Obedience the Proof of Fellowship. Here John repeats in a positive way the teaching of the previous section. Conduct cannot be, as the false teachers claimed, a matter of indifference, for true knowledge of God implies moral affinity to Him, i.e. obedience to His commandments and an attempt to imitate Christ. I know Him was the watchword of the false teachers, their reference being to an esoteric and barren intellectualism. But John uses know in its large Biblical sense as denoting the intimacy of moral fellowship and affection between man and God. Hence by its very nature knowledge involved for man an effort to obey God's will and to imitate His spirit, religion which came short of this being unreal and false.
1 John 2:3. Better, hereby we come to know that, etc. Comparison with 1 John 2:6 shows that to know God and to be in Him are parallel expressions, both denoting vital fellowship, and that to heed Christ's commandments and to walk even as he walked are two ways of stating the same thing, Christ's life being an embodiment of His precepts.
1 John 2:5. been perfected: become mature, reached perfect expression. the love of God: i.e. our love to God; the teaching is (in harmony with John 14:15; John 14:21; John 14:23) that the proof of love is obedience.
1 John 2:7-11. The mention of Christ's commandments leads John to recall specially Christ's new commandment of love (John 13:34). In a sense it was no longer new since it had been the property of the Church from the beginning. Yet it was new: in Christ, because He had made its standard to be that of His own love; in His disciples, as they gradually realised their duty in the growing light of the Gospel. A man who claimed special illumination and yet was without love for his brother was living in spiritual darkness.
1 John 2:7. from the beginning: either of the Church, the reference then being to John 13:34; or, preferably, of their own religious life when they heard it in the teaching given to them.
1 John 2:8. which. you: this difficult expression refers to the newness of the commandment. In a sense the commandment was not new even when Christ uttered it, for love to neighbours had been enjoined in the OT (Leviticus 19:18). Yet Jesus in act and word gave that love a new depth and range, and His followers, in the fresh demands which the commandment made and their growing realisation of its meaning, also found it new.
1 John 2:9 a. A reference, like 1 John 2:4 *, to the special illumination claimed by the false teachers. brother here and in 1 Jn. generally probably means no more than fellow-Christian. John says nothing of the duty of Christians to love non-Christians.