In 1 John 5:18, “We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin; the one who was born of God (Jesus) keeps him safe, and the evil one does not touch him.”
According to John, then, a person “born of God” doesn’t sin. But of course “No one born of God continues to sin,” 1 John 3:9, “because God’s seed remains in him.” Or as another translation phrases it: “When a person is begotten of God, God’s nature is in him for good, and such a heredity is incapable of sin.”
To be conceived or fathered by God, then, means becoming seeded with God’s own heart and mind. It means inheriting his nature, a “new nature just like his” (Ephesians 4:24) that’s incapable of sinning. We’ve been given a new non-sinning self that’s the total opposite to “our old self corrupted by its deceitful desires” (22).
But what if – after we’re born of God with his non-sinning nature – we find we’re still being “corrupted by deceitful desires”? Does it mean we’re not born of God after all, or that we’re no longer his child? Jesus offers a clue in answer to that in John 3:6, when he says, “Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.”
According to Jesus, then, there are two births we can experience in our lives. We all go through the first one, the “flesh” or physical one, when we’re conceived and birthed by physical parents as a physical baby to give life to our physical self. In the second birth, described by Jesus in verse 7 as being “born again,” this time we’re conceived and birthed by the Spirit (8) to give life to our spirit self.
The difference between the two births is important, because it explains how we can still sin when we’re supposed to be incapable of sin. It’s because we now have two selfs, the physical self we were born with, and the spirit self the Holy Spirit conceived and birthed in us. And what dies when we sin is our physical self, not our spirit self.
As Paul phrased it in Romans 8:10, “your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness.” Sin has already killed off the old self we were born with, but not the righteousness, or righteous nature of God in our new self that the Spirit birthed in us. That self cannot die. And it won’t die either, because in the last part of 1 John 5:18, “Jesus keeps us safe”….(next blog)
