed through the works of the Devil, which we will get into more later.
But, John says, now because of Christ, because of what He did on our behalf, both while living and by dying and rising again, that fellowship has been re-established. We are now TRULY children of God, if we “believe on Him whom He sent.” And something about being brought into this relationship with Him by faith has fundamentally changed who we are as a person. This is what we mean when we say that a person must be “born-again.” Not that they must have an altar-call experience, or that they must reach an “age of reason” whereby they can “choose for themselves” to be saved; some people have been “born-again” for as long, if not longer than they can remember, they have always been in fellowship with God through the work of Jesus Christ.
Rather than seeing a fundamental difference between who they “once were” and who they “now are,” the key is knowing that there is a fundamental difference between one who is “born of God” and one who has never been born of God, the default state of anyone who is left to grow up in only the world and outside of this relationship. However, if you have been living apart from that fellowship, outside of a relationship with God, and then come into it, there will be some fundamental changes, sometimes you will see or feel something growing inside of you as you increase in faith. And these changes will make you different from those around you who continue to be separated from this relationship.
But yet, it will always feel as if it is never fully-formed, fully-matured. John tells us next:
2Beloved, we are(E) God’s children(F) now, and what we will be(G) has not yet appeared; but we know that(H) when he appears[a](I) we shall be like him, because(J) we shall see him as he is.
John will, later on, make a comment about God’s seed abiding in us, and part of me wishes right now that he had made that comment closer to this one, because the two can be tied together. John says we already are God’s children. Now, we know from experience that, even if you are in a relationship with God, it doesn’t always look like it. From time to time it may be difficult to see the work of that relationship in your life. This may be, for some, because, like the statement about being “children of God,” you’ve grown so accustomed to it that you don’t always notice it.
I remember when I was in school a teacher asking us what we would think if humans didn’t have fingernails. Nearly everyone in the class said it would look weird for your hands not to have them. And then the teacher made the point that it’s only weird because that’s what we’ve grown up knowing, that’s what we’re used to. But if humans never had fingernails in the first place, no one would know any different, so our hands wouldn’t look weird at all; instead, to have fingernails would be weird then and not having them would be normal.
In a similar way, if you’ve grown up in the church, or if you’ve been in the faith for a long time, you may have grown so accustomed to your own walk with the Lord that it no longer appears remarkable to you; there doesn’t seem to be anything unique about it. And this can cause a person to doubt whether they really are in that relationship with Him or not. You may look to the great saints of the faith, those who have stood up for their faith and practiced a dedication to the Lord which stands out from the crowd and think “I don’t feel like that, I don’t live that way, I must not have real faith.”
Instead, however, John proclaims that WE ARE GOD’S CHILDREN NOW, this instant, He is our and we are His, regardless of how it may look or feel to us. The difference is a problem of perspective. “What we shall be has not yet appeared,” he says, we haven’t seen the final chapter, we don’t have the full picture. Unlike God, we cannot peer into the future and see what’s coming. But, because of what He has promised us in the Resurrection, we know that when Christ comes again, in His glorified body, we will be like Him, the transformation will be complete. Right now we are growing, developing, the seed has been planted in us; when He comes we shall be ripe, God will have pruned and sheered, cultivated and nourished this new life within us, through our faith in Him. This old shell of earthly life will have fallen away and the new plant, the resurrected “us” will appear. We shall be as He is. This is what we hope for in Him. Thus, John continues:
3And everyone who(K) thus hopes in him(L) purifies himself as he is pure.
If you hold this hope, you “purify” yourself. But what does that mean? One might suspect that a Jewish-Christian hearing this passage would, perhaps, have thought of the Jewish purity laws; don’t eat certain meats, don’t touch dead carcasses, wash your hands a certain way, so on and so forth. Is this what John was referring too? I doubt it, seeing as how all of the New Testament stands as a criticism of that concept of holiness.
Well, what does John say about about being purified or cleansed elsewhere in this book? Perhaps you remember from the first chapter, verses seven through nine, where he says:
7But(A) if we walk in the light,(B) as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and(C)the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us (i.e. purifies us) from all sin. 8(D) If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and(E) the truth is not in us. 9(F) If we confess our sins, he is(G) faithful and just to forgive us our sins and(H) to cleanse us (again, purify us) from all unrighteousness.
It is by that walk with Him in the light, in honesty, confession, and humility, by abiding in Him that we are purified- by Him. If you turn the verse on its head it makes a little more sense. It is because He is pure that we are purified when if we hope in Him. It also helps to remember that this word, purifies, is in the present active tense in the Greek. What that means is that it is a continual process. Essentially, like these other passages from the first chapter, this means he’s saying whoever hopes in Christ is purifying himself, not is pure or has purified. This will make a little more sense as we continue on through the passage. John says next:
4Everyone who makes a practice of sinning also practices lawlessness;(M) sin is lawlessness.
I like the ESV’s use of the word practice in this verse, whereas other translations have it as commit, i.e. everyone who commits sin. I think the ESV is justified in translating it as practices or practicing, because the word in the Greek, again in that same present active tense, could be translated as anyone who “is doing” or “is in a state of continually sinning.” It’s not “whoever commits a sin” but whoever is, essentially, defined by sinning.
John continues:
5You know that(N) he appeared to(O) take away sins, and(P) in him there is no sin. 6No one who abides in him keeps on sinning;(Q) no one who keeps on sinning has either seen him or known him.
This plays into an oft-heard quote in Christianity; that Christ died not just to save us from the guilt of our sins, but from our sins themselves. If you continue to “practice” sin, if the “things of this world,” as John put it last week, are what you’re about, then that goes against the very nature of what it means to hope in Christ. You can’t want Christ to take away your guilt, but not the thing which makes you guilty. He isn’t a trapdoor in that sense. We cannot treat Him that way, He won’t allow it.
He goes on:
7Little children,(R) let no one deceive you.(S) Whoever practices righteousness is righteous, as he is righteous.
Again, I like that use of the word practice, again because of its implications. I remember hearing someone make the quip once that Doctors aren’t perfect, that’s why they call it “practicing medicine.” It’s like, in a way, being at Basketball practice. If you had a perfect game, if you made every jumpshot, layup, and dunk, you wouldn’t need to practice. But since no one is that perfect, you practice. And yet, if you practice Basketball, you are a Basketball player.
Or, like an instrument, if you were played the guitar perfectly, new every chord and scale, from day one and never had to learn anything new, you wouldn’t need to practice. But since no one is that good and there’s always room for improvement, you practice. But, if you practice playing guitar, you are a guitar player.
In the same way, we who believe in Christ, practice righteousness by faith. It’s not that we’re perfect, or that there is no need for improvement, but we practice it and thus we grow. And if we practice righteousness, that is, the righteousness that is given to us through having faith in Christ, then we are righteous. The difference is, of course, that in the case of righteousness, it is God who gives us the righteousness, the one who makes us righteous, during our practice. It doesn’t merely develop naturally but has to be given to us through faith.
John then begins to talk about our subject for today, family resemblance, or the marks of who you belong to. He says:
8(T) Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil, for the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was(U) to destroy the works of the devil.
Whichever you practice, sin or righteousness, faith in the world or faith in God, is a result of who you belong to. If you continue practicing sin, then you are, as John puts it “of the devil.” Other places in the New Testament say that to live in the way of the world is to be a part of the “kingdom of darkness,” or the family of darkness if you will. If you continue in it, you do so because you are in a state of broken fellowship with God, the result of the Fall as we discussed earlier.
Christ came to overturn those results, the “works of the devil.” He came to overturn them in your life as well as everyone else’s. This is the story of salvation throughout the entire Bible, that God has come down in human form to take on, face to face, the devil and his works. He did this by living a perfect life, dying as a sacrifice, and being raised again in order that the rest of humanity would be raised with Him and freed from these works.
To practice sin means to not practice righteousness, to lack faith in God, to walk apart from Him; this is what it means to be “of the devil.” There’s no two ways about it. If you do not have faith in God, and as we saw in chapter to, in order to have Father one needs to have faith in the Son, then regardless of how “good” you may think you are, you are in that Kingdom of Darkness.
Then John moves on to what used to be one of the most difficult passages for me to come to grips with in the New Testament, but which has since become one of my favorites. He says:
9(V) No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God’s[b] seed abides in him, and he cannot keep on sinning because he has been born of God.
Now here’s how I used to understand this passage. I would hear it and think it was saying: “if you are born of God, i.e. if you are a Christian, then you better not go on sinning, because you belong to God now, He wouldn’t like it very much, and it would mean that He would have to ‘un-born’ you.” Basically, a return to the law rather than to grace; you can’t go on sinning because Christians aren’t allowed to sin anymore.
But of course, that’s not at all what the passage is saying. Instead, the crucial point of the verse is “God’s seed abides in him, and he cannot keep sinning because he has been born of God.” From what I can tell, given the way the passage is written, and given that the word “cannot” there could be in the “passive tense” in the Greek (though I don’t know enough to know for sure), it seems to me that the idea is that the passage might be understood this way: “God’s seed lives in Him, and thus he is prevented by it from continuing to sin, by being born of God.”
Thus, the idea would be that being born of God, by coming into that family fellowship with Him in Christ, something is put in your heart which works against the sinful nature, which overturns it and keeps it from doing what it would want to do. We are “prevented” from continuing to sin, there is some force at work in us which makes us act in faith and love instead. Not that we don’t still screw up, make mistakes, mess things over in major ways, and so on, it is a matter of practice after all; but we are no longer only sinners, slaves to our sinful nature, we are freed from it and no longer “defined by it.”
Thus John concludes this section by saying:
10By this it is evident who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God,(W) nor is the one who(X) does not love his brother.
Does this qualify us to judge others and their eternal state? No, we are told repeatedly not to do so at other places in the New Testament: judge the teaching, or the act, but not the person. Rather, it’s merely a statement of facts; there will be a “family resemblance;” if you are born of God you will practice faith and love- righteousness; it will cause you to do so. Thanks be to God that He gives us such great gifts.
When you hear the word “family,” what do you think of? Maybe it’s your mom and dad, your kids, maybe your grandma and grandpa, your aunts and uncles, your cousins. Or maybe your definition of family is a little broader than that, maybe it includes the friends you grew up with, that one best buddy you’ve had since kindergarten. Are you thoughts about your family great memories? Warm and fuzzy feelings? Or maybe your family is just the opposite; maybe they represent for you everything you don’t want to be. Perhaps your dad was abusive, or your mom was an alcoholic. Who knows?
Family plays a huge factor in determining who you are as a person, whether it’s a good influence or a bad one, it’s impossible to get past the impact your family makes on your decisions and behaviors, the things you love and the things you hate, and the way you deal with them both. We’re now getting a ways in to October, and soon the holiday season will be upon us. It’s a time to start thinking about all those things which either unite or divide our families; a time to reestablish some of those connections, if possible, and reaffirm the impact that our families have upon our soul and who we become later in life.
Being a father, I’ve found that one of the most entertaining parts about raising my son has been the speculation on who he will turn out to be like, who he reminds us of, who he looks like, who he acts like. It can get kind of confusing sometimes. Now, luckily for my son, so far he’s turned out to look more like his mom than his dad, but unluckily for us, he has the energy-levels of his Uncle Kenny rather than the more passive nature of either of his parents. Either way, it’s neat that you can point to different aspects of his behavior and appearance and say “that’s his so-and-so showing up in him.”
Obviously that’s what we call family resemblance. And, in a way, that’s what John has to speak to us about today. The two big themes for John in these letters are loving one another and being children of God. John’s saying, in the spiritual world, there are only two families: the family of God and family of the Devil; and in both families there are certain traits, there’s a family resemblance. Whatever family you’re a part of affects who you are.
He starts out:
1See(A) what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called(B) children of God; and so we are. The reason why(C) the world does not know us is that(D) it did not know him.
When I first started writing this sermon, I was having a bear of a time. Not because this isn’t good material to work with, it is. In fact, as far as I’m concerned this section and the one coming up next week are the climax of First John. Instead, I was having such a difficult time because saying that we are “children of God” has taken on an almost cliché status in Christianity anymore. We all know we are children of God, we here it again and again and again. It’s taken as being one of those “basic core truths” of Christianity.
In our minds, or in our emotions, it has about as much impact as saying “I’m human,” or “I’m from Indiana.” No one gets up, pumps their fist in the air and shouts “YEAH! I’m from the great state of Indiana!” In a similar way, being a child of God doesn’t seem to motivate us very much, probably because we don’t see this as something which has been changed, really, when we come into a relationship with God.
We often hear the phrase “we’re all God’s children.” And that’s true, isn’t it? Well, in a sense, it is. If we were to talk about “family resemblance,” there’s a few ways in which we all share the family resemblance of God- Genesis tells us we are made in His image. God is the Creator and Lord of All. And God, of course, loves the whole world. But I think John is referring to something else, some other means of being a child of God, a way which stands in sharp contrast to everyone else, all of whom presumably in some sense are not children of God.
Otherwise, how could he say “this is why the world does not know us,” that is, recognize us? We look foreign to them, strange, from someplace else, but how could that be if we’re only God’s children in the sense that every other person on the planet is a child of God?
Maybe it would help if we went back to the first chapter of First John, where he says we “proclaim to you the eternal life,(J) which was with the Father and was made manifest to us— 3(K) that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed(L) our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. 4And we are writing these things so(M) that our[a] joy may be complete.”
The difference is a matter of fellowship. In the teachings of Christianity we understand that the Father and the Son have a unique relationship with one another, a unique fellowship, a powerful bond of mutual love. That relationship has existed between them before the beginning of the world, and before the beginning of the world They, God the Father and God the Son, determined that They would bring others into this same fellowship, this same bond of love, this same relationship with Them. Before the foundations of the World, God Himself determined that He would bring YOU into this unique bond of love with Him.
Thus, God created human beings, and you know how the story goes. Our first parents, Adam and Eve, were disobedient, and before that fellowship could be truly sealed, the beginnings of that bond of fellowship between us and God were destroyed through the works of the Devil, which we will get into more later.
But, John says, now because of Christ, because of what He did on our behalf, both while living and by dying and rising again, that fellowship has been re-established. We are now TRULY children of God, if we “believe on Him whom He sent.” And something about being brought into this relationship with Him by faith has fundamentally changed who we are as a person. This is what we mean when we say that a person must be “born-again.” Not that they must have an altar-call experience, or that they must reach an “age of reason” whereby they can “choose for themselves” to be saved; some people have been “born-again” for as long, if not longer than they can remember, they have always been in fellowship with God through the work of Jesus Christ.
Rather than seeing a fundamental difference between who they “once were” and who they “now are,” the key is knowing that there is a fundamental difference between one who is “born of God” and one who has never been born of God, the default state of anyone who is left to grow up in only the world and outside of this relationship. However, if you have been living apart from that fellowship, outside of a relationship with God, and then come into it, there will be some fundamental changes, sometimes you will see or feel something growing inside of you as you increase in faith. And these changes will make you different from those around you who continue to be separated from this relationship.
But yet, it will always feel as if it is never fully-formed, fully-matured. John tells us next:
2Beloved, we are(E) God’s children(F) now, and what we will be(G) has not yet appeared; but we know that(H) when he appears[a](I) we shall be like him, because(J) we shall see him as he is.
John will, later on, make a comment about God’s seed abiding in us, and part of me wishes right now that he had made that comment closer to this one, because the two can be tied together. John says we already are God’s children. Now, we know from experience that, even if you are in a relationship with God, it doesn’t always look like it. From time to time it may be difficult to see the work of that relationship in your life. This may be, for some, because, like the statement about being “children of God,” you’ve grown so accustomed to it that you don’t always notice it.
I remember when I was in school a teacher asking us what we would think if humans didn’t have fingernails. Nearly everyone in the class said it would look weird for your hands not to have them. And then the teacher made the point that it’s only weird because that’s what we’ve grown up knowing, that’s what we’re used to. But if humans never had fingernails in the first place, no one would know any different, so our hands wouldn’t look weird at all; instead, to have fingernails would be weird then and not having them would be normal.
In a similar way, if you’ve grown up in the church, or if you’ve been in the faith for a long time, you may have grown so accustomed to your own walk with the Lord that it no longer appears remarkable to you; there doesn’t seem to be anything unique about it. And this can cause a person to doubt whether they really are in that relationship with Him or not. You may look to the great saints of the faith, those who have stood up for their faith and practiced a dedication to the Lord which stands out from the crowd and think “I don’t feel like that, I don’t live that way, I must not have real faith.”
Instead, however, John proclaims that WE ARE GOD’S CHILDREN NOW, this instant, He is our and we are His, regardless of how it may look or feel to us. The difference is a problem of perspective. “What we shall be has not yet appeared,” he says, we haven’t seen the final chapter, we don’t have the full picture. Unlike God, we cannot peer into the future and see what’s coming. But, because of what He has promised us in the Resurrection, we know that when Christ comes again, in His glorified body, we will be like Him, the transformation will be complete. Right now we are growing, developing, the seed has been planted in us; when He comes we shall be ripe, God will have pruned and sheered, cultivated and nourished this new life within us, through our faith in Him. This old shell of earthly life will have fallen away and the new plant, the resurrected “us” will appear. We shall be as He is. This is what we hope for in Him. Thus, John continues:
3And everyone who(K) thus hopes in him(L) purifies himself as he is pure.
If you hold this hope, you “purify” yourself. But what does that mean? One might suspect that a Jewish-Christian hearing this passage would, perhaps, have thought of the Jewish purity laws; don’t eat certain meats, don’t touch dead carcasses, wash your hands a certain way, so on and so forth. Is this what John was referring too? I doubt it, seeing as how all of the New Testament stands as a criticism of that concept of holiness.
Well, what does John say about about being purified or cleansed elsewhere in this book? Perhaps you remember from the first chapter, verses seven through nine, where he says:
7But(A) if we walk in the light,(B) as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and(C)the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us (i.e. purifies us) from all sin. 8(D) If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and(E) the truth is not in us. 9(F) If we confess our sins, he is(G) faithful and just to forgive us our sins and(H) to cleanse us (again, purify us) from all unrighteousness.
It is by that walk with Him in the light, in honesty, confession, and humility, by abiding in Him that we are purified- by Him. If you turn the verse on its head it makes a little more sense. It is because He is pure that we are purified when if we hope in Him. It also helps to remember that this word, purifies, is in the present active tense in the Greek. What that means is that it is a continual process. Essentially, like these other passages from the first chapter, this means he’s saying whoever hopes in Christ is purifying himself, not is pure or has purified. This will make a little more sense as we continue on through the passage. John says next:
4Everyone who makes a practice of sinning also practices lawlessness;(M) sin is lawlessness.
I like the ESV’s use of the word practice in this verse, whereas other translations have it as commit, i.e. everyone who commits sin. I think the ESV is justified in translating it as practices or practicing, because the word in the Greek, again in that same present active tense, could be translated as anyone who “is doing” or “is in a state of continually sinning.” It’s not “whoever commits a sin” but whoever is, essentially, defined by sinning.
John continues:
5You know that(N) he appeared to(O) take away sins, and(P) in him there is no sin. 6No one who abides in him keeps on sinning;(Q) no one who keeps on sinning has either seen him or known him.
This plays into an oft-heard quote in Christianity; that Christ died not just to save us from the guilt of our sins, but from our sins themselves. If you continue to “practice” sin, if the “things of this world,” as John put it last week, are what you’re about, then that goes against the very nature of what it means to hope in Christ. You can’t want Christ to take away your guilt, but not the thing which makes you guilty. He isn’t a trapdoor in that sense. We cannot treat Him that way, He won’t allow it.
He goes on:
7Little children,(R) let no one deceive you.(S) Whoever practices righteousness is righteous, as he is righteous.
Again, I like that use of the word practice, again because of its implications. I remember hearing someone make the quip once that Doctors aren’t perfect, that’s why they call it “practicing medicine.” It’s like, in a way, being at Basketball practice. If you had a perfect game, if you made every jumpshot, layup, and dunk, you wouldn’t need to practice. But since no one is that perfect, you practice. And yet, if you practice Basketball, you are a Basketball player.
Or, like an instrument, if you were played the guitar perfectly, new every chord and scale, from day one and never had to learn anything new, you wouldn’t need to practice. But since no one is that good and there’s always room for improvement, you practice. But, if you practice playing guitar, you are a guitar player.
In the same way, we who believe in Christ, practice righteousness by faith. It’s not that we’re perfect, or that there is no need for improvement, but we practice it and thus we grow. And if we practice righteousness, that is, the righteousness that is given to us through having faith in Christ, then we are righteous. The difference is, of course, that in the case of righteousness, it is God who gives us the righteousness, the one who makes us righteous, during our practice. It doesn’t merely develop naturally but has to be given to us through faith.
John then begins to talk about our subject for today, family resemblance, or the marks of who you belong to. He says:
8(T) Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil, for the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was(U) to destroy the works of the devil.
Whichever you practice, sin or righteousness, faith in the world or faith in God, is a result of who you belong to. If you continue practicing sin, then you are, as John puts it “of the devil.” Other places in the New Testament say that to live in the way of the world is to be a part of the “kingdom of darkness,” or the family of darkness if you will. If you continue in it, you do so because you are in a state of broken fellowship with God, the result of the Fall as we discussed earlier.
Christ came to overturn those results, the “works of the devil.” He came to overturn them in your life as well as everyone else’s. This is the story of salvation throughout the entire Bible, that God has come down in human form to take on, face to face, the devil and his works. He did this by living a perfect life, dying as a sacrifice, and being raised again in order that the rest of humanity would be raised with Him and freed from these works.
To practice sin means to not practice righteousness, to lack faith in God, to walk apart from Him; this is what it means to be “of the devil.” There’s no two ways about it. If you do not have faith in God, and as we saw in chapter to, in order to have Father one needs to have faith in the Son, then regardless of how “good” you may think you are, you are in that Kingdom of Darkness.
Then John moves on to what used to be one of the most difficult passages for me to come to grips with in the New Testament, but which has since become one of my favorites. He says:
9(V) No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God’s[b] seed abides in him, and he cannot keep on sinning because he has been born of God.
Now here’s how I used to understand this passage. I would hear it and think it was saying: “if you are born of God, i.e. if you are a Christian, then you better not go on sinning, because you belong to God now, He wouldn’t like it very much, and it would mean that He would have to ‘un-born’ you.” Basically, a return to the law rather than to grace; you can’t go on sinning because Christians aren’t allowed to sin anymore.
But of course, that’s not at all what the passage is saying. Instead, the crucial point of the verse is “God’s seed abides in him, and he cannot keep sinning because he has been born of God.” From what I can tell, given the way the passage is written, and given that the word “cannot” there could be in the “passive tense” in the Greek (though I don’t know enough to know for sure), it seems to me that the idea is that the passage might be understood this way: “God’s seed lives in Him, and thus he is prevented by it from continuing to sin, by being born of God.”
Thus, the idea would be that being born of God, by coming into that family fellowship with Him in Christ, something is put in your heart which works against the sinful nature, which overturns it and keeps it from doing what it would want to do. We are “prevented” from continuing to sin, there is some force at work in us which makes us act in faith and love instead. Not that we don’t still screw up, make mistakes, mess things over in major ways, and so on, it is a matter of practice after all; but we are no longer only sinners, slaves to our sinful nature, we are freed from it and no longer “defined by it.”
Thus John concludes this section by saying:
10By this it is evident who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God,(W) nor is the one who(X) does not love his brother.
Does this qualify us to judge others and their eternal state? No, we are told repeatedly not to do so at other places in the New Testament: judge the teaching, or the act, but not the person. Rather, it’s merely a statement of facts; there will be a “family resemblance;” if you are born of God you will practice faith and love- righteousness; it will cause you to do so. Thanks be to God that He gives us such great gifts.
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