1 John 4:7

As the Spirit of truth is known by doctrine (thus spirits are to be tried), it is known by love likewise; and so here follows a strong fervent exhortation to holy Christian love: Beloved, let us love one another, Jo1 4:7. The apostle would unite them in his love, that he might unite them in love to each other: "Beloved, I beseech you, by the love I bear to you, that you put on unfeigned mutual love." This exhortation is pressed and urged with variety of argument: as,

I. From the high and heavenly descent of love: For love is of God. He is the fountain, author, parent, and commander of love; it is the sum of his law and gospel: And every one that loveth (whose spirit is framed to judicious holy love) is born of God, Jo1 4:7. The Spirit of God is the Spirit of love. The new nature in the children of God is the offspring of his love: and the temper and complexion of it is love. The fruit of the Spirit is love, Gal 5:22. Love comes down from heaven.

II. Love argues a true and just apprehension of the divine nature: He that loveth knoweth God, Jo1 4:7. He that loveth not knoweth not God, Jo1 4:8. What attribute of the divine Majesty so clearly shines in all the world as his communicative goodness, which is love. The wisdom, the greatness, the harmony, and usefulness of the vast creation, which so fully demonstrate his being, do at the same time show and prove his love; and natural reason, inferring and collecting the nature and excellence of the most absolute perfect being, must collect and find that he is most highly good: and he that loveth not (is not quickened by the knowledge he hath of God to the affection and practice of love) knoweth not God; it is a convictive evidence that the sound and due knowledge of God dwells not in such a soul; his love must needs shine among his primary brightest perfections; for God is love (Jo1 4:8), his nature and essence are love, his will and works are primarily love. Not that this is the only conception we ought to have of him; we have found that he is light as well as love (Jo1 1:5), and God is principally love to himself, and he has such perfections as arise from the necessary love he must bear to his necessary existence, excellence, and glory; but love is natural and essential to the divine Majesty: God is love. This is argued from the display and demonstration that he hath given of it; as, 1. That he hath loved us, such as we are: In this was manifest the love of God towards us (Jo1 4:9), towards us mortals, us ungrateful rebels. God commandeth his love towards us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us, Rom 5:8. Strange that God should love impure, vain, vile, dust and ashes! 2. That he has loved us at such a rate, at such an incomparable value as he has given for us; he has given his own, only-beloved, blessed Son for us: Because that God sent his only-begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him, Jo1 4:9. This person is in some peculiar distinguishing way the Son of God; he is the only-begotten. Should we suppose him begotten as a creature or created being, he is not the only-begotten. Should we suppose him a natural necessary eradication from the Father's glory or glorious essence, or substance, he must be the only-begotten: and then it will be a mystery and miracle of divine love that such a Son should be sent into our world for us! It may well be said, So (wonderfully, so amazingly, so incredibly) God loved the world. 3. That God loved us first, and in the circumstances in which we lay: Herein is love (unusual unprecedented love), not that we loved God, but that he loved us, Jo1 4:10. He loved us, when we had no love for him, when we lay in our guilt, misery, and blood, when we were undeserving, ill-deserving, polluted, and unclean, and wanted to be washed from our sins in sacred blood. 4. That he gave us his Son for such service and such an end. (1.) For such service, to be the propitiation for our sins; consequently to die for us, to die under the law and curse of God, to bear our sins in his own body, to be crucified, to be wounded in his soul, and pierced in his side, to be dead and buried for us (Jo1 4:10); and then, (2.) For such an end, for such a good and beneficial end to us - that we might live through him (Jo1 4:9), might live for ever through him, might live in heaven, live with God, and live in eternal glory and blessedness with him and through him: O what love is here! Then,

III. Divine love to the brethren should constrain ours: Beloved (I would adjure you by your interest in my love to remember), if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another, Jo1 4:11. This should be an invincible argument. The example of God should press us. We should be followers (or imitators) of him, as his dear children. The objects of the divine love should be the objects of ours. Shall we refuse to love those whom the eternal God hath loved? We should be admirers of his love, and lovers of his love (of the benevolence and complacency that are in him), and consequently lovers of those whom he loves. The general love of God to the world should induce a universal love among mankind. That you may be the children of your Father who is in heaven; for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth his rain on the just and on the unjust, Mat 5:45. The peculiar love of God to the church and to the saints should be productive of a peculiar love there: If God so loved us, we ought surely (in some measure suitably thereto) to love one another.

IV. The Christian love is an assurance of the divine inhabitation: If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, Jo1 4:12. Now God dwelleth in us, not by any visible presence, or immediate appearance to the eye (no man hath seen God at any time, Jo1 4:12), but by his Spirit (Jo1 4:13); or, "No man hath seen God at any time; he does not here present himself to our eye or to our immediate intuition, and so he does not in this way demand and exact our love; but he demands and expects it in that way in which he has thought meet to deserve and claim it, and that is in the illustration that he has given of himself and of his love (and thereupon of his loveliness too) in the catholic church, and particularly in the brethren, the members of that church. In them, and in his appearance for them and with them, is God to be loved; and thus, if we love one another, God dwelleth in us. The sacred lovers of the brethren are the temples of God; the divine Majesty has a peculiar residence there."

V. Herein the divine love attains a considerable end and accomplishment in us: "And his love is perfected in us, Jo1 4:12. It has obtained its completion in and upon us. God's love is not perfected in him, but in and with us. His love could not be designed to be ineffectual and fruitless upon us; when its proper genuine end and issue are attained and produced thereby, it may be said to be perfected; so faith is perfected by its works, and love perfected by its operations. When the divine love has wrought us to the same image, to the love of God, and thereupon to the love of the brethren, the children of God, for his sake, it is therein and so far perfected and completed, though this love of ours is not at present perfect, nor the ultimate end of the divine love to us." How ambitious should we be of this fraternal Christian love, when God reckons his own love to us perfected thereby! To this the apostle, having mentioned the high favour of God's dwelling in us, subjoins the note and character thereof: Hereby know we that we dwell in him, and he in us, because he hath given us of his Spirit, Jo1 4:13. Certainly this mutual inhabitation is something more noble and great than we are well acquainted with or can declare. One would think that to speak of God dwelling in us, and we in him, were to use words too high for mortals, had not God gone before us therein. What this indwelling imports has been briefly explained on Jo1 3:24. What it fully is must be left to the revelation of the blessed world. But this mutual inhabitation we know, says the apostle, because he hath given us of his spirit; he has lodged the image and fruit of his Spirit in our hearts (Jo1 4:13), and the Spirit that he hath given us appears to be his, or of him, since it is the Spirit of power, of zeal and magnanimity for God, of love to God and man, and of a sound mind, of an understanding well instructed in the affairs of God and religion, and his kingdom among men, Ti2 1:7.

Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible (1708–1710) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

Resumption of the main theme (Jo1 2:29). Love, the sum of righteousness, is the test of our being born of God. Love flows from a sense of God's love to us: compare Jo1 4:9 with Jo1 3:16, which Jo1 4:9 resumes; and Jo1 4:13 with Jo1 3:24, which similarly Jo1 4:13 resumes. At the same time, Jo1 4:7-21 is connected with the immediately preceding context, Jo1 4:2 setting forth Christ's incarnation, the great proof of God's love (Jo1 4:10).

Beloved--an address appropriate to his subject, "love."

love--All love is from God as its fountain: especially that embodiment of love, God manifest in the flesh. The Father also is love (Jo1 4:8). The Holy Ghost sheds love as its first fruit abroad in the heart.

knoweth God--spiritually, experimentally, and habitually.

Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

(7) THE PERFECT LOVE THE SUREST TEST (1Jn_4:7-21).

(a) Fraternal love the necessary product of the true knowledge of God, because God is love (1Jn_4:7-8).

(b) The grand recent historical exhibition of God’s love (1Jn_4:9-10).

(c) Our consequent duty (1Jn_4:11).

(d) God’s abode in us, the perfecting of His love in us, and the proof of His presence through the Spirit, are the equivalent for seeing Him (1Jn_4:12-13).

(e) All this is grounded on the strong, undeniable truth of the Apostolic witness to Christ (1Jn_4:14-16).

(f) The fearlessness which is the result of perfect love (1Jn_4:17-18).

(g) The cause of our love to God, and the necessary connection of that love with love to our fellows (1Jn_4:19-21).

This may be considered the central portion of the second half of the Epistle. Nothing could be more significant of St. John’s teaching. Here many trains of thought which have occurred before are gathered together in one grand treatise on love, divine and human—the complement of the thirteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians. The thought of (a) was suggested, though not in so complete and concise a form, in 1Jn_3:10-11; 1Jn_3:23; 1Jn_2:4; 1Jn_3:6; that of (b) in 1Jn_3:16; 1Jn_2:2; that of (c) also in 1Jn_3:16; that of (d) in 1Jn_2:5; 1Jn_3:24; that of (e) in 1Jn_1:1-2; that of (f) in 1Jn_2:28; that of (g) in 1Jn_2:4; 1Jn_3:17. The connection with the paragraph on the trial of the spirits is very obvious: “every one that loveth is born of God;” so that the quality and quantity of our affection will be the best gauge whether we have the spirit of truth or of error. The absence of love is ignorance of God, for real knowledge of Him imparts His nature. And if any ask how we know of His love, the answer is that it was seen in His Son. In sending Him, He loved us without any love on our part. Our relation to God reminds us that we must have the same love to each other. The fact that God cannot be seen is an additional reason for mutual affection among us; for brotherly love is the demonstrable proof of His presence, and of the growing completeness of the work wrought by His love in us. The Spirit Himself, through whom our love would come, confirms the reality of God’s indwelling. And these spiritual emotions and developments are not illusory, for they are guaranteed by the ocular and oral evidence of the Apostles to the historical Person of Christ. So the result of all this will be perfect and fearless confidence. To sum up (1Jn_4:19): our love to God springs from His to us; hatred of our brother (or the absence of love for him) is the denial of all love for God; and for this duty we rest not on our own deductions only, however true, but on His plain command.

(7 a.) (7) One another.—As God loved the world, so we are to love mankind, not merely Christians. (Comp. 1Jn_3:13.)

For love is of God.—He who is truly alive shares the life of God, which is love. All true love is part of His being.

(8) Knoweth not.—Rather, never knew. Real knowledge of God has a convincing practical effect; without such an effect it is not knowledge, but a mere mental deception.

God is love.—In the early part of the Epistle St. John had defined God as light, and the thoughts had been grouped round and in relation to that central idea. It would of course be impossible ever to exhaust all the definitions of God; but just as our nature may be roughly classified as intellectual and moral, mind and heart, thought and emotion, so, when we have thought of God as Light (embracing all such attributes as truth, knowledge, purity, health, power, and justice), we shall not have traversed in outline all that we can know of His nature, or all that concerns us to know, until we have also thought of Him as Love, the author and source of all true affection, kindness, pity, friendliness, rejoicing in the creation of infinite life for the sake of its infinite happiness, and offering eternal bliss to all His human family, that He may be for ever surrounded by inexhaustible illustrations of the joy and glory of perfection.

(7 b.) (9) In this was manifested.—St. John echoes his beloved Lord (from Joh_3:16).

In us.—(Comp. Joh_9:3.) “In our case.”

Only begotten.—In contrast to us, His adopted sons.

That we might live.—Human life is regarded as no true living, but a mere existence, until “Christ be formed in the heart” and we become “partakers of the divine nature.”

(10) Herein is love.—What love is this, that, distasteful, uncongenial, unloving, unlovely as we must have been in His sight, He did this great thing for us! (Comp. Joh_15:16; Rom_5:8; Rom_5:10; Tit_3:4.) On Propitiation, see 1Jn_2:2; 1Jn_3:16.

(7 c,) (11) Beloved.—An impulse moves St. John’s mind corresponding to that in 1Jn_4:7.

We ought.—As God has bestowed his affection so gratuitously on us, and we benefit by it in such an inconceivable degree, and can make Him no return, we can only pay the debt by bestowing our poor equivalent on our fellow men. Although our happiness depends strictly on God, still He has allowed us to be stewards for Him in some small degree for the happiness of those about us.

(7 d.) (12) No man . . .—St. John quotes his Gospel (Joh_1:18). This is simply the general proposition, “God is invisible,” and has no reference to spiritual sight. (Comp. Exo_33:20; Joh_6:46; 1Ti_6:16.) The appearances of God to Abraham or Moses would be like the Shechinah in the Temple, but no material glimpse of Him who is a Spirit. St. John mentions the fact as an admission of the limits of human nature and the condition of faith, but only in order to state the richness of the substitute, which is the presence of God within the soul, verified and substantiated by the historical Person of Christ.

His love is perfected in us.—Its operation in us has full scope and sway.

(13) Hereby know we.—Comp. 1Jn_3:24.

(7 e.) A second antithesis to the opening words of 1Jn_4:12. The Apostolic witness to the person of Christ is again and again insisted on as the foundation of Christian theology. (Comp. 1Jn_1:1-3; Joh_1:14; Act_4:20; Act_22:15; Act_26:16.)

(14) Saviour of the world.—Comp. 1Jn_2:2.

(15) Whosoever shall confess—i.e., receives the Apostolic witness as beyond dispute. (Comp. 1Jn_2:23, and 1Jn_4:6; Rom_10:9.) The noble width of this declaration is most remarkable, in opposition to human inventions of narrow and sectarian communions.

Son of God, in the sense of “only begotten,” as in 1Jn_4:9.

(16) And we have known and believed.—This has the effect of a reflective repetition of 1Jn_4:14, “Yes. we have known and believed.” This time, however, the “we” includes those who have heard and accepted the testimony of the eye-witnesses.

God is love.—In this meditative recapitulation St. John cannot help summing up everything again in the boundless formula of 1Jn_4:8. Knowledge is here the process that leads to conviction; belief, the result of conviction.

He that dwelleth in love.—St. John’s whole purpose is none other than to raise man to his highest possible development by demonstrating the reality and nature of fellowship with the Divine. Here he arrives at the very central position of all: that as God is Love itself, so he that allows nothing to trouble that atmosphere of pure love (here neither specially towards God or man) which God would enable him to breathe, if his own wilfulness did not turn him away from it, will be bathed in the light of God, animated with His life, and one with Him. It is a combination of 1Jn_4:8; 1Jn_4:15.

Us has the same width as 1Jn_4:15.

(7 f.) (17) Herein is our love made perfect.—Rather, In this love is perfected with us. “Love,” as in 1Jn_4:16, is the disposition to be attracted towards what is worthy of sympathy, whether it be God or man.

That we may have boldness.—The day of judgment, whether near or remote, is regarded as so certain that it is a present fact influencing our conduct. Love will be more or less perfect in us in proportion as it gives us more or less just and reasonable grounds for confidence were we suddenly placed before the great white throne. (Comp. 1Jn_2:28.)

Because as he is, so are we in this world.—If we live in this serene atmosphere of pure sympathy with God and man, Christ is in us and we in Him, because God is Love itself. Sharing His nature, therefore, we must be like Him, and the more completely we allow this Divine love towards our Father and our brothers to transform our whole being, the more we shall be like our Judge, and the less cause we shall have for dread.

In this world merely indicates our present place of habitation.

(18) There is no fear.—The more perfect this disposition of serene sympathy becomes, the less share can any form of anxiety have in it. Even if regarded as directed to an earthly object, if it be pure and divine in its character, not even want of reciprocity can disturb its equanimity. Where it is a well-grounded sympathy with a perfect being, its serenity is all the more complete in proportion to its sincerity. When love is perfect, fear dwindles to nothing, is absolutely expelled. Love, seeking to be perfect, and finding fear alongside of it, will diligently seek out the cause of the fear, perfect itself by getting rid of the cause, and so get rid of the fear. Fear in such a connection implies some ground for alarm, and suffers punishment (not “torment”) by anticipation. The presence of such a ground for alarm would imply a proportionate imperfection of love. (Comp. 1Jn_3:19-21.)

(7 g.) The cause of our love to God, and the necessary connection of that love with love to our fellows (1Jn_4:19-21).

(19) We love him, because he first loved us.—God’s loving us made it possible for us to love Him: otherwise we should not have known Him, or had the faculty of loving Him even had we known Him. To suppose that St. John is putting a mere case of gratitude is to rob him of the dignity and depth of his meaning.

(20) These last three verses are a recapitulation in a vivid form, of the truth and the duty contained in 1Jn_4:10-11. God made it possible for us to love Him, and the very first result of our feeling this power within us, and allowing it to put itself into force will be seen in pure and devout sympathy for all whom we can help. As usual, hating, and not loving, are put as interchangeable members of the class of malevolence. St. John argues on the ground that it is much easier for human nature to be interested by what comes before its eyes than by that about which it has to think. Gregory the Great says, “In love the eyes are guides;” and Œcumenius, “Sight leads on to love.” (Comp. 1Jn_2:4; 1Jn_3:17; and 1Jn_4:12.)

(21) However this may be, there is a still stronger position: the simple command of God in Christ. (Comp. Luk_10:27; Joh_13:34-35; Joh_14:21; Joh_15:9-10; Joh_15:12.)

A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

1Jn_4:7-10

Beloved, let us love one another

A triune philosophy

I.

The philosophy of the new birth. Everyone that loveth is born of God. To begin to love deeply, truely, purely--that is to be born again, for he that loveth is born of God.

II. The philosophy of the true knowledge of God. Everyone that loveth, knoweth God. Not in creeds but through love shall come true knowledge of God.

III. The philosophy of the atonement. Herein is love, etc. (B. J. Snell, M. A.)

Love is of God--God is love

I. Love is of God. This does not mean merely that love comes from God, and has its source in God; that He is the author or creator of it. All created things are of God, for by Him all things were made, and on Him they all depend. But love is not a created thing. It is a Divine property, a Divine affection. And it is of its essence to be communicative and begetting; to communicate itself, and, as it were, beget its own likeness. Love is of God. It is not merely of God, as every good gift is of God. It is of God, as being His own property, His own affection, His own love. It is, wherever it is found, the very love wherewith God loveth. If it is found in me, it is my loving with the very love with which God loves; it is my loving with a Divine love, a love that is thus emphatically of God. Everyone that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.

1. None but one born of God can thus love with the love which, in this sense, is of God; therefore, one who so loves must needs be one who is born of God.

2. Being born of God implies knowing God. How it is the manner of God to love; what sort of love His is; love going out of self; love sacrificing self; love imparting and communicating self; love unsought and unbought; unconditional and unreserved; what kind of being, in respect of love, God is; you who are born of God know, even as the only begotten Son knows.

II. The opposite statement follows as a matter of course--He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. To love with the love which is of God, is to know God; not to love thus, is not to know God; for God is love. In this view, the proposition, God is love, really applies to both of the alternative ways of putting the case; the positive and the negative alike. It assigns the reason why it may be said on the one hand, Everyone that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God; and why it may also be said on the other hand, He that loveth not, knoweth not God. God is love. It is a necessity of His nature, it is His very nature to love. He cannot exist without loving. God is love before all creation; love in exercise; love not possible merely but actual; love forthgoing and communicative of itself; from the Father, the fountain of deity, to the Son; from the Father and the Son to the Holy Ghost. In creation, this love is seen forthgoing and communicative in a new way towards new objects. Sin enters, and death by sin; all sin, and all are doomed. Still God is love; the same love as ever. And in this now is manifested the love of God towards us, because that God sent, etc. This is its crowning glory; the saving mission from God of His only begotten Son. It is consummated in our living through Him, through His being the propitiation for our sins. For now, effectual atonement being made for our guilt, our redemption and reconciliation being righteously and, therefore, surely effected by His being the propitiation for our sins; we, living through Him, are His brethren indeed. The love wherewith God loves Him dwells in us. God loves us even as He loves Him. And so at last the love which, from all eternity, it is of the very nature of Gods essential being to feel and exercise, finds its full fruition in the mighty multitude of all kindreds, and peoples, and nations, and tongues, who stand before the throne and give glory to Him who sitteth thereon, and to the Lamb forever and ever. (R. S. Candlish, D. D.)

Gods existence and love

There must of necessity be in some quarters today a denial that brotherly love rests upon love to God, because there is not a little denial of the being of God altogether. It is not merely the proposition God is love which is contested, but the previous and simpler proposition God is. I do not, of course, mean that this is quite a new thing; anyhow it is as old as the fourteenth Psalm; but certain occurrences, political and social, and the attitude assumed by some of our scientific men, and the tone of much of our current literature, have tended to give a prominence and practical importance to the denial that God is, which it had not half a century ago. But there is another tendency of our times which ought to be noted, and it is the tendency to deny that God is love. The first part of the proposition, we are sometimes told, may be accepted if you think it worth asserting: if you like to explain the order of the physical universe by the hypothesis of what you, call God, there is no harm in it, any more than making the hypothesis of an elastic medium pervading space, or of an electric fluid, or anything else which is hypothetical: but the moment you attribute purpose, and will, and love, and the exercise of moral government to this hypothetical God, then you are told that you fly in the face of modern observation and discovery. You are told, in fact, that the God whom science has revealed is an unbending, invariable, relentless, pitiless law, as different from love as the strokes of a steam engine are from the throbbings of a mothers heart. Now I have no desire to under rate or misrepresent scientific discovery; I do not deny, moreover, that there is much that happens in the world which it is difficult to reconcile with the conception of the overruling providence of a loving Father; anyone who chooses to hold a brief for those who deny that God is love will have no difficulty in finding arguments. But I believe the truth that God is love to be too genuine to be overthrown by any one of them: I believe it to rest upon grounds deeper, more philosophical, and more scientific, than any of the denials or objections which can be opposed to it. I believe that there is something in the human heart, in the universal nature of man, to which it appeals and to which it cannot appeal in vain. In the New Testament the proposition God is love is not an abstract theorem to be proved by the help of axioms and postulates, but it is the condensation in three words of the life of Jesus Christ, our Lord. When I see that weary, wandering Son of man going about doing good, when I see Him feeding the hungry, healing the sick, when I listen to Him preaching the gospel to the poor, and still more when I see Him nailed to the cross of shame, then I bow my head in humble adoration, and I say, In very deed and truth, God is love. This demonstration of the love of God has changed the face of the world: many of its most crying evils have ceased; a bright principle of light and love, which was all but unknown in previous ages, has shined upon the earth; men have gone about doing good, so as they never did before: hospitals are common things: we have seen so great a light in Jesus Christ that no other light is able to dazzle us. In the warmth and brightness of this Sun of our souls, we know and are persuaded that directly or indirectly all love comes from Him. (Bp. Harvey Goodwin.)

The lessons of love

If I mistake not, our first instinct is to suppose that to know God must be some result of hard thinking, something to be got by books, or something which is granted to intellectual power. Whatever truth there may be in this, there is no allusion to it all through Scripture which does not lead us to connect the thought of knowing God with the study, or the library, or the laboratory. It carries us into another region; it speaks of a knowledge which is open to the poor, the uneducated, the young. It speaks of a state of mind rather than of a degree of attainment; something which leads you to say and to feel as you see it in others, not how wonderful! but how beautiful!--not how did he amass all those stores of learning? but, how did he become so noble and so like Christ? He that loveth not, knoweth not God. Is that a hard saying to any of us? What, we ask, the mightiest intellect of modem times, rich with the spoils of time, does not that intellect know God? No, is the Divine answer, not if the man be selfish. It is one thing to know about God, to know what has been said of Him and written and thought of Him, and what science has revealed to us as to the modes of the operations of His hands. This is one thing; but to know God is another. To know God in any true sense is to be unselfish, to be loving, to have towards others the heart of a brother. He who gave us the intellect wishes us to use the intellect according to our age, our strength, our opportunities. Still all this knowledge is at the best knowledge about God not knowledge of God. Let us dare to look on yet further, and lift the wings of the soul. Are we speaking only of that which is, or of that also which shall be hereafter? Of what kind do you suppose will be that higher knowledge? Will it differ in kind from that which was learned often so painfully on earth? Will there be one measurement for the pure in heart who on earth have seen God, and another for those who wake up after His likeness and see His face in heaven? Will the higher knowledge be more of the illumined intellect, and less of the adoring heart? If so, it would not be a higher knowledge in the spiritual order; it would be a lower, with more of earth in it and less of heaven. Everyone that loveth will still know God, and he that loveth not will still not know God. Or, if we pass beyond the region of glowing words, and think calmly of what we have seen and felt in our short passage through life, what report have we to bring on this high matter? When have we seemed to ourselves to be least ignorant of our God, or, may I dare say, understand Him best? Has it been when we were trying to spell out some hard passages in the Bible, or the Creed, or when we caught the echo of some far off thunder of controversy; or has it not rather been when our hearts were touched by something lovely or of good report; when we mourned unselfishly some common loss; when something so moved us at the very centre of our being that all distinctions of age, of ability, of position were merged and lost in one full tide of brotherly affection, and we seemed for a time almost surprised at the nearness and clearness of heaven? There are times, for example, in early childhood, when we have committed some fault. Conscience acts with sternness, and makes her terrors known, but soon love casts out fear; we cannot bear to have done wrong to a mother, or a sister; confession is a necessity; we must have human forgiveness, because, though as yet we know it not, it is to us the image and the representative of the Divine. Then in that weakness and majesty of childish love which resists sin and insists on pardon, we have the knowledge of God. Young as we are, we look on life with the eyes of love and hope. We long to succour, to reform, to purify, to save. But these eyes of love and hope are in truth the eyes of God. Or once more, that which has touched us has been the closing scene of life. We have gathered round some good mans grave. Who shall measure the teaching power of the great? What pulpit, what creed, what treatise on theology, can match for one moment with the open tomb in teaching the knowledge of God? And why? Because we then have ears to hear; because the heart is not closed, but open; because, if I may dare to say so, the spirit of Christian love is in the air. Our hearts recall the gifts and the graces of the Christian dead which made him the loved and honoured. Such lives, such characters, such memories are, indeed, teachers in the knowledge of God. Yes, if it be, indeed, the sober truth, if it be the real state of the case in the external world, that everyone that loveth knoweth God, then our best, perhaps our only teachers in this high knowledge are those who have loving, unselfish hearts, and draw us, whether by the loving voice of an inexorable silence, to think of Him who in the language of heaven is love. (H. M. Butler, D. D.)

The love of God

I. The title beloved. It comes most naturally from John. He was old, and yet the ardent affection of youth still animated his soul. It is a noble triumph of grace to see this spirit maintained and manifested to the last. John had seen and felt much to disappoint and distress him. How he must have been exercised when he wrote 3Jn_1:9-10. All this, and much of the same kind, did not cool his warm heart. Its love still came gushing forth as it had done in the days of his Divine Master.

II. The duty of cherishing brotherly love implied in the exhortation, Let us love one another. While love is natural to the gracious soul, and cannot be suppressed, it is yet very susceptible of culture, and may be much strengthened by the exercise of the duty. Love may be increased by contemplating its object. In the present case that object is the believer. Suppose, then, that we consider him thoughtfully, what will be the effect? We think of his position and what is peculiar to it. His advantages and temptations, and duties and responsibilities present themselves to us. As we think of these we cannot help sympathising with him, and praying for him, and helping him as we have the opportunity. Again, as we are in the presence of a loved object, so is our affection increased. Hence arises the duty of cultivating the society of the godly. Acquaintance will secure many common advantages, and prevent many evils. How often have we cherished a prejudice against some one until it was dissipated by one friendly interview! We may add, the more we serve the object we love, the greater will be our attachment to it. It is not merely that habit confirms and increases the grace; but while this is true, every act of kindness we render draws out the heart in greater kindliness.

III. Many cogent reasons are assigned by the apostle for the exercise of this duty, which we proceed to consider.

1. Love is of God. It has its origin in Him. The more we possess it, the more we resemble Him. To have loved, therefore, is to be Godlike.

2. Everyone that loveth is born of God. Such love as He cherishes is not natural to man. It is contrary to the spirit and habit of a sinner. It exists only in the renewed heart. It is inspired by the Holy Ghost. In all its exercises, its gracious nature and source are conspicuous. It is directed mainly to the people of God.

3. Everyone that loveth knoweth God.

4. He that loveth not knoweth not God. This is said in the way of warning and confirmation. Let no man deceive himself. If there be not love there cannot be the knowledge of God.

5. But the weightiest reason of all yet remains, God is love. The essence of God is love. Power is a perfection. Wisdom is a perfection. Truth is a perfection. But it would not be sufficient to say love is a perfection. It lies as the substratum of the Divine character beneath all the perfections of God. It stimulates and employs them all. (J. Morgan, D. D.)

Christian love

Nothing can be more explicit. The whole nature of religion, as it is interpreted to us in Christianity, is comprised in that one word--love. The Divine nature is love; and piety in us is to be love. When a great structure is arising, there are multitudes of labourers; there are artisans in wood, in stone, in clay, in iron and metals; and each in his own department is in lawful authority. But higher than all of them is the artist and architect. His controlling authority brings all these various workers together, limits and directs their tasks, gives to their cooperative skill a central unity toward which they all are unconsciously tending. Does he, then, abate or limit the power of the heads of departments underneath him? Is not his influence necessary to their greatest development and the highest triumphs of their several skills? So in that temple of the human soul, which each one of us is building by the industries of many noble and potent faculties, Love is the architect, and gives the lines for a foundation, and forms the proportions, and teaches all these diverse faculties, not how to work in their kind and nature, but how, working in their kind and nature, to subserve higher purposes by a Divine unity, and purity, and moral excellence. Love unites their agencies.

I. Let us employ this truth as a criterion of human character. The law of God is the only thing by which we can measure a character. That law, set forth for mans obedience, is Thou shalt love the Lord thy God supremely, and thy fellow man as thyself. Now let us apply this test. Does any man live that does not violate this command of God, Thou shalt love? Let us look inward for one single moment. Did you ever know a man who could say, I have never, from the hour of conscious intelligence, carried my intellect so that in its operations I have violated the law of love? Let a man summon to the bar of his own conscience, pride. What a man would be physically without a backbone, that he would be mentally without the element of pride. And yet, has this element been so controlled in any man that it can rise up and say, I have never disregarded, either negatively or positively, the supreme law of love? Summon that most lithe and nimble feeling--the love of praise--and what man can say, I have so carried my vanity, my approbativeness, that it has always been in subordination to the law of love? Can any man say, My imagination has so acted as never to infract the law of love? Or, can any man say, My moral sentiments have so acted as never to overstep the law of love? What, then, shall we say of the lower feelings? What of the business, executive powers? What of the passions and appetites? Go through the soul, and look at every one of the faculties, and is there one that has not violated this law? I go still further. The action of each element in the soul has been such that its obedience to the law of love has been occasional, has been rare. There are spots where almost everybody, first or last, has felt some glow and warming of love; but to the greatest number of men that ever dwelt on earth, love has been just what Northern days are, when the sun stands above the horizon only one short hour, is sunk below it for the other twenty-three, and is growing worse and worse toward the six-months night. Is not the whole of our outer life, is not our daily conduct, are not our ambitions, are not our secular ends, is not our treatment of men, organised and solidly constructed upon a selfish motive? Thus the inward life and the outward conduct of men both come to one and the same testimony. They are both of them built up not only outside of Gods law, but right over against it, and in antagonism with it. These being the facts: Gods command of love being neglected, and your character and whole history turning on the infraction of it, ought I not to lay this terrible truth before you, and roll it again and again upon you? In my own case, the belief of this doctrine, instead of being an injury, has been a benefit. My charity for men has been augmented in the proportion in which my opinion of their goodness has been lowered. When I deal with men on the supposition that they are good, I am roused with impatience at the manifestations of their wickedness; and when I deal with them on the supposition that they are altogether sinful, I expect nothing from them, and I find myself prepared beforehand to treat them with charity and forbearance.

II. This truth affords, also, a criterion of conversion. There are such loose notions of what religion is, that we cannot too urgently hold attention to the fact that in Christs kingdom love is a characteristic element of piety; and that when a man is converted genuinely, he must be converted to the spirit of love. There may be other things with this spirit, but it is this that makes piety in Christs kingdom. Let us make some discriminations. A man may come to a certain state of great and sudden joy, and of relish for religious exercises, and yet not be a Christian. Religious inspirations and great fertility of feeling, of fancy, fervour of emotion, and elegant utterance, are not evidences, in themselves, of piety. They are blessed concomitants of it often; but they may exist separately from and independently of piety. Your piety is to be tested by its consistency with Gods law of love. The power of right ideas, the clearness with which you take hold of them, the aptness with which you are able to state them, your zeal for them--all these, while they are desirable in piety, are not characteristic of it; and a man may have them and not be a Christian. Gods orthodoxy is of the heart always. That will make the head correct. A man, also, may have great faith and not be a Christian. I go further, and say that a man may be a very generous, good fellow, a very agreeable, companionable man, and yet not be a Christian. A man, likewise, may have an unflinching zeal in religion, and constancy in its service, even to martyrdom, and yet not be a Christian. How many there are that are wardens and doorkeepers of Gods house, who have no love, no benevolence, no conscience, no fidelity. Zeal they may have, but summer in the soul they have not. I go still further, and say that religiousness is not piety. Far be it from me to say a word to discourage reverence, devoutness, awe, in the presence of God. But that alone, that without love, is not enough. With love, it makes piety broader and deeper, and life more massive and noble; but unless there be, first, intermediate, and last, the spirit and the law of love, there is no piety. When a man is converted, therefore, it is very important that he should be converted to the right thing. No man is a Christian till he is converted to the law of love. Since you made a profession of religion, are you kinder in the various relations of life? Is your life more full of the fruits of love? Have you a more comprehensive benevolence toward all mankind? Every year do you less and less accept the service of loving men as a task, and do you more and more accept it with cheerfulness? Do you find that the currents of your thought and feeling are setting outward instead of inward? Are you more full of the sweetness of true Christians love? In this direction you must measure to know whether you are growing in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. (H. W. Beecher.)

Christian love

If a writer upon the vegetable kingdom should say, The tree is of God, he would not be supposed to state any such commonplace fact that all the trees of the orchard and grove are His handiwork, but would be thought to mean some special genus or species of tree, so far exalted in form, uses, or beauty above other trees as to entitle it to this great distinction. It is the tree by eminence--the tree of God. So when John says love is of God, he indicates a special kind of love--a peculiar form or expression of love, so different from every other, so far above and beyond every other as to merit the distinction that it is from God.

I. Such is Christian love, and that we may understand and appreciate it, we must contrast it with other forms and degrees of that affection of the soul which we call love.

1. It is not the love of the parent for the child, nor of the child for the parent. This is, doubtless, God emplanted.

2. Christian love is not the love of friend for friend, nor what is called sexual love. This often springs from the most trivial causes--caprices of fancy.

3. It is not the love of complacency, which in its first and highest sense belongs to God, or His love for all men, which bears with sin, defiance, rebellion, and suspends penalty.

4. It is not to be confounded with even the finest intellectual apprehensions of the perfect and glorious attributes of God.

5. Nor is it identical with profound admiration for the work of God, with that easy and prevalent sentimentalism which is the creature of sublimity, magnitude, and natural beauty.

II. Let us reach it by degrees--positively--

1. With respect to God as its object, it is an affection largely independent of extensive and accurate knowledge. A man may be a sage or philosopher, and know it not. The savage or boor may know its meaning, feel its power.

2. It flows out toward man in the proportion that he is like God.

3. It is elective--knows by a singular instinct the true and the false.

4. It is unselfish and disinterested.

5. Christian love is charitable.

6. It is operative and practical.

7. It is progressive. (J. C. French.)

Love of relations and friends

There have been men who have supposed Christian love was so diffusive as not to admit of concentration upon individuals, so that we ought to love all men equally. And many, without bringing forward any theory, yet consider practically that the love of many is something superior to the love of one or two, and neglect the charities of private life, while busy in the schemes of an expansive benevolence, or of effecting a general union and conciliation among Christians. I shall here maintain, in opposition to such notions, that the best preparation for loving the world at large, and loving it duly and wisely, is to cultivate an intimate friendship and affection towards those who are immediately about us. It has been the plan of Divine Providence to ground what is good and true in religion and morals on the basis of our good natural feelings. What we are towards our earthly friends in the instincts and wishes of our infancy, such we are to become at length towards God and man in the extended field of our duties as accountable beings. To honour our parents is the first step towards honoring God; to love our brethren according to the flesh, the first step towards considering all men our brethren. The love of God is not the same thing as the love of our parents, though parallel to it; but the love of mankind in general should be in the main the same habit as the love of our friends, only exercised towards different objects. The great difficulty in our religious duties is their extent. This frightens and perplexes men, naturally; those especially who have neglected religion for a while, and on whom its obligations disclose themselves all at once. This, for example, is the great misery of leaving repentance till a man is in weakness or sickness; he does not know how to set about it. Now Gods merciful providence has in the natural course of things narrowed for us at first this large field of duty; He has given us a clue. We are to begin with loving our friends about us, and gradually to enlarge the circle of our affections, till it reaches all Christians, and then all men. By trying to love our relations and friends, by submitting to their wishes, though contrary to our own, by bearing with their infirmities, by overcoming their occasional waywardness by kindness, by dwelling on their excellences and trying to copy them, thus it is that we form in our hearts that root of charity which, though small at first, may, like the mustard seed, at last even overshadow the earth. Further, that love of friends and relations, which nature prescribes, is also of use to the Christian, in giving form and direction to his love of mankind at large, and making it intelligent and discriminating. A man who would fain begin by a general love of all men, necessarily puts them all on a level, and, instead of being cautious, prudent, and sympathising in his benevolence, is hasty and rude, does harm perhaps when he means to do good, discourages the virtuous and well-meaning, and wounds the feelings of the gentle. Men of ambitious and ardent minds, for example, desirous of doing good on a large scale, are especially exposed to the temptation of sacrificing individual to general good in their plans of charity. We can easily afford to be liberal on a large scale, when we have no affections to stand in the way. Those who have not accustomed themselves to love their neighbours whom they have seen, will have nothing to lose or gain, nothing to grieve at or rejoice in, in their larger plans of benevolence. They will take no interest in them for their own sake; rather, they will engage in them because expedience demands, or credit is gained, or an excuse found for being busy. Hence too we discern how it is that private virtue is the only sure foundation of public virtue; and that no national good is to be expected (though it may now and then accrue) from men who have not the fear of God before their eyes. I have hitherto considered the cultivation of domestic affections as the source of more extended Christian love. Did time permit, I might now go on to show besides that they involve a real and difficult exercise of it. Nothing is more likely to engender selfish habits (which is the direct opposite and negation of charity) than independence in our worldly circumstances. And this is one among the many providential benefits (to those who will receive them) arising out of the holy estate of matrimony, which not only calls out the tenderest and gentlest feelings of our nature, but, where persons do their duty, must be in various ways more or less a state of self-denial. Or, again, I might go on to consider the private charities, which have been my subject, not only as the sources and as the discipline of Christian love, but further, as the perfection of it; which they are in some cases. The Ancients thought so much of friendship that they made it a virtue. In a Christian view, it is not quite this; but it is often accidentally a special test of our virtue. For consider--let us say that this man, and that, not bound by any very necessary tie, find their greatest pleasure in living together; say that this continues for years, and that they love each others society the more the longer they enjoy it. Now observe what is implied in this. Young people, indeed, readily love each other, for they are cheerful and innocent, more easily yield to each other, and are full of hope--types, as Christ says, of His true converts. But this happiness does not last; their tastes change. Again, grown persons go on for years as friends; but these do not live together; and, if any accident throws them into familiarity for a while, they find it difficult to restrain their tempers and keep on terms, and discover that they are best friends at a distance. But what is it that can bind two friends together in intimate converse for a course of years but the participation in something that is unchangeable and essentially good, and what is this but religion? (J. H. Newman, D. D.)

Brotherly love

A famous writer has said that religion is morality touched with emotion. That is a very inadequate and unsatisfactory definition of Christianity; the only word that can adequately define the religion of Christ is love.

I. A very tender appeal: Beloved.

1. The cold, stoical nature is a power, but it is a power that repels from it, it never draws, it has not the least attractive force in it. If we would win men and persuade them to act as brethren, let us use tenderness. We need not use it to the exclusion of the light, purity, and truth of religion.

2. The sweet reasonableness of the appeal would have great force with those to whom the apostle wrote. Did they not owe everything in a religious sense to love, for had they not been told over and over again that God so loved the world? etc. The hardest and most solid ice will yield to the genial influences of the sun, and the most hardened and stubborn hearts will yield to the gracious power or love when every other force will fail to influence them.

3. It was a consistent appeal. Johns tender words came from a large and loving heart; it was because his heart felt that his lips spake the soft and gentle word.

II. An argument. For love is of God. Fire is found in many objects very dissimilar one from the other. It is found in coal in considerable quantity, it abounds in wood, it is contained in iron, and it is locked up in the flint; and it appears that there is some little measure of it in water even. It would seem that the sun cannot touch any object without imparting to some degree its own nature to that object; for, as you are aware, the sun is the inexhaustible source of fire wherever it is found, whether in the coal, or flint, or water. And wherever we meet with love, whether in the husband to the wife, or the wife to the husband, the brother to the sister, or the sister to the brother, the friend to the friend, or in one Christian to another; wherever we meet with it, God is the source of it, for God is love. In this argument John appeals to one of the most powerful instincts in man--the desire to be like the great. To imitate the great is a universal passion in men. To paint like the great masters is the one all-consuming passion of artists. If we carefully considered the thought in our calmer moments that to love is to be like God, the very sublimity of the idea would be enough to inspire us to love one another, even if every other motive failed. Where there is brotherly love, there is sure to be generous help if it be needed.

III. Two important signs of love.

1. Divine sonship--And everyone that loveth is begotten of God. These are very encouraging words. Almost all Christian people are sorely tried with dark and crushing doubts at one time or other in their history. In such moments of spiritual experience one of the most effectual ways of removing the wretched doubt is to ask ourselves the question, Do I love God and my brethren? If the answer be Yes, then we may console ourselves that we possess one of the most unmistakable signs of sonship.

2. A power to recognise God. And everyone that loveth … knoweth God. The great intellect may recognise Him in His works and dealings with men, but much, if not everything, in regard to our knowledge of God depends upon the state of the heart. It is not of a mere superficial acquaintance with God that the apostle is speaking, such as we obtain of an object or a person by just seeing him a few times; he is speaking of that knowledge which is the grand result of apprehending God as the Father of our spirits and the Author of salvation--it is the knowledge that ripens into a firm faith and a calm trust in God as our unfailing Friend, who is reconciling the world to Himself in Jesus Christ. (D. Rhys Jenkins.)

The voice of God through human love

The true love, of which I would speak, may be thus defined--desire for the well-being of another. Whenever a person acts in the sole interest of another, and on his behalf alone, he is showing his love for him.

1. That love is an instinct or property of human nature needs little or no illustration.

2. There is a word to say also about the difference between love and the conscience. There is no conflict of claims here. Love and conscience both alike demand that we shall do our duty. But love will often discern what that duty is before the reason has a chance to be heard or the conscience has uttered its call. Love leaps up to enjoy doing what the colder and more sluggish conscience only says we ought to do.

3. That we depend largely on knowledge for a right indulgence of our love. Just as conscience requires us to do our best and to take pains to discover what is right, so true love demands still more anxiety. A mother bending over the sick bed of her son is racked with feverish anxiety to know what will do him good. With no less anxiety does a truly loving heart long to know and try to discover what is best to be done for the dear ones benefit. Love is an active, not a passive principle. It is self-sacrifice, not self-will or the worship of crotchets. True love begins at home, and if she is allowed her due rights there, she will not be wanting when we go abroad, nor fail us in our dealings with strangers or with the lower creation.

4. Love is the parent of many virtues. In the first place, love begets justice. Not only justice of deed but justice of thought, of which we all stand even more in need. You cannot be just to anyone whom you dislike or hate, you cannot be just and true to anyone for whom your love is not pure and true. True love then adds to justice the quality of mercy, not sparing in the condemnation of the sin, but tender, merciful, and forgiving to the sinner. Then we find love the faithful parent of patience, forbearance, humility, and meekness, all elements of the highest humanity and sources of unspeakable blessing and peace. When we truly love, we show all these virtues in their lustre. But I pass over them to lay emphasis on the healing and purifying effects of love upon our own sinful hearts. Nothing but love can make us truly repent. Just as we all have some unkindness to repent of, so we all have something to forgive. And love alone can teach us how to forgive right nobly and generously. We know also how love is the parent of the commonest virtues, diligence in business, honesty, trustworthiness--all such virtues are a thousand times over begotten and preserved by the love we bear to those dependent on us. For them we toil and work and keep our hands clean from dishonesty. For them we strive to preserve our character and the confidence of the world. And love is the mother of truthfulness. We all know and feel that the most cruel act we can do is to deceive one who trusts us. Never can we deceive or cheat one whom we truly love. And lastly, love begets courage and heroism. Time would fail me to recount the long and glorious catalogue of those who have given their lives for others--aye, for the undeserving. (C. Voysey.)

For love is of God--

Love is of God

The point which I wish to illustrate is that all the love in the universe is the gift of God. This proposition involves consequences of the most responsible character. Let us first unfold the principle, and then ascertain some of its resulting consequences. When the apostle tells us that God is love he wishes to convey to us the idea that love is the great motive power of the Divine Being. Love is that which shapes and guides all His attributes, so that each is manifested under the working of love, and each directed to the securing of love. But when the apostle says Love is of God he looks at love from another standpoint. He marks it in its human manifestations; and beholding it not so much as a great and original attribute of the Most High, but as seen in daily life, ramifying through all the grades and conditions of society, he traces the affection to its source, and says, Love is of God.

1. Take the first love which one human being ever felt for another--conjugal love--and mark how that is of God. In making the woman out of the rib of man--in uniting them, by the act of God Himself, in holy wedlock; in inspiring prophets and apostles to urge men to love their wives as their own bodies; and in likening the union of husband and wife to the mystical union which exists between Christ and the Church--God has indicated, by the most direct and authoritative way, that He was the author and giver of conjugal affection.

2. Take the second love which grew up on earth--parental love--and see how this is of God. We say, in common parlance, that it is natural for a man to love his child. But what constitutes the naturalness of this love, other than the fact that God implanted it in parents hearts, as a part of their moral constitution?

3. Take the third kind of affection, which, in the order of time, rises in the human breast--the love of children for parents--and we shall find the same truth holds here also. What would a household be, devoid of childrens love? What would a parents heart be if its outgoings of affection found no response in prattling boys and gentle girls? And how much of the sunlight of home would become darkness if filial love were blotted out from mind and memory and heart? Filial love constitutes a large part of human happiness, and pervades every class and condition of our race, and as it could never, by its very nature, create itself, because it is begotten before reason and judgment begin their workings, it must be Divine.

4. The same line of remark applies also to that love of kindred which Constitutes a part of mans moral being. He it is who setteth the solitary in families, who groups men into social circles, and, bestowing upon His creatures affections, calls out these affections in the various forms of social and domestic life.

5. Once more, look at love in the form of philanthropy. Here we behold it breaking over the dikes and channels of conjugal, family, or social affection, and spreading away like the Nile in its overflow, until it covers the entire lowlands of our race. This earth-encompassing and man-elevating love is of God. It is because the Bible tells us that we have one common Father, one common Saviour, one common Comforter, one common salvation, and one common earthly destiny. Now, what would earth be without these various kinds of love? What without philanthropy? It would be a mass of conglomerate selfishness, a world of war, of social discord, and of domestic misery. What would earth be without this love of kindred? The interlacing bonds of family with family would be sundered; society would be disintegrated, save only when force or interest made a union of what was else repulsive and undesired. What would the world be without filial or parental love? A family where there was parental authority without parental love, and where filial obedience was required without filial affection rendered, would not be a home but a prison. And above all, what would earth be without conjugal love--if there was no heart union between man and wife; no love to cheer, soften, and irradiate the lot of woman; no responsive affection to nerve and lift up and make happy the soul of man; if the marriage tie was only a bond of interest or of lust--a bond galling as the manacle of the convict? It would be as if some angel of the pit should pass through this world and turn its green fields into sand wastes, its forest-crowned and picturesque hills into bald rock, its floral kingdom into bramble land, its dancing, leaping, silvery waters into asphaltic streams, its exquisitely tinged clouds and its brilliant sunsets into Cimmerian gloom, its thousand bird melodies into discordant screams. Seeing, then, that with all mans sins and ill-doings, with all Gods punishments and curses, He has continued to us this love, the question arises, Have you ever seriously thought how much you ought to love God, who has given you the inestimable boon of human affection? Can you sum up your debt to Him for this one gift? Yet, when man rebelled against God, and cast off His sway, and virtually said to Him, We desire not a knowledge of Thy ways, God might most justly have stripped him of love and left him to the curse of the loveless and the unloved. It was His love to us which caused Him to continue love in us, There is no love in hell. There is one other aspect of the subject which I must touch upon. Wondrous as is the fact that, notwithstanding our sins, God still continued to us human love, and highly exalting as that fact is of His grace and mercy, it is not so great a display of His love as that manifested in providing for mans redemption. (Bp. Stevens.)

Everyone that loveth is born of God--

Love and religion

The phrase begotten of God is not a large, but it is a very great one. Whither can our genealogy be traced?

I. The Bible answers this immense question by the doctrine that God and man stand to each other in the relation of Father and child, This fact gives to human sin its crimson dye, and to human sorrow its peculiar pathos. Human sin is the sin of Absalom--of a son against his father. Here is a fall from heaven!

II. But the phrase begotten of God means much more than this. It answers the question, What is religion? Religion is orthodox belief, say some; a cult, say others; morality fired with emotion, say others. But the New Testament says that Except a man be born again from above he cannot see the kingdom of God. So far as man is a son by nature only, he may grow up to be dissatisfied with his fathers mode of life, and with the law of his fathers house. He may also adopt a course of action so widely divergent from his fathers that the natural bond between them shall serve only to reveal the widening gulf of character that separates them. To become truly a son he must be born again--must of his own choice accept as his father the parent Providence gave him, and must by his own love and conduct make the house in which Providence placed him a home. To be then fully born of God is for the soul, being filled with the Holy Spirit, to accept the salvation that is in Christ by faith in His blood, to acknowledge Gods fatherly authority, accept Gods law, live His life, do His work; or, in one word, to love God--he that loveth is born of God.

III. Religion, then, is love. Love is not something elementary, something for little children and babes in Christ. Love is final, infinite. It is both Alpha and Omega in religion. But what, you ask, of life and conduct? Well, a holy life is the natural outcome of love to God. If a man love God, he will avoid all sin and do all the good he can. It is related of an eminent singer that his teacher kept him day after day, and even month after month, practising the scales, in spite of the pupils entreaties for something more advanced. At last the master told him to go forth as the best singer in Europe, having mastered the scales. Not otherwise did our Lord teach His first disciples. For three years He taught them to love by miracle and parable, by prayer and sermon. He grounded them in love. When seated with them at the last supper He said: A new commandment I give unto you, and behold it was the old one, That ye love one another. After His resurrection He met the disciples on the beach, and He took the repentant Peter and put him through the scales: Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou Me? Having learnt to love, their education was complete, their training ended. They could go everywhere and do all things. So, if we truly love God, and love all men in God, we are truly religious. (J. M. Gibbon.)

And knoweth God--

Love and knowledge

The desire for knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it. Knowledge is like fire: it must first be kindled from without; but once set burning, it propagates itself. Mans power is in his mind, not his arm. By his knowledge he is the true king of nature, saying to one element Go, and it goeth; to another Come, and it dare not disobey.

I. Yes, heaven has secrets. The soul, by the necessity of its constitution, must look for God; and its prayer is, Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us. Now the text meets this desire of the soul to know God by the emphatic declaration that everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. Love knows God, serves God, possesses God.

II. Well, everyone that loveth knoweth the men that have been, understandeth that which history saith of them. Love is very old. Love came in with Adam and Eve. Here is an old picture of love: The soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. He that loveth knoweth. He that loveth knoweth the love that Jonathan had for David, and his own heart is his best commentary on the verse.

III. Move one step further: He that loveth knoweth God. Love is the clue to human love. Love is the clue to the love of God. Wouldst thou know God? Have love in thine heart, and when thine heart is full of love, look into it, and the image thou shalt see will be a likeness of the face of God. Wouldst thou know Gods feeling for thy sin? Look how sensitive a thing is love--how easily wounded! Wouldst thou know the joy of love? Then look at thine own joy at the recovery of a loved one, or the reclamation of an erring one. All faults are forgotten. And wouldst thou know something of the life beyond the veil, of the things that are to be? Go to your own home. See how, out of your love, you provide all things good for those you love most. See how love works, and watches, and prays--how tenderly it cares for the sick and the weak I Oh! what would not human love do had it the power? Well, God is love with wealth, love with knowledge, love with power. (J. M. Gibbon.)

Knowing God by love

To know is mans highest ambition. Knowledge of God--what is it and how can we secure it?

I. I remark that knowledge is very various, and in every department must be secured by its own methods, in its own direction, by its own appliances, and for its own uses. If I wish to know an object that is near, I must use my eyes; an object that is remote, I call for a field glass or a telescope; an object that is minute, a microscope. If I would test the texture of an object, I touch it with my hands; the solidity, I strike it with a hammer. If I want to know the chemical or medicinal properties, I have my chemical tests, my medicinal tests. The most valuable knowledge is the knowledge of things with reference to their uses; with reference to what we can do with them by combining them with other things; with reference to how we can make them serve us. This is the dominion which God intended for man. If with reference to things immaterial, to things not seen and eternal, scientific men have sometimes said they are unknowable, it is because they have tried to test them by material appliances, with microscopes and telescopes and hammers, which cannot be done. Men have proposed a prayer gauge on the principle of the rain gauge.

II. Our knowledge of God may Be just as various as our knowledge of material things, for He has put Himself variously into material things; but, like all other scientific knowledge, it must always be recognised by its own appropriate tests. The knowledge can come only in its own correspondent way. There is an intellectual knowledge of God--that is, if God is a thinker, an architect, a builder, man, who is made in Gods image, may think Gods thoughts over after Him, may trace his achievements to His plans and make inferences as to His wisdom and power--that is, may thus know Him. God is thus revealed in what we call nature. This is natural theology. If we want to know God as a thinker, we must use our thinking powers, employ our thinking processes. As a thinker, God reveals Himself to our thinking. Geology reveals to us God as an architect and builder; so does astronomy. One of the methods of intellectual culture is to think over the thoughts of other thinkers. When you say, That man knows Shakespeare, is a good Shakespearean scholar, I understand this, that he has thought over Shakespeares thought in all of his great dramas, knows Shakespeare through these thoughts. In one passage, for example, he has felt the power of Shakespeares imagination has felt it in his own imagination, by yielding his Imagination up to the control of Shakespeares imagination, as a sparrow might try the same flight as an eagle. Thus only can he feel it. There is an ethical knowledge of God--a knowledge of God as He has revealed Himself to the human conscience. When Coleridge says that the Bible finds him in deeper depths of his nature than any other book, he refers to this revelation of God which He has there made of Himself to mans moral sense. It is not the book, but the Author, who finds him there. It is this ethical revelation of God in the Bible which gives its grip upon mans nature. The conscience is mans deepest part, the essential man. There is an ethical knowledge of Shakespeare which is quite as real as our intellectual knowledge. To his treatment of our moral sense we respond with perfect unanimity. Hamlets uncle and Lady Macbeth feel just as you and I should feel had we the conscience of a murderer. They both break down in their three-fold nature under the burden of their guilt; go utterly to pieces in body, soul, and spirit. This ethical character of the Bible and of Shakespeare is revealed only to our moral sense. That this ethical character of the Bible appears to us so marked and prominent is partly owing to our own moral attitude toward its Author, to the moral hurt of our own nature. We feel as though a surgeon were dressing a wound which we dread to have disturbed. A creature of sinless nature would be very differently affected, would not find this ethical character at all offensive, even if he consciously recognised it.

III. The knowledge of God spoken of in the text is neither intellectual nor ethical, although it requires both the intellect and the conscience in order to reach it, to prepare the way for it. Those who do not go beyond the Sermon on the Mount stop with the intellectual and ethical in Christianity. They know God only so far as that. There is a higher mountain than that on which this sermon was delivered--namely, Mount Calvary. There is something beyond them that is distinctively Christian. God is the Creator; He is the moral Sovereign; but He is more, and Christianity shows it. The text reads, Everyone that loveth is born of God, for God is love. It is a charmed circle, to be entered only thus. It is very evident that the knowledge of God here spoken is not intellectual. Nor is it ethical knowledge. It does not imply any disrespect to the law of conscience to say this. They are both preparatory to something higher and better. If the views already presented are correct, if knowledge must come through methods correspondent to that knowledge, this other knowledge of God cannot come through the intellect or through the conscience. It is impossible. God is. Is what? He is a Creator. Yes. He is a Sovereign. Yes. These are what He does. God is. Is what? Is love! How can I know Him? By loving Him. There is no other way. He that loveth not, knoweth not God; for God is love. It is just like saying, He that will not think Gods thoughts shall not know God intellectually; he who will not observe the working of God in his conscience shall not know God morally. So, here, he who will not love shall not know God essentially, for God is love. Love understands love. Nothing else does. This is the solution, and God has adopted it. If you begin by asking how the Son of God knows God, He Himself has told us: by loving Him. I and My Father are one. The teachings of the Saviour are thrown into the simplest intellectual form. Indeed it would be a strong epithet to apply to them to call them intellectual at all. Intellect is not prominent in them, does not preponderate there; truth is there; life is there. It is just so as to the conscience. Ethics are not prominent in them. He Himself has said, For I came not into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Me might be saved. Humanity already carries its great burden of condemnation. How can the burden be relieved? Lifted? By showing humanity that God is love. The love which reveals to us God, is love which we are taught by experiencing it and trying to imitate it. We learn to know God by loving as God loves; loving Him, loving man, and entering into Gods purposes to save him. We find Gods love in the Bible. The Bible is the record of Gods patience with men and nations. How are we to know God, who is love? Only by loving Him and walking in the footsteps of the Being who says, He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father. God, who is love, has taken this pains to show us Himself. By studying this life for the sake of making our lives like it, for the sake of putting into our lives the mind and spirit of it, we may come to know God. True knowledge of God can come only as we are like Him. You can come to an intellectual knowledge of the love of God as you see its exercise in the man Christ Jesus. Many a student of the Bible does that. You can bring yourself to know God in the sense of the text only as you try to do as Christ did, and from the motives that actuated Him. There is a proper emphasis to be put upon what are called good works. They have their place in the Christian system; but it is not in the light of present merit or of future reward that we are chiefly to regard them. They will have their suitable recognition when He shall come whose reward is with Him. But in good works--and that is of more practical importance--in imitation of the Son of Man in our lives, are we to find the sphere where we are to know God, since only thus do we become like Him. A great deal is said, and rightly said, about the necessity of being practical Christians in order to keep our Christianity alive; but it is the only way also in which we can keep vivid our knowledge of God, which is the basis of all our Christianity. Every such effort brings one into closer sympathy with that God who is love. The reformed man is urged to try to save other men who need the same change. It is his only safety. (J. E. Rankin, D. D.)

Only love can know love

Blindness cannot understand what light is; it has not the power to experience it. The degraded savage cannot appreciate the noble man. He has not in himself the moral qualities by which the higher nature can be understood. A coward cannot have just and adequate ideas of courage; it is a thing foreign to him. So, to understand the love of God, there must be something within us akin to it, to which it appeals. He who loves most understands God best; he who does not love does not know God in the slightest degree. (Geo. Thompson.)

Love the organ of the highest knowledge

The question is as to God revealing Himself, making Himself known to us as a loving Father. How can it be done? God is love, and love cannot be seen or handled or anatomised. It is even beyond the reach of the subtlest chemical tests. A spiritual test is needed to discover its presence. What is that test? It is love in our own hearts. Suppose some philosopher had been brought up from his birth by himself, apart, on the most rigid system of intellectual training, as, e.g., John Stuart Mill, only still more apart than he or anyone else could be, so that his heart could be utterly destitute of natural affection, so that he has plenty of logic but not a particle of love. Suppose that he is fully trained in scientific method, so that everything of the nature of an emotion has been rigidly suppressed. He can therefore approach every subject with the utmost impartiality. Well, one day he goes out to the world to spy its learning. He sees a mother fondling her babe. What can it mean? It is quite familiar to you; it is new and strange to our scientific critic. He proceeds by the true inductive method. And after he has noted all carefully down he goes home to discover what it all means. A plain, simple woman who never heard of induction has also witnessed the performance. She has taken no notes, made no calculations, and yet she knows a great deal more about it than a scientific man does after spending a year about it. What is her advantage? There is something in her heart which answers to the mother love in the heart of the other woman, and there is nothing in the mans heart. He may apply every test and every method of inquiry that science knows without getting nearer. There are some cases in which an ounce of heart is worth more than a ton of intellect for the purposes of investigation. It is as true as ever that only love can understand love. It cannot possibly be discovered by any process of induction. It is the function, not of the critical faculty, but of the heart. It is a loving, longing heart that recognises the presence of Him whose name is Love. (Christian Weekly.)

The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

1Jn 4:7-8. Let us love one another — From the doctrine he has just been defending, he draws this exhortation: as if he had said, Think it not enough speculatively to admit the Christian doctrine, but let it be your great care to acknowledge it practically, and especially with respect to that most important article, brotherly love. The frequency and earnestness with which the apostle, in the present epistle, inculcates this love, is very remarkable. The greatest part of this chapter, and of chapter 3., is employed in pressing this duty. See also 1Jn 2:8-11. For love is of God — Is from him as its source, and particularly enjoined by him as a duty of the greatest importance, and of absolute necessity, in order to our pleasing and imitating him. And every one that loveth is born of God — Every one, in whose heart this divine principle reigns, and conquers the selfish and contrary passions, shows by it that he is regenerated and transformed into the divine image; and that he knoweth God — By the teaching of his Holy Spirit, as the God of love, infinitely amiable in himself, and infinitely loving to his people. On the other hand, he that loveth not, whatever he may pretend, knoweth not God — Has no experimental and saving knowledge of him; for God is love — Its great fountain and exemplar. He enjoins it by his law, and produces and cherishes it by the influences of his Spirit; and the due contemplation of him will naturally inflame our hearts with love to his divine majesty, and to our fellow-creatures for his sake, whose creatures they are, and especially to his children, who love him, bear his image, and are peculiarly dear to him. This little sentence, God is love, brought St. John more sweetness, even in the time he was writing it, says Bengelius, than the whole world can bring. God is often styled holy, righteous, wise; but not holiness, righteousness, or wisdom, in the abstract, as he is said to be love: intimating that this is his darling, his reigning attribute; the attribute that sheds an amiable glory on all his other perfections.

Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

2. The one confirmatory test—love. The threefold love between God, the believer, and the brethren, 1Jn_4:7-21.

The one test is love; centered in God, 8; and manifested to us in Christ, 9-11; into which love we come by union through faith with Christ and God, 12-16; which love may be perfected in us, 17-19; and this divine love is love to our fellow-man, 20, 21.

Our apostle does not argue and reason out this statement; he affirms it, aphoristically and positively, by successive assertions, as one who knows, having full original acquaintance with Christ himself. His words are dicta; the dicta of an authorized, original expounder, as being derived from the incarnate Original.

7. Love one another—Namely, with that elevated love which desires and seeks to do everything for the happiness of the object loved, both temporal and eternal. Our apostle here begins with this spirit of love in our hearts, and traces it to its fountain, God.

Knoweth God—Philosophers may prove by various arguments the being and attributes of God; but it is to divine experience we must resort to know God as love. Much of goodness appears in nature, but the fulness of love in God is learned by grace alone.

Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

CRITICAL AND EXEGETICAL NOTES

1Jn_4:7.—The previous verses are in some sense an “aside.” The apostle now resumes his proper theme. His main truth is this—Love is the mark of the children of God, who is love. Love to God is a delusion if it does not find expression in love toward one another as brethren. And love of the brethren is a sure test of our having the Spirit of God, for the spirit of antichrist is a self-seeking and self-serving spirit. “Just as it severs the Divine from the human in Christ, so it severs Divine love from human conduct in man.” Love to one another may be recognised as a gift of the Spirit of God, an “effluence from the very being of God.” Born.—Better, “begotten.” Knoweth God.—As one only can know by sharing the same nature.

1Jn_4:8. Knoweth not.—Better, “can never have known”; “hath never known.” God is love.—1Jn_1:5. Not God loves, which is true, but far short of the truth that John expresses. The very essence of God is His going outside Himself, and living in others, in the service of others.

1Jn_4:9. Manifested.—Jesus manifests what God is, and what God does. St. John here speaks of what God does. R.V. renders, “Herein was the love of God manifested in us,” or “in our case.” “Manifested” is one of St. John’s favourite words. It means, “became such that it could be known or apprehended by man.” We see the love in a gift which the love has made. Only begotten.—Though we too are begotten of God, there must be a sense in which Christ’s relationship is unique, and this is expressed by the term “only begotten.” μονογενής as applied to Christ is St. John’s peculiar term. Live through Him.—“Enjoy a blessed fellowship with God, being delivered from that state of estrangement and alienation which is virtually death.” Live applies to the life of the soul, which is the man.

1Jn_4:10. Propitiation.—ἱλασμόν (1Jn_2:2, and not elsewhere in the New Testament). For the idea St. John had, see the notes on the previous passage.

1Jn_4:12. Seen God.—“We cannot contemplate the incomprehensible essence of the Deity by a direct gaze.” God can be seen only in Christ (Joh_1:18). His love is perfected,—I.e. attains just what it wants to attain. Let that love of God which we apprehend in Christ work its full work, and it will be sure to make us “love the brethren.”

1Jn_4:13. Of His Spirit.—Contrasted with those mentioned in the early verses, who professed to have the Spirit, but whose self-seeking tone, and self-glorifying teachings, plainly showed that it was not the Spirit of God.

MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.—1Jn_4:7-14

The Fatherly Love carries with it Brotherly Love.—What may possibly have been in St. John’s mind is the error of assuming a difference between the love that we have for God and the love that we have one for another. And that is an error which is often secretly cherished, though it gains no open expression, and would indeed be ashamed to show itself to the light. How often our feeling is this—“We cannot be expected to love other people just as we love God.” But it may properly be maintained that there can be no varieties in love. There can be differences in quality and degree, but not in kind. There must be relation to its object, but love can never be anything but just itself. Whether it go out to God, or go out to our brother, it is just the same thing—love. Even as in family life, there can be nothing but just the family love. It goes out to the father and mother, or to the brothers and sisters, using a variety of signs and expressions, but it can never be anything but itself; and it is not itself if it is limited to the parents, or limited to the brothers. And St. John affirms that love is not love when it is set only upon God the Father, and restrained from our fellow-men, our brothers. “He that loveth not knoweth not God.” The point of connection in St. John’s mind between this and the preceding section may be found in the fact that false doctrine is always self-centred, self-serving, and consequently tends to separate men from their fellows. You cannot love your fellows, if you only want to make a gain of them. False teachers boasted much about love to God, but they wholly failed under the test of love to men. Dr. Plummer says: “The antichristian spirit is a selfish one; it makes self, i.e. one’s own intellect and one’s own interest, the measure of all things. Just as it severs the Divine from the human in Christ, so it severs Divine love from human conduct in man. ‘Beloved, let us do far otherwise. Let us love one another.’ For the third and last time in this epistle the apostle introduces the subject of brotherly love.

1. It was introduced as a consequence and sign of walking in the light (1Jn_2:7-11). Next, 2, it was introduced as a special form of righteousness and mark of God’s children (1Jn_3:10-18).

3. Here it appears as a gift of the Spirit of God, a contrast to the antichristian spirit, and above all as an effluence from the very being of God.” From a careful examination of the verses we gather, that St. John is endeavouring to impress the truth that profession of love can be of no avail, it must find fitting and adequate expression in the relations of every-day life. Even God’s love must be manifested, in order to be in any sense an effective power on men.

I. Abstract love in God is ineffective.—“God is love.” There the truth stands. It is full and clear to view. It is sublime, but it is unattainable. If that be all, if we only know some absolute and abstract fact concerning the intimate nature of God, then it is really nothing to us. It is high; we cannot attain unto it. If the philosophers can do something with it, we commonplace, every-day men and women cannot.

II. Manifested love is persuasion and power (1Jn_4:9-10).—God’s love has found expression in the most persuasive of all ways—by a gift, and a gift which involved an extreme self-sacrifice; and moreover by a gift which so precisely meets our needs that it carries the persuasion of His love right into our hearts. (Propitiation for our sins.) We feel the love through the manifestation and expression, and we can feel it in no other way.

III. Sentimental love in man is worthless, and even mischievous.—This is really the point which St. John is enforcing. (Compare Jas_2:14-16.) Characteristic of uninspired teaching is fine sentiment about society and brotherhood; and men can be easily carried away by exaggerated and helpless sentiment. They can think themselves good because they have uttered good-sounding phrases.

IV. Practical love towards man alone honours God, and does God’s work.—To express this in the line of St. John’s thoughts. The love must be manifested: it must find its gift; and its gift must carry its self-sacrifice unto the uttermost.

SUGGESTIVE NOTES AND SERMON SKETCHES

1Jn_4:7. To love is the Sign of the New Birth.—“And every one that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth God.” There is physical or natural life; there is moral life; and there is spiritual or Divine life. The sign of physical life is movement. There is a sign indicating the existence of a moral being, a being who can come into relations with other beings. There is a sign of moral life. It is the power to love, to go outside oneself and take on our own heart the concern of another. And there is a sign of the yet higher, spiritual life; and since that life is kin with the moral life the sign is the same for it. It is love; but it is the going outside ourselves to lose ourselves in God. You may know that a man is begotten to the higher, spiritual, Divine life, if you can see that the supreme, the master principle and persuasion of his life is love to God. And it may further be said that the love gauges the life. The fuller the life, the intenser the love, the more ennobling and sanctifying the power of the love.

Love implies Insight of the Highest Spiritual Things.—“And knoweth God.” Knowing depends on two things—on the thing known, and on the person knowing. We know different things in different ways. Things are different to different persons. There is a particular way in which God alone can be known, and in which alone high, spiritual things can be known. They cannot be known by any effort of the intellect alone. And the intellect by itself is not the man. They can be known only through the affections, and their use of the intellectual powers. God, and everything kin with Him, is “spiritually discerned.” And it is not everybody who can know God; only the man whose affections, being spiritually quickened, in a natural way turn to God, and are fully open and receptive to the manifestations and evidences of Himself that God may be pleased to give.

Born of God.—Theologians and others have, I think, assumed that the doctrine of the birth from above is more inscrutably mysterious than it is, and have therefore unwarrantably obscured Christ’s truth. It is, I admit, under any view of it, a “great mystery of godliness”; yet it is not altogether without its parallel in every-day life. Every good son is born again. A child is first, by no choice of his own, born into the family of a good man. So far he is a son by nature only; he may grow up to be dissatisfied with his father’s mode of life, and with the law of his father’s house. He may also adopt a course of action so widely divergent from the father’s, that the natural bond between them shall serve only to reveal the vast and widening gulf of character that separates them, and similarity of feature shall only serve to give painful emphasis to the utter dissimilarity of disposition. The son is now a son in form only—in all things else a foreigner. To become truly a son he must be born again—must of his own choice accept as his father the parent Nature gave him, and must by his own love and conduct make the house in which Providence placed him a home. No parent is truly and fully a father till he is adopted by his own child. To be fully “born of God” is for the soul, being filled with the Holy Spirit, to acknowledge God’s fatherly authority, accept God’s law, live His life, do His work; or, in one word, to love God—“He that loveth is born of God.” God is not fully “our Father” till we love Him as He loves us; and when a heart is won to love, there is joy in the presence of the angels for another holy child born into the great family of God.—J. Morgan Gibbon.

1Jn_4:8. The Truth of Truths.—No two persons ever see the same picture; the image is modified by the personality of him who sees it. No two persons have the same idea of God. He reveals Himself with a separate revelation to each individual soul. There have been two great and dominant ideas of God—one moral and the other physical.

1. The moral. The first great revelation of God was the revelation of Him as the moral governor. The Hebrew prophets lifted Him out of mere locality into a larger sphere; they preached Him as God of the whole earth, the God of righteousness.

2. The physical. This conception came from the Greeks. To them God was the underlying ground and cause of all things; He was power, being; He was infinite and eternal, without passion and without change.

I. Each of these conceptions of God is profoundly true; and each must have its place in our thoughts.—He controls this vast sphere of physical action by laws which cannot be broken, and which are perfectly good. “Of Him are all things, and in Him are all things.” The conception of God as a moral governor has on the one hand been pressed as though it exhausted all that we know about Him; on the other hand, it has been darkened by analogies from human laws, until this supreme conception of a God of righteousness has been transmuted into a conception of One who curses where even men would bless, and who punishes where even men would pardon.

II. The loftier, more Christian idea of God.—The simplest conceptions are always the deepest. In three short words we are told that in the awful Maker of all things seen and unseen, the Infinite, the Absolute, the Eternal, there is something like that which draws the mother to the son and the sister to the brother. This is one of the most practical truths, and one of the most necessary. It is not a formless and impassive spirit that is close to us, but the infinitely holy, infinitely true, infinitely kind. This gives the thought of God a place in practical life.

III. Here is the most practical of truths, and the most necessary.—It is a special truth for our time. It contains the gospel we need; it comes to our sadness as a gospel of consolation; it comes to our restlessness as a gospel of repose. For material want there is material alleviation. Something beyond material relief. I speak of social unrest. To you who feel most of all the strain and stir of life, this revelation of God as love comes with a singular power, for it is the gospel of repose. When tired with noises and stir and strife, tired of the factiousness of political party feeling, with the meanness of social ambition, the chicanery of commerce, just for a moment or two rise, as the spirit can, and rest in the eternal Father who loves you.

IV The supreme manifestation of the love of God in sending His only begotten Son into the world that we might live through Him.—Let our thoughts rest on this one of the innumerable ways in which God’s love has shown itself. To the truth of truths the text calls us. About other truths we may differ; in this, at least, we agree. Into some other truths there may enter elements of doubt which weaken their force as motives of conduct; but here is a sublime revelation. Let it be a sublime inspiration, a constraining motive. Let it be for us the supreme repose to know that the Father Himself loveth us, for “God is love.”—Edwin Hatch, D.D.

Love to God.—Love is the highest, purest, holiest motive from which we can act. Faith makes us strong by keeping before us the great truths and realities of the world unseen. Hope helps us on our way by filling our souls with the longing expectation of the blessedness in store for us. But faith is cold, and hope is selfish, without love. Love is the going forth of the soul towards another, tender and glowing, generous and unselfish. Love will do all things, it will bear all things, for one it loves. And so we read that “Love is the fulfilling of the law.” For, if we love God, we shall fulfil all our duty to God; and if we love man, we shall fulfil all our duty to man. And so to love the Lord our God with all our heart, and our neighbour as ourselves, takes in all we have to do. There would be no need for any other law, if we all obeyed perfectly the law of love. But think specially of love to God. As love is the best motive for our actions, so love to God is the best sort of love. For, when we love God, we are loving that which is perfect, loving Him who is alone perfectly worthy to be loved. And if we love God truly, we are quite sure to love His creatures also. So that the love of God is the fountain of all goodness. Now there are different ways in which we may love God. First, we may love Him for our own sakes, or because we love ourselves; that is, because of all His goodness to us. Another word for this sort of love is gratitude. And it is a right and good thing—only not the best. In this way we may love God for all the blessings we enjoy in this life, and this is the easiest sort of love to gain; or, better still, we may love Him for His spiritual mercies, for the gift of a blessed Redeemer, for the aid of His Holy Spirit, and for the hope of eternal happiness. But a higher and purer way of loving God is to love Him for His own sake, to love Him because He is so lovable—because our hearts are drawn to His infinite perfections—because He is so good in Himself, so fit to win His creatures’ love. This is to love Him as the angels love Him. Perhaps man, while in this world, may never be able to love God entirely with this sort of love. Perhaps none can love quite in this way, except those who see face to face. When that time comes, oh, may we be filled with this pure, childlike, unselfish, angelic love! But, meanwhile, it is very hard to love One so exalted, so far above us in His nature, and so different from us, as God is. And God knew this. How thankful then should we be that, in pity to our weakness, God was pleased to take upon Himself the form and nature of man, so that we have One like ourselves to love—One who can, and does, feel for us and with us, and yet who is God. Those who might find it hard to love an infinite, almighty God, of whom they could form to themselves no image or likeness, will not find it so hard to love the meek, and gentle, and lowly, and loving Man Jesus Christ. How shall we gain more love? Like other Christian graces, it grows by degrees; and, like them, it is the gift of God. So, first of all, we must pray God for this gift of love. It is His Holy Spirit which must make us love Him better; we can, indeed, only love Him by Himself, who “is love,” dwelling within us. We must ask Him to give us of Himself, to come and fill our hearts, that they may be filled with love.

1. We must try to deepen our feeling of love by deepening our feeling of God’s goodness.

2. We must seek to gain more love through faith in Jesus Christ. By looking steadfastly to Him, by realising (that is, making real to us) all He is to us, and all He has done for us, we shall best learn to love Him as He should be loved.—W. Walsham How, D.D.

Gnostic Ideas of God.—The Gnostics knew a good deal about God, but they did not know Him; for instead of loving those brethren who did not share their intellectual attainments, they had an arrogant contempt for them.

1Jn_4:9. God’s Love-gift.—There are two ways of treating the records of Christ’s birth into the world:

(1) we may dwell on the incidents; or

(2) we may ponder over the meanings, as Mary, the mother of Jesus, did. We may ask—Who sent Him? Why did He come? And what did He come to do? The apostle John is the person above all others who can worthily answer our questions.

I. The secret of Christ’s coming is God’s love to us.—The Babe is a sent one, and this is the message He carries. The absolute truth about God is this, “God is love.” And that is the primary truth of the Christian revelation. By itself, however, as something only to think, it would be of little interest to us. We could never find any help in elaborate arguments to prove concerning our mother that “she is love.” Love always wants to find expression—to make the loved one happy, to satisfy itself in what it can do for those on whom its love is set.

II. The further secret of Christ’s coming is this—God wanted to show His love to us.—Love finds expression in gifts. Two things about gifts:

1. Love finds what will best express itself. It really gives itself in the gift. God loved the world, and wanted to give it something that would really be giving it Himself. Would any mere thing do? Nay, He would give His Son, who was Himself in the sphere of our human life, Himself in our humanity.

2. Love finds what will best satisfy those it loves. We ask what the loved one most needs. We find that, and we try to meet that. God asks what His creatures most need. There was something they needed which they hardly knew they needed—a Saviour from sin. God gave that. And God gave that as a babe, because He would save men from sin through love. Just what a babe can do is win love, constrain hearts, deliver from self, and so ennoble. What the infant Jesus did for Mary is the type of what Jesus does for us all. We have salvation in having the Saviour. Take God’s love-gift into the heart, and let Him do His work there, and we are saved.

The Only Begotten Son.—“His Son, His only begottton” (μονογενής). The term is peculiar to St. John, and it means “only born,” distinguishing between Him who was born a son, a son in such a way as can only be figured by a human generation, and those who are made sons, constituted such by an act of creation, which decided the being they should have, and the relations in which they should stand. Matthew Henry says: “This person is in some peculiar distinguishing way the Son of God; He is the only begotten. Should we suppose Him begotten as a creature or created being, He is not the only begotten. Should we suppose Him a natural necessary irradiation from the Father’s glory, or glorious essence, or substance, He must be the only begotten; and then it will be a mystery and miracle of Divine love that such a Son should be sent into our world for us.” In Heb_1:6 the expression appears as “first-begotten.” What has to be discovered, and what is so difficult to discover, is the precise reason St. John had for speaking of Christ in this particular way. The term is indeed exclusively used by St. John, and the associations of the similar terms, “first-begotten,” and “first-begotten from the dead,” and “first-born,” are altogether different. On four occasions in his gospel St. John mentions the “only begotten”: once it is “only begotten of the Father”; three times it is “only begotten Son” (Joh_1:14; Joh_1:18; Joh_3:16; Joh_3:18). In 1Jn_5:1 we have, “Him that is begotten of Him.” In 1Jn_5:18, “He that is begotten of God.” But this last verse is somewhat confusing, because it applies the word “begotten” to believers, and we think it must be kept exclusively for Christ. In Rev_1:5 Christ is spoken of as the “first-begotten of the dead.” It cannot therefore be said that by St. John the idea of a relation to God which can only be represented by human generation is exclusively kept. But he certainly did conceive of a unity between God and Christ differing from the relation subsisting between God and Christ’s people.

1Jn_4:9-10. Love’s Highest Manifestation.—The text is one of the loveliest gems of gospel truth, and the context forms an appropriately beautiful setting. Love is of God, yea, is of the very essence of His being; to be loveless is to be godless, while to love is to be a “partaker of the Divine nature.”

I. The feeling manifested.—Not mere goodness or benevolence, but love. “I have loved thee with an everlasting love.” “Like as a father.” “Thy Maker is thine husband” (Isa_49:15-16). It is love that “passeth knowledge,” for it is an attribute of the infinite Being.

II. Toward whom manifested.—Consider:

1. Our insignificance. “What is man, that Thou shouldst magnify him, and that Thou shouldst set Thine heart upon him?”

2. Our depravity and guilt. “God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Tit_3:3-6).

3. Our indifference and hostility. “Herein is love, not that we loved God,” etc. “When we were enemies, we were reconciled unto God by the death of His Son.”

III. How manifested.—

1. “Sent His only begotten Son.” Consieler:

(1) The greatness of Christ. “God over all, blessed for ever.” Same in substance with Father, equal in power and glory.

(2) His nearness and dearness to the Father. “Only begotten, well beloved”; “His dear Son.” Our children are endeared to us because they are our own flesh and blood, resemble us, have been long associated with us, and have shown fidelity and affection. Christ “and the Father are one”; He is “the brightness of the Father’s glory, and the express image of His person”; “was in the beginning with God”; and is ever faithful and loving. “I delight to do Thy will; yea, Thy law is within My heart.” (See 2Pe_1:17.)

2. “Sent into the world”—a world alienated from God, averse to holiness, and hostile toward holy characters. Parable of the wicked husband-men (Mat_21:34-38). Incarnate Virtue appeared on earth, and instead of worshipping Him the people crucified Him between two thieves. God sent Him with full knowledge of His future sufferings and shame—saw Him recoiling from loathsome touch of tempter, agonising in Gethsemane with piteous appeal to His Father, and heard Him cry in desertion of soul upon the cross, “My God, My God!” And not only with foreknowledge, but predetermination. The very conditions of the Incarnation necessitated the Crucifixion; the path from Bethlehem to Calvary was a straight one marked out by God Himself. “God sent forth His Son, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law.” But Christ could only “redeem us from the curse of the law” by “being made a curse for us.” The Father therefore deliberately “laid on Him the iniquity of us all,” and delivered Him over to punitive justice (Act_2:23; Rom_8:32).

IV. For what purpose manifested.—

1. “To be the propitiation for our sins” (Rom_3:23-26; Col_1:20-22).

2. “That we might live through Him” (Joh_3:16; Joh_10:10).—Agape.

1Jn_4:10. The Propitiation.—The greater anything is, the more sides and aspects it will present to view; the less will it be revealed to any one view, the more necessary it becomes to observe it from every possible standpoint. A dwelling-house can be comprehended after a few minutes’ examination; but a cathedral discloses ever new parts, new relations, new proportions, and new adornments to the man who can be patient, can look at it from every angle, and under every variety of circumstance,—when the sunshine, streaming in through the coloured windows, makes a glory round every pillar and floods the pavement with tints; or when the shadowy twilight makes a saintly gloom hang over the arches; or when the full cold moonlight seems to people aisle and choir with ghostly shapes; or when sounds of holy music rise from the worshippers and circle round, and swell high, going up to God; or when all is still, no human voice is heard, the buried saints alone seem to fill the place, and in the stillness the soul can almost catch the echoes of the heavenly song. And God’s truth is a great whole that is, for us, many-sided, and can never be perfectly known by any one of us. And that particular part of truth which concerns the recovery and salvation of men is one of these great and many-sided things. We may all get our own best positions for examining the great cathedral of the redemption truth, and be thankful for the fitnesses and beauties which we can for ourselves discover. St. Paul helps us to understand the meaning of this expression in the text, “the propitiation for sins,” when he writes in this way of the Lord Jesus Christ, “Whom God hath set forth a propitiation through faith in His blood, to declare His righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God” (Rom_3:25). By making “propitiation for the sin of the world,” let us then understand this little part or piece of the great whole of redeeming truth—the righteousness of God is seen in His justifying freely, as an act of infinite grace, all who, having sinned, believe the message of forgiveness brought to them by Jesus Christ, and sealed to them in His blood. But how does Christ, set forth, declare the righteousness of God in the forgiveness of sin?

I. Christ is the Ambassador of the act of grace.—As Ambassador His credentials were abundant, and in every way satisfactory. His life itself is the great proof that He was the Son of God. His words were Divine words; His miracles were exhibitions of Divine power. Who has ever doubted the righteousness of those messages which Moses and the prophets delivered for God, and concerning Him? Because we are sure that they were men sent from God, we are sure that their message was a righteous message. Then if Jesus Christ was the very highest of all ambassadors, the message He brought was a righteous message, a faithful expression of that eternal righteousness which belongs to Him who is “light,” and in whom is no darkness at all. What then did Jesus tell us concerning God? He preached, on God’s behalf, the forgiveness of sins. He Himself forgave sin. We never can think of Jesus as acting unrighteously when He said to the paralytic, “Thy sins are forgiven thee”; or to the woman whom everybody knew as a sinner, “Thy sins, which are many, are all forgiven thee.” But in those cases Jesus was only showing us God, and telling His message to men. Jesus commanded men to forgive one another freely, so that they might be children of their heavenly Father, who forgave freely. He sent out His disciples into the world to preach everywhere His message for the remission of sins. And on His very cross He prayed for His murderers, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” His very presence here among men was an act of grace. It seemed to say—God has not forsaken even His sinful world. He pities His lost creatures. He will even sacrifice His best if He may save the lost. And the character of Jesus—His perfect righteousness—seems to guarantee the righteousness of His work. He was, all through His life, showing us God; and none ever dwelt among men who showed, as He has shown, the infinite holiness, the spotless righteousness, of God. None of us can think that the gospel which the righteous Jesus brought in any sense limits the perfections of God. Let Christ then preach us His God-honouring gospel. It is the free forgiveness of sins. It is the announcement of God’s gracious act of pardon. Christ came to bring that message to earth, and in order to make us believe it, He sealed it with His own blood. God is not merely willing to forgive; He has once for all forgiven every one who will believe His word. “He pardoneth and absolveth all them that truly repent, and unfeignedly believe His holy gospel” of full and free forgiveness.

II. Christ demands and works such a moral change in men as declares His righteousness in granting forgiveness.—The apostle Paul explains to us that “propitiation is through faith in His blood.” But his language is very careful. He does not say, “a propitiation through His blood”; or, “a propitiation by His blood”; but he distinctly and precisely says, “a propitiation through faith,” the object of the faith being “the blood.” Faith is the thing set so prominently before us—our justification by faith, our forgiveness upon faith, our acceptance on the ground of faith. Evidently this faith is something belonging to men, and it implies some great moral change wrought in men. When the king announces to his rebellious subjects his free pardon of all their offences, and sends that pardon by the hands of his messenger, who is it that needs to be propitiated? Plainly enough, it is not the king. He is propitiated, or he would not send that message of pardon. There is no enmity in him. It is that rebel nation that needs to be appeased. They have taken up an ill-will against their king. It is the work of the king’s messenger to appease men’s anger, and sooth down their ill-feeling toward their king, and so induce them to lay down their arms, and accept his sovereign mercy. What hinders rebels from receiving the forgiveness offered them? Surely nothing but their rebellion. As long as that spirit of rebellion lasts, they cannot have the pardon, though it is proclaimed. How can a man have the king’s pardon while he grasps his weapons? By that continued act he really refuses the pardon. But let his mind be changed, let him throw down those weapons; and then the proclaimed forgiveness covers even him beneath its shadow; then there has been propitiation between the king and his rebellious subjects; then the king’s messenger has become the propitiator, or propitiatory, the mercy-seat where the separated ones have met in reconciliation. This is the truth to which our attention should be most anxiously given—Man needs to be propitiated; man’s enmity against God needs to be appeased. We need that Jesus Christ should be a propitiator to us, and change our hearts towards God. That is the very work entrusted to the Messenger and Ambassador, Jesus Christ. He is sent into the world, that by His life, by His teachings, by His deeds, by His moral influence, by the holy persuasions of His sacrifice, He might get a redeeming power on the hearts of men—breaking down middle walls of partition, changing pride for humility, replacing hard-heartedness with repentance, and hatred of God for love to Him. The great aim of our Lord’s work is, so to bear persuasions on the hearts of men, that they should be willing to accept salvation by grace. How Christ works that change in men’s hearts can only be briefly suggested. It is done partly by that most attractive view of God which Jesus brings: partly, as Jesus shows us what a real son of God is, and so what we should be; partly, by a most extraordinary proof of love; God’s own Son is willing to sacrifice Himself, even in a most painful and shameful death, in order to convince us that God does love us with an everlasting love, and does want to save us. Whosoever believes becomes another man by believing.

1Jn_4:13. “Of His Spirit.”—It would be precisely in accordance with St. John’s teaching here if we read “spirit,” or disposition. What God gives to those who are in vital relations with Him is, the spirit of His own love, which inspires them also to self-sacrifice.

ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER 4

1Jn_4:8. The Love of God.—“God is love.” This single announcement of the beloved disciple, contradicted by so many appearances, yet carrying its own evidence—in the world around us met by many a No and many a murmur, and from the caverns of despair fetching up a fiendish laughter, and yet countersigned by Jehovah’s handwriting on the ruined tablets of the heart, and in trumpet tones reverberated from the hills of immortality—this shortest of sentences, and most summary of gospels, which a breath can utter, and which a signet ring can contain—is the truth which, shining bright at the Advent, will overspread the world in the millennium’s mild lustre. It is a truth on which no man has mused too much, even although he has pondered it all his days, and to which no anthem can do justice, except that in which golden harps mingle, and in which the redeemed from among men are helped by the seraphim.—Dr. James Hamilton.

The Heart of God.—History’s noblest deed and record of love is in the self-devotion of the generous heathen Pylades, who forfeited his life to save his friend; but “God commendeth His love to us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” “You have not seen,” says a great writer and profound thinker, “the greatest gift of all—the heart of God, the love of His heart, the heart of His love. And will He in very deed show us that? Yes, unveil that cross, and see. It was His only mode of showing us His heart. It is infinite love labouring to reveal itself—agonising to utter the fulness of infinite love. Apart from that act, a boundless ocean of love would have remained for ever shut up and concealed in the heart of God; but now it has found an ocean-channel. Beyond this He cannot go. Once and for ever the proof has been given, ‘God is love.’ ”

Our Love comes from God.—As the rays come from the sun, and yet are not the sun, even so our love and pity, though they are not God, but merely a poor, weak image and reflection of Him, yet from Him alone they come. If there is mercy in our hearts, it comes from the fountain of mercy. If there is the light of love in us, it is a ray from the full sun of. His love.—Rev. C. Kingsley.

The Ocean of Divine Love.—In that great ocean of the Divine love we live, and move, and have our being, floating in it like some sea-flower which spreads its filmy beauty, and waves its long tresses, in the depths of mid-ocean. The sound of its waters is ever in our ears, and above, beneath, around us its mighty currents run evermore.—A. Maclaren, D.D.

The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary (gen. ed. Joseph S. Exell; Funk & Wagnalls, c. 1892) — public domain (pre-1929). A full-Bible homiletical/sermon-outline anthology covering 65 of 66 books (2 John is absent from the source module). Text from a community e-Sword module.

7. Brotherly Love and Divine Love as Related to Each Other on the Ground of Christ’s Advent

1Jn_4:7-21

7Beloved, let us love one another: for8 love is of God; and every one that loveth9 is born of God, and knoweth God. 8He that loveth not, knoweth10 not God;11 for God is love. 9In this was manifested the love of God toward12” us, because13 that God sent his 10only begotten Son14 into the world, that we might live through him. Herein15 Isaiah 16 love, not that we loved God, but that he17 loved us, and sent18 his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.19 11Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. 12No man hath seen God at any time.20 If we love one another, God dwelleth21 in us, 13and his love is perfected in us.22 Hereby23 know we that we dwell24 in him, and he in us, because16 he hath given us of his Spirit. 14And we have seen and do testify that 15the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world.25 Whosoever26 shall confess27 that Jesus28 is the Son of God, God dwelleth13 in him, and he in God. 16And we have known and believed the love that God hath to29 us. God is love; and he that dwelleth13 17in love dwelleth13 in God, and God in him.30 Herein31 is our love32 made perfect,33 that we may have boldness in the day of judgment: because as he is, so34 are we in this world. 18There is no fear in love;35 but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment.36 He that feareth is not made perfect in love.37 19We love him,38 because he first loved us. 20If a man say,39 love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how40 can he love God whom he hath not seen? 21And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also.41

EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL

Connection. The whole section 1Jn_4:7-21 insists upon the exhibition of brotherly love, because love is the very Essence of God (1Jn_4:8; 1Jn_4:16), as is evident from the sending and revelation of His Son (1Jn_4:8; 1Jn_4:10-11; 1Jn_4:14-15), from our past and present experience of the love of God (1Jn_4:10-11; 1Jn_4:16), from the experience of our confidence towards Him without fear (1Jn_4:17-18), and because as the children of God, we ought in grateful obedience prove our enjoyment of such love by the love of our brethren, His children (1Jn_4:19-21). Based on the γεννηθῆναι ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ (1Jn_4:7), this exhortation belongs under the great leading thought 1Jn_2:29, and connects with the warning against the false teachers, because faith in Jesus, in whom the love of the Father has been manifested and brought near to us, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit (1Jn_4:13), the Spirit of truth, and the Witness of God’s love in us, must evidence and manifest their truth and vitality in brotherly love.

Exhortation to brotherly love founded on the Being of God. 1Jn_4:7-8.

1Jn_4:7. Beloved, let us love one another.—Ἀγαπητοί, ἀγαπῶμεν, a very emphatic expression; being loved we must love; being in the enjoyment of love we are and dare not be without love; the exhortation, as ἀλλήλους shows, must be restricted to brotherly [Christian—M.] love and not be extended to general love of man. [But the ground, on which this exortation is based, viz. that God is Love (1Jn_4:8) and that He sent His Son εἰς τὸν κόσμον (1Jn_4:9), shows that the love of man in general is not excluded here. Cf. 1Jn_3:13; so Ebrard.—M.].

Because the love is of God, and every one, that loveth, is born of God and knoweth God.—Ὅτι indicates the ground on which the preceding exhortation is made to rest. The demonstration is conducted on a general axiom of truth: Omnis amor ex Deo est (Bengel), originem habet a Deo (Calov). This thought especially strengthened by ἐκ, must not be weakened into caritas res divina maxime laudabilis (Socinus, Episcopius), Deo maxime placet (Grotius), love is Divine as to its nature (de Wette), Deus caritatis auctor est, quatenus nobis mutuæ caritatis causas abunde suppeditat (Schlichting). Neither must we add with A. τὸν θεὸν, nor supply “the brother” with S. Schmidt, Lücke and al.—[Didymus singularly understood ἀγαπή here of Christ,—ἥτινα οὐκ ἀλλην εἶναι νομιστέον ἢ τὸν μονογενῆ, ὥσπερ θεὸν ἐκ θεοῦ, οὕτω καὶ ἀγάπην ἐξ ἀγάπης ὄντα:—and Augustine fitting together “Dilectio est ex Deo,” and “Dilectio est Deus” infers that “Dilectio est Deus ex Deo,” which comparing with Rom. 1Jn_4:5, he infers that love is the Holy Spirit (Tract. 7:6). Alford—M.].—Now since love and life are and spring from God, a man that is born of God proves that he is born of God by loving; for he must have part of that which is in God and comes from Him. The Perfect also alongside the Present shows that here again being born of God is regarded as the antecedent fact, as the cause of love, and love as a consequence warrants and necessitates the back-inference of the truth and reality of being born of God. Cf. 1Jn_2:29. Every one that is born of God knows also in his belonging to God, in his fellowship with God, God as the Source of love, and love as the Essence of God, and hence he must insist upon love and practise love, so that thereby he may prove his knowledge of and familiarity with God; to love and to know God are correlates, because love is of God. Hence Grotius (ostendit se Deum nosse sicut oportet) errs less than Calvin (vera Dei cognitio amorem Dei necessario in nobis generat).

1Jn_4:8. He that loveth not hath never known God.—Consequently: he that lacks love in general, has not known God, has never learnt to know Him at all (Lücke), has never made even the beginning of the knowledge of God (Düsterdieck); this rendering is required by the Aorist ἔγνω joined to ὁ μὴ ἀγαπῶν. The reason of this is given in the following:

Because God is love.—A proposition which in the negative formula, according to the well-known manner of the Apostle, still further defines the former assertion that “love is of God.” This relation of the two propositions and of their contents requires us to give to ὅτι a causal construction; hence it indicates the reason and not the contents of ἔγνω (Tirinus: non novit, Deum esse caritatem); in that case ὁ θεὸς also ought to be wanting and it would be: οὐκ ἔγνω τὸν θεόν, ὅτι ἀγάπη ἐστίν. Cf. Act_14:13. Winer, p. 469. Ὁ θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστίν=Deus nihil est quam mera caritas (Luther), Dei natura nihil aliud est, quam caritas, quam bonitas, quam summum bonum, sui ipsius communicativum (Hunnius). The Being of God is Love; therefore love springs from God. The word is to be taken essentialiter with most Catholic [Anglican—M.] and Lutheran Commentators, and not ἐνεργητικῶς with Calvin and Beza: Dei natura est homines diligere; for this construction makes God’s Love-Essence give place to God’s manifestation of love and adds the limitation of its application to men, whereas angels and even the Trinitarian God are objects of the love of God. Still farther removed from the depth of this saying, even to shallowness, are the expositions of Socinus (caritas est Dei ipsiusque voluntas effectus et is quidem maxime proprius), Grotius (Deus est plenus caritate), Rosenmüller (benignissimus). In this, that God is love as to His essential Being, lies the reason, why he that is born of God, must also have love and live in love and why the love of God must be allied with the love of the brethren who are also born of God. [Equally shallow are the explanations of Benson: “God is the most benevolent of all beings; full of love to all His creatures,” Whitby: “The Apostle intends not to express what God is in His Essence … but what He is demonstrative, ἐνεργητικῶς, showing great philanthropy to men,” and Hammond “God is made up of love and kindness to mankind.”—Alford reviewing these quotations says that in them the whole force of the axiom as it stands in the Apostle’s argument is lost; “unless he is speaking of the Essential Being of God, quorsum pertineat, to say that he that loveth not never knew God, because “God is love?” Put for these last words, “God is loving,” and we get at once a fallacy of an undistributed middle: He that loveth not never knew what love is: God is loving: but what would follow? that in as far as God is loving, he never knew Him: but he may have known Him as far as He is just or powerful. But take ὁ θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστίν of God’s essential Being,—as a strict definition of God, and the argumentation will be strict: He that loveth not never knew love: God is love [the terms are co-essential and co-extensive]: therefore he who loveth not never knew God.”—M.].

Revelation of the love of God through Christ. 1Jn_4:9-10.

1Jn_4:9. In this was manifested the love of God in (on) us.—“We hear the lovely, the living echo of Christ, Joh_3:16.” (Heubner). Ἐν τούτῳ points to the sequel. Ἐφανερώθη as contrasted with the hidden Being of the invisible God, annexes the objective, actual appearing and manifestation of the ἀγάπη τοῦ θεοῦ, of the love which is God’s, in God, as in 1Jn_1:2; 1Jn_3:5; 1Ti_3:16; there is no reference whatever to subjective knowledge. [Huther: “The Apostle does not want to say that the love of God has been known by us through the sending of His Son; cf. 1Jn_4:16, but that therein it stepped forth from its concealment, and did in reality manifest itself.”—M.].—Ἐν ἡμῖν defines either the sphere in which, or the object at which [with regard to which—M.] the manifestation took place; it should be connected with the verb and rendered, either among us, with us, or at [in, with regard to] us. But the context does not introduce us merely as spectators but as receivers of the Divine love (ἵνα ζήσωμεν); and this love is not only to us an object of contemplation, which would be expressed by the Dative ἡμῖν without the preposition; but we ourselves are objects of this love, every one of us believers has experienced it; hence we ought not to leave the matter undecided (Lücke), but must decide for the rendering at [in, with regard to—M.] us (Düsterdieck), according to the manifest analogy of Joh_9:3, where ἐν must be thus construed and explained; hence we may not connect it with ἀγάπη τοῦ θεοῦ (Huther and al.); for it was not the love of God in believers which was manifested, as if the believers existed before the manifestation of God’s love in Christ, but the love of God appeared in Christ and was manifested not to, but at [in] the believers. On this account Bengel’s explanation: “Amor Dei, qui nunc in nobis est,” is equally untenable. Still less admissible is it to make ἐν ἡμῖν=εἰς ἡμᾶς, as is done by Luther, Spener and al. Cf. Winer, pp. 231, 436.—Ἐφανερώθη is explained by what follows:

That God hath sent His son, the only-begotten, into the world.

This is the fact of the manifestation. The designation τὸν μονογενῆ the only child (Luk_7:12; Luk_8:42; Luk_9:38; Heb_11:17; Joh_1:14; Joh_1:18; Joh_3:18), ad auxesin valet (Calvin); what love, that He sent His only son (Huther)! It is therefore not=ἀγαπητός, omnium creaturarum longe carissimus, sibi dilectissimus (S. G. Lange, Socinus, Grotius). John thus marks the exaltation of the Son, just as the term ἀπέσταλκεν εἰς τὸν κόσμον denotes His pre-existence (Joh_3:17; Joh_10:36): to be sent, to be sent into the world can only be true of one already born, not of one who is only born in the world, but one existing above and before the world, 1Jn_1:1.

That we might live through Him.—Thus ἐν ἡμῖν is explained. This indication of the purpose, ἵνα, points as much to the life-fulness in Christ as to our poverty. Cf. 1Jn_3:16-17. [Baumgarten-Crusius: Μονογενής and ζήσομεν are the two emphatic words: The most exalted One—for our salvation!—M.].

1Jn_4:10. In this exists love.—[German like Greek “the love,” i.e. love in the abstract.—M.]. Ἀγάπη is to be taken quite general, as at 1Jn_3:16 (Neander, Düsterdieck, Huther), without the supplement of τοῦ θεοῦ (Spener, Lücke, Sander, de Wette, Brückner and al.), as at Rom_5:5.

Not that we loved God, but that He loved us.—The simplest construction is to supply ἐν τούτῷ to οὐχ and ἀλλά. Thus preparation is made for the comprehensive term πρῶτος 1Jn_4:19; the initiation of loving is with God; the beginning and origin of love is in God (ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ); ἡμεῖς and αὐτὸς are here emphatically contrasted like τὸν θεόν; amari dignissimum, and ἡμᾶς, indignissimos (Bengel), the self-existence, independence, of the Divine love are intimated by the prevenience of that love absolutely unconditioned by any merit on the part of men; the former is what is really said here (Huther), the other, as we may justly infer from what follows, (ἱλασμὸν) and from what precedes (ἵνα ζήσωμεν), is implied (Düsterdieck). Hence there is no reason whatsoever for rendering ὅτι once “because” and then “that” (Baumgarten-Crusius), or for translating both times “because” but only as protases, thus: not because we loved Him but because He loved us, did He send His Son (Lachmann), or for a transposition of the words as if we did read: ὅτι οὐκ (Grotius), or for taking the first proposition as a dependent clause=ἡμῶν μὴ ἀγαπησάντων (Meyer: that although we have not loved God before, yet did He love us). a Lapide erroneously assigns to the implication the first place saying: “Hic caritatem Dei ponderat et exaggerat ex eo, quod Deus nulla dilectione, nullo obsequio nostro provocatus, imo multis injuriis et sceleribus nostris offensus, prior dilexit nos.”

And sent His Son (as) a propitiation for our sins.—This is the proof in fact of αὐτὸς ἠγάπησεν ἡμᾶς. The Aorist ἀπέστειλεν, like ἠγαπήσαμεν, ἠγάπησεν, simply narrates, while the Perfect ἀπέσταλκεν 1Jn_4:9 absolutely presentiates Christ’s having been sent (Lücke). Ἀπέστειλε stands emphatically in ante-position in order to set the act of God in relief; ἱλασμὸν περὶ τῶν ἀμαρτιῶν ἡμῶν has an explanatory and substantiating reference to ζήσωμεν δι’ αὐτοῦ 1Jn_4:9. Cf. 1Jn_2:2; 1Jn_3:16. Insufficient: testatum fecit, se velle condonare (Rosenmüller).

Brotherly love inferred. 1Jn_4:11. [from, 1Jn_4:9-10, and substantiating the exhortation 1Jn_4:7.—M.]

1Jn_4:11. Beloved—ἀγαπητοί has a peculiar emphasis and distinct meaning, i.e. it designates those who stand in the enjoyment of the experience of the love of God.

If God so loved us.—Because εἰ with the Indicative introduces the aforesaid fact, it is described as an indubitable ground for an inference to be built upon it. [Alford calls attention to the difficulty of rendering this εἰ with an Indicative in English, which is neither any expression of uncertainty, nor=since, or seeing that; he describes it as “a certainty put in the shape of a doubt, that the hearer’s mind may grasp the certainty for itself, not take it from the speaker.” If (it be true that).—is perhaps the nearest filling up of the sense.”—M.]. Οὕτως denotes the preceding description of love; it is here=hac ratione, prevenient without any merit on our part, in the sending of His Son for the propitiation of our sins; but it is not=tanta caritate, as in Joh_3:16 (where οὕτως—ὥστε requires such a construction, as Düsterdieck rightly observes). There is no warrant for the interpretation; nullo hominum discrimine (Grotius).

We also ought to love one another.—In the first place we have to take notice of ἡμεὶς—ἀλλήλους: we, first the object of the glorious love of God (ἡμᾶς) must, now also regard and treat every Christian as an object of Divine love and consequently become the subjects of such experienced Divine love; to this necessitates us the brother whom God loves, and to this compels us the love with which we ourselves are loved. Hence the Apostle uses the word ὀφείλομεν not only because there is extant for it an objectively given commandment and example, but also a subjective preparation for it; as God’s children, born out of Him who is Love, born out of His Love-Being, we must love one another.

There is no fellowship with God without brotherly love. 1Jn_4:12-13.

1Jn_4:12. No one hath ever beheld God.—. Cf. Joh_1:18 : ἑώρακεν. The Perfects there, like τεθέαται here are on account of πώποτε to be emphatically referred to the past with respect to its separate course and periods, and must not be construed according to a Hebraism, as carrying present force (Estius), or as comprehending the past and the present (Lücke). The word τεθέαται denotes calm, continued looking at and contemplation of a thing, but it is real seeing [in the literal sense of the word as distinguished from spiritual beholding, inward vision—M.]; this is the view of the Greek Commentators, (Augustine, Spener, Lücke and al.), as in 1Jn_4:14 and=ἑώρακεν also 1Jn_4:20. The sense is: God is invisible (1Ti_6:16). Passages like Exo_33:20, and Gen_12:7; Gen_17:1 etc., are not contradictory, since where God did appear, it was not His face, but some assumed form that became visible. Consequently the passage must not be interpreted in a spiritual sense, as if it imported spiritual seeing and that God cannot be known and apprehended by man’s own, natural powers (Piscator), or immediately (Rickli), or as He is (Estius), that He is consequently inscrutable (Neander). The explanation of this axiom follows from,

If we love one another, God abideth in us and His love is perfected in us.—The proposition: θεὸν οὐδεὶς πώποτε τεθέαται, obviously refers not to the proposition ἀγαπᾷν ἀλλήλους which contains a presupposition and a condition, but to the leading thought: ὁ θεὸς ἐν ἡμῖν μένει. The Apostle is wholly concerned with the inward life-fellowship, with the inward relation between God and man which is to be carried on to perfection and which manifests itself in brotherly love; hence brotherly love is only the presupposition and condition of the assertion and assumption of such life-fellowship with God, but not of that relation itself (contrary to Frommann). So especially Düsterdieck, Huther. The invisibility of God surely does not exclude our love to God (1Jn_4:20. cf. 1Pe_1:8); nor is the invisibility of God used here to direct us to brotherly love, as if we should show to the brethren what we cannot show to Him (Lücke and al.); in that case θεὸν οὐκ θεᾶσθαι and not ἀγαπᾷν ἀλλήλους would have been introduced with ἐὰν. Ἀγάπη θεοῦ denotes His love, the love of God, even the love peculiar to and inhering in Him, which is in us, if He ἐν ἡμῖν μένει. In this life-fellowship with Him we participate in His love, which is τετελειωμένη, has become perfected [i.e. has reached its full completion and maturity.—M.]. This love has its history of growth and completion in us and corresponds pari passu with brotherly love: where the one is, there is also the other; they mutually conditionate each other; it is loving with God, (out) of God, in God, which with Him is in us as His Being; dutiful loving (ὀφείλομεν 1Jn_4:11) is natural in believers. Hence the reference is not to God’s love to us (Hunnius, Calov, Spener, Beza, Sander and al.), for the predicate would not suit such a construction; nor to our love to God (Luther, Calvin, Grotius, Lücke, Neander, Düsterdieck and others), nor to ea dilectio quam Deus præscripsit (Socinus), nor to the mutual relation of love between God and us (Ebrard).

1Jn_4:13. In this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, that He hath given us of His Spirit.—The mark of recognition of the life-fellowship of God with us, and among ourselves with God, agrees exactly with the description at 1Jn_3:24, as does also the reference to the gift of the Spirit (ἐν τούτῳ): ὅτι ἐκ τοῦ πνεύματος αὐτοῦ δέδωκεν ἡμῖν. Neither οὖ 1Jn_3:24, nor the preposition ἐκ here, has partitive force; it rather answers to ἀπὸ τοῦ πνεύματος, Act_2:17; Joe_3:1 (LXX.), while the Vulgate in conformity to the original text renders spiritum meum effundam, and denotes the origin and source of the Spirit in us, although we, as distinguished from Jesus who has the Spirit οὐκ ἐκ μέτρου (Joh_3:34), have only part in Him; the coarse notion of a divisibility or dismemberment of the Spirit must be strenuously excluded. The Spirit Himself is given to us; nothing is said here of His gifts; there is no reference to the διαιρέσις τῶν χαρισμάτων, 1Co_12:4; 1Co_12:11—(in opposition to Estius). His Spirit (τὸ πνεῦμα αὐτοῦ, the Love-Spirit of God) answers to ἀγάπη αὐτοῦ and confirms the explanation of 1Jn_4:12, as given above, and supplements the fact that His Spirit mediates in us His love and its perfections.

Evidence of this inward life-fellowship as a certain fact. 1Jn_4:14-16.

1Jn_4:14. And we have beheld and testify.—Antithesis to 1Jn_4:12 : No one has ever beheld God, but we have seen the Son of the Father. Ἡμεῖς designates the Apostles and their associates, and this reference is confirmed by τεθεάμεθα καὶ μαρτυροῦμεν, which verbs point to an immediate, personal beholding as contrasted with the knowledge mediated by others (1Jn_1:1-2; Joh_1:14), to their eye-and ear-witness (Joh_1:34). What they have beheld, that they testify also; both verbs have the same object:

That the Father hath sent the Son as Saviour of the world.—In Jesus, the Sent One from God, they have beheld δόξαν αὐτοῦ, δόξαν ὡς μονογενοῦς παρὰ πατρὸς, πλήρης χάριτος καὶ ἀληθείας (Joh_1:14), and therefore they beheld Him as the Sent One of God. Τοῦ κόσμου (cf. 1Jn_2:2; Joh_3:16; Joh_4:42), implies that He is sent for every man, not only for the electi in omnibus populis (Piscator); the universality of salvation is also confirmed by the sequel:

1Jn_4:15. Whosoever confesseth that Jesus is the Son of God.—This ὁμολογεῖν is the consequence of the reception of the μαρτυρεῖν of the Apostles. Cf. 1Jn_2:2; 1Jn_2:23. The reference here is neither to the confession in the fact of brotherly love (Bede), nor to the testimony of a holy life accompanying the confession with the mouth (Augustine, Grotius); but the faith of the heart, which receives the Apostolical μαρτυρία is taken for granted. Cf. 1Jn_4:16.

God abideth in Him and He in God.—The confession, therefore, is to be taken as connected with the life-fellowship with God, and an ungodly conversation surely will not belie the confession; God in Christ Jesus will have appropriated salvation to the believer.

1Jn_4:16. And we have known and believed.—The beginning καὶ ἡμεῖς exactly as in 1Jn_4:14. But ἐγνώκαμεν and πεπιστεύκαμεν is matter of the disciples of Jesus without any exception whatsoever (Estius, Calov, Spener, Lücke, de Wette, Düsterdieck, Ebrard, Huther), not of the Apostles only, as in τεθεάμεθα καὶ μαρτυροῦμεν (in opposition to Episcopius, Rickli and al.). Cf. Joh_6:69 : πεπιστεύκαμεν καὶ ἐγνώκαμεν; cf. Lange in this Commentary, Vol. 4., p. 166, German edition. “True faith is, according to John, a faith of knowledge and experience: true knowledge of faith” (Lücke); both are in one another; each conditions and promotes the other. Hence it is really immaterial which of the two is put first; the moral act of faith and the intellectual act of knowing are ultimately not without the working of God in His Spirit on our spirit. For the reception of the word of truth in faith is a receiving from the Lord of the word, just as the shining of this bright word into the heart and the luminous rise of the truth of the word in the heart, come also from Him. The two constitute the foundation of man’s confession. Hence the Perfects which continue to operate in the present confession. The object follows, viz.:

The love which God hath in us.—Cf. Joh_13:35 : ἵνα ἀγάπην ἔχητε ἐν ἀλλήλοις. The Present is emphatically placed first after the preceding Perfects; ἐν is used here as in 1Jn_4:9. It is, as in Joh_6:69 (ὅτι σὺ εἶ ὁ ἅγιος τοῦ θεοῦ), something objective, God’s love on us, namely in Christ Jesus, wherefore Bede says: “Quia videlicet cum haberet filium unicum, noluit illum esse unum, sed ut fratres haberet, adoptavit illi, qui cum illo possiderent vitam æternam.” Hence neither the subjective love of God erga nos (Estius, Luther, Socinus, Grotius, Rickli and al.), nor the love of God indwelling in us (Wilke, Hermeneutik des Neuen Testaments, 11, 64,), nor our love, kindled in us by God’s love (Ebrard).—Now follows the concluding summary,

God is love and he that abideth in love, abideth in God and God abideth in him.—A combination of 1Jn_4:8; 1Jn_4:15. Ἐν τῇ ἀγάπῃ denotes Love absolute, as the element of those who are born of God, and neither brotherly love (Lücke and al.), nor God’s love to us (Ebrard); it occurs here without any qualifying addition. Μένωυ, however, denotes the love of man in which he abides and which dwells in him.

Perfecting of love in fearlessness. 1Jn_4:17-18.

Ver 17. In this, love is perfected with us.—Ἀγάπη is again absolute as in 1Jn_4:16; 1Jn_4:18, and must neither be construed as God’s love εἰς ἡμᾶς, nor as our love εἰς ἀλλήλους (Socinus), nor to God (Lange), but simultaneously as the disposition and activity of love (Huther), as at 1Jn_3:18; and μεθ’ ἡμῶν must receive its full force of among, between, with us; see Winer, p. 336 sq.—Were it not parallel with ἐν ἡμῖν 1Jn_4:12 we might think of fellowship, ecclesiastical fellowship, the Christian Church, within which love has been perfected; the context also points to the individual life and perfection of Christians and not to the life and perfection of the Christian Church as such. Its most natural construction is with the verb τετελείωται (Lücke, de Wette, Düsterdieck and al.), not with ἀγάπη, of which it cannot be the object, since it is not= εἰς ἡμᾶς, as supposed by Luther, Calvin, Spener, Bengel, Sander, Besser and al. The position of the words is not more decisive for the connection with ἀγάπη here than at 1Jn_4:9 (in opposition to Huther); μεθ’ ἡμῶν denotes the place where love was perfected. Hence ἡμῶν must not be resolved into God and we (Rickli) and construed as the mutual love of God and Christians, which would be wholly inadmissible and repugnant to the spirit of the Gospel. Τετελείωται should be construed like τετελειωμένη ἐστίν, 1Jn_4:12, and τελεία and τετελείωται in 1Jn_4:18, this ἀγάπη in and on us is something to be perfected, and this perfection itself is not ready and accomplished at once; it has its stages and degrees. This is inconceivable and unpredicable of the love of God. But wherein is it primarily perfected? ἐν τούτῳ—ἵνα παῤῥησίαν ἔχωμεν:

That we have confidence in the day of judgment.—On παῤῥησία see Notes, on 1Jn_2:28 in Exegetical and Critical. Ἵνα, which follows αὕτη, 1Jn_3:11; 1Jn_3:23; Joh_17:3 and also ἐν τούτῳ, Joh_15:8, gives the purpose of God in the perfecting of love with us; we shall have confidence. Ἐν τούτῳ therefore must neither be referred to what goes before 1Jn_4:16 (Spener), nor, with the assumption of a trajecta anticipatio, connected with ὅτι (Grotius, Beza and al.), nor must ἵνα be construed in the sense of ὥστε (Episcopius, Bengel and al.). The ἡμέρα τῆς κρίσεως is ὅταν φανερωθῇ 1Jn_2:28. Of course ἐν has its usual sense and must not be explained=εἰς; for the reference here is not to the confidence of expectation, the desire of its drawing near (Augustine, Calvin), where men are liable to deceive themselves. Of course, he that may and will have confidence in the judgment, will also have confidence before it takes place; however, it is to be borne in mind that even believers, notwithstanding their activity of love, will be surprised in the judgment (Mat_25:31 sqq.); the reference is solely to confidence in the judgment, not to confidence beforehand. It is incorrect to combine the two with Rickli, Huther and al.; nor must τετελείωται be taken as a futurum exactum. [It is doubtful whether Braune’s exegesis will carry conviction to the mind of the reader. It seems to be rather contradictory, for while he condemns the interpretation of Rickli and Huther, he seems to adopt it when he says that “of course he that may and will have confidence in the judgment, will also have confidence before it takes place.” On the whole, Huther’s explanation, which is substantially that of Alford, seems to be the most natural. He says: “The difficulty that something future (our attitude in the day of judgment), is to be valid as a mark of perfect love in the present, vanishes by the assumption that ἐν involves both the παῤῥησία of believers in the day of judgment, and their present παῤῥησία in anticipation of that day; this combination was natural to the Apostle who thought of the day of judgment not as very remote but as already dawning (1Jn_2:18). In his love this future παῤῥησία is to him already present.”—M.].

Because as He is, we also are in this world.—Ὅτι annexes the reason of our confidence in the day of judgment. Ἐκεῖνος is Jesus and not God (Augustine, Calvin and al.). The Present ἐστί must not be construed= ἦν (a Lapide, Grotius, Rickli and al.), nor must the words ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ τούτῳ be referred to Christ. The comparison must be gathered from the context: it is very strict, καθὼς—καὶ. The point in hand is the μένειν ἐν τῇ ἀγάπῃ, which μένειν perfects love even unto filial confidence in the day of judgment (so Huther who cites Lorinus, “reddit nos caritas Christo similes et conformes imagini filii Dei”). Hence not likeness in suffering (Luther) or temptability (Rickli), not likeness in that, though we are in the world, we are not of the world (Sander); for nothing is said on these points; neither is here any reference to the adoption (Lücke), nor to δικαιοσύνη (Düsterdieck). Love is the eternal Being of Christ, cf. 1Jn_3:7 (Huther). [The last named author lays stress on ἐστὶν and compares in the passage cited the words: καθὼς ἐκεῖνος δίκαιός ἐσ τι ν.—Alford adopts the explanation of Düsterdieck, who thus develops his view: St. John does not say that Love is perfected in confidence in us, because we resemble Christ in Love; but he refers to the fundamental truth on which our Love itself rests and says: because we are absolutely like Christ, because we are in Christ Himself, because He lives in us, for without this there cannot be likeness to Him; in a word, because we are, in that communion with Christ which we are assured of by our likeness to Him in righteousness, children of God, therefore our love brings with it also full confidence. Essentially, the reason here rendered for our confidence in the day of judgment is the same as that given, 1Jn_3:21 sq., for another kind of confidence, viz., that we keep His commandments. This also betokens the δικαιοσύνη, of which Christ is the essential exemplar and which is a necessary attribute of those who through Christ are children of God.—M.]. Ἐν τῷ κόστῳ τούμῳ applied to ἐσμέν, denotes the place of abode, the earthly sphere of life, whereas Christ is in heaven, and is not an ethical idea, though we should supply with Bengel: amoris experte judicium timente.

1Jn_4:18. Fear is not in love.—Antithesis of παῤῥησία ἐν τῇ ἡμέρᾳ τῆς κρίσεως. Quite general: In love is not fear; fear is not a part of love, it is something wholly foreign to it, which is only outside of it (Huther). According to the well known phrase: oderint, dum metuant, hatred and fear are congruous, but love and fear are wholly incongruous. There is nothing said of the fear of God which is the beginning of wisdom (Psa_111:10), nor of love; hence neither our love to God, nor brotherly love (Lücke), and still less God’s love to us (Calvin, Calov, Spener).

But perfect love casteth out fear.—Τελεία is more than sincera, opposita simulationi (Beza), and ἔξω is not out of itself (Lücke), as if it were in it, but out of the heart. “Love not only does not contain fear, but it also does not suffer it alongside of itself; the love which wholly drives away fear is not love in its first beginning, love as yet weak, but love in its perfection.” (Huther). [Alford says of ἀλλά that it is not here the mere adversative after a negative clause, in which case it would refer to something in which fear is, e.g. φόβος οὐκ ἔστιν ἐν τῇ ἀγάπῃ, ἀλλ’ (ἐστιν) ἐν τῷ μισεῖ: but it is the stronger adversative, implying, “nay, far otherwise:” “tantum abest ut.… ut;” and renders: Fear existeth not in love, nay, perfect love casteth out fear, etc.—M.].—Where such love fills the heart, there is no room for fear,

Because fear hath punishment.—This is the reason why love does not suffer fear alongside itself. Κόλασις often used in the LXX., [Eze_14:3-4; Eze_14:7; Eze_18:30; Eze_44:12, cf. Wis_11:14; Wis_16:2; Wis_16:24; Wis_19:4.—M.], as in Mat_25:46 in the sense of punishment, pain of punishment (Besser) under the menace of the κρίσις. Bengel: “tormentum habet; nam diffidit, omnia inimica et adversa sibi fingit ac proponit, fugit, odit.” Hence it is not consciousness of punishment (Lücke), for the punishment has not yet set in; nor condemnation pronounced in the final judgment on him who does not stand in the fellowship of love (Düsterdieck). Ὁ φόβος is neither pro concreto: he that fears (de Wette, Düsterdieck), nor is ἔχει=receives; and least of all: fear holds fast to, tenet, thinks of punishment, knows nothing of clemency and love (Baumgarten-Crusius).—[“The pain felt in expectation of the punishment of Him who is feared” (Huther); “Fear by anticipating punishment has it even now” (Alford).—M.].

But he that feareth is not perfected in love.—Negative connected with the main proposition: ἡ τελεία ἀγάπη ἔξω βάλλει τὸν φόβον, and application to the beginning: φόβος οὐκ ἔστιν ἐν τῇ ἀγάπῃ. Hence δὲ is by all means to be retained, and neither to be cancelled, nor to be construed=οὖν or καὶ [δὲ is strictly adversative.—M.]. It is accordingly both owing to a want of perfection in the individual and to a want of perfection of love (τετελείωται ἐν τῆ ἀγάπῃ—ἡ τελεία ἀγάπη), if fear is present, fear, as in Rom_8:15 : οὐκ ἐλάβετε πνεῦμα δουλείας πάλιν εἰς φόβον. Unnecessary [and diluting—M.]. are the conjectures of Grotius, who proposes to read κόλουσιν (mutilationem) instead of κόλασιν (metus amorem mutilat atque infringit, aut prohibet, ne se exserat), and κολουόμενος instead of φοβούμενος (qui mutilatur aut impeditur in dilectione), and of Lamb. Bos who reads κώλυσιν instead of κόλασιν. [Oecumenius says that there are two kinds of godly fear, φόβος προκαταρκτικός, which afflicts men with a sense of their evil deeds and dread of God’s anger, and which is not abiding; and φόβος τελειωτικός, of which it is said, “The fear of the Lord is clean and endureth forever,” Psalms 19, and which δέους τοιούτου ἀπήλλακται.—M.].

The love of God is necessarily united with brotherly love. 1Jn_4:19-21.

1Jn_4:19. We love God.—Φοβούμενος is contrasted with ἡμεῖς ἀγαπῶμεν θέον, without an address, like ἀγαπητοί, 1Jn_4:7. There is nothing here to indicate the Conjunctive or an exhortation. Ἡμεῖ s,—emphatically placed first, who are born of God, His children,—rather notes the fact, the Indicative (Calvin, Beza, Aretius, Socinus, Spener, S. Schmidt, Bengel, Rickli, Neander, Ebrard, Erdmann, Huther, Hofmann, Schriftbeweis II. 2, 338); it corresponds, like the whole 1Jn_4:19, with οὐχ ὅτι ἡμεῖς ἠγαπήσαμεν τὸν θεόν. Neither the comparison with 1Jn_4:7, nor the ground and the further development in 1Jn_4:20-21, can warrant the interpretation that we must assume here an imperative Conjunctive (as Düsterdieck does). For the majority of authorities favour the addition of the object, even the οὖν of A. implies as much. [Alford, who is on the same side, fixes the connection thus: “He that feareth is not perfect in love. Our love (abstract, not specified whether to God or our brother) is brought about by, conditioned by, depends upon His love to us first; it is only a sense of that which can bring about our love: and if so, then from the very nature of things it is void of terror, and full of confidence, as springing out of a sense of His love to us. Nor only so: our being new begotten in love is not only the effect of a sense of His past love, but is the effect of that love itself.”—M.]. In the ground

Because He first loved us, πρῶτος is emphatic, and this seems to suggest a primary reference to our love to God, cf. 1Jn_4:9-10. From our most natural love to God, grounded on our experience of the love of God, the Apostle now passes on to brotherly love.

1Jn_4:20. If any say, I love God, and hate his brother, he is a liar.—Ἐὰν τις εἴτῃ, cf. 1Jn_1:6; ὅτι before ἀγαπῶ τὸν θεόν frequently introduces direct speech. This progress confirms the assumption of the Indicative in 1Jn_4:19. Here the Apostle resolves the communicate form of speech into the singular form as a conclusion and proof. Μισῇ answers to the next following ὁ μὴ ἀγαπῶν. Cf. 1Jn_3:14-15. “To hate is the positive form of not to love.” (Huther). Cf. Luk_14:26. Col. Mat_10:37. Every defect of love makes room to hatred. Hence ψεύστης ἐστὶ, as in 1Jn_1:6. The reason:

For he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God (or cannot love God) whom he hath not seen?—The main stress lies in the antithesis ὃν ἑώρακεν and ὃν οὐχ ἑώρακεν. The Perfect denotes sight continuing in its effect (de Wette, Düsterdieck, Huther); Lücke: ἑωρακέναι=to have before one’s eyes; a Lapide: vidit et assidue videt. Socinus goes too far in emphasizing the Perfect so as to make it also intimate that it is enough to have seen and become acquainted with one, and that it is not necessary to have him still before one’s eyes. The saying of Gregory: oculi sunt in amore duces, and the remark of Oecumenius: ἐφελκυστικὸν ὅρασις ποὸς ἀγάπην, supply what is understood in the inference. Love to God, the Invisible, is difficult; also 1Pe_1:8 : ὃν οὐκ εἰδότες ἀγαπᾶτε express both joy and amazement. He therefore who performs the more difficult task of loving God whom he does not see, must also perform the easier work of loving his brother whom he does see. The Apostle’s object, consequently, is not to lead us from the love to our brother to the love of God, but only to verify the latter by the former; love to God ever remains the first, the deepest and highest work, which must, however, evidence itself in brotherly love. The interrogative form is as strong and authentic as the simple negation; but the anteposition of the object τὸν θεὸν ὃν οὐχ ἑώρακεν greatly intensifies the thought. Πῶς or οὐ δύναται ἀγαπᾷν presupposes ἐάν τις εἴπῃ and denotes the supposition of the assertion of loving God [under the circumstances.—M.] to be impossible, and the assertion itself a lie. The Apostle’s argumentum ad hominem applies only to the liar (Düsterdieck). Bengel: Sermo modalis; impossibile est, ut talis sit amans Dei, in præsenti. Hence the reference to the imago Dei, which Augustine [apostolus hic pro confesso sumit, Deus se nobis in hominibus offerre, qui inscriptam gerunt ejus imaginem; Johannes nil aliud voluit, quam fallacem esse jactantiam, si quis Deum se amare dicat, et ejus imaginem, quæ ante oculos est, negligat), Sander, Ebrard (who suggests that it is not easier to love one who is visible before us, but has hurt us) and al., find here is by no means warranted, nor that of Grotius who calls man opus Dei pulcherrimum. De Wette also erroneously maintains that God, the ideal, invisible object could only be loved in reality in our brother, the visible, empirical object of love.

1Jn_4:21. And this commandment we have from Him.—Καὶ simply adds a new reason: the reference is to a specific commandment. This is a firmius argumentum (Calvin): for quomodo diligis eum, cujus odisti præceptum? (Augustine). ̓Απ’ αὐτοῦ refers to God (Lücke, de Wette, Düsterdieck and al.), not to Christ (Calvin), Sander, Huther and al.). The fact that δεὸν is used afterwards does not militate against the application of αὐτοῦ to θεὸν, since Jesus in His intercessory prayer Joh_17:3 mentions His own name instead of saying ἐμέ. The analogy of 1Jn_1:5; 1Jn_2:25 can not upset the context and 1Jn_3:23-24, and only indicate that αὐτὸς also may designate Christ, and that not ἐκεῖνος only does designate Him. The ἐντολή is and remains a commandment, and not=ἀγγελία, doctrine (Carpzov).

That he who loveth God, love his brother also.—But this commandment is nowhere found; not even at Mat_22:39. But the Apostle justly puts in the form of a definite Divine command the essential principle of Christian Ethics, which really and fundamentally carries everything which here (1Jn_4:7 sqq. 1Jn_3:10; 1Jn_3:19. cf. Joh_13:34, etc.) is told of the inviolable duty of brotherly love to those who are born of God and in filial love united to their Father (Düsterdieck); ἵνα denotes also here the end and aim and not only the substance of the command, as Huther supposes.

DOCTRINAL AND ETHICAL

1. God is Love—a sentence, which “is the summary and most simple expression of what the Scripture, the whole Scripture teaches throughout” (Hofmann, Schriftbeweis I. p. 71), and has an important bearing retrospectively and prospectively. Retrospectively it bears even on the Being of God and on the history of God’s revelation in Christ Jesus. If the Being of God is Love it must also be personal and cannot be substance only in the pantheistic sense. Yea, it points to the Trinity or God’s vitality and fulness of life; Him that loves, who is yet not without Him that is loved, and reciprocal Love, as Augustine tried also this purely ethical construction of the Trinity alongside the psychological analogy (memoria, intelligentia, voluntas) in De Trinitate (VI. 1 John 5 : and therefore there are not more than three: One who loves Him who is of Him, and One who loves Him of whom He is, and Love Itself. If this is nothing, how is God Love? If it is not Substance, how is God Substance? XI. 1 John 2 : If I love something there are three,—I, what I love, and Love itself. For I do not love Love, if I do not love Him that loveth, for love is not where nothing is loved); hence he could, according to Rom_5:5, understand in our passage (1Jn_4:7) by ἀγάπη the Holy Ghost, while Didymus explained ἀγάπη of Christ. In the middle ages Augustine was particularly followed by Richard of St. Victor, the mystic scholastic, or the scholastic mystic (cf. Liebner, Hugo von St. Victor p. 82 sqq.), in his work De Trinitate, especially III. 14—and in modern times, first of all, by Sartorius: Die heilige Liebe, Part I. p. 1 sqq., and Liebner: Christologie I (in many places). See also Nitzsch on the Essential Trinity of God in the Studien und Kritiken, 1841, pp. 295–345, especially p. 337 sqq.

2. Retrospectively, traces of this truth may be found in the History of the Revelation of God in Exo_34:6; Psa_103:8-13; Psa_86:5; Psa_86:15; Deu_32:6; Is. 73:16; Jer_31:9. But. John treats in the most comprehensive manner, with perfect ease and certainty this most profound thought which would never have occurred to any thinker out of his own strength and reason! The heavens declare the glory and majesty of God only, (Psalms 19.) His word alone declares His grace. In nature we meet His handiwork, His Power and Wisdom, in His word alone do we encounter His Love and Mercy. The axioms “God is a Spirit” (Joh_4:24), and “God is Love” set forth the most vital truths concerning the Nature and Being of God.—“Spirit is His Nature, Love His Life” (Schöberlein), or Spirit is the Substance and Nature, Love the character of God and not only in His attitude.

3. Prospectively this Johannean saying points to the life of knowledge and of demeanour. Sartorius in his “Heilige Liebe” has based on this saying the whole of his Ethics. Cf. also Köhler, “Gott der allein Gute” (God the Only Good One) in Studien und Kritiken 1856, p, 426 sqq. “Practicam definitionem Dei proponit 1Jn_4:8 : Deus caritas est. Ex caritate omnia Dei opera procedunt, et Spiritus Sanctus a Patre et Filio ab æterno procedens est substantialis amor Patris et Filii. In tempore Deus ex caritate omnia creavit, ex caritate misit Filium ad opus redemtionis: præstandum, ex caritate dat Spiritum Sanctum, qui similes motus in cordibus credentium accendit, ex caritate in vita æterna a facie ad faciem beatis sese intuendum præstabit.—Omnia in caritate et ex caritate agit (Joh. Gerhard Exeg. 2. p. 71). But we must guard against straightway identifying Love, which is the Nature of God, with the Personality of God which is the logical presupposition of the former (against Liebner, i. 1, 111), and to take care not to combine Love with Truth and Righteousness (as does Nitzsch, System § 63. 1), for communication of self is implied in the nature of Love, but not in the nature of truth and holiness, and what becomes of the difference between παιδεία and κόλασις, of the anti-scriptural conception of ἀποκατάστασις τῶν πάντων and the wrathless God in Origen and Schleiermacher? Cf. Thomasius, Christi Werk und Person, i. p. 127 sqq.; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2. p. 79 sqq.

4. The love of God was revealed in the sending of His only begotten Son. 1Jn_4:2; 1Jn_4:9-10; 1Jn_4:12; 1Jn_4:14. Hence He is called μονογενής=μόνος γεννώμενος (Joh_1:14; Joh_1:18; Joh_3:16; Joh_3:18), and not πρωτότοκος (Rom_8:29; Col_1:15; Col_1:18; Heb_1:6; Rev_1:5). The greatness of the Sent One and the object of His Mission are designed to mark the love of Him that sent Him. The reference to the first-born would mark the success of the Mission and the work of the Sent One. There is no other proof of the love of the Father, equal to this: Christ, the Son of God by His appearing and message compensates us for the want of seeing the Invisible God (1Jn_4:12. Joh_14:9). Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, 1:71.

5. To see, know, believe on, confess and testify of Jesus the Son of God on the part of the Apostles, to hear, know, believe and confess on the part of the Church, is indispensable to the life-fellowship of God with us, and of us with God, since, through and through ethical, it can only be acquired and preserved by an ethical process. With the new birth out of God, spiritual regeneration, begins the life-process of sanctification. To remain untouched, unmoved in the presence of Jesus, or only to be turned to Him outwardly, or even to turn away from Him, to deny Him in doubt or decided unbelief, is immorality.

6. The nature of this life-fellowship, begun with our regeneration, is mutuality in continuous reciprocity of action; He to and in us, we in Him, believingly knowing and confessing Him, living and loving, we full of confidence, He in His ever prevenient grace and work of grace to and in us.

7. The degrees of development are given by Bengel thus: “Sine timore et amore, cum timore sine amore, cum timore et amore, sine timore cum amore.” And Augustine: “Timor quasi locum præparat caritati. Si autem nullus timor, non est, qua intret caritas. Timor Dei sic vulnerat, quo medici ferramentum. Timor medicamentum, caritas sanitas. Timor servus est caritatis. Timor est custos et pædagogus legis, donec veniat caritas.” Though man in his sin begin with servile fear before God, in the presence of God’s Nature of Love and attitude of Love he will progress in filial fear even unto fearlessness and confidence in all humility.

8. Brotherly love is and remains the measure of our life from God, from whom comes all love; he that abides in God, cannot be without love, and he that is without love cannot be in God, nor can God abide in him. He, who is Love, has thus ordained it Himself; it is His Will, His explicit commandment, even as it is in conformity with His Nature.

9. [Wordsworth on 1Jn_4:10 : “A statement of the doctrine of the Atonement, and a statement the more remarkable, because it anticipates the objections that have been made to it in later times.—These objections have taken the following form. God, it is said, is Love (1Jn_4:8). He loves us, and He loves His only-begotten Son. We are sinners; and as long as we are sinners, and without pardon from God, we have no hope of heaven. As sinners we owe an infinite debt to God, which we can never pay. But God is infinite in Love; He willeth not that any should perish (2Pe_3:9), but that all should be saved (1Ti_2:4). He can forgive us the debt. He can do this freely. To suppose that He cannot do so, is to set limits to His Omnipotence. To imagine that He will not do so, is to disparage His Love. To allege, that He will require an equivalent for the debt, is to represent the God of mercy as a rigorous exactor, and to believe that He required such a price for our pardon, as the blood of His own beloved Son, and that He exposed Him who is perfectly innocent, to the death of the cross for our sakes, at the hands of wicked men, is to charge God with cruelty, injustice and weakness; and to suppose Him to be angry with us, at the same time that we say that “He loved us,” and gave His only Son to die for us (1Jn_3:16; 1Jn_4:10), is, it is alleged, to involve ourselves in inconsistency, and to misrepresent God, as if He were affected by human passions. And lastly, to say that Christ shed His blood as a ransom to deliver us from the captivity of Satan, is, it is argued, to make the Son of God tributary to the Evil One. Such are the objections made by Socinians and others, to the doctrine of the Atonement.—These objections rest on fallacious grounds. They proceed on the supposition that as sinners we are only debtors to God. But in His relation to us, God is not only a Creditor, but He is our Lawgiver and Judge, our King and Lord; and He is perfectly just and holy.

Besides, as St. John teaches (1Jn_3:4), the, essence of sin is, that it is a violation of God’s Law, and all are sinners (1Jn_1:10). And God represents Himself in Scripture as a Moral Governor, infinite in justice, and when we contemplate Him as He is represented by Himself in His own Word, and when we regard sin as it is in His sight, and as it is described in the Holy Scriptures, we must conclude that He is grievously offended by sin; and He has declared in His word that He is angry with it and will punish it. The wrath of God is revealed against all ungodliness (Rom_1:18). The wages of sin is death (Rom_6:23).—But this proposition is not at variance, as has been alleged, with St. John’s declaration, that God loved us, and sent His own Son, the only begotten, that we might live through Him; and that herein consists Love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son a propitiation for our sins.

That which God loved in us was not our sin, but our nature. It was that nature which God Himself had made in His own likeness, and which we had marred, and which He desired to repair. And because He hates sin, and knows its consequences, even death eternal, and because He loved our nature which was exposed by it to everlasting perdition; and because being infinitely just, He must punish sin, which He, who is infinitely pure, must hate, and which He who is infinitely true, has declared that He will punish; and because the sins of the whole world are so heinous, and because they demand a satisfaction infinite in value, and because without shedding of blood there is no remission (Heb_9:22); therefore, in His immense love for our nature, which He had made and which we had marred by sin, He sent His own Son, God of God, to take that Nature, the Nature of us all, in order to be the substitute of all, and Saviour of all, and to become our Emmanuel, God with us (Mat_1:23), God manifest in the flesh (1Ti_3:16), partaking of our flesh and blood and to be the Lord our Righteousness (Jer_23:6; Jer_33:16), and to suffer death, the wages of sin, in our nature, as our Proxy and Representative, and to appease God’s wrath by an adequate propitiation, and to take away our guilt, and to redeem us from bondage and death by the priceless ransom of His own blood, and to deliver us by His death from him who had the power of it, even the devil, and to reconcile us to God, and to restore us to His favour, and to effect our atonement with Him, and to purchase for us the heavenly inheritance of everlasting life. See Heb_2:14; Heb_2:17.—As Origen says (in Matthew 16.): “Homo quidem non potest dare aliquam commutationem pro anima sua (Psa_49:9; Mat_16:26); Deus autem pro animabus omnium dedit commutationem, pretiosum sanguinem Filii sui (1Pe_1:18).” “Si non fuisset peccatum, non necesse fuerat Filium Dei Agnum fieri; nec opus fuerat Eum in carne positum jugulari; sed mansisset hoc, quod in principio erat, Deus Verbum. Verum, quoniam introiit peccatum in hunc mundum, peccatiautem necessitas propitiationem requirit, et propitiatio non fit nisi per hostiam, necessarium fuit pro-videri hostiam pro peccato.” (ibid. hom. 4 in Num.) If it be said that according to this statement the just suffer for the unjust, and that the beloved Son of God was delivered to death for the offences of those who did hot love Him, but were at enmity with Him, this is perfectly true; it is the assertion of God Himself in Holy Scripture, see 1Pe_3:18; 2Co_5:21; 1Pe_1:19.—The Just suffered for the unjust. Yes, suffered for a time. But this is not at variance with daily experience. Parents suffer for children; brethren for brethren; friends for friends; subjects for sovereigns, and sovereigns for subjects. And if we are to reject the doctrine of the Atonement on the plea that vicarious sufferings are not reconcilable with justice, we cannot stop short of Deism or even of Atheism. Cf. Bp. Butler’s Analogy of Religion. Part II. 1 John 5.

If any victim was to take away sin, that victim must be innocent. In order to take away infinite guilt, it must be infinitely innocent. The price paid for Infinite Justice must be infinite in value. In order to suffer for men the victim must be human; and in order to satisfy God, it must be Divine. Be it remembered also that the Son of God suffered willingly. He gave Himself a ransom for all (1Ti_2:6). The Good Shepherd giveth His life for the sheep (Joh_10:11). Cf. Mat_20:28; Gal_1:4; Gal_2:20; Eph_5:2; Tit_2:14; Heb_9:14.—They also for whom He gave Himself are His own flesh and blood. He is their Head, they His members. They are one with Him.—Still further.—By His meritorious sufferings in that human nature, which He has taken, and joined forever in His own Person to the Nature of God, He has delivered that nature from sin and death, and has exalted it to the right hand of God. Therefore He suffered joyfully. To do evil is indeed evil; and to suffer evil in eternity, is dreadful; but to suffer evil in time, in order that others by our means may be happy in eternity, is not evil, but glorious. Earthly conquerors die with joy in the hour of victory. Much more Christ. He knew that suffering was His path to glory. He knew that because he was obedient to death, even to the death of the cross, therefore God would highly exalt Him, and give Him a Name above every name (Php_2:8-9). He saw of the travail of His soul and was satisfied (Isa_53:11). Doubtless, in His human flesh He shrank from the cup of agony and from the anguish of the cross. But even in the glorious hour of His transfiguration He had talked with Moses and Elias of His death (Luk_9:31). His Divine eye pierced through the clouds of suffering, and saw the visions of glory to which it would lead, a victory over Satan, a world rescued from his grasp, God’s justice satisfied, His wrath appeased, His love glorified; and so the cross became a triumphal chariot, in which the Conqueror rode in victory (Col_2:14), and mounted to heaven, and bore mankind with Him through the gates of the heavenly palace of the everlasting capital and was greeted by the song of the angels; “Lift up your heads,” etc. Psa_24:7.

It has been alleged that if by sin we were prisoners to Satan, therefore the price of Christ’s blood which He paid upon the cross for our liberation from Satan was paid to Satan. But this we deny. See Greg. Nazianzen, Orat. 45, p. 862, ed. Paris, 1778. It might as well be said that the ransom paid for the delivery of prisoners from a king’s prison, is paid to the gaoler in whose custody they are. We, by our sins, had made ourselves slaves of Satan: and as a just punishment for our sins, we were made prisoners of Satan. Satan was God’s executioner against us. He was our gaoler. Tophet is ordained of old (Isa_30:33), as one of God’s instruments of death (Psa_7:14). But Christ, by dying for us, delivered us from death. He rescued us from the hands of Satan, and paid the price of our ransom, not to Satan, but to God. He delivered us from Satan by offering Himself to God. (Cf. Rom_3:23-26).

They who contravene the doctrine of the Atonement often claim the credit of exercising their Reason, and deny that unbelief of the doctrine of the Atonement rests on the foundation of reason. But a right use of reason leads to a firm belief in the doctrine of the Atonement; and a denial of it proceeds from an abuse of reason.—

The doctrine of the Atonement cannot be discovered by reason. No; but we can prove by reason that the Holy Scriptures are from God, and that the doctrine of the Atonement is clearly revealed in the Holy Scriptures. And thus this doctrine rests on the foundation of reason. Being a portion of supernatural truth revealed by God in Scripture to the world, it is not to be discovered by reason, or fully comprehended by reason, but it is to be heartily embraced and surely held fast by faith, which implies a right use of reason. And reason teaches us, that it would be very unreasonable to expect, that what is contained in a revelation from such a Being as God to so frail a creature as man, in his present state on earth, should be fully comprehended by reason; and that, if reason could understand everything, there would be no use in revelation, and no place for faith. Right reason itself teaches us that to deny the Lord who bought us (2Pe_2:1), because we cannot understand, why God allowed sin to prevail, which required the sacrifice of the death of His own ever-blessed Son, would be to renew the indignities of the crucifixion, and to smite our Redeemer with a reed, the reed of our unregenerate reason, when we ought to fall down and worship in faith. Reason itself teaches us that it is very reasonable to expect mysteries in revelation; and that they are our moral discipline, and exercise our humility, patience, faith and hope, and teach us to look forward to that blessed time, when we, who now see through a glass darkly (1Co_13:12), shall behold the clouds removed, etc. Thus reason leads us to the door of the Holy of Holies; and then we pass within the veil by faith; and there we stand, and with the eye of faith, we behold God enthroned upon the Mercy Seat, sprinkled by the blood of Christ. Further, as reasonable men, looking at the cross of Christ, we see there the most cogent reasons for presenting ourselves, our souls and bodies a living Sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is our reasonable service (Rom_12:1).

This doctrine of the Atonement is the root of Christian practice, and they, who impugn that doctrine, are not only undermining the foundations of Christian faith, but also of Christian morality. This was clearly evinced even in the Apostolic age, by the licentiousness and profligacy, engendered by heretical doctrines, against which St. John contends in his Epistles, concerning the Incarnation and Death of Christ.

We cannot adequately estimate the moral heinousness of sin, without considering the sacrifice which it cost to redeem us from its power and guilt. We cannot duly understand the obligations of love and obedience, under which we lie to Christ, and the motives which constrain us to holiness, without remembering that we are not our own, but have been bought with a price—the blood of Christ—and are therefore bound to glorify Him in our bodies which are His. See 1Co_6:20.

Accordingly, St. John, having stated the doctrine of the Atonement, proceeds and continues to the end of the Epistle, to enforce the moral duties consequent on this doctrine. “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” He teaches us to contend earnestly for the doctrine of the Atonement, as the groundwork of Christian duty to God and man. Cf. Pearson on the Creed, art. 10. pp. 670–688.—M.].

HOMILETICAL AND PRACTICAL

In love, even in God’s glorious Love thou livest—well, let love live also in thee!—the primal fount of the Love in God streams round thee, and onward to thee, also through thy heart; wilt thou enjoy it without having part thereof?—Out of thee must shine forth that which has been manifested to thee, even the love and kindness of God thy Saviour, which seeks that which is lost. Brotherly love must grow warm in filial love which has been kindled at the Father’s heart.—In thy child people recognize a member of thy family, thy race; and ought not our heavenly Father to be recognized in thee? Therefore exercise thyself in love of the brethren!—Dost thou boast of thy knowledge of God, of understanding the Holy Scripture? prove it in thy brotherly love!—In nature thou seest His handiwork, the traces of His Omnipotence, in Christ the love-purpose of His heart, His peace-thoughts respecting thee (cf. Doctrinal and Ethical No. 2). He takes care that thy sins be atoned for, that thou become not estranged from Him, or keep remote from His life; do not build anew at the wall of partition between Him and thee; such building destroys thy life and thy salvation.—The anticipating offices of friendship are gratifying and humiliating; realize and receive the prevenient grace of God.—As He took the initiative in creation, so He had to take it also in redemption, which is also a creation; and how Has He done it! Though without thee He could create thee, yet Ho neither can nor will save thee without thee.—Above thee rules thy Father, for thee the Son is sent, in thee works His Spirit; do not hinder the work of God for and in thee; do not in unkindness to thyself and thy brethren arrest the perfecting of His work of love.—Do not reject the testimony of eye-and ear-witnesses; surrender to it, receive it in faith, hold it fast in confession; exercise thyself in the love which thou believest and knowest. For to be unloving is to be ungodly, and to be ungodly is to be unloving. If thou art disposed to disparage confession, recollect that like love it radiates from faith; confession is the love of the mouth, love is the confession of the deed, and both come from the heart.—Behind the judgments in the world’s history and in the history of thy life, there is a judgment, to stand in which is salvation and bliss.—The unloving must be undone in the judgment of Him who is Love, before the Judge who desired to become the Saviour.—That cannot be our desire in life which does not give us confidence in the last judgment.—Fear, which does not strengthen but expels love, is worthless; so is also that love, which is unable to overcome fear (cf. Doctrinal and Ethical, NO. 7).—Brotherly love, in comparison with the love of God, is as inferior as is rendering unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s, in comparison with rendering unto God, the things that are God’s; but on that account both must not be undervalued, for both are enjoined upon us. Still it is certain that when the less is wanting, the greater has no room and cannot find the ability to practise it.—Behold of brotherly love: 1. The origin. 2. The measure. 3. The power. 4. The growth. 5. The prize and victory.—Only in obedience to the will of God thou growest in the nature of God and art changing from a creature into a child, from a servant into an heir of God.—The glory of love: 1. Whence is it? 2. Where was it manifested? 3. What does it effect? 4. whither; does it lead?—The power of love 1. on earth with reference to the brethren, even to hostile ones; 2. in heaven, in the judgment, before God and Jesus Christ, the Holy One.—The perfecting of love to the brethren Isaiah 1. difficult, 2. appointed, 3. sure, 4. glorious.

Bernard:—God is Love: what then is more precious than love? And he that abides in love, abides in God; what then is more sure than love?

Augustine:—Thou beholdest the Trinity, when thou beholdest Love, for there are three, he that loveth, he that is loved, and reciprocal love.

Luther:—For what shall one say much of it? If one says in a lengthy way, that it is a lofty, noble qualitas in the soul and the most precious and perfect of virtues, as the philosophers and work-teachers discourse of it; all this is nothing in comparison with this word which he pours forth in overflowing eloquence that “God is Love,” and that His Being and Nature is wholly Love. If any tine would paint and produce a likeness of God, he must produce a picture which is wholly love; as if the Divine Nature were nothing else than an oven and fire of love, filling heaven and earth. And again, if Love could be painted and portrayed, it ought to be a picture that is neither real and human, nor angelic and heavenly, but God Himself. See thus the Apostle understands to paint here, that he represents God and Love as identical, in order that by such a noble, precious and lovely picture He may draw and attract us more to Himself and to make us strive to have love among ourselves and to beware of envy, hatred and discord. For as Love is a picture of God, neither a dead picture nor painted on paper, but a living Being of Divine Nature, burning and overflowing with whatever is good, so hatred and envy are a veritable picture of the devil, not human or devilish only, but the devil himself, who is nothing in his nature but an eternal burning of hatred and envy of God and all His works, both man and all creatures; so that that would be the best picture of the devil which would represent all hatred and envy.—As there are also among us still many who hear and teach the Gospel with us, use the same sacraments and affect the manners of genuine Christians; but they are among us like chaff among the wheat; if the battle approaches it becomes manifest whose they are and whither they belong. For there is nothing but pride, vanity, envy, contempt and the devil himself.—It is not a great art to begin a Christian life and love; but it is an art and a task to abide therein and perseveringly to continue therein especially in the presence of temptation and opposition. Although there still are many rough, coarse people that fall off spontaneously like rotten worm-eaten apples or pears, and proceed drowned in their avarice, pride, envy, etc., they are spoiled, useless fruit, wholly unprofitable, that shall and can not remain. But we refer to those who are blown off or struck down by wind and weather, that is, those who suffer themselves to be changed by temptations and thoughts like these: Why should I abide by the doctrine? I well perceive, that it yields no other returns than those of being burdened with the disfavour, contempt, enmity, rage and fury of all the world, that I must risk my body and life, and must ever take the lead against the devil, the world and the flesh, etc. Who can come up to this and persevere, if that is all he is to get?—But it is not to be so; the true course is rather to tear through all opposition, to proceed without heeding obstacles, whether we meet with the sour or the sweet, however it fare with us, be it friend or enemy, or the devil himself and ever to think: I have not entered upon this work in order that the people should give, love or reward me; and therefore no desisting from it though I receive the reward of ingratitude, envy and hatred. It (the world) shall not be so ill to me, as to overcome me with its ill: I will the rather, in opposition to it, continue to do good, regardless of thee or any one else, but for the sake of my Lord Christ, even as He did and still doeth.

Starke:—Have we become partakers of the Divine Nature, if we are heavenly-minded and lead a heavenly life? It is infallible. As much true love, so much resemblance to God. He is a wise teacher who grounds his exhortations more on the Gospel than on the Law. The power and efficacy of encouragements are in proportion to their friendliness and lovingness.—You say much concerning God, but lack the best thing. You know Him in words, but deny Him in works. You do not know Him at all and will not be known of Him.—In order that one, provoked to anger, may not be overcome by the temptation and succumb, he should forthwith remember that “God is Love.” That will be a good medicine to him and preserve him.—None can attain the life of glory without having first experienced here on earth the life of grace in Christ.—Holy Scripture does not expatiate in multiplied phrases which mean the same thing; but what it does repeat, is peculiarly emphatic, and intended to be carefully remembered.—Nothing can be more sweet, agreeable and delightful to us poor men in the vale of misery of this world, than to hear and to receive the assurance that God loves us. The love of God is the cause and rule of our love.—Love is not the cause of our union with God, but it assures, cements, confirms, and preserves it.—Beloved, though sometimes you do not feel any thing of the grace of the union of God and your heart, if you love cordially and abide in love, you have sufficient evidence that you are nevertheless united with God.—None is able to commend love to others with a good conscience, joyfulness and success, who does not himself walk in love. Preachers, more especially, ought to remember that when they exhort others to love, they themselves should copy the example of Christ and practise love.—God is willing, if we do not hinder Him, to make His love more full and to increase its efficacy; and then all the powers of the inner man do also grow in us, and among their number, the love of our neighbour.—Of what avail are the best testimonials if conscience contradicts them? A heart, full of love, is the best witness of friendship with God that endures also in the fire of temptation.—Thou art pleased when a loved friend comes to see thee, and is thy guest for a few days. Rejoice! God, thy best friend, dwells in thee, abides with thee, and possesses thee altogether, but thou art His property and possession. With God thou hast all things.—The love of God manifested in Jesus Christ, is the most excellent object of our faith and knowledge. The more we study it, the greater is our taste of its sweetness.—A glorious mark of the Christian religion as the only Divine religion, viz.: it effects so great a union between man and God, that God is in man and man in God.—O, wicked man, how canst thou be joyful in anticipation of the judgment-day? Beware that thou do deceive thyself with a false security instead of joyfulness!—Good Christian, whenever thou art about to do or to omit a thing, ask thyself: did my Saviour also do or omit this? It will be of great benefit to thee and happily further thee in thy Christian course.—Be not afraid if thou art summoned before an earthly court of justice; if thou lookest joyfully forward to the great judgment of the world, why shouldest thou not be equally joyful in respect of a little human judgment day? Wherever a Christian may be, he should always suffer himself to be seen without fear or dismay. [Verse of old German hymn.—M.].

A. H. Francke:—One droplet of faith is more glorious than a whole ocean of science, even though it be the historical science of the Divine word.

Heubner:—Love has illuminating power, while hatred darkens the soul. The more you love, the greater the brightness of your knowledge; the more you love, the less it is possible for you to be deceived.—Want of love is a token of want of real knowledge of God. All knowledge, all theology must be rooted in love. Theology without the love of God is deception and show. What dry metaphysics have often been called religion and philosophy of religion, without containing a breath of love!—God who is Love can only be known e praxi, ex usu; as long as I have not made personal experience of the infinite Love of God, I can at the most only repeat what others say of God. Lauding the love of God from what is seen of Him in nature, is not the shadow of the love of God in Christ.—Proud philosophy could assert virtue and morality without the love of God and even go as far as to maintain that virtue without religion is even stronger and purer [than virtue with religion—M.].—Want of love to God is the most telling proof of the fall. For in the statu integro our first sign of life ought to be love to God, even as a babe is naturally drawn to its mother’s breast. It is true that our love to God proceeds from a sense of shame, from conviction [of sin and ingratitude—M.]; but that cannot now be altered: and he that would deny it ought first to turn the whole world round. And who will most readily own it? They who have begun to love God: they are painfully aware how little they love God!—If there had been no apostasy, no breach, what necessity would there be for reconciliation? If reconciliation could have been effected without the Son, by our own efforts, by our own improvement and amending, what purpose would have been served by the sending of the Son?—This is the miracle of love in God, that He kept immovable in His Love and continued to love His creature now as ever, sought the creature although the creature had rebelled in enmity against Him. The love of God, therefore is eternal, unchangeable and having its cause in Himself, without having ever been greater or less than it is. This miracle of love no man can know before he has become aware of his misery, has had his eyes opened and seen with tearful eyes how loving the Lord is.—God has loved us; He has also deemed my neighbour worthy of His love; if God loves him, am I to refuse loving him? A knowledge of the love of God that has remained unfruitful, is not yet perfected.—There is sympathy or antipathy between the plants of God’s planting and of those of his enemy’s planting. The children of God are sensible of the spirit of affinity or antipathy in others. So it is said of Coccejus, who beyond all other things strove after a pure heart, that he frequently knew men at the first encounter.—He that underrates historical evidence, overthrows the whole foundation of Christianity and opens the gate and the door to all deception and delusion. Historical knowledge and personal spiritual life-experience together constitute true Christianity. God is through and through Love, His whole Essence, His real Nature is Love, i.e. is essentially His property to communicate Himself, to impart Himself, to cause His glory and felicity to stream forth on others [i.e. His creatures—M.], as it is the essential property of the sun to shine. It is true that the love of God, like the heat of the sun, manifests itself to men only by way of gradation. God is Love to all who stand in love and turn to His Love, but He is a consuming fire to those who stand outside of love. Love spurned brings torment: evil men, because of their own guilt, experience a sense of wrath. Every thing depends upon the attitude of men towards God.—The Bible is, as it were, the trumpet of the love of God, not nature, by a long way; it is only to believing Christians that nature becomes the trumpet of the love of God. The first tones of the love of God may be heard in Genesis 1, 3.; but they sound loudest in the New Testament.—Man is not lost as long as he believes in love; but he is lost, when he loses that belief. Chrysostom says that the devil would be saved if he could believe in the love of God.—Love changes God the Judge into God the Father.—He that cannot confide in love, is unable to endure the look of the Most Loving. Who but those who have pure and indefatigable love are in this world like God and representatives of God?—Where we experience fear, a secret dread, aversion to and distrust of God, love is not yet perfected; fear is the first discipline of boys.—1Jn_4:19. The whole wonderful structure of the Christian system; the one half is morality: to love God with every thing implied therein; the other half the doctrine of faith, the conditioning ground: the love of God to us sinners in Christ. The ground must be before the superstructure.—Love is most touching where it prevents the unworthy.—We can only exhibit our love to God the Unseen in His children that are seen.—Christianity indissolubly unites the love of God and the love of the brethren; its characteristic is that in it religion and virtue commingle in the Spirit of love.

Gerok (1Jn_4:7-12): Love the fundamental law of the world: 1. As written in heaven: for God is Love. 2. As written on the cross: for Christ is Love. 3. As written in our hearts: for Christianity is Love.

Leonhardi (1Jn_4:9): The manifestation of the love of God to us in holy Christmas. It shines forth: 1. from the Divine Christmas-gift, and 2. from its blessed destination for us. It was manifested 1. in God sending His only-begotten Son into the world, 2. in that we should live through Him.

Clauss:—The sending of Christ is the greatest proof of Divine Love. 1. Christ is the Only Begotten. 2. He brings life to the world.

The same (on 1Jn_4:12-16):—The mystery of the Divine Essence. 1. In which sense does It always remain concealed? 2. In what form has It been revealed? 3. With what eye only are we able to recognize It?

Wilhelm:—The Church of the Lord. 1. The good it has; 2. The confession it makes: the signs whereby it is known.

Leonhardi:—Whereon is based our Trinity-rejoicing? 1. We know that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world (1Jn_4:14-15); We have learned in the Son the love which the Father has in regard to us (1Jn_4:15-16); we know from our love to one another, that He has given us of His Spirit.

Luthardt (1Jn_4:9, Advent-Sermon):—The love of God in Christ is our life. I. The love of God; 2. The sending of his Song of Solomon 3. Our life.

Spurgeon (1Jn_4:19):—Real love viewed 1. as to its origin, 2. as to its maintenance, 3. as to its progress.

Ahlfeld (Marriage address on 1Jn_4:19, and Sermon on 1Jn_4:9-16):—With threefold bonds are we tied to the Triune God. 1. In the love among one another God abides in us; 2. In the Holy Ghost we abide in God and God in us; 3. In the confession of the Son of God, God abides in us and we in God.

On the Epistle for the first Sunday after Trinity, 1Jn_4:16-21.

Heubner:—The belief, that God is Love, our only consolation in evil times. 1. Why is it thus? 2. How do we become capable of this consolation? The Divine nature of love. 1. Proof (1Jn_4:16-18); 2. Inferences (1Jn_4:19-21).—God is Love.—1. Explanation. 2. Proof (also Defence); 3. Duties, arising therefrom, incumbent upon us.—Belief in the love of God. 1. Description of what it is, and whereon it is founded; 2. The power of this belief; 3. Inferences (resistance to attacks on that belief; its animation by the imitation of Christ).

C. J. Nitzsch (1813 during the siege of Wittenberg, inaugural Sermon on the Epistle for 1st Sunday after Trinity, 1Jn_4:16-21):—The value of true love under the fear of exciting prospects of the future. Love exalts us above the whole of our earthly future. Her pains are deep, her complainings sincere; yes, she looks so much the more sadly out into the future, because she can never suffer for herself alone, but true love can nevermore cease to confide or despair of deliverance. To all true love is accorded the privilege of overcoming the world and to soar beyond time in the strength of true faith. She casts the brightest looks into the shadow of the future. She is not blind through fear, and knows that every time will have its own salvation, its own footprints of Divine Love, from the ruins of the old there will spring up the new and the better, in the school of distress there will mature and prosper a nobler liberty and wisdom of the nations, our children and the grandchildren of our race in a rejuvenated world will think with emotion and edification of their fathers, and we ourselves shall never fall short of the assistance and comfort which we need in our weakness. And bright-eyed love has also an indefatigable arm; it makes the best provision for whatever may be in store.

Schleiermacher:—Perfection of love. 1. The token, indicated by the Apostle, of the perfection of love. 2. That that, whereof he treats, can only be achieved by the perfection of love.

Kapff:—God is Love, and love only makes us one with God.

Gerok:—Another love sermon. 1. The eternal fountain of love. 2. The holy duty of love. 3. The true test of love. 4. The blissful happiness of love.

Ranke:—Life in love is the noblest life! let that be our conviction; we will abide in this love! let that be our resolve; then God will abide with us, let that be our blessing.

J. Müller:—Love, the Essence of the Christian life. 1. The Christian life begins with love to God through Christ; 2. it develops into love to our neighbour; 3. it perfects itself in the perfection of this twofold love.

Harless:—Who knows and loves the living God who is Love? 1. He who instead of deifying his own love, knows and loves God in His love-manifestation in Christ; 2. he who, instead of loving God without fear, in his love fears God without torment; 3. he who, instead of calling in such love all the world his brethren, loves every one, but after the manner of God in Christ.

Spitta:—The word of the Holy Apostle John concerning love. 1. A word of doctrine, wherein he teaches us love; 2. A word of exhortation, wherein he exhorts us to practice love.

Claus Harms:—Let us love God! Consider 1. The ground of the love of God, 2. its power and manifestation inwardly, 3. its power and manifestation outwardly.

Bobe:—God is love! 1. A confession of gratitude (1Jn_4:8); 2. a voice of comfort (1Jn_4:17-18); 3. a rule of life (1Jn_4:19-20).

Florey:—The hallowing power of love on the heart of man. 1. It unites the heart of man separated from God (1Jn_4:16); 2. it calms—the anxious heat (1Jn_4:17-18); 3. it warms—the cold heart (1Jn_4:19); 4. it purifies—the impure and sinful heart (1Jn_4:20); it animates and fructifies—the dead heart (1Jn_4:21).

Genzken (Confession-address):—What do I yet lack of true Christianity? 1. Its beginning is that we know the love which God has to us. 2. Its progress, that we abide in this love; 3. Its full measure, that the experience of its hallowing power expels the fear of death and the judgment; 4. The test of all this is brotherly love.

[Pearson:—1Jn_4:9. Our belief in Christ, as the eternal Son of God, is necessary to raise us unto a thankful acknowledgment of the infinite love of God, appearing in the sending of His only-begotten Son into the world to die for sinners. This love of God is frequently extolled and admired by the Apostles. See Joh_3:16; Rom_8:5; Rom_8:32. If we look upon all this as nothing else but that God should cause a man to be born after another manner than other men, and when he was so born after a peculiar manner, yet a mortal man, should deliver him to die for the sins of the world; I see no such great expression of His love in this way of redemption more than would have appeared, if He had redeemed us in any other way. It is true indeed, that the reparation of lapsed man is no act of absolute necessity in respect of God, but that he hath as freely designed our redemption as our creation: considering the misery from which we are redeemed, and the happiness to which we are invited, we cannot but acknowledge the singular love of God, even in the act of redemption itself; but yet the Apostles have raised that consideration higher, and placed the choicest mark of the love of God in choosing such means, and performing in that manner our reparation, by sending His Only-begotten into the world; by not sparing His own Son, by giving and delivering Him up to be scourged and crucified for us, and the estimation of this act of God’s love must necessarily increase proportionably to the dignity of the Son thus sent into the world; because the more worthy the Person of Christ before He suffered, the greater His condescension unto such a suffering condition; and the nearer His relation to the Father, the greater His love to us, for whose sakes He sent Him to suffer. Wherefore to derogate any way from the Person and Nature of our Saviour before He suffered, is so far to undervalue the love of God, and consequently to come short of that acknowledgment and thanksgiving which is due unto Him for it. If then the sending of Christ into the world were the highest act of the love of God which could be expressed; if we be obliged to a return of thankfulness some way correspondent to such infinite love; if such a return can never be made without a true sense of that infinity, and a sense of that infinity of love cannot consist without an apprehension of an infinite dignity of nature in the Person sent; then it is absolutely necessary to believe, that Christ is so the Only-begotten Son of the Father, as to be of the same substance with Him, of glory equal, of majesty coëternal.—M.].

[Barrow: (on 1Jn_4:9).—How indeed possibly could God have demonstrated a greater excess of kindness to us, than by thus, for our sake and good, sending His dearest Son out of His bosom into this sordid and servile state, subjecting Him to all the infirmities of our frail nature, exposing Him to the worst inconveniences of our low condition? What expressions can signify, what comparisons can set out, the stupendous vastness of this kindness? If we should imagine that a great prince should put his only son (a son most lovely, and worthily most beloved) into rags, should dismiss him from his court, should yield him up to the hardest slavery, merely to the intent that he hereby might redeem from captivity the meanest and basest of his subjects, how faint a resemblance would this be of that immense goodness, of that incomparable mercy, which in this instance the King of all the world hath declared toward us His poor vassals, His indeed unworthy rebels?—And what greater reason of joy can there be, than such an assurance of His love, on whose love all our good dependeth, in whose love all our felicity consisteth? What can be more delightful than to view the face of our Almighty Lord so graciously smiling upon us?—M.].

[Bernard, de Nativ. Serm. 1. Apparuerat ante potentia in rerum creatione, apparebat Sapientia in earum gubernatione; sed benignitas misericordiæ nunc maxime apparuit in humanitate.

P. Leo M., de Nativ. Serm. 1. Semper quidem diversis modis, multisque mensuris humano generi bonitas divina consuluit, et plurima providentiæ suæ munera omnibus retro seculis clementer impertüt; sed in novissimis temporibus omnem abundantiam solitæ benignitatis excessit; quando in Christ. ipsa ad peccatores misericordia, ipsa ad errantes veritas, ipsa ad mortuos vita descendit, etc.—M.].

[Secker: (on 1Jn_4:18).—For want of cultivating the love of

God, the thoughts of Him are dreadful to the generality of men. Too many are tempted to wish in their hearts, if they durst, that He were not, or had no regard to human conduct; and if any of them can but persuade themselves for a while on the strength of some poor cavil, to hope what they wish, they triumph in the imagined discovery, that sets them so much at ease. From the same default, humbler and righter minds consider Him very often in no better light, than as a rigid lawgiver arbitrarily exacting a number of almost impracticable duties, and enforcing them with the dread of insupportable punishments: whence they are ready to sink under the terrors of religion, even while they are conscientiously fulfilling its precepts. Looking on God as the object of love would rectify these mistaken conceptions entirely. We should all see and feel, that a Being of infinite goodness, directed by infinite wisdom, is the highest blessing: and the want of such an one would be the greatest calamity that is possible: we should be satisfied that the strictest of His laws, and the severest of their sanctions, are means which He knows to be needful for our good; that His mercy will forgive on repentance our past transgressions of them; that His grace will strengthen us to keep them better; and that He will never reject a soul affectionately devoted to Him. In proportion then as we are so, all terrifying apprehensions will vanish from us. “There is no fear in love” saith the Apostle; “but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment.”—M.].

[Jortin:—The love of God differs so much from the love of sensible objects, and from our other passions, that it can hardly be called a passion in the same sense in which they are so called. It differs in this, that it is at first raised, and afterwards kept up, by reason. It is therefore a religious habit and virtue, which no other passion is, unless it hath God and morality and religion for its objects. In this also it differs from them, that being both produced and preserved by reason, it is a sober and moderate affection, accompanied with no blind impetuosity, no restless uneasiness, no violent commotion of mind, like other passions; and as it riseth not to the same height with them, so neither does it sink as low at other times, but shews itself in an uniform and sedate love of righteousness, of every thing that God approves. Some persons, not duly considering this, sincerely desire to please God, and carefully endeavour to lead a good life; and yet sometimes are afraid that they have no love for God, because they experience not in themselves that warmth of affection, to which others pretend, and which is expressed and required in some books of devotion. They may learn from the Scriptures, that where there is obedience there is always love; and that whoever delights in holiness, and justice, and goodness, and mercy, and truth, may reasonably conclude that his heart is right towards God. Others looking upon the love of God as upon a mere passion, a disposition of mind producing devotion and ending there, have excited in themselves a high zeal and affection for God, and a firm persuasion, that they were His favourites: and, having done this, have thought themselves arrived at Christian perfection; whilst at the same time they have perhaps been under the dominion of evil habits, and addicted to wrath, malice, covetousness, censoriousness, injustice, pride, ambition, sensuality. This strange mixture of hypocrisy, vice and enthusiasm, hath been common in all ages, and ever will be so. There are always those, whose religion and devotion is, to use the words of St. Paul, “sounding brass,” or clamour and confidence; whilst true goodness is modest and unaffected, and teaches men to make less noise, to live more honestly. To preserve us from such delusions, Christ hath told us, that we should either keep His commandments, or not pretend to love Him; and that it signifies nothing to say to Him, “Lord, Lord,” and not to do what He requires.—Other love towards God than this the Scriptures know not: they never recommend that spiritual fever, those warm transports, and that bold familiarity, which some zealots affect; nor that cold, refined, mysterious, and disinterested devotion, which another sort of fanatics require: for, first, the love of God is sober reason, and not blind passion; reverence, and not presumption: secondly, it is gratitude; and we “love Him, because He first loved us.”—M.].

[Horne: (on 1Jn_4:21).—Observe the firm basis on which is forever fixed the morality of the Gospel. How clear in its principles! how powerful in its motives! “We love God, because He first loved us;” “and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. If God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.” For “he who loveth Him that begat, loveth Him also that is begotten of Him.” The head of the most unlearned cannot but comprehend the meaning of these few words: and the heart of the most learned must feel the force of them. Such is the ground of that charity, which performeth every duty of social life, and fulfilleth the law. To inculcate and produce in us this heavenly disposition, is the end of the Gospel and all its doctrines. It is deduced in Scripture even from those that may seem to be of the most mysterious and speculative nature: the unity of the Divine Persons; the Divinity and the satisfaction of Christ; doctrines, which cannot therefore be denied or degraded, without removing or proportionably lessening the most endearing and affecting incitements to the Christian life. Indeed the happy temper of a Christian is the natural and kindly effect of the great evangelical truths, when treasured up in the mind, and made the subjects of frequent meditation. The ideas of a reconciled God; a Saviour and Intercessor on high; a gracious Spirit, informing our ignorance, purifying our hearts, relieving our necessities, alleviating our cares, and comforting our sorrows: such ideas as these enable us to bridle the appetites of the body, and to calm the emotions of the mind; to bear with patience and cheerfulness the calamities of life: they sweeten the tempers, and harmonize the affections, resolving them all into one, diversified according to the different situation of its proper object; of which grief laments the absence, and fear apprehends the loss; desire pursues it; hope has it in view; anger rises against obstruction, and joy triumphs in possession. Thus religion fixes the heart on its treasure, in faith without wavering, and resignation without reserve: it draws the affections upwards towards heaven, as the sun does the exhalations of the earth, to return in fruitful showers, and bless the world. M.].

[Sermons and Sermon Themes.

1Jn_4:8. Leland, John, The goodness of God. 4. Serm. Disc. I. p. 225.

Dwight, T., Benevolence of God is proved by the works of creation and providence.—Benevolence of God, as exhibited by revelation.—Theology I. pp. 119, 139.

Scott, T., God is Love. Works, 4, 69.

1Jn_4:9. Tillotson, Abp., The love of God to men in the incarnation of Christ. Serm. 6, 3.

1Jn_4:9-10. Simeon, C., The love of God in giving His Son for us. Works 20, 479.

1Jn_4:10. Henry, Phil., Christ is our Propitiation. M. Henry’s Works. Appendix, 40.

1Jn_4:10-11. The unpurchased love of God in the redemption of the world by Jesus Christ, a great argument for Christian benevolence.

1Jn_4:11. Horne, Bp., Charity recommended on its true motive. Disc. 5, 441.

1Jn_4:18. Saurin, La tranquillité qui nait de la parfaite charité Serm. 6. 483.

1Jn_4:18-21. M’Cheyne, R. M., The perfect love of God to us. Remains, 368.

1Jn_4:19. Erskine, R., Preventing love; or God’s love the cause of our love to Him. Works, 2, 1.

Wardlaw, R., On the question how far disinterestedness is an essential quality in legitimate love to God. Christian Ethics, 278.

Chalmers, T., Gratitude, not a sordid affection. Works, 8, 222.

1Jn_4:20. Howe, John, The love of God and our brother, considered in Seventeen Sermons. Works, 6, 1.

Williams, Isaac, Love the mark of God’s children. Serm. 2, 51.

1Jn_4:21. Smalridge, Bp., The necessary connection between the love of God and our brother. Sermons 310.

Wilberforce, S., The love of the brethren. Sermons on several occasions. 78.—M.].

Footnotes:

[8]1Jn_4:7. [German: “The love.”—M.]

[9]1Jn_4:7. πᾶςὁἀγαπῶν without τὸν θεὸν, B. C. Sin. al.—A. adds τὸν θεὸν.

[10]1Jn_4:8. [German: “Knew not God;” Alford: “hath never known God;” Lücke “hath never learned to know Him at all.” The force of the Aorist that he hath not once known God should be brought out.—M.]

[11]1Jn_4:8. ὁ μὴ ἀγαπῶν οὐκ ἔγνω τὸν θεὸν is wanting in Cod. Sin., but adds ἔγνωκεν instead of γινώσκει (from 1Jn_5:7). A.

[12]1Jn_4:9. [ἐν ἡμῖν=German: “in us” (an uns) “in regard to us.” Alford.—M.]

[13]1Jn_4:9. [ὅτι, not “because” but “that;” so German, Alford, Lillie.—M.]

[14]1Jn_4:9. [German: “His Son, the only begotten.”—M.]

[15]1Jn_4:10. ἐν τούτῳ; render “In this” as in 1Jn_4:9. instead of the unnecessary variation “herein” of E. V.—M.]

[16]1Jn_4:10. [German: “exists” Wordsworth “consists.”—M.]

[17]1Jn_4:10. αὐτὸς, the most authentic reading; A has ἐκεῖνος.

[18]1Jn_4:10. Instead of ἀπεστείλεν, Cod. Sin. reads ἀπέσταλκεν as in 1Jn_4:9; 1Jn_4:14.

[19]1Jn_4:10. [German: “And sent His Son as propitiation for our sins.” More correctly: “And sent His Son a propitiation for our sins.” No need for the supplement to be in E. V.—M.]

[20]1Jn_4:12 [German: “God hath no one ever seen.” Alford: “God hath no one ever beheld.” But render more idiomatically: “No one has ever beheld God.”—M.

[21]1Jn_4:12 [μένει, μένομεν, etc., had better be rendered uniformly “abide.”—M.]

[22]1Jn_4:12 There is a great variation in the readings of the final words: ἐν ἡμῖν before τετελειῳμένη ἐστίν A. Vulg; ἐν ἡμῖν after τετελειωμένη ἐστίν G. K. and many versions; ἐν ἡμῖν between τετελ. and ἐστίν Cod. Sin. B. [Alford: The love of Him is perfected in us.—M.]

[23]1Jn_4:13. [ἐν τούτῳ=“In this.” See note 7 above.—M.]

[24]1Jn_4:13. [German: “that.”—M.]

[25]1Jn_4:14. [German: “As Saviour of the world.” So Alford, Lillie. No need for the supplement to be in E. V.—M.]

[26]1Jn_4:15. Instead of ὃς ἂν, B. reads ἐὰν.

[27]1Jn_4:15. [German: “confesseth;” so Alford who justly objects to all Futures “shall confess,” and Futuri exacti “shall have confessed” and recommends the English Present with an exegesis,—viz., “that this Present betokens not a repeated act and habit, but a great act once for all introducing the man into a state of ὁμολογῆσαι.”—M.]

[28]1Jn_4:15. B. adds Χριστός after Ἰησοῦς.

[29]1Jn_4:16. [ἐνἡμῖν. German: “an uns” literally “at or on us“ to which “concerning us” or “in regard to us” come nearest.—M.]

[30]1Jn_4:16. B. G. K. Cod. Sin. add μένει, which owing to the same conclusion of the preceding verse was more likely to be omitted than added.

[31]1Jn_4:17. [“In this.” See note 7 above.—M.]

[32]1Jn_4:17. Cod. Sin. adds ἐν ἡμῖν after μεθ’ ἡμῶν, probably an error (with reference to 1Jn_4:12) as ἐν ἀγάπῃ τῆς κρίσεως is plainly a slip of the pen.

[33]1Jn_4:17. [German: “In this love with us is perfected;” Alford: “In this is love perfected with us.” The rendering “our” of E. V. is almost solitary and should be changed. See below in Exeget. and Critical.—M.]

[34]1Jn_4:17. [German: “Because as He is, we also are in this world.” So Alford and Lillie, who transpose, however: “Are we also, etc.”—M.]

[35]1Jn_4:18. [German: “Fear is not in love.” Alford: “Fear existeth not, etc.”—M.]

[36]1Jn_4:18. [German: “Punishment;” so Lillie, see note in Exeget. and Critical.—M.]

[37]1Jn_4:18. [German: “Is not perfected in love.” Alford: “Hath not been perfected in [His] love.”—M.]

[38]

1Jn_4:19. Cod. Sin. reads τὸν θεὸν after ἀγαπῶμεν; G. K. αὐτὸν [A. B. omit either.—M.] A inserts οὖν after ἡμεῖς.

[German: “We love God.”—M.]

[39]1Jn_4:20. [German: “If one says … hateth …” Translate: “If any say … hate …”—M.]

[40]

1Jn_4:20. πῶς, A. [K. L. al. Tischend. Alford—M.]; οὐ, B. Cod. Sin. [Lach. Buttm. al.—M.] The true reading cannot be determined by the analogy with 1Jn_3:17 (Düsterdieck), or by the consideration that the interrogative is more expressive than the negative (Huther).

[German: “How can he love God (or: cannot love God) whom he hath not seen?”—M.]

[41]1Jn_4:21. [German: “Also love his brother.” Doddridge—“Love also his brother” Alford, Lillie.—M.]

8. The power of faith (1Jn_5:1-5), its testimony (1Jn_5:6-10), and substance (1Jn_5:11-12)

Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures (Critical, Doctrinal, and Homiletical), ed. John Peter Lange, English translation edited by Philip Schaff (1864–1880) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

4:7-21 John explains the source of a Christian’s love and its outworking.

Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

1Jn 4:7. Ἀγαπῶμεν, let us love) From that very doctrine, which he has just defended, he now derives an exhortation to love. See 1Jn 4:9. The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit: 1Jn 4:2; Rom 5:5.—ἡ ἀγάπη, love) All love is from God.

Bengel's Gnomon of the New Testament — English translation (T&T Clark, Edinburgh, 1860) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

1Jn_4:7-8. Exhortation to mutual love, and the establishing of this.

The address ἀγαπητοί emphatically introduces the command: ἀγαπῶμεν.

The object ἀλλήλους shows that here also it is not human love in general, but Christian brotherly love that is the subject. Mutual love is the holiest calling of Christians who are τέκνα τοῦ Θεοῦ, for ἡ ἀγάπη ἐκ τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐστι,[261] i.e. love proceeds from God; Calovius: originem habet a Deo. Unsatisfactory is the explanation of Grotius: Deo maxime placet bonitas. ἡ ἀγάπη is used without a determining object, because it is love in its full extent that is meant.

καὶ πᾶς ὁ ἀγαπῶν ἐκ τοῦ Θεοῦ γεγέννηται κ.τ.λ.] Inference from what immediately precedes. If love is of God, then he who lives in love must also be born of God and know Him. The relation of ἀγαπᾷν and ἐκ τοῦ Θεοῦ γεγεννῆσθαι is not to be defined thus, that the former is the condition of the latter (de Wette), but thus, that the former is to be regarded as the criterion of the latter; to be born of God does not follow from love, but love follows from being born of God. The same relationship exists also between ἀγαπᾷν and γινώσκειν τὸν Θεόν;[262] what sort of a knowledge of God is meant, however, is seen from the close connection of ΓΙΝΏΣΚΕΙ with ἘΚ ΤΟῦ ΘΕΟῦ ΓΕΓΈΝΝΗΤΑΙ.1Jn_4:8. From the foregoing it follows further: Ὁ ΜῊ ἈΓΑΠῶΝ ΟὐΚ ἜΓΝΩ ΤῸΝ ΘΕΌΝ; ΟὐΚ ἜΓΝΩ, i.e. has not known. The reason is: ὅτι ὁ Θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστίν.

By this thought the preceding Ἡ ἈΓΆΠΗ ἘΚ ΤΟῦ ΘΕΟῦ ἘΣΤΊ receives its full comprehension.

ἈΓΆΠΗ is without the article, because it is considered as a general definition of the nature of God; so 1Jn_4:16, comp. 1Jn_1:5 : Ὁ ΘΕῸς Φῶς ἘΣΤΊ. Love is not so much a quality which God has, as rather the all-embracing total of what He is (Besser). Luther: Deus nihil est quam mera caritas; Grotius tamely: plenus est dilectione.

[261] Neander: The apostle does not here lay down a commandment of love; he does not want to impress on believers new motives for love, but to convince them that as sure as they are Gods children, this fact must he manifested by mutual love.As proof he adduces that love is of God, and therefore every one who loves is born of God.

[262] It was previously stated in this commentary: John does not here say that love flows from the knowledge of God, but that love, because it is of divine nature, necessarily brings with it the knowledge of God. This is incorrect, since γινώσκει τὸν Θεόν stands in the same relationship to ἀγαπῶν as ἐκ τοῦ Θεοῦ γεγέννηται does, even though it is in itself true also that only he who himself loves can really know God, who is love. For the correct explanation, see Lücke, Braune, Weiss. It has already been observed, however, that the last-named does not correctly state the connection between being born of God and the knowledge of God, as he makes the latter the condition of the former.

1Jn_4:7-21. After the apostle, induced by the appearance of the antichristian nature, has characterized the spirit of truth and the spirit of error, he passes on directly to a detailed account of the elements of faith and love alluded to in chap. 1Jn_3:23.

Meyer — Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament — English translation by Peter Christie, edited by Frederick Crombie (T&T Clark, 1880) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

1Jn 4:7-21 . The Blessedness of Love. “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God, and every one that loveth of God hath been begotten and is getting to know God. He that loveth not did not get to know God, because God is love. Herein was manifested the love of God in us, because His Son, His only-begotten, hath God commissioned into the world, that we may get life through Him. Herein is the love, not that we have loved God, but that He loved us and commissioned His Son as a propitiation for our sins.

“Beloved, if it was thus that God loved us, we also are bound to love one another. God no one hath ever yet beheld Him: if we love one another, God abideth in us and His love is perfected in us. Herein we get to know that we abide in Him and He in us, because of His Spirit He hath given us. And we have beheld and testify that the Father hath commissioned the Son as Saviour of the world. Whosoever confesseth that Jesus is the Son of God, God in him abideth and he in God. And we have got to know and have believed the love which God hath in us.

“God is love, and he that abideth in love in God abideth, and God in him abideth. Herein hath love been perfected with us so that we may have boldness in the Day of Judgment because, even as He is, we also are in this world. Fear there is not in love, but the perfect love casteth out fear, because fear hath punishment; and he that feareth hath not been perfected in love. We love because He first loved us . If one say, ‘I love God,’ and hate his brother, he is a liar. For he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, God whom he hath not seen, he cannot love. And this commandment have we from Him, that he that loveth God love also his brother.”

1Jn 4:7 . St. John reiterates the “old commandment” (1Jn 2:7-11 ). It is so all-important that he cares not though his readers be tired of hearing it. Cf. the anecdote which St. Jerome relates on Gal 6:10 : “Beatus Joannes Evangelista cum Ephesi moraretur usque ad ultimam senectutem, et vix inter discipulorum manus ad Ecclesiam deferretur, nec posset in plura vocem verba contexere, nihil aliud per singulas solebat proferre collectas nisi hoc: Filioli, diligite alterutrum. Tandem discipuli et fratres qui aderant, tædio affecti quod eadem semper audi-rent, dixerunt: Magister, quare semper hoc loqueris? Qui respondit dignam Joanne sententiam: Quia præceptum Domini est, et si solum fiat, sufficit.” Love is the divine nature, and those who love have been made partakers of the divine nature (2Pe 1:4 ); and by the practice of love they “get to know God” more and more.

The Expositor's Greek Testament, edited by W. Robertson Nicoll (1897–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

The first reason: Because it is a very divine thing: and therefore very meet for the sons of God: so that whosoever is void of it, cannot be said to know God aright.

He returneth to the commending of brotherly love and charity.

Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain. Text via Bolls.life.

Verse 7. Beloved, let us love one another] And ever be ready to promote each other's welfare, both spiritual and temporal.

For love is of God] And ever acts like him; he loves man, and daily loads him with his benefits. He that loveth most has most of God in him; and he that loveth God and his neighbour, as before described and commanded, is born of God, εκτουθεουγεγεννηται, is begotten of God-is a true child of his heavenly Father, for he is made a partaker of the Divine nature; and this his love to God and man proves.

Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

7 Beloved He returns to that exhortation which he enforces almost throughout the Epistle. We have, indeed, said, that it is filled with the doctrine of faith and exhortation to love. On these two points he so dwells, that he continually passes from the one to the other.

When he commands mutual love, he does not mean that we discharge this duty when we love our friends, because they love us; but as he addresses in common the faithful, he could not have spoken otherwise than that they were to exercise mutual love. He confirms this sentence by a reason often adduced before, even because no one can prove himself to be the son of God, except he loves his neighbors, and because the true knowledge of God necessarily produces love in us.

John Calvin's Commentaries (1540-1563) — public domain. Text from the Calvin Translation Society English edition (1840s-50s) via the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (ccel.org). Calvin's coverage is partial (roughly two-thirds of the Bible); uncommented books and verses are honest gaps, never fabricated. The 19th-century editor's footnotes and remarks are omitted so the notes are faithfully Calvin's own voice.

7–21. Love is the Mark of the Children of the God who is Love

7. Beloved, let us love one another] See on 1Jn_3:2. The transition seems abrupt, as if the Apostle had summarily dismissed an unwelcome subject. But the connexions of thought in S. John’s writings are often so subtle, that it is rash to assert anywhere that two consecutive verses or sections are entirely without connecting links. Two such links may be found here. 1. The power to love one another, no less than the power to confess the Incarnation, is the gift of the Spirit (1Jn_4:2; 1Jn_4:12-13). And faith and love mutually aid one another. This is the case even between man and man. Faith and trust soon pass into love. 2. The antichristian spirit is a selfish one; it makes self, i.e. one’s own intellect and one’s own interest, the measure of all things. Just as it severs the Divine from the human in Christ, so it severs Divine love from human conduct in man. ‘Beloved, let us do far otherwise. Let us love one another’.

For the third and last time in this Epistle the Apostle introduces the subject of brotherly love. First it was introduced as a consequence and sign of walking in the light (1Jn_2:7-11). Next it was introduced as a special form of righteousness and mark of God’s children (1Jn_3:10-18). Here it appears as a gift of the Spirit of God, a contrast to the antichristian spirit, and above all as an effluence from the very Being of God.

‘Love one another’ here, as in 1Jn_3:11, applies primarily to the mutual love of Christians. The love of Christians to unbelievers is not expressly excluded, but it is not definitely before the Apostle’s mind.

love is of God] And ‘we are of God’ (1Jn_4:6), and ‘ye are of God’ (1Jn_4:4); therefore there should be the family bond of love between us.

every one that loveth is born of God] This follows from the preceding statement. If God is the source of all love, then whatever love a man has in him comes from God; and this part of his moral nature is of Divine origin. Of ‘every one that loveth’ is this true, whether he be heathen or Christian: there is no limitation. If a Socrates or a Marcus Aurelius loves his fellow-men, it is by the grace of God that he does so. See concluding note on 1Jn_3:4.

knoweth God] He comes by experience to know Him by thus sharing the Divine nature.

The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Beloved, let its love one another,.... The apostle having finished what he proposed to say concerning the trying of spirits, returns to his former exhortation to brotherly love, and which comes with fresh force and strength; for since worldly men follow, hear, embrace, and cleave to the false teachers; such as are of God, and on the side of truth, should love one another, and their faithful ministers, and stand fast in one spirit by the truths of the Gospel, in opposition to every error:

for love is of God: to love one another is the command of God, it is his revealed will, and is well pleasing in his sight; it comes from him, is a gift of his grace, and a fruit of his Spirit, and which he teaches regenerate ones to exercise:

and everyone that loveth God, as the Alexandrian copy reads, or Christ, and the saints, who seem to be particularly meant:

is born of God; for love to the brethren is an evidence of regeneration; See Gill on Jo1 3:14;

and knoweth God; he knows God in Christ, and therefore loves those who have the grace of God in them, and the image of Christ upon them; he knows the mind and will of God, being taught of God to love the brethren; and he knows the love of God, and has had an experience of the grace of God, which influences him to love the saints.

John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

7 Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.

Ver. 7. Beloved, let us love one another] This beloved disciple breathes nothing but love; as if he had been born with love in his mouth, as they say.

John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Beloved, let us love one another - This verse introduces a new topic, the consideration of which occupies the remainder of the chapter. See the Analysis. The subject is one on which John dwells more than on any other - that of love. His own character especially inclined him to the exercise of love; and the remarkable affection which the Lord Jesus had shown for him, seems to have had the effect to give this grace a special prominence in his views of what constituted true religion. Compare Joh 13:23. On the duty here enjoined, see the Joh 13:34-35 notes, and 1Jo 3:11, 1Jo 3:23 notes.

For love is of God -

All true love has its origin in God.

(2)Real love shows that we have his Spirit, and that we belong to him.

(3)It assimilates us to God, or makes us more and more like him.

What is here said by the apostle is based on the truth of what he elsewhere affirms, 1Jo 4:8, that God is love. Hatred, envy, wrath, malice, all have their source in something else than God. He neither originates them, commends them, nor approves them.

And everyone that loveth, is born of God - Is a regenerated man. That is, everyone who has true love to Christians as such, or true brotherly love, is a true Christian. This cannot mean that everyone that loves his wife and children, his classmate, his partner in business, or his friend - his house, or his farms, or his horses, or his hounds, is a child of God; it must be understood as referring to the point under discussion. A man may have a great deal of natural affection toward his kindred; a great deal of benevolence in his character toward the poor and needy, and still he may have none of the love to which John refers. He may have no real love to God, to the Saviour, or to the children of God as such; and it would be absurd for such a one to argue because he loves his wife and children that therefore he loves God, or is born again.

Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

Let us love one another. This is the repeated admonition of St. John, the evangelist, both in this epistle and to the end of his life, as St. Jerome relates in his Epist. ad Galat. (cap. vi. tom. 4, part 1, p. 414) that the apostle being very old, and when carried to Church meetings of the Christians, being desired to give them some exhortation, he scarce said any thing, but "love one another;" and it being tedious to his disciples to hear always the same thing, they desired some other instruction, to whom (says St. Jerome) he gave this answer, worthy of St. John: that this was the precept of our Lord, and that if complied with, it was sufficient. --- Charity is of God, is love, is the fountain and source of all goodness and mercy, infinitely good in himself, and in his love and mercy towards mankind. This love and charity of God hath appeared by his sending his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. See John i. 14. --- Thus God having first loved us, (ver. 10) when we were sinners, and his enemies, let us not be so ungrateful as not to love him, and to love one another after his example. (Witham)

George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).

Beloved, let us love one another: in opposition to the malice and cruelty of these enemies to true and pure Christianity, he exhorteth to mutual love, not limited to themselves, as undoubtedly he did not intend, see note on 1Jo 3:14; but that they should do their part towards all others, letting it lie upon them, if it were not reciprocated and mutual.

For love is of God; this he presses as a further discrimination; nothing being more evidential of relation and alliance to God, than a duly regulated love, which is of him.

Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

Vers. 7-21. God is Love, and love is the surest test of birth from God. 1Jn_3:11, 12 St. John renews his exhortations to love, this time at greater length and in closer connexion with the other great subject of this second half of the Epistle, the birth from God.

Beloved (see on verse 1) The address is specially suitable where the subject is love. As before, we must not look for the chief purport of the section in the exhortation with which it opens. Just as "prove the spirits" is subordinate to "every spirit which confesseth," etc., so "let us love one another" is subordinate to "God is Love." (For the history and meaning of the specially Christian term ajgaph, see Trench"s "Synonyms of New Testament.")

Vers. 7-12.

Love.

Connecting link: The apostle here seems to begin a new paragraph; yet it is one by no means disconnected from that which precedes. If antichrist plies its seductive arts without, it is for those who are "of God" to cleave closer together; knit by the bonds of a holy love, which is of itself born of him who is love. TopicLove"s fount, channel, stream, and outlet. We have more than once had occasion to remark that both the matter and the style of the Apostle John are peculiarly his own. The matter, for it gathers round a few key-words "life," "love." The style, for it is not like Paul"s, cumulative; it is rather radiative. We have no specimens of prolonged and closely connective argument; but a series of rich and beautiful teachings throughout a paragraph, on one of his key-words. Here the keyword is love. Respecting it we have eight distinct assertions.

I GOD IS LOVE. In Joh_4:24 we have "God is Spirit." In chapter 1:5 "God is Light." Here "God is Love." The first indicates the substanceof the Divine nature personal, conscious, intelligent Spirit. The second declares the perfection of that nature in knowledge and in purity. The third shows the benevolence of the Divine nature in its regard for those who are the creatures of his power and the subjects of his grace. These three words contain more information about God than all the sacred books of the East put together. They are a revelation. We are taught how to think about God, and if we keep within the lines marked out by these three words, we cannot go far wrong. Note: This light thrown on God"s nature gives us the clue to the meaning of his works and ways in nature, providence, and grace. The three spheres give us the triple unfolding of infinite love, and nothing else.

II THAT LOVE HAS BEEN MANIFESTED TO OUR RACE. (Verses 9, 10.) Through whom? "His only begotten Son." How? "A Propitiation." For what? "For our sins." With what intent? That we might live through him. No true life of peace, joy, and fellowship with God was possible for us until sin was put away. No one could do this but One in and of the race, yet over it One who by his humanity could represent earth, and who yet as the eternal Son could represent the Father; he alone could take this place, and by offering himself to the Father, for us, on account of our sin, he revealed how sin burdened the heart of God, and gave by his own sacrifice such an expression to man of the Divine holiness and rectitude, that, on the ground thereof, the infinitely Pure One might receive the penitent lovingly to his embrace, yet make no compromise with sin.

III SUCH A PROPITIATION REVEALS A LOVE ALTOGETHER UNIQUE. (Verses 9, 10.) "In this," etc. "Herein is love;" as if it were seen nowhere ease. All other love fades away in comparison herewith. This will appear as we study:

1. Its origin. God"s own love, self originated and sustained, unbought, spontaneous.

2. Its method. The bestowment of the greatest possible gift, and that as a sacrifice.

3. Its objects. lie loved us sinners, traitors, alienated ones.

4. Its extent. "The whole world;" i.e., all the race on the globe through all time!

5. Its intent. That we might live. That all who believe might be made heirs of glory.

IV SUCH A LOVE, SO MANIFESTED, CREATES A NEW DUTY OF LOVE ON OUR PART. (Verse 11.) Nothing ever threw so much light on the value of man in God"s eye as the work of the Lord Jesus Christ on his behalf. Nothing else ever disclosed what God meant to do with us. But, it once being shown how great are the possibilities opening up to man through Christ, all the relations between man and man come to be invested with new meaning; and the self-evidencing force of the appeal of verse 11 ought to be irresistibly felt.

V GOD"S AMAZING LOVE TO MAN IS ATTENDED WITH A NEW CREATIVE POWER. (Verse 7.) "Every one that loveth is born of God." "It should never be forgotten," says Trench, "that ajgaph is a word born within the bosom of revealed religion; it occurs in the LXX, but there is no example of its use in any heathen writer whatever." The pure and holy parental love, the love of children as we understand it, the fondest,and purest affections of husband and wife, are the birth of Christianity, i.e., of Divine love as revealed in Christ. Men cannot know how truly and how largely this is the case till they examine into the state of the pagan world at the time of Christ. The apostle himself declares, "We love, because he first loved us.

VI WHEN BEING BORN OF GOD, WE LOVE LIKE HIM, WE ARE BROUGHT INTO FELLOWSHIP WITH HIM. (Verses 12, 13.) When God hath given us of his own Spirit of love, so that we in our measure come to love like God, then we know that "we dwell in him, and he in us." There is a loving and abiding intercommunion. We, being in full sympathy with God, must needs yearn to pour forth ourselves to others, as God hath given himself to us. And this outgoing of ourselves to our brother is a sure pledge of God being in us, and we in him.

VII IN PROPORTION AS THIS IS THE CASE, WE KNOW GOD. (Verse 12.) The first and second clauses of this verse are very closely connected together. "No man hath seen God at any time, but if we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us;" and so we come to know God, though no one hath ever seen him. We know him through love whom we cannot behold by the sight. (cf Mat_5:8) Only love can possibly read love. A cold heart can never understand a warm one, but one warm heart can read another. So we come to know God through learning from him to love as he loves. And the more complete our devotion to man for God"s sake, the fuller and richer will be our knowledge of God"s infinite love.

VIII THE HEART THAT LOVETH NOT CANNOT KNOW GOD. (Verse 8.) The love of God is so vast that it embraceth "a great multitude which no man can number." It is so minute that it yearns for "one sinner" to repent. It is so active that it sent its noblest embassy to invite the wanderers to return. It is so tender that it would not that "one of these little ones should perish." How can, a man who does not love understand all that? It is not that God closes his heart against the man; it is the man that steels his heart against God. And until the warmth of Divine love melts the thick-ribbed ice of his frozen soul, no stream of love will ever flow from him to gladden and fertilize a world.

Note: See what it is will estrange a man for ever from his God, and will shut him up in hopeless ignorance of Godunlovingness; simply this. Objection: But are you not reasoning in a circle? You say man does not love till God"s love kindles his, and yet that he cannot know God till he loves! Which is first? Surely here is vicious circle. No; not at all. God"s love goes out first. That love is manifested in the work of Christ. When we were yet sinners Christ died for us. "He that would be warm must keep near the fire," said Matthew Henry. Even so, let the cold frozen heart stay near the cross, till, fueling the warmth of love there, it is set aglow. Then, being set aglow by learning of the love of God, he will at once begin to understand the God of love!

Vers. 7-21.

Threefold recommendation of the duty of loving one another.

I THE DUTY RECOMMENDED, FROM LOVE HAVING ITS ORIGIN IN GOD. The duty enjoined. "Beloved, let us love one another." John has a winning way of urging duty, addressing his readers as objects of his affection, and desiring himself to be stirred up to duty. He has in view the "absolute type of love" (Westcott) in the Christian circle. There are considerations adduced which go beyond brotherly love, which suggest rather compassionate love. But it is to be remembered that love to child, to friend, to sinner, is intended to have its outcome and complete satisfaction within the, Christian circle.

1. Divine origin of love.

(1) Positive. "For love is of God; and every one that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth God." It is true of all physical force that there is in the world, that it is of God, in this sense that it came originally from the creative energy of God. In the same way, love is of God, inasmuch as we have been created with a capacity of loving. But that will not meet the requirement of the thought here. Love is of God in the sense that, as an actual spiritual force, it has come from a fountain of love in God. Every one that loveth, then, is begotten of God, i.e., has had a nature imparted to him like God"s, and so that he is a child of God. He also knoweth God, i.e., has daily and growing acquaintance with God, through which there is communicated to him more of the force of Divine love.

(2) Negative. Statement. "He that loveth not knoweth not God." There is not derivation in this case; but there is the singling out of a person in whom love is not a force, and it is said of him (passing over nature) that he knoweth not God. The difference of tense, which is not brought out in the translation, seems to be aimed at apparent knowledge. When he said, at his baptism or at any other time, that he knew God, looking to the absence of love as a force in his life, John is confident that he never knew him. Reason. "For God is Love." This is the way in which the most sublime statement of Scripture is the first time introduced. One of the most striking introductions to a sermon is that by the late M. Monod of Paris, in which he supposes an almost effaced bit of paper to have been found among the ruins of Herculaneum. After great difficulty, the assembled men of letters succeed in deciphering the first two words, "God is." There is dreadful suspense, while they labour to decipher the third word. What is God? is a question upon the answer to which human destiny very much depends. There is a glow of satisfaction when, at last, they make out letter by letter 1-o-v-e. God is Love. It was left to the disciple of love to make this late, but fully satisfying, announcement about God, if from his own consciousness, also from the spirit of inspiration. God is a Spirit that is a statement of cur Lord"s recorded by John, describing the Divine nature as above all limitations of space and time. God is Light that is a statement already made in this Epistle, describing the Divine nature as purity with no limit to its diffusiveness. God is Love that is a statement the excellence of which lies in its bringing out the personal element in the Divine nature. This God is essentially, apart from all thought of creation. But how are we to think of him as love in the depths of his own being? "Love involves a subject and an object, and that which unites both" (Westcott). "We must not, therefore, think merely of the love of God to the creature, but also of the inner Divine Trinitarian love in God" (Ebrard). There is the outgoing of infinite love in the Father which finds an infinite response in the Son, and this is maintained through the Spirit. That language is vague; but it may serve to mark the loving intercommunication that there is within Godhead. It is because God essentially realizes love, without going outside of his own being, that he is Self-blessed.

1. The love of God was manifested in the Incarnation. "Herein was the love of God manifested in us, that God hath sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him." There is the full satisfaction of love within Godhead; and yet there was a movement of love with an object beyond Godhead. It was love that moved God to create the desire to communicate of the riches of his own Being. It can be said that, even from eternity, we lay in the thoughts of God, with the clearness of the Divine intentions and the kindling of the Divine affection around us. And so the place of all beings and of all things in his world lay before him, as that in which, anticipatively, he took delight. When angels were brought into being, it was love that was operating, and, there being none other, God himself rejoiced over them. When the foundations of the earth were fastened, and the cornerstones thereof laid, it was love that was operating; and "the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy." "Herein was the love of God manifested." Creation, in all its lines, has been drawn by love, and so it is essentially a glad study, calling forth, from the students of its many parts, the symphonious song, and the common shout of joy. But it is not to this manifestation that John calls attention. His

2. mind has been filled, from the beginning of his letter, with that which is the manifestation of love by pre-eminence. It is the Incarnation that he cannot leave out of sight. "Herein was the love of God manifested." The manifestation is said to be in us, i.e., in believers; for it is in them that the Incarnation reaches its end. The Incarnation is described as God sending his only begotten Son into the world. We start from the thought of his dignity as the only begotten Son of God, besides whom the Father had none in whom the Father"s love found an adequate object. He found the condition appointed for him in the world. That is, without ceasing to be the only begotten Son, he became a man among men, even sharing the evil of their condition, yea, suffering death at the hands of sinners. What was the meaning of this strange manifestation? It was not that God took delight in the evil condition of his Son. But it was love going out toward men. We were in a dead state, in relation to the vindication of Law, and in relation to our true life; and we had not yet come to the worst. God did not blot out the fair page of creation, he did not part with one son out of many; but he parted with his only begotten Son the most glorious of all beings, perfectly reflecting his own majesty, that we might live through him. He made the sacrifice in which his feelings were the most deeply involved, that our interests might be advanced to the highest point. "Herein was the love of God manifested.

3. The Incarnation is proof that love was not first in us, but in God. "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the Propitiation for our sins." Whence has love sprung? Was it first in our hearts, and then, by contact with love in our hearts, was it kindled in the Divine heart? Ah! no; love has its eternal dwelling-place in God. It was not that we loved God; any movement of love in us was necessarily subsequent to the movement of the Divine love in creating us. It was not that we loved God; we were not actually lovers of God in our characters. We were laden with sins, those sins being all love of self and want of love toward God. It was that he loved us; and he created us that he might make us sharers with him in his bliss. It was that he loved us; and, when we had frustrated the end of his love, he did not leave us in our sins. He acted without prompting from without, he acted with absolute spontaneity, he acted out of the infinite freedom of his own will; and what did he do. He sent his Son to be the Propitiation for our sins; i.e., sent him into our nature to remove all the obstacles that our sins presented to our enjoying the blessings of Divine fellowship. Love is free, and yet it has an inner law of righteousness. Our sins could not be removed in any way, they could not be removed by Divine fiat, they could not be removed without adequate satisfaction. And, when righteousness demanded that the satisfaction should be given in our nature, Divine love proved equal to the emergency. The Son, breathing forth the Father"s love, did not eschew our nature, and, in it dying, made infinite satisfaction for our sins. Such is love, in all the glory of its freedom and of its power.

II THE DUTY RECOMMENDED FROM LOVE BEING NECESSARY TO FELLOWSHIP WITH GOD. The duty inferred from the Incarnation. "Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another." John again adopts the affectionate form of address. He proceeds on the manner of love brought out in the preceding verse. "If so the emphatic position God loved us." It is implied that we have been brought into the position of God"s children, and should act as God does. The conclusion then follows, that we should love one another. As for the manner of our love, it should be love that can go the length of sacrifice, and love that can conquer obstacles of sin. But as for the object of our love, why is it loving one another? It is to this point that John directs himself.

1. To love one another is the way to have fellowship with the invisible God. "No man hath beheld God at any time: if we love one another, God abideth in us, and his love is perfected in us." The fact of the invisibility of God is also stated in Joh_1:18, "No man hath seen God at any time." The verb is different here, conveying the idea of seeing intently, seeing so as to image to the mind what God is through the sense of sight. In Joh_1:18 the invisibility of God is regarded as relieved by the Incarnation. Herethe invisibility of God is regarded in connection with fellowship with God, and there is brought into view, not the visible Mediator, but our visible brethren. How are we to have (not to prove that we have) fellowship with the invisible God? The way is to have visible objects for our love, especially to love one another in the Christian circle. Loving one another, on the one hand, "God abideth in us," so as to be nearer to us for fellowship, than if we beheld him. Loving one another, on the other hand, his love, i.e., our love to him, is perfected. It cannot be brought to perfection unless with the help of love to the brethren. This thought receives further expression at the close of this chapter.

2. Participation in the Spirit is the sign of fellowship with God. "Hereby know we that we abide in him, and be in us, because he hath given us of his Spirit." The thought is similar in 1Jn_3:24. Loving one another leads to mutual abiding. But how is this to be discovered? It is by the distribution to us of the Spirit. He cannot be communicated to us in the full flood of his influence, but only according to our nature and disposition. It is evident that the Spirit is the common element on which our fellowship with God proceeds. But another question at once arises How do we know that we participate in the Spirit? The answer, given in what follows, is, our appreciation of the Incarnation.

3. There can be no fellowship with God apart from the Incarnation.

(1) The Incarnation historically attested. "And we have beheld and bear witness that the Father hath sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world." Strictly speaking, what the apostles beheld was what Christ was in the flesh. There was thus a good historical basis for their testimony. They knew, at first hand, that Christ was baptized, wrought miracles, was transfigured, died, rose again, and that he claimed to he the Son of God. But the testimony is carried here beyond the actual facts to the meaning of the facts. As here expressed, it is that "the Father hath sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world." The apostles, carefully observing the facts, gave this as their only rational explanation. He with whom they had been thrown into closest contact, was no mere man, but the Son of God. He was the object of the Father"s infinite love; but the Father, in a wondrous manner, sent him forth on a mission of a saving nature and wide as the world in its reach. John here echoes the Samaritans, of whom he records that they said to the woman with whom Christ had a conversation, "Now we believe, not because of thy speaking: for we have heard for ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Saviour of the world." It is well to have a title that sets forth so clearly the impartiality, the universality, of Christ"s mission. It is implied that his mission is lasting. He is still to be thought of as sent into the world as its Saviour. Every unsaved person has a right to claim him as his Saviour; and that is the simple fact with which we have to do. There is hint here of a love that oversteps love of the brethren.

(2) The test of confession. "Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son. of God, God abideth in him, and he in God." It underlay the apostolic attestation that Jesus is the Son of God. This, then, is the form which the test takes, in agreement with forms in which it has already been put. The Unitarians escape the application of the test, by retaining the language while taking away from the meaning. "To us," says Channing, "he is the first of the sons of God, the Son by peculiar nearness and likeness to the Father. In this mighty universe, framed to be a mirror of its Author, we turn to Jesus as the brightest Image of God, and gratefully yield him a place in our souls, second only to the infinite Father, to whom he himself directs our supreme affection." But the whole aspect of the Incarnation is changed if we think of Jesus as only an exalted creature, humbling himself to a lower creaturely condition, and not as the uncreated Son, humbling himself to what was infinitely below him. As an exhibition of love, the one humbling is not to be compared with the other. The Son is to be taken as absolutely as the Father, i.e., One in whom the Father sees his perfect image. Where the Spirit of God works, there is prompting to the confession of the mysterious entering of the Divine Son into our nature; and it is only in the line of this thought that we can maintain fellowship with God.

4. Experience of love in which there is fellowship with God.

(1) Experience of love. "And we know and have believed the love which God hath in us." The comfort of the Incarnation is that it is infinite love finding a lodgment in our nature, and especially in our hearts as believers. According as we believe, have we experience of the love: and, however much we have experience of it, there is still room for the exercise of faith.

(2) R estatement regarding the nature of God. "God is Love." In neither case is the statement made to stand out; it is introduced as though it were a familiar thought to the writer. "Pure, universal Love thou art." One bearing of this is that God cannot love partially, loving one and not loving another.

For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all.

Another bearing of it is that God cannot love feebly. Even in his reserve there is strength. He rests in his love; (Zep_3:17) but it is because he is conscious of his strength. He had infinite repose in view of the entrance of sin into the world; but it was because he was conscious of his power to defeat it for his own glory on the cross. And we must think of him as having infinite repose in view of the final issue of things. That he is Love means this to us that all means will be used to overcome the evil of our hearts.

(3) Inference regarding fellowship with God. "And he that abideth in love abideth in God, and God abideth in him." If God is Love, as the Spirit gives us to see in the Incarnation, then he who moves habitually in love as the sphere of his being, keeps up fellowship with God.

III THE DUTY RECOMMENDED FROM LOVE WORKING TOWARD BOLDNESS.

1. Consummation. "Herein is love made perfect with us, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment; because as he that One is, even so are we in this world." It is a most solemn thought that there is before us all the day of judgment. "It is appointed unto men once to die, and after this cometh judgment." There is a final and authoritative judgment to be pronounced on the value of our life. What has there been in it of obedience to God? How far have we received Christ into it? Upon that the sentence must turn. Love is now with us; i.e., joined to us as an influence in our life. What is the greatest thing that it can do for our future? It is this, to inspire us with boldness that day when we stand before the judgment-seat of Christ. The ground of our present confidence is likeness to Christ. That One who is to be on the judgment-seat was once in this world in bodily form; he is still in the world in spirit, loving those who are his people, and seeking to embrace all others within the number of his people. According as we are in sympathy with the movements of his love love his people, and seek to embrace others within the number of his people can we assure our hearts in view of the day of judgment.

2. Imperfection on the way to the consummation. "There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear, because fear hath punishment; add he that feareth is not made perfect in love." The opposite of boldness is fear: this is excluded from love. It is of the nature of fear to shrink back from a person; it is of the nature of love to be attracted toward a person. There is naturally fear in us to be cast out. According as love takes possession of us does it cast out fear. Men may have a certain fear of each other on first acquaintance; but let love be drawn out, and fear is gradually expelled. So we have a feeling of fear toward God, while our relations to him are not satisfactorily determined, while we have not satisfactorily discovered his feelings toward us. We are startled when we think of our sin, when we think of the Divine indignation against sin. But when we think of God as in infinite compassion making provision for us as sinners, we are emboldened. "He is near that justifieth me; who is he that will contend with me?" And as we realize more of the greatness of redeeming love, there is less room left for fear. There is a punitive office fulfilled by fear. It is God in a painful manner dealing with us for our imperfect love, and telling us that we must love better.

3. Love that is operative is caused by anticipative love. "We love, because he first loved us." There is an affirmation here, and an explanation. The affirmation is, "We love" (without definition of object), There are multitudes who, without untruthfulness and without presumption, can say,

love." Can we say this? The love of parents to their children is acknowledged to be real. We are not long in a home before we see that love is, in no feigned manner, operating. The parents cannot suffer their children to he long out of their sight. They have doubts and fears about them in many ways. And they are always planning for their well-being. Do we love all round in the same way? Would we be conscious of a great blank in our existence if we had not a God to love? Would the light of our eye, the joy of our heart, be gone? Do we delight in fellowship with God? Do we form plans for advancing the glory of God? Does love, too, operate toward our brethren? Have we a real interest in them, rejoicing with them when they rejoice, and weeping with them when they weep? Does our love operate toward those who are not yet brethren, leading us to make sacrifices for them, and to form plans for their being brought into the fold of the Redeemer? But there is also an explanation. "We love, because he first loved us." What is the origin of love in us? It is God exercising influence over us; but in what way? Not by the manifestations of his power, not by the manifestations of his wisdom, not by the manifestations of his righteousness; but by the manifestations of his love. Like produces like. God loved us before we had the opportunity of loving. He loved us in creating us, in putting it into the hearts of parents to care for us in infancy and childhood. He thus anticipated us with goodness. And then he was ready with a scheme of mercy for our coming into the world. We are not long in the world before we learn that we have got evil hearts, that we are in the midst of sin and misery; and sometimes the prospect seems dreary enough. But, on the other hand, it is true that God has made the world warm for our coming into it. There is love in it as well as sin; and thus God has been beforehand with us. He did not wait until we sinners returned to him. That was impossible by an act of our own will, even by an act of the Divine will, as sheer force. It needed some powerful influence to bear upon our hearts; and that was found in the anticipative love of God in redemption. It is the greater love that event comes first. Two persons have a quarrel. The one comes to the other, and desires a reconciliation; the other is overcome, and loves in return. That was the greater love which took the initiative, and broke down the alienation. So God"s love is the greater, for he speaks the first word of reconciliation. And what makes it all the greater is that the fault was entirely on our side. We had wronged him; he regarded our sin with the utmost displeasure; and yet he loved us. The love with which he anticipated us was greater than any of which we were capable; great as his own nature. That love has received ample manifestation. There was once a poor Man in this world. He was brought up in an insignificant little town. He received no education but what that little town could afford him. He at first worked as a carpenter, eating his bread in the sweat of his brow. Then he began to work miracles as with Divine power, and to teach as with Divine wisdom. His public career was, however, cut short; for men did not like his teaching, and plotted his death. He was crucified as a malefactor at the age of thirty-three. This poor Man was none other than the Son of God. What was the meaning of this humiliation? It was anticipative love. "God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." Of this love we can give no account, no explanation; it is a mystery, before which we must bow. But our love is capable of explanation. "We love, because he first loved us." Let the pressure of anticipative love upon us be evermore felt.

4. Love that is operative rises from the seen to the unseen. "If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, cannot love God whom he hath not seen. And this commandment have we from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also." It is declared in the most emphatic manner that love to God cannot exist apart from love to our brother, on the ground that there is a close connection between loving the seen and loving the unseen, and further, on the ground that this connection is embodied in a positive Divine command. A first noticeable thing is that love should form the subject of a command. It seems strange that we should be commanded to love. Love is supposed to have a freedom, an immunity of its own. And yet it must be with the affections as with other parts of our nature. They must be placed under government and discipline. There must, in the first instance, be the voice of God, the voice of conscience, authoritatively prescribing their course, directing them to proper objects, and keeping them in just harmony. This would be necessary, even if the affections were naturally pure. The authority of conscience would need to be exercised over them in order to give them character. It is, therefore, all the more necessary, seeing their most fine gold has become changed. They are not naturally Christian. Christ is the very last Person round whom they would center. For "he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him." And how hard it is to Christianize the affections, to give them the genuine, unmistakable Christian stamp and temper; to give them Christ"s steadiness, and tenderness, and fervour, and catholicity! How hard for us, who are beset with sin, to reach to that! A first love, a youthful enthusiasm, is beautiful, as youth always is. But it is not true to Christ, as the needle to the pole; it is notoriously erratic. Neither is it strong and enduring, as the feeling of him who has been accustomed to the storm; it soon waxes faint. And when youth is past, how dull and sluggish the affections, how unexcitable even before the cross, and in presence of human sin and sorrow! how unseemly, and perhaps malicious, when they come unexpectedly out in the conflict of opinion and interest! They need to be treated with severity; they need to be dragged at the heels of duty. It is only by superintendence and watchfulness and chastening that they can be brought into loving obedience to Christ Jesus, the altogether Lovely. A commandment, then, is reasonable; it is urgently needed, and shall be needed until love is the law of our being until love shall perform every function in the body of Christ, with all the quickness and all the regularity of an instinct. A second noticeable thing is the manner in which John issues the command. There were two com mands from him, i.e., from God. The first and great commandment is that we should love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind. It might seem, then, that we should not love others at all. But Christ, going beyond the lawyer"s question, brings into view the second commandment, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself," connecting it by declaring it to be like unto the first. John, in the line of the Master"s thought, brings the two more closely together, calling them one commandment. The broad principle here is this that the love of our brother man, whom we see, is a help to the love ofour Father-God, whom we do not see.

(1) The family affections. What does the family institution teach us regarding God? Nature gives us an idea of God as the great and inexhaustible Creator. To the magnitude and beauty of his working there no one has yet discovered the limit. Every augmentation of optical power, every improvement in the science of seeing, only brings fresh worlds into view a truth which holds not merely in astronomy, but in the whole circle of the sciences. And yet the distance between God and nature is very great all the distance there is between a workman and his work, between an author and his book. Nature, after all that can be said of it, is only a work, a production, a thing made. Society gives us a higher idea of God; for here, under a variety of forms, we have the relation of governing and governed. The state, especially, is the great governing institution. It gives us the idea of God as the righteous Governor; One ruling in right, and backed by power. This brings God nearer to us; for the distance between a ruler and his subjects is much less than between a workman and his work. But the family gives us a still higher, and the very highest, conception of God; for it is to be regarded as the revelation of his Fatherhood. We are more than creatures, we are more than subjects; we are sons. We stand in the most intimate relation to God: a more intimate relation we do not know. And we take it that God has founded the family, has instituted the relationship of father and son among men, just to show us how closely related we are to him. The family is full of spiritual interest and meaning. Traces of infinite benevolence and wisdom are to be found in all its arrangements. The first significant fact is that the opening period of each human life is marked by helplessness. This is not peculiar to man; for the same arrangement is found in other creatures. In the human economy, however, it is most strongly marked. In comparison with other creatures, man is but slowly furnished with the knowledge and strength needful for self-subsistence. The period of his pupilage or dependence may be said to extend to a third or a fourth of his lifetime. At first sight this does not seem to be honouring to man. Would it not be better for him to spring at once into self-subsistence, with powers not needing to be matured? But the true explanation is greatly to his honour. Among the lower creatures, it is those that in infancy are most dependent that show the greatest natural affection. And so it is because infancy and childhood, and to a certain extent youth, serve the purpose of God in cultivating the affections, that they are thrown so much on the kindly help of others, and take up so large a proportion of our brief lifetime. The filial affection seems to be the special care of God. While there is yet no reflection, no power of resistance, no reasoning about anything, it comes into existence under parental nurturing. It gets the start of all else that has a place or a power in our nature. And for a time it has all the sway. It is allowed time silently to operate and to deepen, and to become an ineradicable habit of the nature. To the young novitiate, the parent is very much in the place of God is supposed to know everything, to be able to do everything. But by-and-by in many little things his finitude is discovered. It is then that the thought of God breaks in upon the child, and in the form most congenial to his training, viz. as the earthly parent raised out of all imperfection. Mark here the beautiful illustration of the apostolic principle, that it is through the love of the seen that we are to rise into the love of the unseen. The child does not need a new class of feelings, does not need to part with the old, when God is first thought of. It is not the seen against the unseen; for if it were, then, the feelings with which we regard the seen being already deeply rooted, there would be no inlet for the unseen. But herein magnify and adore the wise and good providence of God, that, in giving such strength and vitality and advantage to the filial feelings, he is thereby recommending and fortifying religion; he is giving it the start; he is unfolding and putting forward the great truth of his Fatherhood, and winning over the young heart to it before the entrance of a heartless world. If we would understand the love of the seen parent, strong and overmastering, we must connect it with the love of the unseen Parent. The one naturally passes into the other, when wants arise too deep for that which is finite to supply. "If ye love not the seen," says the apostle, "how can ye love the unseen?" implying that it is by loving the seen that we are to learn to love the unseen. There is a lesson to be learned here regarding the education of children. There must be a proper representation and interpretation of fatherhood made to them. There must be gentle, wise, and firm dealing, signifying this, "As I the earthly father love you, so does the heavenly Father love you." For, more than we think, the our Father in heaven depends on the our father on earth. How much parents have it in their power to make religion attractive, or to make it repellent, to their children! The family affections are, to some extent, connected with trying experiences. "When father and mother forsake me, the Lord will take me up." And there is a forsaking by father and mother before there may be a forsaking by death. The child, as he grows up, becomes more and more independent of his parents; but it should not be to be cut loose from all supports, but only to be more thrown upon and taken up by the heavenly Parent. And then, when the total forsaking by father and mother takes place, he is not so desolate, having a Father upon whom to lean, who has promised, "I will never leave thee nor forsake thee." Again, when a youthful member of a family is put into the furnace of affliction, what an effulgence and concentration of affection! It was strong before, but, in the effort to relieve the sufferer, it is wonderfully intensified. And when is it strongest? when does it pass all bounds? Is it not in the last dark lone hour? This is the method of the Divine working. And, without doubt, one end is effectually attained affection does break forth in all its strength; it does shine with more than a sevenfold luster, the darkness only making it more refulgent. But may it not be charged with severity? Strange, some one may say, that the child should so charm the parent"s heart, should be placed so as to secure the tenderest affection, should be suffered to remain until being is inseparably blended with being, and then be taken to the altar! Strange that Abraham should be sent into the land of Moriah, to have his affection toward an only and a peculiar son cut to the quick! Strange that there should be such lamentation in Ramah Rachel weeping for her children, and not to be comforted because they are not! Were it not better to love the seen less? were it not better to be divested of all affection, or, at least, to limit its sphere? were it not better to retire into a convent, there to forget all earthly relationships, there to escape all heart-breakings and sad farewells, there to love God purely and uninterruptedly? But that would be to fight against nature and nature is strong. We must love the seen, and must love passionately when the seen threatens to leave us. Now, there is reason, and very weighty reason, that the seen should be loved, and should be taken away so as to bruise love; there is reason for the breaking up of families, as well as for the institution of families; and in both cases the reason is substantially the same. We have a family education on earth, that we may be early familiarized with the truth of God"s Fatherhood. Now, what is the Bible representation of that truth? We find that earthly things are indeed made after the heavenly things. We find a home in Godhead; we find the relationship of Father and Son existing in eternity. How very strong, how very affecting, the expression of home feeling and experience the Father delighting in the Son, and the Son rejoicing in the Father"sworks (Proverbs 8)! How true to human nature, we should say, looking from our standpoint, or, rather, how very like the human and the Divine, the seen and the unseen! We find, further, such words as these, "God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son;" "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us;" "He who spared not his Son, but delivered him up for us all." There was sacrifice, then, on the part of God the sacrifice of the Son of his love; and, in thinking of it, away with allcallousness. It is a sacred theme, and is not to be approached with common feeling. There was no cessation, no diminution of affection no, not for a moment. But what shall we say? We must, indeed, beware of ascribing to God human imperfection; but are we to think of him as an uninterested onlooker at Calvary? Would not these words, "God so loved the world," and other kindred words, be emptied of their vast meaning if, in our way of thinking, we are not allowed to take into account the strong paternal affection? It is because the relation between Father and Son was so very close, so very intimate, that the straining of it for a time, in a human atoning life and death, was so very high and so very mysterious a manifestation of Divine love. And how shall we understand how God felt in contemplating the cross? How shall we understand the meaning of his not sparing his Son, his not holding him back even from the altar of sacrifice, better than by such an experience as that of Abraham, or that of David when he uttered the lamentation, "O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son"? To gain this high end, viz. to enter into sympathy with God in the highest act and manifestation of his Godhead, is it not fitting that the family relations are made so close and tender, and should we not be willing to bear the dismemberment of the family with all its hallowed associations? He in whose hands all these arrangements are is not severe or austere, as some say; he is the God of families, very tender and very compassionate; and in every home there should be an altar erected for his worship.

(2) The brotherly feelings as connected with excellence in others. It is in this line that the apostle"s thought chiefly moves. How are we helped to the conception of the Divine excellence? Partly by what of excellence we find in ourselves; but, beyond that, by what of excellence we find in others. It is in the Christian circle that true excellence is to be found. Friendship is not placed on a proper basis unless it is associated with Christian elements. Our conception of excellence is enriched from the past. We are greatly helped in this respect by the excellence exhibited by those two men Paul and John. But there is additional help when we have actual experience of excellence in our own circle. We feel it to be more of a reality, we can lay more definite hold upon it, and our love is called forth into actual operation in all befitting forms. Divine excellence is the varied excellence apprehended in a wide circle, infinitely purified and heightened. And our love to God is more real, more definite, and flows forth more naturally, when we rise from excellence that is seen to excellence that is unseen. Let us, then, love our brethren sincerely, with appreciation, and within no narrow circle, that our love to God may have reality, definiteness, richness. "If ye love not the seen," says the apostle, "how can ye love the unseen?

(3) The missionary feelings. We mean those feelings which we are to cherish toward a sinner, or toward a fellow-Christian who has fallen into sin. It is the element of sin in their object that broadly distinguishes them from those feelings with which we regard kindred or friends. Here, too, as formerly, it holds true that the love of our brother-man, whom we see, is a medium through which we are helped to rise into the love of our Father-God, whom we do not see. What are the feelings with which we are to regard the sinner? There are some and the thought of it is saddening there are some who actually rejoice in the existence and prevalence of sin. A second class look upon sin as a weakness, or, what is the same thing, lay the blame upon circumstances. A third class treat it with utter indifference. The dust they tread under their feet gives them as little concern. A fourth class, strange to say, find in it occasion for bitter, irreconcilable hatred. The man who has fallen from respectability is to be branded and cast out, never to be received back. If we belong to any of these four classes, then we are not true Christians. For the Christian, by all holy memories, by all sacred associations, is a philanthropist. By this he should be known in his private walk and in the public arena. On his banner the device is, "One lifted up to the cross by men, and yet drawing all men to him." Let us inquire for a little into the nature of Christian sympathy. It is often misrepresented or misunderstood. The creed of some is of this nature, "We must take up a certain moral position; we must, indeed, be humane when suffering comes in our way; but to go down to the fallen is, forsooth, to compromise our moral position." It is the old Pharisaic feeling: "He is the Friend of publicans and sinners: he sits down with those, therefore he countenances their wicked practices. It is safe to keep the leprous at a distance." But Christian sympathy is not at variance with the highest moral position. The truth is, it is only to be found in conjunction with the very severest view of sin. It may be said to have its origin, its exciting, stimulating cause in self-condemnation We ourselves must feel the darkness, the isolation, the insupportable sorrow of heart occasioned by an awakened conscience. For it is only when we have realized what sin is in ourselves that we can feel for those who are under its power. Were sin a light thing, we might let it pass, we might suffer it to lie upon a neighbour; but seeing it is so heinous a thing, so subversive of law, so dishonouring to God, so ruinous in its consequences, how can we but deplore it wherever and in whatever form it exists? And is it not when such a view of sin is brought home most strongly to our minds that we feel greatest sympathy with the erring? Is it not in this way, too, that we cast off uncharitableness? There is a providence in our having faults, if, by keeping our eves upon them, we are led to pass a charitable judgment upon the conduct of others. What pleasure can it be to see a neighbour plagued as we are? So is it with forgivingness. It is well that we ourselves stand in perpetual need of forgiveness, if thereby we are led to forgive others. So is it with active benevolence. Does it never seem strange that the Christian life is so very difficult? The young Christian imagines it is to be all victory: his faith shall never waver, his Father"s countenance shall never be turned away; and so, when he turns to his neighbour and says, "Come with us, and we will show you good; for the Lord hath spoken good concerning Israel," he is not prepared for a refusal; he expects the devil to go out of the possessed at once; he lacks patience, which is a sure sign that his sympathy is not yet deep. But he does not go far ere a change comes over himself. As it is put, the old Adam is too much for the young Melancthon. Satan is not yet cast out of his own heart; but continues to molest in formidable strength, and it is only too apparent that there must be many a struggle and many a fall. Mark now how this produces a very material change in his treatment of others. Sin is a greater evil than he supposed it to be, and he feels for it a deeper sorrow. Shall he not sorrow the more for those who are under its power, but who do not see it as he sees it? Shall he not be more patient when abuse and obloquy are heaped upon him, or when he receives the stolid look of the indifferent? It is not to be overlooked that the simple manifestation of a genuine, warmhearted sympathy is sometimes sufficient. There are many souls in the world, ay, in the sphere in which we move, that are waiting to be comforted, that are waiting to be lifted up out of the dust. All that they need is a kind Christian word. Tell them that we forgive them we, a brother and a sinner once like them. Assure them by all we hold most dear that God forgives them for his Son"s sake forgives them, the vile, the outcast; and that will be as life from the dead; the hope of the gospel will take possession of them, and shed a mild, benign luster over their dark world. But there are others who are not so easily dealt with. There must be a prolonged, more laborious, and, in the end, perhaps, a sharper treatment. But, seeing that it may be got, shall we, who are the messengers of God, refuse the needful assistance? A physician finds that there are some diseases more malignant and more intricate than others; but shall he therefore confine himself to cases in which the cure is safe and easy? Why, if he has a remedy and refuses to apply it, because he is appalled at the danger or grudges the labour, he would be counted- a disgrace to his profession; he would lack the element which is next in importance to skill that which gives life and form and beauty to skill sympathy with thedistressed. And shall we who have a simple and universal remedy hold it back from those who have the worst kind of distemper, or from those who are the most virulent against ourselves? Shall we not the rather extend to them our warmest sympathy? shall we not the rather extend to them the largest share of our earnest, prayerful, thoughtful consideration, regardless of consequences, regardful only of him whose Name we bear, and whose honour we would by no means tarnish? This may be put on various grounds. We put it here on this ground that it is by thus loving sinners that we are to be brought into sympathy with that God who loves sinners. "For scarcely for a righteous man will one die: yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die. But God commendeth his love towards us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." That is one great feature of the Divine love very mysterious, if we think of it, very repugnant to all our preconceptions that God should love those who were so opposed to him. There is something here that startles us; there is something here that quite overwhelms us. The truth is, we do not wonder enough at it; we give our wonder to lesser things. Is it not often with us so low as this only a vacant look as he passes before us? But say, all ye that pass by, have ye seen anything like to this in your experience, anything so really wonderful as God"s love to sinners? If we would realize it, if we would breathe the atmosphere of the cross, if we would feel with God in his love to sinners, we must love sinners even as he loves them. True, it is a hard thing to conceive an interest in a sinner, a hard thing to retain that interest when all the romance is gone, a hard thing to undertake some definite direct line of procedure for his reclamation; but that is the Divine arrangement, and Divine grace is offered. "If ye love not the seen," says the apostle, "how can ye love the unseen?" implying that it is by loving the seen that we are to learn to love the unseen. If we do not know the forbearance and patience which need to be exercised towards sinners, how can we know the Divine forbearance and patience that need to be exercised toward us? It is to be borne in mind that love to our Father-God has an important influence on love to our brother-man. The latter would soon wither and decay if it were not fed from a higher source. He who commands here, spake from Sinai; he now speaks from Calvary. Here him speaking from Calvary. His first word to the sinner is not "Love your brother," but, "Believe on me." Should not an ordinary gratitude prompt to instantaneous obedience to the command? R.F.

The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Let us love one another - From the doctrine he has just been defending he draws this exhortation. It is by the Spirit that the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts. Everyone that truly loveth God and his neighbour is born of God.

John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.

The greatness of God’s love:

v. 7. Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God.

v. 8. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is Love.

v. 9. In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world that we might live through Him.

v. 10. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. This paragraph is one of the most beautiful and, at the same time, one of the most powerful passages in the entire New Testament.

It opens with an affectionate appeal: Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God, and every one that loves is born of God and knows God. For the third time in this letter St. John is constrained to speak of brotherly love, to plead with all Christians to show that love which was given into their hearts by faith. Such love is a creature of God, it is a reflection of the love of God in the hearts of those that have learned to know His love. It is a part of the new divine disposition and conduct which characterizes the believers. It is a proof of the new birth by the power of God through the Gospel; it is an outgrowth, a fruit, of faith, of the saving knowledge of God. On the other hand: He that does not love does not know God. Where there is no love toward the brethren in the conduct and life of a person, this is a sure and certain sign that he has not yet come to know God as he should, that there is no saving knowledge, no faith toward God in his heart.

That this is true St. John brings out in an uncontrollable burst of ecstasy: For God is Love: herein was manifested the love of God in us, that His only-begotten Son God sent into the world that we might live through Him. The test which St. John suggests is so definite, because it is impossible to know God, to be united with Him in true faith, and yet not to have love in the heart. For God is Himself Love: He is the personification, the embodiment, the source of love. How can anyone be born out of this love, receive a new spiritual nature from this love, be fully acquainted with its divine power, and yet not be inspired with love toward the brethren? For the love of God was manifested, was revealed, appeared to us and in us in such a wonderful way that the very angels were moved to the depths of their being. His only-begotten Son, than whom there was no being in heaven and earth in whom He felt greater pleasure, with whom He was united in a more intimate union, this beloved Son God sent down from heaven, from the abode of everlasting bliss, into this world, this vale of sin and corruption and death, in order that we, lost and condemned sinners that we are in ourselves, might have life, true, spiritual, eternal life, through Him and in Him. There is no message in all the universe more comforting, there is no passage in all literature more powerful than this simple statement of God’s love in Jesus Christ, His Son.

And it is a gift of God’s free love and mercy that John is speaking of: In this lies love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as propitiation for our sins. Here all merit, all boasting on the part of man is excluded, for this singular example of love is not to be found on the part of men, as though we, of our reason and strength, might have felt love for Him and longed to be united with Him. The very opposite is true. While we were yet sinners, while we were enemies of God, Rom 5:8, God loved us, and it was His love alone which prompted Him to send His only Son into the world to be a propitiation for all our sins, to offer up Himself in vicarious satisfaction for the transgression of all mankind. A perfect atonement has been made, a perfect redemption has been gained for all, and all the blessings of this salvation are ready to be received by faith, we, the believers, having become partakers of them all through the power of God in the Word.

Paul E. Kretzmann, Popular Commentary of the Bible (1921–1924) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Our apostle here resumes his exhortation to brotherly love, and urges and reinforces it with fresh arguments.

1. He assures us, that love is God; that is, the fruit of his good spirit in us; common love is his common gift, and holy love is his special grace: Love is of God.

2. It is an evidence that we have a right knowledge of God, both of his nature and will, and that we understand both what he is, and what he requires; he that has not the grace of love in his heart, has not the right knowledge of God in his head, whatever he may think of himself, or pretend to others.

3. The apostle assures us, That love is not only commanded, but exemplified by God himself: God is love. He had said before, Love is of God, as a quality; here he says, God is love;not as a mere quality, but his essence. God is love.

1. Essentially; love in the creature is an accidental quality, in God an essential property.

2. God is love, casually, the efficient cause of whatever is loving or lovely in us: All our love to him, and one another, is but a reflection of his love to us.

3. God is love, objectively; he is, or ought to be, the supreme object of our love; and we must love him above all, or he accounts we love him not at all.

4. God is love, declaratively; all his works, as well as his word, are a declaration of his love to us, and ought to engage us to stedfastness in our love to him. Let us, therefore, says the beloved disciple, love one another, for love is of God is love.

William Burkitt's Expository Notes on the New Testament (1700–1703) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

ARGUMENT 10

GOD IS LOVE

7-9. The attributes of God are omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience, but the essence of the divine nature is love, i.e., the heavenly agapee, which is utterly alien from human love, so positively heterogeneous as in no way to be comparable with it. This same agapee, divine love, constitutes the sum and substance of the Christian religion. As this love is only native in the heart of God, none but God, i.e., the Holy Ghost, can confer it. Holiness is simply another name for Holy Ghost religion. Hence all antiholiness religion is essentially diabolism from beginning to end, and can lead only to hell. The agapee, divine love, is imparted in regeneration (Rom 6:5) and made perfect when all of its antagonisms are removed in entire sanctification. It is like the wheat in the stock, intrinsically clean and pure, but extrinsically encumbered with chaff, straw, dirt and other impurities, till the steam thresher sweeps them all away. So the regenerated man needs the baptism of the Holy Ghost and fire to consume all the trash Satan put in him at the fall, and leave the heavenly agapee to reign without a rival.

10. This indefinable agapee came all the way from heaven to die for a lost world.

William B. Godbey, Commentary on the New Testament (1896–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

7–11. Love one another. He that is born of God must love because the Father is love; hence love shows that we are of him and know him. On the other hand (8) he who knows not God does not love.

B. W. Johnson's The People's New Testament with Notes (1889–1891) — public domain. Electronic text from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL) ThML edition.

General Information:

John continues to teach about the new nature. He teaches his readers about God's love and loving one another.

Beloved, let us love

"You people whom I love, let us love" or "Dear friends, let us love." See how you translated "Beloved" in 1 John 2:7.

let us love one another

"believers are to love other believers"

and everyone who loves is born from God and knows God

"and because those who love their fellow believers have become God's children and know him"

for love is from God

"because God causes us to love each other"

born from God

This is a metaphor which means someone has a relationship to God like a child to his father. (See: Metaphor)

The person who does not love does not know God, for God is love

The phrase "God is love" a metaphor which means "the character of God is love." AT: "Those who do not love their fellow believers do not know God because the character of God is to love people" (See: Metaphor)

translationWords

beloved

love

born again

God

unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.

7–21. LOVE IS THE MARK OF THE CHILDREN OF THE GOD WHO IS LOVE

7. ἀγαπητοί, ἀγαπῶμεν ἀλλήλ. See on 1Jn 3:2 and 1Jn 4:11. The transition seems abrupt, as if the Apostle had summarily dismissed an unwelcome subject. But the connexions of thought in S. John’s writings are often so subtle, that it is rash to assert anywhere that two consecutive verses or sections are entirely without connecting links. Two such links may be found here. 1. The power to love one another, no less than the power to confess the Incarnation, is the gift of the Spirit (1Jn 4:2; 1Jn 4:12-13). And faith and love mutually aid one another. This is the case even between man and man. Faith and trust soon pass into love. 2. The antichristian spirit is a selfish one; it makes self, i.e. one’s own intellect and one’s own interest, the measure of all things. Just as it severs the Divine from the human in Christ, so it severs Divine love from human conduct in man. ‘Beloved, let us do far otherwise. Let us love one another’.

For the third and last time in this Epistle the Apostle introduces the subject of brotherly love. First it was introduced as a consequence and sign of walking in the light (1Jn 2:7-11). Next it was introduced as a special form of righteousness and mark of God’s children (1Jn 3:10-18). Here it appears as a gift of the Spirit of God, a contrast to the antichristian spirit, and above all as an effluence from the very Being of God.

‘Love one another’ here, as in 1Jn 3:11, applies primarily to the mutual love of Christians. The love of Christians to unbelievers is not expressly excluded, but it is not definitely before the Apostle’s mind.

ἡ ἀγάπη ἐκ τ. Θεοῦ ἐστίν. And ‘we are of God’ (1Jn 4:6), and ‘ye are of God’ (1Jn 4:4); therefore there should be the family bond of love between us.

πᾶς ὁ ἀγαπῶν κ.τ.λ. This follows from the preceding statement. If God is the source of all love, then whatever love a man has in him comes from God; and this part of his moral nature is of Divine origin. Of ‘every one that loveth’ is this true, whether he be heathen or Christian: there is no limitation. If a Socrates or a Marcus Aurelius loves his fellow-men, it is by the grace of God that he does so. See first note on 1Jn 3:3.

γεγέννηται. ‘Hath been begotten of God and remains His child’; the full sense of the perfect. Translate with R.V. is begotten of God. καὶ γινώσκει. And groweth in the knowledge of God: see on ὁ γινώ σκων in 1Jn 4:6. A loyal child must increase in knowledge of its father.

Cambridge Greek Testament for Schools and Colleges (Cambridge University Press, 1896; 21 vols, various authors incl. Carr, Maclear, Plummer, Farrar, Lumby, Moule, M. R. James, Simcox) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

7-21.] The Apostle again takes up his exhortations to brotherly love, but this time in nearer and deeper connexion with our birth from God, and knowledge of Him who is Himself Love, vv. 7, 8. This last fact he proves by what God has done for us in and by His Son, vv. 9-16: and establishes the necessary connexion between love to God and love to man, vv. 17-21.

The passage is in connexion with what went before, but by links at first sight not very apparent. The great theme of the whole was enounced ch. 2:29. The consideration of that has passed into the consideration of that δικαιοσύνη in its highest and purest form of love, which has been recommended, and grounded on His love to us, in ch. 3:11-18, where the testimony of our hearts came in, and was explained—the great test of His presence in us being the gift of His Spirit, ch. 3 ult. Then from the necessity of distinguishing and being sure of that His Spirit, have been inserted the foregoing tests and cautions respecting truth and error. And now he returns to the main subject. The γινώσκει τὸν θεόν, ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ ἐστιν and γεγέννηται, the taking up again of God’s love to us in Christ at ver. 9 from ch. 3:16, the reiteration of the testimony of the Spirit in ver. 13, all serve to shew that we are reading no collection of spiritual apophthegms, but a close and connected argument, though not in an ordinary style.

7,

Henry Alford, The Greek Testament (1849–1861) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

7. ἀγαπητοί] One of the writer’s favourite words. It occurs ten times in the Epistles, though not in the Gospel. It is his usual method of address when he wishes to appeal to the better thoughts and feelings of his readers, or, to use S.Paul’s phrase, to “open the eyes of their hearts.” It emphasizes the natural grounds of appeal for mutual love, which can most readily be called out among those who are loved or lovable.ἡ ἀγάπη ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ ἐστίν] The whole of the Biblical revelation of God emphasizes the fact that man is made in the image of God, not God in the image of man, however much our conceptions of God are necessarily conditioned by human limitations. It suggests that whatever is best in man is the reflection, under the limitations of finite human existence, of something in the nature of God. The true nature of love cannot be appreciated unless it is recognized that its origin must be sought beyond human nature. We may compare the doctrine of “Fatherhood” insisted upon in Eph 3:15.

πᾶς ὁ ἀγαπῶν] It is generally recognized that love is here presented, not as the cause of the new birth from God or of the knowledge of God, but as their effect. The presence of love is the test by which the reality of their presence in any man may be known. The discussion of the question whether the writer intends to present the relation of the being born of God to the knowledge of God as one of cause and effect, or of effect and cause, is perhaps idle. He who loves shows thereby that he has experienced the new birth from God which is the beginning of Christian life, and that its effects are permanent and abiding. He also shows that he has entered upon that life which consists in the gradual acquiring of the knowledge of God. Whether this process of acquiring knowledge begins before, and leads to, the new birth, or only begins after that has been experienced and is its consequence, is not stated. The question was probably not present to the writer’s mind.

η αγαπη] post εστινIa 175 (319).

του (? Io)] om. Ic 116 (—).

ο αγαπων] + τον θεον Α: + fratrem demid. tol. Fulg.: + fratrem suum. Did.: cf. omnes qui diligunt se inuicem sahd.

καιIo—(8) εστιν] om. syrp.

γεγεννηται] γεγενηται99. 177*. 180 jscr Iscr Dam.

International Critical Commentary — older volumes (1896–1929), various authors — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Of God [εκ του θεου] . Flows from God.

Marvin R. Vincent, Word Studies in the New Testament (1887–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.