1 John 5:16-17 — If any man see his brother sin a sin which is not unto death, he shall ask, and he shall give him life for them that sin not unto death. There is a sin unto death: I do not say that he shall pray for it. All unrighteousness is sin: and there is a sin not unto death. 

Somebody asked a question about these verses on a Facebook page that I follow. It was a good question … these verses can seem confusing. 

The first thing to note is that the verses are about Christians. If you find someone who isn’t a brother sinning there’s no point trying to deal with the sin until the Holy Spirit has dealt with the sin nature!

The next thing to see is that death can be a consequence of sin. We have to reconcile that with:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. (John 3:16)

The key, of course, is that John is talking about life after death in his gospel. Salvation brings eternal life, but it doesn’t set aside the earthly death that is the unavoidable consequence of Adam’s fall. In the epistle John is talking of physical death which, it seems, could be a result of sin. But we all (barring one or two mysterious exceptions) go through that — “it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.” (Hebrews 9:27). It seems, then, that John is saying that sin can cause death to come sooner rather than later.

So now we come to the most difficult question. John distinguishes between sin that leads to death, and sin that doesn’t. So what is the sin that leads to death? There’s been a lot of disagreement about it. Church of England clergyman Alfred A. Plummer, in his commentary on the Epistles of John first points out that the Greek text should not be translated “there is a sin”, but “there is sin” and then writes:

‘Sin unto death’, therefore, is not any act of sin, however heinous, but a state or habit of sin wilfully chosen and persisted in: it is constant and consummate opposition to God. In the phraseology of this Epistle we might say that it is the deliberate and persistent preference of darkness to light, of falsehood to truth, of sin to righteousness, of the world to the Father, of spiritual death to eternal life.

That seems right to me. If you have a brother who has slipped into a persistently sinful life, you need to help him quickly … because it is sin leads to death, and no amount of praying will keep safe the sinner who will not repent and return to the right way.