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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadCambridge Greek Testament for Schools and Colleges - 1 John 5:4 - 5:4
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4. Reason why keeping even the difficult commandment of loving others rather than oneself is not a grievous burden. It is the world and its ways which makes the Divine commands grievous, and the new birth involved in faith gives us a new unworldly nature and a strength which conquers the world. Without this new nature and strength we should find God’s commandments, in spite of their reasonableness, intolerable.
ὅτι πᾶν τὸ γεγ. ἐκ τ. Θ. Because whatsoever is begotten of God: see on 1Jn 5:1. The collective neuter, ‘whatsoever’, gives the principle a wide sweep by stating it in its most abstract form: comp. Joh 6:37; Joh 17:2. Moreover, whereas the masculine would make the victorious person prominent, the neuter emphasizes rather the victorious power. It is not the man, but his birth from God, which conquers. In 1Jn 5:1 we had the masculine and in 1Jn 5:18 return to the masculine again. In all three cases we have the perfect, not the aorist, participle. It is not the mere fact of having received the Divine birth that is insisted on, but the permanent results of the birth. Comp. Joh 3:6; Joh 3:8, where we have the same tense and a similar change from neuter to masculine.
ἡ νίκη ἡ νικήσασα τ. κ. The victory that overcame the world: aorist participle of a victory won once for all. Under the influence of the Vulgate (quae vincit mundum) Wiclif, Luther, Tyndale and others, all have the present tense here. Faith, which is ‘the proof of things not seen’ (Heb 11:1) which ‘are eternal’ (2Co 4:18), has won a decisive victory over the world which is visible and which ‘is passing away’ (1Jn 2:17). Faith is both the victory and the victor. Illa nimirum fides quae per dilectionem operatur. Illa fides, qua ejus humiliter auxilium flagitamus, qui ait … confidite, ego vici mundum (Bede). Πίστις occurs nowhere else in these Epistles, nor in the Gospel; νίκη nowhere else in N.T. Note the characteristic repetition of τὸν κόσμον, thrice in two verses, and always in the sense of the great human tradition of indifference or antagonism to God. See on 1Jn 2:2.