1 John 4:10-12 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Herein is love Worthy of our highest admiration; not that we loved God First; for we were, on the contrary, in a state of enmity to him, in which, if we had remained unsolicited and untouched by his love and grace, we should have persisted and perished; but that he loved us First, (1 John 4:19,) without any merit or motive in us to induce him to do it; and, in his boundless compassion to our necessities and miseries; sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins That is, to make atonement to his injured justice for them by offering himself as a sacrifice, and so to introduce us into his favour on honourable terms. If God so loved us With such a transcendent, free, and inconceivable love; we ought also to love one another In imitation of his divine example, from a sense of the happy state into which we are brought, and in gratitude to him for so inestimable a favour. And it is of the greater importance that we should do this, because it is absolutely necessary in order to our having fellowship with him. For no man hath seen God at any time Nor indeed can see him, since he is in his own nature invisible; nor can any one have any knowledge of him, or intercourse with him by his senses, or any information concerning his will and the way of pleasing him by any visible appearance of him, or converse with him; yet, from what his only-begotten Son hath taught us, we know that if we love one another In consequence of first loving him; God dwelleth μενει, abideth, in us This is treated of 1 John 4:13-16; and his love is perfected Has its full effect; in us This is treated of 1 John 4:17-19.