You are of God, little children, and have overcome them; because greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world. They are of the world. Therefore they speak of the world, and the world hears them. We are of God. He who knows God listens to us. He who is not of God doesn’t listen to us. By this we know the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error.
Beloved, let’s love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves has been born of God, and knows God. He who doesn’t love doesn’t know God, for God is love. By this God’s love was revealed in us, that God has sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, if God loved us in this way, we also ought to love one another. No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God remains in us, and his love has been perfected in us.
By this we know that we remain in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. We have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son as the Savior of the world. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God remains in him, and he in God. We know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and he who remains in love remains in God, and God remains in him. In this love has been made perfect among us, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment, because as he is, even so we are in this world. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear has punishment. He who fears is not made perfect in love. We love him, because he first loved us. If a man says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who doesn’t love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? This commandment we have from him, that he who loves God should also love his brother.
John Calvin 1540 · Public Domain On vv4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 4 Ye are of God He had spoken of…
4 Ye are of God He had spoken of one antichrist; he now mentions many. But the many were the false prophets who had come forth before the head appeared. But the Apostle’s object was to animate the faithful, that they might courageously and boldly resist impostors, for alacrity is weakened when the issue of the contest is doubtful. Besides, it might have caused the good to fear, when they saw that hardly the kingdom of Christ had been set up, when enemies stood ready to suppress it. Though then they must contend, yet he says that they had conquered, because they would have a successful issue, as though he had said that they were already, though in the middle of the contest;, beyond any danger, because they would surely be conquerors.
But this truth ought to be farther extended, for whatever contests we may have with the world and the flesh, a certain victory is to follow. Hard and fierce conflicts indeed await us, and some continually succeed others; but as by Christ’s power we fight and are furnished with God’s weapons, we even by fighting and striving become conquerors. As to the main subject of this passage, it is a great consolation, that with whatever wiles Satan may assail us, we shall stand through the power of God.
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But we must observe the reason which is immediately added, because greater, or stronger, is he who is in you than he who is in the world. For such is our infirmity, that we succumb before we engage with an enemy, for we are so immersed in ignorance that we are open to all kinds of fallacies, and Satan is wonderfully artful in deceiving. Were we to hold out for one day, yet a doubt may creep into our minds as to what would be the case tomorrow; we should thus be in a state of perpetual anxiety. Therefore the Apostle reminds us that we become strong, not by our own power, but by that of God. He hence concludes, that we can no more be conquered than God himself, who has armed us with his own power to the end of the world. But in this whole spiritual warfare this thought ought to dwell in our hearts, that it would be all over with us immediately were we to fight in our own strength; but that as God repels our enemies while we are reposing, victory is certain.
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.
Geneva Bible translators 1599 · Public Domain On vv4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 He comforteth the elect with a most sure hope…
He comforteth the elect with a most sure hope of victory: but yet so, that he teacheth them that they fight not with their own virtue, but with the virtue and power of God.
Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain.
John Trapp 1656 · Public Domain On vv4–21 4 Ye are of God, little children, and have…
4 Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world.
Ver. 4. And have overcome] viz. In your Head, Christ, and by the help of his Holy Spirit, your sweet inhabitant, whereby ye are more than conquerors, because sure to overcome and triumph.
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.
Matthew Poole 1685 · Public Domain On vv4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 Their being born of God, and their participation of…
Their being born of God, and their participation of a directive and strengthening influence from him, kept them from being overcome by the plausible notions, the alluring blandishments of the flesh and sense, the terror of persecution used towards them by these antichristian or pseudo-christian tempters; and enabled them to overcome, because the Divine Spirit in them was stronger than the others’ lying, impure spirit.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
William Burkitt 1703 · Public Domain On vv4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 14, 17, 19, 20, 21 Observe here, 1. A character and description given of…
Observe here, 1. A character and description given of these Christians to whom our apostle writes. He tells them they were of a nobler descent, of a more excellent pedigree, and higher offspring, than their false teachers; Ye are of God, regenerated by the Spirit of God, quickened by his renovation, led by his manuduction, acted by his influences, animated by his assistances: Little children ye are of God.
Observe, 2. What is affirmed of these Christians, Ye have overcome them; that is, ye have resisted their temptations, withstood their seductions, and all their arts and endeavours to mislead you, when others have been perverted by them.
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Learn hence, That by steadfastness in the doctrine of Christ, Christians do overcome impostors and seducers, when unstable souls are overcome by them.
Observe, 3.The reason assigned why, and the means declared by which, they overcome, namely, because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world; that is, Christ, who by his Spirit and doctrine dwells in you, is greater and more powerfully efficacious than the spirit of error, which influences these vile impostors and secucers that are abroad in the world.
William Burkitt's Expository Notes on the New Testament (1700–1703) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Henry 1710 · Public Domain On vv4, 7, 14, 17 In these verses the apostle encourages the disciples against…
In these verses the apostle encourages the disciples against the fear and danger of this seducing antichristian spirit, and that by such methods as these: - 1. He assures them of a more divine principle in them: "You are of God, little children, Jo1 4:4. You are God's little children. We are of God, Jo1 4:6. We are born of God, taught of God, anointed of God, and so secured against infectious fatal delusions. God has his chosen, who shall not be mortally seduced." 2. He gives them hope of victory: "And have overcome them, Jo1 4:4. You have hitherto overcome these deceivers and their temptations, and there is good ground of hope that you will do so still, and that upon these two accounts:" - (1.) "There is a strong preserver within you: Because greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world, Jo1 4:4. The Spirit of God dwells in you, and that Spirit is more mighty than men of devils." It is a great happiness to be under the influence of the Holy Ghost. (2.) "You are not of the same temper with these deceivers. The Spirit of God hath framed your mind for God and heaven; but they are of the world. The spirit that prevails in them leads them to this world; their heart is addicted thereto; they study the pomp, the pleasure, and interest of the world: and therefore speak they of the world; they profess a worldly messiah and saviour; they project a worldly kingdom and dominion; the possessions and treasures of the world would they engross to themselves, forgetting that the true Redeemer's kingdom is not of this world. This worldly design procures them proselytes: The world heareth them, Jo1 4:5. They are followed by such as themselves: the world will love its own, and its own will love it. But those are in a fair way to conquer pernicious seductions who have conquered the love of this seducing world." Then, 3. He represents to them that though their company might be the smaller, yet it was the better; they had more divine and holy knowledge: "He that knoweth God heareth us. He who knows the purity and holiness of God, the love and grace of God, the truth and faithfulness of God, the ancient word and prophecies of God, the signals and testimonials of God, must know that he is with us; and he who knows this will attend to us, and abide with us." He that is well furnished with natural religion will the more faithfully cleave to Christianity. He that knoweth God (in his natural and moral excellences, revelations, and works) heareth us, Jo1 4:6. As, on the contrary, "He that is not of God heareth not us. He who knows not God regards not us. He that is not born of God (walking according to his natural disposition) walks not with us. The further any are from God (as appears in all ages) the further they are from Christ and his faithful servants; and the more addicted persons are to this world the more remote they are from the spirit of Christianity. Thus you have a distinction between us and others: Hereby know we the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error, Jo1 4:6. This doctrine concerning the Saviour's person leading you from the world to God is a signature of the Spirit of truth, in opposition to the spirit of error. The more pure and holy any doctrine is the more likely is it to be of God."
Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible (1708–1710) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Gill 1763 · Public Domain On vv4–20 Ye are of God, little children,.... This, with what…
Ye are of God, little children,.... This, with what follows, is said for the comfort of the saints, and to deliver them from the fears of being drawn aside by the delusions of the false prophets, and antichrists; since they belonged to God, were his elect, and therefore could not be finally and totally seduced; they were the children of God by adopting grace, and could not become the servants of men; they were born of God, and so were kept by the power of God unto salvation, as all that are begotten unto a lively hope are; they were enlightened by the Spirit of God, and had a discerning of truth from error, and therefore could not be imposed upon:
and have overcome them; the false prophets, being in a good cause, fighting the good fight of faith, and having good weapons, particularly the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, and invincible arguments from thence; and also gracious assistance from the Spirit of God, who gives a mouth that none can shut, and wisdom that none can resist; as well as an inward experience of the truth, and power of Gospel doctrines: a testimony within themselves, which will stand the whole shock and opposition of the enemy: the Vulgate Latin version reads, "and have overcome him"; antichrist, whose spirit was then in the world; or the world itself, or Satan, the god of the world; and so the Ethiopic version reads, "and have overcome the evil one", as in Jo1 2:13; the reason of which victory, and which adds to the comfort and support of saints in their present warfare, is,
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because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world; by "he that is in the world" is meant either the devil, the prince and god of the world, and who goes up and down in it, dwells in the hearts of the men of it, under whose influence they are, and in whom he works effectually; or antichrist, whose spirit was now in the world, and whose doctrine was propagated by the false teachers, in whom he began to appear; but he that is in the saints, either God who dwells in them, and their in him, Jo1 4:15; is mightier than the man of sin, and his emissaries, to keep and preserve from all corruptions, and every false way; or Christ, who dwells in their hearts by faith, and is stronger than the strong man armed, and able to save and deliver out of his hands; or the Spirit of God; and so the Arabic version reads, "the Spirit that is in you"; who is in the saints, as a spirit of regeneration and sanctification, as a spirit of adoption, and the earnest of their inheritance; he is able to carry on the work of grace in them, and finish it, and will do it; and he, as a spirit of truth, is more powerful than the spirit of error; and when the enemy comes in like a flood, or pours in a flood of errors and heresies, he lifts up a standard against him, causes him to fly, and secures the saints from being carried away with it: compare with this the Septuagint version of Psa 124:1, "if it had not been the Lord who was on our side"; which render it thus, "if the Lord had not been in us".
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Wesley 1765 · Public Domain On vv4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 Ye have overcome these seducers, because greater is the…
Ye have overcome these seducers, because greater is the Spirit of Christ that is in you than the spirit of antichrist that is in the world.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke 1810 · Public Domain On vv4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 Verse 4. Ye are of God] Ye are under…
Verse 4. Ye are of God] Ye are under the influence of the Divine Spirit, and have overcome them-your testimony, proceeding from the Spirit of Christ, has invalidated theirs which has proceeded from the influence of Satan; for greater is the Holy Spirit which is in you, than the spirit which is in the world.
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Joseph Benson 1811 · Public Domain On vv4, 7, 9, 10, 13, 15, 18, 20 1Jn 4:4-6. Ye — Who abide in the truth…
1Jn 4:4-6. Ye — Who abide in the truth taught you from the beginning; are of God, and have overcome them — Namely, these seducers, in all their snares and delusions: that is, the doctrine to which you adhere has prevailed against those who deserve the name of antichrist, (as undoubtedly all who oppose the Christian interest in some measure did,) and as you have the true miraculous gifts of the Spirit among you, to which they falsely pretend, it is soon seen that the advantage is clearly on your side. Because greater is he that is in you — Namely, the Spirit of Christ; than he — The spirit of antichrist; that is in the world — The Son of God, who stands at the head of that interest in which you are embarked, and who aids you by the mighty communications of his Spirit, is infinitely too strong for Satan, the great head of the apostacy, and for all his confederates. Thus, the issue of the divine government will be, that truth and virtue shall be finally victorious over error and wickedness, because God, the Patron of truth and virtue, possesseth far greater power and wisdom than the evil spirits who promote error and wickedness. They — Those false teachers; are of the world — Of the number of those that know not God; therefore speak they of the world — From the principle, wisdom, and spirit, that actuate worldly men; and, of consequence, the world heareth them — Namely, with approbation. “Lest the faithful should be discouraged by the success which false teachers oftentimes have in spreading their errors, the apostle observes that their success arises generally from their accommodating their doctrines to the prejudices and evil inclinations of the world. Wherefore, from the prevalence of any doctrine no argument can be drawn in favour of its truth.” We — Apostles; are of God — Immediately taught and sent by him, and have approved ourselves to be so by such irresistible evidence, that I may now venture to say, he who knoweth God — And experiences the governing influence of his fear and love, heareth and regardeth us; but he who is not of God heareth not us — Neither believes nor obeys our word; but, by rejecting our testimony, attended as it is with such evidence, he proves himself destitute of all true religion. Hereby we know — From what is said 1Jn 4:2-6; the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error — “This mark, by which St. John directed his disciples to judge of teachers, is not to be understood of their hearkening to the apostles personally, but of their receiving their doctrine with that submission which was due to persons inspired by the Spirit of God. Wherefore, though the apostles be all dead, yet as they still speak in their divinely-inspired writings, John, in this passage, declares that their writings are the test by which the disciples of Christ are to judge both of teachers and of their doctrine.”
Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Albert Barnes 1834 · Public Domain On vv4–21 Ye are of God - You are of his…
Ye are of God - You are of his family; you have embraced his truth, and imbibed his Spirit.
Little children - Notes, 1Jo 2:1.
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And have overcome them - Have triumphed over their arts and temptations; their endeavors to draw you into error and sin. The word them in this place seems to refer to the false prophets or teachers who collectively constituted antichrist. The meaning is, that they had frustrated or thwarted all their attempts to turn them away from the truth.
Because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world - God, who dwells in your hearts, and by whose strength and grace alone you have been enabled to achieve this victory, is more mighty than Satan, who rules in the hearts of the people of this world, and whose seductive arts are seen in the efforts of these false teachers. The apostle meant to say that it was by no power of their own that they achieved this victory, but it was to be traced solely to the fact that God dwelt among them, and had preserved them by his grace. What was true then is true now. He who dwells in the hearts of Christians by his Spirit, is infinitely more mighty than Satan, “the ruler of the darkness of this world;” and victory, therefore, over all his arts and temptations may be sure. In his conflicts with sin, temptation, and error, the Christian should never despair, for his God will insure him the victory.
Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary 1859 · Public Domain On vv4, 5, 6, 7, 12, 17, 18, 20 You....little children, born anew in Christ by baptism, have…
You....little children, born anew in Christ by baptism, have overcome him, (i.e. every such antichrist) not by your own strength, but by the grace of Christ, because greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world; i.e. the Spirit of God in you is above all your enemies. (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).
Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures 1864 · Public Domain On v7 7. Brotherly Love and Divine Love as Related to…
7. Brotherly Love and Divine Love as Related to Each Other on the Ground of Christ’s Advent
1Jn_4:7-21
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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.
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset & David Brown 1871 · Public Domain On vv4–21 Ye--emphatical: YE who confess Jesus: in contrast to "them,"…
Ye--emphatical: YE who confess Jesus: in contrast to "them," the false teachers.
overcome them-- (Jo1 5:4-5); instead of being "overcome and brought into (spiritual) bondage" by them (Pe2 2:19). Joh 10:8, Joh 10:5, "the sheep did not hear them": "a stranger will they not follow, but will flee from him: for they know not the voice of strangers."
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he that is in you--God, of whom ye are.
he that is in the word--the spirit of Antichrist, the devil, "the prince of this world."
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
Daniel D. Whedon 1874 · Public Domain On vv4–21 4. Second test of antichristic spirits—worldliness. In the contest…
4. Second test of antichristic spirits—worldliness. In the contest between the Church and the world, they are on the world’s side.
Have overcome— By placing faith in Christ, the world’s conqueror. Note on 1Jn_5:4.
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Them—The antichristic spirits, who are identified with the world. He…
in you—God.
In the world—Satan, as its inspirer and prince.
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges 1878 · Public Domain On vv4–21 4. Ye are of God] As in 1Jn_2:20 the…
4. Ye are of God] As in 1Jn_2:20 the Apostle passes abruptly from the false teachers to his true children with an emphatic pronoun, made still more emphatic here by the asyndeton. Ye, in marked contrast to them, are of God.
and have overcome them] By withstanding the seducers they have proved their superiority. In the masculine ‘them’ (αὐτούς) the Apostle passes from the antichristian spirits to the false prophets who are their mouth-pieces. Comp. ‘And a stranger will they not follow, but will flee from him; for they know not the voice of strangers’ (Joh_10:5): thus the stranger is defeated.
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because greater is He that is in you] Not in their own strength has the victory been won, but in His whose word abideth in them (1Jn_2:14). It is precisely for this reason that they may have confidence against all spiritual enemies: it is not confidence in themselves (1Co_15:57 especially Eph_6:10-17).
he that is in the world] ‘The ruler of this world’ (Joh_12:31), the devil, the father of these lying teachers (1Jn_3:10; Joh_8:44), whose works Christ came to destroy (1Jn_3:8). By saying ‘in the world’ rather than ‘in them’, the Apostle indicates that they belong to ‘the world’. “S. John constantly teaches that the Christian’s work in this state of probation is to conquer ‘the world’. It is, in other words, to fight successfully against that view of life which ignores God, against that complex system of attractive moral evil and specious intellectual falsehood which is organized and marshalled by the great enemy of God, and which permeates and inspires non-Christianized society” (Liddon).
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.
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers 1878 · Public Domain On v7 (7) THE PERFECT LOVE THE SUREST TEST (1Jn_4:7-21).
(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).
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(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.
The Pulpit Commentary 1880 · Public Domain On vv4–21 Ye are of God. The uJmeiv is in emphatic…
Ye are of God. The uJmeiv is in emphatic opposition to the false teachers. (comp 1Jn_2:20) They are on one side, and the apostle"s readers on the other, and it is from this standpoint that they are to "prove the spirits." St. John knows nothing of any neutral position from which the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error can be criticized "with absolute impartiality." "He that is not with me is against me." This assumed neutral position is already within the domain of error. Ye have overcome them. "Them" means the false teachers; but in what sense have St. John"s "little children" overcome them? He may be speaking by anticipation; confident of the victory, he writes of it as an accomplished fact. (comp Joh_16:33) But it is better to take the statement literally. By refusing to listen to the false teachers (Joh_10:8) the sheep have conquered them: theseducers have "gone out", (1Jn_2:19) unable to hold their own within the fold. Nor is this wonderful: the one side have God with them, the other Satan. O ejn tw kosmw here is equivalent to oJ arcwn tou kosmou toutou. (Luk_12:31) Just as God is in believers and they in God, so the world is in the evil one (1Jn_5:19) and the evil one in it.
HOMILIES BY W. JONES Ver. 4.
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The victory of the Christian over antichristian teachers.
are of God, little children, and have overcome them," etc. Very suggestive are the words with which our text begins, "Ye are of God." As having communion with him; as heartily holding and confessing the truth which unites with him (verse 2); as having been born of him, and being his offspring morally and spiritually, they were of God. The text suggests the following observations.
I THAT CHRISTIANS ARE EXPOSED TO THE ASSAULTS OF HERETICAL TEACHERS. It was so in St. John"s time. There were those that denied that Jesus Christ had come in the flesh, maintaining that his human body was apparent, not real. And others held, with Cerinthus, "that the Aeon Christ had entered into the man Jesus at his baptism, and remained with him until the commencement of his sufferings; but denied that Jesus Christ came in the flesh" (Ebrard). Christians are still assailed by the teachers of grave errors, many of which relate to the Person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ.
II THAT CHRISTIANS MAY OVERCOME THE ASSAULTS OF HERETICAL TEACHERS. St. John"s readers had done so. "Ye have overcome them." By their fidelity to the truth they had obliged the teachers of error to retreat. (cf 1Jn_2:14, 1Jn_2:19) And their complete and final victory the apostle looks upon as an assured certainty. The false prophets were probably plausible, persuasive, and influential; but they were not irresistible. They had been repulsed; they would be completely vanquished. We are not bound to accept any teaching that is offered to us. If we please, we may refuse to read the questionable hook or to hear the teacher of whom we stand in doubt. Or we may read the book and hear the teacher, and then test their teaching by that of our Lord and his apostles, and accept or reject it according to its agreement or disagreement with the Divine standard. "Despise not prophesyings; prove all things; hold fast that which is good.
III THAT CHRISTIANS MAY OVERCOME THE ASSAULTS OF HERETICAL TEACHERS BECAUSE OF THE PRESENCE OF GOD WITHIN THEM. " Ye have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world." He that was in the Christians is God; he that was in the world is Satan, "the prince of this world.
1. God dwells in his people.
(1) By his Word. The author whose works have been sympathetically and diligently studied may be said to be in the student. The student knows the views and opinions, the thoughts and theories, the principles and convictions, of his favourite author, and sympathizes with them. The godly soul knows God in his Word; (Psa_1:2 Psa_119:97) and by means of his Word is filled with his thoughts, feelings, and principles.
(2) By the faith which they exercise in him. Their faith in him is not mere intellectual assent, but spiritual conviction, which makes his existence and presence real unto them.
(3) By their love to him. (cf verses 12, 13, 16; Joh_14:23) There is no real spiritual indwelling apart from love.
(4) By his Spirit. (cf verse 13; Joh_14:16, Joh_14:17)
2. God is greater than Satan. "Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world.
(1) God is independent, but Satan is dependent. Satan cannot do anything except by permission of the Most High. (cf Job_1:12 Job_2:6) But as for God, "he doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth: and none can stay his hand, or say unto him, What doest thou?
(2) God is infinite, but Satan is finite. However great the power of the evil one may be, it is limited. His intelligence is limited, his agencies and instruments are limited, and the duration of his power is limited. (Rev_20:1-3) But God is infinite in intelligence, in wisdom, in power, in duration, in perfection.
(3) God is the God of truth, hut Satan is the father of lies. (Joh_8:44) Truth is a permanent and victorious force; falsehood is transient, feeble, and doomed to extinction. The power of the prince of this world is based upon lies, and, for that reason, its overthrow is certain. But the power of God is the power of truth and holiness, and is therefore destined to continue and grow eternally.
(4) "God is love," but Satan is malignant. However persistent and strong hatred may be, it is not persistent, patient, or powerful as love. In love God dwells in his people for their salvation; but Satan dwells in the world for the destruction of the worldly. And the loving, saving Spirit is immeasurably greater and mightier than the hating, destroying spirit.
3. God"s presence within his people is the secret of their victory over heretical teachers. "Ye have overcome them: because greater is he," etc. This Presence in the soul imparts power for spiritual conflict and conquest. The most effective safeguard against error in religious faith and union is not the subtle and strong intellect, but the devout and godly spirit and the upright life. "The meek will he guide in judgment," etc.; "The secret of the Lord is with them that fear him," etc.; (Psa_25:9, Psa_25:14) "If any man willeth to do his will, he shall know of the teaching," etc.. (Joh_7:17) In the conflicts of the spiritual life the mightiest weapons are not logical, but devotional. In this sphere the greatest victories are often won upon our knees. The consciousness of God"s presence within us is the inspiration for the achievement of the sublimest conquests. W.J.
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Biblical Illustrator 1887 · Public Domain On vv4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome…
1Jn_4:4-5
Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is He that is in you, than he that is in the world
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The advantages of truth, in opposition to error
I.
Divine truth carries greater evidence along with it.
1. The doctrines which are from God have a more intrinsical goodness in them, and teach such things as are most worthy of God, and more likely to proceed from Him.
2. The external confirmation of Divine doctrines is greater and carries more conviction along with it. By external confirmation I mean chiefly that of miracles.
3. Besides the goodness of the doctrines which are from God, and the external confirmation of them by miracles, the Spirit of God doth likewise illuminate good men, and those who are desirous to know the truth, and hath promised to lead them into it, and to assist them in discerning between truth and falsehood (Joh_7:17).
II. The motives which good men have to persuade them to adhere to truth and holiness are more powerful than the motives to the contrary. The believing that Jesus is the Son of God infers the belief of His doctrine, and consequently of that eminent part of it, the eternal recompense of another world, which, whosoever firmly believes, will be able to resist and overcome all the temptations of this world.
III. Those who sincerely embrace and obey the truth of God have a greater assistance and are acted by a more powerful spirit and principle, than, that which is in the world.
1. There are these two principles in the world, the Spirit of God and the devil, very active and powerful, the one in good, the other in bad men.
2. The Spirit of God which is in good men is greater than he that is in the world: He is more able and ready to assist men to good purposes than the devil is to tempt and help forward that which is evil.
(1) The Spirit of God is more powerful than the devil.
(2) The Spirit of God is as willing to assist men to good purposes as the devil is to the contrary.
(3) The Spirit of God hath a more free and immediate access to the minds of good men, and a more intimate conjunction with, and operation upon them, than the devil.
3. In what ways the Spirit of God doth move and assist good men.
(1) By exercising good motions in us, and enabling us to bring them to effect.
(2) By supporting us under persecution for religion. (Abp. Tillotson.)
The Spirit of Christ in us greater than the spirit of antichrist in the world
1. He that is in the world is great. And his greatness lies in this, that he operates in a two-fold way. He forms and fashions the world spiritually; and he finds for it, or makes for it, appropriate and congenial spiritual food. The world, in a sense, lives, and moves, and has its being, in him. He is in it as the spring of its activities, the dictator of its laws, the guider of its pursuits and pleasures; in a word, the ruler of its darkness. The darkness of its deep alienation from God, he rules. And he rules it very specially for the purpose of getting the world to be contented with an image, instead of the reality, of godliness. He takes advantage of whatever may be the worlds mood at the time, as regards God and His worship, throws himself into it, controlling or inflaming it, as he may see cause, so as to turn it to his own account. And then he contrives to bring under his sway prophets or teachers, not always consciously false, often meaning to be true, able men, holy men, men of God and of prayer, preeminently so it may be. And bringing into contact the world which he has doctored and the doctors whom he has tutored, he adjusts them skilfully to one another. He causes his teachers, perhaps insensibly, to draw much of their inspiration from the particular world which, as to its religious bias, he has influenced with an eye to their teaching. And so they are of the world; therefore speak they of the world, and the world heareth them.
II. But greater is He that is in you, little children, for He is the Lord God Almighty. He is strong; and He strengthens you with might by His Spirit in the inner man; Christ dwelleth in your heart by faith; and you being rooted and grounded in love. He is strong; and He makes you strong; strong in holding fast the form of sound words, and contending earnestly for the faith once delivered unto the saints; strong in cleaving to the truth as it is in Jesus; strong in your real, personal, close, and loving acquaintance with Him, whom to know is life eternal. He who is in you is God; God abiding in you; giving you the Spirit. He is in you; not merely on your side, at your right hand, around you; but within you. He is working in you; so working in you as to secure your safe triumph, in this great fight of truth against error, over the world and him who is in it. (R. S. Candlish, D. D.)
The secret of overcoming Satan
He that is in you, refers to God, and He that is in the world, refers to the devil; and the first thought that strikes us is that there is no attempt in the Bible to deny or dispute the greatness of Satan.
I. First, then, let us consider the greatness of Satan so that we may understand the character of the adversary whom we have to contend with. The Bible represents Satan as the head of a great army of foes. If you examine the Epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians, you will find there seem to be seven grades of fallen angels, as there are seven grades of unfallen angels. We read of Principalities, Powers, Dominions, Authorities, Rulers, Thrones, Wicked Spirits, etc., and above them all, as I believe, there is a rank of arch angels, or chief angels. So we are to imagine Satan as the highest over all the ranks of fallen angels. Suppose that, for instance, one of the provinces or colonies of Great Britain should rebel and cut loose from the parent government; it might carry into its rebellion all its officers, from its governor-general down to the mayors of its cities, and even its police magistrates; and apparently when this great rebellion took place among the angels of God they carried over into their revolt the ranks they had before rebellion came among them, so that Satan is a chief demon, an evil spirit, a fallen angel of tremendous power. Then, again, Satan has marvellous wisdom and knowledge. He knows how to reach the human soul; he knows how to deceive you and mislead you. When the Duke of Richmond presented his report about fortifications, Sheridan said, I compliment the noble president on his talents as an engineer, which were strongly evinced in planning and constructing that paper He has made it a contest of posts, and conducted his reasoning not less on principles of trigonometry than of logic. There are certain assumptions thrown up like advanced works to keep the enemy at a distance from the principal object of debate; strong provisos protect and cover the flanks of his assertions, and his very queries are his casemates. And Satan is a civil engineer. He constructs his fortifications to make the evil strong and repel the good. And so, as he is a demon of marvellous power and wisdom, is he also formidable in his familiarity with evil, and it is this that constitutes the great hold of Satan over the human soul. Remember that he has in himself the very secrets of hell.
II. Yet notwithstanding this, we are bidden to remember that He that is in you is greater than he that is in the world. Conceding the greatness of Satan, let us look for a moment at the superior greatness of Jesus Christ. In the first place, Jesus Christ has all power. Satan has great power, but not omnipotence. Christ is not only a God of all power, but He is a God of all wisdom. Satan is very wise, but he is not omniscient, and Christ is. Then Jesus Christ is everywhere present. He is in your heart, and in my heart, and the heart of every disciple, by the Holy Spirit, so that of a true child of God we may still say, He that is in you is greater than he that is in the world, since He is the all-powerful, the all-wise, and the all-present God. And, then, remember that Jesus Christ represents perfect holiness, and holiness, like the light of the sun, positively dispels the darkness, that is to say infinite holiness repels evil and drives evil to the wall; and in the great ages to come, when Christ shall be crowned as King, we shall find darkness absolutely dispersed and light pervading the moral universe.
II. What is the secret of our possession and exercise of this overcoming power? We are told in this epistle that there are three secrets of overcoming power (1Jn_2:14; 1Jn_3:8-9; 1Jn_3:24). The first secret is, the Word of God abides in you. The second is the seed of God abides in you; and the third is God Himself abides in you. Now look successively at these three secrets. The Word of God is represented in the Scriptures as the sword of the Spirit, a two-edged sword. A Damascus scimitar has but one sharp edge and a dull back. Hence you can hew with a scimitar, but you cannot thrust with it successfully. But when you have two edges to a sword, and each side is keen, you can cut both ways with such a blade; and the two keen edges unite in one burning point, and you can thrust with such a sword. And so the Word of God is represented as having two keen edges and one burning piercing point. Again, it is represented as a living sword. The Word of God is quick, i.e., alive and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword. Knowing the Word, and having it in your heart, you shall find that Word going forth like a two-edged sword out of your mouth, a living sword, and a powerful sword, that hews men to pieces before God, and lays bare their thoughts and intents. Secondly, the seed of God abides in the child of God. The seed represents the living principle. I suppose you are all familiar with certain great facts of nature. You know how, for instance, in the vegetable world the seed is the most carefully preserved and guarded of all the products of plant life. Here is a little plant growing up and putting out its branches and leaves, and by and by its flowers. The flowers may be very beautiful and very fragrant, and you may value them and consider them the finest products of the plant, but, if I may use such language, the plant does not so regard them. The thing the plant cares most for in the economy of nature is not root nor stem, is not beauty nor blossom, nor even fruit, but seed. Now the teed in the plant and the seed in the animal represents not only the highest products of life, but the means of producing and propagating life, and therefore the seed is the most precious thing in nature. And how significant it is that the principle of life in God which represents the highest perfection of Deity and represents the means by which Gods likeness is reproduced in you and in me is called by the sacred name of seed, and we are told that when the seed of God remains in us we feel that we cannot sin. We have a new affinity. We are like a tree planted by the rivers of water with its little spongelets at the end of the roots drinking up the blessed water of life, and making sap of it. That is what John means when he says the seed of God is in the disciple, and he feels that he cannot sin because the seed of God leads him to love the things of God, and hate the things of the evil one. But we are told once more that God Himself abides in us (Joh_14:23). God would have you to feel this great fact, that if Jesus Christ dwells in you by the Holy Spirit, He makes you strong to overcome Satan, as He Himself was strong to overcome Satan in the desert and in the Garden of Gethsemane, and that is the secret of your triumph over evil. We are told that when Hercules was a little baby in his cradle, there were some serpents that came into the room and wound their way into the cradle and tried to sting him, and folding their coils round him to choke the life out of him. But we are told in the fable that with his little hands he just took hold of the necks of these serpents and strangled them to death. God would have you to feel that a little babe in Christ that is rocked in the cradle of the Church, when he comes into contact of She the great serpent, the devil, if Jesus is in him, can beat back the serpent, the serpent cannot strangle him. But remember this, that you are only strong when you are on the Lords ground, not on the devils ground. Nosy I have read a story about a swan that was walking on the shore of a lake, and a wolf came up and ran after the swan, and would have torn him to pieces. But the swan said to himself, I am not strong on the land, but I am strong on the water. So he plunged into the water, and when the wolf followed him into the water, he with his strong bill just gripped the wolf by the ears, and pulled his head down under the water, and drowned him. There are a great many people who try to fight the devil on the devils ground, and they always get defeated; but if you can meet the devil on the Lords ground you will defeat him. (A. T. Pierson, D. D.)
The Christians conquest over sin
Wherein consists the superiority of the power of good over the power of evil in us?
1. The power of God is much nearer to us, and, by its relation to our true nature, so much more capable of becoming ours than the power of evil or the devil. We are the children of God. Can the renewed child of God say that any evil power lies nearer to his heart and more appropriately belongs to him, than that influence of a Fathers love which he acknowledges to be the holiest and most blessed thing in the universe?
2. The greater power of good over us may be seen by comparing those parts or elements of our nature to which good and evil influences respectively appeal. On the one hand, we have the appeal of God, of good, and of truth, to our reason, judgment, and conscience, to the deepest instincts and most fixed principles of the soul, and to love, in itself the strongest element in our nature. On the other hand, the appeal of evil is only to prejudice, fancy, and appearance, to passion and to selfishness.
3. The objects through which good principle influences us are vastly greater than those with which evil is associated. Even in reference to the present visible world, we may see this contrast. Evil, which is necessarily selfish, limits the objects of our thought and life to our own mean, narrow selves. It knows no large and noble objects or ends. Good embraces all things, all beings, all great and lofty ends. Good objects and aims kindle the heart to an enthusiasm before which difficulties vanish; evil purposes sink the heart into meanness and weakness. But when we turn to the invisible and eternal world, how much more striking is the contrast. God Himself is the centre and fountain of all sublime thoughts, of all mighty emotions, and of all boundless hopes. The summit of greatness is before us in Christian perfection. All this greatness we as Christians can claim as our possession; and can all this dwell in and fill the soul, and yet awaken no sense of greatness and power? But what has evil to compare with this? Where are its sublime heights, grand conceptions, boundless prospects? What immortality invests it with unfading splendour, what solid reason guarantees its infinity of bliss? Can we, then, say that the ignoble and mean has the same power over us as the sublime and glorious? (S. Edger, BA.)
The two spirits
I. There are two mighty spirits at work amongst mankind. There is some correspondence between their operation.
1. Both act uncoercively. There is no invasion of the principles of responsibility in either case.
2. Both act universally. The one is the prince of the power of the air; the other is in all our hearts.
3. Both act perseveringly.
4. Both act productively. Both produce fruits in their subjects (Gal_5:19-23).
5. Both act resistibly. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Ye do always resist the Spirit of God.
II. That whilst these spirits are both universal in their influence, the special sphere of the one is the world, and the other, the Church.
1. The Church cherishes the Spirit, and resists the devil.
2. The world cherishes the devil, and resists the Spirit.
III. That the spirit whose special sphere is the Church is infinitely greater than the spirit whose special sphere is the world. Greater is He that is in you, etc.
1. The one that is in the Church is absolutely independent; the one that works in the world is not so. The Holy Spirit can do whatsoever He please; Satan cannot move without His permission.
2. The one that is in the Church sways His influence by absolute right, the other by usurpation.
3. The one that is in the Church works to save, the other to destroy.
4. The one that is in the Church acts through truth, the other through error. The first stone of Satans empire--the foundation stone--was a lie.
But the Spirit works by truth--regenerates, sanctifies, comforts, by truth. Which is the greater, truth or error? Truth is eternal, error is not; truth is a necessity, error is a contingency; truth is mighty, error is weak. A lie has no power, only as it wears the garb of truth. Conclusion:
1. The human soul is an object of stupendous interest. These two spirits are working for it.
2. The philosophy of human commotions is explained. Two opposite spirits are working in the heart of the world.
3. The ultimate triumph of goodness is certain. Greater. (Homilist.)
They are of the world: therefore speak they of the world--
The worldly speak of the world
The water riseth not (unless forced) above the fountain. Out of the warehouse the shop is furnished. (J. Trapp.)
Speech is a child of thought,
which the mind always travaileth and teemeth with, and which after its birth is wont in features to resemble its parent. (I. Barrow.)
The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Expositor's Bible 1887 · Public Domain On v17 Chapter 14
Chapter 14
BOLDNESS IN THE DAY OF JUDGMENT
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1Jn_4:17
IT has been so often repeated that St. Johns eschatology is idealised and spiritual, that people now seldom pause to ask what is meant by the words. Those who repeat them most frequently seem to think that the idealised means that which will never come into the region of historical fact, and that the spiritual is best defined as the unreal. Yet, without postulating the Johannic authorship of the Apocalypse-where the Judgment is described with the most awful accompaniments of outward solemnity {Rev_20:12-13} -there are two places in this Epistle which are allowed to drop out of view, but which bring us face to face with the visible manifestations of an external Advent. It is a peculiarity of St. Johns style (as we have frequently seen) to strike some chord of thought, so to speak, before its time; to allow the prelusive note to float away, until suddenly, after a time, it surprises us by coming back again with a fuller and bolder resonance. "And now, my sons," {1Jn_2:28} (had the Apostle said) "abide in Him, that if He shall be manifested, we may have confidence, and not be ashamed, shrinking from Him at His coming." In our text the same thought is resumed, and the reality of the Coming and Judgment in its external manifestation as emphatically given as in any other part of the New Testament.
We may here speak of the conception of the Day of Judgment: of the fear with which that conception is encompassed; and of the sole means of the removal of that fear which St. John recognises.
I We examine the general conception of "the Day of the Judgment," as given in the New Testament.
As there is that which with terrible emphasis is marked off as "the Judgment," "the Parousia," so there are other judgments or advents of a preparatory character. As there are phenomena known as mock suns, or halos round the moon, so there are fainter reflections ringed round the Advent, the Judgment. Thus, in the development of history, there are successive cycles of continuing judgment; preparatory advents; less completed crises, as even the world calls them.
But against one somewhat widely spread way of blotting the Day of the Judgment from the calendar of the future-so far as believers are concerned-we should be on our guard. Some good men think themselves entitled to reason thus-"I am a Christian. I shall be an assessor in the judgment. For me there is, therefore, no judgment day." And it is even held out as an inducement to others to close with this conclusion, that they "shall be delivered from the bugbear of judgment."
The origin of this notion seems to be in certain universal tendencies of modern religious thought.
The idolatry of the immediate-the prompt creation of effect-is the perpetual snare of revivalism. Revivalism is thence fatally bound at once to follow the tide of emotion, and to increase the volume of the waters by which it is swept along. But the religious emotion of this generation has one characteristic by which it is distinguished from that of previous centuries. The revivalism of the past in all Churches rode upon the dark waves of fear. It worked upon human nature by exaggerated material descriptions of hell, by solemn appeals to the throne of Judgment. Certain schools of biblical criticism have enabled men to steel themselves against this form of preaching. An age of soft humanitarian sentiment-superficial and inclined to forget that perfect Goodness may be a very real cause of fear-must be stirred by emotions of a different kind. The infinite sweetness of our Fathers heart-the conclusions, illogically but effectively drawn from this, of an Infinite good nature, with its easy going pardon, reconciliation all round, and exemption from all that is unpleasant-these, and such as these, are the only available materials for creating a great volume of emotion. An invertebrate creed; punishment either annihilated or mitigated; judgment, changed from a solemn and universal assize, a bar at which every soul must stand, to a splendid, and-for all who can say I am saved-a triumphant pageant in which they have no anxious concern; these are the readiest instruments, the most powerful leverage, with which to work extensively upon masses of men at the present time. And the seventh article of the Apostles Creed must pass into the limbo of exploded superstition.
The only appeal to Scripture which such persons make, with any show of plausibility, is contained in an exposition of our Lords teaching in a part of the fifth chapter of the fourth Gospel. {Joh_5:21; Joh_5:29} But clearly there are three Resurrection scenes which may be discriminated in those words. The first is spiritual, a present awakening of dead souls, (Joh_5:21) in those with whom the Son of Man is brought into contact in His earthly ministry. The second is a department of the same spiritual Resurrection. The Son of God, with that mysterious gift of Life in Himself, (Joh_5:26) has within Him a perpetual spring of rejuvenescence for a faded and dying world. A renewal of hearts is in process during all the days of time, a passage for soul after soul out of death into life. The third scene is the general (Joh_5:24) Resurrection and general Judgment. (Joh_5:28-29) The first was the resurrection of comparatively few; the second of many; the third of all. If it is said that the believer "cometh not into judgment," the word in that place plainly signifies condemnation.
Clear and plain above all such subtleties ring out the awe inspiring words: "It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the Judgment;" "we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ."
Reason supplies us with two great arguments for the General Judgment. One from the conscience of history, so to speak; the other from the individual conscience.
1. General history points to a general judgment. If there is no such judgment to come, then there is no one definite moral purpose in human society. Progress would be a melancholy word, a deceptive appearance, a stream that has no issue, a road that leads nowhere. No one who believes that there is a Personal God, Who guides the course of human affairs, can come to the conclusion that the generations of man are to go on forever without a winding up, which shall decide upon the doings of all who take part in human life. In the philosophy of nature, the affirmation or denial of purpose is the affirmation or denial of God. So in the philosophy of history. Society without the General Judgment would be a chaos of random facts, a thing without rational retrospect or definite end-i.e., without God. If man is under the government of God, human history is a drama, long drawn, and of infinite variety, with inconceivably numerous actors. But a drama must have a last act. The last act of the drama of history is "The Day of the Judgment."
2. The other argument is derived from the individual conscience.
Conscience, as a matter of fact, has two voices. One is imperative; it tells us what we are to do. One is prophetic, and warns us of something which we are to receive. If there is to be no Day of the General Judgment, then the million prophecies of conscience will be belied, and our nature prove to be mendacious to its very roots. There is no essential article of the Christian creed like this which can be isolated from the rest, and treated as if it stood alone. There is a solidarity of each with all the rest. Any which is isolated is in danger itself, and leaves the others exposed. For they have an internal harmony and congruity. They do not form a hotchpot of credenda. They are not so many beliefs, but one belief. Thus the isolation of articles is perilous. For, when we try to grasp and to defend one of them, we have no means left of measuring it but by terms of comparison which are drawn from ourselves, which must therefore be finite, and, by the inadequacy of the scale which they present, appear to render the article of faith thus detached incredible. Moreover, each article of our creed is a revelation of the Divine attributes, which meet together in unity. To divide the attributes by dividing the form in which they are revealed to us, is to belie and falsify the attribute; to give a monstrous development to one by not taking into account some other which is its balance and compensation. Thus, many men deny the truth of a punishment which involves final separation from God. They glory in the legal judgment which "dismisses hell with costs." But they do so by fixing their attention exclusively upon the one dogma which reveals one attribute of God. They isolate it from the Fall, from the Redemption by Christ, from the gravity of sin, from the truth that all whom the message of the Gospel reaches may avoid the penal consequences of sin. It is impossible to face the dogma of eternal separation from God without facing the dogma of Redemption. For Redemption involves in its very idea the intensity of sin, which needed the sacrifice of the Son of God; and further, the fact that the offer of salvation is so free and wide that it cannot be put away without a terrible wilfulness.
In dealing with many of the articles of the creed, there are opposite extremes. Exaggeration leads to a revenge upon them which is, perhaps, more perilous than neglect. Thus, as regards eternal punishment, in one century ghastly exaggerations were prevalent. It was assumed that the vast majority of mankind "are destined to everlasting punishment"; that "the floor of hell is crawled over by hosts of babies a span long." The inconsistency of such views with the love of God, and with the best instincts of man, was victoriously and passionately demonstrated. Then unbelief turned upon the dogma itself, and argued, with wide acceptance, that "with the overthrow of this conception goes the whole redemption plan, the Incarnation, the Atonement, the Resurrection, and the grand climax of the Church scheme, the General Judgment." But the alleged article of faith was simply an exaggeration of that faith, and the objections lay altogether against the exaggeration of it.
II We have now to speak of the removal of that terror which accompanies the conception of the Day of the Judgment, and of the sole means of that emancipation which St. John recognises. For terror there is in every point of the repeated descriptions of Scripture-in the surroundings, in the summons, in the tribunal, in the trial, in one of the two sentences.
"God is love," writes St. John, "and he that abideth in love abideth in God: and God abideth in him. In this [abiding], love stands perfected with us, and the object is nothing less than this," not that we may be exempted from judgment, but that "we may have boldness in the Day of the Judgment." Boldness! It is the splendid word which denotes the citizens right of free speech, the masculine privilege of courageous liberty. It is the tender word which expresses the childs unhesitating confidence, in "saying all out" to the parent. The ground of the boldness is conformity to Christ. Because "as He is," with that vivid idealising sense, frequent in St. John when he uses it of our Lord-"as He is," delineated in the fourth Gospel, seen by "the eye of the heart" {Eph_1:18} with constant reverence in the soul, with adoring wonder in heaven, perfectly true, pure, and righteous-"even so" (not, of course, with any equality in degree to that consummate ideal, but with a likeness ever growing, an aspiration ever advancing)-"so {Cf. Mat_5:48} are we in this world," purifying ourselves as He is pure.
Let us draw to a definite point our considerations upon the Judgment, and the Apostles sweet encouragement for the "day of wrath, that dreadful day." It is of the essence of the Christian faith to believe that the Son of God, in the Human Nature which He assumed, and which He has borne into heaven, shall come again, and gather all before Him, and pass sentence of condemnation or of peace according to their works. To hold this is necessary to prevent terrible doubts of the very existence of God; to guard us against sin, in view of that solemn account; to comfort us under affliction. What a thought for us, if we would but meditate upon it! Often we complain of a commonplace life, of mean and petty employment. How can it be so, when at the end we, and those with whom we live, must look upon that great, overwhelming sight! Not an eye that shall not see Him, not a knee that shall not bow, not an ear that shall not hear the sentence. The heart might sink and the imagination quail under the burden of the supernatural existence which we cannot escape. One of two looks we must turn upon the Crucified-one willing as that which we cast on some glorious picture, on the enchantment of the sky; the other unwilling and abject. We should weep first with Zechariahs mourners, with tears at once bitter because they are for sin, and sweet because they are for Christ. But, above all things, let us hear how St. John sings us the sweet low hymn that breathes consolation through the terrible fall of the triple hammer stroke of the rhyme in the "Dies irae." We must seek to lead upon earth a life laid on the lines of Christs. Then, when the Day of the Judgment comes; when the cross of fire (so, at least, the early Christians thought) shall stand in the black vault; when the sacred wounds of Him who was pierced shall stream over with a light beyond dawn or sunset; we shall find that the discipline of life is complete, that Gods love after all its long working with us stands perfected, so that we shall be able, as citizens of the kingdom, as children of the Father, to say out all. A Christlike character in an un-Christlike world- this is the cure of the disease of terror. Any other is but the medicine of a quack. "There is no fear in love; but the perfect love casteth out fear, because fear brings punishment; and he that feareth is not made perfect in love." We may well close with that pregnant commentary on this verse which tells us of the four possible conditions of a human soul-"without either fear or love; with fear, without love; with fear and love; with love, without fear."
William Robertson Nicoll, ed., The Expositor's Bible (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1887–1910) — public domain. 65 of 66 books (1 Corinthians is not separately keyed, as that volume carries no machine-parseable verse references); section-level commentary keyed to the opening verse. Introductory and overview sections not keyed to a specific passage are excluded.
B. W. Johnson 1891 · Public Domain On vv4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 4. Ye … have overcome them. The saints had…
4. Ye … have overcome them. The saints had overcome these false prophets, because they were of God, and the Spirit in them was mightier than the evil spirit, that of the prince of the world, which was in the false prophets.
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.
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary 1892 · Public Domain On vv7, 15 1Jn_4:7.—The previous verses are in some sense an “aside.”…
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.
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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.
William B. Godbey 1900 · Public Domain On vv7, 11 7-9. The attributes of God are omnipotence, omnipresence and…
ARGUMENT 10
GOD IS LOVE
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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.
Alexander MacLaren 1905 · Public Domain On vv10, 16, 17, 18, 19 1 John
1 John
CHRIST’S MISSION THE REVELATION OF GOD’S LOVE
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1Jn 4:10.
This is the second of a pair of twin verses which deal with substantially the same subject under two slightly different aspects. The thought common to both is that Christ’s mission is the great revelation of God’s love. But in the preceding verse the point on which stress is laid is the manifestation of that love, and in our text the point mainly brought out is its essential nature. In the former we read, ‘In this was manifested the love of God,’ and in the present verse we read, ‘Herein is love.’ In the former verse John fixes on three things as setting forth the greatness of that manifestation--viz., that the Christ is the only begotten Son, that the manifestation is for the world, and that its end is the bestowment of everlasting love. In my text the points which are fixed on are that that Love in its nature is self-kindled--’not that we loved God, but that He loved us’--and that it lays hold of, and casts out of the way that which, unremoved, would be a barrier between God and us--viz., our sin: ‘He hath sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.’
Now it is interesting to notice that these twin verses, like a double star which reflects the light of a central sun, draw their brightness from the great word of the Master, ‘God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’ Do you not hear the echo of His voice in the three expressions in the verse before the text--’only begotten’ ‘world’ ‘live’? Here is one more of the innumerable links which bind together in indissoluble union the Gospel and the Epistle. So, then, the great thought suggested by the words before us is just this, that in the Incarnation and Sacrifice of Jesus Christ we have the great revelation of the love of God.
I. Now there are three questions that suggest themselves to me, and the first is this, What, then, does Christ’s mission say about God’s love?
I do not need to dwell on the previous question whether, apart from that mission, there is any solid revelation of the fact that there is love in Heaven, or whether we are left, apart from it, to gropings and probabilities. I need not refer you to the ambiguous oracles of nature or to the equally ambiguous oracles of life. I need not, I suppose, do more than just remind you that even the men whose faith grasps the thought of the love of God most intensely, know what it is to be brought to a stand before some of the dreadful problems which the facts of humanity and the facts of nature press upon us, nor need I remind you how, as we see around us to-day, in the drift of our English literature and that of other nations, when men turn their backs upon the Cross, they look upon a landscape all swathed in mists, and on which darkness is steadily settling. The reason why the men of this generation, some of them very superficially, and for the sake of being ‘in the swim’ and some of them despairingly and with bleeding hearts, are turning themselves to a reasoned pessimism, is because they will not see what shines out from the Cross, that God is love.
Nor need I do more than remind you, in a word, of the fact that, go where we will through this world, and consult all the conceptions that men have made to themselves of gods many and lords many, whilst we find the deification of power, and of vice, and of fragmentary goodnesses, of hopes and fears, of longings, of regrets, we find nowhere a god of whom the characteristic is love. And amidst that Pantheon of deities, some of them savage, some of them lustful, some of them embodiments of all vices, some of them indifferent and neutral, some of them radiant and fair, none reveals this secret, that the centre of the universe is a heart. So we have to turn away from hopes, from probability dashed with many a doubt, and find something that has more solid substance in it, if it is to be enough to bear up the man that grasps it and to yield before no tempests. For all that Bishop Butler says, probabilities are not the guide of life, in its deepest and noblest aspects. They may be the guide of practice, but for the anchorage of the soul we want no shifting sand-bank, but that to which we may make fast and be sure that, whatever shifts, it remains immovable. You can no more clothe the soul in ‘perhapses’ than a man can make garments out of a spider’s web. Religion consists of the things of which we are sure, and not of the things which are probable. ‘Peradventure’ is not the word on which a man can rest the weight of a crushed, or an agonising, or a sinking soul; he must have ‘Verily! verily!’ and then he is at rest.
How do we know what a man is? By seeing what a man does. How do we know what God is? By knowing what God does. So John does not argue with logic, either frosty or fiery, but he simply opens his mouth, and in calm, pellucid utterances sets forth the truths and leaves them to work. He says to us, ‘I do not relegate you to your intuitions; I do not argue with you; I simply say, Look at Him; look, and see that God is love.’
What, then, does the mission of Christ say to us about the love of God? It says, first, that it is a love independent of, and earlier than, ours. We love, as a rule, because we recognise in the object to which our heart goes out something that draws it, something that is loveable. But He whose name is ‘I am that I am’ has all the reasons of His actions within Himself, and just as He
‘Sits on no precarious throne,
Nor borrows leave to be,’
nor is dependent on any creature for existence, so He is His own motive, He is His own reason. Within that sacred circle of the Infinite Nature lie all the energies which bring that Infinite Nature into action; and like some clear fountain, more sparkling than crystal, there wells up for ever, from the depths of the Divine Nature, the love which is Himself. He loves, not because we love Him, but because He is God. The very sun itself, as some astronomers believe, owes its radiant brightness and ever-communicated warmth to the impact on, and reception into, it of myriads of meteors and of matter drawn from the surrounding system. So when the fuel fails, that fire will go out, and the sun will shrivel into a black ball. But this central Sun of the universe has all His light within Himself, and the rays that pour out from Him owe their being and their motion to nothing but the force of that central fire, from which they rush with healing on their wings.
If, then, God’s love is not evoked by anything in His creatures, then it is universal, and we do not need anxiously to question ourselves whether we deserve that it shall fall upon us, and no conscious unworthiness need ever make us falter in the least in the firmness with which we grasp that great central thought. The sun, inferior emblem as it is of that Light of all that is, pours down its beams indiscriminately on dunghill and on jewel, though it be true that in the one its rays breed corruption and in the other draw out beauty. That great love wraps us all, is older than our sins, and is not deflected by them. So that is the first thing that Christ’s mission tells us about God’s love.
The second is--it speaks to us of a love which gives its best. John says, ‘God sent His Son,’ and that word reposes, like the rest of the passage, on many words of Christ’s--such as, for instance, when He speaks of Himself as ‘sanctified and sent into the world,’ and many another saying. But remember how, in the foundation passage to which I have already referred, and of which we have some reflection in the words before us, there is a tenderer expression--not merely ‘sent,’ but ‘gave.’ Paul strengthens the word when he says, ‘gave up for us all.’ It is not for us to speculate about these deep things, but I would remind you of what I dare say I have had occasion often to point out, that Paul seems to intend to suggest to us a mysterious parallel, when he further says, ‘He that spared not His own Son, but freely gave Him up to death for us all.’ For that emphatic word ‘spared’ is a distinct allusion to, and quotation of, the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac: ‘Seeing thou hast not withheld from Me thine only son.’ And so, mysterious as it is, we may venture to say that He not only sent, but He gave, and not only gave, but gave up. His love, like ours, delights to lavish its most precious gifts on its objects.
Now there arises from this consideration a thought which I only mention, and it is this. Christian teaching about Christ’s work has often, both by its friends and its foes, been so presented as to lead to the conception that it was the work of Christ which made God love men. The enemies of evangelical truth are never tired of talking in that sense; and some of its unwise friends have given reason for the caricature. But the true Christian teaching is, ‘God so loved ... that He gave.’ The love is the cause of the mission, and not the mission that which evokes the love. So let us be sure that, not because Christ died does God love us sinful creatures, but that, because God loves us, Christ died for us.
The third thing which the mission of Christ teaches us about the love of God is that it is a love which takes note of and overcomes man’s sin. I have said, as plainly as I can, that I reject the travesty of Christianity which implies that it was Christ’s mission which originated God’s love to men. But a love that does not in the slightest degree care whether its object is good or bad--what sort of a love do you call that? What do you name it when a father shows it to his children? Moral indifference; culpable and weak and fatal. And is it anything nobler, if you transfer it to God, and say that it is all the same to Him whether a man is living the life of a hog, and forgetting all that is high and noble, or whether he is pressing with all his strength towards light and truth and goodness? Surely, surely they who, in the name of their reverence for the supreme love of God, cover over the fact of His righteousness, are mutilating and killing the very attribute that they are trying to exalt. A love that cares nothing for the moral character of its object is not love, but hate; it is not kindness, but cruelty. Take away the background because it is so black, and you lower the brilliancy of whiteness of that which stands in front of it. There is such a property in God as is fittingly described by that tremendous word ‘wrath.’ God cannot, being what He is, treat sin as if it were no sin; and therefore we read, ‘He sent His son to be the propitiation for our sins.’ The black dam, which we build up between ourselves and the river of the water of life, is to be swept away; and it is the death of Jesus Christ which makes it possible for the highest gift of God’s love to pour over the ruined and partially removed barrier and to flood a man’s soul. Brethren, no God that is worthy the name can give Himself to a sinful soul. No sinful soul that has not the habit, the guilt, the penalty of its sins swept away, is capable of receiving the life, which is the highest gift of the love. So our twin texts divide what I may call the process of redemption between them; and whilst the one says, ‘He sent His Son that we should have life through Him,’ the other tells us of how the sins which bar the entrance of that life into our hearts, as our own consciences tell us they do, can be removed. There must first be the propitiation for our sins, and then that mighty love reaches its purpose and attains its end, and can give us the life of God to be the life of our souls. So much for my first and principle question.
II. Now I have to ask, secondly, how comes it that Christ’s mission says anything about God’s love?
That question is a very plain one, and I should like to press the answer to it very emphatically. Take any other of the great names of the world’s history of poet, thinker, philosopher, moralist, practical benefactor; is it possible to apply such a thought as this to them--except with a hundred explanations and limitations--that they, however radiant, however wise, however beneficent, however fruitful their influence, make men sure that God loves them? The thing is ridiculous, unless you are using language in a very fantastic and artificial fashion.
Christ’s mission reveals God’s love, because Christ is the Son of God. If it is true, as Jesus said, that ‘He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father,’ then I can say, ‘In Thy tenderness, in Thy patience, in Thy attracting of the publican and the harlot, in Thy sympathy with all the erring and the sorrowful, and, most of all, in Thy agony and passion, in Thy cross and death, I see the glory of God which is the love of God.’ Brother, if you break that link, which binds the man Christ Jesus with the ever-living and the ever-loving God, I know not how you can draw from the record of His life and death a confidence, which nothing can shake, in the love of the Father.
Then there is another point. Christ’s mission speaks to us about God’s love, if--and I was going to say only if--we regard it as His mission to be the propitiation for our sins. Strike out the death as the sacrifice for the world’s sin, and what you have left is a maimed something, which may be, and I thankfully recognise often is, very strengthening, very helpful, very calming, very ennobling, even to men who do not sympathise with the view of that work which I am now setting forth, but which is all that to them, very largely, because of the unconscious influence of the truths which they have cast away. It seems to me that those who, in the name of the highest paternal love of God, reject the thought of Christ’s sacrificial death, are kicking away the ladder by which they have climbed, and are better than their creeds, and happily illogical. It is the Cross that reveals the love, and it is the Cross as the means of propitiation that pours the light of that blessed conviction into men’s hearts.
III. My last question is this: what does Christ’s mission say about God’s love to me?
We know what it ought to say. It ought to carry, as on the crest of a great wave, the conviction of that divine love into our hearts, to be fruitful there. It ought to sweep out, as on the crest of a great wave, our sins and evils. It ought to do this; does it? On some of us I fear it produces no effect at all. Some of you, dear friends, look at that light with lack-lustre eyes, or, rather, with blind eyes, that are dark as midnight in the blaze of noonday. The voice comes from the Cross, sweet as that of harpers harping with their harps, and mighty as the voice of many waters, and you hear nothing. Some of us it slightly moves now and then, and there an end.
Brethren, you have to turn the world-wide generality into a personal possession. You have to say, ‘He loved me, and gave Himself for me.’ It is of no use to believe in a universal Saviour; do you trust in your particular Saviour? It is of no use to have the most orthodox and clear conceptions of the relation between the Cross of Christ and the revelation to men of the love of God; have you made that revelation the means of bringing into your own personal life the conviction that Jesus Christ is your Saviour, the propitiation for your sins, the Giver to you of life eternal? It is faith that does that. Note that, in the great foundation passage to which I have made frequent reference, there are two conditions put in between the beginning and the end. Some of us are disposed to say, ‘God so loved the world that every man might have eternal life.’ That is not what Christ said, ‘God so loved the world that’--and here follows the first condition--’He gave His Son that’--and here follows the second--’he that believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’ God has done what it is needful for Him to do. His part of the conditions has been fulfilled. Fulfil yours--’He that believeth on Him.’ And if you can say, not He is the propitiation for our sin, but for my sin, then you will live and move and have your being in a heaven of love, and will love Him back again with an echo and reflection of His own, and nothing shall be able to separate you from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture (1904–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
C. I. Scofield 1917 · Public Domain On vv9, 10, 12, 14, 18 kosmos = mankind. (See Scofield "Mat 4:8").
world
kosmos = mankind. (See Scofield "Mat 4:8").
The Scofield Reference Bible (1917 edition), notes by C. I. Scofield — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Paul E. Kretzmann 1924 · Public Domain On vv4, 7, 11, 16 The distinction between the spirit of truth and the…
The distinction between the spirit of truth and the spirit of error:
v. 4. Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them; because greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world.
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v. 5. They are of the world; therefore speak they of the world, and the world heareth them.
v. 6. We are of God; he that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth not us. Hereby know we the Spirit of Truth and the spirit of error.
The spirit which the apostle has above called the spirit of Anti-Christ is here identified with the spirit of this world, with the spirit that works in the children of disobedience, Eph 2:2. This is shown by the contrast: You are of God, little children, and you have conquered them, because greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world. The believers belong to God, they are the children of God, having been born again out of the water of Baptism and the Spirit. Therefore they not only have the knowledge necessary to examine and test the spirits, but they also have the ability, the power to withstand their allurements, to conquer them. All anti-Christian temptation is powerless against the strength of God that lives in the believers. For though Satan, the prince of darkness and the father of lies, is in the false teachers, lives in them, actuates them, yet God, who lives in us, who is our Strength and our Refuge, is greater and stronger than the devil with all his evil angels.
The apostle adds another reason for carefully examining the claims and for guarding against the evil influence of the false teachers: They are of the world, therefore they talk as of the world, and the world listens to them. No matter what their pretense and their glamour, the false teachers belong to the world, they have the world’s manner and mind. This is shown also in their talking, in their teaching and preaching, for its substance is not divine and leading to godliness, but it is inspired by the world, by its manner of thinking and acting. False teachers usually have messages that tickle the itching ears of their hearers. The children of the world will gladly hear them, the world receives their doctrines with enthusiasm. It is an almost unfailing criterion: if a certain preacher is widely advertised and acclaimed as a prophet for our times, he has probably managed to accommodate the old Scriptural language to some of his own philosophy in denying the fundamentals of the Bible. Witness the so-called Christianity of the social gospel.
Of himself and of his co-workers John writes, by way of contrast: We are of God; he that knows God hears us, he that is not of God does not hear us; in this you can recognize the Spirit of Truth and the spirit of error. The apostles were not only converted Christians, true believers, but they were also messengers, ambassadors of God. Thus all true preachers, whose call is from God, are messengers of God, no matter how lowly they may be in the sight of the world. True Christians show their knowledge of God, their faith in Him, by listening to these messengers, by yielding due obedience to the Gospel-message which they bring. They are thereby distinguished from those that know nothing of regeneration and want to know nothing of the Gospel of salvation. The attitude of men toward the true preachers of the Gospel is a reliable indication of their own spiritual state, whether they are still governed by the spirit of error, of falsehood and deceit, or whether they have opened their hearts to the Spirit of Truth and have come to faith.
Paul E. Kretzmann, Popular Commentary of the Bible (1921–1924) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
unfoldingWord translationNotes 2017 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv4, 7, 9, 11, 15, 17, 19 dear children
dear children
John was an elderly man and their leader. He used this expression to show his love for them. See how you translated this in 1 John 2:1. AT: "my dear children in Christ" or "you who are as dear to me as my own children" (See: Metaphor)
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have overcome them
"have not believed the false teachers"
the one who is in you is
"God, who is in you, is"
the one who is in the world
Two possible meanings are 1) this refers to Satan. AT: "Satan, who is in the world" or "Satan, who works through those who do not obey God" or 2) this refers to worldly teachers. AT: "worldly teachers" (See: Metonymy)
They are from the world
The words "are from" are a metaphor for "receive their power and authority." "The world" is a metonym ultimately for "the one who is in the world," Satan, though it is also a metonym for sinful people who gladly listen to them and so also give them authority. (See: Metonymy)
therefore what they say is from the world
"The world" here is a metonym ultimately for "the one who is in the world," Satan, though it is also a metonym for sinful people who gladly listen to them and so also give them authority. AT: "therefore they teach what they have learned from sinful people" (See: Metonymy)
and the world listens to them
The words "the world" are a metonym for people who do not obey God. AT: "so the people who do not obey God listen to them" (See: Metonymy)
translationWords
God
children
world
unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.
Tyndale Open Study Notes 2022 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 15, 17, 18, 19 4:5 The world’s viewpoint is one of systematic evil,…
4:5 The world’s viewpoint is one of systematic evil, opposed to God (2:15-17).
Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.