Bible Commentaries

1 John 4:1

We are all discerners of spirits. That diagnosis lies aloft in our life or unconscious power. The intercourse of society—its trade, its religion, its friendships, its quarrels—is one wide, judicial investigation of character.

—Emerson, on The Over-Soul.

1 John 4:1

A poor 1 John 4:7

God desires neither narrow hearts nor empty heads for His children, but those whose spirit is of itself indeed free, yet rich in the knowledge of Him, and who regard this knowledge of God as the only valuable possession.

—Hegel.

"The true sage," says Maeterlinck, "is not he who sees, but he who, seeing furthest, has the deepest love for mankind. He who sees without loving is only straining his eyes in the dark."

I never yet cast a true affection on a woman; but I have loved my friend, as I do virtue, my soul, my God. From hence, methinks, I do conceive how God loves man; what happiness there is in the love of God.

—Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (pt ii. sec5).

References.—IV:7.—Archbishop Alexander, Christian World Pulpit, vol. liv. p20. J. Keble, Sermons for Sundays After Trinity, pt. i. p223. T. Binney, King's Weigh-House Chapel Sermons, p206. IV:7 , 8.—H. S. Holland, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvi. p107.

The Master Key

1 John 4:8

Here is all we want. Here we have three words, which are three syllables, and they are bigger words than all the piled words of the most elaborate dictionary ever constructed. These are the words out of which all the other words come.

The use of this text is not to be found in its own verbal exposition. This is a text that is to be carried all over the Bible; this is the commentator of the whole Scripture. Turn over a page—where is the lamp? That is Bible reading. You fail to expound the Scripture because you have lost the lamp. Do not suppose, then, that "God is love" is a text that can be explained in one discourse or explained in all the discourse ever poured from the fluent tongue of eloquence. Never read a chapter without lighting the lamp and putting it just over the chapter you are reading. What is your lamp? God is love."

I. The lamp! We might take it with us now and look at a few passages in the light of this gleaming candle of God. Take this awful text: "In the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die". He threatens the man whom He has made! He does not. The lamp! now read under the light of the lamp, and you will find that this is no threat, this is no uplifting of the arm of Jehovah, as who should say, Take care what you are about, or one mistake on your part and you are a dead man. God never learned that savagery of tone; God speaks in another music. These were hard words, no doubt, to the man who heard them for the first time. When you point out to your dear little child that if he goes into a certain place he will be injured, you are not threatening the boy; we cannot say, Why speak to the dear little boy in that tone? You properly reply that the tone is an expression of solicitude, anxiety, tenderest love, saying in all the music of the parental heart, Take care! If you go down there you will be perhaps injured, something may meet you there that will frighten you; if you once go into that den or jungle where the wild beast is you will be torn to pieces: take care not to go in that direction. That is not threatening; that is loving, caring-for, going-out-after, with tender desire and anxiety. So I take my lamp text, "God is love," and hold it all above the story of Eden, and behold, I know that God has made all things good and designed all things in love, and that the very voice of warning is a new accent in the music of sweetest, tenderest care.

II. Let us hold the lamp over another text that is almost too terrible to read. May I read it in a genteel assembly? shall I not be hissed out of the pulpit I degrade if I read this text?—"The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God." I admit that it is possible so to utter these words as to import into them a false meaning and a false tone, but I insist that it is also possible so to read them as to make them about as tender words as can be found in the whole compass of inspired revelation. This is not wrath, it is pleading, it is the expression of solicitous love: as who should say, My dear soul, do you really know what wickedness is? do you know what it means, what it involves, and what it really must come to in the bitter end? Here, in one of those socalled rough imprecatory passages, wherein God is supposed to be very wrathful and very stormy, here, we find the very heart of love; in the midst of all this warning there is one large tender tear that wets the cheek of God. Do not believe those persons, therefore, who point out the imprecations and denunciations, and wish you to believe that all these things are indications of the wrath of God. Hear me, they are not; they are indications of the love of God; God in His mercy thinks it right to tell us what the harvest of sin-sowing 1 John 4:8-9

Love, as John tells us again and again, is to be seen and known only in what it does. We shall therefore look at this love of God disclosing itself in lovely deeds, and rise step by step to see the supreme disclosure in the Cross of Christ.

I. The first and simplest thing to say about love is this—it is a social passion. There cannot be love without at least two, a lover and a beloved. The man who had never seen the face of a fellow-man could not know the meaning of love. The faculty of love would be dormant in him, and be felt only as an unsatisfied yearning. If God be love, He must have loved from all eternity. Before the angels were created, or the universe had being, God was love God never dwelt in a still and awful loneliness.

II. The second simple thing to say about love is this—love is creation. Love must create, and it must create well-being. Love cannot be inactive. It must plan and toil and spend its resources and exert its energy. It must devise order, goodness, beauty, joy. Here we have the mighty motive of creation. Love is the source and creation is the stream. God does not love the world simply because He created it He created this world of life and beauty and order because He is love. It is always love that builds a home. It is always love that makes a garden. It is always love that peoples a wilderness. The first words of the Bible are a revelation of love: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth".

III. The third simple thing to say about love is this—that love is providence. Love cannot be content with creation. It must pass on to care, and God's care is His providence. Your little son makes himself a rudely shapen boat. Its designing has filled his heart and busied his hand for hours. At length he launches his little mimic craft by some beach. Does he set his venture afloat and then turn his back upon it, heedless of its fate? Mark how he waits and watches and risks himself lest his little vessel come to untimely shipwreck. Love created it, and love hangs over it in absorbing care. And so God did not create the universe, and make all things beautiful in their season, and set His spirit in 1 John 4:8-9

Of the reality of God's love St. John had no doubt; neither need we have any, though some do doubt it, thinking that God's justice and hatred of sin interfere with His love. But justice does not interfere with love in God. Justice and love are compatible in 1 John 4:10

Love to God, like the rain and the snow, must come down from heaven. St. 1 John 4:11

Blessed is he that loveth Thee, and his friend in Thee, and his enemy for Thee.

—Augustine, Confessions (IV:9)

References.—IV:11.—S. Gregory, How to Steer a Ship, p103. Archbishop Benson, Living Theology, p71. IV:12.—R. W. Church, Village Sermons (2Series), p221.

1 John 4:12-13

1 John 4:16

In his essay on Boswell's Life of Johnson, Carlyle defines the few higher natures of every age as people who "examine and determine, not what others do, but what it is right to do.... These are properly our Men, our great Men; the guides of the dull host—which follows them as by an irrevocable decree. They are the chosen of the world; they had this rare faculty not only of "supposing" and "inclining to think," but of knowing and believing; the nature of their being was, that they lived not by Hearsay, but by clear Vision."

References.—IV:14.—U. R. Thomas, Christian World Pulpit, vol1. p310. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xl. No2383. IV:14 , 15.—Expositor (6th Series), vol. v. p290. IV:15.—C. S. Macfarland, The Spirit Christlike, p157. Expositor (5th Series), vol. vii. p210. IV:16.—R. M. Grier, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlvi. p28. C. D. Bell, The Power of God, p13. Bishop Gore, Christian World Pulpit, vol1. p49. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. v. No253. G. F. Pentecost, Christian World Pulpit, vol. li. p232. IV:16-18.—C. Kingsley, The Good News of God, p256.

The Servant As His Lord

1 John 4:17

Large truths may be spoken in little words. Profundity is often supposed to be obscurity, but the deepest depth is clear. 1 John 4:18

Fear and love—these two—and the greater of these is love. We are all agreed that love is the mightiest lever in the universe; but it is very possible that we are not all of one mind as to the use of fear in religion. And has it any legitimate use? Our answer is decidedly in the affirmative. The Bible speaks of two kinds of fear—the filial and the slavish. We fear God, and we fear the devil; but we do not fear the one in the same sense as we fear the other. Filial fear is a duty; but slavish fear is a sin. The one attracts us to God; but the other drives us away from Him. Fear's thunders, unless followed by love's enrapturing melodies, have a baneful influence upon the human soul; and this we shall endeavour to show.

I. Fear has a tendency to produce a Morality of Policy, unless supplemented by Love. The terrified soul strives to be virtuous, not from any love for virtue per se, but from fear of sin's punishment. We must strive to hate sin as sin, and love virtue as virtue, independently of the punishment or reward.

II. Incessant appeals to Fear have a sadly enervating influence upon the moral nature. Fear paralyses the soul, deprives it of its moral vigour, and positively hinders effort. Fear weakens the physical frame, and paves the way for any disease that may be hovering about And is not this true of the intellect? Fear may drive the soul out of Egypt; but we need a more benignant power to lead it into Canaan.

III. Incessant appeals to Fear tend to promote unbelief. A dreaded God will eventually become a God despised, hated and denied.

IV. Incessant appeals to Fear tend to make spiritual worship impossible. Love delights to commune with its object; but a dreaded object will put a summary end to all pleasurable communion. A dreaded God cannot be heartily and devoutly worshipped. You can no more love Him than you can caress a volcano!

V. Incessant appeals to Fear may lead to a forced Obedience which is practically worthless. "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still." When the judgments were removed, Pharaoh forgot all his promises. Forced obedience, generated by fear, is little better than disobedience. In the face of all that we have said, some may be tempted to ask, "What, then, is the use of fear in religion? Has it any use at all". Our reply is that fear must be used to pave the way for something better than itself; in itself, it must be the herald and forerunner of love Sinai must be the precursor of Calvary. It is so in the Bible, it is so in Providence, and it must be so in the spiritual history of the individual.

—J. Ossian Davies, Old Yet Ever New, p179.

Love and Fear

1 John 4:18

John has been speaking of boldness, and that naturally suggests its opposite—fear. He has been saying that perfect love produces courage in the day of judgment, because it produces likeness to Christ, who is the judge. In my text he explains and enlarges that statement For there is another way in which love produces boldness, and that is by its casting out fear. These two are mutually exclusive. There are three things here that I wish to notice—the empire of fear, the mission of fear, and the expulsion of fear. I. The Empire of Fear.—Fear is a shrinking apprehension of evil as befalling us, from the person or thing which we dread. (1) There are conditions of human nature, in which the God who ought to be our dearest joy and most ardent desire becomes our ghastliest dread. The root of such an unnatural perversion of all that a creature ought to feel towards its loving Creator lies in the simple consciousness of discordance between God and 1 John 4:18

Cromwell wrote in1652to his 1 John 4:18

Other fears and sorrows, grievances of body and mind, are troublesome for the time; but this is for ever, eternal damnation, hell itself, a plague, a fire; an inundation hurts one province alone, and the loss may be recovered; but this superstition involves all the world almost, and can never be remedied. Sickness and sorrows come and go, but a superstitious soul hath no rest.

—Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.

Charles Kinsley's eldest son once wrote that ""Perfect love casteth out fear" was the motto on which my father based his theory of bringing up his children; and this theory he put in practice from their babyhood till when he left them as men and women. From this, and from the interest he took in all their pursuits, their pleasures, trials, and even the petty details of their everyday life, there sprung up a "friendship" between father and children that increased in intensity and depth with years."

"In a sense, we were afraid of him," Thomas Arnold writes of his father, Dr. Arnold of Rugby, in Passages in a Wandering Life (p9); "that 1 John 4:18

In heaven, love will absorb fear; but in this world, fear and love must go together. No one can love God aright without fearing Him; though many fear Him, and yet do not love Him. Self-confident men, who do not know their own hearts, or the reasons they have for being dissatisfied with themselves, do not fear God, and they think this bold freedom is to love Him. Deliberate sinners fear but cannot love Him. But devotion to Him consists in love and fear, as we may understand from our ordinary attachment to each other. No one really loves another who does not feel a certain reverence towards him. When friends transgress this sobriety of affection, they may indeed continue associates for a time, but they have broken the bond of union. It is mutual respect which makes friendship lasting. So again, in the feelings of inferiors towards superiors. Fear must go before love. Till he who has authority shows he has it and can use it, his forbearance will not be valued duly; his kindness will look like weakness. We learn to contemn what we do not fear; and we cannot love what we contemn. So in religion also. We cannot understand Christ's mercies till we understand His power, His glory, His unspeakable holiness, and our demerits; that 1 John 4:19

The correct reading of my text, as you will find in the Revised Version, omits "Him" in the first clause, and simply says "we love," without specifying the object. That is to say, for the moment John's thought is fixed rather on the inward transformation effected—from self-regard to love—than on considering the object on which the love is expended. When the heart is melted, the streams flow wherever there is a channel. The river, as he goes on to show us, parts into two heads, and love to God and love to man are, in their essence and root-principle, one thing. So my text is the summary of all revelation about God, the ultimate word about all our relations to Him, and the all-inclusive directory as to our conduct to one another.

I. The ultimate word about God. "He first loved us." Properly and strictly speaking, that "first" only declares the priority of the Divine love towards us over ours towards Him. But we may fairly give it a wider meaning, and say—first of all, ere Creation and Time—first of all things was God's love: last to be discovered because most ancient of all. (1) Consider, for a moment, the relation which all the other perfections of the Divine nature have to this central and foundation one. There is the central blaze: the rest is but the brilliant periphery that encloses it. (2) Are we not warranted in believing that in that which we call the love of God there do abide the same elements as characterise the thing that bears the same name in our human experience? The spectrum has told us that the constituents of the mighty sun in the heavens are the same as the constituents of this little darkened earth. And there are the same lines in the Divine spectrum that there are in ours.

II. Here we have the ultimate word as to our religion. (1) A simple trust in the love of God, as manifested in Jesus Christ, our Lord, is the only thing which will so deal with man's natural self-regard and desire to make himself his own object and centre, as to substitute for that the victorious love of God. (2) If we love Him, it will be the motive power and spring of all manner of obedience and glad services. St. Augustine's paradox, rightly understood, is a magnificent truth, "Love! and do what you will".

III. Here is the ultimate word about our conduct to men. The only victorious antagonist to the self-regarding temperament of average men, and the only power which will change philanthropy from a sentiment into a self-denying and active principle of conduct, is to be found in the belief of the love of God in Jesus Christ, and in answering love to Him.

—A. Maclaren, Triumphant Certainties, p305.

1 John 4:19

It was in his happier state of mind that Law was found by Wesley, and in this spirit he said to him: "You would have a philosophical religion, but there can be no such thing. Religion is the most plain, simple thing: in the world. It is only, we love Him, because He first loved us".

—Southey.

The religious idea is essentially not an individualist perception, not a single fact which stands separate and palpable, but an organic and organising principle, which binds man to 1 John 4:20

"But," said Vinet half-sadly, half-ironically, in his diary, "it is just the brother one sees whom it is so difficult to love".

References.—IV:19.—H. S. Holland, Christian World Pulpit, vol. liv. p168. W. H. Evans, Short Sermons for the Seasons, p96. R. J. Campbell, City Temple Sermons, p122. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. v. No229; vol. xvii. No1008; vol. xxii. No1299 , and vol. xlvii. No2730. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture— 1 John , p355. IV:20.—J. M. Whiton, Summer Sermons, p53. H. S. Holland, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlv. p329. Bishop Riley, Church Family Newspaper, vol. xv. p536. IV:20 , 21.—J. C. M. Bellew, Christ in Life: Life in Christ, p315. IV:21.—J. S. Boone, Sermons, p190. V:1.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xvii. No979. V:1-5.—Expositor (6th Series), vol. v. p287.