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1Jn_5:21. If believers have come to the true God through Christ, they have to take care that they do not lose this eternal and highest good by giving themselves up to any vain idol. In this train of thought John closes his Epistle with the short exhortation, so impressive, however, in its brevity: τεκνία φυλάξετε ἑαυτοὺς ἀπὸ τῶν εἰδώλων . In the address τεκνία we may see the depth of the feeling with which John utters these concluding words.
εἴδωλα are properly images; this signification is retained here by many commentators (Tertullian, Oecumenius, Lyranus, Lorinus, Salmeron, Lücke, Baumgarten-Crusius, Erdmann, Düsterdieck, etc.), whilst some of them, however, extend the idea to that of “false, heathen gods;” others, again, refer the expression to the arbitrary self-made representations of God which the false teachers had—thus Bede, Rickli, Sander, Thiersch (Versuch zur Herstellung, p. 241), etc.
Others combine both views, and understand by εἴδωλα here all sorts of images which men arbitrarily make for themselves of God (Ebrard, Braune). If the warning is not to be regarded as a detached appendix, foreign to the contents of the Epistle, we cannot rest satisfied with the first interpretation. As the apostle, just in the antithesis to the false teachers, who belong to the κόσμος , has so decidedly referred to the ἀληθινὸς Θεός , he certainly has in view in this warning, if not altogether, yet principally, the untrue mental images of those teachers.[337] It is only if so taken that the warning to keep themselves from idols forms the appropriate conclusion of the whole Epistle.
[337] That the apostle here also means the res mundariae, inasmuch as man is attached to them (Myrberg), is so much the more improbable as the foregoing contains no reference to them.