3.21 - Salvation By Love
Chapter 21 Salvation By Love (1 John 4:15-21)
St John’s Freshness in Repetition—God in Men that love Him—Men love Him for sending His Son—Chilling Effect of a Minimizing Christology—Faith reproduces the Love it apprehends—Love removes Fear of Judgement—Confidence of the Christ-like—Fear a Salutary Punishment—Learning Love from God—The Lie of loving God alone—Orthodoxy without Charity—God no Monopolist.
―—―♦———
Whosoever should confess that Jesus is the Son of God,
God dwelleth in him, and he in God.
And we have come to know, and have believed, the love that God hath
in regard to us.
God is love;
And he that abideth in love abideth in God, and God abideth in him.
Herein hath love been perfected in us, that we may have confidence in
the day of judgement,
Because as That Other is, so we also are in this world.
There is no fear in love, but the perfect love driveth out fear;
Because fear hath punishment, but he that feareth hath not been
perfected in love.
We love, because He first loved us.
If anyone should say, “I love God,” and hate his brother, he is a liar;
For he that doth not love his brother, whom he hath seen,
Cannot love God, whom he hath not seen.
And this commandment we have from Him,
That he who loveth God, should love also his brother.
―—―♦———
1 John 4:7-21 form the longest paragraph in the Epistle. There is no interruption in the current of thought, and our sectional division at this point may appear artificial. St John is pursuing the same theme—to him a never-ceasing wonder and entrancement—the thought of the eternal Father’s love, that flows through Christ into human souls and draws them into blissful union with itself and with each other. To think that “God so loved the world!” We traced redeeming love, in 1 John 4:7-14, from its source in the being of God to its consummation in the brotherhood of the Church. It seems as though there were nothing more to be said upon this line; when the Apostle has shown that “the love of God has been perfected” in Christian men who are true to their calling (1 John 4:12), and that by such manifestation of God’s goodness made in their lives they are assured of His indwelling (1 John 4:13) and verify to the world the truth of the Redeemer’s mission (1 John 4:14), the Apostle has surely exhausted the subject; he has said the last possible word upon it. There is, in fact, scarcely a single new word, or new item of thought, in 1 John 4:15-21. These sentences are for the most part a rehearsal of ideas that we have already met in the letter; but the combination gives them fresh import and significance. They are brought into relation with the love manifest in the character of Jesus, where all Christian truth is focused by St John; they are thus made to shine with new light, and to yield applications not apparent before. The ideas of this section are accessory and supplemental to the governing conception of the last section; it is difficult to present them in a clear analysis. The teaching of 1 John 4:15-21 may be reduced, however, to the following topics: the connection of Christian love and faith (1 John 4:15-16), the relation of love to judgement (1 John 4:17-18), the identity of love to God and love to men (1 John 4:19-21); in other words, love lives by faith, love casts out fear, love unites God and man within one breast.
1. The conception that we have just elicited from 1 John 4:15-16 is only apparent upon reading these sentences in the light of the earlier context. At the end 1 John 3:1-24, as we remember (pp. 306-307), St John laid down two things as the tokens of a genuine Christianity—“that we should believe the name of the Son of God, and that we should love one another.” The false teachers of the day were discredited upon both points: they did not believe what this name affirms —that Jesus and Christ are one, and that He is the Son of God; and they were wanting in brotherly love and practical benevolence. At the same time, the Gnostics assumed to be “dwelling in God,” to be spiritually united with the Deity, in a manner beyond that of ordinary Christian believers, by virtue of their deeper knowledge of God’s being. The Apostle, therefore, brought to bear upon their pretensions a two-fold test: in the first paragraph of chapter 4 (1 John 4:1-6) he applied to the spirit of error the touchstone of a sound faith in the person of Christ; and in the second paragraph, which we last discussed, he opposed to it the law of Divine love operative in the mission of Christ. Now he proceeds to draw these two principles together, and he finds that they are one. 1 John 4:1-6 and 1 John 4:7-14 are fused together and brought to a single point in 1 John 4:15-16. To say that “if anyone confesses that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, God dwells in him,” is to reaffirm in experimental language what was declared more abstractly in 1 John 4:2, that “every spirit which confesseth Jesus Christ as come in flesh is of God”; the same criterion was given, for the detecting of Anti-christ, in 1 John 2:22-23; once more this challenge will ring out (1 John 5:1) in the words, “Every one that believes that Jesus is the Christ, has been begotten of God.”
But why should the assertion of the Godhead of Christ be made just here? how does the confession of this determine God’s dwelling in men? “That Jesus is the Son of God” is a theological dogma, a metaphysical article of the creed: what has this to do with ethical Christianity? Much every way. The great doctrinal affirmation of 1 John 4:15 comes in between the statements of experimental religion made in 1 John 4:14 and 1 John 4:16, and is the link connecting them; it supplies the key to them both. “We (ἡμεῖς),” the Apostle writes in 1 John 4:14, opposing himself and his readers to men who profess a different doctrine—“we have beheld and do bear witness that the Father hath sent the Son as Saviour of the world” (1 John 4:14); and again, with the same emphasis, “We (ἡμεῖς)”—not those others—“have known and have believed the love that God hath toward us.” For it is those only who discern in Jesus the Son of God, who see in His coming the mission of the Son sent by the Father for the world’s salvation, who apprehend the scope of the Christian redemption and can testify with effect thereto; to others it must seem a lesser and lower thing. Understanding as these do—as they alone can do—the transcendent greatness of the Saviour and His infinite preciousness to God, they realize the love of God which gave Him to the world. The man who gives this testimony is of the Father’s mind concerning Christ; he has heard the Voice which said from heaven, “This is my Son, in whom I am well-pleased”; he is one with God in regard to Jesus Christ and the purposes of grace disclosed in Him. So “God dwells in” the confessor of this truth and he “dwells in God,” since the Father who sent His Son, and the believing soul that receives Him, have come to agreement about Him and are at peace in Him (p. 91). The acknowledgement of the Divinity of Christ is necessary for a proper sense of the love of God. It was no inferior messenger, no creature-angel, no effluence or emanation, or single ray of His glory out of many; it was the Only-begotten, “the fulness of the Godhead,” the Word that was God with God in the beginning, whom “God sent into the world, that we might live through Him.” By the Divine glory of Christ we estimate the love of the God who gave Him to our race. The largeness of His salvation is measured by the majesty of the Saviour’s person.
Any theory, whether of the ancient Gnostic or the modern Unitarian type, which makes Christ’s nature less than Divine, makes God’s love less than perfect in the same proportion. The theology which robs Christ of His Godhead, robs God of the glory of His love, and robs man of the one belief that generates a perfect love within him. To weaken faith is to deaden love. Faith in the Divine Sonship and mission of Jesus Christ is the channel along which God’s redeeming love is flowing into the world. Obstruct that channel, and you arrest the work of salvation; you impoverish the world of the love of God, which beats with all its strength in the hearts of those who know God’s own Son for their Saviour.
Faith begets love in the children of God, because it is faith in love: “we have known and have believed the love96 that God has in us.” Faith’s issue is love, for its object is love; it lays hold of the love that is in God, and reproduces that love in its own working. Faith is the channel by which God’s love imparts itself and finds passage through the world, pouring from heart to heart. Faith is the gaze by which, as men look on the Divine glory in the face of Jesus Christ, they are “transformed into the same image” (2 Corinthians 3:18). We understand therefore how the Apostle can say in the two succeeding verses (2 Corinthians 3:15 and 2 Corinthians 3:16), using identical terms but reversing the order of the clauses, first, that “God dwells in him and he in God,” who “confesses Jesus as God’s Son”; then, that “he dwells in God and God in him,” who “dwells in love.” For thus to confess Jesus is to realize God’s love to men; and he who realizes God’s love in this way becomes possessed by it, and is thus, in effect, possessed by God Himself. He “dwells in love” as one surrounded by its atmosphere, bathed in its light—and so “dwells in God”; his soul is filled with its fragrance, inspired by its effluence, swayed by its motions—and so “God dwells in him.” For “God is love.” A second time this equation is made; it is repeated in 1 John 4:16 from 1 John 4:8. This is the watchword of the Apostle John; it is not the whole message of his Gospel (see p. 331), but it is the distinctive note of it; in these three words lies all that he has most at heart to say. God the Father has put His very self into the gift of Jesus Christ, sending His Son from His bosom; and such a gift demonstrates, as no other boon could, that He is love toward man. Had the Eternal spent on saving man the whole finite creation, this would have cost little, and proved but little in the way of love, compared to the sacrifice of the Only-begotten. Thus in 1 John 4:15 and 1 John 4:16 the Apostle finds in the Divine Sonship of Jesus, the world’s Saviour, the evidence that “God is love,” as in 1 John 4:8 he found in the answering love of the believer the sign that he has received this evidence and knows God as love. Jesus Christ, coming from the open heart of the Godhead, reveals the love that burns there; and men who catch the flame from Him, kindle its fire all through the world.
2. From the dwelling-place of the soul in God, the Apostle looks on toward “the day of judgement” and the fears that it excites (1 John 4:17-18). More than once he has directed our thoughts this way. In 1 John 2:28 he urged the readers to “abide in God, that if Christ should be manifested, we may have confidence and not be ashamed before Him at His coming.” This anticipation lay behind the words of 1 John 3:3, “Every one who has this hope set on Him, purifies himself as He (Christ) is pure”; and of 1 John 4:19 in the same chapter, “Herein we shall know that we are of the truth, and shall assure our hearts before Him.” In the self-accusation of the heart wanting in brotherly love, that was intimated in 1 John 4:20-21 following the sentence last quoted, we felt a foreshadowing of the condemnation awaiting uncharitable Christian professors at their Master’s judgement-seat (see 1 John 3:14-18, and Chapter 18 above; compare Matthew 25:31-46).
It is incorrect to say that St John sets aside the Parousia and has no place in his doctrine for the Judgement-day, on which other New Testament teachers insist. To him, as truly as to St Matthew or St Paul, “the coming of the Lord” is the supreme crisis for the soul and for the Church. All human character and doings await the ultimate sentence of “that day”; in St John’s eyes no faith and love are of any worth, which will not approve themselves in the final test. “Confidence97 in the day of judgement” (1 John 4:17) is a mode in which St John realizes and conceives for himself the end of the Christian life; this is the future aspect and outcome of “perfect love”; it is the crown of blessing awaiting those who “are as Jesus is in this world” (compare pp. 67-68, and 231-235).
“Herein hath love been perfected with us”—that is, with those who hold the confession of Jesus Christ, who have this faith about Him and enter into the truth that He is the Son of God, allowing it to take effect upon them. St John did not see “love perfected” in other quarters; love gets full play and reaches its height only amongst those of whom he has spoken in the sentences foregoing,—the men who “love one another” in the consciousness that “God dwells in them” through the mediation of His Son, who see Christ in their fellows, and God in Christ. He assures his readers that the Divine love which has thus far attained its purpose and realized itself in their case, will bear them on to the final goal. “The love of God poured out in their hearts” and wrought out in their lives will sustain their hope (compare Romans 5:5 ff.) and vindicate them before the Judgement-seat. The “confidence” thus inspired—the boldest and loftiest the human spirit can entertain—rests on a ground of present fact; it is no abstract theological inference, but is warranted by the change already effected in the life of Christian believers: “because as He98 is, so also are we in this world.”
Now what is He?—“Jesus Christ the righteous” (1 John 2:2; 1 John 3:7), the “pure” (1 John 3:3); “Jesus Christ come in flesh” (1 John 4:2); “the Lamb of God that takes away the world’s sin,” in whom “there is no sin” (1 John 3:5),—the clear, radiant embodiment of the love and holiness of God in human form. And the Apostle who wrote this knew, in all humility, that “in this world” which has “the Evil One” for its lord, with its “many antichrists,” amid a society full of unrighteousness, uncleanness, and lovelessness, he and his companions mirrored in themselves the glory of Christ who is the image of God; they reproduced the character of their Master, and maintained the Christian ideal unimpaired. Having this consciousness of unbroken fellowship with the Lord and unqualified loyalty to Him, it was impossible for him to feel any misgiving in regard to the coming judgement, or to dread the sentence which Christ’s lips may then pronounce. We may falter in the appropriation of St John’s joyous words; but we must not minimize the emphasis with which he used them. Till we can adopt this testimony, till our faith in Christ is so complete that it brings us a full revelation of the love of God and in consequence a full conformity thereto, till we possess “A heart in every thought renewed, And full of love Divine,” there must remain a lingering of condemnation, a remnant of fear; “he that feareth hath not been perfected in love”—his fear goes to prove this. And this “fear,”99 as St John puts it, “hath punishment.” The premonition of judgement falling upon hearts that must condemn themselves for defects in love and for disobedience to the law of Christ (compare 1 John 3:18-21), the presentiment of the conscience that it may go ill with us on such accounts when we stand before our Lord at the last, is a chastening that should both humble and alarm the soul. This is no “torment” (as the older Version misrendered the Greek noun); it is a tender, gracious “punishment,” under the infliction of which, as St Paul said in regard to a kindred matter, “we are chastened by the Lord, so that we may not be condemned with the world” (1 Corinthians 11:32). St John’s word for “punishment” in 1 John 4:18 (κόλασις) is found in the New Testament but once besides,—where our Lord speaks of the “eternal punishment” (κόλασιςαἰώνιος) that is to fall at the end on those banished from “the kingdom prepared” for “the blessed children of His Father.” Heartlessness is the crime that incurs this doom, according to Christ’s prophetic words (Matthew 25:34-40). “The fear” which St John associates with defects in Christian love points the same way; suchquaking of heart is a salutary earnest of the fate that must overtake those who disregard Christ’s need in His suffering members; it is a danger-signal, to be ignored at our peril—a punishment blest to the sufferer if it prove corrective, but growing into an “eternal punishment” when the heart hardens under it.
3. St John’s thought moves on from the proof of the Supreme Love given in 1 John 4:14-16 to its working upon those who respond to it—first, as it operates negatively by casting out fear (1 John 4:17-18), then as it works positively by fostering love in man to man (1 John 4:19-21). This last is the mark at which the Apostle’s reasonings and appeals are always aimed. The Apostle has reaffirmed that “God is love”; he dares to connect human love directly with the eternal and Divine: “We100 love, because He first loved us.” He does not say “We love Him” (that is the copyist’s mistake); but “we love”—we have caught the spirit, we have learnt the art of love from God’s love to ourselves in Christ (compare p. 279). It is the same love, existing in manifold forms, which glows in the heart of the child of God toward the Father and toward the brethren; the Apostle is thinking of the source and quality, not of the particular object of Christian love, when he writes as he does in 1 John 4:19. The sense of God’s forgiving love, of His adopting grace—so pitiful, so benignant, so self-devoting and self-imparting, and so undeserved—smites the heart into tenderness and gratitude, opening in it springs of emotion, depths of holy passion, of which heretofore it knew nothing. “Behold,” cried the Apostle, “what manner of love the Father bestowed upon us, that we should be called children of God”! (1 John 3:1). Who can behold this sight and hear in his heart the witness of the Spirit bidding him call God “Father,” without a heaven of love and joy being born within him? All his sensibilities are touched and elevated; the whole range of his feelings is enlarged and his moral nature charged with new potentialities, when the love of God comes into his soul. It is not God alone that he learns to love; all his loves and sympathies, every relationship in which he stands to his fellow-men and to the creatures about him, is penetrated by the new influence. He has learnt, for the first time, to love with heart and mind, with soul and strength, to pour himself out in affection and service upon others. He casts from himself, with the old fear, the old self-seeking and the old pride. The fountain of love is in God—“He first loved us.” The initiative in the great reconciliation and affiance lay entirely with Him, as the Apostle said in 1 John 4:10 (see p. 330): “It was not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son a propitiation for our sins.” The love began there—no affection worthy of the name existed upon our part; love was dead in many hearts, fevered and spotted with corruption in many others. A fresh stream of life and love must be poured from the primal source into the shrunken veins and disordered frame of humanity, that it might know health and joy again. And this renewal has come to the world in the coming of the Son of God. God “first loved us”; after that, we learn to love Him and each other. The exchange of love began with Him; but it does not end there. The love which the Father spends on us, does not merely return to Him: the sun’s light shining on each planet is reflected not to the source alone, but to every space around the reflector where there are eyes to catch it. If the light and fire of heaven burn in one heart, every other heart within its range is touched by the glow; the radiance of the indwelling Godhead by its mere presence radiates from the life that holds it. If one has God’s love, one cannot help but return it; and in the nature of things, one cannot return it to Himself alone. There is no stopping at the First Commandment of Jesus—one must needs go on to keep the Second; when the heart is in the full course and stream of the love of God that pours upon the world in Christ, it is borne along through all the channels of service and affection. The very momentum of the current, the whole bent of the Divine love and the eternal Will which supply its impetus, carry him whom it has caught into the work of human salvation and involve him in the countless obligations of brotherly love; these demands he has no moral right, and should have no will or desire, to escape.
Such is the logic of redeeming love, which lies behind the Apostle’s denunciation in 1 John 4:20—the warmth of expression shows that he has actual hypocrites of the sort indicated in his view: “Should a man say I love God, while he hates his brother, he is a liar.” The form of expression recalls 1 John 1:6, 1 John 1:8, 1 John 1:10 (see p. 104). Here is another of the things which men say, but which can never be,—sayings in which the essence of sin’s deceitfulness is contained, and which reveal a deep falsity of character, a rent running through the whole tissue of life. There is but one way by which our love to God can be tested and certified. If it be God that a man really loves, he will love His image in other men. Our Lord said to those who assailed Him, “If God were your Father, you would love me” (John 8:42). The Jewish Scribes feared and despised the Nazarene; they saw in Him what was most contrary and condemning to their own disposition—it was the Spirit of God in Him against which they fought; the mind and purposes of God expressed in Jesus, roused the evil in them and brought out the sin of their hearts in furious antagonism. “They have both seen and hated both me and my Father” (John 15:21-24): such was His final verdict against His people.
St John’s accusation turns upon the same argument: “For he who loves not his brother whom he hath seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.” There is something of God to be seen in every child of God, in every “brother” of the household of faith; if seeing that specimen of God, the “seed” of the Divine (1 John 3:9) within the man, you do not love him for it, then it is plain you do not love God, however much you may say or think so. “He that hath seen me, hath seen the Father,” said Jesus to Philip (John 14:8-9), and what was to be seen perfectly in Jesus Christ is visible less perfectly, but no less truly, in all who “are as He is in this world” (1 John 4:17). God is, manifest in good men. Infirm and faulty men they may be, “broken lights” of the Father’s glory and far from being full of grace and truth—those “brothers whom you have seen”—but they are the one object in which God is manifest before your eyes on earth. His image shines there for every man to behold, who has a sense for the Divine; and those who will not recognize it, fail to see God. If you do not like the visible sample, it is idle to say that you approve the invisible bulk. Orthodoxy without charity, religious zeal barren of human affection, a love to God which leaves a man bitter and cynical or cold and full of selfish calculation toward his brethren, is amongst the most false and baneful things that can exist, amongst the things most blighting to faith and goodness and most hateful in the sight of God. This is the cardinal hypocrisy, the feigning of love toward God. The mind of God has been plainly shown in this all-important matter. The duty is not, left to inference; nor does it stand on bare grounds of reason and propriety; it is put into solemn and distinct injunction: “This commandment we have from Him, that he who loves God should love also his brother.” This is the sum of “the commandments,” that was illustrated by the perfect life of Jesus (1 John 2:4-6), the “old and new commandment’’ (1 John 2:7-11) which governs God’s whole will for men from first to last; it is the command which attends the movements of faith at every step (1 John 3:23-24); it is enforced by every obligation under which we are placed to God, and every relationship that associates us with our brethren in the Church of Christ. God forbids us to love Him, unless we love our brethren: all narrower love He rejects as spurious and vain. The Father will not give His love to unbrotherly any more than to unfilial men. The Head of the Church spurns the affection that pretends to be fixed upon Himself, and does not seek His lowly brethren. To offer God an exclusive love is to impute our own selfishness to Him and to make Him a monopolist within His universe,—the Father whose name is Love and whose nature it is to “give liberally unto all without upbraiding.” Clearly, the man who proffers this sort of homage to his Maker, “has not seen Him nor known Him” (1 John 3:6). As Rothe finely says upon this passage, “Just because God is love, He would not absorb the love of His creatures, nor thrust His children aside in the claims He makes upon us. All love to Him He will have divided and shared with men. But this division is only a division in appearance.” God is so truly one with mankind in Christ, that there is no room for opposing claims and divided interests in love’s empire. To impute to the Father jealousy of the love we cherish toward His children, is to belittle and to wrong Him strangely. Every new access of love to God deepens the heart and makes it more capable of generous and pure affection to our own kind.