LIKE MANY OF you, I do a lot of reading. But I rarely read fiction, even though I enjoy it. I mostly read non-fiction for the sake of learning new things and adding to what I know. That comes with the territory of being a professor. But as a faculty member and sometime administrator in a complicated institution (is there any other kind?), I also have to read a lot of documents and reports. It can get quite tedious, especially when the report is poorly organized and drowns the reader in a sea of details. That’s when I appreciate a good executive summary up front that gets straight to the point: Here’s the gist of what we really want you to know; see the following to learn more.

Letters, of course, aren’t reports. They differ in style and substance. John isn’t writing to convey information to a group of decision-makers; he’s writing to encourage a group of people whom he loves and who rely on his pastoral care and advice. He doesn’t write a crisply worded document with a point-by-point linear argument; he repeats himself and sometimes seems to write in circles.

But that doesn’t mean that something like an executive summary wouldn’t be useful. As we’ve seen, the ending of 1 John isn’t like the ending of Paul’s letters, in which Paul addresses a variety of practical matters before signing off. By contrast, while John seems to have finished with his main points, he concludes the letter with some final pastoral words that continue to address his readers’ concerns. And by the time we get to his closing words, he provides something that functions like a four-verse executive summary.

We’ll look at the fourth and final verse later. For now, here are the other three:

We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin; the One who was born of God keeps them safe, and the evil one cannot harm them. We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one. We know also that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true. And we are in him who is true by being in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life. (1 John 5:18-20, NIV)

Three times in three verses, John says, “We know,” and follows it up each time with a statement of something he wants his readers to know and take to heart. Some of what he says is new, but much of it repeats or builds on something he said earlier in the letter.

The first part of verse 18, for example, says, “We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin.” That clearly echoes what he said earlier, in 3:9: “No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in them; they cannot go on sinning, because they have been born of God.”

There are two closely related ideas here. The first is that believers are “born of God.” This is language he’s used before. In 2:29, for example, John writes that “everyone who does what is right has been born of him.” In 4:7, he says that “Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.” And in the opening verse of chapter 5, he writes that “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God.” Through all of this, John is reassuring his readers that they are in fact God’s children.

The second idea is that those who are born of God, as the New International Version translates it, “do not continue to sin.” It’s clear from the rest of the letter that John knows that Christians can still sin; to claim otherwise would be a lie (e.g., see 1:8). But John’s Greek here could just as well be translated as saying that those who are born of God don’t sin, period, as opposed to saying that they don’t continue to sin. The NIV inserts the word “continue” in a way that most other English translations do not, probably to avoid the appearance of a contradiction.

But again, if we read John’s reference to sin here in context, he’s probably reiterating the idea that true believers — those born of God — don’t sin in a way that leads to death or the loss of eternal life. That reading is reinforced by the context of the other passage we cited earlier. When in 3:9 John says that “No one who is born of God will continue to sin,” the context is about the sin of lawlessness, a reference to the secessionists’ rejection of the authority of God.

Moreover, in both of these parallel passages, John mentions the work of the devil. Here is 3:9 again, this time, in the context of the two verses that surround it:

The one who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work. No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in them; they cannot go on sinning, because they have been born of God. This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not God’s child, nor is anyone who does not love their brother and sister. (1 John 3:8-10)

Lawlessness, rebellion, a refusal to accept God’s word: these are all ways of describing the fundamental sin of the devil. With that as a backdrop, listen again to what John says in 5:18 and 19:

We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin; the One who was born of God keeps them safe, and the evil one cannot harm them. We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.

What do we know? Again, at the beginning of verse 18, John says that anyone truly born of God doesn’t sin the way the secessionists did by rejecting the truth about Jesus. When at the beginning of verse 19 he says, “We know that we are children of God,” he’s reiterating what he said in the previous verse. Literally, he says, “We know that we are of God”; the word “children” is not there.

Thus, I think John is doing more than just recapping what his readers already know, as if only to say, Remember, you’re born of God! Rather, he’s encouraging them with what he wants them to know: This whole dark world may be under the devil’s sway, and people will fall into sin because of it. So don’t take lightly what I said about sin. Don’t assume that just because your destiny is secure that you can be complacent about sin in your own life. But don’t panic either. I want you to know that the devil can’t touch you, because Jesus is keeping you safe.

John may be remembering what Jesus told the festival crowd as he walked through the courts of the Jerusalem temple:

My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand. (John 10:27-28)

That’s the Jesus you believe in and follow, John seems to tell his readers. Not even the devil himself can snatch you from his hand.

And in a world such as ours, that’s comforting to know.