Don Carson expounds on 1 John 5:4–21 and our assurance of salvation through faith in Christ. Carson addresses interpretations of John’s writings, particularly the symbolism of water and blood, which affirm Jesus’s baptism, death, and divine nature. Emphasizing the importance of grounding our assurance in God’s promises, Carson encourages believers to deepen their understanding of Jesus’s identity and the transformative power of faith in him alone.
Transcript
Don Carson: I’m reading this evening from 1 John 5:4b to the end of the chapter. We have seen already how often the apostle John has a transition verse or two from section to section. So also here, verses 4b and 5 are transition lines into the main theme of the last section.
“This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world? Only he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God. This is the one who came by water and blood: Jesus Christ. He did not come by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth. For there are three that testify: the Spirit, the water and the blood; and the three are in agreement.
We accept man’s testimony, but God’s testimony is greater because it is the testimony of God, which he has given about his Son. Anyone who believes in the Son of God has this testimony in his heart. Anyone who does not believe God has made him out to be a liar, because he has not believed the testimony God has given about his Son. And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life.
I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life. This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have what we asked of him.
If anyone sees his brother commit a sin that does not lead to death, he should pray and God will give him life. I refer to those whose sin does not lead to death. There is a sin that leads to death. I am not saying that he should pray about that. All wrongdoing is sin, and there is sin that does not lead to death.
We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin; the one who was born of God keeps him safe, and the evil one cannot harm him. We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one. We know also 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, even in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life. Dear children, keep yourselves from idols.”
So reads the Word of God.
In the famous words of Mark Twain, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.” Today, we don’t domesticate faith quite that way. In modern perspective, faith is a religious conviction without any intrinsic right to make demands in the village square or on the village green. It has no right to make demands in the college quadrangle. It is private. It is personal. It may be true for you, but it is not in the open marketplace of truth.
Yet in the Christian way, faith takes on very large proportions. “Without faith,” the Bible tells us, “it is impossible to please God.” The Bible insists that without faith, there is no salvation. “By grace,” we are told, “you have been saved through faith.” Not by works, not by love, not by self-discipline, not by righteousness, not by reading the Bible, not by prayer, but by faith.
So what is this faith that is so important? How are we to think of it? How are we to construct it in our minds? How are we to present it to a world that thinks of faith in very subjective, idiosyncratic categories? It is extraordinarily important to remind ourselves of some of the critical elements of faith, and this chapter is full of them.
1. The object of Christian faith
Verses 6 to 12. In the transitional section, we are told that faith overcomes the world, and only the one who believes overcomes the world. What does he or she believe? “That Jesus is the Son of God.”
Now we’ve seen already that part of the background to this epistle is a rising system of thought that made Jesus an ordinary man and Christ, or the Son, coming upon him at some point and leaving at some point. There was not one person, the God-man.
Instead, there was a Jesus who didn’t matter too much and a spirit entity who came upon him and revealed all kinds of good things, but there was no real integration, and his death was shunted to the side as something largely irrelevant. Here, now, John reviews the doctrinal thing that must be believed. He focuses especially on the cross.
The language is a bit alien to our way of thinking. Let me re-read the crucial verses and outline the flow. “This is the one who came by water and blood: Jesus Christ. He did not come by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth.” Now that language is not self-evident. It is sufficiently obscure that, inevitably, it has generated all kinds of interpretations across the history of the church.
One interpretation that is wrong, it seems to me, is this: water and blood refer to the Christian sacraments. On this reading, Jesus Christ comes to us, in some way, through water (that is, at baptism), and he comes to us, in some way, through blood (that is, Holy Communion). But there is no place in the ancient world (either in the New Testament or in the early church fathers) where Holy Communion is referred to simply by the word blood. Bread and wine, yes. The bread symbolizes his body and the wine his blood, yes.
But to refer to Holy Communion just by mentioning blood, there is no evidence for that anywhere. Moreover, it is simply irrelevant to the passage. The book, we have seen, is concerned, again and again and again, with who Jesus is, not how he may or may not make himself known in the rites of the church. It would simply be irrelevant to the flow of the argument.
Another interpretation which has received a lot of support but, in my view, is misleading is that this is a reference to the water and blood that flowed from Jesus’ side on the cross. You remember what happened. Toward the end of the day on which Jesus was brutally executed, in order to satisfy some of the religious scruples of the Jews, the authorities wanted to take Jesus and the other two down from their crosses and bury them before sunset (when the High Sabbath began).
A person crucified in the ancient world could survive for days in torment, but if, for any reason, soldiers wanted to hasten their death, what they did was take their staves and come along and simply smash their legs. The way you survived on a cross was by pulling with your arms and pushing with your legs to keep your chest cavity open. That way, you could breathe.
Then the muscle spasms would be so great that you’d sag again. When you couldn’t breathe, you’d pull with your arms and push with your legs to breathe again. That torment would go on for days. So if they wanted to end it quickly, they just broke your legs. You were dead of asphyxiation in a few moments.
When they came to Jesus, however, they discovered that he was already dead. They didn’t break his legs. What they did instead, we are told, was take the spear and shove it up into his side. “Out came,” we are told, “blood and water.” Some think, therefore, John is referring to that. “He did not come by water only, but by water and blood.” In that view, it’s trying to say that he really was a human being who actually came and died on the cross. He actually poured forth blood and water when he died. “There was a witness,” the author says, “I saw these things.”
I don’t think that quite fits either, for several reasons. First, the order in John 19:34–35 is “blood and water,” not “water and blood.” Why this strange order? Second, this passage in 1 John seems to be talking about two separate events or two separate foci. John says, “He did not come by water only, but by water and blood.”
When the blood and water flowed from his side, it was testimony to the one event of his death. Then, when we come to the next verse and find that the Spirit is added, there are three that testify: the blood, the water, and the Spirit. But if blood and water flowed at the same time, how can you count them as two testimonies?
No, I think that the traditional interpretation here is, almost certainly, correct. The water refers to Jesus’ baptism. The blood refers to his death. We’ll come to the Spirit in a moment. In fact, in the Greek, there is a change of prepositions that is probably significant. “He did not come by water only, but by water and blood.” But the first reading, verse 6, is: “This is the one who came through water and blood.”
“Well,” people object, “if water refers to his baptism and blood to his death, one can understand how Jesus came through the water at his baptism, but how can you really refer to him coming through the blood?” The point is that this is confusing the sign with what it signifies. The water refers to his baptism: he came through the baptism. The blood refers to his death: he came through his death.
What certain heretics were saying at the time was that Jesus, the man, lived up to the baptism. At his baptism, the Spirit came upon him. Then Jesus and the Spirit together lived until the death. At Jesus death, but before he died, the Spirit left him, leaving Jesus to cry on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” That is what this heresy says.
John insists, “No, no, no, no, no, no. This is Jesus, the Son of God, and he came through the water. That is, he was the Son of God through the entire event of the baptism, not taking on Sonship at that point. He always was the Son. He came through the water. He also came through the blood. That is, he lived right through the death.
Then the preposition changes to one simply meaning at the time of. “He did not come by water only …” That is, only at the baptism was there really the Spirit on Jesus, the Son of God somehow coming on Jesus, the man. No, no, no, no. Rather, in water (that is, at the baptism) and in blood (that is, at the death), he was always Jesus Christ or, in the language of verse 5, Jesus the Son of God.
Then we are told, “It is the Spirit who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth.” Why is this thrown in? I think the reference is, again, explicitly to Jesus’ baptism. Do you remember what John himself recorded when Jesus was baptized?
The fourth gospel, chapter 1, verses 32 and following say, “Then John gave this testimony: ‘I saw the Spirit come down from heaven as a dove and remain on him. I would not have known him, except that the one who sent me to baptize with water told me, “The man on whom you see the Spirit come down and remain is he who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.” I have seen and I testify that this is the Son of God.’ ”
In other words, the Spirit’s testimony at this event is explicitly that the one on whom this apparition falls is, himself, nothing other than God’s own Son. John summarizes, “There are three, then, that testify: the Spirit …” In this apparition as a dove. “… the water …” Jesus Christ, Jesus the Son of God, passed right through that event. “… and the blood …” That is, the whole cross work, all of its sequence. “… and the three are in agreement.”
That is to say, they all point in the same direction, namely that Jesus was fully the Son of God, not someone who had a dose of Spirit for a short time. He always was the Son of God. He was himself the Christ. The three are in agreement: the Spirit, the water, and the blood. Then, John says, “We accept man’s testimony …” That’s the way we weigh up things.
We do this in a court of law. The law itself prescribes us to listen to two or three witnesses. We listen to things, and we evaluate. We’re used to doing this even at the human level. But God’s testimony surely is more believable than that! “… but God’s testimony is greater because it is the testimony of God.”
So the apostle sees, behind these three events, finally, one actor: God himself. It was God who sent the Spirit. It was God who brought Jesus through the baptism. It was God who brought Jesus through the event of the cross. This was God’s doing. There may be three witnesses that all point in the same direction, but God is the one who brought these things to pass. Are we going to say, “I don’t believe what God has done”?
John says, “Anyone who believes in the Son of God has this testimony in his heart.” Now I need to pause there. Some think that this is referring to the testimony of the Spirit in the individual believer’s life so that, somehow, we have assurance, by the Spirit, that we are children of God. Somehow, we know that the truth is true because the Spirit tells us inside. We’re told that we have this testimony in ourselves.
I think that is a mistake in this passage. There are passages in the New Testament that teach precisely that. We’ll come to two or three of them in a moment. But I’m not sure that is what this one is saying. Here, the testimony of all three, this testimony of God, is in our heart. That is, we have the truth absorbed into ourselves. The original does not say “in our heart” or “in our mind,” instead it says “in ourselves.” We’ve absorbed it. We’ve taken this truth on board. It is ours. “We believe these things,” John says.
“We accept man’s testimony, but God’s testimony is greater because it is the testimony of God, which he has given about his Son.” Anyone who believes on this has this testimony on board into himself or herself. It is now ours. We have absorbed this testimony. We believe these things are true. “Anyone who does not believe God, then, has made him out to be a liar …” That is, we’ve said, “I just don’t believe what you’ve done. I don’t believe this is the truth.”
In effect, we’ve said, “I don’t believe that God has really done this. I can’t believe that this has any validity.” If someone comes to me and asks my witness to something or other, I give my witness, and the person responds, “I don’t believe you,” then what has that person done? He’s just charged me with being a liar (or a fool).
So, also, if God chooses to disclose himself, if he has actually taken steps to reveal himself, and then we come to his revelation and say, “I don’t believe this,” then aren’t we simply saying, “God, you must be a liar. I don’t believe your testimony”? That is part of what Jesus recognized in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. If you recall, the rich man lifts up his eyes, being in torment, and beseeches Abraham at least to go back and warn his brothers.
In the parable, Abraham says, “It won’t do any good. They’re not going to believe someone who comes from the dead.” The rich man disagrees, “Oh yes, if someone rose from the dead and told about heaven and hell, if someone rose from the dead and explained what God wants, the nature of faith, and God’s initiative in grace, then they would believe, and they would not come to where I am.”
Abraham says, “No, no. They have Moses and the Prophets. If they will not believe them, they will not believe even if someone should rise from the dead.” Someone has risen from the dead, and many still do not believe. At the end of the day, in John’s view, that’s equivalent to saying that no matter what God does, we call him a liar. We always find reasons for disbelieving.
“Anyone who does not believe God has made him out to be a liar, because he has not believed the testimony God has given about his Son. And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life.”
Now we see clearly why John is so adamant throughout his epistle, again and again and again insisting that the doctrinal test, in this particular case, is to believe that Jesus is the Christ, to believe that Jesus is the Son of God. Again and again, John comes to that same point. Why?
Because without that vision of who Jesus Christ is, we do not accept that God has disclosed himself in Jesus Christ supremely on the cross. If Jesus came through water only, he may have come through an experience that somehow qualifies him to be a good and moral teacher, an edifying nurturer, and a wonderful religious model.
But if Jesus, the Son of God came through blood, if it was Jesus the Son of God who came through the whole experience of the cross, then our estimate of the whole purpose of his coming, of what salvation consists in, is radically different. What is at stake, now, is not him simply passing on knowledge (we take on gnosis, knowledge, and become Gnostics).
No, now it is a question of the themes introduced to us in the first chapter and the first couple of verses of the second chapter. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins.” The blood of Jesus, God’s Son, cleanses us from all sin. He is the propitiation for our sins and not for ours only, but for the sins of the world. John is coming back to the truths that he laid out at the very beginning.
If you don’t get right who Jesus the Son of God is, you can’t make sense of the cross. If Jesus’ death was simply an accident in the vicious Mid-Eastern politics of the first century and he was not himself a sacrifice, God’s provision to take our sins in his own body on the tree … if we cannot say with Paul that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself … then the entire Christian fabric disintegrates. There is nothing there.
Thus, the disputes about who Christ is have to do with God’s means of providing us with salvation. They have to do, ultimately, with whether or not we may have eternal life. “He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life.” Here, then, is the object of Christian faith. It turns on a space-time revelation by God himself, complete with explanatory words. It is in the open marketplace. There are testimonies to it. There is an exclusive framework that you divide around. This is the object of Christian faith.
2. The assurance of Christian faith
Verse 13: “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.” Let’s take a closer look: “I write these things to you who believe …” That is, to Christians, to believers. “… so that you may know that you have eternal life.” That is, so that you may have assurance that you have eternal life.
The history of Christian assurance in the church is a strange thing. Some of you may have done training with Campus Crusade, with a Billy Graham counseling team, or in some other pattern. Many Christians in the West, when we’re taught today to lead someone to Christ … to give a presentation of the gospel and invite someone to actually bow the knee and pray for forgiveness of sins and for real faith in the living Christ … are then taught some steps such as the following.
If we’re using John’s gospel at the time, we might turn to John 5:24, which promises that anyone who believes in Jesus has eternal life. So then we’re taught to say something like this: “Well, now, do you have eternal life?”
“I don’t know.”
“What does this text say?”
“Which text?”
“This one right here.”
“Well, it says that if you believe in Jesus Christ, then you have eternal life.”
“Well, do you have eternal life?”
“I don’t know.”
“What does the text say?”
“If you believe in Jesus Christ, you have eternal life.”
“Do you believe in Jesus Christ?”
“Yes.”
“So …?”
“So what?” You go through this five, six, seven times, until … “Well, I guess if I believe in Jesus Christ, then it means I have eternal life.”
“So do you have eternal life?”
“Well, yes, I guess so. I have eternal life.”
“How do you know you have eternal life?”
“Well, I know I have eternal life because I believe in Jesus Christ.”
The point of this whole exercise, of course, is to ground a new convert’s assurance in the promises of God. That’s the theory. In fact, it corresponds roughly to debates that went on in the time of Martin Luther. In street-level Catholicism in Luther’s day, there was a common perception that no individual could know that he or she had eternal life this side of death. Because, after all, even if you are in a state of grace right now, you could sin a mortal sin in the next five minutes. Then if you died unconfessed, you could be in very grave danger.
Of course, at the street level again, there were people like Tetzel wandering around, selling indulgences at various levels. There were indulgences that would remove some future sins, and there were the very best papal indulgences that would remove all sins and guarantee you eternal life. Now the best Catholic theologians at the period didn’t say anything like that, but at the street level, that’s the way Catholicism was operating.
When Luther, then, came to the doctrine of justification by grace through faith and people then asked him, “But how do you know God has accepted you? How do you know you’re saved? If the pope hasn’t signed an indulgence, if the priest hasn’t pronounced absolution, how do you know?”
Within this framework, of course, the primary answer was, “Such assurance is a function of faith. If you really trust Christ to provide for your sins, then the very trust that has confidence in him is also assurance. Otherwise, if you are lacking in assurance, it’s a measure of your want of genuine faith in him. Thus, real faith and assurance are locked up. They’re bound up together.” In the course of those polemics, that was a very shrewd answer. There are many witnesses in the New Testament that say exactly that sort of thing.
Ultimately, our confidence that we are forgiven and stand as the apple of God’s eye, that we are forgiven with a full assurance of a new heaven and a new earth, and that we are sons of God and joint-heirs with Jesus Christ … All of these turn on the promise of God. God has promised, and he has made the provision in Jesus Christ. If we accept it by faith, our very faith in this certainty and the blessing and the sureness of the object brings with it its own assurance.
Calvin didn’t speak of assurance coming from other things like works, but he did speak, for example, of works ratifying our assurance. That put a slightly different wobble on things. By the time you come to the Puritans in England, you have the same sort of concern to have works play its part, partly in reference to an epistle like 1 John.
Listen to this text again: “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.” In other words, John certainly envisages it as possible to believe in the name of Jesus Christ and yet not have adequate assurance. Otherwise, why should he write these things in order that you should have adequate assurance?
So within that framework, then, the Puritans … taking the insights from Calvin and the biblical work done by the magisterial reformers but applying the situation, now, to the Church of England, where they were concerned for spurious conversions … laid the emphasis slightly differently. They said, “Yes, the object of faith is Christ and his finished work. That’s correct. But how do you know that you’ve really appropriately trusted Christ? How do you know that this faith is genuine and that Christ’s life really is pulsating within you?”
The answer the Puritans gave was, “Well, in the first place, it so changes your life in obedience and in love that there are works that follow. So although the works aren’t the ground of the salvation, they are a testing evidence. They ratify the salvation. They give you confidence and assurance. In addition, since the Spirit is poured out upon you, there is the testimony of the Spirit within you. There is something within you that testifies in your spirit that you are the child of God.”
So now there is a kind of three-legged stool. The objective ground in Christ, the internal witness of the Spirit, and then this changed life. People have debated these points ever since: how to get these balances right and what biblical evidence is there for each one. There are sections of the Christian church today that still insist the only proper ground of assurance is the finished cross work of Christ and so forth.
Let me now start from the other end. Why does a person need assurance? Well, because there’s doubt. There’s want of assurance. What are the causes of doubt? Supposing you are in your room. You’re a Christian now; you’ve been a Christian for some time. You’ve thought these things through a wee bit, and you are interested in helping other Christians.
There comes a knock on your door and in comes someone who has been a member of the CU for a couple of years and has had a Christian background. This person comes to you and says, “You know, Sue, I’ve been meaning to talk to you for some time. I have doubts about my salvation.” What are you going to say?
John 5:24? Will that do? Well, it depends. What are the grounds for the doubt? If she has taken her eyes off the finality of the cross work of Christ, then there are passages in Galatians and Romans and John that you have to go back to and lay the foundations again. You have to go back to the kinds of themes we were just looking at, the proper object of faith.
But suppose, instead, you probe and say, “Well, Helen, when did you start losing this confidence that you had in Christ? Are you still praying? I don’t mean to be nosy, but I have to ask. Are you hiding something big from the Lord and from other Christians?” Her head goes down, and she says, “Well, I don’t know how to tell you this, but I’m sleeping with my boyfriend.” Now what are you going to do? John 5:24?
You see, the reasons for doubt may be many. The appropriate medicine that you give is as important in spiritual cases as it is in medical responses in the physical world. You don’t give the same medicine for every disease. In this particular case, the reason why there’s want of assurance, of course, is because there is multiplying sin and guilt.
This is suppressing the truth, driving the person farther and farther away from Christ so that there is no ratifying response of the Spirit, only shame. If I take a person like that back to John 5:24 and say, “Do you believe this? If so, you must have eternal life,” then all I’m doing is confirming that person in sin. That’s all I’m doing. In fact, the way to begin in that case is to say:
“It is a wonderful mark of God’s grace in your life that you are ashamed of what you’re doing. I tell you frankly, you will not taste anything of the assurance of God again until you get this thing right. For that, too, is part of the work of the Spirit: to convict you of sin and to lead you in the paths of righteousness. I would be far more worried for you, Helen, if, in fact, you thought that you could sin wildly and it wouldn’t make any difference, and you still had all your confidence. I would tell you then that it would be falsely based confidence.”
So we need to get some things very clear in this matter of assurance. Whether 1 John 5:13 refers just to the immediately preceding verses (and thus to the objective basis of Christ) or to the entire epistle (where there are tests in the realm of obedience and the anointing of the Spirit) is disputed. But it doesn’t really make much difference because listen to all the other passages in 1 John that say the same thing and refer to something other than the objective of the gospel (those of you who have attended these weeks will recall that I’ve purposely skipped them over).
Chapter 2, verse 3: “We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commands.” Chapter 3, verse 10: “This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not a child of God; nor is anyone who does not love his brother.” Chapter 3, verses 18 through 20: “Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence whenever our hearts condemn us.”
Or the end of chapter 2, verse 27: “His anointing teaches you about all things and as that anointing is real, not counterfeit; just as it has taught you, remain in him.” That is the anointing of the Spirit, what the Puritans used to refer to as the “testimony of the Spirit.” Or to use the language of Paul in Romans 8:17, his Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God. Yes, there is an inner quiet confidence that comes from the Spirit. Or again, in chapter 4, verse 13: “We know that we live in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.”
So in passage after passage, there are these either subjective, internal Spirit-testifying sorts of utterances or a direction toward the external world (obedience, faith). That means, therefore, that when we examine ourselves or when we’re talking with our friends and say, “How am I to have confidence before God? How am I to be assured in his presence? What do I do? What do I turn to?” there are several important points to remember.
A) Always understand that the sole basis upon which you have access to the presence of God is by the death of his own Son, Jesus Christ the Son of God.
He died. He bore our sins, not only those that we committed yesterday but those that we commit today and those that we’ll commit tomorrow. He died. We rest on him in faith. We have no other access.
That is what Christians mean when they end their prayers, “In Jesus’ name, amen.” That’s not a magic formula or a merely liturgical bit of creed. It is an admission, a confession, and a joyful, exuberant testimony that we have confidence in the presence of God because of what Jesus has done on our behalf. That is the objective basis, not our works, not our changed life, not anything else, but Christ, always Christ.
If 50 billion years from now, someone were to ask you in the new heaven and the new earth, “What right do you have to be here?” your answer will still be the same: “My right was achieved by a God-man on a little hillock outside of Jerusalem, and that is my sole plea.” In that sense, that’s your only ground of assurance.
B) But because the gospel is powerful, it does change you.
Then you can turn back and say with John Newton, the ex-slave trader who became a Christian, “I am not what I want to be. I am not what I ought to be. But I am not what I was and, by the grace of God, I am what I am.” He could look back and witness the changes. They are observable. They have to do with obedience. They have to do with loving the brothers and sisters for Christ’s sake. Within this framework, too, we recognize that the Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are a child of God.
3. The results of Christian faith
Verses 14 to 17. The first is confidence in prayer. “This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have what we asked of him.”
Have you seen these plaques on the walls? They’re dying now; they’re not so common. In pious homes, you read them still: “Prayer changes things.” That’s a toughie, isn’t it? You don’t want to say “No, it doesn’t” because that almost sounds like a clarion call for prayerlessness. But if it does, what do you mean? Do you mean God changes his mind? That he hadn’t quite decided on that one until you persuaded him? That he needed your advice? What do you do with that? Does prayer change things or does it not?
As a result, you find these pious sentiments in books on prayer. Like this: “In prayer, we are not asking God to bring his will into line with ours, but we are conforming our will to his.” Well, I suppose in a sense that’s right. There are certainly some prayers like that. Jesus in Gethsemane says, “Not my will, but yours be done.” But then what do you actually pray about? Do you get down on your knees and say, “Not my will, but yours be done”? Then you’ve sort of covered it, haven’t you? “Amen, let’s go home!” What do you do?
Clearly, there’s something here that is supposed to be prayed over. Then, somehow, it seems to be taken away. “This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything …” Leave out the next bit. “… he hears us.” That sounds promising. Prayer does change things. “And if we know that he hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have what we asked of him.” If he hears us, all he has to do is do it. There are no degrees of difficulty for omnipotence. Ask what you like, and he does it!
Of course, there’s that little phrase “according to his will.” So we’re back to the beginning again. Maybe prayer doesn’t change things, and all we’re doing is saying, “So let it be. Amen.” How do you handle this? At the risk of telling a personal story, let me tell you how a pastor helped me to understand it 27 years ago. At the time, I was finishing a degree in chemistry, but in the summer, I worked in a new church plant.
That summer, my senior (whose name was Ken) and I had been meeting for prayer every Monday night. He was trying to teach me to pray (not with a lot of success). We would gather, whenever we were both free, and we would pray, sometimes for half an hour or an hour, sometimes into the small hours of the night. I have to tell you, frankly, I felt as if I were more or less doing my duty, but I didn’t enjoy it. Am I the only one who has feelings like that in prayer sometimes?
We would do all the things you’re supposed to do: prayer through Scriptures, have our prayer lists, and so on. But I felt as if I were holding up my end of the stick, as it were, but that’s partly because he was there propping it up. Then one night, he said to me, “Tonight we’re going to do something a little bit different.” After a short period of praise, as we remembered together the attributes of God and thanked him for who he is, he said, “Tonight we’re going to try to think through what it means to pray according to his will.” What’s on your mind to pray about?
There was a girl, I’ll call her Jane, 120 miles away in Montreal, who we both knew. Ken and I both knew her and knew her story. She had been converted through the ministry of a church where we had both been involved. So when Ken asked what we could pray about, I mentioned this girl. I had just got a letter from her. I knew that Ken knew her.
Jane had been born on the wrong side of the tracks. She had lived a slovenly, sleazy life until she was wonderfully converted when she was in nursing school. She had been a Christian, but this point, only a year and a half or two years. She had just discovered that she had a vicious cancer, and the doctors had given her six weeks to live.
The letter was full of bitterness. “Why is God picking on me? After all that I have suffered, why doesn’t he pick on somebody his own size? He finally brings me into a mode of life and friends and contacts where I have hope and cleanness for the first time, and then he hits me with this.” Pages of venom, hurt, and pain.
“All right, now, what do you pray for Jane?” That’s a serious question. What do you pray for Jane? What does it mean to pray according to Jesus’ will for Jane? Ken forced me to think through options. Do we pray that Jane will be healed? Do we pray that God will take her home quickly so she won’t suffer too long? Do we simply pray, “Your will be done”? Or do we say, “Lord, if it pleases you, here’s a long list of options.” Do we pray that God will rebuke her for her insolence? What do you pray for Jane?
So we went through the various options, and he tried to make me think biblically through each one. There are instances where God takes people out quickly because of their sin. There are instances where he heals people. I do not think that he is covenantally bound to heal everyone who is sick; otherwise no one would ever die.
The final blessings of the cross come in the new heaven and the new earth. The question is not whether or not there’s healing in the atonement. Of course there’s healing in the atonement. There’s also a resurrection body in the atonement. That doesn’t mean I’ve seen many people wandering around with resurrection bodies! Of course the atonement secures our ultimate healing and our resurrection bodies, but that doesn’t mean we get everything now.
So, yes, we can pray, “If the Lord wills, we will do this or that.” We can pray, “Lord, if it will please you, then do heal her in your mercy.” But what could we pray in confidence that he would do? At the end of the day, Ken led me through various paths to conclude this: if Jane really was a child of God, if she really was, and we had every evidence for believing that she was, then God would keep his own promises.
God promises to complete in us that which he has begun (Philippians 1:6). Jesus promises that he will not lose any of the sheep that the Father has given him (John 10). Eternal life itself issues forth in much fruit. “Now if she really is your child, if we have read this aright, then by your own covenantally sealed promises, Lord God, keep your word. Would you do that? Just keep your word. You have promised to preserve your own people. So bring her through this in triumph, in faith, in joy.”
It took him two hours to get me to work through merely eight items that night. That’s all. He was trying to get me to think biblically about praying. He took the first, and I took the second; back and forth we prayed. When we left at the end of the two hours, I left feeling, for one of the first times in my life in praying, that I had done business with God.
That was Monday night. On Thursday, I got a letter from Jane. She had written it on Tuesday. She said, “Dear Don, I am so ashamed of that last letter. After all that the Lord has done for me in sending his own dear Son, for me to respond like that at the first little cross he’s asked me to bear, is pathetic beyond words. I do not know why, but I awoke this morning with a confidence that he loves me and, whether in life or death, I want to serve him.” There were pages of the same sort of stuff.
She died six weeks later, and everybody in Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Montreal knew that Jane was a Christian. Of the original eight things that we put on that list, three were answered as decisively, though not all as quickly. Only that one was quick. Two or three (I’ve forgotten the exact breakdown now), we changed in later weeks as we thought more about what God’s will is in these matters.
Two or three others, the remaining two or three, were the long-range kinds of things that the Bible commands us to pray for. “Pray to the Lord of the harvest that will send forth workers into his harvest field.” He commands us to pray that. We should be praying it constantly. The next Monday night when we got together to pray, do you not think that we gathered with enormous incentive to pray then?
I wish I could tell you I’m a great prayer warrior. I’m not. I struggle with these things. I go up and down. Over the years, I’ve taken many students with me for short periods of time to try to teach them some of the basic principles. We work through these things, and I forget them and struggle on. But I am sure of this: in the mystery of God’s providence, God works in us to give us a heart to pray for what he wants, in line with his revealed Word, in our circumstances. That becomes his means for blessing.
I’m not saying that if we hadn’t prayed, Jane wouldn’t have turned around. I can’t say that. The point is that I don’t know what else God might have done. He might have raised up someone in Snowdon Baptist Church in Montreal, her home church, to be praying the same thing. Maybe, in fact, there were 20 people in that church that I didn’t know about that were praying the same thing. I don’t know.
Nor can we say that our prayer is abstracted from God’s sovereignty, so that God’s sovereignty is over there, we’re praying over here, and we can change the sovereignty. We still pray under that sovereignty. It is his work in us both to will and to do of his good pleasure. I am sure of this: In the mystery of God’s providence, of his working in his people, he wants us to pray according to his will. That means finding out more about his will, finding out what kind of God he is, what he wants us to pray for, and what he does in certain circumstances.
Some circumstances, quite frankly, are so complex, so difficult, and so convoluted that we tell God about these things, and we say, “Lord God, I don’t know what to ask for, but your will be done. Glorify your Son. Whatever you do, glorify your Son. Bring strength to your people.” Then, according to Romans 8, the Spirit himself may pray with groanings that cannot be uttered, because we don’t know enough and he does.
That doesn’t stop the fact that there can be all kinds of circumstances where we do know enough if we just take time to find out what his will is and to pray according to his will. He hears us. That is part of the ministry he has called us to. The assumption is that this praying is a function of our faith and assurance before him.
Some of you, I’ll tell you why you can’t pray. You can’t pray because you’re nurturing so much bitterness, so many sins hidden in your hearts, that you don’t have a clean conscience before God. You get down to pray, and it’s all playacting. The bottom line for beginning to pray is a clear conscience before God. “If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me,” the Old Testament tells us.
No, no, no, no. What we do is come before God and trust the provision he has made in his Son. We look back and see his grace in our lives, and we thank him. We know that we have free access to his presence, not because we’re so good or great, but because he is gracious and has made a way for us in the person of his dear Son. We confess our sins. We do not hide them. We do not deny them. We confess our sins and discover afresh that he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
Then, like a child, we say, “And now Father, in addition to the praise and the thanks, I have some things that I’d like to ask you for. Because you’re wise and I’m not, because I want to please you and want to do what your will is, in these matters it seems to be that your will is this and this and this. Lord God, this is what you’ve promised here. Would you do this? Is this your will? Would you do it for Jesus’ sake?”
Isn’t that what Moses is doing when he’s pleading for the people in the desert? God threatens to wipe them all out after the sin of the golden calf. What is it that Moses prays? “How can you do that, God? You promised on oath to bring them out. Do you want people to say that God can’t keep his word?” He was praying according to God’s own expressed will. If we pray according to his will, he hears us.
Then the specific example. We’ll go more quickly through this one. “If anyone sees his brother commit a sin that does not lead to death, he should pray and God will give him life. I refer to those whose sin does not lead to death. There is a sin that leads to death. I am not saying that he should pray about that. All wrongdoing is sin, and there is sin that does not lead to death.”
Now you must know that this passage is hotly disputed as well. I won’t go through the various options. Let me simply say this: The life that is here referred to is clearly eternal life. There is a word for that that John always uses, and that is what is at stake here. So he’s praying that someone will have eternal life. Correspondingly, the death, therefore, must be eternal death. I think that is certain.
There are passages in the New Testament where people die physically because of sin. Read Acts 5 or 1 Corinthians 11. One can approach the Lord’s Table and die physically; that is possible. I could tell you some fairly terrifying stories of ministers in this century who, in particular circumstances, have seen the judgment of God fall on some in their congregation in quite spectacular ways. But I’m not sure that that’s what this is dealing with here.
No, this is in the context of the problem that John is facing; namely, of people who have made profession of faith, joined the church, to all intents and purposes appear to be brothers, then have self-consciously looked at the gospel, and walked away from it. They have seceded from the church. We already saw in 1 John 2:19 what John thinks of them. He says, “They went out from us in order that it might be made clear that they never were of us. If they had been of us, they would have remained with us.”
So this is apostasy in the sense that these people have made profession of faith, they’re lined up with the church, they have been baptized, they’re accepted as brothers and sisters in the congregation, they have believed certain things, but they do not have the grace to persevere. They do not have the matter so in them that they produce fruit unto eternal life. We’ve seen already that that’s quite possible in Jesus’ parable of the sower and other passages.
So here someone now is sinning a sin that either leads to death (that is, this apostasy) or that does not lead to death. The closest New Testament parallel, I think, is Hebrews 6, where someone tastes of the power of the life to come but yet walks away and crucifies the Son of God afresh to open shame. Hebrews says it is impossible for that person to turn again and repent. No, no, no. You don’t necessarily pray for that sin, where you’re sure it is committed. You don’t.
But what do you do when a brother or sister does sin? Supposing you see someone sinning in CICCU? What do you do? Someone who you think is a Christian? Someone sinning in false belief or the moral arena or in attitude? What do you do first? What you do first is pray for them, pray for them, pray for them. There may be other things to do, but you pray for them. If they’re real Christians, it’s not a sin unto death, but you pray for them. God gives them life.
In other words, John is directing our attention to the kinds of things that we should be praying for, first and foremost. We’re coming up to exams. I know what some of you are praying for! There’s nothing wrong with that, but in the eternal scale of things, as you pray for one another, you should be praying for holiness.
As you pray for one another, you should be praying that you turn your backs on sin. As you pray for one another, you should be praying for eternal values, that you make the right kinds of vocational and marriage choices that will bring glory to God all the rest of your life. Not just whether you get a 2:1 or a First. God is more interested in your holiness than in your academic status.
Don’t misunderstand me. In our academic work, too, we offer ourselves up to God. We do our best for his sake. That, too, is part of our devotion to him. If he’s called you to be a student, you be the best student you can be. But at the end of the day, he wants you to be holy first. He doesn’t rate you on whether you get a First or a 2:1 or a 2:2.
So John, here, has not only told us to pray according to God’s will, but he tells us here explicitly the kinds of things that are according to his will. If you see a believer sinning, this is the way you should be praying.
4. The certainties of the Christian faith
Verses 18 to 20. John ends up with some massive summaries. I’ll just go through them very briefly. There are three large “we knows.”
A) “We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin; the one who was born of God …”
This is probably a reference to Jesus. “… keeps him safe, and the evil one cannot harm him.” He cannot ultimately destroy him. We know that. That is, we know that there is genuine perseverance amongst those truly born of God. Unlike those in the previous verse, who have sinned unto death (they don’t persevere), genuine Christianity always perseveres. There is a kind of Christianity that seems, to all outward appearances, entirely kosher, but it doesn’t persevere.
“But we know …” John says, as he said in 2:19 in other words. “… that anyone born of God does not continue to sin.” You do not move off to apostasy and stay there. It cannot be. There is perseverance built into the very structure of genuine born-again-ism. If you are begotten of God, then the one who has been born of God, Jesus himself, keeps you safe and the Evil One cannot harm you.
B) “We know we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.”
That is to say, we live in between the times, between D-Day and V-E Day. We maintain the faith and struggle on, on the victory side but still in a world that is divided all around us. We know that.
C) “We know also that the Son of God has come …”
This great, central christological truth. “… and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true.” That is, we have not deduced these things ourselves by superior intellect. This, too, has come from his grace. “We are in him who is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ. He …” This is a reference, I think, to Jesus Christ. “… is the true God and eternal life.” This is the ultimate self-disclosure of God. He is himself the true God and eternal life. These are the great certainties of Christian faith.
5. The preservation of Christian faith
Verse 21. It is an astonishing way to end a letter. There is no other letter like it in the New Testament or amongst the early church fathers. “Dear children, keep yourselves from idols.” What does he mean by that? In the Jewish world, idols had a noxious flavor. Nobody wanted to be associated with idolatry. In the Greco-Roman world, because these people had been converted and had left the idolatry behind, they didn’t want to be thought of as playing with idols anymore. They were serving the living God.
Now John is using that noxious odor connected with idolatry to say something more profound and more telling. He is saying this: “Any vision of God, short of the vision of the God who has disclosed himself, is idolatrous.” You can take the name of Jesus on your lips, as the Gnostics did, but if it’s not the Jesus who was there, the Jesus who came through water and blood, who was attested by the Spirit, who died for our sins, then it’s not the Jesus. It is an idol Jesus.
You can talk about spirituality, but if it is not connected with the Holy Spirit, it is idolatry. You can talk God talk, moral talk, but if it is not a question of pleasing God … the God who is there, the God who has made us, the God to whom we must give an account one day, the God who has disclosed himself supremely in his Son … it is idolatry. “My little children,” John says, writing as an old man, “keep yourselves from idols.”
In the moral sphere, in the material sphere, in the intellectual sphere, in your vocations, in your goals, in your doctrine, in your relationships, do not prize anything above the God who has disclosed himself in Jesus Christ. It is all idolatry. Wherever it is raised to the point where it claims your whole attention, your primary allegiance, your chief love, it is idolatry. Keep yourselves from idols. Therein lies the preservation of the faith. Keep a watch on your heart. Keep yourselves from idols.
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Join the mailing list »Don Carson (BS, McGill University; MDiv, Central Baptist Seminary, Toronto; PhD, University of Cambridge) is emeritus professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, and cofounder and theologian-at-large of The Gospel Coalition. He has edited and authored numerous books. He and his wife, Joy, have two children.