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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
4. ὑμεῖς. Ye, with emphasis and in marked contrast to the false teachers, are of God. The emphasis is intensified by the asyndeton.
νενικήκατε αὐτούς. In the masculine S. John passes from the antichristian spirits to the false prophets who are their mouthpieces. By not listening to these seducers his ‘little children’ have overcome them. ‘A stranger will they not follow, but will flee from him, for they know not the voice of strangers’ (Joh 10:5). Thus the stranger is defeated.
ὅτι μείζων ἐστὶν ὁ ἐν ὑμῖν. Qui audit ‘Vicistis’ erigit caput, erigit cervicem, laudari se vult. Noli te extollere. Vide quis in te vicit (S. Augustine). ‘Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts’ (Zec 4:6). It is precisely for this reason that they may have confidence against all spiritual enemies: it is not confidence in themselves (1Co 15:57 and especially Eph 6:10-17). In ὁ ἐν ὑμῖν and ὁ ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ we have two personal powers opposed to one another: and therefore ὁ ἐν ὑμῖν must be understood of God or Christ rather than of ὁ λόγος τοῦ θεοῦ.
ὁ ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ. The same as ὁ ἄρχων τοῦ κόσμου τούτου (Joh 12:31), the devil, the father of these lying teachers (1Jn 3:10; Joh 8:44), whose works Christ came to destroy (1Jn 3:8). By saying ‘in the world’ rather than ‘in them’, the Apostle indicates that they belong to ‘the world’. “S. John constantly teaches that the Christian’s work in this state of probation is to conquer ‘the world’. It is, in other words, to fight successfully against that view of life which ignores God, against that complex system of attractive moral evil and specious intellectual falsehood which is organized and marshalled by the great enemy of God, and which permeates and inspires non-Christianized society” (Liddon).