Pursuit of wisdom for today from the Ancient of Days
I John 3:4-10
A sign of life.
No one who is born of God practices sin; he cannot sin. This is the clear signal that one belongs to the Savior and has eternal life. John lays out this marker to encourage his readers to reject the gnostic teaching.
These comments from our passage require us to explore what John does not mean before we consider what he does mean.
Christians do stumble into sins, and John insists that we be honest about our own failures in the verses at the end of the first chapter. If we say we have no sin, or that we have not sinned, then we make God out to be a liar and are self-deceived.
We are continually cleansed by the blood of the Lord Jesus. For believers, all of our sins, even future sins, are washed away by Calvary. The continual cleansing refers to what is called family forgiveness — the restoration of our fellowship with a holy God.
So since this is what John emphatically expresses in chapter 1, what does he mean here in chapter 3?
The sense rides on the grammar of the verbs in his comments and doesn’t easily come through in translation. The emphasis of this paragraph is continual action. One who belongs to God cannot have sin be the continual, uncontested habit of his life. The words “he cannot sin” are in the present tense, so some of our more recent Bible translations try to help us understand by rendering it “he cannot sin continually.”
So believers do stumble into sins and can even become calloused toward their sin, but God will not leave them alone in that state. Hebrews 12 describes the process of correction that God their Father will apply to such Christians for their rescue. Paul refers in 1 Corinthians 11:30 to the fact that this discipline sometimes involves God taking the life of a wayward believer.
Hebrews supplies the opposite side of the picture: people without chastisement are not children of God. And this helps bring us back to what John is teaching.
There is this strong, existential contrast between those who know God and those who don’t. It is the grip of purity upon the life of a believer.
Sin is lawlessness and rebellion against God. It brings corruption and destruction to life. The world is full of people trapped in such living who are children of the devil. Satan has constructed this evil system and through his temptation led the masses into a state of delusion.
Christ came into the world to destroy this edifice of evil, this stronghold of brokenness. And He did not fail. He came to rescue people out of their guilty condition and set them free to walk in newness of life.
Having come to see Jesus, knowing Him, abiding in Him, a believer comes into contact with His infinite purity. The Holy Spirit baptises believers into Christ, applying all the riches of Calvary and cleansing away the guilt. Spiritual life opens a vista of obedience leading away from the paths of darkness.
For believers a continuance of walking in darkness just doesn’t happen in an unquestioned, unchallenged way. The Lord simply doesn’t let that happen.
When we are born of God, He plants the seed of eternal life within us. That seed blossoms with increasing fullness. One day perfect and permanent purity will be ours when we stand in glory.
The gnostic teachers were quite confused on the topic of good and evil, and so I assume their lives were obviously sin-filled. If true, this would have presented to John’s readers a stark contrast to their own lives and stand as a signal which would bolster their confidence that Christ had already provided them with the eternal life they were seeking.
Previous Scripture Notes
You can find notes that were published earlier on this page.
Pursuit of wisdom for today from the Ancient of Days
Join us for:
iumbic notes
Fortnightly newsletter with stabilizing truth and peace of mind from the Bible.
free copy of Flourish
Put down roots and thrive by God’s word.