In a passage in Romans, Paul states that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). A few verses earlier, the apostle quotes from the Old Testament with similar content: “As it is written: ‘There is none righteous, no, not one; there is none who understands; there is none who seeks after God. They have all turned aside; they have together become unprofitable; there is none who does good, no, not one’” (Romans 3:10-12). This makes the statement of Holy Scripture clear: every human being sins, as Solomon also formulated in his prayer to God: “There is no one who does not sin …” (1 Kings 8:46). But how then is the statement in 1 John 3:9 to be understood?
Without question, a Christian should strive to overcome sin in every form—but unfortunately, no Christian, no matter how faithful, can be absolutely sinless. John writes this very clearly in his letter: “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:8, 9). He goes even further when he writes one verse later: “If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us” (1 John 1:10). John calls such an assertion, making God a liar! God clearly describes our sinful nature in many places in His word. 1 John 1:8, therefore, rightly calls the claim to be sinless self-deception. And we know from our own experience that we simply cannot manage not to sin. But how then can John write a few chapters later: “… he cannot sin because he has been born of God” (1 John 3:9)?
The believer that John describes here has the distinctive characteristic that he is “born of God.” The Greek preposition ek is used for “from.” It indicates the origin, in our case God. The verb “is born” is in the perfect tense, meaning that the action began in the past, and the result is still visible unchanged in the present. In summary, this means that the believer is born of God, has become a child of God, and remains so. At the same time, the believer has received a new nature through the power of the Spirit of God. And the hallmark of this new nature is that it cannot sin. For “the one who is born of God,” sin is something abnormal or unnatural. From this perspective, the one born of God does not sin.
But: the new nature has no power in itself. The letter to the Romans shows this. The new nature strives for things that are for the glory of God. But in order to have the power to carry them out, practical submission to Christ and His Spirit is necessary. This walk in the Spirit is essentially the result of a real, heartfelt agreement with God’s judgment on the old nature at the cross of Christ. The believer still has the old nature, and if he does not consider himself dead to sin—which unfortunately happens all too often—then he sins.
Thus, the above biblical passages do not contradict each other at all. They describe, on the one hand, man by nature, who is a sinner, and, on the other hand, the new nature (the new life) of the believer, who is incapable of sinning.
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