Love Is Supreme
LOVE IS SUPREME
1 JOHN 4:1-12
People cannot see God, but at least in our love they can see some expression of him.
At the end of chapter 3, John mentioned the Holy Spirit for the first time, even though he is implicit in a passage like 2:20. The reason immediately becomes obvious. Then as now there were those who preferred the “gifts of the Spirit” to the more costly “fruit of the Spirit.” They might not show much love, but they did display spiritual gifts, in this case prophetic (4:1). John did not deny the fact of spirit activity, for there are spirits other than the Holy Spirit (4:1). The acknowledgment of the incarnation was a sure test (4:2), for apparently it had brought the spirits in a special way under the control of the name of Jesus Christ (Mark 16:17; Acts 19:13). “The spirit of antichrist” (4:3): see 2:18. Stress on these phenomena, even if they are superficially harmless and orthodox, deflects attention from Christ. Their attractiveness is that “they are of the world” (4:5), ie they appeal to our natural side. Ultimately, we may know the validity of a teacher’s message by those whom they attract (4:6).
John then dismisses these people by returning to the subject of love, the supreme nature of which remains absolute (see 1 Corinthians 13:1-3), and it is the one certain test of a person’s standing before God. Such love is always seen in action: the love of God is characterized by God’s sending (4:9; see also John 3:16). God’s love is always prior and basic (4:10). One of the basic emphases in Hosea lies here. Since God had included all Israel in his covenant love, for one Israelite to wrong another was to deny the relation of covenant love that God had set up. “Love me, love my dog” is a down-to-earth version of what is being stressed here.
It goes further. “No one has ever seen God” (4:12): we know him by what he has done for us, above all in Jesus Christ, in whom he became visible, and by what he has worked in other people. So long as our love toward God is a matter of feelings toward him, or even expressed in the living of a moral life, it is a static love. Once it shows itself in action toward those whom God has loved, it “is perfected in us.”