1 John 4

22. He merely says that consciousness of honesty toward God and of a steadfast aim to do his commandments legitimately begets confidence before him, and that God will respond with favoring answer to our prayer—of course only for Christ’s sake. Well does Neander remark on this passage: “As sons whose filial relation has suffered no interruption can with childlike trust and confidence ask all from their father, so believers whose life is of the truth, who are conscious of no disturbance of their filial relation to God through unfaithfulness on their part, can ask all with childlike confidence from God their Father.”

23,24. If you ask what are the central commandments in the gospel scheme, he answers: Believe in Jesus; love one another. Keeping his commandments ye come into most intimate mutual relations to him; ye dwell in him; he dwells in you; and of this indwelling his Spirit, present to your soul, is the witness. H. C.—He abideth in us. There is something at once dreadful and delightful in this indwelling of the Holy One in houses of clay. It is dreadful to be so near that divine glory, before which the seraphim veil their faces. It is, on the other hand, delightful to consider that the source of all holiness and comfort is within us, if we belong to Christ. The promised Comforter has made his shrine in our very bodies, and possesses our souls with his presence. He can not be ignorant of our condition, and no trial can befall us without his permission, as there is also no sorrow which he can not assuage. This is felt with unutterable peace when the divine witness testifies within the soul. “And hereby we know that he abideth in us, by the Spirit which he hath given us.” J. W. A.

The Spirit which he hath given us. It is at our worst peril that we, either theoretically or practically, lose sight of this sacred agent, the Spirit of the Father and the Son, amid that branching yet united system of channels through which he makes his ordinary approaches to our understandings and our hearts; seeking thus to reach our invisible souls through our bodily senses, and through those audible and visible means, of preaching and the sacraments, in which those senses are met. Let the divine Spirit, the sacred Illuminator and Comforter of the soul, be ever held in clear view amid the surrounding institutes of the Church, and always regarded as the only efficient agent in our renewal and sanctification; acting alone through all sensible channels, and using truth, men, and ordinances in doing his own proper work. J. S. S.

1. BELOVED, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because 2 many false prophets are gone out into the world. Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: 3 Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: and every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already 4 is it in the world. Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater 5 is he that is in you, than he that is in the world. They are of the world: therefore speak 6 they of the world, and the world heareth them. We are of God: he that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth not us. Hereby know we the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error. 7 Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born 8 of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. In 9 this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten 10 Son into the world, that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved 11 God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if 12 God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. No man hath seen God at any time. 13 If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us. Hereby know 14 we that we dwell in him, and he in us, because he hath given us of his Spirit. And we 15 have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world. Who- soever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him, and he in God. 16 And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that 17 dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment: because as he is, so are we in this world- 18 There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He 19 that feareth is not made perfect in love. We love him, because he first loved us. If a 20 man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother 21 whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? And this command- ment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also.

It is easy to see that, with this apostle, all centers ultimately in love. That holy name most aptly describes the heart of God, and reveals the deepest meaning of all his works and ways. The creation is the act of love, laying the foundation for its future manifestations. The law and promise are the revelation of a love which would draw men to Christ. The Incarnation is the personal manifestation of redeeming love in intimate, indissoluble union with our nature. So, on our part, love to God and man is the sum of all duty and virtue. Does it not lie at the bottom of all the apostles’ exhortations? James, indeed, makes Christianity chiefly law and obedience; but he makes love the queen of the law. Peter, the apostle of promise and hope, is most beautiful and lovely in his enthusiastic devotion to Christ and his flock. Paul, the apostle of righteousness and faith, still calls love the bond of perfectness, the most precious of all spiritual gifts, the greatest in that triplet of cardinal Christian virtues; because, being the highest form of union with the Godhead, it never ceases. In John, the apostle of incarnation and love, this virtue meets us in the deepest and tenderest form—as in his life, from the time he first lay on Jesus’ bosom to that last touching exhortation to his little children in his extreme old age, so also in his writings, the whole design of which is to lift the veil from the mystery of eternal love, and draw all his susceptible readers into the same holy and happy fellowship of life with the divine Redeemer. P. S.

To expose false spirits; to prove their false character by decisive tests; to give tests of real piety for each one’s own self-judgment; to give prominence to love as the cardinal element of Christian character—these are the leading themes in this chapter. H. C.

1. The gift of discerning spirits is of a critical character, concerned primarily with distinguishing true prophets from false, divine inspiration from human or perhaps Satanic. For, where the powers of light are specially active, there also, according to the law of antagonisms, the powers of darkness also most bestir themselves. But the discerning of spirits in the wider sense denotes in general the power of keenly discriminating between the truth and error, which might be mixed together in the discourse of a genuine prophet—for none but the apostles have any claim to infallibility—as also the power of judging characters and discerning motives hidden from the common eye. P. S.—We are commanded to “try the spirits, whether they be of God”—that is, we are to bring the statements of those who profess to teach in the name of God to the one standard of truth, and to receive nothing which that standard disallows, by whomsoever advanced, and whatever may be the antiquity and the authority by which it is enforced. Ferguson.

3. Come in the flesh. The Docetæ were a sect of the Gnostics who held that Jesus Christ was a mere phantasm, destitute of a real body, that he lived, labored, and suffered only in appearance. The First Epistle of John belongs to that age, when this Docetic or Gnostic error was gradually becoming more dangerous, and specially in Asia Minor. The Manicheans held that Christ descended from the sun in a seeming body, to lead men to the worship of the true God. It is supposed that 1 John 1: 1-3, and 4: 1-6 were designed to oppose the doctrine of the Docetæ. B. B. E.

6. The disciple whom “Jesus loved” (and we can not doubt on account of a kindred simplicity, purity, and elevation of temper) occupied a sphere of meditative abstraction which raised him above that level where faith is most assaulted—in an emphatic sense, he lived on high, and looked upon the things of earth as angels may look upon them. It is altogether in harmony with this order of feeling that we hear him calmly (and justly) and like a messenger from heaven challenging all truth for the Church, and assigning all error to the world. “We know that we are of God.” I. T.—The great apostle of the Gentiles, amid fightings without and fears within, built in his argumentative Epistles the outworks of that temple, of which his still greater colleague and successor was chosen noiselessly to complete, in his peaceful old age, the inner and holier places. And this, after all, ranging under it all secondary aims, we must call the great object of the evangelist; to advance, purify from error, and strengthen that maturer Christian life of knowledge, which is the true development of the teaching of the Spirit in men, and which the latter part of the apostolic period witnessed in its full vitality. And this, by setting forth the person of the Lord Jesus in all its fullness of grace and truth, in all its manifestation in the flesh by signs and by discourses, and its glorification by opposition and unbelief, through sufferings and death. A.

7. Born of God. There is no possibility of redemption or spiritual restoration for us save that, as being open to the inbreathing of God, we may so be impregnated with a new power of life, and, by force of a divine visitation within, be regenerated in the holiness of God. All which is described in the Scripture as being born of God. And what a height of almost divinity do we look upon in such a truth as that! What man will not even tremble, as in awe of himself, when he contemplates, in this word of Scripture, the eternal Spirit of God coursing through the secret cells and chambers of his feelings, turning him about in his motions, breathing in his thoughts, and calling back his wild affections to a common center with his own? H. B.—

That loveth knoweth. Between God and man, the interpreter is love. Love renders intelligible to man the truths of the gospel—not indeed those abstract truths which relate to the essence of God, the knowledge of which is equally inaccessible and useless to us, but those other truths which concern our relations to God, and constitute the very foundation of religion. Let love, sweet, gracious, luminous, interpreting, come between the gospel and the human soul, and the truth of the gospel shall have a meaning, and one as clear as it is profound. Then shall your soul find itself free and happy in the midst of these strange revelations. Then shall those truths you have accepted, through submission and obedience, become to you as familiar and as necessarily true as those common, every-day truths upon which depends your existence. A. V.

8. All who become children necessarily wear the image. And he that loveth not is not of God. A man without love, without inward fountains of human tenderness, without a heart that broods over the world in some measure like the heart of God, is without the chief feature of the great family likeness. But those who return good for evil and love for hatred, who forgive all who trespass against them as they are themselves forgiven of God, and seek the salvation of souls as men seek gold—they put on the image of the heavenly, they look like their brothers of the upper kingdom, they look like what they are—the children of the King! A. R.

God is love. God has not denied us what was most important. He has told us his name in the gospel; and henceforth we know that God is holy, that God is love. To know this is to know all. It is to know that this world is not a chaos, but a world. It is to know that our earthly career is not without reason nor without end. It is to know that man, even in the depth of his fall, is a being whose nature God honors. It is to know the true name of prosperity, which is grace; and of distress, which is trial. It is to know that life is not what we call by this name, but that our true life is hid with Christ in the bosom of God. It is, in fine, to know our true name; we are the children of pardon, after having been the children of wrath. All this has been proclaimed from the height of the cross, and transcribed in the gospel, where the most ignorant among us can spell it with the most learned. In naming himself, God has named all. A. V.

The everlasting love was disclosed by our Lord’s life and death. It showed that God forgives because he loves to forgive. He works by smiles, if possible; if not, by frowns. Pain is only a means of enforcing love. D. Livingstone.—God is love, not God became love. Above all creation, above every beginning and end, from everlasting to everlasting in himself, God is love; Father, Son, and Holy Ghost is the one living and loving Jehovah. It is into this love that we are planted by the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus. A. S.—Redemption is the fruit of that sovereign benignity which equally belongs to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. Christ did not die that God might love man; he died because God loved man. The atonement is not the cause, but the effect of the love of God. J. B.

10. The highest act of love is the sacrifice of self; the highest act of God’s infinite love to man was in the redemption; but from the ineffable mystery which hangs over the Godhead, God could not be said to sacrifice himself, and therefore he sacrificed his only Son—that object which was so near and so dear to him, that nothing could be nearer and dearer. T. A.—When you would revive the spirit of the contrite, say to him, God is love. It will be a dead letter to him, unless he looks at the cross; but let him so look, and he beholds a door. Thus the solitary young monk was led in by Staupitz: “Look at the wounds of Christ,” he said to Luther, “and you will there see shining clearly the purpose of God toward men. We can not understand God out of Christ.” Hence the maxim of the reformer’s after years: “I can not come near the absolute God.” J. W. A.

11. This was the main cause of Christ’s coming, that man might know how much God loves him, and know it to this end, that he might be kindled with affection for him who loved him first, and might love his neighbor at the bidding of him, who became man’s neighbor by loving him when he was no neighbor, but one sojourning far away. Aug.—Jesus crucified is God’s charity toward man. Impossible that men should not feel themselves bound to act toward each other as God has done to them; and toward what man is not charity a duty? Without the divinity and sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the value of man’s soul, if I may be pardoned the expression, sinks; neither his salvation nor the example of his Saviour is any longer the question; charity becomes nothing more than human goodness, a sentiment, however noble and useful, still limited both in impulsive energy and in efficacy; having its source in man alone, it is not suited to inspire any long effort or great sacrifice; it is not adequate to convert the longing desire for the moral amendment, the physical relief of humanity, into that inextinguishable sympathy and untiring and impassioned emotion which really constitute charity, and which the Christian faith, in the history of the world, has alone been able to inspire. Guisot.

12. The Scripture itself recognizes the difficulty of considering God in his own nature, and therefore urges us to seek him in and through his Son Jesus Christ. Providence, the Supreme Being, the Deity, and other such terms, repel us of necessity to an infinite distance; they speak of One incomprehensible and unapproachable. Our God is the Lord, revealed to the Israelites as the God of their own nation, who came down upon Mount Sinai to give the law, who dwelt between the cherubim in the mercy-seat, in the innermost part of the Temple; revealed to us as the Son of man, born of a woman, made in all but sin one of ourselves, living and dying and rising again, after the common condition of us all. This is our manifestation of God. To Him we should come in faith and love, and He will show us of the Father, and give us of his Holy Spirit, in such measure as our present nature can bear, preparing us for a fuller revelation hereafter. T. A.

13. Find thou but within thee sanctification by the Spirit, and this argues necessarily both justification by the Son and the election of God the Father. Hereby know we that we dwell in him, and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. Where this sanctifying Spirit is not, there can be no persuasion of this eternal love of God; they that are children of disobedience can conclude no otherwise of themselves but that they are the children of wrath. L.—The exhibition of that love in God is to be made the means of producing love in us; the glorious spectacle of love as beheld in God is to be turned into a living principle in us. For this end, the holy, unconfined, and infinite Spirit came down with a fullness and a power as if he sought to fill every heart, to replenish the Church, to be the soul of the world, to encircle the earth with an atmosphere of grace as real and universal as the elemental air which encompasses and circulates around the globe itself, that whoever inhaled it might have eternal life. J. H.

14. It is simple love to that only Jesus, who is very man and at the same time very God and eternal life, that speaks from the mouth of John, and that would fain constrain the spirits of men, yea, of all who come into the world, to come to John’s beloved Master, and to the bosom on which he lay. Loke.

16. The natural child-faith is a faith without light. Hence the exhortation of the apostle: “Be no more children tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine.” The blind child-faith is that which believes because others have believed and testified. The glorified child-faith is that which believes because it has known. A. T.—"And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us." This was the blessing; this was the privilege. The infinite misery of the denying world was that it did not know and believe the love that God had to it; that it believed him to have no love to it; that it refused all communion with love. That neither the belief of the Church nor the unbelief of the world affected the nature and being of God in the least, he affirms in the next clause, “God is love.” This is not an accident of his character, but its essence; not an aspect which it wears at certain times or to some fortunate persons, but that which is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, that which has no respect of persons. Maurice.

When God loves us his heart goes out toward us, and with his heart all that he can bestow. All the resources of his power, all the counsels of his wisdom, all the preciousness of his promises, all the gifts of his Spirit, are at our disposal, if only our hearts are open to receive them in the day of his power. To know and believe the love God hath to us—here, in a single sentence, is the beginning of Christian life, the history of Christian experience, the fullness of Christian joy. That God should love me, and yet refuse me anything for my good, is as utterly impossible as that he should cease to be God. To suppose that Christ can have suffered for me, and yet while laying on me his cross deny me the needful grace to carry it after him; sooner than think this, let us boldly say at once that he has died in vain! A. W. T.—“God is love—fountain, flood, and sea—and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.” We let God love us into love, which itself suffices, and carries all grace with it. Know, then, and believe the love God hath to you, and you shall have all that you are willing to receive, more than you can ask or even think. H. B.

18. It is not by any power in our love to appease the stingings of sin that we get rid of the fear. We lose it because our love comes from apprehending that great gospel and blessed hope, that God’s love is mine, mine in his Son, mine that my love may be perfectly fixed upon it, mine without disturbance from any of his awful attributes, mine without fear of loss or harm from any events. Believing this, the heart fills with a mighty tide of calm, responding love, which sweeps away on the crest of its rejoicing wave the vileness, the sorrows, the fears, which once choked its channels. They are flooded out, and the heart is delivered. We stand peaceful, safe, blessed. Whatever betide, nothing can separate us from the love of God. We are bound to him by that everlasting loving-kindness with which he has drawn us. There is lifted off the heart the whole burden of “fearful looking-for of judgment,” the whole burden arising from the dark thought, God is mighty, God must be right- cous, God may strike! because we know “he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.” Henceforth our thoughts of God are to be thoughts of perfect, absolute, everlasting love, who is the foundation of our life and the basis of all our hope and work. The love of God casts out the fear of God, and the love of God casts out all other fear! A. M.

19. “We love him because he first loved us.” This is indeed the gospel in its sublime simplicity and its harmonious purity, but, moreover, in its unfathomable riches and its all-conquering power. If once the word—nay, the fact—“God first loved us,” as seen in Christ, has indeed become to us the fact unparalleled, this henceforth determines all our life and faith—nay, then there is no need to say to us, “Love him again.” Love has awakened love. We really love “because he first loved us.” Van O.—There is no foundation for my love to God except only the old one, “God loves me.” There is no proof that that foundation is laid except only the old one, “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” There is no way of building on that foundation except only the old one, We believe and are sure that thou art the Christ, the Saviour of the world! A. M.

To love God is verily a gift of God. He who, when he was not loved, loved us, gave us power to love him. When we were displeasing to him, he loved us, that there might be formed in us that whereby we might please him. Council, A. D. 529.—We are not to understand the apostle as saying that we love God out of gratitude for the love he shows us. Let us understand him to say, “We love God only because that true original love which is in him is moving us and inspiring us.” Maurice.—It is actually “God’s” own “love” (to use the apostle’s expression), “shed forth in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us”; it is not man’s love at all, if you trace it up to its source, but God’s love, intercepted and returned upon him from a heart which has the capacity of reciprocating it. It does not take its rise in our own bosoms; we have no other property in it than that of simply reflecting and giving it back. If this be so, if our love to God be only his love to us reflected from our hearts, it must be quite clear that the more we expose our hearts to his love the more truly shall we love him. E. M. G.

20. Our love to our brethren is not only the evidence but the measure of our love to Christ. He that hath not love enough in him for a man like himself, how can he love God, whose goodness, being above our knowledge, requireth a transcendency in our love? This is a sure rule, He that loveth not a member of Christ loveth not Christ; and he who groweth in his love to his brethren groweth likewise in his love to Christ. Bp. Reynolds.—We are not required to love infirmities or imperfections; nay, we could not do so, if required; for infirmities and imperfections are naturally repelling. Our brother’s true self is the object upon which our love is to fasten; and as to his infirmities and imperfections, which he shares with us in virtue of our common deterioration by the fall, those are to be borne with and overlooked out of regard to his true self, and to the filial relation which this true self bears to God. He would have me love my neighbor exactly as He loves me, fastening my regard upon his true self, upon the feature of God’s image which is reflected in his soul, and bearing with his infirmities out of this esteem for the true self. Must it not be practicable? It is what He is constantly doing to me. E. M. G.

Jesus Christ sending in his Spirit into the heart unites it to God in himself by love, which is indeed all, that loving of God supremely and entirely, with all the mind and soul, all the combined strength of the heart! And then that same love, first wholly carried to him, is not divided or impaired by the love of our brethren, but is dilated, as derived from the other. God allows, commands, yea, causes, that it stream forth and act itself toward them; remaining still in him as in its source and center; beginning at him and returning to him; loving our brethren in God and for him; not only because he commands us to love them, but because in loving our brethren after a Christian manner we do even in that love our God. L.—You can not compel light to shine in one direction, or on one side only. It will radiate all around. So will true love. Upward to God it is reverence and worship; toward angels and saints it is affectionate and grateful interest; abroad among the good it is brotherly love; among the bad the kindness of pity. To an enemy it is generous forgiveness; and to one’s own flesh and blood, what should it be but unquenchable tenderness, natural feeling strengthened, purified, and made fruitful by the grafting of grace upon it? J. Hall.