Some, knowingly or sincerely being deceived, actually preach against the very remedy God has given to save believers in Christ from walking themselves straight into hell. By teaching Christians that they have perpetual forgiveness from God so that they do not need to confess their sins to be forgiven, they strive to undo what the Bible says in 1 John 1:9: If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:9). Nevertheless, Jesus has already declared that the Scriptures cannot be broken (John 10:35). 1 John 1:9 has also been rendered thus: “if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to have forgiven us our sins and to have cleansed us from our sins”. In this way, the Scripture is read directly backwards, and it is made to say the exact opposite of what it is saying. But how far will we want to go to add our own words to the Bible in order to make our personal doctrines fit? The Bible warns against this behaviour: “Every word of God is flawless... Do not add to His words, lest He rebuke you and prove you a liar” (Proverbs 30:5-6). We should beware of any tendency we have to add to or take away from the Scriptures in order to justify our own personal doctrines. The Bible says the end result of such behaviour is destruction (2 Peter 3:16).
The original Greek rendering of this 1 John 1:9 clearly makes forgiveness of sins conditional on our confessing our sins to God. It literally says, “In order for God to forgive our sins we must first confess them to Him. As per this Scripture, the very reason God gives for confessing our sins to Him is so that we will receive His forgiveness. When we attempt to replace this reason with some other reason, we simply rebel against the word of God. The very attempts made to change what 1 John 1:9 says is an acknowledgement by those who do so that the very words of this Scripture, when simply obeyed just as God spoke it, leave believers with no option than to confess their sins in order to be forgiven. But did the Holy Spirit mean exactly what He inspired John to write in 1 John 1:9? Let’s find this out by the Scriptures.
One of the attempts made to discredit 1 John 1:9 from exactly what it says is that “the first chapter of 1 John was not written to believers but to Gnostics who did not believe that Jesus came in the flesh, hence the uncharacteristic opening in the first epistle of John”. First of all, the Bible does not prescribe a characteristic opening by which letters to believers must be written. Therefore the claim that the first chapter of 1 John is not for Christians because its opening is not like the first and second epistles of John is a weak argument and clearly unscriptrual. Secondly, the Bible was not written in chapters and verses, and John certainly did not write his first epistle with chapters and verses. These chapters were later added to the Bible somewhere in the 16th Century for easy referencing. So, the church, before the 16th century, did not have the luxury of taking John’s first letter and apportioning chapters and verses they did not like to unbelievers. They had no chapters and verses to begin with but just one long letter written by John to them. Receiving this long letter from John should have been enough to convince them that John had actually written the letter to them. And if that was not enough, they simply had to read the entire letter to find out who John was writing to.
John started his epistle by stating the credibility he had to write such a letter, and also went on to address the issue of sin. After telling them that they had to confess their sins in order to be forgiven (1 John 1:9) and stressing the seriousness to confess our sins (1 John 1:10), he went on with the very next sentence (what we artificially call Chapter 2 verse 1) in the same letter to say that “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin.” By calling them children, he did not claim that those he was writing to were his biological children; history does not support this. But rather, he noted that they were his children in the faith, i.e. Christians and believers just as he, John, was (e.g. 1 Corinthians 4:15, 1 Timothy 1:2). Again, this sentence, was not the beginning of a second letter John wrote. It was a sentence in the same letter, with which he told them why he had been writing to them. Before this sentence, he had, in the same discourse, made several important statements to them about walking in the light and about sin. So when they read, “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin”, they did not have to wonder who John was talking to . John himself told them, i.e. his children in the faith and fellow believers, that it was for their very benefit that he had been writing. Thus the church was given no basis upon which to assume that John had been writing to some other group apart from them.
John concluded this first, one-piece, long letter, by again affirming that the church was the very group of people he has been writing to: “ Little children, guard yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:21). So clearly, John in his own writing leaves no room for us to guess to whom he wrote the first chapter of his epistle and particularly 1 John 1:9. He plainly said he meant 1 John 1:9 for the church. Therefore, we can’t simply take portions of John’s letter to the church which annuls our personal doctrines, call it chapter one by our own human invention, and ascribe them to unbelievers.
Kwadwo Omari, PhD
June 29, 2019