So we have here two time periods being communicated. We have the time period of “from the beginning”: “the devil has been sinning from the beginning,” so the document of his indictment is long. That is one.

You have the devil, who has been sinning from the beginning. Then you have the Son of God, who was revealed at a specific point in history. That specific point in time was about 2,000 years ago. He was born of the Virgin Mary, born around 4 B.C.—that is one of the best dates people have concluded for the birth of Jesus Christ. So He was revealed. That means He existed before His revealing. That is the point. The Son of God existed before His revealing.

The same writer of 1 John also wrote John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was fully God. The Word was with God in the beginning. All things were created by him, and apart from him not one thing was created that has been created” (John 1:1–3). So we see Jesus Christ defined, communicated as God who existed from eternity past, “whose origins are in the distant past” as Micah would prophesy (Micah 5:2). The Son of God has been the Son of God from eternity past. But His revealing, His unveiling in time—what the Bible will call “the fullness of time” when “Christ died for the ungodly” (see Galatians 4:4; Romans 5:6)—happened in history.

So we have the devil, who has been sinning from the beginning, whose list of indictments is long, and he seems to be having a field day. And just as God spoke in Genesis chapter 3 and said, “I will put hostility between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring; her offspring will crush your head, and you will strike his heel” (Genesis 3:15), we have a confrontation here. And the word used in 1 John 3:8 is “destroy”: “to destroy the works of the devil”—to remove the poison of sin so that we will have life through Him.

When Jesus Christ was going to communicate who He is, He said, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:14–15).

We were the factory of the devil—the sin factory of the devil—but with the emergence of Jesus Christ, we are saved. Just as everybody who looked at that bronze serpent, it was as if they were never bitten; it was as if there was nothing called the poison in them. That was their reality. They were free from the consequences of their sin, the ongoing effect of their sin. “Those who look to Him will be saved.”

So here we have “the one who practices sin.” He is saying this person who is practicing sin is mirroring the devil, because “from the beginning” the devil has been sinning. We see a consistency with the devil. So he is saying, look, the person in whom we see a consistency of sinning “is of the devil.” The devil has been sinning from the beginning. That creates a distinction between the people who are of Christ and the people who are not of Christ.

“For this purpose the Son of God was revealed: to destroy the works of the devil,” so that you will not be among the people this verse is describing. You will not be one of those who practice sin, whose native habitat is sinning. That will not be you. You will manifest the destruction of the works of the devil—which is sin—in your life. It will be manifested in your life. You will be an exemplar of someone in whose life the works of the devil have been destroyed.

God bless you.