Daily Thoughts from 1 John: Keep Yourselves from Idols (5:18-21)

Daily Thoughts from 1 John: Keep Yourselves from Idols

We know that everyone who has been born of God does not keep on sinning, but he who was born of God protects him, and the evil one does not touch him.  We know that we are from God, and the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.  And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true; and we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life. Little children, keep yourselves from idols.  (1 John 5:18-21 ESV)

John ends his letter with one more statement of the test.  A true believer does not keep on sinning habitually but instead is protected by God’s Son, Jesus Christ, against the influence of the evil one, the devil.  Satan would keep us tied to sin all our lives and so living in death.  Jesus has freed us from the power of sin over our lives.

John ends his letter with one more statement of the contrast that exists between the world and believers.  The world operates in the power of the devil.  He controls and manipulates the world through lies and seeks, of course, to bring his influence to bear on the church.  This is why there is a constant rising up of new (yet old) heresies.  He wants to detour us from the truth.

John therefore also ends his letter with a final warning.  Only a true understanding of Jesus as the true God can deliver us to eternal life.  So keep yourselves from idols.  False views of Jesus are simply the human heart’s attempt to form a god we can control.  Satan knows this desire of our hearts and uses it to lead us astray.  We must choose the real thing.

This far, indeed, we differ from each other, in that everyone appropriates to himself some peculiar error, but we are all alike in this, that we substitute monstrous fictions for the one living and true God – a  disease not confined to obtuse and vulgar minds, but affecting the noblest, and those who, in other respects, are singularly acute.” Calvin’s Institutes I:5:11