What Does 1 John 5:10 Mean?

14. From sobriety of spirit and endurance of hope Peter passes to obedience, holiness, and reverential fear. **As--**marking their present actual character as "born again" (1Pe 1:3, 22). **obedient children--**Greek, "children of obedience": children to whom obedience is their characteristic and ruling nature, as a child is of the same nature as the mother and father. Contrast Ep 5:6, "the children of disobedience." Compare 1Pe 1:17, "obeying the Father" whose "children" ye are. Having the obedience of faith (compare 1Pe 1:22) and so of practice (compare 1Pe 1:16, 18). "Faith is the highest obedience, because discharged to the highest command" [Luther]. **fashioning--**The outward fashion (Greek, "schema") is fleeting, and merely on the surface. The "form," or conformation in the New Testament, is something deeper and more perfect and essential. **the former lusts in--**which were characteristic of your state of ignorance of God: true of both Jews and Gentiles. The sanctification is first described negatively (1Pe 1:14, "not fashioning yourselves," &c.; the putting off the old man, even in the outward fashion, as well as in the inward conformation), then positively (1Pe 1:15, putting on the new man, compare Ep 4:22, 24). "Lusts" flow from the original birth-sin (inherited from our first parents, who by self-willed desire brought sin into the world), the lust which, ever since man has been alienated from God, seeks to fill up with earthly things the emptiness of his being; the manifold forms which the mother-lust assumes are called in the plural lusts. In the regenerate, as far as the new man is concerned, which constitutes his truest self, "sin" no longer exists; but in the flesh or old man it does. Hence arises the conflict, uninterruptedly maintained through life, wherein the new man in the main prevails, and at last completely. But the natural man knows only the combat of his lusts with one another, or with the law, without power to conquer them.