And the witness is this, that God gave unto us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He that hath the Son hath the life; he that hath not the Son of God hath not the life. These things have I written unto you, that ye may know that ye have eternal life, even unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God.
I John 5:11 – 13
I remember preaching this verse as a Protestant – “See, it does not say that ye may hope ye have eternal life or that ye may hope that ye have eternal life. But that ye may KNOW that ye have eternal life”
But what I overlooked is what was written just before this – “THESE things have I written unto you, that …” John did not write “This thing”, which would refer to the previous verse, but “these things”. This means that John was referring to all these things in the whole letter in order that the readers would know that they have eternal life.
So looking at the whole letter of John, one can know he has eternal life if…
1) He does not walk in darkness at all, but walks in the light (1 John 1:5-7)
2) But if say we have no sin, we lie and the truth is not in us (1 John 1:8)
3) He keeps His commandments (1 John 2:3, 4)
4) He walks as Jesus walked (1 John 2:6)
5) He does not hate his brother (1 John 2:9)
6) He loves his brother (1 John 2:10, 3:14)
7) He never causes his brother to stumble (1 John 2:10)
8) He does not love the world (1 John 2:15)
9) He does the will of God (1 John 2:17)
10) He does righteousness (1 John 2:29, 3:7)
11) He purifies himself (1 John 3:3)
12) He does not sin (1 John 3:6, 9)
13) He loves Jesus and other Christians (1 John 1:5)
14) He loves Jesus by keeping His commandments (1 John 5:2)
That is all a person has to do in order to know that he has eternal life! Piece of cake! Right? Not really! Notice how #2 seems to contradict #3 and #12. We know that we have passed from death to life if we keep His commandments. We know if we sin we cannot claim to know God. And yet if we say we have no sin, the truth is not in us. John is satisfied with leaving this apparent contradiction. If we sin the truth is not in us. If we say we do not sin the truth is not us. This is a mystery – the paradox of the Christian life. If we are born of God we do not sin. But if we say we have no sin, then we lie and are not born of God.
So you can see that John was having a little fun with his readers. He wrote that we can know we have eternal life, but only if we do “these things” he wrote in his letter – the 14 items I have just listed. But one of these items (#2) says that we cannot perfectly keep the other 13 items. We will fall short. So if we cannot perfectly keep these items, then that means we cannot have perfect knowledge that we have eternal life.
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
John 3:16
As a minister I relied on an inadequate translation of the verse – the NIV. The NIV translates this verse in this way:
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
But the problem in the NIV rendering of this passage is that the “shall not perish” is not in the indicative mood but the subjunctive mood. The subjunctive means that a more accurate translation would be “should not perish but should have eternal life” or “may not perish but may have eternal life”.
Some bible versions chose to translate the subjunctive "μη αποληται" as "will not be destroyed!" This of course is incorrect! To translate the subjunctive as "will not be destroyed (NIV)" turns the 'subjunctive' into the 'indicate mood.' As a subjunctive the correct translation is "should not be destroyed (KJV)."
http://insightsfromthebible.blogspot.com/2010/04/subjunctive-mood-john-316.html
This passage does not give an absolute promise of eternal life if we merely believe in Christ. It only opens the possibility of eternal life to the believer. The believer must still come to the light of Christ and be willing to have his deeds exposed (John 3:19, 20) . This means he must continue to live a penitent life and keep His commandments.
