1Where do wars and fightings among you come from? Don’t they come from your pleasures that war in your members? 2You lust, and don’t have. You murder and covet, and can’t obtain. You fight and make war. You don’t have, because you don’t ask. 3You ask, and don’t receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures. 4You adulterers and adulteresses, don’t you know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. 5Or do you think that the Scripture says in vain, “The Spirit who lives in us yearns jealously”? 6But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” 7Be subject therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners. Purify your hearts, you double-minded. 9Lament, mourn, and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. 10Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he will exalt you.
11Don’t speak against one another, brothers. He who speaks against a brother and judges his brother, speaks against the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge. 12Only one is the lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge another?
13Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow let’s go into this city and spend a year there, trade, and make a profit.” 14Yet you don’t know what your life will be like tomorrow. For what is your life? For you are a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. 15For you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will both live, and do this or that.” 16But now you glory in your boasting. All such boasting is evil. 17To him therefore who knows to do good and doesn’t do it, to him it is sin.
John states a principle, evidenced by his use of “whoever.” This alludes back to Cain and Abel. John now applies it to the Christian life. John is still talking about Christians’ attitudes toward other Christians. His use of “brother” indicates this. He will further define “hate” in a later verse.
Once again, what they “know” (οἴδατε) is by instruction. This is something they have been taught. He states a second principle: “No murderer has eternal life remaining (abiding) in him.” This is often interpreted to mean that murderers are unregenerate. However, Christians do commit murder and remain saved. Peter (1 Peter 4:15) commands Christians not to suffer as murderers, and James (James 4:1-2) accuses his readers of murdering. Both are addressing Christians and affirm the possibility in a Christian’s life. Paul, too, identifies murder as one of the “works of the flesh” that a Christian can do when not filled with the Spirit (Gal 5:19-21).
If “remaining” (abiding) is understood in the way Jesus used it in the Upper Room, John’s point is that murderers are not being influenced by eternal life. Taking this one step further, John indicates in his prologue that eternal life is a person he had handled and seen, Jesus. Thus, it seems better to see John saying that when a Christian hates another Christian, Jesus, eternal life incarnate, is not influencing that person. Hatred and murder do not originate with Jesus. When the life of Jesus, eternal life, is expressed in the actions of a believer, it produces love, not hatred.