3.20 - The Divinity Of Love
Chapter 20 The Divinity Of Love
Solidarity of Love in the Universe—Love of, not only from God—Love the “One Thing needful”—Lovelessness of Man—Love and other Attributes of the Godhead—The Incarnation the Outcome of God’s Fatherhood—Bethlehem consummated on Calvary—The Surrender of the Son by the Father for Man’s sake—The Conquests of God’s Father-love—Divine Love “perfected” in Good Men—Thwarted in Selfish Men.
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Beloved, let us love one another;
For love is of God, and every one that loveth hath been begotten of God,
and knoweth God.
He that doth not love, hath not known God; for God is love.
Herein was manifested the love of God for us,
In that God hath sent His Son, the Only-begotten, into the world,
To the end that we may live through Him.
Herein is love:
Not in that we loved God, but in that He loved us,
And sent His Son to be a propitiation for our sins.
Beloved, if God so loved us, we too are bound to love one another.
God no one hath at any time beheld:
If we love one another, God dwelleth in us,
And His love, consummated, is in us.
Herein we know that we abide in Him, and He in us,—
In that He hath given us of His Spirit;
And we have beheld, and do bear witness,
That the Father hath sent the Son to be Saviour of the world.
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ALL St John’s arguments lead to one conclusion, all his appeals have one intent: “Beloved, let us love one another.” Heaven and earth, nature and grace, the old times and the new, sound to his ears one strain: “Little children, love one another!” This is the gist of the Epistle, and formed the burden of the aged Apostle’s ministry (see pp. 19, 195). Twice already has he enlarged on the command of love,—urging it in 1 John 2:7-11 as the law of a true life for man, and in 1 John 3:10-18 as the sign of a new birth from God.95 He has now to ground these positions by showing that love is of the essence of God Himself. The pure affection glowing in human hearts comes from the bosom of the Father; the spark of brotherly love cherished under the chills and obstructions of earthly fellowship, has been kindled from the fires that burn everlastingly in the being of the All-holy. The solidarity of love—our love one with that dwelling in the infinite God, all love centring in one Divine communion and commonwealth: this thought possesses the writer’s mind for the rest of 1 John 4:1-21. He holds it up as a jewel to the sun; each turn of expression, like another facet, flashes out some new ray of heavenly light. The paragraph before us is hortatory and ethical rather than theological. The Apostle is commending love, not defining or explaining God. To the three tests laid down in 1 John 4:1-6 of the true and false spirits abroad in the world, viz. the confession of the incarnate God in Christ, the verdict of the Christian consciousness, and the sentence of the Apostolic word (see Chapter 19), a fourth is now virtually added. Faith in the incarnate, redeeming Son of God works by love, like no other power that has touched mankind; by this outcome Christian doctrine verifies itself and vindicates its origin. The spirit of love coincides with “the Spirit of truth” (1 John 4:6),—
“That mind and soul according well, May make one music.” Their identity constitutes the reality of life. Here the Apostle John’s inmost convictions are rooted—in the experience of the life hid with Christ in God. “God is light” at once and “love”; “grace and truth came”—elements one and indivisible—“through Jesus Christ” (John 1:17). The best is always the truest and surest. At the core of the universe, in the inner-most substance of things, there is found a pure good-will. Love furnishes, therefore, the practical guarantee of religious truth: “He that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God” (1 John 4:7). The two requirements that were prescribed to us in 1 John 3:23—“that we should believe the name of God’s Son Jesus Christ” (in other words, should hold fast the truth about Him), and “should love another”—on which the fourth chapter turns, are complementary demands. The love of the Christian is born of and fed from his faith; his faith blossoms out and fructifies in his love.
Three main ideas respecting the love revealed in Christ emerge from this section of the letter: love’s source in the nature of God, love’s manifestation in the mission of Christ, and love’s consummation in the Christian brotherhood. These steps of thought are marked by the three leading sentences, “God is love,” “He sent His Son a propitiation,” and “If we love one another, His love hath been perfected in us.” We trace, then, in the course of these verses the fountain, the stream, and the issue of redeeming love.
1. “Love is of God,” “God is love” (1 John 4:7-8). The former apophthegm bottoms itself upon the latter. They serve severally to justify the two assertions made about the lover of his brethren, “that he is begotten of God”—his new nature springs from the Eternal Fount of love; and that “he knows God”—since he knows love, and that is just what God is.
God sends us many blessings from outside Himself; “every good gift is from above” (James 1:17). Health of body, friendship and natural kindness, rain and sunshine, flowers and springtide—these are from God, being His creatures bestowed on us. We cannot say, without a pantheistic confusion of ideas, that they are of God, for God’s own nature is not in any or all of such bounties. Men enjoy them richly apart from the Bestower; they do not serve of themselves to bring God to the mind; it is by inference rather than intuition that we connect Him with them. It is otherwise with the “love” that St John describes—the spiritual gravitation drawing soul to soul, the profound emotion uniting the children of God which fills Christian assemblies and burns in the hearth-fires of the household of faith. This flame is fanned by the breath of the Holy Spirit; its heat and life are drawn from no other source than the heart of the Eternal.
“Herein is love”: here is the sun which shines through all love’s heavens, here the fountain-head from which its thousand streams derive; “herein have we known love” (1 John 3:16). In this disclosure a clue to creation is given us; the secret mind of God toward His universe comes to light, in the revelation of the Father made by Jesus Christ; for, as the Apostle teaches elsewhere, “all things were made through” Christ, the eternal Word and Will of the Father. The discovery brings peace; it gives to our souls the rest vainly sought elsewhere. The heart craves affection, as the understanding craves knowledge. The poetry of the human race, the romantic flights of fancy, the delights of home, the sacrifices of friendship and patriotism, all testify to this deep hunger which springs up afresh in every young soul, to the immense capacity for love in our common nature. In callousness men conceal, or beat down within them, this instinct; folly and depravity tempt them to slake the thirst at poisoned springs, or they “hew out for themselves broken cisterns that can hold no water.” Their very sins point to the need and the capability for better things. At the bottom of our restless passions lies the aching of the human heart for the love of God. Through the weary generations the children of men have groped and famished for a perfect sympathy, for some enduring and adequate affection. It is found at last, and the Apostle shouts the great eureka, “Herein is love!”
St John argues by contrast; the lights of his picture are developed by deep shadows (compare 1 John 3:10-12). He reminds us where love is not, that we may better realize where indeed it is: “Not that we loved God” —if there be love between ourselves and the Creator, it did not begin with us. In human affections it is often hard to tell upon whose part the attraction commenced; there is no difficulty in deciding here. We ought to have loved God; we were made for this. We could love; many objects won and held our regard, while the heart was cold toward its Maker. We feared Him and worshipped Him from a distance—the Unknown and Undesired; we did not love Him. Thus many of St John’s readers, then and now, must confess. The things we hankered for and dreamed over, the prizes that glittered in our eyes —alas, God was not in them; we desired, we admired everything, anything, rather than Him who is the centre and glory of all. From the Father of spirits love originates, not from His erring children. The heart of man—selfish, vain, impure—could never have given birth to aught that resembles the gospel of Jesus Christ. God “loved us when we were dead in trespasses and sins,” and “reconciled us to Himself when we were enemies “ (Romans 5:8, Romans 5:10). He loved us then, as Jesus saw; for His rain moistened our fields, His sun shone along our pathway; His Spirit gave strength to our frame and light to our reason, even while we used strength and reason against the Giver. On His part forbearance, pity, forgiveness, love—a goodness ever leading to repentance; on man’s part coldness, pride, unbelief rebellion the carnal mind “that” is enmity against God” (Romans 8:7).
We spoke just now of love as being a necessity for man, a demand supplied by the Gospel of Christ. But this is a one-sided view; such modes of statement put ourselves in the first place rather than God. The Gospel was in truth a necessity for God’s own love. “God is love,” and love must bless. It is a communicative principle, and looks for reciprocity; it consumes the heart till it finds vent. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is nothing else than God’s love taking voice and shape, God’s love rending the veil and looking forth. Long time had it refrained itself: now it will be held back no longer; it will stop at no sacrifice, and be affronted by no rejection; at any cost the Father’s love must win back man’s rebel heart and save the doomed race. One is overwhelmed to think of the infinite depth and force, the awful passion and the iron restraints, of that love for man in the being of the Almighty which sent His Son upon the work of redemption. In asserting that “God is love,” the Apostle does not mean that He is love and nothing more; this attribute does not make up the sum of the Infinite (see p. 98). Other predicates hold equally of Him; God is reason, God is will, God is conscience, is righteousness. When “Jesus Christ the righteous” was said, in dying, to have been “a propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10; 1 John 2:2), this implied, unless St John has twisted the word ἱλασμός from its accepted meaning, a high and just resentment in God against transgression, beside the love He bears to the transgressors (see pp. 120-129). But when we ascribe to the Supreme those other attributes, we do it with a certain reservation or even misgiving, and remembering that His thoughts are not our thoughts. We feel the danger of limiting the Godhead in the directions indicated, by our defective finite categories. When we say “God is love,” we declare a truth the hardest of all to believe, but a truth that, once realized, can be believed utterly and brings with it none of the embarrassment attaching to other definitions. For love (ἀγάπη)—that is, self-devotion to other rational and moral beings, a pure good-will that goes out to all whom it can reach—is a notion simple and complete, and capable of indefinite expansion. It posits only a universe of personal being, and a mind that can embrace the whole. In love the contradictions of finite and infinite vanish. In its purity, love is the same in man and in God—in the drop and in the ocean; the compatibility of the Divine with the human in Jesus Christ raises no difficulty on this point. It is love that makes the union of the two natures in one person conceivable, and meets the problems of the incarnation. This, then, is the focus of the Christian revelation of God; around it all the lights play, all the forces work; about this centre the ideas and images of the New Testament group themselves and take their measure and complexion. When we are taught that “God is light” (1 John 1:5), this of course means more than love; but it does signify love in the first instance. Love is the ground-colour of the New Testament picture of God; other attributes blend with this and melt themselves, as one may say, into love to make the perfect splendour of the Godhead.
2. This chief glory of God was veiled from men until Christ came: “In this was manifested the love of God—in that He sent His Son.” In our Lord’s person there shone, according to St John’s testimony, “the glory as of the Only-begotten from the Father (John 1:14)—of One reflecting by immediate derivation and in unshared fulness the being of the Eternal; and love was the glory of His glory. No other religion gained more than glimpses of this mystery. Judaism was taught the righteousness of God; Greek thought apprehended Him as wisdom; modern science posits God as force; Jesus Christ displays Him as love—not denying nor ignoring other aspects of the Divine, but centring and coordinating them in this. The perfect glory of the invisible God is seen only where St Paul beheld it, “ in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6).
There are three statements in this paragraph about the love of God which was displayed in the mission of Jesus Christ: first, “God has sent His Son, the Only-begotten, into the world, that we might live through Him”; secondly, “He sent His Son a propitiation for our sins”; thirdly, “the Father has sent the Son as Saviour of the world.” The first sentence declares the design of Christ’s incarnation; the second the fact of Christ’s atonement. The second makes a climax to the first: in the sending of the Only-begotten love “was manifested” (1 John 4:9); but the Apostle writes “Herein is love,” when he points to the sending of the Son as “a propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10). The broad and final issue of both, as acknowledged in the faith of the Church, is declared in 1 John 4:14, assuring us that not “we” alone, but “the world” is the object of the mission of the Son of God. The sacrifice of the Cross forms the crowning moment of the manifestation; “God was in Christ,” wrote St Paul (2 Corinthians 5:19), “reconciling the world unto Himself.” The entire scope of the manifestation—a human incarnation and a world-atonement—is embraced in the great saying of John 3:16, “God so loved the world that He gave His Son, the Only-begotten, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have eternal life.”
(1) Every syllable in 1 John 4:9 is charged with meaning. His Son God has sent—no servant, or created angel—but the Only One, His perfect image, the object of His unmeasured love, His other self. Hath sent (ἀπέσταλκεν) —no transient, but a permanent commission; the coming of Christ is a historic fact, but it is also an enduring power, a fixed and effectual certainty; in going away, the Lord Jesus said, “Lo, I am with you always!” Into the world—that means, with St John, the present evil world, the enemy’s country ruled by “the prince of the world,” who sits in possession as a “strong man armed,” to be overpowered only at the cost of death (see Chapter 13). That we might live (ζήσωμεν, come to life) through Him—for without Christ our life was mere guilt and death.
We must venture on the comparison which the Apostle’s words plainly imply—“the Father sent the Son”; our Lord taught us to read the paternal heart of God by the affections that move in ourselves, though evil, toward our children. We know perhaps what it costs a father or mother to let the heart’s child go at the call of duty and for the love of souls into some perilous climate, to a life of manifold hardship and disgust. Some parents refuse the sacrifice; they are not “imitators of God.” Are we not to understand that there was a real surrender and a parting, in some sense, on the side of God—an eclipse of “the brightness of the Father’s glory,” an impoverishment of heaven—when the Only-begotten “went into the world?” When the eternal Son took on Himself the nature of flesh and blood and shut Himself within its walls, when He submitted to the infirmities and temptations of frail, suffering humanity—when He thus “came forth from the Father and came into the world”—if words mean anything, and if it be permitted us to think in any positive way about the relations of the incarnate Son to the Godhead, there was a veritable yielding and putting Himself to cost on the part of the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ; He “spared not His own Son, but gave Him up for us all” (Romans 8:32). To say this, is “anthropomorphism” if you like, it is speaking war κατ’ἄνθρωπον; but the incarnation is itself a mighty utterance of God in human terms, and we cannot conceive of the Eternal to definite purpose in any other fashion, nor except on the assumption that our nature by all that is deepest and best in it mirrors the Divine.
(2) If this had been all and the sacrifice had stopped at the incarnation, how signal a proof of God’s love to mankind, that “He has sent His only Son into the world” to give us life through Him! But there is more—wonder succeeding wonder, the birth in Bethlehem, the life at Nazareth, the three years of toil and teaching, followed by the death of Calvary—the incarnation culminating in the atonement: God “sent His Son to be a propitiation for our sins.” “Herein is love,” here the conclusive evidence that “God loved us” who “had not loved Him” (1 John 4:10). The Only-begotten of the Father steps down at the Father’s behest from the throne of heaven to the life of an afflicted and despised man,—downward again at the same command to crucifixion and the grave (see His words in John 10:18). The Divine Teacher and Master of men becomes their sin-bearer; “the Good Shepherd” must fulfil His shepherding by “giving His life for the sheep.” The Church makes much of the love of Jesus in all this. Perhaps she does not always please Him in the manner of her praise. Our gratitude should not stop short at Jesus Christ. He was jealous upon this point, wishful above everything that men should recognize the love of the Father. “I came,” He always said, “not to do a will of mine, but the will of Him that sent me” (John 6:38, etc.); Christ would not allow us to regard Him as our Saviour in distinction from God, but only as acting for God, with God the Father impelling and approving Him. Jesus Christ is the full and proportioned image of the invisible God. Our sins are no less intolerable to the Son than to the Father. This repugnance caused the constant distress of His life; it gave the sting to His death, that He should be “numbered with the transgressors.” On the other hand, the pity that the Lord Jesus felt for human suffering, and the delight He had in saving sinners, came from the bosom of the Father. His heart was full of the love that sent Him. Shall we not think, then, with a trembling amazement of the love of God to our race, which carried out, as it had prepared, the awful sacrifice? The Father heard the Son of His love when He cried in agony, “If it be possible, let this cup pass”—and He did not take it away. The Almighty Father saw Him, the Well-beloved in whom there was no spot of blame, led as a lamb to the slaughter; saw Him stretched out with naked limbs and nailed upon His cross and lifted up before the mocking crowd, and hanging in His blood for those long hours, insulted, tortured, abandoned, till the Patient One must cry, “My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” and still no hand reached forth to save, no arrows of vengeance launched against the murderers of the Son of God; the dreadful scene went on undisturbed to its close, till the Sufferer Himself should say “It is finished.” God would not save His Son, until that Son had saved us.
All this the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ witnessed and (must we not say?) endured; the whole event was, in fact, controlled by His determinate counsel and foreknowledge. God is not glorified by the crediting of Him with an infinite stoicism, an “impassivity” that makes no response to the delight or anguish of His universe. Not so does Jesus teach us, when he tells that “there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth!” The love we ascribe to the Father as His highest praise would mean nothing intelligible to us, if we were to suppose that the experience of the Only-begotten left it unaffected, that the distress of our Lord cast no shadow on the bliss of heaven and sent no thrill of sympathetic pain to the heart of the Divine, which is for ever one in Son and Father.
“God commendeth His own love to us,” says St Paul, “in that Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). The proof lies in the cost of the sacrifice to Him who “spared not His own Son.” Granting Jesus Christ to be the very Son of God, here on the Father’s business and under His direction, no other explanation of the event of His death is possible. From love to men and with the purpose of redeeming them from sin, God sent His Son to suffer and die, and contemplated the sacrifice from eternity. Indeed, our Lord seems to say that God loved Him for this very reason—not for His own sake merely, but for His devotion to us: “Therefore doth the Father love me, because I lay down my life” (John 10:17). St John, with St Paul, glories in nothing so much as in the cross of his Lord, because the propitiation that it makes for sin displays the love of God in its uttermost reach, and reveals a grace that overmatches man’s abounding guilt. When one knows this love, he knows God. The universe has no greater secret to tell him; heaven and eternity will be but the unfolding of “the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Now this manifestation has proved no idle display, no spectacle for mere wonder and delight, but a transforming energy—a light to lighten the nations, a leaven to leaven the lump of humanity. The revelation of God in Christ and His cross has prevailed against bitter estrangement and determined unbelief and rooted antipathy; it has reached the conscience of the world, it has gone to the heart of mankind. Witnesses to the long succession of the Gospel’s triumphs through the centuries since the Apostolic age, we adopt with a richer meaning than his own St John’s profession, “We have beheld, and do testify, that the Father hath sent the Son as Saviour of the world” (1 John 4:14). “I saw, and lo, a great multitude,” cries the Seer of the Apocalypse, “which none could number, out of every nation, and of all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb; and they cry with a loud voice, saying, Salvation to our God that sitteth upon the throne, and to the Lamb!” (Revelation 7:9-10). What St John saw in the spirit of prophecy, is becoming accomplished fact. The manifestation of God’s love in the offering of Calvary will before long be visible to the whole world; it will be recognized by the reverent and grateful spirit of mankind.
3. The unique thought of the paragraph lies, however, in 1 John 4:11-12, in the conception here given of the effect of God’s love upon men, culminating in the daring words, “His love hath been perfected in us,” or (to render the sentence more exactly) “exists in us,—a love made perfect.” The Divine love, when first manifested, found us dead, for God “sent His Son into the world, that we might come to life through Him” (1 John 4:9); it found us loveless. When the Apostle goes on to say (in 1 John 4:10), “It was not that we loved God,” there is a sad litotes here; as St Paul puts it, “The mind of the flesh is enmity against God,” “we were living in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another” (Romans 8:7, Titus 3:3); and St John has told us that to “love the brethren” is to “have passed out of death into life” (1 John 3:14). Life, in the Christian sense, subsists by love and knows itself in the consciousness of love. Now the love Divine came in Jesus Christ to communicate itself, to form itself in us; so, to use His own words, “He came that we might have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). St John and the people of his Churches by virtue of their abounding brotherly love are rich possessors of the new life which touched the world in Christ.
When the Apostle writes, “If God so loved us, we ought also to love one another,” what is his argument? where does the obligation lie? Does he mean, “We must pay the great Lover back in kind; we must love the children for the Father’s sake”? It is a loftier and directer appeal that he really makes; the logic is that of imitation, not of bare gratitude: “Being God’s children (1 John 3:1) and knowing His love in Christ (see 1 John 4:16), we must be like Him; the Father’s own love to men beats in our breast; for He is in us, He has given us of His Spirit” (1 John 4:13, 1 John 4:16). We are reminded of the saying of Jesus, which extends this superhuman affection to infinite lengths, “Love ye your enemies, that ye may be children of your Father who is in heaven. Ye shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:45-48); and of St Paul’s injunction, “Be imitators of God as beloved children, and walk in love as Christ also loved us.” “Who was I?” says St Peter in justifying before strait-laced Jewish believers his consorting with Gentiles in the house of Cornelius—“was I able to withstand God?” (Acts 11:17). Since He has called these aliens into His household and bestowed on them His Spirit, “giving them the like gift as to us,” His love to them may not be gainsaid; we must give it free course. This man or that may be antipathetic to myself, his temper averse from mine, his style and habits of mind uncongenial,—naturally, I should mislike and avoid him; but God loves and owns the man—how can I oppose His gracious will or despise what God esteems? This is the argument that beats down pride, and makes coldness of heart amongst Christians a mean and miserable thing.
But, in the Apostle’s sense of the matter, there is something deeper than imitation in this conforming of human love to the Divine; God’s own Father-love is in the brother-love of His children, and is consummated in theirs,—τετελειωμένηἐνἡμῖνἐστιν. The eternal love that sent Christ on His errand, attains its full sway and development, and realizes itself to perfection, only when men love one another in Christ’s fashion. “For God can do nothing greater in His love than to realize in us His innermost nature, which is love, and so to make within us His fixed dwelling-place” (B. Weiss). Till we are brought to this, till perfect love has cast out in God’s children all bitterness, meanness, self-will and self-seeking, the love of the Father finds itself wanting and imperfect, since it misses its due effect and full display, and is robbed of its crown of beauty. Despite its grand revelation in the person and the cross of Christ, the infinite love of God still manifests itself to the world a maimed and half-impotent thing, because of the sour spirit, the envious and contentious temper, of so many of those who represent it to their fellows. As Christ the Author of faith “could not do many mighty works” where unbelief stood in His way, so God the Father of love cannot be known in His proper character nor accomplish His perfect work, where His human instruments are flawed with sin and His witnesses by their lovelessness gainsay love’s message sent through them.
“The name of God is blasphemed because of you,” said St Paul to unworthy Jews (Romans 2:24); and “because of you the love of God is denied,” he would have said to unlovely Christians. They thwart the love of the Almighty. They reduce it, so far as in them lies, to a broken force, a great endeavour that has failed to reach its mark. Happy is it for the man from whose heart and life all obstruction to the good pleasure of God’s saving will has passed away; “in him verily is the love of God perfected.”