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16. ‘The prayer of faith’ is all-prevailing when it is in accordance with God’s will. This is the sole limit as regards prayer on our own behalf. Is there any other limit in the case of prayer on behalf of another? Yes, there is that other’s own will: this constitutes a further limitation. Man’s will has been endowed by God with such royal freedom, that not even His will coerces it. Still less, therefore, can a brother’s prayer coerce it. If a human will has deliberately and obstinately resisted God, and persists in doing so, we are debarred from our usual certitude. Against a rebel will even the prayer of faith in accordance with God’s will (for of course God desires the submission of the rebel) may be offered in vain.—For exhortations to intercession elsewhere in N.T. see 1Th 5:25; Heb 13:18-19; Jam 5:14-20; comp. Php 1:4.
τὸν ἀδελφόν. Here ‘brother’ must mean ‘fellow-Christian’, not any human being, whether Christian or not.
ἁμαρτάνοντα ἁμαρτίαν. As R.V., sinning a sin. The supposed case is one in which the sinner is seen in the very act. No earlier English Version marks the participle; neither does Luther, nor the Vulgate (peccare peccatum). Ἁμαρτάνειν ἁμαρτίαν occurs nowhere else in N.T.; but περὶ τῆς ἁμαρτίας αὐτοῦ ἦς ἥμαρτε occurs repeatedly in LXX. (Lev 5:6; Lev 5:10; Lev 5:13; Eze 18:24.)
αἰτήσει. Future equivalent to imperative; he shall ask, as A.V. and R.V.: or, he will ask; i.e. a Christian in such a case is sure to pray for his erring brother. The latter seems preferable. Comp. τότε νηστεύσουσιν ἐν ἐκείνῃ τῇ ἡμέρᾳ (Mar 2:20); i.e. the children of the bridechamber not only can fast, but will fast, when the Bridegroom is taken away.
δώσει αὐτῷ ζωήν. Ambiguous. The nominative may be either God or the intercessor; and αὐτῷ may be either the intercessor or the sinner for whom he intercedes. If the latter alternatives be taken, we may compare ‘he shall save a soul from death’ (Jam 5:20). Commentators are much divided. On the one hand it is urged that throughout Scripture asking is man’s part and giving God’s: but, on the other hand, when two verbs are connected so closely as these, ‘will ask and will give’ (αἰτήσει καὶ δώσει), it seems rather violent to give them different nominatives; ‘he will ask and God will give’. It seems better to translate, he will ask and will give him life,—them that sin not unto death. ‘Them’ is in apposition to ‘him’, the clause being an explanation rather awkwardly added, similar to that at the end of 1Jn 5:13. If ‘God’ be inserted, ‘them’ is the dativus commodi; ‘God will grant the intercessor life for those who sin’. The change to the plural makes the statement more general: ‘sinning not unto death’ is not likely to be an isolated case. The New Vulgate is here exceedingly free; petat, et dabitur ei vita peccanti non ad mortem. Tertullian also ignores the change of number; postulabit, et dabit ei vitam dominus qui non ad mortem delinquit. The Old Vulgate has petit, et dabit ei vitam, peccantibus non ad mortem.
ἔστιν ἁμαρτία πρὸς θάν. There is sin unto death; we have no τις or μία, a fact which is against the supposition that any act of sin is intended. In that case would not S. John have named it, that the faithful might avoid it, and also know when it had been committed? The following explanations of ‘sin unto death’ may be safely rejected. 1. Sin punished by the law with death. 2. Sin punished by Divine visitation with death or sickness. 3. Sin punished by the Church with excommunication. As a help to a right explanation we may get rid of the idea which some commentators assume, that ‘sin unto death’ is a sin which can be recognised by those among whom the one who commits it lives. S. John’s very guarded language points the other way. He implies that some sins may be known to be ‘not unto death’: he neither says nor implies that all ‘sin unto death’ can be known as such. As a further help we may remember that no sin, if repented of, can be too great for God’s mercy. Hence S. John does not speak even of this sin as ‘fatal’ or ‘mortal’, but as ‘unto death’ (πρὸς θάνατον). Death is its natural, but not its absolutely inevitable consequence. It is possible to close the heart against the influences of God’s Spirit so obstinately and persistently that repentance becomes a moral impossibility. Just as the body may starve itself to such an extent as to make the digestion, or even the reception, of food impossible; so the soul may go on refusing offers of grace until the very power to receive grace perishes. Such a condition is necessarily sin, and ‘sin unto death’. No passing over out of death into life (1Jn 3:14) is any longer (without a miracle of grace) possible. ‘Sin unto death’, therefore, is not any act of sin, however heinous, but a state or habit of sin wilfully chosen and persisted in: it is constant and consummate opposition to God. In the phraseology of this Epistle we might say that it is the deliberate and persistent preference of darkness to light, of falsehood to truth, of sin to righteousness, of the world to the Father, of spiritual death to eternal life.
οὐ περὶ ἐκείνης λέγω ἵνα ἐρωτήσῃ. Not concerning that do I say that he should make request. This reproduces the telling order of the Greek; it avoids the ambiguity which lurks in ‘pray for it’; it preserves the emphatic ἐκείνης; and marks better the difference between the verb (αἰτεῖν) previously rendered ‘ask’ (1Jn 5:14-16) and the one (ἐρωτᾷν) here rendered in A.V. ‘pray’. Of the two verbs the latter is the less suppliant (see on Joh 14:16), whereas ‘pray’ is more suppliant than ‘ask’. Two explanations of the change of verb are suggested. 1. The Apostle does not advise request, much less does he advise urgent supplication in such a case. 2. He uses the less humble word to express a request which seems to savour of presumption. See on 2Jn 1:5. With ἐκείνης here, indicating something distinct, alien, and horrible, comp. ἐκεῖνος of Judas (Joh 13:27; Joh 13:30).
(1) Note carefully that S. John, even in this extreme case, does not forbid intercession: all he says is that he does not command it. For one who sins an ordinary sin we may intercede in faith with certainty that a prayer so fully in harmony with God’s will is heard. The sinner will receive grace to repent. But where the sinner has made repentance impossible S. John does not encourage us to intercede. Comp. Jer 7:16; Jer 14:11. Yet, as S. Bernard says, Fides aliquando recipit, quod oratio non praesumit, and he instances the sisters’ faith in ‘Lord, if Thou hadst been here my brother had not died’.
(2) Note also that, whilst distinguishing between deadly and not deadly sin, he gives us no criterion by which we may distinguish the one from the other. He thus condemns rather than sanctions those attempts which casuists have made to tabulate sins under the heads of ‘mortal’ and ‘venial’. Sins differ indefinitely in their intensity and effect on the soul, ending at one end of the scale in ‘sin unto death’; and the gradations depend not merely or chiefly on the sinful act, but on the motive which prompted it, and the feeling (whether of sorrow or delight) which the recollection of it evokes. Further than this it is not safe to define or dogmatize. This seems to be intimated by what is told us in the next verse. Two facts are to be borne in mind, and beyond them we need not pry.