The secret of sinlessness--our abiding in Christ--the seed of God abiding in us--our being born of God
I.
These texts (1Jn_3:6; 1Jn_3:9) do not teach either the doctrine of perfection or that other doctrine which is apt to usurp its place--the doctrine that God sees no sin in His people, or that what would be sin in others is not sin in them.
II. There is another mode of dealing with the statements before us which I cannot feel to be satisfactory. It is to limit their comprehensiveness, and to understand the apostle as speaking, not of sin universally, but of sin more or less voluntary and presumptuous. According to this view, one abiding in Christ cannot sin deliberately, intentionally, knowingly. Is that true? Was it true of David? Or of the man in Corinth who was excommunicated for incest, and, upon repentance, restored?
III. It may help us out of the difficulty if we first look at the statements before us in the light, not of what we are now by grace, but of what we are to be in the future state of glory. It will be true then that we sin not; it will be impossible for us then to sin. What will make it impossible for us to sin? Simply our abiding in Christ, our being born of God, His seed abiding in us. Let me remind you that this impeccability lies in the will--the seat of it is the will. It is because, in the state of glory, my will is made “perfectly and immutably free to do good alone,” that my will is, or that I myself am, incapable of doing evil. And if it is your will that is to be thus free--free, as His will is free, to do good alone, and therefore incapable of an evil choice, then your impeccability must be, if I may say so, itself voluntary; voluntarily accepted and realised.
IV. Let me try to bring out more clearly this principle as one that must connect the future with the present. Why is it that in heaven, my will being free as God’s will is free, I can no more sin than He can sin? What answer would John give to that question if you could put it to him now? As thus: “In whatever sense, and with whatever modifications, thou didst, in thy experience when here, find that to be true which thou hast so emphatically put--as the test, apparently, of real Christianity--it is all true of thee there, where thou art now! How is it so? Why is it so?” “Because I abide in the Son of God, and God’s own seed abides in me, as being born of God”--is not that his reply? What other reply can he give? Then, does it not follow that it is an impeccability that may be realised on earth? For the causes of it are realised on earth; first, your abiding in the Son of God; secondly, your being born of God so as to have His seed abiding in you.
V. Viewed thus in the light of “what we shall be,” and of the bearing of what we shall be on what we are, John’s statements assume a somewhat different aspect from what they are apt to wear when taken by themselves. They become not one whit less solemn, but greatly more encouraging. For one thing, you may now regard them as describing a precious privilege, as well as imposing a searching test. They show you the way of perfect holiness; how you are to be righteous even as Christ is righteous; even as God is righteous.
VI. Taking this view, I confess I do not feel so much concern as otherwise I might feel about reconciling such strong statements as that one abiding in Christ sinneth not, or that one born of God cannot sin, with the acknowledged and lamented fact that he does sin. John has dealt with that fact already, and told us how to deal with it. It is not his business here to be making allowance for it. For indeed it is most dangerous to be considering the matter in that light or on that side at all. It is almost sure to lead, first to calculations, and then to compromises fatal to singleness of eye and the holy ambition that ought to fire the breast--calculations first about the quantity and quality of the residuum of old corruption which we must lay our account with finding in the purest God-born soul, and then compromises under the sort of feeling that, as the proverb says, what cannot be cured must be endured. Let a few practical inferences be suggested.
1. I think the texts teach, or imply, the doctrine of the final perseverance of the saints, the impossibility of their either wholly or permanently falling away from a state of grace.
2. The texts teach very plainly that this doctrine, whatever may be its practical use and value in its right place, and when turned to legitimate account, cannot give to any man security in sin, cannot make him safe when he is sinning, when he is committing sin or transgressing the law.
3. John’s true design and purpose is to put you in the way of not sinning, of its being impossible for you to sin. (R. S. Candlish, D. D.)
The inadmissibility of sin
This paragraph goes to show that the practice of sin is out of the question for a believer in Christ. Sin has no place whatever in the Christian life, according to the proper view and conception of it. We observe five distinct reasons alleged by the apostle for this conclusion.
I. First he makes out, in verses 2 and 3, that on purity depends our future glory. This is the starting point of his denunciation of sin. John and his readers are “now,” in this present life, the “children of God.” The manner of their future existence is not revealed. One thing “we know,” that it will be a God-like state. We want to see God, for we are His children. And we are told that “without holiness no man shall see the Lord.” Then we must be holy. Now the pattern of God-likeness for us is Jesus the Son of God. We will, therefore, conform ourselves to Him. Everyone who longs to see God, and has seen Jesus Christ, knows now what he must be like in order to attain the vision. So he “purifies himself, as He is pure.” The apostle does not tell us here how this purity is to be gained. He says one thing at a time. He wants to convince us that such purity is indispensable. Observe, by the way, the word which John uses here for pure. It is hagnos, which elsewhere and commonly means chaste (2Co_11:2; Tit_2:5). It signifies the delicate purity of virgin thoughts and an uncontaminated mind (comp. Rev_14:4), the opposite of sensuality and carnality; the purity of one in whom the animal and earthly are refined and transformed by the spiritual--as in Jesus.
II. Now St. John proceeds from the positive to the negative, from enjoining holiness to denouncing sin. And of his prohibitions this is the first: sin is illegal. So he puts it, with concise energy, in verse 4. This seems to you, perhaps, a commonplace; because you have behind you many ages of Christian teaching. Not so with John’s readers. Most of them had been Pagans, taught to think that if they kept the ceremonial rules of religion, and the laws of the state as sanctioned by religion, the gods were satisfied with them, troubling themselves no further about men’s conduct or the condition of their souls--that, in fact, private morals are one thing, law and religion quite another. Some of them had, probably, been Pharisaic Jews, accustomed to observe strictly the letter of their sacred law, while they found means, by all manner of evasions, to indulge in gross wickedness. Now the apostle traverses this position in verse 4. He deepens our conception of sin and broadens our conception of law, while he makes them coincide and cover the same ground, when he says, “Sin is lawlessness.” The law of God is all-embracing, all-penetrating; it touches every part of human nature and conduct. We have no business to do anything or think anything that is in the least degree ungodly. Every sinner is a rebel and an outlaw in God’s creation. This is the first and fundamental condemnation--the constitutional objection to sin, as we may call it.
III. In the next place, sin is unchristian. Here again we must put ourselves in the position of the readers, who had to learn things of God that He has been teaching us and our fathers for centuries. “He was manifested that He might take away sins”--not “our sins,” but “sins” in the most unlimited sense (compare 1Jn_2:2). This our apostle had learnt from his first master, the Baptist, who pointed him to Jesus with the words, “Behold the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sin of the world!” That great manifestation, the appearance of the Son of God in human flesh, was God’s demonstration against sin. Christ’s one object was to destroy it; and we can only “abide in Him” on the understanding that we have done with it too. Nor must we deceive ourselves by thinking that “righteousness” consists of good frames and feelings--we must “do righteousness” (verse 7). This apostle had known his Master on earth more intimately than anyone besides. And in this one word he describes the character of Jesus, and says of Him what could be said of no other child of Adam: “In Him sin does not exist.” Elsewhere he calls Him “Jesus Christ the righteous,” “the pure,” “the true.” To “take away sins,” to “cleanse us from all sin” (1Jn_1:7), is with John a summary term for the abolition of moral evil. The Lord Jesus carries our sins right away and discharges us from them. Herein lies the glory and the fulness of the redemption that is in Christ Jesus--it destroys sin root and branch, in its guilt and power, its burden on the conscience, and its dominion over the heart. It is a hard saying, that of verse 6: “Whosoever sinneth hath not seen Him nor known Him!” The interpreter needs to walk warily, lest with this sentence he should break some bruised reed, or quench the smoking flax in the heart of one who loves the Lord and yet has to mourn his many failures and shortcomings. The apostle writes here, and in verses 4 and 6, in the Greek present participle, which describes a continuous act or habit of sin: “everyone that sinneth” signifies everyone who lives in sin, or every sinner; and “everyone that doeth sin” means everyone whose life bears this fruit and yields sin for its product and result. The apostle is not thinking of the case of men weak in faith or “overtaken in some trespass.” Once to have seen the Lord Jesus, as John had seen Him, is enough to make any other ideal of life impossible. If you have “seen Him,” then you have fallen in love with holiness, once and forever. For you to put up with sin any more, or be at peace with it, is a thing impossible.
IV. Once more, St. John gives us to understand that sin is diabolical (verse 8). The righteous Son of God has come forth to be the leader of the sons of God, who are saved by His blood and abide in His righteousness. For the doers of sin there is another leader and pattern: “He that doeth sin is of the devil.” Every act of wrong-doing is an act of assistance to the enemy of God and man; it is an act of treason, therefore, in the professed servant of God, the soldier of Christ Jesus. Every such act helps in its degree to prop and maintain the great fortress of evil, the huge rampart raised in this world against the holy and almighty will of God, which Scripture calls sin.
V. Finally, St. John comes round again to what he had said at the outset: sin is unnatural in a child of God (verse 9). The two sentences of verse 9 amount to saying: First, as a matter of fact, the child of God does not sin; secondly, as a matter of principle, he cannot sin. Concerning “everyone that is begotten of God,” the apostle asserts, “sin he does not commit.” There is a master influence, a principle of Divine life and sonship, which produces the opposite effect, a “seed” that bears good fruit of righteousness instead of the old evil fruit of unrighteousness. This “seed of God abiding” in the believer is surely, according to John’s way of thinking, the presence of the Holy Spirit, that which he called in 1Jn_2:27 “an anointing from the Holy One dwelling in you,” the chrism (anointing) which makes men Christians. Of the same grace he writes in 1Jn_3:24 : “In this we know that He dwells in us, from the Spirit which He gave us.” And St. Paul teaches us that the Holy Spirit, given to believers in Christ, is at once the seal of their sonship to God and the seed of moral goodness; for he speaks of the manifold forms of Christian virtue as “the fruit of the Spirit” (Gal_5:22-23), that excludes “the works of the flesh.” For “these are contrary one to the other, so that you may not do the things you would; the Spirit lusts against the flesh”--it desires and effects what the flesh most disliked. Sin is done away not by mere negation and repression, but by the counterworking of a positive and stronger principle. The ground is so filled with the good seed that weeds have no room to grow. To a child of God, to the new nature, the new tastes and dispositions of the man “born of the Spirit,” sin becomes a moral impossibility. It is wholly repugnant to that “Divine nature” of which he now partakes (2Pe_1:4). What shall we say, then, to the notorious fact of sin in believers? Some have shamelessly declared that their sin is no sin, for they are “born of God,” and therefore “cannot sin” 1 St. John would infallibly draw, for such men, the opposite conclusion--that, seeing they thus sin, they are not born of God, they “lie and do not the truth.” The fact must be admitted, but not for a moment allowed. Sin is an alien and monstrous thing to the regenerate; its detection in the heart must cause to a child of God the deepest pain and shame. Its actual commission, even for a moment, is a fall from grace, a loss of the seal of sonship, only to be retrieved by prompt repentance and recourse to the all-cleansing blood. Christianity can make no concession to sin, no compromise with it in any shape or form, without stultifying itself and denying its sinless, suffering Lord. (G. G. Findlay, B. A.)
Abiding in Christ the remedy against sin
As the Venerable Bede wrote long ago, “Quantum in Eo manet, tantum non peccat” (“In so far as he abideth in Him, thus far he sinneth not.”)
Christian purity
This deliverance does not imply the annihilation of the reward tendency to sin, so that we shall no longer find it in us as a force against which we have to watch and to contend. For, if Christ, by His own presence and power in our hearts, gives us complete and constant victory over the hostile force within us, so that it no longer consciously moulds our acts, or words, or thoughts, we are already saved from all polluting power of sin. A tendency to evil which is every moment trodden underfoot will cause us no spiritual shame. (J. A. Beet, D. D.)
Centrifugal and centripetal forces
This exposition may be illustrated by a far reaching analogy found in the solar system. The motive force in a planet at any moment, which force is an accumulation of its previous motion, would, if the attractive force of the sun were withdrawn, carry the planet from its orbit and to ruin. Whereas, if the inherent force were removed, the planet would fall into the sun, thus losing its individual existence. But under the combined influence of these two forces, each exerting its full influence every moment, the planet moves on its appointed path, preserving its individuality, yet subordinate to a body immensely greater than itself. So we move in absolute devotion to Him from whom we receive light and life and all things. (J. A. Beet, D. D.)
Counteracting sin
Similarly, we carry in our bodies chemical forces which would destroy us were they not neutralised by the presence of animal life. Yet, in spite of these forces, the body may be in perfect health. For the neutralising power is sufficient to preserve us. Just so the presence of Christ in our hearts holds back our inborn tendencies to evil, aggravated as they are by personal sin, and preserves us from all corruption. Thus does He save His people from their sins. (J. A. Beet, D. D.)
