Doing and Knowing.
I. St. John assumes that the knowledge of God is as possible, is as real, for human beings as any knowledge they can have of each other. Nay, he goes further than this. There are impediments to our knowledge of each other which he says do not exist with reference to that higher knowledge. We may know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments. I sometimes suspect that we give too loose a sense to that word "keep." No doubt it means to "obey." It does not mean more than that; for obedience is very comprehensive, a little too comprehensive for slow and narrow creatures such as we are. The word "keep," if we consider it, may help us to know what obedience is and what it is not. A friend gives me a token to keep for him; he wishes that it should remind me of him, that it should recall days which we have spent together. Perhaps it may be only a flower or a weed that was gathered in a certain place where we were walking or botanising; perhaps it is something precious in itself. If, instead of giving me anything, he enjoins me to do a certain act or not to do a certain act, I may be said as truly to keep that injunction as to keep the flower. To fulfil it is to remember him; it is a token of my fellowship with him, of my relation with him.
II. St. John began with this revelation of God to men in His Son. It was the ground of all his teaching. He had told the Ephesians already that there was that darkness, that covetousness, in them which St. Paul had found in himself, which had caused him so much horror. But he had told them also, as St. Paul had told them, that they were not created to walk in this darkness; that they might walk in the light which Christ had revealed, and have fellowship with it. So now, taking this for granted, he could tell them that these commandments might be kept as the commandments of a God who was at one with them in His Son, and that the more they kept them the more they would know of Him. Many in that time said, "We know God; but what are the commandments, what is common earthly morality, to us?" "I tell you," says St. John broadly and simply, "that if they are nothing to you, God is nothing to you." You may use what fine language you will; you may have what fine speculations you like; but it is in practice, in that daily practice of life, in the struggle with the temptations to cheat and slander, to be unchaste and to be covetous, which beset us all in different ways and forms, it is in revering parents and the name of God, it is in heeding God's rest and God's work, it is in keeping ourselves from idols, it is in worshipping Him as the common Deliverer, that we come to know Him thus, and only thus.
F. D. Maurice, The Epistles of St. John,p. 69.
References: 1 John 2:5. R. Duckworth, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxxiv., p. 217. 1 John 2:6. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxix., No. 1732. 1 John 2:7-11. Homiletic Magazine,vol. vi., p. 234.