1 John 5:5 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Who is he that overcometh the world That is superior to all earthly care, desire, fear? Who is the man, and where is he to be found? Surely none have gained, or will gain, this important victory, but they who believe that Jesus is the Son of God “The great principles,” says Doddridge, “peculiar to our divine religion, a sense of redeeming love, and the prospect of such a sublime and perpetual happiness as the gospel opens upon us, can alone be sufficient to teach us to triumph over these transitory vanities, and to establish a uniform character, superior to the variety of temptations with which we may be assaulted: while the boasted triumphs of others, upon meaner principles, have been very partial and imperfect, and they have evidently been seduced by one vanity, while they have gloried in despising another.” “That the Jews,” says Macknight, “universally believed their Messiah, or Christ, was to be the Son of God, appears from many passages of the New Testament, especially from the following: Peter answered, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God, Matthew 16:16. Devils also came out of many, crying out, Thou art Christ, the Son of God, Luke 4:41. These things are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, John 20:31. And that the Jews universally believed the Son of God to be God, appears from the following passages: Jesus answered, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work. Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill him, because he not only had broken the sabbath, but said also that God was his Father, making himself equal with God, John 5:17-18. The Jews answered, For a good work we stone thee not, but for blasphemy, because thou, being a man, makest thyself God, John 10:33. The high-priest said, I adjure thee, &c., that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God. Jesus saith to him, Thou hast said. Then the high-priest rent his clothes, saying, He hath spoken blasphemy: what think ye? they answered, He is guilty of death, Matthew 26:63. “The high-priest and council, composed of men of the highest learning and rank among the Jews, equally with the common people, believed that the Messiah was to be the Son of God, and that the Son of God is himself God, otherwise they could not have reckoned Jesus a blasphemer for calling himself Christ, the Son of God. From these indisputable facts it is evident that the modern Socinians contradict the gospel history in two of its essential articles, when they affirm that the first Jewish Christians, before their conversion, had no idea that their Messiah was to come down from heaven, having never been taught to expect any other than a man like themselves. Next, since John hath so frequently declared, and, in what followeth the verse under consideration, hath proved that Jesus is the Christ and the Son of God, the same Socinians must be mistaken when they affirm, that in this epistle John is silent concerning the divinity of Christ, and hath not in any part of it censured those who deny it.”