ii. 29-v. 12. GOD IS LOVE.
c. ii. 29-iii. 24.The Evidence of Sonship: Deeds of Righteousness before God.
- The Children of God and the Children of the Devil (ii. 29-iii. 12).
- Love and Hate: Life and Death (iii. 13-24).
29. "He is righteous . . . begotten of Him." The difficulty is to determine the antecedent of the pronouns "he" and "him." The last person mentioned is Christ the Judge. But "to be born of Christ" is not a scriptural idea. It is evident that John so firmly believed that the Father reveals Himself in His co-equal Son that he made the transition from one Divine Person to the other almost unwittingly.
"Is begotten of Him." He who in his character is like God is in Hebrew phrase begotten of Him. The habitually righteous man is a true son of the righteous God. Other points of likeness are faith and love.
CONCLUDING NOTE TO CHAPTER II
The connection of thought in the first verse, expressed by "these things," reflects light upon the treatment of sin in Chapter I. Some earnestly contend that verses 8 and 10 teach the absolute presence of sin in every believer's heart after forgiveness has been bestowed and the new birth and purification by the Holy Spirit procured by the blood of Christ have been experienced. In other words, after grace has done its utmost the Christian has sin which he should confess. Now the natural effect of the doctrine that sin is inevitable is to give up the struggle against it and to yield ourselves unresistingly to its lusts. In fact, one exegete tells us, in view of the inevitableness of sin, that John was constrained to put in this caveat: These things I do not write that ye may sin. But he did not write thus, but in view of the turpitude of sin rendering the sinner false hearted and accusing God of lying, and considering the effectual provisions of grace in the atonement to transform and entirely sanctify the believer, so that sin is now in every case avoidable, "I write unto you that ye do not sin even once" (aorist tense denoting a single act). No bulwark against sin can be made out of the statement that the holiest saints on earth are sinners. But a positive restraint from sin exists in forgiveness, regeneration and entire sanctification by the Holy Spirit initiating us into a state of perfected holiness.
"If we say." "This 'if we' continues in almost every verse until ii. 3, after which it is changed into its equivalent 'he that,' which continues down to ii. 11; after that neither form is used." (Cambridge Bible for Schools.) Mark this, that "if we" is the exact equivalent of "he that." Substitute the latter for the former and the fallacy of the assertion that John includes himself where he says, "If we say we have no sin," immediately appears. Ebrard suggests "that 'if we say' is quite analogous to the 'though a man say,"' in James ii. 14. On that account we must not lay too much stress on the first person plural; it serves only to express the general "one," and only so far represents the universal application of the saying announced in verses 6, 7 (he might have said verses 8, 9 and 10 also); not as if St. John had meant to say, "even if I, the apostle, were to say this, and nevertheless walk in darkness, I should be a liar." Ebrard then argues extendedly that there is a radical difference between "having sin" and walking in darkness: "For the latter is assumed to be entirely excluded from the condition of a Christian, while the former must be acknowledged as present in every Christian" (the first person plural). Such contradiction and sophistication mar a great scholar and exegete who admits that "the Gnosticism of a Cerinthus, that enemy of the truth who was living in the same city with John himself, was confronting the apostle with the root of all the heresies — docetic, pantheistic Gnosticism," which denied the existence of sin in the human spirit, insisting that it pollutes the body only, and hence that the unregenerated Gnostics had no need of the blood of Christ in atonement because they had before their professed conversion to Christ no sins to be expiated. If we admit with Episcopius, Grotius, Whedon and others that the phrase "to have no sin" denies the guilt of sins before conversion, we relieve the Epistle from the most glaring inconsistency and manifest contradiction, in asserting that a soul can be forgiven its sins and cleansed from all unrighteousness, and at the same time have sin entailing guilt such as is implied by John's idiomatic phrase, "to have sin."
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