1 John 5:20 Commentary

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1 John 5:20

Comments

We know that God has done something to make possible our belonging to God, something that we would scarcely have dared to ask for, even if we had seen it was necessary. He has sent his Son into the world and through him every other blessing that we receive is made possible. He has come to us personally and dealt with individual minds, for the Son of God has access to our hearts as no man has, and is able to remove confusion and open our minds to understand the gospel which would otherwise be hidden from us. Furthermore we are in God: united with him and in fellowship with him by the Spirit, and we are in the Father because we are in the Son. This is why when Philip said to him, ‘Lord, show us the Father’, Jesus answered, ‘He that hath seen me hath seen the Father’ (John 14:8-9). None can advance beyond this; none can bypass the Son and come directly to the Father, and to cement this in our minds John rises to the highest point when he says, ‘This’ – Jesus Christ – ‘is the true God, and eternal life’.

Application

Questions

By using the word ‘even’, the KJV implies that Jesus Christ is the same person as ‘him that is true’, but John teaches that Christ has come to show us the Father, and he is not identifying the Father with the Son – ‘his Son’ means the Father’s Son. The words ‘…in his Son Jesus Christ’ tells us the means by which ‘we are in him that is true’.

Arius the great heretic of the early church argued that ‘This is the true God’ refers to the Father, not the Son, but his view must be rejected because:

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the word ‘This’ refers back to the closest previous person which is Christ;

that interpretation would make John repeat himself for no reason at the climax of his epistle – ‘… him that is true … is the true God’ – which is not worth saying since no one would dispute it;

the title ‘eternal life’ is not given by John to the Father, but only to the Son (1 John 1:2; John 1:4; 11:25; 14:26). John 17:3 speaks of knowing a person, not of the person himself.

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Outline

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Introduction

1 John 5:20 Commentary and Bible Study