3.17 - Love and Hatred, and Their Patterns
Chapter 17 Love and Hatred, and Their Patterns (1 John 3:10-18)
Divine or Diabolic Sonship “manifest”—Two Sorts of Men—Personality of the Evil One—Marks of Spiritual Parentage—Love the Burden of the Gospel—Diligo, ergo sum—The Master of Love, and His Lesson—Testing of Love by Material Needs—Cain a Prototype—Evil must hate Good—Implicit Murder—Misanthropy.
―—―♦——— In this the children of God are manifest, and the children of the Devil;
Whosoever doth not do righteousness is not of God, and he that doth not love his brother;
For this is the message which you heard from the beginning,—that we should love one another.
Not as Cain was of the Evil One, and slew his brother.
And for what cause did he slay him?
Because his works were evil, and his brother’s righteous:
Do not wonder, brothers, that the world hateth you.
As for us, we know that we have passed out of death into life, in that we love the brethren.
He that doth not love, abideth in death;
Every one who hateth his brother, is a murderer;
And you know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him!
In this have we known love,—in that He for us laid down His life;
And we ought, for the brethren, to lay down our lives.
But where anyone hath worldly means, and beholdeth his brother in want, and shutteth up his heart from him,
How doth the love of God abide in him?
Little children, let us not love in word nor with the tongue, but in deed and truth.
―—―♦———
THE previous paragraph of the Epistle (1 John 3:4-9) ended with the strong declaration concerning the child of God, “He cannot continue in sin (ἁμαρτάνειν), because he has been begotten of God.” The argument of that passage went to show that the filial relation to God is, on every account, incompatible with a life of sin. The two states are mutually exclusive; they are ethical contradictories, just as, in St Paul’s way of thinking, are the dominion of the Spirit and of the flesh. And just as St Paul, after he has laid down this axiom, at once draws its consequences in the sphere of practical and visible life saying, “The works of the flesh are manifest, which are these,” and then in turn describes the opposite “fruit of the Spirit” (Galatians 5:16-24); so St John, in his concise and positive fashion, proceeds here: “In this are manifest the children of God, and the children of the Devil: everyone who does not do righteousness is not of God, and he who does not love his brother.” On this antithetic statement the paragraph is based. Two families are set in contrast with each other—the two races who occupy the moral world, the two forces that contest the field of human life—which have God and Satan for their fathers, Christ and Cain for their respective prototypes.
How simple are the Apostle’s views of life! The complexities of human nature, the baffling mixtures and contradictions of character, for him scarcely exist. Men are parted, as they will be at the judgement-seat of Christ, when the ultimate analysis is reached, into two classes and no more—the sheep and the goats. We are the subjects of two warring kingdoms, the offspring of two opposed progenitors; no third category exists. The undecided must and will decide. The universe resolves itself into heaven or hell. Right or wrong, love or hate, God or Satan, eternal life or death—these Are the alternatives that St John never ceases to press upon us. Through the whole Epistle the duel goes on between these master-powers; at each turn the light of God’s love and the night of Satanic hate confront each other; the former chases the latter from verse to verse of this paragraph (compare p. 52).
"Children of the Devil” is a frightful designation. It was suggested by 1 John 3:8: “He that committeth sin is of the Devil, for the Devil sinneth from the beginning” (see p. 264). Jesus Christ had first said to the Jews who hated Him, “You have the Devil for your father. . . . He was a murderer from the beginning” (John 8:37-44). The Apostle generalizes this impeachment, and applies it to all habitual sinners. The Evil One is the author and father of sin; sinners therefore are of his kindred. Especially do the more violent and shameless forms of wickedness suggest such paternity; the intensity of the evil, and its furious resistance to the Divine will, point to an infernal origin. Similarly our Lord described the tares sown amongst the wheat in God’s field as “the sons of the Evil One”; for they spring from seed sown by him, even as there is a “seed of God abiding” in His children (1 John 3:9).
Such expressions are nowadays commonly regarded as metaphors and personifications of moral influences; and our Lord in employing this form of statement is supposed to be adopting, as a part of His incarnation under the given environment, the modes of speech and the mental concepts belonging to His time, or accommodating Himself for didactic purposes to the current superstitions. For it is assumed that physical science and psychology have explained away the phenomena of demonism, reducing its symptoms to mere cases of brain-disturbance and nervous derangement. But the explanation is not so complete as might be desired. The same physical antecedents result in effects widely different in different instances, and varying in accordance with the spiritual condition and affinities of the patient. Moreover, if Jesus Christ had a real insight, such as He decidedly claims, into the powers and movements of the supersensible world, the sayings which attest His recognition of unseen evil wills affecting the lives of men and hostile to Himself, are a witness to the affirmative that must not lightly be set aside. The hypothesis appears to be supported by a considerable amount of personal experience and evidence, more easily ridiculed than explained away. The force of this testimony will be variously estimated according to the nature of our faith in His word, and our reliance upon the fidelity of the Evangelic record.
Two conjoint marks distinguish the children of the opposed spiritual parents—righteousness and brotherly love on the one side, unrighteousness and hatred upon the other (1 John 3:10). The latter tendencies have reached their goal in murder (1 John 3:12), the former in the supreme self-sacrifice (1 John 3:16). The Apostle at this point combines the separate tests of the Christian character which he laid down in 1 John 3:9-11 and 1 John 2:29. “Righteousness,” the first of these signs, is obviously in agreement with Divine law; the expression “to do righteousness,” in fact, sums up the performance of all that God’s will and law require from men, alike in their relations to Him and to each other. St John was careful to assert that the true righteousness is no less derived from God’s nature, and proves a Divine filiation in him who exhibits it (1 John 3:7). The second quality, viz. “love to the brethren,” while it is an assimilation to the nature of God (1 John 4:7-14), is at the same time matter of obedience to God’s command (1 John 2:7-8, and 1 John 3:23). The two demands, therefore, cover the same ground, for “ love is the fulfilling of the law”; the same acts which in the language of the will, when regarded objectively and in relation to the order of the universe, are deeds of “righteousness,” in the language of the heart and viewed in the light of their motive, as matters of character and temper, are deeds of “love.” Man’s righteousness is loyalty to God, and consequent harmony with His nature; man’s love is affinity to God, and consequent obedience to His In the Lord Jesus we see the perfect unity of these all-embracing virtues; in Him who said at the beginning, “Thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness,” and at the end, “Greater love hath no man than this, that one lay down his life for his friends” (Matthew 3:15; John 15:13). Their combination in this text corrects the one-sidedness into which we are apt to fall. Firm and strong men are so often harsh; tender, sympathetic men, so often weak. Conscience and heart, duty and affection, strictness and gentleness, are the right foot and the left foot of Christian progress, and must keep equal step. So righteousness and love mount to heaven, while wrong and hate march down to hell.
Righteousness had its due in the previous section of the letter; the rest of what the writer has here to say concerns love, along with hate, its deadly counterpart. Through the whole passage love and hatred alternate like day and night; the Apostle’s thought swings to and fro between them. Let us untwine his interlaced sentences, and pursue love to the end of this section, then taking up hate in turn.
I. 1 John 3:11, 1 John 3:14, 1 John 3:16 stand out in the sunshine; they speak for the nature and offices of Christian love.
1. Love is, to begin with, the burden of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This was introduced in 1 John 2:7-8, as the “commandment, old and new,” which “you had from the beginning “ (see Chapter 11; now it appears as “the message which you heard from the beginning.” For love is both the sum of all God would have us do, and the end of all He would have us know. That men should “love one another”—that God meant this in the original shaping of human life, and aimed at this in the mission of His Son and the work of redemption—was news to the world, “glad tidings of great joy.” When the angels sang at Bethlehem of “peace on earth,” they sounded the note of this message “from the beginning.” Commencing his letter, St John wrote, “This is the message, that God is light” (1 John 1:5); but now, “This is the message, that we should love one another” —the first an announcement of the supreme certainty, the second an announcement of the sovereign duty. The two thats of 1 John 1:5 and 1 John 3:11 are grammatically different—ὅτι and ἵνα. They signify respectively, the content and the purport of the Divine message, the chief fact and the chief effect of revelation; they show us what God is, and what consequently men should be. The sum of the Gospel of Christ, in its intention and its issue, is comprised in this, “that we should love one another”—this is the message! The verb for “love” (ἀγαπῶμεν) is, to be sure, the characteristic New Testament word which fills this letter, denoting a spiritual, godlike affection; and it stands, as did the verb for “sin” throughout 1 John 3:6-9, in the Greek continuous present tense, for it signifies the habit and rule of life—“that we should be lovers one of another."
Now this “message,” ever sounding in the Gospel, has not fallen upon deaf ears, and the “new commandment” is no expression of a high-flown unpractical ideal the design of God’s grace is realized in the experience of writer and readers. “As for us”—in contrast with the Cain-like world that is ignorant of our secret—“we know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren” (1 John 3:14). The mutual love which bound together the first Christian communities and marked them off conspicuously from surrounding society, proved that a new life was born amongst them. Such love was the light and the atmosphere of St John’s existence. Unkindled by this flame, which the Apostle had caught from the breast of his Master and conveyed to so many souls, the human spirit lies dormant and is dead while it seems to live: “he that loveth not, abideth in death” (1 John 3:14). As one recovered from drowning or from the numbness of frost, or as Lazarus waking up in his tomb when his heart began to beat and the warm blood swelled his veins and his body felt once more its kinship with the breathing world, so the Christian heart knows itself alive by the sense of a spiritual love. Cogito, ergo sum, is the axiom of philosophical reason; Diligo, ergo sum, is the axiom of the Christian consciousness. Love proves life. The witness of the Spirit to which St Paul appealed (Romans 8:14-17), speaks to the same effect. “In this we know,” St John writes in 1 John 4:13, “that we abide in Him [in God], and He in us, in that He hath given us of His Spirit”; and a glance at the foregoing sentence shows that the Apostle means by “His Spirit” the Spirit of a God-like love.
We must consider well how high and pure an emotion is “love” in Christian speech, how free from the turbidness of passion and the sordidness of self-interest. We must understand, besides, that its object is “the brethren”—not those of my own sect or set, my particular coterie or party in the Church, those who accept “our views” or attend “our meetings,” but the children of God that are scattered abroad, the lovers and friends of my Lord Jesus Christ, all whom He in any wise owns and who bear marks of His image. To turn zeal for God into bigotry and to spoil piety by the sour leaven of censoriousness, is the familiar device of Satan. “Ye know not what spirit ye are of,” says Christ to the angry and contemptuous vindicators of the gospel of charity, who make bitter words their arrows and whet their tongue like a sharp sword in the fight of faith; to the stiff, unreasoning maintainers of prejudice; to the ready suspecters of their opponents, and denouncers of those who “follow not us.” Against such combatants St Paul, most stalwart of Christ’s good soldiers, protested: “The servant of the Lord must not fight; but must be gentle toward all, apt to teach, ready to endure evil, in meekness correcting them that oppose themselves “ (2 Timothy 2:24-25).
2. In the next place, love has its pattern in Jesus Christ. The Authorized Version has misread 1 John 3:16,—“Here-by know we the love of God.” That is St John’s point in 1 John 4:7-14: what he means to say just now is, “Herein we have got to know love”; we have learnt what love is—its reach and capability, its very self discovered in Jesus Christ. Other notions of love and attainments in the way of love are meagre compared to this, and hardly deserve the name. Robert Browning speaks somewhere of the present life as man’s “one chance of learning love”: that chance had come to the writer and his friends in the knowledge of Jesus Christ, and they had seized it. They had found the life of life, the thing for which “if a man would give all the substance of his house, it would be utterly contemned.” Love’s mystery lies open to them, brought from the bosom of the eternal Father and wrought into His own life and death by Him who said, “Greater love hath none than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). For all this, the Apostle’s downright inference, in 1 John 3:16, brings a certain surprise. The sacrificial death of Jesus was solitary and all-sufficing. He is the “one” who “died for all,”—the Holy “Lamb of God” carrying alone upon His innocent shoulders and in His mighty heart “the sin of the world” (John 1:29; 2 Corinthians 5:14; Hebrews 2:9). God forbid that we should even ourselves to Him, who “by Himself bare our sins in His body upon the tree”; as “the Lamb that hath been slain,” Jesus Christ shares forever the blessing and honour and glory and dominion of “Him that sitteth upon the throne” (Revelation 5:12, Revelation 7:10). St John would be the last to imagine that his own death or sufferings partook in any degree of the expiatory virtue that attaches to the one sacrifice for sins. “He,” the Apostle declared, “is the propitiation for our sins, and for the whole world” (1 John 2:2). Nevertheless the “one sacrifice” has its moral sequel in many sacrifices, that seal and supplement it: “’We too ought to lay down our lives (or souls, ψυχάς) for the brethren.” Unique in its merit and redemptive effect, our Lord’s death was as far as possible from being isolated in its causes or in the spirit in which it was undertaken and endured. The Apostle Paul regarded his whole Christian life as a “being conformed to” his Master’s “death” (Php 3:10); this is the noblest ambition of every Christian man. The cross is stamped on that “image of God’s Son” to which the “many brethren” of “the Firstborn” are “conformed” (Romans 8:29). Hard as it is to bear the cross after Christ, His yoke grows easy and His burden light to those who “know love.” The imitation is complete in him who daily “offers his body,” under the constraint of God’s mercies, “a living sacrifice” upon the altar that God’s will and man’s need are ever building for him (Romans 12:1-21). In the first days the duty stated in this passage was no ideal requirement, no stretch of an heroic fancy. Every Christian held himself at the disposal of the community. At any time martyrdom might be called for; already many a dear life had been laid down for the brethren’s sake. When we excuse ourselves from demands that involve the surrender of cherished earthly good, or when Christ’s service in dangerous lands calls for reinforcements that are not sent, the Church is holding back what belong to Him and shows herself unworthy of the Lord that bought her, and untrue to her own history. We are condemned by the love to which we owe ourselves, if we are not such as can hazard their lives for the name of the Lord Jesus, if we have not the heart to die for those whom Christ purchased by His blood.
3. Further, St John insists that brotherly love finds its practical test in things of common need.1 John 3:17 speaks bluntly to this effect. Too easily, in dreaming of unrequired heroisms, one misses the humble sacrifices of ease and luxury, of self-will and social pride, awaiting him in the daily occasions of life. In many a Church the man is found singing with unction, "Were the whole realm of nature mine, That were a present far too small!" for whose shrunken soul the smallest coin out of a full purse proves large enough to meet Christ’s loud appeal. St John aggravates the case supposed by the verb he uses in describing the unfeeling Christian; he “beholds his brother having need,—beholds as a spectacle on which he causes his eyes to rest” (Westcott); he sees the need in its distressful circumstances—and then deliberately bars his heart against its entreaty and turns away without a sign of sympathy. You say with St John, “How dwelleth the love of God in him?” St James’ words on the same subject (James 2:16) show that such conduct was not unheard of in the Apostolic Church. And when alms were lavishly given, this might be done from ostentation or with the notion of earning merit (see Matthew 6:2-4; 1 Corinthians 13:3), out of a cold and self-engrossed heart.
Christian charity was then new in the world; and habits of neglect and callousness, especially when they have become engrained and traditional, are slowly overcome. The beneficence so renowned in the early Church was the outcome of an acquired disposition, that did not spring into activity at once as the immediate consequence of the new love to God felt by Christian men. Like all practical virtues, the grace of charity required inculcation, discipline, habituation, to bring it to proper exercise; the spirit of brotherly love grew by use into the temper of brotherly love and the aptitude for its expression. To this end much of the ethical teaching of the New Testament is devoted. St John must perforce reiterate and insist upon it, though it be a thing so plain, “that he who loves God should love also his brother” (1 John 4:21). The Apostle’s last word here, in 1 John 3:18, warns his readers against making philanthropic talk and social theory a substitute for personal deeds of compassion. “My little children,” he says—pleading with those whom he loves and values as true-born Christians, but in whom this fruit of Christ’s Spirit is still unripe—“let us not love in word nor with the tongue, but indeed and truth."
II. Hate throws its gloom across the light of Christ’s love newly shining in the world. Cain afforded the pattern upon this side, as Jesus upon that—each a representative “son of man” and firstborn among many brethren. Cain is the model and the forerunner of enviers and destroyers, as Jesus is of lovers of their kind. “We are not,” the Apostle writes, “as Cain, who slew his brother."
1. The evil and good mingled in Adam, the earthly progenitor, were parcelled out in the two elder-born sons which the sacred story assigns to him. Cain was the eldest of the Devil’s brood amongst mankind. The Palestinian Targum on Genesis ascribes Cain’s conception to the influence of Samael, the Angel of Death, while Abel is described as Adam’s proper son. Whether this representation was current in St John’s time, we do not know; it gave a legendary expression to the Jewish idea of the Cainite nature, of which he makes use. A radical divergence of character showed itself in the bosom of the first human family; and this contrast, engendering strife and death, pervades the history of our race. “The way of Cain” alluded to in Jude 1:11, takes there a wider range, including rebellion against God in any form.
Cain is still slaying Abel, and Abel’s blood is crying to God from the ground, in every act of unscrupulous rivalry and extortion from the necessity of others, in every encroachment of strong nations upon the weak, in every advantage gained by cunning over honesty, in every angry blow and slanderous word. All such sins are murderous, preying upon life itself; they weaken and impoverish human existence, and when finished bring forth death. “He slaughtered him,” says St John of Cain’s homicide, as a man cuts the throat of an ox. The gladiators of the platform and the Press, and the purveyors of intemperance and vice, display in many instances as little feeling for their victims.
2. And why? “Because his works were evil, but his brother’s righteous.” Reason enough, as the world goes! This is the standing quarrel between the children of God and the children of the Devil: “They loved darkness rather than light,” said Christ of His traducers, “because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19). Men scorn and vilify the goodness that condemns them. We may detect this diabolic spirit in ourselves, if there starts in our mind a misliking toward those whose greater zeal and success, or whose stricter walk and loftier tone, reprove our own behaviour. Since such wicked enmity showed itself in the world’s beginning, then “marvel not, my brethren,” cries the Apostle, “if the world hates you.” This is an old fashion—a war pursued incessantly from the day that sin entered into the world. The strife of the primeval brothers had but just now culminated in the tragedy of Calvary. Expecting this end, Jesus said to His disciples concerning the Jewish world, “They have hated me before you” (John 15:18-20; Matthew 10:24-25). His servants must count on faring like their Master; they should not expect nor wish to be popular with such as do not love God nor honour His laws. If that world admires and likes them, they may be sure that it sees something in them of itself: “the world loves its own.” The war between the kingdoms of God and Satan is internecine. No compromise or arrangement of terms is possible: “the friendship of the world is enmity with God “ (James 4:4). The grey of the twilight merges into sunrise or black night; it is that of morning, or of evening. But, for the sons of God, “the night is far spent”; Christ’s heralds descry the dawn of a and everlasting day: “The darkness is passing,” our Apostle has reported, “and the true light already shines; the world passeth away, and the lust thereof” (1 John 2:8, 1 John 2:17). Cain belongs to the bygone times; the future is with Jesus, the true “woman’s seed” and Son of man.
3. The climax of hatred is in murder; and the crowning Murder was the slaying of “the Prince of life.” Hate is the principle of death, as love is the principle a life. The Rabbinical story of Cain’s genesis, fathering him upon the Angel of Death, contained a true parable. “You know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him” (1 John 3:15): the destroyer acts after his kind; he kills, because death is in him. And though no lethal act be committed, the venom and animus are there in the malignant soul. As the lustful look counts in God’s sight for adultery, so the malicious thought counts for homicide. “Every one that hates his brother, is a murderer”: put the weapon in his hand, promise immunity, and he would kill him! At that rate, many a manslayer walks the streets un-accused,—guiltier perchance before the great Judge than that other who expiates his crime upon the scaffold. Nor is positive and active hatred alone in this condemnation. The absence of love tends to the same issue, for “he that loveth not abideth in death” (1 John 3:14). Indifference to our fellows is, in truth, impossible. Selfishness, cynicism, lovelessness, however dull and apathetic, are never merely negative. There is a sullen, brooding misanthropy worse than explosive violence; it is the reservoir of hate stored the breast, ready when the occasion comes to burst in Satanic fury. Moroseness, contempt towards our kind, may be more evil than concentrated hatred. Such passions nurse themselves, hiding and festering in those recesses of the mind which are “the depths of Satan,” till they make the soul one mass of resentment and antipathies. They grow with a frightful embitterment, into imaginings like that of the tyrant who wished that mankind had a single neck for his axe to strike! This cruel spirit exists more widely, under the smooth surface of civilized life, than one likes to think; it is the standing menace of society.
He who loves Christ, cannot hate men. He who has not “known love” as Christ teaches it, may go far in hatred. Most of us have to do with some persons whom we are liable to hate, if we do not love them for God’s sake. These are the test of our genuine temper,—the people who thwart us, irritate us, despise us. “Love ye your enemies, said Jesus; the very brutes can love their friends.