But a more serious objection to this method of explaining these difficult verses in First John is that it contradicts the very point that the Apostle is making. If close attention is paid to the conclusion of First John 3:9 it should guard from these errors: “Whosoever is begotten of God doeth no sin, because his seed abideth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is begotten of God.”
That seed which is born of God is, as Dr. A. J. Ramsey has pointed out, the Child of God himself, not a seed in him. While he abides he cannot sin. (As Moffatt also translates: “The offspring of God remain in Him.”) The whole argument of the Epistle of John, and particularly of this portion, is that a normal Christian is one who is free from sin. The Apostle does not mean to say that a child of God does not “deliberately” sin, or that he does not “continue in sin” as the rule of his life, or that he does not let the inward impulses of sin express themselves: he means that the Christian, while he abides in Christ, where he belongs, does not sin. He is God’s new creation, and walks in the light having fellowship with God. For “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5).
When a Christian Acts as a Child of Satan
Does John mean that a Christian does not sin, or that he ceases to be a Christian if he sins? The opposite is taught in this very Epistle. John is writing these things that Christians may not sin, but he recognizes that they may, and tells them just what to do to have the sin cleansed away in case they do sin.
When a Christian sins, he is acting against his true nature. That is the argument of First John and of all the Epistles. When a Christian sins, he is acting as though he were a child of the devil. He as a child of God can have nothing to do with sin. But there is his free will to step out of the place of abiding, and this makes possible the tragedy of a Christian’s sinning.
James is facing this tragedy of a Christian’s acting against his true nature when he exclaims: “Doth the fountain send forth from the same opening sweet water and bitter? can a fig tree, my brethren, yield olives, or a vine figs? neither can salt water yield sweet” (James 3:10-12). All these things act according to their true nature. If a Christian acted thus there would flow always from his life and lips the fruit of the Spirit. But the Apostle shows in the passage that a Christian may pray with the same mouth that he uses to say mean things about his neighbor, and that he may have in his heart “bitter jealousy and faction.”
Here, then, is our foundation truth that God has but one standard for the Christian life, one kind of holiness, and that is the standard of his Son, who is to be our life. And that Life, that holiness, God has given to every Christian.
God’s Perfect Provision for Every Christian
It was to those “carnal” Corinthians, who had jealousy and strife in their midst, that Paul by the Spirit wrote: “I thank my God always concerning you, for the grace of God which was given you in Christ Jesus; that in everything ye were enriched in him, in all utterance and all knowledge; even as the testimony of Christ was confirmed in you: so that ye come behind in no gift; waiting for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ; who shall also confirm you unto the end, that ye may be unreprovable in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful, through whom ye were called into the fellowship of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord” (1 Cor. 1:4-9).
This surely is a picture of the fulness of blessing in Christ, and it is stated that this grace had been given to the Corinthians because they were Christians. Similarly in the eighth chapter of Romans the life of victory is described: “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and of death” (Rom. 8:2). This freedom belongs to every believer in the Lord Jesus. So throughout the New Testament it is made clear that when God spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all, he freely gave with Christ all things that a Christian needs.