The True God

John writes in today’s verse, “The Son of God has come” (1 John 5:20). This is yet another reference to the true incarnation of our Lord. The divine Son has come into the world and has taken on human flesh, a historical fact denied by the proto-Gnostic false teachers who confronted the original audience of this epistle. Those with faith and assurance, however, will embrace the incarnation wholeheartedly.

John continues, writing that this Son has not only come but has also “given us understanding” (5:20). This is an interesting choice of words, since the conception of salvation by right knowledge would have been important to John’s opponents. Yet knowledge is also important to biblical Christianity. We cannot know God without a revelation from the Son (Matt. 11:27), and thus knowledge is vital for salvation. Unlike the false teaching of John’s opponents, however, the knowledge leading to salvation is knowledge of a person—the incarnate Christ—and it involves not only a reception of facts but also personal trust in Him as Savior and Lord (James 2:19–20). Christ has come to give us understanding as the true Prophet of God, revealing to us by His Word and Spirit the will of God for our salvation (Westminster Shorter Catechism 24). This is why knowing “him who is true”—the Father—is inseparable from being in union with His true Son (1 John 5:20). To know the true God and to have eternal life is to be in the Son, and only those who are disciples of Christ have everlasting salvation.

The final sentence of the verse says something that John’s opponents could never have said: “He is the true God and eternal life.” The nearest antecedent of the pronoun is “Jesus Christ,” named in the previous sentence, and the church has long understood this sentence as one of the clearest declarations of the Son’s deity that we find in the New Testament. John has insisted that eternal life is in the Son; here, the Son Himself is called eternal life. The tests of doctrine, holiness, and love all converge on this person, and apart from Him none of them makes sense. Here the whole letter comes to a point: If Jesus Christ is the true God and eternal life, then to have Him is to have everything, and to lack Him is to lack everything. To know Christ in His person and work is to possess eternal life.