Love We Remember the SACRIFICE on Good Friday. We Celebrate the VICTORY on Easter

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Tis the Season…Love We remember the SACRIFICE on Good Friday. We celebrate the VICTORY on Easter. We celebrate the SENDING on Christmas Why did the Lord do these things? LOVE.

Have you ever been disappointed? Someone you love made a bad choice? Ever met someone who was unlovable? What made them that way?  Their actions! What made someone loveable?  Their actions!

Dear friends, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent His One and Only Son into the world so that we might live through Him. 10 Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 11 Dear friends, if God loved us in this way, we also must love one another. 1 John 4:7-11

Why was the first century church so special? So, effective? AGAPE. Godly/Sacrificial Love.

When it comes to our Faith…. You must live a life of love.

What kind of love? Sacrificial love. AGAPE love. Hesed is not an emotional response to beauty, merit, or kindness but rather a moral attitude dedicated to another’s good, whether or not that other is lovable, worthy, or responsive (see Dt 7:7–9). Agape specifically means to love the undeserving, despite disappointment and rejection.

Love is…  Love is TOUGH - Sometimes we have to say NO because we KNOW that is best.  Love is HARD - It isn’t easy to love someone who isn’t reciprocating that love. Marriage, for example, isn’t easy! It’s hard sometimes…  Love is Sacrificial – As parents we sacrifice for our kids. We invest time, energy, finances, prayers, & tears… We put up with their teenager stuff & pray like crazy they grow out of it; assuming we don’t kill them first.   Love is Intentional – Despite the pain, we love someone anyways. o It’s easier to do with family; kids in particular. But what about that terrible Boss? Jerk Neighbor? Stranger who cuts us off in the Dillon’s parking lot or leaves a big door ding on our new car? . But it is that intentionality that made us aware of the sacrificial love that Christ has for us. If the Lord had waited on us to be worthy, to make the first step….well it never would have happened! But Christ came to us! . Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. V. 10  Love is the Foundation of why God did what He did through Christ. God is Love (8b), but love is not God. Meaning, not all types of love is divine love. Can there be a wrong kind of love? ABSOLUTELY  In my High school growing up we had several Seniors who ended up falling in “love” with their teachers & vice-versa… That is a wrong kind of “love.” o Not talking about a lust filled kind of love fueled by emotion & hormones.  Not all love is Holy. Thus, not all love is ordained by God. o Calling immorality “love” does not make it holy or right in God’s eyes. o Church, God’s word is our standard that we live by & stand upon; not human emotion. . God modeled the kind of love that He is please by & we need to exhibit. A holy & Sacrificial love.  Christian love is different… V. 10

You must live a life of love for God & for Others….

You must live a life of love Example’s Christ gives for Love…  Loving God. o Keeping commandments o Laying down life in sacrifice of the Lord  Loving Others o Helping those in need o Sharing the world’s goods

Application:

Dear friends, if God loved us in this way, we also must love one another. V. 11 Are you striving to love people the same way Christ loved you? Serving with BHI? Seeking out those who need love this season?  Shut-ins.  Someone who’s loved one has passed away. Invite a friend to a worship service. Most people become part of a church family because they’re invited by a friend.

Are you striving to love people the same way Christ loved you?

Closing question. Why does the church exist? “It is true, as has been said, that the church exists for those who are not yet members, but it is also true that the love among her members should be one of her most powerful magnets.” (Jackman)

You must live a life of love

Invitation: Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. V. 10 Propitiation: “Jesus perfect obedience and sacrificial death satisfied God’s just demand for sin to be punished.” (HCSB Study Bible) But that punishment was meant for others, who sinned, not for Himself.

What God Is: “God Is Love” (1 John 4:7–8) This is the third of three expressions in John’s writings that help us understand the nature of God: “God is spirit” (John 4:24, NASB); “God is light” (1 John 1:5); and “God is love.” None of these is a complete revelation of God, of course, and it is wrong to separate them. God is spirit as to His essence; He is not flesh and blood. To be sure, Jesus Christ now has a glorified body in heaven, and one day we shall have bodies like His body. But being by nature spirit, God is not limited by time and space the way His creatures are. God is light. This refers to His holy nature. In the Bible, light is a symbol of holiness and darkness is a symbol of sin (John 3:18–21; 1 John 1:5–10). God cannot sin because He is holy. Because we have been born into His family, we have received His holy nature (1 Peter 1:14–16; 2 Peter 1:4). God is love. This does not mean that “love is God.” And the fact that two people “love each other” does not mean that their love is necessarily holy. It has accurately been said that “love does not define God, but God defines love.” God is love and God is light; therefore, His love is a holy love, and His holiness is expressed in love. All that God does expresses all that God is. Even His judgments are measured out in love and mercy (Lam. 3:22–23). Much that is called “love” in modern society bears no resemblance or relationship to the holy, spiritual love of God. Yet we see banners saying “God is love!” displayed at many festivals, particularly where young people are “doing their own thing”—as if one could dignify immorality by calling it “love.” Christian love is a special kind of love. First John 4:10 may be translated: “In this way is seen the true love.” There is a false love, and this kind of love God must reject. Love that is born out of the very essence of God must be spiritual and holy, because “God is spirit” and “God is light.” This true love is “poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us” (Rom. 5:5, NASB). Love, therefore, is a valid test of true Christian faith. Since God is love, and we have claimed a personal relationship with God, we must of necessity reveal His love in how we live. A child of God has been “born of God,” and therefore he shares God’s divine nature. Since “God is love,” Christians ought to love one another. The logic is unanswerable! Not only have we been “born of God,” but we also “know God.” In the Bible, the word know has a much deeper meaning than simply intellectual acquaintance or understanding. For example, the verb know is used to describe the intimate union of husband and wife (Gen. 4:1). To know God means to be in a deep relationship to Him—to share His life and enjoy His love. This knowing is not simply a matter of understanding facts; it is a matter of perceiving truth (cf. 1 John 2:3–5). We must understand “he that loveth not knoweth not God” (1 John 4:8) in this light. Certainly many unsaved people love their families and even sacrifice for them. And no doubt many of these same people have some kind of intellectual understanding of God. What, then, do they lack? They lack a personal experience of God. To paraphrase 1 John 4:8, “The person who does not have this divine kind of love has never entered into a personal, experiential knowledge of God. What he knows is in his head, but it has never gotten into his heart.” What God is determines what we ought to be. “As He is, so are we in this world” (1 John 4:17). The fact that Christians love one another is evidence of their fellowship with God and their sonship from God, and it is also evidence that they know God. Their experience with God is not simply a once-for-all crisis; it is a daily experience of getting to know Him better and better. True theology (the study of God) is not a dry, impractical course in doctrine—it is an exciting day-by-day experience that makes us Christlike! A large quantity of radioactive material was stolen from a hospital. When the hospital administrator notified the police, he said: “Please warn the thief that he is carrying death with him, and that the radioactive material cannot be successfully hidden. As long as he has it in his possession, it is affecting him disastrously!” A person who claims he knows God and is in union with Him must be personally affected by this relationship. A Christian ought to become what God is, and “God is love.” To argue otherwise is to prove that one does not really know God!

What God Did: “He Sent His Son” (1 John 4:9–11) Because God is love, He must communicate—not only in words but in deeds. True love is never static or inactive. God reveals His love to mankind in many ways. He has geared all of creation to meeting men’s needs. Until man’s sin brought creation under bondage, man had on earth a perfect home in which to love and serve God. God’s love was revealed in the way He dealt with the nation of Israel. “The Lord did not set His love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all people. But because the Lord loved you … hath the Lord brought you out with a mighty hand” (Deut. 7:7–8). The greatest expression of God’s love is in the death of His Son. “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8, NASB). The word manifested means “to come out in the open, to be made public.” It is the opposite of “to hide, to make secret.” Under the Old Covenant, God was hidden behind the shadows of ritual and ceremony (Heb. 10:1); but in Jesus Christ “the life was manifested” (1 John 1:2). “He that hath seen Me,” said Jesus, “hath seen the Father” (John 14:9). Why was Jesus Christ manifested? “And you know that He was manifested to take away our sins” (1 John 3:5). “For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8). Where did Jesus take away our sins and destroy (render inoperative) the works of the devil? At the cross! God manifested His love at the cross when He gave His Son as a sacrifice there for our sins. This is the only place in the epistle where Jesus is called God’s only-begotten Son. The title is used in John’s Gospel (John 1:14). It means “unique, the only one of its kind.” The fact that God sent His Son into the world is one evidence of the deity of Jesus Christ. Babies are not sent into the world from some other place; they are born into the world. As the perfect Man, Jesus was born into the world, but as the eternal Son, He was sent into the world. But the sending of Christ into the world, and His death on the cross, were not prompted by man’s love for God. They were prompted by His love for man. The world’s attitude toward God is anything but love! Two purposes are given for Christ’s death on the cross: that we might live through Him (1 John 4:9) and that He might be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 4:10). His death was not an accident; it was an appointment. He did not die as a weak martyr, but as a mighty conqueror. Jesus Christ died that we might live “through Him” (1 John 4:9), “for Him” (2 Cor. 5:15), and “with Him” (1 Thes. 5:9–10). A sinner’s desperate need is for life, because he is “dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1). It is something of a paradox that Christ had to die so that we may live! We can never probe the mystery of His death, but this we know: He died for us (Gal. 2:20). The death of Christ is described as a “propitiation.” John has used this word before (1 John 2:2), so there is no need to study it in detail again. We should remember that propitiation does not mean that men must do something to appease God or to placate His anger. Propitiation is something God does to make it possible for men to be forgiven. “God is light,” and therefore He must uphold His holy Law. “God is love,” and therefore He wants to forgive and save sinners. How can God forgive sinners and still be consistent with His holy nature? The answer is the cross. There Jesus Christ bore the punishment for sin and met the just demands of the holy Law. But there, also, God reveals His love and makes it possible for men to be saved by faith. It is important to note that the emphasis is on the death of Christ, not on His birth. The fact that Jesus was “made flesh” (John 1:14) is certainly an evidence of God’s grace and love, but the fact that He was “made sin” (2 Cor. 5:21) is underscored for us. The example of Christ, the teachings of Christ, the whole earthly life of Christ, find their true meaning and fulfillment in the cross. For the second time, believers are exhorted to “love one another” (1 John 4:11). This exhortation is a commandment to be obeyed (1 John 4:7), and its basis is the nature of God. “God is love; we know God; therefore, we should love one another.” But the exhortation to love one another is presented as a privilege as well as a responsibility: “If God so loved us, we ought also to love one another” (1 John 4:11). We are not saved by loving Christ; we are saved by believing on Christ (John 3:16). But after we realize what He did for us on the cross, our normal response ought to be to love Him and to love one another. It is important that Christians progress in their understanding of love. To love one another simply out of a sense of duty is good, but to love out of appreciation (rather than obligation) is even better. This may be one reason why Jesus established the Lord’s Supper, the Communion service. When we break the bread and share the cup, we remember His death. Few men, if any, want their deaths remembered! In fact, we remember the life of a loved one and try to forget the sadness of his death. Not so with Christ. He commands us to remember His death: “This do in remembrance of Me!” We should remember our Lord’s death in a spiritual way, not merely sentimentally. Someone has defined sentiment as “feeling without responsibility.” It is easy to experience solemn emotions at a church service and yet go out to live the same defeated life. True spiritual experience involves the whole man. The mind must understand spiritual truth; the heart must love and appreciate it; and the will must act on it. The deeper we go into the meaning of the Cross, the greater will be our love for Christ and the greater our active concern for one another. We have discovered what God is and what God has done; but a third foundation fact takes us even deeper into the meaning and implications of Christian love.1

1 Wiersbe, W. W. (1996). The Bible exposition commentary (Vol. 2, pp. 515–520). Wheaton, IL: Victor Books.

Does God really love us?

1 John 4:7–12

The last three words of verse 8 form one of the most profound statements of the whole Bible and perhaps for many people today one of the hardest to believe. God is love. When we think of this ‘grubby tennis ball’ of a planet, set in the vast infinity of space, our own lives as just moments in the onward surge of time, and our individuality among countless millions, can we really talk meaningfully about God loving us? And when we look at the world with all its evil and suffering, so many damaged and broken lives, how can there be a God who really loves? Yet, John insists, this is the very nature of God. And if we are not to empty the word ‘God’ of all its meaning, we must realize that such an infinite yet personal Creator is not too great to be bothered with my tiny life. He is so great that he can be bothered with each of us individually. Our study of the last few paragraphs has been rather like a progression through the ante- rooms in a great palace, each one more breathtaking as we move nearer to the throne room. We have seen the splendour of the King’s magnificent provision for his children in the revolutionary difference of their attitudes and actions when compared with those of the world. We have marvelled at his detailed love and care for each one of us, accepting us in our weakness and producing confidence in our lives as we reflect his love. But now the magnificence becomes overwhelming as the throne-room doors are flung open and we are introduced to the glorious person who has done all this—the God who is love. Everything else in the splendour of these verses circles around this one supreme reality: ‘God is love.’ John is not identifying a quality which God possesses; he is making a statement about the essence of God’s being. It is not simply that God loves, but that he is love. We are helped to understand this when we remember that God is revealed in Scripture as the holy Trinity, three persons in one God. We shall never be able to comprehend the full meaning of this with our finite minds, but at least we can grasp that at the heart of the deity there is a dynamic inter- relationship of love. Love flows between the three persons in a constant interaction, so that every activity expresses the love which is the divine nature. The Father loves the Son; the Son loves the Father; the Spirit loves the Son, and so on. This is not just a static description, but a living, active dynamism. God loves, within his own being, because his nature is to love. Therefore, to imagine that God does not love us is to deny his true nature, to repudiate his character. It is to distort the free grace of God into something much less worthy, a conditional ‘love’ that depends on the attractiveness or worthiness of the object for it to be exercised. Divine love (agapē) is utterly different. It cannot be earned; it cannot be deserved. God loves us because that is his nature. This helps us to understand more clearly what John means when he affirms in verse 7 that love comes from God. He is as much its source as he is the source of all true light (1:5). This will underline why love for one another stands along with belief in Christ as the main criterion for proving that we have a true knowledge of God. It also helps us to interpret the second part of verse 7, Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Clearly John is not teaching that every manifestation of human love is a sign of genuine spiritual life. Plummer argues, ‘If God is the source of all love, then whatever love a man has in him comes from God; and this part of his moral nature is of Divine origin.’ While agreeing that the capacity to love is part of what is meant when we speak of man being made in the image of God, and that loving human relationships among non-Christian people are part of God’s common grace, we must not confuse this with being born of God and knowing God. There is no doubt that in verse 7 John is talking about Christian love for the brotherhood. The definite article before love in the Greek here particularizes that special quality of divine love which ought to characterize Christian fellowship. It is love for our fellow believers that John puts forward as irrefutable evidence of the new birth. Its absence, whatever a person’s pretensions may be, indicates that he has no true personal knowledge of God (verse 8a). John is also aware, however, that the word ‘love’ needs definition and clarification, and so he focuses on two great evidences, in which the love of God can be both seen and communicated.

1. God’s love is seen in the cross of Christ (verses 9–10) These two verses are packed full of meaning as John elaborates his second great theme. Since God is love, all our definitions of what love is and how it behaves must be drawn from him if they are to accord with reality. This also helps to elaborate and explain the quality of love, to which John has been referring in the previous two verses. The love which is the proof of a true relationship with God is a love which is manifested in actions for the benefit of others, even to the point of self-sacrifice. To understand that love we have to understand the heart of God himself. We have already seen that the action of Jesus in laying down his life for his people is the perfect demonstration of divine love (3:16). Now, as John returns to the theme of the cross again, he begins by looking at its meaning from God’s viewpoint. This is how God showed his love among us. The verb (phaneroō) was used back at the start of the letter (1:2) to describe the coming of Christ, the life, into the world. Here the death of Jesus is seen as the public appearance of God’s love for his people. Among us is literally ‘in us’, which Clark suggests might be better translated ‘in our case’.2 Let us also note at this point the important clause in verse 10a, not that we loved God. This is no reciprocation by God, meeting a person halfway because he has shown some desire to be right with his master. The initiative is entirely God’s. He decides to manifest his love to those who do not love him and who do not want to love him, to enemies and rebels armed to the teeth against him, to a world of lost sinners. Let us acknowledge once and for all that if it were not for the fact that God is love, we would have no expectation of mercy or forgiveness, no hope and no future. The initiative in the work of man’s salvation belongs entirely to the God of love. From verses 9 and 10 we can build up the full picture John wants to give us of this loving God in action. He sent his one and only Son (verse 9). The object is placed emphatically at the beginning and then the subject and verb are reversed, so, to quote Lenski, a more accurate rendering of the feeling of the original would be ‘his Son he has sent, God has sent’. To increase the emphasis on the amazing fact that God should bother with human beings, the word ‘God’ is repeated over and over again in this paragraph. The adjective ‘only begotten’ (monogenēs) is added to the description of the Son who came. We are familiar with its use in John 3:16. The NIV translation one and only catches the meaning well. It means ‘unique, one of a kind’. It was amazing that God should send a Son, but to send his only Son is a measure of the enormity of this love. The same word is used of Isaac in Hebrews 11:17, to illustrate the greatness of Abraham’s faith and obedience when God tested him. He was prepared to sacrifice his one and only son, the son who had been promised so long, if that was what Yahweh commanded. We have here the idea of a Son who is specially precious and greatly loved because he is the only one. God had only one Son, and he was sent into a hostile environment, into a rebel world, on a rescue mission to redeem us and reconcile us to God. This is love. But there is more, for the precious, only Son was sent as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. The word is hilasmos, on which we commented at 2:2. Love finds the means by which just and righteous wrath can be satisfied and so turned away, in order that forgiveness may be offered and reconciliation achieved. The only way was at infinite cost to the one who loves. ‘The depth of God’s love is to be seen precisely in the way in which it bears the wounds inflicted on it by mankind and offers full and free pardon.’ It is no help to our understanding to pretend that a loving God would not require an atoning sacrifice, because he would not punish sin. This would be to destroy the truth that God is light and to remove all grounds of morality. The nobler, biblical way is to magnify the love of God by seeing at what tremendous cost the atonement was made, and therefore of what amazing length, devotion and scope this love is capable. It also underlines the fact that only those who have been ransomed by that love know its full extent. ‘Even angels long to look into these things’ (1 Pet. 1:12). Stronger his love than death or hell; Its riches are unsearchable; The first-born sons of light Desire in vain its depths to see; They cannot reach the mystery, The length, and breadth, and height. Finally, let us grasp a further truth about what the death of Christ accomplished. He died for our sins. It was because of our sins that Jesus died, for he had none of his own. In that death he dealt with them, because he paid the penalty of separation from the heavenly Father, which we deserve. Our sins are therefore forgiven and removed because of the cross, the consequence being that we might live through him (verse 9b). So the ultimate purpose of this sending and commissioning was that we might receive eternal life in the place of certain death. It is only through Jesus that such life can come to us. He is the personal mediator who pleads for us at the Father’s throne (2:1). He is the source and the channel of spiritual, eternal life. Not only are the rebels pardoned; they are made sons. ‘And a son belongs to [the family] for ever’ (Jn. 8:35). This is love. Its source is in God; it is manifest in the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ; its purpose is the blessing of a multitude of lives, made right with God, through the death of his Son.

2. God’s love is seen in how Christians love one another (verses 11–12) Verse 11 calls not so much for comment as for grateful obedient implementation. Repeating the exhortation of verse 7 with which the section begins, ‘let us love one another’, John has now immensely strengthened his case and his readers’ motivation. Note the little adverb so in the phrase since God so loved us. This takes us back to all the details of the preceding verses, and is intended as a further refutation of Cerinthus and his heresies. The one who suffered was the eternal, unique Son of the Father. It was his blood that flowed for our forgiveness. And those who have been forgiven will demonstrate this revolutionary change at the heart of their life by a new love for one another. God’s love supplies both the reason and the resources. If we are truly his children we shall want to be like our Father. But there is also a dimension of obligation in the verb. This is not just an extra ingredient that we might add to our discipleship if we feel especially moved to do so. We owe it to the loving Father not to slander his name any further by denying his love in our human relationships. If we have been cleansed through Christ’s blood, our new lives must be clean, like his, as we mix with others in God’s family. If we have appreciated something of the infinite price paid for our redemption, then we shall see at once how vital it is that we do not continue to indulge ourselves in sin. There is a new constraint within us that longs to live differently (Rom. 5:5). So the Christian church should be a community of love, unlike any other human society. It is true, as has been said, that the church exists for those who are not yet members, but it is also true that the love among her members should be one of her most powerful magnets.2

The Origin of Christian Love (4:7–10)

SIX TIMES IN this letter John employs the personal address “beloved” (NIV, “dear friends”),4 expressing his pastoral, heartfelt concern for the welfare of his followers. The exhortation to love (see also 3:11, 23) he now explains as originating from God himself (4:7a). The coming of Jesus Christ provides a compelling portrait of God’s love for us. This theme—the compelling origin of divine love—weaves its way throughout the section (4:7–11, 16, 19). Thus for John, an exhortation to obedience does not come with a threat. Instead, obedience is encouraged through inspiration. God’s inspiring love, his generous affection, compels us to obey. If he has done this much for us, how can we do less? Genuine love cannot be exhibited in any community unless it reflects God’s love, unless it is empowered by an experience of being loved. Christians who live out such love are exhibiting much more. They are also giving evidence that they have been born from God and know him (4:7b; cf. 5:4). The first verb is a perfect tense, suggesting that divine rebirth is past, yet bearing fruit in the present. A person once converted now demonstrates the fruit of that conversion. The second verb is a present tense, implying that love is connected to an ongoing awareness of who God is. Why did John select these particular words? Spiritual rebirth and divine knowledge were no doubt promoted among the secessionists (see 3:9). John therefore gives a test of true spiritual maturity that defeats in a stroke his opponents’ spiritual claims; he bases his comments on their unspiritual conduct, that they have been unloving. John goes on to point out that the reverse is also the case (v. 8). Whoever does not love—in the setting of the Johannine church—cannot possibly know God (also 4:20). Note that the tense of the verb “to know” has changed from the present tense to the aorist (or past) tense. John describes here a person who has never experienced God’s love at any time. No doubt our emphasis should be on the positive character of this principle: Since God is love, those who encounter him have the power to become loving persons. When verse 8 says “God is love” (cf. v. 16), it is important to note what John is not saying. He is not saying that “God is loving” (though this is true). Nor is he saying that one of God’s

2 Jackman, D. (1988). The message of John’s letters: living in the love of God (pp. 117–123). Leicester, England; Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. activities is “to love” us (though this is true as well). John is saying that God is love, that “all of his activity is loving.” Love is the essence of his being. But the reverse is not the case. We cannot say, in other words, that “love is God,” as if any display of affection suddenly qualifies as divine. John is carefully defining the character of who God is and what it means to live in relation to him. To genuinely contemplate the true identity of God is to become like him. A true apprehension of the personhood of God should lead us to change how we live and behave. In verses 9–10 John carries his theological definition further with words strongly reminiscent of 1 John 3:16, “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us” (cf. John 3:16). The ultimate act of God’s self-revelation is found in his activity in Jesus Christ. The NIV “showed” in verse 9 translates the Greek word phaneroo (lit., “revealed”), a word that refers to the disclosure of things formerly hidden. Never before has God done such a thing in history! Christ is the unveiling of God’s heart; he is God, displayed vulnerably before the world.7 These verses offer two developments over 1 John 3:16. (1) God’s love is what initiated the sending of Jesus. We enjoy not only the love of Christ, but also God’s hidden passion for humankind, visibly expressed in Jesus Christ. Thus we should see not only Christ as our ally, working to placate an angry God. It is God himself who loves us—who is devoted to us. As Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:19, “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ.” (2) First John 3:16 describes how Christ surrendered his life for us and how this should inspire our sacrifices for one another. Now John adds that the sending of Jesus, this overture of love, is intended that we might live (v. 9b) and that the penalty for our sins might be covered (v. 10b). “To have life” is a favorite Johannine expression (John 5:25; 6:51, 57, 58; 11:25; 14:19). But such life comes about only through forgiveness of sins. This is the second time Jesus’ death is called “an atoning sacrifice” (see discussion on 2:2). This term and its associated verbs and nouns appear only six times in the entire New Testament. The Greek word hilasmos describes an act of “removing” an offense (e.g., through sacrifice), which repairs a relationship with God and is often translated “expiation.” Thus, enjoying God’s love has a requirement: the renewal of a broken relationship that can only be accomplished by Jesus Christ.

The Inspiration of Christian Love (4:11–16)

VERSE 11 SHIFTS subjects to the immediate concern on the apostle’s mind. We are alerted to this change by his use again of “beloved” (see above, v. 7). John is a pastor writing passionately to his followers. The conditional clause in verse 11 (beginning with Gk. ei [“if”], translated “since” in NIV) must be interpreted accurately. It does not express uncertainty (as some translations suggest) but fact: “since God so loved us.…” There is no condition here—John has already affirmed in no uncertain terms that God’s activity in Christ has given us indisputable evidence of the Father’s love. Therefore, the exhortation to love springs not from any anxiety about losing this love nor from a threat of God’s wrath. Our obligation to love one another is a by-product of God’s loving generosity toward us (cf. 3:11, 14, 23; 4:12, 21; 5:2; 2 John 5). John believes that this is the first inspiration of Christian love: It is a reflection of divine love already showered upon us.3

3 Burge, G. M. (1996). Letters of John (pp. 186–188). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House. 4:7–12 Love one another. 7 John reinforces let us love one another with the reminder that love comes from God. Love, as Christians understand it, is not a human achievement; it is divine in origin, a gift from God. If anyone loves in this sense it shows that that person has been born of God and knows God. 8 The negative underlines the point: Whoever does not love does not know God. The reason for this is one of the greatest statements in the whole Bible: God is love. This means more than ‘God is loving’ or that God sometimes loves. It means that he loves, not because he finds objects worthy of his love, but because it is his nature to love. His love for us depends not on what we are, but on what he is. He loves us because he is that kind of God, because he is love. 9 This kind of love is not found everywhere, or indeed anywhere as a human achievement. We know it only because God showed it when he sent his one and only Son into the world. His purpose in doing this was to give us life. Life in the full sense comes to us through him alone. 10 The real meaning of love and the real source of life are discerned only in the cross. It is not that we loved God. We will never find what this love is if we start from the human end (we is emphatic; not that we loved). We find it in that God loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice (better as the NIV mg. ‘the one who would turn aside his wrath’). To see what love means we must see ourselves as sinners, and thus as the objects of God’s wrath, and yet as those for whom Christ died. ‘So far from finding any kind of contrast between love and propitiation, the apostle can convey no idea of love to anyone except by pointing to the propitiation’ (J. Denney, The Death of Christ [Hodder and Stoughton, 1905], p. 276). It is one of the NT’s resounding paradoxes that it is God’s love that averts God’s wrath from us, and indeed that it is precisely in this averting of wrath that we see what real love is. 11 This has consequences. When we see that God loves like this we (the word is emphatic) also ought to love one another. The mainspring of our love for other people is the divine love shown to us in Christ’s atoning work. Christians should love, not because all those they meet are attractive people, but because the love of God has transformed them and made them loving people. They should love now not because attractiveness in other people compels their love, but because, as Christians, it is their nature to love. 12 Love for other people is very important as is clear from the fact that it is this love and not love for God that shows that God lives in us. That no-one has ever seen God (cf. Jn. 1:18) does not deny the visions in the OT (e.g. Ex. 24:11). But such visions were partial and incomplete. It is in Christ that we see God. And when we love, God lives in us. Indeed, his love is made complete (i.e. reaches its aim) in us, a staggering statement.4

In the Writings of John What John later recalled, and reflected upon, forms the crown of biblical teaching about love. For John, love was the foundation of all that had happened—“God so loved the world” (Jn 3:16; 16:27; 17:23). This is how we know love at all: Christ laid down his life for us (1 Jn 3:16). The mutual love of Father, Son, and disciples must be the fundamental fact in Christianity because God himself is love (4:8, 16).

We know this by the Incarnation and by the cross (1 Jn 4:9–10). Thus we know and believe the love God has for us, and that love itself is divine (“of God”). It follows that “he who loves is born of God.” “He

4 Morris, L. L. (1994). 1 John. In D. A. Carson, R. T. France, J. A. Motyer, & G. J. Wenham (Eds.), New Bible commentary: 21st century edition (4th ed., pp. 1406–1407). Leicester, England; Downers Grove, IL: Inter- Varsity Press. who does not love does not know God.” Such a person “is in the darkness,” “is not of God,” and “remains in death.” No one has ever seen God; nevertheless “if we love, … God abides in us” and we in God.

God’s love is thus prior and original; if we love at all, it is “because he first loved.” Our love is directed first toward God, and John is exceedingly searching in his tests of that Godward love. It demands that we “love not the world,” that we “keep his word [and] his commandments,” and that we love our Christian brothers and sisters. This commandment we received from Christ, “that he who loves God should love his brother also,” for “if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” Twelve times John stressed the duty of mutual loyalty and love. Indeed, if one closes his heart against his brother or sister, “how does God’s love abide in him?”

This emphasis upon the mutual love of Christians has been held a serious limitation of the love Jesus required. “Your brother” appears to have supplanted “your neighbor.” In this respect the commandment given in the upper room (Jn 13:34) is “new” compared with that in Matthew 22:39 (citing Lv 19:18), and the circumstances explain why. The night on which Jesus was betrayed was shadowed by the surrounding world’s hostility, the imminent crucifixion, and the defection of Judas. All the future depended upon the mutual loyalty of the 11 disciples, standing together under social pressure. By the time of John’s letter, new defections had rent the church. A perversion of the gospel called Gnosticism, essentially intellectualist, proud, “giving no heed to love” (Ignatius), had drawn away leaders and adherents (1 Jn 2:19, 26). Once again mutual loyalty was all-important, and John wrote expressly to consolidate and maintain the apostolic fellowship (1 Jn 1:3).

However, love for one’s fellow Christians does not exclude, but instead leads on to, a wider love (cf. 2 Pt 1:7). John insists that God loved the whole world (Jn 3:16; 1 Jn 2:2; 4:14). Moreover, if love fails within the Christian fellowship, it certainly will not flourish beyond it but evaporate in mere words (1 Jn 3:18).

In countering the loveless conceit of Gnostic Christianity, John’s concern was with the basic commandment of love to God and people as at once the criterion and the consummation of true Christian life. He does not, therefore, detail the many-sided expressions of love. For description of love in action, his mind recalls Christ’s words about “keeping commandments” and “laying down life” in sacrifice (Jn 15:10, 13; 1 Jn 3:16), and he mentioned especially love’s noticing a brother’s need, and so sharing this world’s goods (v 17). Terse as these expressions are, they contain the heart of Christian love. John’s forthright realism in testing all religious claims ensures that for him love could be no vague sentimentalism.

The Christian ideal can only be socially fulfilled within a disciple band, a divine kingdom, the Father’s family, the Christian fellowship. In Scripture, love is no abstract idea, conceived to provide a self- explanatory, self-motivating “norm” to resolve the problem in every moral situation. It is rooted in the divine nature, expressed in the coming and death of Christ, experienced in salvation, and so kindled within the saved. Thus it is central, essential, and indispensable to Christianity. For God is love.5

5 Elwell, W. A., & Comfort, P. W. (2001). In Tyndale Bible dictionary (p. 828). Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers.