You please turn with me in your Bibles to First John chapter 5 beginning at verse 11.
And this is the testimony: that God gave us eternal life and this life is in his son. Whoever has the son has life; whoever does not have the son does not have life. I write these things to you who believe in the name of the son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life.
And this is the confidence that we have toward him: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him. If anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he shall ask, and God will give him life to those who commit sins that do not lead to death. There is sin that leads to death; I do not say that one should pray for that. All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin that does not lead to death.
We know that everyone who has been born of God does not keep on sinning, but he who is born of God protects him and the evil one does not touch him. We know that we are from God, and the whole world lies in the power of the evil one. We know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding so that we may know him who is true, and we are in him who is true, in his son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life. Little children, keep yourselves from idols.
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray. Father God, your word is a comfort to us in times of trial and in times of sadness. It always seems to speak to us most, though, whenever we open it and we hear you speak. We ask that you open our hearts and our minds to hear your word, to be encouraged, and to be lifted up and strengthened in our faith and trust in you. We pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.
So you have now heard the testimony, all that we have read and heard before, and accepted it as being reliable and true. Therefore, you believe it. Jesus Christ came by the water and the blood, as testified to in sacred scripture and by the Holy Spirit indwelling every believer. God the son was incarnated into time and space as a living, breathing, eating, and drinking physical human person, adding the human nature to his eternal divinity as the God-man.
This God-man died a human death upon a Roman cross around 2,000 years ago as the atoning sacrifice, the atonement for the sins of all God’s chosen people, justifying us under the cover of his blood. This also is the testimony of men and the testimony of the Holy Spirit that Jesus, God the son, was raised from the dead on the third day bodily, possessing in himself an eternal life that he shares with everyone who trusts in him as their savior and Lord, who are thereby united into him by their pisto, their faith.
Previously, John has already informed us throughout this whole epistle about the many benefits which the children of God, all those who are born of God, enjoy. We have fellowship, koinonia, with God the father and the son. We have joy because of that fellowship; we get to walk in the light now, desiring to be faithful and obedient to our Father in heaven. We have forgiveness for our sins whenever we confess in repentance. We have love, agape, knowing that we are loved by God and that we love God and all others as we are loved.
Now at last, he explains the penultimate benefit for us: that God gave us eternal life and this life is in his son. Whoever has the son has life; whoever does not have the son of God does not have life. Our true love, zoe, our spiritual life, is found only in God the son, and it’s only received through pisto in him. If we believe on and trust in him, Jesus, then we have the son; we are united in fellowship with him.
Therefore, through this union, because he lives, so too do we; and we shall live because Jesus was raised from the dead. His flesh, his sarx, was transformed and glorified. We trust that we will experience the same because Jesus has ascended into heaven and is presently seated at the right hand of God our Father, reigning over and reigning for us. We trust that we too shall be brought into his presence in heaven, where we shall reign with him until he establishes the new heavens and the new earth.
This is the zoe which we hope for and understand that we already have received. When a person is regenerated by the Holy Spirit, becoming born of God, they receive faith in Jesus Christ and new life in his name. However, the new life which they receive is zoe because what they already possessed was bios, or bios, physical natural life. Zoe is the life we were always intended to have, the life which Adam and Eve lost for us back in the Garden of Eden.
While everyone now living has bios, not everyone has zoe; that belongs only to the regenerated elect, only to those who have been born again. Everyone now living will experience thanatos, death, just as everyone who has ever come before has died, unless Jesus returns first. But the elect, the children of God, will continue to live on in the same eternal zoe of Christ. We shall continue to live on in the spirit in heaven until the day of resurrection, when all shall be raised and Christ shall judge both the just and the unjust.
Then everyone will pass on to their true ultimate and final destination. That is the kind of life which the Holy Spirit gives to everyone whom he causes to believe in Jesus Christ; that is the Christian expectation and hope for our future in the kingdom of God.
However, there is an important final note about eternal life which we must understand. Understand what does John mean by eternal, especially as relating to us. The Greek word translated as eternal is aion, and I’m sure you can hear the older English word eon, or aon, which used to be used to mean an age or eternity. Now, there are two dimensions to eternality: a human dimension and a divine dimension.
The first and ordinary simple use of the term is in the sense of an unending or everlasting duration of time, meaning that once something eternal gets going, it keeps ongoing and will never stop. Like the line graph in math that’s used to depict something which is greater than or equal to the black dot with a solid arrow pointing off to the right into infinity. Such an expression has a definite beginning point without a definite ending, and that is what John means when he uses aion in relation to ordinary human persons.
However, when he uses it in relation to God, to Jesus, he means it in a second, more broad and inclusive sense as being an unending or everlasting duration of time, both forward into the future and backward into the past. So while every human person has a definite beginning, every regenerate person will have no definite end because they possess eternal life; they are born in time and shall continue on into eternity according to the Lord’s good providence. There was a time when they were not, an incontrovertible fact attested to by every parent.
However, the eternality of God is to another degree. God exists outside of both time and space. However, time was the first thing God created in the beginning, or when beginning, God created. He created the clock, set it running, and it will continue to run for as long as he wills. There was never a time when God was not; there can never be a time when God is not.
But what about Jesus, God the son? That was the question and the problem at the heart of the Arian controversy which prompted the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. and the writing of the Nicene Creed that we recited last week. Arius thought that Jesus as God the son was not eternally God but was merely the eldest, greatest, and first created among all the angels and all creation. He was arguing out of John 3:16, ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life,’ meaning that if the Son of God was begotten, then therefore logically there must have been a time when he was not.
But Arius, however, was ignoring the plain text of John 1:1-3, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God, and all things were made through him, and without him was not anything that was made.’ Here John identified Jesus as both the Word and God the son and attributes to him eternality, existence prior to creation.
He was in the beginning with God; divinity. The Word was God, and as the agent of creation, all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. Therefore, since Jesus, God the son, is identified as being both God and being with God in the beginning, he must also be fully eternal according to the plain text of scripture.
Because all three persons of the Trinity have existed eternally outside, before, above, and will continue to exist beyond time, that is what makes the Incarnation of God the son so special. God the son, the second person of the Trinity, entered into time and creation and took on humanity. The infinite God added the finite human nature to himself through the person of Jesus without a mixing or mingling of their essences.
So while the man Jesus was finite and temporal, having a definite beginning point in time as regards to his human nature, as God the son, the second person of the Trinity, he remained infinite and eternal in his divine nature. The eternal life that every Christian looks forward to enjoying in the presence of our Lord is like the everlasting and never-ending eternal life which is possessed by the man Jesus Christ, but it’s not the same. Unlike God the son, we each have a definite beginning, and we have not always been.
Another way to say this would be that we all have an immortal soul, one which shall continue on and last forever, but this is not an eternally existent soul. Since eternal life is the ultimate benefit for everyone who believes in Jesus, John tells us one final time why he wrote this epistle: ‘I write these things to you who believe in the name of the son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life.’
He wrote this so that we believers may know that we have eternal life. He wrote it so that we may have certainty and rest secure in this promised assurance of our faith. If you believe in Jesus, if you have pisto in him, then know that you have eternal life. Know and believe that when this mortal shell is shed at the end of your natural bios, you shall be clothed in imperishable immortality, and you shall rest in heaven, gathered together around God’s throne with all the saints who have gone before, where you shall worship him until the day of resurrection and judgment, when you will then be welcomed into the New Jerusalem to live and dwell with our eternal Emmanuel forever. Amen.
If we, knowing that we have been regenerated into an eternal life, this is the confidence that we have toward him: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.
Lastly, John explains how we should interact and engage with God in our koinonia fellowship through prayer, as accompanied by our reading, understanding, and knowing the testimony of scripture to help us test the spirits. Although John does not expressly mention our knowledge of scripture right here, it is very much implied through what he said.
Since we have this fellowship with God as our Father and as our brother and as our Lord and Savior, master and friend, we each possess confidence based upon our relationship to him to go to him and ask for whatever it is we truly need. However, John does not encourage us to offer frivolous prayers because no true prayer to God that’s offered in earnest faith is ever frivolous. But he also does not encourage us to pray for the desires of our sinful heart and expect God to answer them with a yes.
John hearkens back to what Jesus taught in his gospel: ‘Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it.’ Asking, praying in Jesus’s name is what John means when he writes, ‘If we ask anything according to his will.’ He means that because of our relationship, because the Holy Spirit indwells every believer, sanctifying us and conforming us closer to the image of Christ, that when we pray rightly, we will pray for whatever God wants and wills rather than our own selfish sinful wants and desires.
Then we will pray in truth: ‘Thy will be done,’ as Jesus prayed in the garden and as he taught the disciples to pray: ‘Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven.’ This is where our need to be knowledgeable about what scripture says and teaches comes into play.
Not only is scripture the written testimony about who Jesus is, it’s also the revelation of God’s will and purpose for his chosen people. So by praying in this way, God allows us to join him and participate in his redeeming work in the world. By praying this way, we surrender our idolatry of self for an act of true pleasing worship to our creator. By praying in this way, we better recognize and acknowledge our insufficiency and our utter dependence upon him and his merciful providence.
By praying in this way, we become more Christlike and more closely united to our Savior. By praying in this way, our wills and wants become transformed and conformed to be closer to God’s will. By praying in this way, the Holy Spirit within us sanctifies, cleanses, and redeems our sin, selfish prayers, making them acceptable before God.
Although the Spirit does not necessarily improve every prayer so that it becomes a yes, we may remain confident that when God answers our poor prayers with a no, he follows it up with, ‘No, that is not my will for you. I will something far better for you; you just do not know what it is yet.’
When we pray in Jesus’s name, it means that we are praying on Jesus’s behalf; we are praying as if we are Jesus praying to God our Father. So whenever we pray in Jesus’s name and we sincerely pray ‘Thy will be done,’ we know that Jesus hears our prayer and that he surely answers that prayer, our request, with a yes.
This is such a wonderful privilege for us to take it to the Lord in prayer, but this is also a terribly wonderful responsibility and burden for us, one which we should not dare to shun.
John continues: ‘If anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he shall ask, and God will give him life to those who commit sins that do not lead to death.’ We have a responsibility for one another, and we have a responsibility to one another. We believe that when Jesus ascended into heaven, where he’s presently sitting at the right hand of God our Father, reigning over us, he also went there as our intercessor to plead and speak with God on our behalf.
Right now, Jesus is praying for each and every one of us. That is why we’re charged to pray for one another as well, to intercede with God on each other’s behalf—not because God is more likely to listen to anyone of us, but because it reflects our Christlikeness. Because it is what our brother in heaven is doing right now.
Praying for our brothers and sisters in Christ is yet another powerful expression of God’s agape. What John is telling us is that whenever we see a brother or sister in Christ, or a brother or sister who do not yet know Christ, when we see them engage in anything sinful, we ought to pray for them.
Actually, no, that’s not quite right; that’s not what John says. John says that he shall ask, really meaning that he or she shall ask. To ask does not mean the same thing as ought to pray or should pray. Shall ask is an imperative command, whereas ought and should describe what is right, but also leaves the sense that doing the right thing is somehow optional instead of being required.
So when you see someone sinning, you shall pray, and you shall ask God to bring them to repentance. Ask God to forgive them; ask God to give them zoe life, just as Jesus does. Now stop and understand me here: when you see someone sin—not if, but when—you shall pray, and you shall ask God to bring them to repentance. Ask God to forgive them and ask God to give them zoe life, just as Jesus does.
Because when Jesus sees you sinning—and he sees it each and every time you sin, because he is God the son and is therefore omnipresent and omniscient, everywhere and all-knowing—he does not miss a single one of any of our sins. When he sees us, he prays for you and for me, and he asks God to bring us to repentance, to forgive us, and to give us and preserve us in his zoe life. That is what Jesus is doing on your behalf right now, so that is what you shall be doing on your brother and sister’s behalf.
No ifs, ands, or buts. And then you shall be certain that God will give them life if that’s his will for them. You see, something that we often forget is that we do not pray in order to convince God to do something; we do not pray to persuade God to act as we would wish him to act. We do not pray and then hope that we somehow changed God’s mind. That is never how prayer is portrayed in scripture.
If it was, then do you not think that Jesus’s prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, when he asked, ‘My father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me,’ do you not think that that would have had the greatest chance and the greatest effect toward changing God’s mind?
Instead, God still answered Jesus’s prayer because his will was done. Our role in prayer, our part and portion in every prayer, is to, number one, ask God; number two, ask God in Jesus’s name; number three, ask God in Jesus’s name that what God wills will be done.
Because our will, as regenerate Christians, is supposed to be aligning with God’s will, our role in prayer is to ask God in Jesus’s name that God’s will would be done. Because our will and our want is that God’s will would be done, because we know that he has the best will for his elect children, we shall pray for anyone that we see engaged in sin.
Because we shall pray in Jesus’s name, because we shall pray as Jesus prays and alongside Jesus as he prays, God will give life to those who commit sins that do not lead to death. What does that mean? This is where our understanding of scripture as Protestants tends to get a little bit fuzzy and where the understanding of Roman Catholics gets obscured by arbitrary assumptions.
John writes, ‘There is sin that leads to death.’ I do not say that one should pray for that. All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin that does not lead to death. This passage here is the biblical source for the Roman Catholic distinction between venial sin and mortal sin, where venial sins are those that are forgivable and pardonable by God following a person’s repentance, confession, and acts of contrition.
While mortal sins are those sins which destroy charity in the heart of a man by a grave violation of God’s law. It turns man away from God by preferring an inferior good to him; thereby, they believe that it kills the immortal soul—the immortal regenerate soul—and causes a person to actually lose their salvation, not just their assurance of salvation.
Then the Romans categorize and catalog every possible sin and place it into one category or the other, developing formulas and routines to deal with each different sin. Because venial sins are ranked from bad to worse.
But while I agree that there is a hierarchy of sins, I do think they missed the mark here. Modern day evangelicals, on the other hand, generally believe that the only sin that leads to death is the nebulous unforgivable sin in Matthew 12:31.
‘Therefore I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven people, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. And whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.’
Even those evangelicals who hold to an Arminian position—that a person can lose their salvation—they ordinarily believe that this unforgivable sin is the only sin which a person cannot repent of, be forgiven, and be restored to the grace of God. Otherwise, they will agree that every sin is bad, that every sin is deserving of God’s judgment and wrath, but that no one sin is worse than any other.
Although, sadly, some others will try to soften the severity of our sin by teaching that sin is not as horrible a thing as scripture makes it out to be, that repentance and a changed life is not really necessary, that God will just wave his hand and forgive everything and anything if you’re just a good person because God is love. And so I know that they also missed the mark about this.
However, what reformed Christians believe is that the only sins which will not be forgiven by God are all of those for which Jesus Christ did not die and atone for. Those are all the sins belonging to the reprobate, the children of wrath who are doomed to destruction and are not redeemed by Christ, washed by his blood, and regenerated by the Holy Spirit.
Sin is cosmic treason, as R.C. Sproul used to say. Sin is not something insignificant or easily forgiven and forgotten, as we forgive and excuse our own frequent harmless and seemingly inconsequential transgressions of human law—like speeding, double parking, parking in a handicap spot without having a handicapped person in the car.
Unforgiven sins, however, are characterized by a stubborn refusal to repent, a stubborn refusal to ask for forgiveness, a stubborn refusal to recognize their sinfulness, and a stubborn refusal to believe on Jesus Christ—a refusal to believe in him.
See, for reformed Christians, we understand the unforgivable sin of Matthew 12 as being blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, a sin which we know is impossible for any of the elect to commit, because in his divine sovereignty, all those whom the Father has given to the Son will remain with the Son, because no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand.
The unforgivable sin is unforgivable because not only is it a total denial and rejection of who Jesus and God the Father are, but because it also attributes their work and power to Satan. This understanding most rightly nails the mark, in my opinion, because it is the least limiting towards God, the most dependent upon his sovereign grace and mercy, and the most realistic concerning our human propensity towards sin, our total depravity.
According to the standards of our faith, the Westminster Confession, the larger catechism, we believe that while all sin is deserving of death, the ultimate sanction, all sins are not equally heinous. Because like the Romans, we believe that some sins are truly worse than others.
Now, may you be right to ask, what makes one sin worse than another? Our catechism teaches that sin may be aggravated depending on the characteristics of the person sinning: being a child or an adult, someone knowing or unknowing, and whom they might also be encouraging to sin by their actions, such as contributing to the delinquency of minors.
Considering the person who sinned against, whether it is a child, an adult, a woman, or the elderly. The nature and quality of the sin, whether it’s a compounding of multiple sins, like killing a bank teller during a bank robbery. Whether the sin is only conceived within the heart, yet is not acted upon: envy, jealousy, lust, hatred, same-sex attraction.
Whether the sin is against the light of nature, meaning against the natural created order, such as same-sex practice, beastiality, or any other such like. Or a sin may be considered as being worse based upon the time and place of their commission—a school shooter as opposed to gangbangers gunning one another down in the street.
Now I know that’s a lot to parse through and think about, and you’ll be thankful I’m not going to go through all those possibilities today, but suffice it to say that while all sin is equally an affront to our holy God and equally deserving of death, not all sins are equal.
For example, a child lying to a parent versus an adult lying on a government document, or a person intentionally lying under oath in court that causes somebody to be wrongfully and unjustly convicted and sentenced to prison or even executed. All three of those are examples of the sin of lying, breaking the ninth commandment: “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.”
Yet I’m certain you will agree that there is an obvious escalation of badness between them, and no one would ever claim a moral equivalence between a child lying to their parent and malicious perjury.
The point about these different sins that John is making is that whenever we see someone sinning, we shall pray for them. We shall intercede with our heavenly Father on their behalf because we are being interceded for on our behalf by our brother Jesus, and because we hope that they are also being interceded for by Jesus.
When John writes, ‘I do not say that one should pray for that,’ referring to a person sinning a sin which leads to death, I do not think that he intends for us to judge the state of another person’s salvation, but to remain hopeful even still that God, in his wisdom and mercy, will choose to save them.
Finally, John begins ending his closing: ‘We know that everyone who has been born of God does not keep on sinning.’ It’s still remaining human and possessing a sinful nature after our regeneration. The Apostle Paul made it quite clear that even elect Apostles like himself continue to sin in this life.
So what hope does anyone have? Here’s our hope: But he who is born of God protects him, and the evil one does not touch him. Believers, all those who are born of God and numbered among his elect, help one another in agape and support one another through our prayers.
We protect one another and preserve one another through our prayers because Jesus preserves us and protects us through his divine intercession with the Father and applies it to us by the Holy Spirit dwelling within each and every one of us.
Lastly, remember that John’s stated purpose in writing this epistle was so that we may know that we possess eternal life because of who Jesus Christ is and what he’s done for us; so that we may know that we’ve been brought into the light of God; and so that we may continue and remain walking in it.
So that we may know that we are in fellowship with God the Father and God the Son through God the Holy Spirit, and so that all of our joy will be made complete—that your joy, my joy, our congregation’s joy, John’s joy, and God’s joy will be made complete.
John’s final closing is powerful and he says it far better than I could, so I’ll leave us with his words: ‘We know that we are from God and the whole world lies in the power of the evil one. We know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding so that we may know him who is true and that we are in him who is true, in his son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life.’
That’s a promise, and that is our hope. Amen.