Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 1 John · About this commentary
Keep Yourselves from Idols
1 John 5:20-21
20 We know that the Son of God has come and has given us an understanding, that we know him who is true; and we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life. · WEB
The letter ends without a farewell, on a warning that seems to come from nowhere until the preceding sentence is read.
Verse 20 is the third we know, and it gathers the letter. The Son of God has come — the arrival the opponents denied. He has given understanding — the knowledge the departed teachers claimed to have gone beyond. And that understanding has an object: him who is true, a phrase used three times in one verse.
The last clause is the letter's highest statement and its grammar is worth stating carefully. This is the true God and eternal life. The nearest antecedent is Jesus Christ, named immediately before, and reading it that way matches everything the letter has argued — that the life is in the Son 1 John 5:11 and that having the Son is having the life 1 John 5:12. A reader could take this to refer more broadly to the God just described; the letter's own argument favors the nearer reading, and neither disturbs what it has said throughout.
Then verse 21, and the letter simply stops. No greeting, no benediction, no names — matching an opening that had none either 1 John 1:1.
Little children, guard yourselves from idols. It reads as an abrupt change of subject until the sentence before it is taken seriously. The letter has just identified where the true God is found. An idol, in that light, is not only a carved thing; it is any account of God assembled somewhere else — which is precisely what the people who left had offered.
held with reason What this mark means