CRITICAL AND EXEGETICAL NOTES
1 John 4:7.—The previous verses are in some sense an “aside.” The apostle now resumes his proper theme. His main truth is this—Love is the mark of the children of God, who is love. Love to God is a delusion if it does not find expression in love toward one another as brethren. And love of the brethren is a sure test of our having the Spirit of God, for the spirit of antichrist is a self-seeking and self-serving spirit. “Just as it severs the Divine from the human in Christ, so it severs Divine love from human conduct in man.” Love to one another may be recognised as a gift of the Spirit of God, an “effluence from the very being of God.” Born.—Better, “begotten.” Knoweth God.—As one only can know by sharing the same nature.
1 John 4:8. Knoweth not.—Better, “can never have known”; “hath never known.” God is love.— 1 John 1:5. Not God loves, which is true, but far short of the truth that John expresses. The very essence of God is His going outside Himself, and living in others, in the service of others.
1 John 4:9. Manifested.—Jesus manifests what God is, and what God does. St. John here speaks of what God does. R.V. renders, “Herein was the love of God manifested in us,” or “in our case.” “Manifested” is one of St. John’s favourite words. It means, “became such that it could be known or apprehended by man.” We see the love in a gift which the love has made. Only begotten.—Though we too are begotten of God, there must be a sense in which Christ’s relationship is unique, and this is expressed by the term “only begotten.” μονογενής as applied to Christ is St. John’s peculiar term. Live through Him.—“Enjoy a blessed fellowship with God, being delivered from that state of estrangement and alienation which is virtually death.” Live applies to the life of the soul, which is the man.
1 John 4:10. Propitiation.—ἱλασμόν (1 John 2:2, and not elsewhere in the New Testament). For the idea St. John had, see the notes on the previous passage.
1 John 4:12. Seen God.—“We cannot contemplate the incomprehensible essence of the Deity by a direct gaze.” God can be seen only in Christ (John 1:18). His love is perfected,—I.e. attains just what it wants to attain. Let that love of God which we apprehend in Christ work its full work, and it will be sure to make us “love the brethren.”
1 John 4:13. Of His Spirit.—Contrasted with those mentioned in the early verses, who professed to have the Spirit, but whose self-seeking tone, and self-glorifying teachings, plainly showed that it was not the Spirit of God.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— 1 John 4:7-14
The Fatherly Love carries with it Brotherly Love.—What may possibly have been in St. John’s mind is the error of assuming a difference between the love that we have for God and the love that we have one for another. And that is an error which is often secretly cherished, though it gains no open expression, and would indeed be ashamed to show itself to the light. How often our feeling is this—“We cannot be expected to love other people just as we love God.” But it may properly be maintained that there can be no varieties in love. There can be differences in quality and degree, but not in kind. There must be relation to its object, but love can never be anything but just itself. Whether it go out to God, or go out to our brother, it is just the same thing—love. Even as in family life, there can be nothing but just the family love. It goes out to the father and mother, or to the brothers and sisters, using a variety of signs and expressions, but it can never be anything but itself; and it is not itself if it is limited to the parents, or limited to the brothers. And St. John affirms that love is not love when it is set only upon God the Father, and restrained from our fellow-men, our brothers. “He that loveth not knoweth not God.” The point of connection in St. John’s mind between this and the preceding section may be found in the fact that false doctrine is always self-centred, self-serving, and consequently tends to separate men from their fellows. You cannot love your fellows, if you only want to make a gain of them. False teachers boasted much about love to God, but they wholly failed under the test of love to men. Dr. Plummer says: “The antichristian spirit is a selfish one; it makes self, i.e. one’s own intellect and one’s own interest, the measure of all things. Just as it severs the Divine from the human in Christ, so it severs Divine love from human conduct in man. ‘Beloved, let us do far otherwise. Let us love one another.’ For the third and last time in this epistle the apostle introduces the subject of brotherly love.
1. It was introduced as a consequence and sign of walking in the light (1 John 2:7-11). Next, 2, it was introduced as a special form of righteousness and mark of God’s children (1 John 3:10-18).
3. Here it appears as a gift of the Spirit of God, a contrast to the antichristian spirit, and above all as an effluence from the very being of God.” From a careful examination of the verses we gather, that St. John is endeavouring to impress the truth that profession of love can be of no avail, it must find fitting and adequate expression in the relations of every-day life. Even God’s love must be manifested, in order to be in any sense an effective power on men.
I. Abstract love in God is ineffective.—“God is love.” There the truth stands. It is full and clear to view. It is sublime, but it is unattainable. If that be all, if we only know some absolute and abstract fact concerning the intimate nature of God, then it is really nothing to us. It is high; we cannot attain unto it. If the philosophers can do something with it, we commonplace, every-day men and women cannot.
II. Manifested love is persuasion and power (1 John 4:9-10).—God’s love has found expression in the most persuasive of all ways—by a gift, and a gift which involved an extreme self-sacrifice; and moreover by a gift which so precisely meets our needs that it carries the persuasion of His love right into our hearts. (Propitiation for our sins.) We feel the love through the manifestation and expression, and we can feel it in no other way.
III. Sentimental love in man is worthless, and even mischievous.—This is really the point which St. John is enforcing. (Compare James 2:14-16.) Characteristic of uninspired teaching is fine sentiment about society and brotherhood; and men can be easily carried away by exaggerated and helpless sentiment. They can think themselves good because they have uttered good-sounding phrases.
IV. Practical love towards man alone honours God, and does God’s work.—To express this in the line of St. John’s thoughts. The love must be manifested: it must find its gift; and its gift must carry its self-sacrifice unto the uttermost.
SUGGESTIVE NOTES AND SERMON SKETCHES
1 John 4:7. To love is the Sign of the New Birth.—“And every one that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth God.” There is physical or natural life; there is moral life; and there is spiritual or Divine life. The sign of physical life is movement. There is a sign indicating the existence of a moral being, a being who can come into relations with other beings. There is a sign of moral life. It is the power to love, to go outside oneself and take on our own heart the concern of another. And there is a sign of the yet higher, spiritual life; and since that life is kin with the moral life the sign is the same for it. It is love; but it is the going outside ourselves to lose ourselves in God. You may know that a man is begotten to the higher, spiritual, Divine life, if you can see that the supreme, the master principle and persuasion of his life is love to God. And it may further be said that the love gauges the life. The fuller the life, the intenser the love, the more ennobling and sanctifying the power of the love.
Love implies Insight of the Highest Spiritual Things.—“And knoweth God.” Knowing depends on two things—on the thing known, and on the person knowing. We know different things in different ways. Things are different to different persons. There is a particular way in which God alone can be known, and in which alone high, spiritual things can be known. They cannot be known by any effort of the intellect alone. And the intellect by itself is not the man. They can be known only through the affections, and their use of the intellectual powers. God, and everything kin with Him, is “spiritually discerned.” And it is not everybody who can know God; only the man whose affections, being spiritually quickened, in a natural way turn to God, and are fully open and receptive to the manifestations and evidences of Himself that God may be pleased to give.
Born of God.—Theologians and others have, I think, assumed that the doctrine of the birth from above is more inscrutably mysterious than it is, and have therefore unwarrantably obscured Christ’s truth. It is, I admit, under any view of it, a “great mystery of godliness”; yet it is not altogether without its parallel in every-day life. Every good son is born again. A child is first, by no choice of his own, born into the family of a good man. So far he is a son by nature only; he may grow up to be dissatisfied with his father’s mode of life, and with the law of his father’s house. He may also adopt a course of action so widely divergent from the father’s, that the natural bond between them shall serve only to reveal the vast and widening gulf of character that separates them, and similarity of feature shall only serve to give painful emphasis to the utter dissimilarity of disposition. The son is now a son in form only—in all things else a foreigner. To become truly a son he must be born again—must of his own choice accept as his father the parent Nature gave him, and must by his own love and conduct make the house in which Providence placed him a home. No parent is truly and fully a father till he is adopted by his own child. To be fully “born of God” is for the soul, being filled with the Holy Spirit, to acknowledge God’s fatherly authority, accept God’s law, live His life, do His work; or, in one word, to love God—“He that loveth is born of God.” God is not fully “our Father” till we love Him as He loves us; and when a heart is won to love, there is joy in the presence of the angels for another holy child born into the great family of God.—J. Morgan Gibbon.
1 John 4:8. The Truth of Truths.—No two persons ever see the same picture; the image is modified by the personality of him who sees it. No two persons have the same idea of God. He reveals Himself with a separate revelation to each individual soul. There have been two great and dominant ideas of God—one moral and the other physical.
1. The moral. The first great revelation of God was the revelation of Him as the moral governor. The Hebrew prophets lifted Him out of mere locality into a larger sphere; they preached Him as God of the whole earth, the God of righteousness.
2. The physical. This conception came from the Greeks. To them God was the underlying ground and cause of all things; He was power, being; He was infinite and eternal, without passion and without change.
I. Each of these conceptions of God is profoundly true; and each must have its place in our thoughts.—He controls this vast sphere of physical action by laws which cannot be broken, and which are perfectly good. “Of Him are all things, and in Him are all things.” The conception of God as a moral governor has on the one hand been pressed as though it exhausted all that we know about Him; on the other hand, it has been darkened by analogies from human laws, until this supreme conception of a God of righteousness has been transmuted into a conception of One who curses where even men would bless, and who punishes where even men would pardon.
II. The loftier, more Christian idea of God.—The simplest conceptions are always the deepest. In three short words we are told that in the awful Maker of all things seen and unseen, the Infinite, the Absolute, the Eternal, there is something like that which draws the mother to the son and the sister to the brother. This is one of the most practical truths, and one of the most necessary. It is not a formless and impassive spirit that is close to us, but the infinitely holy, infinitely true, infinitely kind. This gives the thought of God a place in practical life.
III. Here is the most practical of truths, and the most necessary.—It is a special truth for our time. It contains the gospel we need; it comes to our sadness as a gospel of consolation; it comes to our restlessness as a gospel of repose. For material want there is material alleviation. Something beyond material relief. I speak of social unrest. To you who feel most of all the strain and stir of life, this revelation of God as love comes with a singular power, for it is the gospel of repose. When tired with noises and stir and strife, tired of the factiousness of political party feeling, with the meanness of social ambition, the chicanery of commerce, just for a moment or two rise, as the spirit can, and rest in the eternal Father who loves you.
IV The supreme manifestation of the love of God in sending His only begotten Son into the world that we might live through Him.—Let our thoughts rest on this one of the innumerable ways in which God’s love has shown itself. To the truth of truths the text calls us. About other truths we may differ; in this, at least, we agree. Into some other truths there may enter elements of doubt which weaken their force as motives of conduct; but here is a sublime revelation. Let it be a sublime inspiration, a constraining motive. Let it be for us the supreme repose to know that the Father Himself loveth us, for “God is love.”—Edwin Hatch, D.D.
Love to God.—Love is the highest, purest, holiest motive from which we can act. Faith makes us strong by keeping before us the great truths and realities of the world unseen. Hope helps us on our way by filling our souls with the longing expectation of the blessedness in store for us. But faith is cold, and hope is selfish, without love. Love is the going forth of the soul towards another, tender and glowing, generous and unselfish. Love will do all things, it will bear all things, for one it loves. And so we read that “Love is the fulfilling of the law.” For, if we love God, we shall fulfil all our duty to God; and if we love man, we shall fulfil all our duty to man. And so to love the Lord our God with all our heart, and our neighbour as ourselves, takes in all we have to do. There would be no need for any other law, if we all obeyed perfectly the law of love. But think specially of love to God. As love is the best motive for our actions, so love to God is the best sort of love. For, when we love God, we are loving that which is perfect, loving Him who is alone perfectly worthy to be loved. And if we love God truly, we are quite sure to love His creatures also. So that the love of God is the fountain of all goodness. Now there are different ways in which we may love God. First, we may love Him for our own sakes, or because we love ourselves; that is, because of all His goodness to us. Another word for this sort of love is gratitude. And it is a right and good thing—only not the best. In this way we may love God for all the blessings we enjoy in this life, and this is the easiest sort of love to gain; or, better still, we may love Him for His spiritual mercies, for the gift of a blessed Redeemer, for the aid of His Holy Spirit, and for the hope of eternal happiness. But a higher and purer way of loving God is to love Him for His own sake, to love Him because He is so lovable—because our hearts are drawn to His infinite perfections—because He is so good in Himself, so fit to win His creatures’ love. This is to love Him as the angels love Him. Perhaps man, while in this world, may never be able to love God entirely with this sort of love. Perhaps none can love quite in this way, except those who see face to face. When that time comes, oh, may we be filled with this pure, childlike, unselfish, angelic love! But, meanwhile, it is very hard to love One so exalted, so far above us in His nature, and so different from us, as God is. And God knew this. How thankful then should we be that, in pity to our weakness, God was pleased to take upon Himself the form and nature of man, so that we have One like ourselves to love—One who can, and does, feel for us and with us, and yet who is God. Those who might find it hard to love an infinite, almighty God, of whom they could form to themselves no image or likeness, will not find it so hard to love the meek, and gentle, and lowly, and loving Man Jesus Christ. How shall we gain more love? Like other Christian graces, it grows by degrees; and, like them, it is the gift of God. So, first of all, we must pray God for this gift of love. It is His Holy Spirit which must make us love Him better; we can, indeed, only love Him by Himself, who “is love,” dwelling within us. We must ask Him to give us of Himself, to come and fill our hearts, that they may be filled with love.
1. We must try to deepen our feeling of love by deepening our feeling of God’s goodness.
2. We must seek to gain more love through faith in Jesus Christ. By looking steadfastly to Him, by realising (that is, making real to us) all He is to us, and all He has done for us, we shall best learn to love Him as He should be loved.—W. Walsham How, D.D.
Gnostic Ideas of God.—The Gnostics knew a good deal about God, but they did not know Him; for instead of loving those brethren who did not share their intellectual attainments, they had an arrogant contempt for them.
1 John 4:9. God’s Love-gift.—There are two ways of treating the records of Christ’s birth into the world:
(1) we may dwell on the incidents; or
(2) we may ponder over the meanings, as Mary, the mother of Jesus, did. We may ask—Who sent Him? Why did He come? And what did He come to do? The apostle John is the person above all others who can worthily answer our questions.
I. The secret of Christ’s coming is God’s love to us.—The Babe is a sent one, and this is the message He carries. The absolute truth about God is this, “God is love.” And that is the primary truth of the Christian revelation. By itself, however, as something only to think, it would be of little interest to us. We could never find any help in elaborate arguments to prove concerning our mother that “she is love.” Love always wants to find expression—to make the loved one happy, to satisfy itself in what it can do for those on whom its love is set.
II. The further secret of Christ’s coming is this—God wanted to show His love to us.—Love finds expression in gifts. Two things about gifts:
1. Love finds what will best express itself. It really gives itself in the gift. God loved the world, and wanted to give it something that would really be giving it Himself. Would any mere thing do? Nay, He would give His Son, who was Himself in the sphere of our human life, Himself in our humanity.
2. Love finds what will best satisfy those it loves. We ask what the loved one most needs. We find that, and we try to meet that. God asks what His creatures most need. There was something they needed which they hardly knew they needed—a Saviour from sin. God gave that. And God gave that as a babe, because He would save men from sin through love. Just what a babe can do is win love, constrain hearts, deliver from self, and so ennoble. What the infant Jesus did for Mary is the type of what Jesus does for us all. We have salvation in having the Saviour. Take God’s love-gift into the heart, and let Him do His work there, and we are saved.
The Only Begotten Son.—“His Son, His only begottton” (μονογενής). The term is peculiar to St. John, and it means “only born,” distinguishing between Him who was born a son, a son in such a way as can only be figured by a human generation, and those who are made sons, constituted such by an act of creation, which decided the being they should have, and the relations in which they should stand. Matthew Henry says: “This person is in some peculiar distinguishing way the Son of God; He is the only begotten. Should we suppose Him begotten as a creature or created being, He is not the only begotten. Should we suppose Him a natural necessary irradiation from the Father’s glory, or glorious essence, or substance, He must be the only begotten; and then it will be a mystery and miracle of Divine love that such a Son should be sent into our world for us.” In Hebrews 1:6 the expression appears as “first-begotten.” What has to be discovered, and what is so difficult to discover, is the precise reason St. John had for speaking of Christ in this particular way. The term is indeed exclusively used by St. John, and the associations of the similar terms, “first-begotten,” and “first-begotten from the dead,” and “first-born,” are altogether different. On four occasions in his gospel St. John mentions the “only begotten”: once it is “only begotten of the Father”; three times it is “only begotten Son” (John 1:14; John 1:18; John 3:16; John 3:18). In 1 John 5:1 we have, “Him that is begotten of Him.” In 1 John 5:18, “He that is begotten of God.” But this last verse is somewhat confusing, because it applies the word “begotten” to believers, and we think it must be kept exclusively for Christ. In Revelation 1:5 Christ is spoken of as the “first-begotten of the dead.” It cannot therefore be said that by St. John the idea of a relation to God which can only be represented by human generation is exclusively kept. But he certainly did conceive of a unity between God and Christ differing from the relation subsisting between God and Christ’s people.
1 John 4:9-10. Love’s Highest Manifestation.—The text is one of the loveliest gems of gospel truth, and the context forms an appropriately beautiful setting. Love is of God, yea, is of the very essence of His being; to be loveless is to be godless, while to love is to be a “partaker of the Divine nature.”
I. The feeling manifested.—Not mere goodness or benevolence, but love. “I have loved thee with an everlasting love.” “Like as a father.” “Thy Maker is thine husband” (Isaiah 49:15-16). It is love that “passeth knowledge,” for it is an attribute of the infinite Being.
II. Toward whom manifested.—Consider:
1. Our insignificance. “What is man, that Thou shouldst magnify him, and that Thou shouldst set Thine heart upon him?”
2. Our depravity and guilt. “God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Titus 3:3-6).
3. Our indifference and hostility. “Herein is love, not that we loved God,” etc. “When we were enemies, we were reconciled unto God by the death of His Son.”
III. How manifested.—
1. “Sent His only begotten Son.” Consieler:
(1) The greatness of Christ. “God over all, blessed for ever.” Same in substance with Father, equal in power and glory.
(2) His nearness and dearness to the Father. “Only begotten, well beloved”; “His dear Son.” Our children are endeared to us because they are our own flesh and blood, resemble us, have been long associated with us, and have shown fidelity and affection. Christ “and the Father are one”; He is “the brightness of the Father’s glory, and the express image of His person”; “was in the beginning with God”; and is ever faithful and loving. “I delight to do Thy will; yea, Thy law is within My heart.” (See 2 Peter 1:17.)
2. “Sent into the world”—a world alienated from God, averse to holiness, and hostile toward holy characters. Parable of the wicked husband-men (Matthew 21:34-38). Incarnate Virtue appeared on earth, and instead of worshipping Him the people crucified Him between two thieves. God sent Him with full knowledge of His future sufferings and shame—saw Him recoiling from loathsome touch of tempter, agonising in Gethsemane with piteous appeal to His Father, and heard Him cry in desertion of soul upon the cross, “My God, My God!” And not only with foreknowledge, but predetermination. The very conditions of the Incarnation necessitated the Crucifixion; the path from Bethlehem to Calvary was a straight one marked out by God Himself. “God sent forth His Son, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law.” But Christ could only “redeem us from the curse of the law” by “being made a curse for us.” The Father therefore deliberately “laid on Him the iniquity of us all,” and delivered Him over to punitive justice (Acts 2:23; Romans 8:32).
IV. For what purpose manifested.—
1. “To be the propitiation for our sins” (Romans 3:23-26; Colossians 1:20-22).
2. “That we might live through Him” (John 3:16; John 10:10).—Agape.
1 John 4:10. The Propitiation.—The greater anything is, the more sides and aspects it will present to view; the less will it be revealed to any one view, the more necessary it becomes to observe it from every possible standpoint. A dwelling-house can be comprehended after a few minutes’ examination; but a cathedral discloses ever new parts, new relations, new proportions, and new adornments to the man who can be patient, can look at it from every angle, and under every variety of circumstance,—when the sunshine, streaming in through the coloured windows, makes a glory round every pillar and floods the pavement with tints; or when the shadowy twilight makes a saintly gloom hang over the arches; or when the full cold moonlight seems to people aisle and choir with ghostly shapes; or when sounds of holy music rise from the worshippers and circle round, and swell high, going up to God; or when all is still, no human voice is heard, the buried saints alone seem to fill the place, and in the stillness the soul can almost catch the echoes of the heavenly song. And God’s truth is a great whole that is, for us, many-sided, and can never be perfectly known by any one of us. And that particular part of truth which concerns the recovery and salvation of men is one of these great and many-sided things. We may all get our own best positions for examining the great cathedral of the redemption truth, and be thankful for the fitnesses and beauties which we can for ourselves discover. St. Paul helps us to understand the meaning of this expression in the text, “the propitiation for sins,” when he writes in this way of the Lord Jesus Christ, “Whom God hath set forth a propitiation through faith in His blood, to declare His righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God” (Romans 3:25). By making “propitiation for the sin of the world,” let us then understand this little part or piece of the great whole of redeeming truth—the righteousness of God is seen in His justifying freely, as an act of infinite grace, all who, having sinned, believe the message of forgiveness brought to them by Jesus Christ, and sealed to them in His blood. But how does Christ, set forth, declare the righteousness of God in the forgiveness of sin?
I. Christ is the Ambassador of the act of grace.—As Ambassador His credentials were abundant, and in every way satisfactory. His life itself is the great proof that He was the Son of God. His words were Divine words; His miracles were exhibitions of Divine power. Who has ever doubted the righteousness of those messages which Moses and the prophets delivered for God, and concerning Him? Because we are sure that they were men sent from God, we are sure that their message was a righteous message. Then if Jesus Christ was the very highest of all ambassadors, the message He brought was a righteous message, a faithful expression of that eternal righteousness which belongs to Him who is “light,” and in whom is no darkness at all. What then did Jesus tell us concerning God? He preached, on God’s behalf, the forgiveness of sins. He Himself forgave sin. We never can think of Jesus as acting unrighteously when He said to the paralytic, “Thy sins are forgiven thee”; or to the woman whom everybody knew as a sinner, “Thy sins, which are many, are all forgiven thee.” But in those cases Jesus was only showing us God, and telling His message to men. Jesus commanded men to forgive one another freely, so that they might be children of their heavenly Father, who forgave freely. He sent out His disciples into the world to preach everywhere His message for the remission of sins. And on His very cross He prayed for His murderers, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” His very presence here among men was an act of grace. It seemed to say—God has not forsaken even His sinful world. He pities His lost creatures. He will even sacrifice His best if He may save the lost. And the character of Jesus—His perfect righteousness—seems to guarantee the righteousness of His work. He was, all through His life, showing us God; and none ever dwelt among men who showed, as He has shown, the infinite holiness, the spotless righteousness, of God. None of us can think that the gospel which the righteous Jesus brought in any sense limits the perfections of God. Let Christ then preach us His God-honouring gospel. It is the free forgiveness of sins. It is the announcement of God’s gracious act of pardon. Christ came to bring that message to earth, and in order to make us believe it, He sealed it with His own blood. God is not merely willing to forgive; He has once for all forgiven every one who will believe His word. “He pardoneth and absolveth all them that truly repent, and unfeignedly believe His holy gospel” of full and free forgiveness.
II. Christ demands and works such a moral change in men as declares His righteousness in granting forgiveness.—The apostle Paul explains to us that “propitiation is through faith in His blood.” But his language is very careful. He does not say, “a propitiation through His blood”; or, “a propitiation by His blood”; but he distinctly and precisely says, “a propitiation through faith,” the object of the faith being “the blood.” Faith is the thing set so prominently before us—our justification by faith, our forgiveness upon faith, our acceptance on the ground of faith. Evidently this faith is something belonging to men, and it implies some great moral change wrought in men. When the king announces to his rebellious subjects his free pardon of all their offences, and sends that pardon by the hands of his messenger, who is it that needs to be propitiated? Plainly enough, it is not the king. He is propitiated, or he would not send that message of pardon. There is no enmity in him. It is that rebel nation that needs to be appeased. They have taken up an ill-will against their king. It is the work of the king’s messenger to appease men’s anger, and sooth down their ill-feeling toward their king, and so induce them to lay down their arms, and accept his sovereign mercy. What hinders rebels from receiving the forgiveness offered them? Surely nothing but their rebellion. As long as that spirit of rebellion lasts, they cannot have the pardon, though it is proclaimed. How can a man have the king’s pardon while he grasps his weapons? By that continued act he really refuses the pardon. But let his mind be changed, let him throw down those weapons; and then the proclaimed forgiveness covers even him beneath its shadow; then there has been propitiation between the king and his rebellious subjects; then the king’s messenger has become the propitiator, or propitiatory, the mercy-seat where the separated ones have met in reconciliation. This is the truth to which our attention should be most anxiously given—Man needs to be propitiated; man’s enmity against God needs to be appeased. We need that Jesus Christ should be a propitiator to us, and change our hearts towards God. That is the very work entrusted to the Messenger and Ambassador, Jesus Christ. He is sent into the world, that by His life, by His teachings, by His deeds, by His moral influence, by the holy persuasions of His sacrifice, He might get a redeeming power on the hearts of men—breaking down middle walls of partition, changing pride for humility, replacing hard-heartedness with repentance, and hatred of God for love to Him. The great aim of our Lord’s work is, so to bear persuasions on the hearts of men, that they should be willing to accept salvation by grace. How Christ works that change in men’s hearts can only be briefly suggested. It is done partly by that most attractive view of God which Jesus brings: partly, as Jesus shows us what a real son of God is, and so what we should be; partly, by a most extraordinary proof of love; God’s own Son is willing to sacrifice Himself, even in a most painful and shameful death, in order to convince us that God does love us with an everlasting love, and does want to save us. Whosoever believes becomes another man by believing.
1 John 4:13. “Of His Spirit.”—It would be precisely in accordance with St. John’s teaching here if we read “spirit,” or disposition. What God gives to those who are in vital relations with Him is, the spirit of His own love, which inspires them also to self-sacrifice.
ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER 4
1 John 4:8. The Love of God.—“God is love.” This single announcement of the beloved disciple, contradicted by so many appearances, yet carrying its own evidence—in the world around us met by many a No and many a murmur, and from the caverns of despair fetching up a fiendish laughter, and yet countersigned by Jehovah’s handwriting on the ruined tablets of the heart, and in trumpet tones reverberated from the hills of immortality—this shortest of sentences, and most summary of gospels, which a breath can utter, and which a signet ring can contain—is the truth which, shining bright at the Advent, will overspread the world in the millennium’s mild lustre. It is a truth on which no man has mused too much, even although he has pondered it all his days, and to which no anthem can do justice, except that in which golden harps mingle, and in which the redeemed from among men are helped by the seraphim.—Dr. James Hamilton.
The Heart of God.—History’s noblest deed and record of love is in the self-devotion of the generous heathen Pylades, who forfeited his life to save his friend; but “God commendeth His love to us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” “You have not seen,” says a great writer and profound thinker, “the greatest gift of all—the heart of God, the love of His heart, the heart of His love. And will He in very deed show us that? Yes, unveil that cross, and see. It was His only mode of showing us His heart. It is infinite love labouring to reveal itself—agonising to utter the fulness of infinite love. Apart from that act, a boundless ocean of love would have remained for ever shut up and concealed in the heart of God; but now it has found an ocean-channel. Beyond this He cannot go. Once and for ever the proof has been given, ‘God is love.’ ”
Our Love comes from God.—As the rays come from the sun, and yet are not the sun, even so our love and pity, though they are not God, but merely a poor, weak image and reflection of Him, yet from Him alone they come. If there is mercy in our hearts, it comes from the fountain of mercy. If there is the light of love in us, it is a ray from the full sun of. His love.—Rev. C. Kingsley.
The Ocean of Divine Love.—In that great ocean of the Divine love we live, and move, and have our being, floating in it like some sea-flower which spreads its filmy beauty, and waves its long tresses, in the depths of mid-ocean. The sound of its waters is ever in our ears, and above, beneath, around us its mighty currents run evermore.—A. Maclaren, D.D.