1 John 4:8 · Doctrine · Love
God Is Love
Two verses of one chapter state it, and the texts behind it run from Exodus to Romans.
Jonah told the LORD that he had fled toward Tarshish because he knew God was gracious and compassionate, One who relents from sending disaster.
Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.
- First taught
- Exodus 34:6 “…out: “The LORD, the LORD God, is compassionate…”
- Fullest statement
- 1 John 4:16 “…and believe the love that God has for…”
Summary
John's first letter says twice that God is love. John shows what that love is by what God did: He sent His Son. The whole Bible shows the same love before John names it. At Sinai God called out His name before Moses, and He chose Israel because He loved them and kept His oath to their fathers. He promised a love that lasts forever, grieved over a wayward son, gave the Son and poured out the Spirit. Readers differ on whether love is God's very being or one of His perfections beside His holiness. Scripture keeps the two together.
- John says what love is: God loved us and sent His Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins (1 John 4:10).
- The Old Testament shows the same love first. At Sinai the LORD named Himself abounding in loving devotion, and through Jeremiah He called His love everlasting (Jeremiah 31:3).
- The Father loved the Son before the foundation of the world (John 17:24).
- God's love stands with His holiness. The LORD who abounds in loving devotion will by no means leave the guilty unpunished (Exodus 34:7), and the God who is love is also light (1 John 1:5).
The Sentence in 1 John 4
John's fourth chapter joins what God is to what God did in sending the Son.
The doctrine that God is love takes its words from John's first letter. It is the ground of love, the value Scripture commands of God's people, because John draws the love believers owe one another from the love God first showed them. The question this doctrine answers is what the sentence means: what it says about God, where the rest of Scripture shows the same love, and how that love stands beside God's holiness and judgment. The sentence stands in a chapter that opens by telling believers to test the spirits by whether they confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh (1 John 4:1 to 2).
John first writes the sentence as a reason in verse 8: whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. In the Greek the words are ho theos agape estin, with the article on God and none on love, so God is the subject of the sentence and love is what is said of Him. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown drew the same conclusion in their commentary of 1871 and said the words cannot be translated love is God.
This is how God’s love was revealed among us: God sent His one and only Son into the world, so that we might live through Him. And love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.John defines love by God's act of sending the Son, and the command to love one another follows in 1 John 4:11.
In 1 John 4:7 to 21 John uses the noun agape twelve times and the verb agapao fifteen times.
And we have come to know and believe the love that God has for us. God is love; whoever abides in love abides in God, and God in him.The second statement turns from God's act to the believer's knowledge and trust.
Seven Texts from Sinai to John's Letter
Seven texts from the Law, the Prophets, the Gospels and the letters carry the doctrine in the order of the canon.
From Exodus to 1 John, Scripture shows God's love in what He says and does before John writes that God is love.
1The name proclaimed, Exodus 34:6
- What it adds
- God's love belongs to the name He gives Himself
2The choice made for love, Deuteronomy 7:7 to 8
- What it adds
- God's love is the ground of Israel's election
3The everlasting love, Jeremiah 31:3
- What it adds
- God's love for His people has no end
4The father's heart, Hosea 11:8
- What it adds
- God's love outlasts His people's unfaithfulness
- What it adds
- God's love reaches the world through the gift of the Son
6The Spirit poured out, Romans 5:5
- What it adds
- God's love is placed in believers by the Holy Spirit
- What it adds
- John names as what God is the love the other six texts show
A chain of seven links in canon order, from the Law to the Epistles, each link named with its reference and what it adds to the doctrine.
Moses, Jeremiah and Hosea on God's love for IsraelDeuteronomy 7:7 to 8; Jeremiah 31:3; Hosea 11:1 to 4
The LORD did not set His affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than the other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples. But because the LORD loved you and kept the oath He swore to your fathers, He brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.Moses gives this answer to Israel before they cross the Jordan into the land.
The Hebrew of Deuteronomy 7:8 reads me-ahavat Yahweh, from the love of the LORD, and the verse joins that love to the oath sworn to the fathers.
The LORD appeared to us in the past, saying: “I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have drawn you with loving devotion.The LORD speaks these words through Jeremiah in the chapter that promises Israel's restoration and a new covenant (Jeremiah 31:31).
The verse joins two Hebrew words for love: ahavat olam, everlasting love, and hesed, which the Berean text renders loving devotion. Hesed stands 247 times in the Old Testament, and 127 of them are in the Psalms.
When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called My son. But the more I called Israel, the farther they departed from Me. They sacrificed to the Baals and burned incense to carved images. It was I who taught Ephraim to walk, taking them in My arms, but they never realized that it was I who healed them. I led them with cords of kindness, with ropes of love; I lifted the yoke from their necks and bent down to feed them.Hosea pictures the LORD as a father who taught his child to walk while the child went after the Baals.
The verb ahav, to love, stands sixteen times in Hosea.
Paul on the love of God shown in ChristRomans 5:8; Ephesians 2:4 to 5; Romans 8:38 to 39
But God proves His love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.Paul measures God's love by the condition of those for whom Christ died.
But because of His great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in our trespasses. It is by grace you have been saved!Paul traces salvation by grace to a love God had before anyone turned to Him.
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.Paul ends the argument of Romans 8 with God's love as the believer's security.
Paul places the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, and John places it in the sending of the Son. Both apostles point to an act of God in history when they speak of His love.
The Rest of the Passage, Step by Step
John begins with what God is and ends with the command to love a brother.
Beloved, let us love one another, because love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.John grounds the command in what God is.
Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God remains in us, and His love is perfected in us.These verses turn God's act into the church's duty.
By this we know that we remain in Him, and He in us: He has given us of His Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent His Son to be the Savior of the world. If anyone confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God.These verses answer how a believer knows that he abides in God.
In this way, love has been perfected among us, so that we may have confidence on the day of judgment; for in this world we are just like Him. There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear, because fear involves punishment. The one who fears has not been perfected in love.These verses carry the passage from the church's life to the last day, and readers divide over the fear they name.
If anyone says, “I love God,” but hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And we have this commandment from Him: Whoever loves God must love his brother as well.These verses bring the passage back to the command it opened with.
1 John 4:13 to 15, 1 John 4:17 to 18, 1 John 4:20 to 21
Love and Holiness Together
Moses, Hosea and John each set God's love beside His holiness or His judgment in the same passage.
maintaining loving devotion to a thousand generations, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin. Yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished; He will visit the iniquity of the fathers on their children and grandchildren to the third and fourth generations.”The name the LORD proclaimed to Moses holds loving devotion and the punishment of the guilty in one sentence.
Nahum later applied both halves of this name to Nineveh (Nahum 1:3).
I will not execute the full fury of My anger; I will not turn back to destroy Ephraim. For I am God and not man— the Holy One among you— and I will not come in wrath.Here God's holiness becomes the ground of His mercy toward a rebellious people.
And this is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you: God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.The first message of John's letter is that God is light, and the letter later adds that God is love.
In the chapter that says God is love John also writes of confidence on the day of judgment (1 John 4:17).
The Letter and Its Churches
Westcott dates the letter to the last decade of the first century.
Two earlier verses of the letter give its occasion. Westcott places its writing at Ephesus.
Irenaeus says John lived there until the reign of Trajan. He quotes this letter's words on the many antichrists as John's own.
He also reports a story he had from those who heard Polycarp. John left a bath-house at Ephesus without bathing because Cerinthus, a teacher he called the enemy of the truth, was inside. Irenaeus is the only ancient writer who tells this story.
Eusebius counts the first epistle of John among the books the churches accepted. He adds that Papias quoted it.
They went out from us, but they did not belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us. But their departure made it clear that none of them belonged to us.This verse shows that the letter was written after a split in the churches.
By this you will know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and which is already in the world at this time.This is the test by which the churches were to know the teachers who had left.
What the Text Leaves Unsaid
John leaves three matters open in 1 John 4:7 to 21.
John names none of the teachers who went out, and the letter gives no more of their teaching than the denial in 1 John 4:3.
The passage leaves open how the unseen God will be seen.
The love the passage commands is love for one another and for a brother, and it does not take up love for an enemy.
Beloved, we are now children of God, and what we will be has not yet been revealed. We know that when Christ appears, we will be like Him, for we will see Him as He is.John's answer to the question of sight stands a chapter earlier, at the appearing of Christ.
But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,Jesus extends the command to enemies in the Sermon on the Mount.
The Father Loves the Son
Three verses of John's Gospel speak of the Father's love for the Son, two of them in the words of Jesus.
Father, I want those You have given Me to be with Me where I am, that they may see the glory You gave Me because You loved Me before the foundation of the world.In His last prayer Jesus speaks of a love between the Father and the Son older than creation.
The Father loves the Son and has placed all things in His hands.The verse makes the Son's authority flow from the Father's love.
The Father loves the Son and shows Him all He does. And to your amazement, He will show Him even greater works than these.Jesus answers those who opposed His healing on the Sabbath by pointing to the Father's love for the Son (John 5:16 to 19).
John uses two Greek verbs for this one love: agapa in John 3:35 and philei in John 5:20, and the Berean text renders both The Father loves the Son.
How the Church Has Taught It
Augustine in the fifth century, Bernard of Clairvaux in the twelfth and Charles Spurgeon in the nineteenth taught from the sentence to the Trinity and to the love God asks in return.
Augustine found a trinity in love: one that loves, that which is loved, and love.On the Trinity, book 15, chapter 10
He wrote that "when we came to treat of love, which in the Holy Scriptures is called God, then a trinity began to dawn upon us". He named the three as "one that loves, and that which is loved, and love".
Bernard taught that God Himself is the reason for loving God, and love without measure the measure.On Loving God, chapter 1
He wrote that "the reason for loving God is God Himself; and the measure of love due to Him is immeasurable love".
Spurgeon taught that God's love comes before ours and is its cause.Love's Logic, sermon 1008, 1871
Preaching on 1 John 4:19, he said that "God's love is evidently prior to ours" and that "God's love is the cause of ours".
Where Readers Differ
Readers differ on whether the sentence names God's ruling attribute, on what the atoning sacrifice of 1 John 4:10 achieves and on which fear perfect love drives out.
All three positions hold that God's love is real and that it was shown in the sending of the Son. They differ on how the sentence ranks love among God's perfections.
Love as God's reigning attributeJohn Wesley; Albert Barnes
The reading rests on the form of 1 John 4:8, where John uses the noun itself of God. John Wesley made the case in his Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755). God, he wrote, is "often styled holy, righteous, wise; but not holiness, righteousness, or wisdom in the abstract, as he is said to be love". He called love "his darling, his reigning attribute".
Albert Barnes, in his Notes on 1 John 4:8, wrote that God "is not merely benevolent, he is benevolence itself".
The objection: John writes in the same letter that God is light (1 John 1:5), so the use of a noun does not by itself set love above God's other perfections.
Love as an excellence named in human wordsClement of Alexandria
Clement of Alexandria wrote on 1 John in comments kept in the Latin of Cassiodorus. He held that John "does not express the divine essence" in this sentence. In Clement's words, John "has applied to the Divinity what is best and most excellent in the view of men". He concluded that "God, then, who is ineffable in respect of His substance, is light."
The objection: John ties the sentence to the sending of the Son (1 John 4:9 to 10). The love it names is shown in God's own act and is more than a way of speaking.
Love and light held togetherMatthew Henry
Matthew Henry, in his Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710), held that "love is natural and essential to the divine Majesty". He also wrote, "Not that this is the only conception we ought to have of him; we have found that he is light as well as love".
The objection: Henry grants that love is essential to God, the ground of the first position, so his reading may be an emphasis within that position.
The Greek noun behind atoning sacrifice is hilasmos, used in the New Testament only here and at 1 John 2:2. Abbott-Smith's Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament gives an appeasing and a means of appeasing, and in the Greek Old Testament forgiveness. Older English versions render it propitiation.
Propitiation: God's anger at sin turned asideJohn Calvin
John Calvin reads the word as the sacrifice by which God, pacified by Christ's death, receives sinners into favor. He meets the question why a God who already loved needed a sacrifice: God's love requires righteousness, and sinners cannot know they are loved until Christ absolves them from guilt.
“We are taught, secondly, that it is the beginning of our life, when God, having been pacified by the death of his Son, receives us unto favor: for propitiation properly refers to the sacrifice of his death.”
John Calvin · Commentaries on the Catholic Epistles, on 1 John 4:10 · on 1 John 4:10Reformed
The objection is Westcott's: the New Testament never speaks of propitiating God.
Expiation: the sin that separates taken awayBrooke Foss Westcott
Brooke Foss Westcott traces the word through the Greek Old Testament. He finds that it alters what stands between God and the sinner, while the love of God is the same throughout.
The objection is Calvin's: wherever sin appears God's wrath is to be reckoned with, until Christ by His death abolishes the sin.
In 1 John 4:18 fear is phobos, punishment is kolasis, which the lexicon gives as penal infliction, and perfect is teleios, complete or full-grown.
Servile fear cast out, a pure fear keptAugustine of Hippo; John Wesley
Augustine sets 1 John 4:18 beside Psalm 19:9.
“What is the chaste fear? The fear lest thou lose the good things themselves. Mark! It is one thing to fear God lest He cast thee into hell with the devil, and another thing to fear God lest He forsake thee. The fear by which thou fearest lest thou be cast into hell with the devil, is not yet chaste; for it comes not from the love of God, but from the fear of punishment: but when thou fearest God lest His presence forsake thee, thou embracest Him, thou longest to enjoy God Himself.”
Augustine of Hippo · Ten Homilies on 1 John 9 · on 1 John 4:18Patristic
John Wesley reads the verse as a map of growth in the Christian life.
“There is no fear in love - No slavish fear can be where love reigns. But perfect, adult love casteth out slavish fear: because such fear hath torment - And so is inconsistent with the happiness of love. A natural man has neither fear nor love; one that is awakened, fear without love; a babe in Christ, love and fear; a father in Christ, love without fear.”
John Wesley · Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament · on 1 John 4:18Evangelical
The objection is Calvin's: the verse speaks to a troubled conscience.
The fear of the LORD is pure, enduring forever; the judgments of the LORD are true, being altogether righteous.Augustine's Latin read the psalm's word pure as chaste, the name he gives the fear that love keeps.
The conscience quieted by God's loveJohn Calvin
Calvin sets the distinction between servile and filial fear aside for this verse, and he reads the love as God's love for us.
“the Apostle only teaches us, that when the love of God is by us seen and known by faith, peace is given to our consciences, so that they no longer tremble and fear.”
John Calvin · Commentaries on the Catholic Epistles, on 1 John 4:18 · on 1 John 4:18Reformed
The objection is Augustine's: Scripture also speaks of a fear of the LORD that endures forever, so the fear cast out must be one kind of fear.
Books to Read Next
Four works that treat 1 John and that a reader can open for free.
Ten Homilies on the First Epistle of John
Augustine of Hippo · early fifth century
Augustine preached through the letter in ten homilies, and the seventh, eighth and ninth take up 1 John 4:7 to 21.
Read it at New AdventCommentaries on the Catholic Epistles
John Calvin · translated 1855
Calvin comments on the letter phrase by phrase, in John Owen's translation for the Calvin Translation Society.
Read it at CCELThe Epistles of St John
Brooke Foss Westcott · 1892, third edition
Westcott comments on the Greek text and adds a long note on the word for atoning sacrifice.
Read it at the Internet ArchiveExplanatory Notes upon the New Testament
John Wesley · 1755
Wesley gives a short note on every verse of the New Testament.
Read it at CCELLove That Begins in God
John's sentence says what God is, and the cross shows what it means. The love that chose Israel, grieved over Ephraim and gave the Son came first, and every act of love Scripture asks of believers answers it.
We love because He first loved us.John draws the believer's love from God's love in one short sentence.
Sources
Scripture is the Berean Standard Bible.
- The tagged Hebrew and Greek text of Deuteronomy 7:8, Jeremiah 31:3, John 3:35, John 5:20, 1 John 4:8 and 4:16, and 1 John 4:7 to 21, with Strong's numbers and morphology.
- STEP Bible, Translators Brief lexicon of Extended Strongs for Hebrew (Tyndale House, Cambridge), CC BY 4.0, entries h157 and h2617.
- Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset and David Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871), on 1 John 4:8.
- John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755), on 1 John 4:8.
- Albert Barnes, Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on 1 John 4:8.
- Clement of Alexandria, Comments on the First Epistle of John, from the Latin translation of Cassiodorus, on 1 John 4:16.
- Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710), on 1 John 4:8.
- Augustine of Hippo, On the Trinity, book 15, chapter 10.
- Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God, chapter 1, the Christian Classics Ethereal Library text.
- C. H. Spurgeon, Love's Logic, Sermon No. 1008, Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit (1871), in its lightly modernized online edition.
- Abbott-Smith, Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament (1922), via STEP Bible TBESG.
- John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755), on 1 John 4:18.
- Augustine, Ten Homilies on the First Epistle of John, Homily 7, trans. H. Browne, NPNF First Series vol. 7, 1888.
- Augustine, Ten Homilies on the First Epistle of John, Homily 9, trans. H. Browne, NPNF First Series vol. 7, 1888.
- John Calvin, Commentaries on the Catholic Epistles, trans. John Owen, Calvin Translation Society, 1855.
- Brooke Foss Westcott, The Epistles of St John, third edition, Macmillan, 1892.
- Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.3.4 and 3.16.5, trans. Roberts and Rambaut, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1, 1885.
- Eusebius, Church History 3.25.2 and 3.39.16, trans. A. C. McGiffert, NPNF Second Series vol. 1, 1890.
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