Verse 6
6. Abideth in him Christ, who is viewed here as the embodiment of his own atonement and doctrine; and to abide in him is to live in the full embodiment therein of our own being.
Seen him By the divine spiritual vision; as in John 14:7; John 14:9; 3 John 1:11.
Known him Become experimentally acquainted with him. The English perfect tense seems to the reader to deny that if a man now sins he ever possessed religion. “If he has lost it, he never had it.” But, as Alford well shows, the Greek perfect much more strongly emphasizes the present time than the English, and even sometimes loses the reference to the past and expresses the present only. We may add that Ezekiel (Ezekiel 33:13,) declares of the apostate that “all his righteousnesses shall not be remembered.” To the divine recognition he never has been righteous, just as (Ezekiel 33:16) to the divine eye the convert to righteousness has never been a sinner. In truth, however, John has no reference to an apostate; he is only strongly emphasizing the blindness of the sinner to Christ.
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