In 1 John 5:5, John asks, “Who is he that overcomes the world?” And his answer is: “he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.” But why the need to “overcome the world,” first of all?
Because as John made clear in the story of Cain, there’s an “evil one” whose sole intent is to create a world of death on this planet, by getting us to hate each other. It started with Cain hating his brother so much he killed him, and it has continued ever since, resulting in billions more people dying – and the wrecking of marriages, family relationships and friendships – because of the same hate, jealousy and explosive anger Cain had.
But fortunately, 1 John 3:8, “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work,” enabling us, therefore, verse 14, to “pass (or move away from) that world of death to life,” where instead of hate “we love our brothers.” And in so doing we “overcome the world” of hate and death that the evil one infects our world with.
But why do we need to “believe that Jesus is the Son of God” for this to happen? Because, John writes in 1 John 4:15, “If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him and he in God.”
For us to love and not hate we need “God to live in us and us to live in him,” enabling us to live in his world of love, not the world of Cain. But how did God make that possible? Verse 14, “the Father sent his Son to be the Saviour of the world.” It was in his Son that he set in motion the switch from hate to love (1:9).
It is the Father’s “command” in 1 John 3:23, therefore, that we “believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded,” because what Jesus did in love for us, and the love he taught us to live by, is what the Father set in motion to combat what the evil one set in motion in Cain.
In his Son, therefore, the Father has provided us with “victory over the world” (5:4). And we experience that personally in what the Father also set in motion in his Son, which is the giving of his Spirit (3:24), because the Spirit “in us is so much greater than the (evil) one who is in the world” (4:4). In his Son, therefore, the Father is telling, showing, and living in us what he created us for. Or as John puts it, “Jesus is God’s testimony”….(next blog)
Buck To Basics 