WHEN MY OLDEST SON JEREMY was about five years old, we played catch for the first time. I came home one spring day and presented Jeremy with a new baseball glove. After showing him how to use it, I pulled out my old baseball glove and a baseball from the deep recesses of the closet and asked him, “Want to play catch?” His eyes lit up! I backed up about ten feet and gently threw the ball to him. The first few times he dropped the ball. When he returned the throw, it was usually errant to the left or right or too high or too low. Gradually over the next few weeks and months as we played catch in the front yard, his ability in throwing and catching improved. I initiated the game of catch by buying him a glove, showing him how to use it, and pitching the ball to him for the first time. From then on he could hardly wait for me to get home from work to play catch with him outside. I don’t know how many times we played catch together over the next thirteen years. It seemed like a million. Watching him play in tee ball and all the way up through high school baseball, I often pictured that first time as a five-year-old when he donned a glove and we played catch. For a five-year-old, playing catch was one way of showing my son I loved him and wanted to spend time with him.
Dozens of times in this letter alone John uses the word “love.” Primarily he speaks about three kinds of love: God’s love for us, our love for God, and our love for one another. The concept of love is so important to John that three times he discusses it in this letter. This is the third passage. The first time was in chapter 2, he talked about love as evidence for our fellowship with God. In chapter 3 it was an evidence of our sonship with God. Now in chapter 4 John comes to the apex of what love is. He traces the stream of love to its source: “God is love.” There are three spiritual truths we learn from this passage. The first is found in verses 7, 8.
Love Personified (vv. 7, 8)
Love is not like other subjects. It cannot be understood and then practiced. It can only be understood by practice. It is more like measles than math.1 John affirms that the essence and evidence of Christian living is love. We are commanded to love one another, and John gives two reasons for doing so. The first reason is, love has its source in God. Just as light radiates from the sun, love radiates from God’s very nature. We have already seen in our previous studies what John means by the term “love.” Love is not a sentimental, squidgy, emotional word. It is not an Oprah group hug word. It is more than a description of how you feel. “Love” is a word that involves your emotions, but more than that the Biblical concept of agapē is a love that is unconditional, a love that seeks the highest good for the one who is loved, a love of total commitment. When God loves in the Bible, he does not say: “I love you if . . .” or “I love you because . . .” There is nothing in us that would cause God to love us. We are sinners. God’s love for us does not have anything to do with something in us that caused God to love us. God’s love for us is motivated by who he is, not by who we are. Later in this passage we see that we did not first love God; rather he first loved us. There is nothing lovely about us. There is nothing within us that would cause a perfect and holy God to express his love to us. Why on earth would he do that? Geddes MacGregor said this news “may well be deemed astonishing, since there is no reason why a being who is able to do anything he pleases should also be a loving being. Indeed, it seems prima facie unlikely.”2 From our perspective, of course that would seem true. But God loves because it is his nature to love. He desires that we know him.
We who are exhorted to love are already loved by God. This is the ground for the command to love others. John is not speaking of our love as only an imitation of what we see in God, though that is true. Our love is not an imitation from a distance but participation from within. Nor is he speaking of our love as only gratitude or mere emotion. His concept of love goes much deeper than that. God’s love is creative! It actually produces its like in us! We love from God’s fullness and not for it as some ideal to achieve to quench the thirst of our own emptiness. Feelings come to us. Agapē comes from us. Feelings are passive and receptive. Agapē is active and creative. Feelings are instinctive. Agapē is chosen. We fall in love, but we do not fall into agapē. Our choice to love comes not from weather, digestion, good vibrations, heredity, or environment but from our own heart, the center of our being.3
The second reason we are commanded to love one another is that “whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.” Two things are said to be true about Christians who practice love: 1) they have been “born of God,” and 2) they know God. The presence of love in your life is an evidence of your Christian experience. Of course, John does not mean that anybody in the world who has a feeling of love for somebody else is therefore a Christian. John is talking about the relationship between God and believers. If you have children, they possess your DNA. Your children have your nature, which has been genetically passed on to them. John is saying that a similar thing is true of those who have been born of God. If God as to his nature is love, then everyone who has truly been born of God partakes of his nature of love. Not only have we been born of God, but a second thing is true about us: we know God. The word “knows” here conveys the meaning of having an intimate relationship with God. It is more than knowing facts about God or understanding perceived truths about God. To know God really means to be rightly related to him.
God’s love produces genuine change in us. When we respond to God’s love, we are able to become loving people. This is why John speaks more than once in his letter about love being “perfected” in us (2:5; 4:12, 17). By “perfected” John means that love has reached its aim, purpose, and goal for our lives. You cannot command unsaved people to love others. They may or may not do it. But you can command Christian love. As one who has been born again, I now have the capacity to love. Though I am tempted to act like my old unsaved self, as a Christian I recognize I have no right to live like an unsaved person. I must live like the Christian I am.4
In verse 8 John states the same thing he said in verse 7 but now from a negative perspective. What he said in verse 7 is now emphasized by stating the reverse in verse 8. Those who do not love in the way described by John in verse 7 give evidence that they do not know God. If you score minus points in the love league, you don’t have a clue who God is!5 The reason for this is then given: “God is love.” Three times in John’s writings we read statements about God’s nature: John 4:24: “God is spirit,” 1 John 1:5: “God is light,” and now in this verse and later in verse 16 John says, “God is love.” What a powerful statement that is.6 We need to unpack its meaning and implications. First, we cannot reverse this statement and say “love is God.”7 All love is not Godlike love. In logic, “A is B” does not mean the same thing as “A equals B.” If A = B then B = A. But if A is B that does not mean that B is A. God is love, but love is not God. Love doesn’t define God. God defines love. God cannot fall in love; he is love. God cannot fall in love for the same reason water can’t get wet: it is wet. God is love-in-eternal-action.8
By means of his revelation of himself through Jesus and the Scriptures, God teaches us what love is all about. Love is a part of God’s very nature and can never be absent from God. Love is not just an attribute of God; it is a part of his nature. Second, God’s love is more than mere emotion or good will. It is his settled disposition toward us that flows from his being, nature, and divine attributes. Human love comes second in the sense that it is usually defined and described in terms of response to something desirable in the situation, object, or person. “I love her because she is beautiful.” “I love him because he is handsome.” “I love her because she is smart.” “I love him because he is rich!” Human love is usually response love. Agapē love comes first. It creates value in its object whether there is any intrinsic value there or not. The sun shines on the earth not because the earth is the earth but because the sun is the sun.9 God loves me because he is he, not because I am I.
When John says “God is love,” he means to say more than just “God loves us,” as marvelous as that truth is in and of itself. As C. H. Dodd rightly pointed out, this statement
might stand alongside other statements, such as “God creates,” “God rules,” “God judges”; that is to say, it means that love is one of His activities. But to say “God is love” implies that all His activity is loving activity, even his judgment. If He creates, He creates in love; if He rules, He rules in love; if He judges, He judges in love. All that He does is to the expression of His nature, which is to love.10
God’s love is, according to C. S. Lewis, “Gift-love. In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give. This kind of love in us enables us to love those who to us are naturally unloveable.”11
That our God, who is by his very nature perfect, sovereign over all, needing nothing, with no ambitions to fulfill or goals to attain, chose to create is a marvel! Yet he not only created the universe, but he chose to create human beings and love them! Further, even when they rebelled against him and deserved eternal death, he chose to love them still and provide a way for their salvation. God became man in the person of Jesus Christ and by self-limitation and self-abnegation paid for the sins of the world! What love!
Love Proven (vv. 9, 10)
Verse 9 gives us the grounds of God’s love: “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.” What a statement about the greatness of God’s love! To “manifest” something means to make it visible and known. The love of God was made known “among us.” It is also possible that the Greek construction means “God’s love in us,” as in the nasb. God’s love is seen in the sending of his Son so that we might have eternal life through him.
The greatness of God’s love is shown in five ways. First, notice it was God’s love that caused the mission of sending his Son. Notice the words “God sent . . .” Stop right there! If there is going to be reconciliation between God and man, you would think the offender should be the one to initiate it. After all, he is the one who caused the problem in the first place. Suppose you and I are sitting next to each other in church on a Sunday morning. After the service concludes, in my haste to exit and beat everybody to the restaurant, I bump into you abruptly and step on your toes. Do you turn to me and say, “Oh, excuse me, I’m sorry”? No! I am the one pauses and apologizes to you for my behavior and seeks your forgiveness. I am the offending party. In social etiquette, the offender seeks forgiveness from the offended. But God did not wait for rebellious humanity to send word to his throne for terms of reconciliation. God himself commenced negotiations!12
Second, notice whom God sent: his only Son. God did not send Abraham, Moses, or one of the prophets. He did not send an angel. He sent Jesus who is his only Son. The word order in Greek puts emphasis on “his Son”: “that his son, his only Son, has God sent. . . . ” Furthermore, the verb translated “sent” is in the perfect tense in Greek, conveying the connotation, “God has sent Jesus, and we now enjoy the blessings of his mission!”13 In Greek the word translated “only” is monogenēs. It is made up of two words that we have borrowed from Greek and brought into English. Mono means “one,” and genēs is the word from which we get our word gene. Jesus as Son is “one of a kind,” unique, sharing in the very nature of the Godhead in a way that no other created being shares. Jesus is the Son of God who is divine. Our sin caused such a mess that only the Son of God himself could extricate us from it! The greatness of God’s love for you and me is of such a nature that his love is expressed in the fact that he sent his only Son. God could not have given us a greater gift.
Third, the greatness of God’s love is revealed in the purpose of his sending the Son: “so that we might live through him.” As Paul says in Ephesians 2:1, we were “dead in [our] trespasses and sins.” Our only hope of eternal life is forgiveness of sins and a relationship with God through his Son, Jesus. Fourth, the greatness of God’s love is that it originates with God and not with us. God first bestowed his love on us, and only after regeneration could we even begin to love God.
Fifth, the greatness of God’s love is demonstrated by its cost: God sent his Son Jesus to be “the propitiation for our sins” (v. 10).”Propitiation”—now there is a five-dollar stained-glass word we don’t use every day. I’ll bet when you and your friend were running late to math class in school you did not say to your friend, “We are going to be late, and the teacher is going to be mad; so we’d better find a way to make propitiation.” We don’t talk that way. But this word is a very important word in the Bible; so let’s camp out on it for a moment. Propitiation is a word that means “to appease someone’s wrath.” In ancient Greek mythology, the gods were capricious and easily angered by humans. Humans sought to appease that anger by offering sacrifices to the gods.
Why is it necessary that there be “propitiation” for our sins? Why doesn’t God just wave his magic wand and forgive everyone’s sin? Let me answer this question with another question. Why doesn’t the state of Colorado just wave its magic wand and forgive James Holmes for murdering twelve people and wounding fifty-eight others in a theater in Aurora in the summer of 2012? To ask the question is to answer it. To do so would be an egregious violation of justice. If God were to do the same for our sins, it would be a denial of the seriousness of sin and a gross violation of his justice. Sin is so bad that it leads to a state of affairs where the Son of God himself ends up being crucified.
Propitiation is a word that includes six things in its definition: God’s holiness, wrath, justice, mercy, love, and grace. Why does there need to be a propitiation in the first place? All sin is an affront to God’s holiness. God’s wrath is his settled disposition against all sin (Romans 1:18). God is angry with sin and sinners. You say, “Wait a minute, you just got through telling me about God’s love for us.” Yes, I did. “Now you are telling me God is angry with us.” Yes, I am. God can be angry with sinners and love them at the same time. Sin violates God’s law, and his law demands that justice be done. God is just. He must punish sin. But God is also merciful. He is willing that sinners not receive all they deserve for their sin. Even more, God is love. His love extends to all people. God desires the salvation of all people. But there is nothing sinners can do to earn God’s forgiveness for their sins. This is where God’s grace comes into the picture. God does something for us that we could never do for ourselves. He pays the price for our sin. When Jesus died on the cross, he became our substitute and took the wrath of God against our sin upon himself, thus satisfying God’s justice in a payment for sin. In Jesus’ death on the cross, God’s holiness, justice, wrath, mercy, love, and grace all converge.
That is the “why” of it. Now let’s talk about the “who” of it. In Greek mythology humans always sought to propitiate the capricious wrath of the gods. But there is nothing we can do to turn away God’s righteous anger against us and our sin. So God himself takes the initiative to propitiate his own wrath. God’s love through Jesus on the cross provides the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Anselm rightly said only man should make the sacrifice for his sins because he is the offender. But only God could make the sacrifice for our sins since he has demanded it. Jesus, as God and man, is the only Savior in whom the “should” and the “could” are united. The Father gave the Son; the Son gave himself. The Father sent the Son; the Son came. The Father did not lay on the Son a cross he was reluctant to bear. The Son did not extract from the Father a salvation he was reluctant to bestow.
So, what is propitiation all about? God giving himself in his Son for our sins. God himself in his holy wrath needs to be propitiated. God himself in holy love undertook propitiation. God himself in the person of Jesus died to make propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but for the entire world (1 John 2:2). The initiative is from God; the response must be from us. God first moves toward us so that we can move toward him. God first loved us so that we might be able to love him.
Ty Cobb was one of the all-time greats in the game of baseball. He had a .367 lifetime batting average, with 4,191 hits and 892 stolen bases. He won nine straight batting titles. But Ty Cobb was also the meanest man in baseball. Known for stopping at nothing to win, he would insult, humiliate, and even injure other players in his quest for victory. Even his own teammates once rooted against him when he was in a tight race one season for the batting title. He was known to make unprovoked racial slurs. He had three wives, all of whom he verbally and physically abused. He was constantly involved in fistfights, arguments, and tirades against fans and players. He once pistol-whipped a would-be mugger so badly that the face of the corpse could not be identified. Some players, like the famous Ted Williams, tried to help Cobb, but to no avail. Cobb was worth millions because of his early investment in Coca-Cola. When he died, he had in his possession millions in stocks, bonds, and cash because he was an early investor in Coca-Cola. And yet it would be hard to find a more apt specimen of total depravity. But the story does not end there.
Not long before he died, Cobb was visited by a Presbyterian minister named John Richardson. Cobb curtly told the preacher to leave. Two days later he returned. This time Cobb listened as Richardson explained to him the plan of salvation. Hearing of Christ’s love for sinners and how he had come to die for the likes of Ty Cobb, “the Georgia Peach” was overcome with emotion. Richardson continued to explain the necessity of repentance toward sin and faith in Jesus as the only way of salvation. Cobb told the preacher he was ready to put his complete trust in Jesus Christ as his Savior. Two days before he died, Ty Cobb told Richardson, “I feel the strong arms of God underneath me.”14 “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” No one has ever sinned himself or herself beyond the love of God. There is nothing you can do to make God love you any more than he loves you right now. There is nothing you can do to make God love you any less than he loves you right now.
Love Practiced (v. 11)
When we truly understand what God has done for us and how much he loves us, we must love one another. That’s why John defines love for us before he exhorts us to love. You can’t love as you ought until you understand how God has loved you! Focus on that little word “ought” in verse 11. It means obligation. Some Christians view loving others all the time as optional. Love is not optional; it’s obligatory. We are under moral obligation to love one another. The expression of our divine duty is, “we also ought to love one another.” If the greatest commandment is to love God with all our heart and to love our neighbor as ourselves, then the greatest sin is not to do it!15 Godlike living demands Godlike loving. This is the divine imperative based on divine logic.
“Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (v. 11). Once again it is Christ’s propitiatory death that is the standard of our own love: we are to love sinners with a sacrificial love because Jesus did. God “so loved.” The little word “so” translates a Greek adverb meaning “so intensely.”16 It is not easy to understand “one another” here as meaning “Christians only,” because the model is Christ, who died for sinners, and we are to love as he did. This is the way we should understand verse 12: “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected [or has reached its purpose, aim, goal] in us.” As John will say in 4:14, “We have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world.” God’s love extends beyond those who believe and includes the world. Our love should go and do likewise. Leon Morris said, “Passages like these make it clear that this epistle pictures God as loving sinful people outside the Christian brotherhood.”17
John draws a practical conclusion from the love of God expressed in the death of Christ on the cross: we ought to love one another. Godlike living demands love. Look at the word “ought.” The word in Greek means we are bound to love. It is our responsibility to love one another. We are bound to love one another in response to God’s love for us. We have an obligation to love one another. The false gospel that is preached by those in the so-called faith movement (health and wealth gospel) says that the abundant life is yours for the taking—God wants you healthy and wealthy—get your best life now! This is totally contrary to the New Testament writers. They say to believers, “You have no right to live like you once did before you were saved. To do so is to deny the gospel you believe.” John says, “We also ought to love one another.” This is the divine imperative based on divine logic. If we have really come to know God in salvation, our Christian life will be the outworking of the truth that we claim to believe.18
But there is a problem. Some Christians are difficult to love. “To dwell above with saints I love, that will be glory. But to dwell below with saints I know, now that is a different story.” Our love for others should grow out of our love for God and his own love for us. Love is not predicated on like. Love is not predicated on agreement, though it helps. Through Jesus you can love people with whom you don’t agree. I can just picture the scene in the Upper Room with Jesus in John 13 when he gives them the new commandment. Peter looks over at John and thinks, You mean I have to love that dreamer, that guy who has his head in the clouds? John looks at Peter and thinks, You mean I have to love that loudmouth? Matthew looks at Thomas and thinks, You mean I have to love that skeptic? Thomas looks at Matthew and reflects, I have to love that tax collector? Can you imagine what went through the minds of those men when Jesus gave them the new commandment to love one another?
How did they do it? How do we do it? We remind ourselves of the words, “if God so loved us . . .” Those words are a game-changer. They keep me from thinking or feeling that I’m the one being wronged, that I’m the one being shortchanged. Not so fast! says the gospel. Remember who you are; remember who you were before you came to Christ. It used to be all about me. Self on the throne. Self-centeredness, self-assertion, self-conceit, self-indulgence, self-pleasing, self-seeking, self-sensitiveness, self-defensiveness, self-sufficiency.19 Now, because of Christ in my life, it is all about him and others. When I see myself as I really am, when I have died to self, it is impossible for someone to insult me or offend me. Whatever the world may say about me, the truth is probably worse!20 “If God so loved us . . .” “There is something in each of us that cannot be naturally loved. It is no one’s fault if they do not so love it. Only lovable can be naturally loved. You might as well ask people to like the taste of rotten bread or the sound of a mechanical drill.”21 How can you love someone if you don’t like them? Easy! We do it to ourselves continually. Sometimes we feel foolish, stupid, asinine, or wicked. But we can still love ourselves.22
The early church father Tertullian tells us that he was brought to Christ not because he had studied the Scriptures but because he had seen Christians’ lives and coveted what they possessed that caused them to live the way they lived. Would to God that could be said of me . . . and you!
The love of God is the answer to the quest for life’s supreme value and reality but also to life’s deepest meaning and purpose. Since God is love, we must love God and love whatever God loves. He is the divine conductor. If we follow his baton, the music of our life will be a symphony.23
God sent us a love letter in the person of his Son Jesus. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). God’s love for us is so great that he overcomes all the many reasons he could give for not loving the sinful people we are. The question for us is this: if God has bestowed such love on us, will we overcome all our petty reasons for not loving one another? I find it interesting that the word amateur means literally “a lover.” Amateur athletes do what they do for love of the game. They are not professionals. When it comes to loving, we should be amateurs, not professionals. Professionals don’t do much screaming, hugging, or crying. Amateurs do. It’s the cost of loving those you really care about.24
The greatest love you can show to those who don’t know Christ is to tell them about Jesus. John’s point is to ground our love for others in the love that God has for us and for the world in Christ. As Spurgeon in his sermon on this passage said:
Go forth at once, and try and make reconciliation, not only between yourself and your friend, but between every man and God. Let that be your object. Christ has become man’s reconciliation, and we are to try and bring this reconciliation near to every poor sinner that comes in our way. We are to tell him that God in Christ is reconciled. . . . God is now able to deal on gospel terms with the whole race. We need never think that we shall meet with men to whom God will not consent to be reconciled.25
Ask men you know to list their top five baseball movies. Most men will place Field of Dreams on their list. Ray Kinsella, played by Kevin Costner, lives in rural Iowa with his wife Annie and his young daughter Karin. While walking through the cornfield, Ray hears a voice whisper, “If you build it, he will come.” Ray concludes that the voice is telling him to build a baseball field. So he plows under his corn and does just that. He waits and watches, but nothing happens. Suddenly one summer night the ghosts of several deceased baseball players appear out of nowhere and are practicing on Ray’s field. It’s unbelievable! Why, there is Shoeless Joe Jackson and other players from the 1919 Chicago White Sox! The plot of the movie twists and turns to the final scene. The sun is westering in the sky, and the ballplayers leave the field and disappear in the corn. Shoeless Shoe Jackson, played by Ray Liotta, looks at Ray and tells him, “If you build it, he will come.” Then he glances toward the catcher near home plate who is removing his chest protector and mask.
Ray suddenly recognizes that the player is his father, John Kinsella, as a young man, before Ray was even born. When Ray was seventeen, he had a big fight with his father. He packed his things, said something awful to his father, and left. He never spoke to his father again. Ray had regretted this all his life, but his father had died, and Ray had lost his chance to make things right. Now he and his father converse for a moment, both understanding, but neither saying anything more. Ray’s father turns and begins to walk toward the cornfield to leave. With deep emotion, choking back the tears, Ray calls out to this father, “Dad . . . wanna play catch?” His father turns, pauses, and responds, “Yes, I’d like that very much.” Ray dons a glove, and he and his father play catch as the movie draws to a close.
But Field of Dreams got it exactly backwards. In the movie the wayward son asks the father, “Wanna play catch?” But in the Bible it is God the Father who asks his rebellious son, “Wanna play catch?” Because of his great love for us, God initiated our salvation. Think of your life and your love like a baseball, and throw the ball back to the divine pitcher who threw it to you first, and the game continues. Do you hear that heavenly voice? “Wanna play catch?”