1 John 3:4-5 Whoever commits sin transgresses also the law: for sin is the transgression of the law.… St. John has set before us the child of God as striving to shape his inner and outer life after the pattern of God's purity. This is to him a law: he must in each thought and act make himself as like God as he can. He must give himself no freedom of choice. His will must be to do what he knows to be the will of the all-wise, and truthful, and loving God. Over against him St. John puts the man who has no rule of life, who simply pleases himself, obeying the desires of his own flesh and mind, allowing neither God nor man to pass within the edge of the circle he has drawn round himself. All within it is his own, and all of that he will keep to himself; no one has any claim upon it, no one has a right to tell him what to do with it. This is lawlessness, which is indeed a form of selfishness. Nothing can be further from the mind of God. For there is no act of God which is not wrought under the great laws of truth, and justice, and love. Every time we sin, we not only set ourselves against authority, we also deny the truth of God's witness to some eternal facts. We put ourselves outside of the laws which give order, and firmness, and strength to all the world and to God. St. John goes on to give another reason why all the children of God should be righteous. It was, he says, for the sake of taking away sins, or of making man righteous that God manifested Himself to us. It may not be clear to us why, for this end, so costly a sacrifice must be made. But we know that made it was, and we see from the greatness of it that it could not but be made, and thus learn that to the laws which God lays on His children He submits Himself, and that these laws therefore have not their rise in His mere will, but are themselves eternal. There is in God a "must" and a "must not," which set bounds to Him, even as they set bounds to us. To reach this truth through the manifestation of God in Christ is in itself a large step towards righteousness. It would be well if all Christians quite understood that the great end of God when He manifested Himself in Christ was to bring men to be like Himself, in goodness and happiness, by taking away sins, or, as it is put in the kindred passage (v. 8), by destroying the works of the devil. (C. Watson, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law: for sin is the transgression of the law.WEB: Everyone who sins also commits lawlessness. Sin is lawlessness. |
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