Verse 10 “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”
Not only are these basic results produced from the manifestation of Christ but love continues to exist and act in the christian system, which follows His manifestation. Herein, in apostolic Christianity, the love continues to be and to exert its benevolent effects on earth.
It was not love in us for God that caused Him to love us. In nature, as creatures of God, we were complete spiritual failures, failing to elicit love from God for us by our merits. No love for God resulted in humanity from his being a creature of His hand and from enjoying what He affords providentially as the God of nature. Despite man’s natural failure, the love of God remained. He still willed to pour forth His love to produce the effects He desired. Our natural failure and its effects, our sins, which separated us from God, had first to be dealt with by the manifestation of the love of God in His Son. The love of God used the circumstances and conditions produced by human failure to manifest itself to the full.
Divine love alone explains why God originally created that which was capable of failure. In His wisdom and love, God permitted evil to act in creation, even to overcome the humanity He had originally created in His image and likeness. Even more fundamentally, God created Satan knowing that he would become evil. Yet God makes no mistakes and is never caught unawares. We believe in a God who is spiritually responsible for evil and who has Himself suffered more from the activity of evil than creation has, that thereby His love might flow forth. The cross sets this forth in all its fulness. It is of course wrong to call God morally responsible, for morality only applies to man, who is soulish rather than spiritual.
We do not now wish to deal with the subject of good and evil as it is contained in all the Word of God. It is however illustrated in Genesis 3. After He completed the rest of creation, God planted a garden in Eden. By this we understand that the rest of earth was in a state of natural chaos. God was, in forming this garden, giving man a pattern. He was telling him in effect to use his natural powers to make the rest of the earth like this pattern-garden. God deliberately planted the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden knowing what would transpire. He commanded Adam not to partake. He was telling man not to get involved in the issues of good and evil in his life and service but to leave that to Himself to deal with according to His purpose.
Man’s weakness in the face of evil, his lack of love for God, was then manifested and brought about conditions in which divine love could be fully manifested to deal with sin. Evil appeared to triumph over good in nature. Natural beings and their powers, originally created and established by God in creation, failed to do His bidding but this was according to divine foreknowledge and intention. The love of God is the greatest and most dominant characteristic and power in God and it had still to operate even after creation’s completion. Man’s true significance in creation is that God chose him as the being in whom He would fully manifest Himself. He is significant, in other words, because of his natural failure rather than his success. The intervention of God in love results in the production of a nature in man, the new man, which enables him to know and enjoy the fulness of divine love. Even angelic beings do not possess natures great enough to receive and contain the fulness of divine love.
Those who were to be the objects of divine love were found to be sinners in nature and practice. They were incapable of bringing divine order into nature, far less of entertaining true thoughts of God. Their sins had to be atoned for, covered over propitiously, because of divine righteousness which prevents Him from dealing with sinners for blessing. The God who made humanity, who allowed him to be involved in evil and who still had love within Himself and the desire to manifest it so as to bless man, had to undertake to deal with their sins first of all. So the sending of the Son assumed a certain character. He was sent to be a propitiation. He could not at His coming immediately shower the fulness of divine love upon man directly.
In chapter 2:2 the propitiation is Jesus Christ. Here it is the Son, for it is God Himself in Deity who is presented. God Himself in the Person of the Son has so great love as to become Himself a propitiation for our sins. His love is so great that He involved Himself in that which He hated most, our sins, that He might remove them from us in His sight. As in 2:2 His life in flesh became a bloodstained mercy-seat at its termination. Had there been no evil and so no sins, there would have been no death. In particular, Christ could not have died in the flesh. So there could have been no complete manifestation of divine love and no nature produced in creation sufficiently great to comprehend it. The best God could have done then would have been to improve nature by redeeming humanity socially and providentially.
Verse 11 “Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.”
John then exhorts them to respond aright to such love as God has lavished on them. Despite our previous failure and despite the cost to Himself, He has so loved us. This puts a present obligation upon us. We ought, in the Christianity we practise in response to God, to go on loving one another with this divine love we have received. The love of God made Himself and His beneficent work available to us. We ought to so act toward one another in Christianity as to make available for all the family that which we each receive from God. God now fully revealed is thereby known and loved by His present people.
Verse 12 “No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and His love is perfected in us.”
He is invisible and remains so. Christianity does not make God visible to, or comprehensible by, man’s natural faculties. But this no longer means that He cannot be known. His love has been manifested, producing on earth His Word, a nature capable of appreciating it, and a system of truth in which is mediated the knowledge of Himself.
If we love one another, God goes on abiding in us and His love is perfected in us. John has set forth what God has wrought for us in Christ. Now he deals with what God is doing in us in Christianity. Spiritual conditions are necessarily imposed upon us that we might realise the purpose for which God established Christianity on earth. It is if we go on loving one another that we will become perfect for His purpose.
Christianity is not, according to divine intention, an individualistic, pietist way of life. Divine activity for the realising of God’s purpose goes on in us if we love one another. Thus the love of God already becomes fully appreciated and enjoyed and so is effective and purposeful on earth. It is a question of man knowing the potential effects of divine manifestation in Christ, knowing the God who has become knowable as a result. Amidst such spiritual conditions and circumstances, God effectively abides on earth as a result of the finished work of Christ and the continuing work of love in the family.
God’s love has produced a divine family, or families, on earth in which man’s potential for ultimate greatness lies in their realising of the spiritual ideal. They are to be built up a dwelling-place for a God who is active in creation to bring about His declared intentions to bless the world. God’s love is being perfected in us by the spiritual activity of each member. The love of God is being perfected in causing us to go on to perfection.
Not only do we now possess eternal life in Christ but we should possess it in perfection, in full spiritual growth. We will realise this if we come under the full unhindered influence of the Holy Spirit as a divinely gathered and activated company. A company formed and unified by the doctrinal truth which forms the basis of Christianity, is the only means toward this end. It is not an end in itself. For this the Lord Jesus prayed at His departure from the world – ‘that they may be perfected into one’, John 17:23.
Verse 13 “Hereby know we that we dwell in Him, and He in us, because He hath given us of His Spirit.”
Knowledge is set forth as being the important and significant possession of christians. We have to know why we are the people of God on earth in the present dispensation of the outworking of divine purpose. It has to do with our continuing to abide in God and He in us. This corresponds to John 17:21 “that they may be one in Us”.
In apostolic Christianity, we go on abiding in God in conscious knowledge and experience. By it man is raised up spiritually out of nature to live in Deity. The spiritual sphere which the Lord Jesus occupied when He was alive in the flesh is described by John in his gospel and is in connection with this subject of no one seeing God, chapter 1:18. There He was described as being in the bosom of the Father. This is the sphere we have been set into to abide in.
The family of God has been built up spiritually by God and by man’s response to receiving truth from God that it might dwell in Himself, fully revealed as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The spiritual sphere in which Deity once lived exclusively has been opened up for God’s family to abide in. We are to know that we continually abide in the sphere in which God lives and acts to reveal Himself: it is the sphere in which He loves fully and effectively. In Pauline terms, we have been blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies and should possess this inheritance.
This christian state of affairs, man dwelling in God and God in man, has been made possible by God giving us ‘of His Spirit’. This characterises the age we live in Godwardly. It is a time when, in the outworking of divine purpose, the Holy Spirit has proceeded forth to produce effects from the manifestation of the Son in flesh. He has completed the Word of God and is raising up a people who may come to know it perfectly.
The Holy Spirit has come to abide, not merely to live, in those who by nature were merely of the flesh. He lives in each member. He abides in the family, actively and purposefully. He has given us of His Spirit. This is rather different to what happened in the case of the Lord Jesus. John declares in his gospel that ‘He gives not His Spirit to Him in measure but in all fulness’. With us, it is not that the Holy Spirit in His fulness dwells in each member individually but that each member has a part of, a share in, this gift. He has come that He might build up effective families for God’s present purpose.
The continued abiding of God in man is dependent upon continued corporate family life and practice for the production of the present effects which God desires. “Be ye filled with the Holy Spirit” was the command given by Paul to an assembly, the one in Ephesus. His continued abiding in them, unhindered and ungrieved, would build them up to perfection that they might render the service God desired of them. This is that they might by the Holy Spirit glorify His Son, who is glorified by God in the completed Scriptures. They should be able to apprehend the Holy Spirit’s presentation of the Son.
The Lord Jesus, as a man on earth at His public declaration of submission to the Father’s will in His baptism in Jordan, received the Holy Spirit as the means whereby He might fulfil the spiritual obligations He took upon Himself when He involved Himself in the outworking of divine purpose. Baptism, total immersion in water, signifies the same thing with us – we declare ourselves disciples involved in the outworking of divine purpose. It is not that we receive the Holy Spirit by baptism, any more than it was the case with the Lord Jesus that He only submitted Himself to divine service at the age of thirty in baptism. His birth, His incarnation, involved that. Baptism was His public declaration that He would go into death for the realising of divine purpose. We are also buried with Him by baptism into His death.
So we His people receive the same means, the gift of the Holy Spirit, that we might render the same service to the Son as He rendered to the Father. He has been given to us that we might interpret the accomplished work of God in Christ into spiritual reality. Then we know that we abide in Him and He in us by the Holy Spirit being given to us.
Verse 14 “And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world.”
John then shows the consequences when there is this experimental spiritual reality. In true Christianity we have seen and go on testifying. As with the Lord Jesus, we speak what we have seen and testify what we know about the Person and work of God. This was particularly true of apostolic ministry, by which the Word of God has been completed. They received the gift of apostleship by the Holy Spirit to give His interpretation of the Person and work of the Son whom the Father sent, in the words He taught them, 1 Cor 2:13.
Deity abiding in humanity and humanity abiding in Deity may also become effectively true in the experience and service of the exponents of Christianity. We have received from the apostles the completed Word of God and are brought together into a spiritual sphere, wherein we can acquire the spiritual ability to see God who is fully revealed. As a result of this spiritual vision and insight we continue to testify. Our witness-bearing is that the Father has sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world. The proof of the effectiveness of divine intervention is that God has obtained by it a people who appreciate Him in His work. They can also set forth this knowledge thus obtained, convincingly on earth. Just as God is a God who has completed His Word, so His people should be a people who know Him in it. God the Father has sent the Son in the character of ‘Saviour of the world’. God has by His manifestation of Himself completed a work referrable to the world.
God has taken up His abode in humanity to bear testimony to this completed revelation and redemptive work in the Person of the Holy Spirit. In this is the complete procession of Deity. God has, selectively as yet, brought humanity unto Himself by the Holy Spirit on the basis of the Saviourship of the Son. The coming of the Holy Spirit caused the Word to be completed and formed an effective people as a present result. According to their spiritual development, and no limit has been set upon this, they know the truth and testify of it. God has committed the knowing and glorifying of His completed work as Father and Son unto the Holy Spirit, who takes up His abode in His people to do so.
This is the same truth as is set forth in John 17:21, “that they may be one in us that the world may believe that Thou hast sent Me”. The present is not the time when He is known universally as the Saviour of the world but the time when a testimony which can create faith is being borne to the work which He did as the Son, which qualifies Him to be its Saviour. He is now the Saviour effectively to those who believe in Him in the world.
The people of God are now to declare that, in the sending of the Son, the Father was fulfilling His purpose. This is the testimony they bear in their involvement in the realising of divine purpose. The Son performed and completed the work by which the whole world will be saved. It will be fully reconciled unto Himself redemptively. Creation is now estranged from God and has become purposeless and meaningless in itself. One, however, is now being testified who is giving it ultimate purpose. All that God purposed in creating the world can now be brought into being by this salvation resulting from the Father sending the Son.
The people of God, abiding in Himself by what He has established, should now be effectively declaring God’s purpose and message. This produces the effect God desires from the present dispensation of His dealings with humanity. God is now acquiring and equipping a people of ultimate spiritual significance.
Verse 15 “Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him, and he in God.”
As a result of the present testimony being borne in creation, certain men in it, the ‘whosoever’, confess divine truth. The testimony now being borne, in its due time, is that Jesus is the Son of God. A Man who was sent into the world in humanity, has now taken humanity back into glory. He is Jesus the Son of God. A Man now lives in the sphere outside creation in which previously God alone lived in absolute Deity. A Man, Jesus, has altered the character of eternity by entering into it in humanity. Before the ascension of Jesus, God alone inhabited eternity. It was God’s intention, however, to bring other beings into eternity with Himself. He has succeeded in fulfilling His declared intentions by Jesus, the Son of God.
This is the truth of there being a Man in divine glory who is being confessed on earth. This confession is an act complete in itself, a basic declaration of the new spiritual facts of life that He has thus opened up heaven, the new creation, for humanity. It is as the people of God get to know and declare these new facts of life that they render effective eternal service to God. Setting a Man, Jesus, in His presence in glory, is what God has wrought already for the ultimate salvation of the world. This is the message that the Holy Spirit has given to God’s people so that they might bear witness effectively to it in the world to produce faith. “Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God”.
Confession is the declaration that what God says in His Word is true. “The Word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth ….. that if thou shalt confess Jesus as Lord ……… thou shalt be saved”. God has, by the Holy Spirit, already put into our mouths the Word by which we are saved. We do not think it out for ourselves. His message of salvation is the finished product of divine activity for man’s salvation. His saving work takes the form of a message which can, if properly heard, produce faith. The true presentation of the Word of God to ‘whosoever’ and their subsequent true understanding of it, produces the faith which enlightens and saves.
To confess by this enabling of the Holy Spirit that Jesus is, not was, the Son of God, is to accept from God and rest before God in the virtue of the completed work this God-man has performed as Saviour. Jesus the Son of God has completed on earth a work by which He has Himself righteously become a Man in Deity. Confession of Him as Saviour signifies a realisation that this new form of human life and not the old is God’s answer to evil, to all the problems of man’s old defective nature. Postively also, this form of life is transmissible. It is receivable by faith made available to all by the message of God. What God has done in Jesus, the Man in glory, He can do by Jesus to all men when He is confessed as Saviour. The divine power, which operated to set Him into glory as Saviour, is received by the acceptance of such a Saviour to raise us up with Him there spiritually. The present spiritual effects resulting from such a confession of God’s Word by men is that, in such born-again humanity, God goes on abiding. They also go on abiding in God. In this the order is reversed from verse 13. Here it is God abiding in humanity first. That is, the divine nature is begotten and eternally abides in those who were originally born of the flesh, of human nature. God now continues to abide in those who possess eternal life in this present age in the Person of the Holy Spirit, as He did in the life and experience of the Lord Jesus. He has initiated a new age in the spiritual history of the world.
A further result is that man now goes on abiding in God in full unhindered fellowship, in the new spiritual sphere into which God has introduced him. He abides in the enjoyment of the things of God there. The Holy Spirit has revealed the things of God in the Word of God according to His divine ability. This is what Paul sets forth in 1 Cor.2:10-13. The Holy Spirit also gives us the wisdom to lay hold upon the things of God and thus abide in God. We have the knowledge and present enjoyment of the salvation which God is making available to the world. We are the proof of its effectiveness in the world now. Humanity has been caused to dwell in Deity and we know this experientially.
Verse 16 “And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love: and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.”
The children begotten by God’s salvation have believed and enjoy divine love in all its fulness. John is still speaking in this section about true christian knowledge, of effective Christianity. God’s love for the world, for His creation, has been manifested in the sending of His Son into it in the flesh. The Son has, moreover, entered into a glorified form of humanity to become a Saviour. As a result, He is acting effectively on earth as a Saviour already. He has introduced whosoever participates in His salvation, by its mere acceptance, into divine life and godliness in which we have known and believed the love God has to us. By Christianity, we have come to know and believe what we could not know or believe in by nature. This is that God is love and that He is acting in its full display toward us. What is contained in the christian system is determined wholly by divine love to men, full, free and unhindered.
God is love. Christianity is a system which contains in a knowable way the limitless love of God. It has nothing to do with flesh, human nature and what is in it. I t does not seek to bring out the best in man but it has brought out all that is in God for man’s benefit. It reproduces divine life and causes it to grow in humanity, the medium in which God has chosen to implant His own nature.
He that abides in the love abides in God and God in him. This sets forth that which comes from effective continuing in Christianity. The completion of the Word of God and what this produces in the world is the expression and manifestation of the love of God. We have to abide in this love and what it has produced in order that God might realise the present purpose for which He has acquired a people. God does not desire merely to have a nominal people. It is not merely a question of God getting as many candidates for heaven as He possibly can. There are other ways by which men will get to heaven than Christianity but there is no other way of obtaining eternal life here and now on earth for the realising of God’s present and ultimate intentions.
God desires a people who go on abiding in the love. They are the fruit of His love and go on to appreciate it in all its fulness. This is similar truth to what Paul sets before the family of God in Ephesus, in chapter 3:16-20. We may be made strong by divine provision to fully appreciate the love of the Christ and the knowledge of God which passes knowledge. This is possible because God is able to do exceeding abundantly above all we can ask or even think possible.
Man in effective, purposeful Christianity goes on dwelling in the love, in what God has made Himself known to be, by the manifestation of the Lord Jesus and by the work of the Holy Spirit. He then effectively goes on abiding in God and the new nature continues in him so as to bear much fruit. The order of abiding is again reversed to that which is found in the previous verse. The primary thing here is man abiding in God and then comes the effective results produced from this ideal spiritual state of affairs – God abiding in man on earth.
John sets forth the same subject in his gospel in chapter 15. That has also to do with abiding and its subsequent fruitfulness for divine purposes. Christianity is, according to divine intention, the present effective form which divine activity takes in the world to realise the ultimate objectives God had in mind when He created. By Christianity, we are elevated spiritually into the sphere in which God lives and acts that we might act there also to produce fruit. We should develop spiritually and become fruitful in the knowledge of God.
Verse 17 “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.”
Christianity is a system in which the love of God is manifested toward us (verse 9), perfected in us (verse 12) and perfected with us (verse 17). In this aspect of Christianity, perfect love is presented as being with us while we are still on earth. This determines the character of the place we occupy ideally in this world. God has acquired a people for Himself who are called to be effective in a creation in which the power of evil and divine judgment still act. He sends forth this people into the world officially in connection and association with His perfected love. God has prevailed and will hence prevail universally by His love, not merely by the exercise of His direct power.
So perfect is the love of God with us that we may have boldness in the day of judgment. The spiritual issues raised in creation are now being brought to their ultimate conclusion. We are alive in a world which is declared to be under the judgment of God. Judgment will come at the completion of God’s present purpose, when He has secured the means of salvation and blessing for the world. He is now perfecting His people by the love already perfectly present with them. We have already such confidence, even in knowing about the coming judgment, that we may have boldness as to the part we have now to play in divine purpose. God is successfully bringing all the issues of good and evil to an end in creation, in that He is acquiring the means for establishing blessing by the Saviour of the world. The world is heading for God’s definitive judgment, which will usher in the golden age when all He purposed for the world will be fully realised. The present time is characterised for us by confidence and boldness and not by the fear of coming judgment. All judgment for us has passed, for we are already perfected in love. “There is no judgment to them that are in Christ Jesus”.
Our place in the world and in God’s ultimate scheme of things is characterised for us by Christ and the state of glory in which He is now found. As He is, so are we in the world. Here it is not a question of our being made like Him when we see Him: that has already been dealt with in chapter 3:2. We have already been set by God in this world so as to live effectively in knowing what His purpose is and what our part is in the realising of it. Christ has been set by God in glory to further His divine purpose on earth. We are set on earth, as He is in glory, to be effective in this respect. We may now have boldness in our occupation of the place God has now set us into on earth despite its responsibility. Christ has gone through this world and entered into glory, procuring eternal salvation for us in the process. We are already caused by God to participate in this world-salvation He has procured. We are ‘as He is’ and we are this in the world. We share His glory and are set in the world as already participating in it.
Verse 18 “There is no fear in love: but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment: He that feareth is not made perfect in love.”
Perfect love is viewed as being with us on earth. This is the power with us by which divine purpose will be realised by us. There is no fear in this love, for it is God’s love and has nothing to do with nature. Natural love is a mixture of affections and cannot be or become, in the very nature of things, pure toward God. The purpose of the commandment that man should ‘love God with all his heart and soul’ was to manifest the fact that this is impossible by nature. When divine love is present and active, it acts only in its purity. God’s love does not adapt itself to the conditions it finds when it expresses itself. It does not draw back when it finds resistance but overcomes it. Fear of what opposes it does not operate in divine love. By it, God is inexorably achieving His purpose, acquiring the objects and objectives He desires.
John then speaks of the present operation of divine love with us on earth. The effect of such love is to cast out fear from those who receive it. Fear is the opposite of love and arises in man when he does not know how he will achieve his desired ends. Divine love unmixed by fear was perfectly embodied in Christ in the flesh and so He fully revealed God. Divine love also acts with us in the world in that we now understand the fulness of this revelation. Perfect love with us enables us to do perfect work for God.
There are difficulties which operate against the people of God in their present service. There is fear and it has torment. Spiritual fear may still be produced in the children of God if they do not know what they are supposed to accomplish for God on earth or how they are to go about it. We are called to be God’s responsible people and there is fear and torment when spiritual truth, the product of divine love given for our success, is not apprehended.
So much religion, which insists on absolute moral purity as a present attainable ideal, springs from the emotion of fear. This is particularly fear of the judgment which it is believed God will bring down on those who commit impurity, as assessed by the natural or social conscience or from a naturalistic, literal interpretation of the Word of God. Fear produces a religion of guilt in which human nature is important. Divine love rejects human nature from any place in the outworking of divine purpose. “He that feareth has not been made perfect in love”. Exponents of the christian system who still act in fear, in the power of the flesh which always finds external difficulties in the way, have not yet fully matured spiritually so as to become fully effective for God. Divine love is now perfected with us in order that we might be made perfect for Him. It is not the love, the purposeful activity of God in us, that is being spoken of here but our being in it. We are called to be perfect in the love.
The love of God has produced a complete, perfect revelation of God so that we can lay hold upon it in its perfection. The Word of God produces divine life, yet undeveloped divine life in us is not the present perfecting of divine love in us, or of us. The new life produced, grows under the influence of unhindered divine love acting in the family between the various members. It produces spirituality. A perfect full-grown son, or a perfect family, is one in whom the love of God operates in their practice of Christianity. They are governed by the fully revealed and fully appreciated truth of God and not by man’s natural ability or inability to distinguish between good and evil.
Verse 19 “We love Him, because he first loved us.”
This is the characteristic spiritual fact by which we will understand our present function in Christianity. What has resulted on earth in the present stage of the evolution of divine purpose is a people on earth who not only live in divine life but who go on loving God with divine love. This returns effectively to Him as the result of His bestowal of it in the first place.
We do not love Him because we originally possessed a nature which could love the God of revelation. We love Him because of the new provision and arrangements He has made for those involved in His purpose. When no love existed for Himself and His purpose in creation, God Himself intervened and manifested His love. This produced a Saviour for us who saves us out of our natural standing and state before God. Such a Saviour and His salvation, produces and matures a new life in us which is responsive to God in a purposeful way. God is now loved on earth by men who increasingly come to know Him more fully according to His Word.
Verse 20 “If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?”
John then speaks of what we profess in Christianity – “if anyone say”. We are called upon to bear witness to the revealed truth. External christian service consists in His people manifestly going on loving the God of revelation on earth. We say we are concerned with this. The proof and outworking of this is, however, in our going on loving the brethren. The Word of God is now producing the people of God for God. In this, the upbuilding of the spiritual ideal, lies our work also.
If we say we love God, that is, if we profess to be practising Christianity aright and hate our brethren, we are liars. We have received divine truth and claim to be governed by it. The reality of our claim is substantiated if we love by divine love the brethren with whom we are joined to make a family of God. Hating our brother would signify our refusal to live for his spiritual profit. It is a lie against revealed truth if we do not devote ourselves to the spiritual welfare and upbuilding of the family. God has given to each of us the means, and will develop in each of us the ability, to establish spiritual reality. We will then do effective work for Him and ultimately for the blessing of humanity. If the flesh, human nature with its social affections, is the power by which we practise Christianity, then we are liars. Our Christianity is built upon a lie.
During the present stage in the evolution of divine purpose we are given the things of God, the Word of the truth, to handle for mutual growth. The brethren whom we now see, for as yet we have not seen the Lord, form the objects toward whom divine activity in us is to be directed. God wants a spiritually matured people to result for Him from the present time and this is how He is going to get it. Love for the local assembly is the same thing as love for God. It is the present manifestation of divine love whereby it produces spiritual effects, a community who get to know the Word of God fully. They are not presented by John as being in need of social, worldly benefits but all the wealth that the love of God has already supplied is presented as being for them. The love of God has resulted in all His truth, the completed Word, being given for His own. The love of God still acts in those who make this truth, truth in its inward parts, available to the brethren.
Verse 21 “And this commandment have we from Him, That he who loveth God love his brother also.”
This is the commandment which the Lord Jesus gave to the apostles to govern their spiritual life and service, “that he who loveth God love his brother also”. God was fully manifested in humanity and performed a work in it so that man might love God and love those begotten of Him.
Popular ‘Christianity’ has become a religion which seeks to cause natural man to love his fellow-man, or christians to love their fellow-men. This form of Christianity is a lie. We should of course love our fellow human-beings anyway, inasmuch as it is within each person to do so. This, however, is not the fulness of Christianity nor can perfection be arrived at in this way because of the inherent imperfections of human nature. The trouble with natural, fleshly ‘Christianity’, viewed as a religion amongst other religions, is that it blinds its adherents and exponents to spiritual realities. They see Adam, the old man, where they should see Christ and the new sort of humanity.
Christianity has to do with loving God, the God of revelation. Human love cannot do this. Divine love in us cannot be brought to bear upon our fellow-men directly for they have not the faculties capable of seeing it when it is manifested. They did not see Deity at work in Christ and cannot see God at work in His Word, for they can only receive the letter. Only those who possess the divine nature are capable of knowing the truth of God as it is contained in His Word. Natural man, like Pilate, can only ask, ‘What is truth?’ The multitude of books setting forth man’s opinions about what inspiration is testifies to this. The doctrine of the universal fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man, becoming almost universally believed and practised for Christianity, shows how the divine system has been corrupted by natural men. It manifests the inability of the natural man to receive the things of the Spirit of God.