02.01.08. 1John 4:7-21 God is love . . .
§ 8. 1 John 4:7-21
GOD IS LOVE At this point in the Epistle we pass from the thought of the conflict of the Church and the world, or of Christ and the antichrists, and henceforward are occupied with the consideration of what Christianity, the true religion, essentially is. And the point of this section is that in-as-much as religion is fellowship with God, and in Christ God has revealed His essential character as love, so love — a love like Christ’s — is the essence and test of the true religion. Where love is, God is; and where love is not, God is not. So he begins, “Beloved, let us love one another.” Inasmuch as love can proceed from no other source than God, every one who really loves has his birth from God and knows God. On the other hand, as God’s very being is love, a loveless or selfish person shows conclusively that he does not know Him. If the question be asked, How do we know God’s real character, the answer is that He has made it evident in our case by sending His only Son into the world — the one and only perfect expression of Himself— that through Him we might share the true life, the life of God. Love is not something which belongs to human nature or starts from our side toward God. It is all the other way.
God sent His Son to redeem us from our sins and reconcile us to Himself by the sacrifice of His life. Here, in this sacrifice of self for man, we see the character of God. And hence follows the duty of so loving our brother-man. The vision of God as He is has never yet been within the capacity of man; but in Christ we know of what sort He is, and can therefore imitate Him in the love of our brethren, and herein find assurance that God, whose being love is, dwells in us and His love has found its accomplishment in us. It is only to say this in other words, to say that the presence of love is proof of the presence of the Spirit of God, and the presence of His Spirit is the guarantee of the mutual indwelling of God and us. Or, again, inasmuch as our love is based upon the recognition of the love of God, as manifested in Christ for the world’s salvation, so we must say that the confession of this manifestation, the confession of Jesus as Son of God, is the guarantee of this mutual indwelling of God and us. So only has the Son of God been recognized and believed.
This, then, is our sure ground. As God is love, so where love is, God is, and the permanence of love in us means that we are permanently dwelling in God and God in us. And inasmuch as the perfection of love is in mutual confidence, so the perfection of divine love is to be shown in our case by our confidence in the final day of disclosure — the day of judgement. We are living the life of love — as He is, so are we in the world.
We have accordingly nothing to fear. There is a complete understanding between us. Love in its perfection must, in fact, expel fear: for fear is fear of punishment and means that love is not perfect. And again be it said, this love in man is no invention of man— no enterprise of his own. It is purely and simply the following of God, who showed us His love to us. And, in our case, love can only be proved manward. For a man to profess love to God while he hates his brother is to prove himself a liar. For the testing of love is in experience.
You have seen your brother. He has come into your experience. Do you love him? If not, you have not love, and it is an idle boast to say, in that case, that you love God whom you have not seen — that is to say, that love exists in you where it has not been put to the test of experience, when it has been shown not to exist where it has been put to the test. Besides, it is not merely a matter of inference. It is a matter of a positive commandment of God that he who loveth God love his brother also.
Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. Herein was the love of God manifested in ns, that God hath sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No man hath beheld Gk)d at any time: if we love one another, God abideth in us, and his love is perfected in us: hereby know we that we abide in him, and he in us, because he hath given us of his Spirit. And we have beheld and bear witness that the Father hath sent the Son to be the Savior of the world.
Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God abideth in him, and he in God. And we know and have believed the love which God hath in us. God is love; and he that abideth in love abideth in God, and God abideth in him. Herein is love made perfect with us, that we may have boldness in the day of judgement; because as he is, even so are we in this world. There is no fear in love: but perfect love casteth out fear, because fear hath punishment; and he that feareth is not made perfect in love. We love, because he first loved us. 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.
1. God is love.—Bt. John’s whole argument implies that in Jesus Christ we see revealed the true character of God. It is true that the phrase so often repeated, “God sent His Son,” need not of itself mean so much. The character of the Messenger might be different from the character of Him that sent Him. And, in fact, theologians have sometimes been at such pains to guard the “impassibility” of the Father — that is, His incapacity for suffering — that the whole of that spirit of self-sacrifice which appears as the very central characteristic of our Lord has been represented as alien to the being of the Father. But St. John conceives of the Son as in His incarnation revealing nothing else than the mind and character of the Father. “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” His love is God’s love, and as the very essence of His love is self-sacrifice, such, St. John would have us believe, is the love of the Father. The Patripassians, i.e. those who ascribed the sufferings of Christ to the Father, were no doubt rightly condemned, for they were defined by Origen, their contemporary, as “those who identify the Father and the Son, and represent them as one and the same person under two different names.” “Herein, no doubt, they fell into most serious error. No one could reasonably argue that St. John does not represent Father and Son as different “persons.”
It was clearly, in his view, the Son and not the Father who lived among men and prayed to the Father and suffered on the Cross. But the opponents of Patripassianism, though they have the truth on their side so far, often use arguments which are certainly not derived from the Bible, but from Greek philosophy, arguments implying that the divine being is in itself so wholly “impassible,” so emotionless and passionless, that the ascription to it of the name of love would seem unreal. Nothing can be less true of the God revealed in the Old Testament and of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is the innermost and divine being of the Son which St. John would have us believe is revealed under human conditions ’’in the flesh” of Jesus Christ. And in this His divine being He is “of one substance with the Father."
He differs from the Father in no respect except in being His Son, derived, therefore, from Him and dependent upon Him, but identical in quality and character. It is only because this is absolutely the case that St. John can argue back from Christ’s love to God’s love, and assure us that God is love in His very essence, and where love is, love of which the characteristic act is self-sacrifice, God is. Indeed, if it were not so — if the Father were not implicated (so to speak) in the sufferings of Jesus — the “sending” of Him to suffer and die might be an argument rather for indifference on His part than for love.
Truly the Church always needs to remember that the speculations of theologians about the mysteries of God’s being need constantly to be brought to trial at the bar of God’s word — His true expression of Himself through His prophets and in His Son. And the ideas of God’s almightiness, unchangeableness, omniscience, impassibility, etc, which the Bible conveys to our minds, differ considerably from the abstract ideas derived from Greek philosophy. The ancient philosophers, in fact, were so obsessed with the desire to deny to God not merely everything carnal, but everything that belongs to the emotional nature of man, that the religion of the Bible — the religion of the Incarnation — can never in this respect find itself at home with them. There is nothing about God in the philosophers which will compare with Isaiah’s “In all their afflictions he was afflicted... in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; and he bare them, and carried them all the days of old.”
2. “Love is of God.” Some modem thinkers — Huxley, Bertrand Russell, Wells — have told us just the opposite of this. Love is a splendid human growth, which rebel man has to make a desperate attempt to impose upon or acclimatize in a reluctant universe. The great bulk of nature knows nothing of it. Now, we must rejoice that such men should hold fast by what they know in their consciences to be the best, even if the universal life were all against them. Nevertheless, for man to war with nature is at bottom an irrational and futile kind of rebellion. Nature is too vast for puny man to impose its will upon it. The wise man has always seen that man’s true desting must be in harmony with nature. And St. John’s magnificent assurance of the supremacy of love depends, as he so deeply perceives, on the belief that the origin and fount of love is in God and not in us. “Love is of God.’’ “God is love.” And again, this assurance can be grounded on no other secure basis than the belief that Christ, who certainly is love, comes, as He Himself declares, from God, and discloses, in the intelligible lineaments of human self-sacrifice, the very heart of the eternal and onmipresent God, the maker and sustainer of all that is.
3. The purpose for which the Father sent His only-begotten Son into the world is described by St. John in this passage in three phrases: (1) that we might live through Him; (2) to be the propitiation for our sins; (3) to be the Savior of the world. Each phrase is characteristic. The first represents the constant theme of the Fourth Gospel. “In him was life and the life was the light of men” (John 1:4). “As the Father hath life in himself, so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself” (John 1:26).
’’God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should have eternal life.” (John 3:16).
“Verily, verily, I say unto you. Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life... As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father; so he that eateth me, he also shall live because of me” (John 6:63-67).
“I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly’’ (John 10:10). “I am the... life” (John 14:6). “ Because I live, ye shall live also." (John 14:19). Here we have the whole doctrine of what St. Paul also calls “ the life that is life indeed” (1 Timothy 6:19). The Son is, by communication from the Father, the eternal seat of life. He has illuminated man since his creation as a rational being, but in His incarnation He manifested the true life under human conditions to human observation. Men become receptive of it by faith, but it is only by the actual communication of Christ’s manhood to them that they can have it in themselves. That they may so have it is the purpose of His coming. And (it must be added) the instrument of its communication to them is the Holy Spirit. This is implied in our Lord’s words about the “ living water ’’ (John 7:37) and in His last discourses (John 14:1-31, John 15:11-27, John 16:1-33), and is expressed more directly by St. Paul. This, then, is the object of His coming,” that we might live through Him.’’
Then in the second phrase St. John repeats in part what he has said earlier in his Epistle (1 John 2:2), and declares Christ to have come into the world “ to be the propitiation for our sins “— that is, to remove the preliminary obstacle to fellowship with God which men’s sin had interposed, and by the sacrifice of Himself to reconcile us to God and restore the free current of His love. St. John plainly accepts this idea of propitiation and its necessity without scruple, but he does not go even so far as St. Paul in suggesting an explanation. He simply asserts it twice here in his Epistle, as in his Gospel he relates St. John Baptist’s suggestion of it (John 1:29), and alludes to it under the figure of the brazen serpent (John 3:14) and in explanation of Caiaphas’s “prophecy” (Jn 11:61-2).
Thirdly, he expresses the purpose and universal scope of Christ’s work in the incarnation by the phrase to be “the savior of the world” (cf. earlier, 1 John 2:2, ’’ and not for our sins only, but for the whole world’’). It is characteristic of St. John that he does not seek to supply us with any help in correlating these different statements, any more than his statements about love and right belief and the possession of the Spirit, as, each in itself, the all-sufficient mark of divine sonship. But it is safe to affirm that St. John would have us see in Christ’s work in us, actually renewing and imparting the true life to us, and abiding in us that we may abide in Him and so in the Father by the Spirit, the ultimate purpose of Christ’s coming, without which all else would have been in vain. At the same time he would have us recognize a preliminary necessity for the removal of the existing obstacle of sin. This is Christ’s work for us, which He calls “propitiation.” Hereby, without any assistance or co-operation on our part, simply by the power of His perfect sacrifice, Christ gave mankind a new standing-ground before the Father, and enabled the Father to look upon man, in Christ, with new eyes, and pour out upon him freely the fulness of His love. And if we seek for the phrase to express, in accordance with man’s universal sense of need, what the love of God intends, and for whom He intends it, we can find it only in St. John’s third phrase — salvation as wide as the world. The world in various ways, ignorantly but earnestly, was asking for “salvation” and deliverance from the manifold evils of life. And St. John affirms that it is the purpose of God to correspond with this world-wide desire without stint or limitation, and that there is one only name given under heaven wherein this universal salvation is really to be found.
4. There are two chief tests given by St. John of our abiding in God and God in us — the one is love and the other is the confession that Jesus is the Son of God. As already remarked, no guidance is given us how to think of cases where the two tests do not coincide — none at least in the case where there is the genuine love but not the true confession. But we need to notice the fact that St. John does insist on the intellectual as well as the moral test. There is a very widespread tendency to-day to disparage the value of intellectual propositicms or dogmas in religion. St. John would have none of this. For him the practical belief that love is the supreme expression of God is only rational if it is also believed that God has really revealed Himself in Jesus, and that Jesus is personally His only-begotten Son incarnate. He cannot separate, or allow us to separate, the practical belief from its intellectual expression. He is sure they are interdependent, and that no other opinion about Jesus will justify us in maintaining that God is love. Therefore he insists on his two tests— the one practical, the other intellectual — with an equal and unconditional emphasis.
5. Perfect love casteth out fear. — The reason which St. John gives why perfect love is incompatible with fear is that fear “hath”’ or “involves’’ (the word is vague) punishment. This may mean that fear is fear of divine punishment. The man fears to sin because God will punish him for his sin hereafter. It may also mean that fear torments the soul and is itself a punishment. I am inclined to believe that the former meaning is the right one. Cf. Isaiah, “Sinners in Zion are afraid’’ at the tidings of the approach of God. “Who among us?” they cry, “shall dwell with the devouring fire? who among us shall dwell with the everlasting burnings? “ It is the divine visitation that is described thus under the figure of fire. It represents itself to them as terrible punishment. But “he that walketh uprightly" need have no such terror. He “shall behold the King in his beauty.” So St. John says “perfected love” has no place for servile fear of the punishment which the day of the Lord will bring with it. But he does not say that perfect love is not based upon and cannot grow out of a very imperfect sort of love, which must consist with a large element of fear. Our generation is extraordinarily without the fear of God. But its fearlessness seems like the fearlessness of Jehoiachim and his courtiers, a foolish fearlessness, due only to a failure to consider the awfulness of the divine presence and judgement. Our Lord Himself bids us fear — “fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell." And it is only too possible to be premature in claiming the fearlessness which belongs to love only when it is perfected.
6. He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, etc. — In the authorized version this sentence concluded with a question, “How can he love God whom he hath not seen? “ which seemed to imply that it was much easier to love what you had seen than what you had not. This may be true. But I remember a brilliant young man — young, that is, more than forty years ago — exclaiming against St. John’s argument, because he himself found no difficulty in loving people till he had seen them. It was the sight which caused the difficulty. I think this is really St. John’s point. It is “sight,” that is, experience, which brings our love to the test. The practical probation is that we have “to love the people whom we don’t like.”
If we fail when this practical test is applied, we prove that we have not genuine love — only natural liking with its correlative disliking. And our profession of loving God, where our love has been put to no such test, is disproved.
“If he loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, he cannot love God whom he hath not seen.” And we may venture to extend the argument.
Sometimes we have, if not sight, yet at least experience of God, and He seems hard, remorseless, inexorable. If we fail under this trial, if all our love to God quite vanishes under His seemingly heavy hand, is it not a proof that we never had any real love of God? But this is not suggested by St. John. Experience, or what St. John calls “sight,” is the testing of the reality of love, and this testing he is content to find in the relations of men to one another.
7. “In us,” in 1 John 4:9 and perhaps in 1 John 4:16, should be, I think, “among us’’ or “in our case” (see R.V. margin), in spite of the rather frequent recurrence of “in us” in the context. The Greek preposition can carry this meaning, and what is in view appears to be the disclosure of the divine love among men in the person of Jesus Christ.
8. In the word “only-begotten” here applied to our Lord (1 John 4:9), the emphasis is on the first part of the compound word. It is used of anything that is unique in kind.