In 1 John 5:16, John speaks of “a sin that does not lead to death,” but also of a sin that does lead to death. So what’s the difference?
John makes the difference rather clear in 1 John 3:14, when writing that “Anyone who does not love remains in death,” compared to the first part of the verse that “we’ve passed from death to life, because we love our brothers.” And to make that difference even more clear in verse 15: “Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life in him.”
To hate a brother, therefore, is a sin that leads to death – “death” to John meaning “no eternal life.” To John we’re either on the road that leads to eternal life or the road leading to no eternal life, one obvious difference between the two being how we view and treat our brothers.
This became a serious issue for John too, because he was up against people who “claimed to be in the light but hated their brothers” (2:9). These were people who put on a good show of love – “loving with words,” as John put it in 1 John 3:18 – but, verse 17, “How can the love of God be in them if, on seeing a brother in need and they’ve got the material possessions to help him, they show no pity on him?”
In other words, they’d rather watch a brother starve than help him, which could lead to that brother literally dying. Love – the very essence of eternal life that God sent Jesus to create in us – is totally absent in them. No wonder John calls such an attitude “a sin that leads to death,” because not only could it lead to the physical death of a brother, it’s also the death in an individual of what God got started in him through his Son in 1 John 4:19, that “We love because he first loved us.”
It’s because God had pity on us that started us on the road to eternal life, of being able to love as he loves. So a person who says, “I love God, yet hates his brother, is a liar” (19). He’s not on the road to eternal life at all. Instead, according to John in 1 John 2:22, “Such a man is antichrist,” because he’s not living the life of love that Christ came to make possible in us. As such, John says back in 1 John 4:16, there’s not much point in praying for him, because it looks like he was never with it in the first place (2:18-19).
But what about the “Sin that doesn’t lead to death”?….(next blog)
Buck To Basics 