v. 13-21. CONCLUSION.
- Intercessory Love the Fruit of Faith (v. 13-17).
- The Sum of the Christian's Knowledge (v. 18-20).
- Final Injunction (v. 21).
13. "That ye may know." The Gospel of John was written "that ye may have life" (xx. 31), but this Epistle was written "that ye may know that ye have eternal life." The one leads to the obtaining of the boon of life. The other to the joy of knowing that it is not only obtained, but that it is eternal. Thus from the Gospel to the Epistle there is progress. True faith always leads to knowledge. (Eph. iv. 13.)14 And this is the boldness which we have toward him, that, if we ask anything according to his will, he heareth us
14. "This is the boldness." Better, "And the boldness that we have towards Him is this, that if," etc. Thrice before this has John spoken of the Christian boldness (ii. 28, iii. 21, 22, iv. 17). Here it is in reference to intercessory prayer, prompted by love of the brethren. The conscious possession of eternal life enables the believer to come directly before God and to speak every thought with perfect freedom. This boldness is more than simple belief, it is a sure inward experience.
"According to his will." This only limit to acceptable prayer is equivalent to "in my name," John xiv. 13. It comprises all spiritual perfection and all temporal things that are contributory to this perfection.
15. "And if we know." There may be uncertainty respecting the fact of the presence of the knowledge, but not in the knowledge itself. He who is prompted by the Holy Spirit will ask for those things only which accord with God's will, and he will have them in the assured promise, if not in conscious realization. (Mark xi. 24.) This may be delayed.
"We have the petitions." Their equivalent, if not necessarily the actual things asked for. A saint in need may pray for gold and receive that which is better than gold, the trial of his faith; confidence in God may be tested and strengthened. This finds its most characteristic expression in intercessory prayer, as in the next verse. Fellowship with God implies deep interest in our fellow-men, especially professed disciples of Christ. But there is one great barrier to the success of such prayer, "sin unto death."
16. "Sin not unto death." Death spiritual is separation from Christ "the life." All sin tends to this separation, but not in equal degrees. A hasty or thoughtless sin flowing from human imperfection and infirmity does not carry the same momentum of volition as a deliberate transgression. A course of sin is more worthy of condemnation than a single act, immediately confessed and repented.
"He will ask." The true believer will naturally offer prayer for his erring and imperilled brother in Christ. He needs no command. "Prayer is the Christian's vital breath."
"And he will give to him life." The pronoun "he" naturally refers to him who prays. "There is nothing unscriptural in the thought that the believer does that which God does through him, as in James v. 20." The life given is not life restored, but rather life invigorated as the life of a sick man on the way to death is strengthened by a skilful physician.
"There is sin unto death." This is the R. V. marginal reading. The A. V., "a sin," is too definite and indicates a single act, or a certain act, which the Greek does not imply.
"I do not say he shall pray for it." We are not forbidden to pray, but excused. In Jer. vii. 16, and xiv. 11, the prophet was forbidden to pray for the Jewish people in their apostasy, because they had exhausted the forbearance of God and He had determined to "consume them." But in the New Testament we are not commanded to refrain from prayer for the very worst people, even those who have committed the irremissible sin, the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost. We are told that we may innocently refrain from prayer in such a case.
This sin is not limited to a single act, such as a crime worthy of punishment by death, or a manifestly Divine visitation, or a sin punished by the church with excommunication. It is rather a course of wilful sin in defiance of the known law of God persisted in so obstinately against the influences of the Holy Spirit, that repentance becomes a moral impossibility, just as a man may starve himself so long as to lose the power to appropriate, digest and assimilate food. Just as there is an abstinence from food unto death, there is a career of sin and a refusal of the offers of grace until the power to receive grace perishes. Here arises the question, "How can we know when a sinner has reached this fatal point? How can we know when we are excused from intercessory prayer in his behalf?" So far as our powers of perception are concerned the line between God's mercy and His wrath in this world is imperceptible. But since all true prayer is prompted and helped by the Holy Spirit (Rom. viii. 26), the total absence of such prompting and assistance in the case of attempted prayer for an individual, whether a brother in the church or not, affords to the living Christian, who has the spirit of prayer for other sinners, ground for the inference that this person has sinned unto death, having passed the point in his course of sin which marks the soul for eternal despair. Our exegesis is strongly confirmed by the preceding context, which teaches that when we fulfil the conditions of true prayer we receive "whatsoever we ask." John pauses to note one exception to this promise, namely, when praying for another our prayer will be useless if that person has reached the point in his persistent sinning beyond which there is no possible passing out of death into life. Hence I believe that if the "sin unto death" is in act of sin, however heinous, it is the culmination of a state or habit of sin wilfully chosen and persisted in. It is the deliberate and final preference of darkness to light, of falsehood to truth, of sin to holiness, of the world to God, and of spiritual death to eternal life. It is the choice of Milton's Satan, "Evil, be thou my good."
17. "All unrighteousness is sin." "This statement," says the Cambridge Bible, "serves as a farewell declaration against the Gnostic doctrine that to the enlightened Christian declensions from righteousness involve no sin," because, as they assert, sin inheres in matter only, and hence the human spirit is always sinless. John's wider scope given to the definition of sin includes not only positive transgression of the law, but also all failures to fulfil our duty to God and to one another. These are unrighteousness, although our natural infirmities and birth propensities do not involve us in guilt and entail punishment. John had already declared (i. 9) that there is ample provision in the atonement for both the forgiveness of actual sins and for cleansing from all unrighteousness. Here is a wide field for brotherly intercession.
"There is a sin not unto death." This is added as a safeguard against despair. Bishop Westcott finds an unsolved paradox in this clause and the declaration in chap. iii. 9, "Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; and he cannot sin because he is born of God." But in this verse John asserts that there is a sin which does not destroy the spiritual life. This has been accounted a plain contradiction. The perplexity disappears, or, rather, is greatly alleviated, by a careful reading of the Greek tenses. The perfect tense "has been born of God" implies that the regenerating efficacy of divine grace continues, and his likeness to God, figuratively expressed by the phrase "son of God," remains undimmed to the present moment. In that case, while love to God rules the conduct, the person cannot be sinning or in a career of rebellion against God, which is spiritual death ending in eternal death. But from chap. ii. 1 it is assumed that there may be a single sin (aorist tense), contrary to the tenor and trend of this regenerate and saintly character, committed under the stress of sudden temptation, and immediately bewailed with true penitence and trust in the great Advocate with the Father. Such a sin finds speedy forgiveness. The spiritual life is not extinguished in eternal death. In this sense there is possible "a sin not unto death." But if instant repentance is not made, and a second and a third sin are committed, the law of habit comes in, and, like the fabled boa constrictor which crushed Laocoon and his sons in his deadly coils, destroys forever the spiritual life. He has ceased to be a child of God, because he has ceased to be like God. The "sin unto death" has been committed.
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