1 John 3

¹¹ For this is the message that you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. ¹² We should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous. ¹³ Do not be surprised, brothers, that the world hates you. ¹⁴ We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers. Whoever does not love abides in death. ¹⁵ Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him. ¹⁶ By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. ¹⁷ But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him? ¹⁸ Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth. ¹⁹ By this we shall know that we are of the truth and reassure our heart before him; ²⁰ for whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything. ²¹ Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God; ²² and whatever we ask we receive from him, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him. ²³ And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us. ²⁴ Whoever keeps his commandments abides in God, and God in him. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit whom he has given us.

No idea lends itself more to tautology and sentimentality and rhetorical hyperbole than “love.” We might say that our culture is in love with love. I suppose the notion of love is used so pervasively and so carelessly in our culture simply because it is so unbelievably powerful, and powerful things tend to overwhelm and intoxicate. After all, since “God is love” (1 John 4:8), and since the human heart instinctively yearns for God, it is not all that surprising that the world would, in its blind reaching for God, attempt to deify love itself. This manifests itself in what we just mentioned: love as the end-all and be-all of life. Despite our culture’s sloppy handling of the idea, its obsession with love points to a fundamental truth: we are loved and are made to love.

God is love and the love of God will one day win out. It will not be obscured by the hatred of the devil and the fallen world forever. The love of God will win and the love of God is even now winning where it is truly practiced and proclaimed.

I am drawn to Andrew Peterson’s wonderful song, “After the Last Tear Falls.” It captures this idea of the ultimate victory of love perfectly.

After the last tear falls

After the last secret’s told

After the last bullet tears through flesh and bone

After the last child starves

And the last girl walks the boulevard

After the last year that’s just too hard

There is love

Love, love, love

There is love

Love, love, love

There is love

After the last disgrace

After the last lie to save some face

After the last brutal jab from a poison tongue

After the last dirty politician

After the last meal down at the mission

After the last lonely night in prison

There is love

Love, love, love

There is love

Love, love, love

There is love

And in the end, the end is

Oceans and oceans

Of love and love again

We’ll see how the tears that have fallen

Were caught in the palms

Of the Giver of love and the Lover of all

And we’ll look back on these tears as old tales

‘Cause after the last plan fails

After the last siren wails

After the last young husband sails off to join the war

After the last “this marriage is over”

After the last young girl’s innocence is stolen

After the last years of silence that won’t let a heart open

There is love

Love, love, love

There is love

And in the end, the end is

Oceans and oceans

Of love and love again

We’ll see how the tears that have fallen

Were caught in the palms

Of the Giver of love and the Lover of all

And we’ll look back on these tears as old tales

‘Cause after the last tear falls

There is love

Yes, the love of God, manifested definitively in the person and work of Jesus, will one day win out. But one of the things John tells us in 1 John is that love must begin to win even now. In 1 John 3:11-24 we have a text that makes precisely this point. It does so in a number of different ways, hitting the reader from numerous angles with the need for and the significance of love.

Love is the eternal commandment. (v.11)

John begins by noting that the command to love is foundational.

¹¹ For this is the message that you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another.

Edward McDowell sees this reference to “the beginning” as a statement that the “new commandment belonged to the primitive teaching” and points specifically to Jesus’ words in John 13:34: “that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.”[1]

That is so, but we also note that John used the phrase “the beginning” in John 1:1 (“In the beginning was the word…”) as a clear parallel with Genesis 1:1 and likely does the same thing in 1 John 1:1 (“That which was from the beginning…”). There are reasons, then, to think that John is not merely pointing back to the teachings of the incarnate Christ but further back to the beginning in the sense of Genesis 1:1.

Love is foundational. Love rests in the very heart of God and is the impetus behind what we call the missio Dei, the mission of God. This is made clear in the beginning of John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son…” The Father’s love led the Father to give and the Father’s love enables the world to receive.

The supremacy of love is expressed most beautifully by Paul in the famous thirteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians.

¹ If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. ² And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. ³ If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. ⁴ Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant ⁵ or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; ⁶ it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. ⁷ Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. ⁸ Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. ⁹ For we know in part and we prophesy in part, ¹⁰ but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. ¹¹ When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. ¹² For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. ¹³ So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Love, we might say, is the eternal commandment. It is primary and orients all the other commandments.

Wickedness is corrosive to love. (v.12-13)

We love because we are loved and, in so loving and being loved, we are enabled to live rightly and well. When we turn from righteousness, however, love is corroded by the acid of hate and we become Cain.

¹² We should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous. ¹³ Do not be surprised, brothers, that the world hates you.

The opposite of loving is hating. Love brings peace. Hatred brings murder. Had Cain allowed love to shout down hatred, Abel would not have been slain. Furthermore, John tells us that the world, mired in darkness, will hate us since we are bound by and to the love of God in Christ.

As a young man in Germany, J. Heinrich Arnold once wandered into a pro-Nazi rally. What he saw there horrified him. Here is his grandson’s description:

Fulda, January 30, 1933 As night fell on the day Hitler took office, the quiet town of Fulda became feverish. Heiner, who had been watching a throng gathering in the street below his window, decided to go out and explore. He walked into the heart of the city, toward the main square that spread below the cathedral. Catholicism defined Fulda’s whole character, as it had for hundreds of years, even through the Reformation, when the rest of this region turned Protestant. Since then, it had guarded against every heresy outside its gates, including Nazism. When Hitler first began his march to power, the people of Fulda had despised him as a demagogue and a washerwoman’s son. Nazi uniforms had been banned from the streets. But tonight squads of brown and black-shirted paramilitaries were marching, singing, and carrying torches like a triumphant army in enemy territory. Which is what they were – SA and SS troops from out of town. In Boniface Square, they rigged up a stage and sound system. “Repent!” the man at the podium was bellowing as Heiner approached. His voice ricocheted back and forth between the bishop’s castle and the cathedral. “Repent and join the National Socialist Party now, while Hitler is still merciful! Have you opposed us? Now is your hour of grace! Watch out, because the day of judgment is near!” Columns of Nazis screamed back their approval like amens and brandished their swastika-emblazoned flags. They were winning converts. A stream of people was flowing into the town hall where a meeting was in progress. Heiner followed them, half repulsed, half fascinated. Inside, three rows of black-clad men were arrayed below the podium, wearing the skull-and-crossbones of the Death’s Head SS. The speaker behind it was employing the same revival-tent style as his comrade outside. “Repent! Come on your knees to Hitler! The Thousand-Year Kingdom is here!” Except for the men in uniform, few in the hall were card-carrying Nazis. But they must have long shared a silent approval of Hitler’s goals. Now they roared with enthusiasm as the speaker denounced Social Democracy, the humiliation of Versailles, and the evil of world Jewry. They stamped and clapped and sang and grew tearful. When the speaker had lashed the crowd into a frenzy, a cluster of men broke into song. It was the old hymn to the dishonored glories of imperial Germany: Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles! The people sobbed in ecstasy, rising to their feet as one body. Only Heiner remained sitting. The oneness of the crowd, so raw and passionate, stirred him even as it filled him with horror. “Here are people ready to die for a cause,” he thought. “Maybe they’re more ready to sacrifice themselves than I am. If only they were on the side of love! The early Christian martyrs died for love. This crowd will die for hate.”[2]

Wickedness is corrosive to love. It makes us martyrs to hate. We must reject the path of Cain and choose love instead.

Love is the confirmation of our conversions. (v.14a)

Love is the great confirmation that we have been saved, that we have been born again.

^14a We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers.

“The brothers” is a telling statement. John is speaking here of the Church. If we love our fellow Christian, we have evidence that we are born again. This love is not situated in mere humanitarian concern but rather in the shared experience of being the body of Christ together. To love “the brothers” is to be concerned about those who are in Christ as one who is likewise in Christ.

This is what is so dastardly about any group calling itself a church that does not love those who are in Christ. On the other hand, this is what is so very attractive about a church that loves. Warren Wiersbe has recounted this well-known story from D.L. Moody:

            When D.L. Moody was building his great Sunday School in Chicago, children came to him from everywhere. They often passed by other churches and Sunday Schools to be with Mr. Moody. When asked why he walked so far to attend Moody’s Sunday School, one boy replied, “Because they love a fella over there.”[3]

“Because they love a fella over there” must be said of any church claiming the name of Christ. On the other hand, if we do not love we should not pretend to be the church. Commenting on our passage, the Venerable Bede wrote, “Let no one who is preparing death traps for the members of Christ, no one who is still abiding in death, presume to approach the holy mysteries of life, as if prepared to receive them.”[4] By “the holy mysteries” he meant communion. If you do not love your fellow Christian, if, to use Bede’s terminology, you are “preparing death traps for the members of Christ,” do not approach the Lord’s Supper table and act as if you care.

We can extend this to any and all churchly activities. If we do not love the body of Christ then we do not love Christ.

To reject love is to die and to kill. (v.14b-15)

Furthermore, to reject love is both to die and to kill.

^14b Whoever does not love abides in death. ¹⁵ Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.

McDowell notes that “whoever does not love” can be translated “the non-lover.”[5] So “the non-lover” occupies two states: that of the killed and that of the killer. He “abides in death” and he is “a murderer.”

John is simply repeating what Jesus said in a different form in Matthew 5.

²¹ “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ ²² But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire.

To fail or refuse to love is to “abide in death” in that death is the only end of those who will not love. Love is life, and to fail to give it is to reveal that your home is of and among the dead. To traffic in hatred or indifference is to traffic in the things of death.

Augustine expertly combined the ideas of the non-lover as both killed and killer. “Whoever hates is a murderer,” wrote Augustine. “You may not have prepared any poison or committed a crime. You have only hated, and in doing so, you have killed yourself first of all.”[6] Put in these terms, we might say that hatred is both manslaughter and suicide. It seeks to kill another but it kills the one who hates first of all.

The cross enables knowledge of love and enactment of love. (v.16)

How, then, are we to love? Is there a vision of love that is able to overpower our instinctive desire to hate?

¹⁶ By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.

John once again points to the cross as the central act that enables us to know what love is and to live it out. The cross of Jesus is “how we know love.” “Greater love has no one than this,” said Jesus in John 15:13, “that someone lay down his life for his friends.” Christ Himself pointed to His coming embrace of the cross as the ultimate expression of love.

In Michael Card’s song, “Why?” he sings, “Why did they nail His feet and hands? His love would have held him there.” It is a powerful thought and a true one. The cross is the definitive expression of the love of God.

Our failure to act in love demonstrates our failure to possess love. (v.17-22)

Continuing with the cross as our ultimate example, we must also say that true love necessarily demonstrates its presence through acts of love.

¹⁷ But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him? ¹⁸ Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth. ¹⁹ By this we shall know that we are of the truth and reassure our heart before him; ²⁰ for whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything. ²¹ Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God; ²² and whatever we ask we receive from him, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him.

Put another way, our failure to act in love demonstrates our failure to possess love.

Every time an abusive husband says “I love you” to a battered wife it is an expression of hellish insanity. Love does not abuse. Love heals and helps and protects and nourishes.

Every time a neglectful parent says “I love you” to their child they pass on the fundamental incongruity of word and action and hurt the child yet further. Love does not neglect.

Every time a church says “I love you” to hurting people they ignore and do not help, the world walks further away from Jesus.

Love does not, John tells us, turn a blind eye to a “brother in need.” In Luke 10, Jesus pressed this point home powerfully in the parable of the good Samaritan.

³⁰ Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. ³¹ Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. ³² So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. ³³ But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. ³⁴ He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. ³⁵ And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ ³⁶ Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” ³⁷ He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesus said to him, “You go, and do likewise.”

The failure to move toward the ones we profess to love and the failure to demonstrate our love leads to self-condemnation if we claim to be in Christ. The love we claim to have must be love in action, a love that walks and moves and reaches and heals and helps. Outside of such action, our love is merely verbal, which is not love at all.

Love is evidence of abiding in the Triune God. (v.23-24)

Finally, love is evidence of our abiding in the Triune God.

²³ And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us. ²⁴ Whoever keeps his commandments abides in God, and God in him. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit whom he has given us.

John concludes 1 John 3 with a profoundly beautiful Trinitarian statement.

• “we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ”
• “Whoever keeps his commandments abides in God, and God in him.”
• “we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit whom he has given us”

This anchoring of the discussion of the necessity of love in the Trinity is significant. Jesus did the same in the priestly prayer of John 17.

²⁰ “I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, ²¹ that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. ²² The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, ²³ I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. ²⁴ Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. ²⁵ O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know that you have sent me. ²⁶ I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.”

The Trinity is therefore the model of love that we should have one for another. The love that exists between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is a demonstration and a model for the love that must exist among us. Nor is it a mere demonstration, as if at a distance. Rather, the inter-Trinitarian love is the love that enables us to love each other and the world.   For this reason, those who gather in the name of the triune God must, if they are to be faithful, model the love that is both demonstrated and given, the empowering love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Church should display a love that confounds the world, including the world’s skepticism.

Fred Craddock has given an example of this in the story of his own father.

My mother took us to church and Sunday school; my father didn’t go. He complained about Sunday dinner being late when she came home. Sometimes the preacher would call, and my father would say, “I know what the church wants. Church doesn’t care about me. Church wants another name, another pledge, another name, another pledge. Right? Isn’t that the name of it? Another name, another pledge.” That’s what he always said.

            Sometimes we’d have a revival. Pastor would bring the evangelist and say to the evangelist, “There’s one now, sic him, get him, get him,” and my father would say the same thing. Every time, my mother in the kitchen, always nervous, in fear of flaring tempers, of somebody being hurt. And always my father said, “The church doesn’t care about me. The church wants another name and another pledge.” I guess I heard it a thousand times.

            One time he didn’t say it. He was in the veteran’s hospital, and he was down to seventy-three pounds. They’d taken out his throat, and said, “It’s too late.” They put in a metal tube, and X rays burned him to pieces. I flew in to see him. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t eat. I look around the room, potted plants and cut flowers on all the windowsills, a stack of cards twenty inches deep beside his bed. And even that tray where they put food, if you can eat, on that was a flower. And all the flowers beside the bed, every card, every blossom, were from persons or groups from the church.

            He saw me read a card. He could not speak, so he took a Kleenex box and wrote on the side of it a line from Shakespeare. If he had not written this line, I would not tell you this story. He wrote: “In this harsh world, draw your breath in pain to tell my story.”

            “I said, “What is your story, Daddy?”

            And he wrote, “I was wrong.”[7]

May a skeptical and weary world be proven wrong by the love of the people of God. It is primarily now through God’s people that the love of Christ is manifest and made known. May we love so overwhelmingly that the world sets aside its skepticism and says, “I was wrong.”

 

[1] Edward A. McDowell, “1-2-3 John.” The Broadman Bible Commentary. Gen. Ed., Clifton J. Allen. Vol. 12 (Nashville, TN: Broadman Press, 1972), p.210.

[2] Mommsen, Peter (2015-04-30). Homage to a Broken Man: The Life of J. Heinrich Arnold – A true story of faith, forgiveness, sacrifice, and community (p. 96). Plough Publishing House. Kindle Edition.

[3] Warren Wiersbe, The Bible Exposition Commentary. Vol. I (Colorado Springs, CO: David C. Cook, 2001), p.132.

[4] Gerald Bray, ed., James, 1-2 Peter, 1-3 John, Jude. Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. Gen. Ed., Thomas C. Oden. New Testament, Vol. XI (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), p.202.

[5] Edward A. McDowell, p.211.

[6] Gerald Bray, ed., p.203.

[7] Fred Craddock. Craddock Stories (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2001), p.14.