God Is Love

Scripture: 1 John 4:7–21

Read 1 John 4:7–21 before proceeding. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

In this is love, not that we have loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
1 John 4:10

Beloved, Let Us Love One Another

Having just handled the sobering task of testing the spirits, John now turns to what is perhaps the warmest and most treasured passage in the letter. The sharp Christological discernment of the previous paragraph is immediately followed by the overflowing love that defines the Christian life. Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.

This is the great love chapter of the letter, and it contains some of the most famous statements John ever wrote. God is love. God sent His Son. Perfect love casts out fear. We love because He first loved us. Each of these is a sentence Christians have meditated on across the centuries, quoted at weddings and funerals, carried as hope in dark places, returned to again and again when other words failed. And each of them belongs to the particular pastoral argument John is making: not free-floating inspirational quotations but the specific teaching of a specific apostle to specific congregations, meant to accomplish specific pastoral work.

The work the passage is doing is the same work the whole letter has been doing: building assurance. John wants his readers to know, with settled confidence, that they have eternal life. And he is building that assurance, in this section, on the foundation of God’s own love. The love that has reached us in the sending of the Son. The love that has been poured into our hearts by the Spirit. The love that is producing the love we are now called to show our brothers. The love that casts out the fear of judgment. The love that gives us confidence before God, because He Himself is love, and the ones who know Him are abiding in His love.

In this session we will walk carefully through the passage, following its own movements. We will begin with John’s exhortation to love and the astonishing statement that God is love. We will look at the demonstration of that love in the sending of the Son as the propitiation for our sins. We will see the connection John draws between God’s loving us first and our loving one another. We will examine the indwelling of God in the Christian and the perfecting of His love in our lives. We will reach the treasured teaching on boldness for the day of judgment and the casting out of fear. And we will close with the final test: the one who says he loves God but hates his brother is a liar.

John begins with the exhortation and the ground. Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.

The statement at the end is one of the most profound in all of Scripture. God is love. Three words, infinite depth. It stands alongside John’s earlier statement that God is light. Together these two definitional claims describe what God is: light and love, unmixed with any contrary, absolute in both dimensions. To say God is love is to say that the very being of God is love. Love is not one attribute among many that God happens to have. Love is not something God does when He feels like it. Love is what God is, in His essence, in His eternal being, in the relationships of the Triune God with Himself before any creation existed.

What This Claim Means

This has implications we rarely grasp. If God is love, then love predates creation. The Father has eternally loved the Son. The Son has eternally returned the love of the Father. The Holy Spirit has eternally proceeded from the Father and the Son. Augustine famously spoke of the Spirit as the mutual love of Father and Son as a way of contemplating this mystery. We should not turn that analogy into a definition, but it helps us confess that love is not something God acquired after creation. The Triune God was love before any creature existed to be loved. When the Christian says God is love, she is saying something about the inner life of the Trinity, not merely something about how God relates to us.

This matters enormously. Some religions posit a solitary divine being who came to love only when something outside Himself appeared to love. For such a God, love is contingent, acquired, a relationship with the not-God that was not always present. The God of Christian Scripture is different. Love has always been present in Him, because within the Trinity there has always been the eternal love of Father, Son, and Spirit. When this God creates and loves what He has made, He is acting out of what He has always been. The love is not something new He has learned. It is the overflow of what He has eternally been.

And What This Does Not Mean

Because the statement is so easily misread, it is worth saying clearly what it does not mean. To say God is love does not mean love is God. This is a common modern confusion. Our culture sometimes treats love (meaning romantic feeling, or benevolent sentiment, or the ethic of non-judgment) as itself the ultimate reality, the final measure by which God Himself must be evaluated. This inverts John’s claim. John does not say love is God. He says God is love. God is the subject, love the predicate. What love is, is defined by what God is, not the reverse. We do not come to know love first and then use our definition of love to evaluate God. We come to know God through Christ, and our understanding of love must be reshaped by who we find Him to be.

This matters because many contemporary arguments against Christian teaching begin with an assumed definition of love (drawn from the culture, from romantic feeling, from therapeutic wisdom) and then conclude that the God revealed in Scripture does not match this definition. The Bible’s God speaks hard truths, judges, disciplines, calls to repentance, asks for costly obedience. Much of this does not fit modern definitions of love. The modern conclusion is often that these parts of Scripture must be wrong, because love would not do such things. But this inverts the proper order. The definition of love must come from God, who is love. What He does defines what love is, not the reverse. The Christian learns what love is from the God of Scripture, not the other way around.

The Demonstration of Love

John moves from the claim that God is love to the demonstration of that love in history. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent His only Son into the world, so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

This is where John anchors the claim that God is love. The statement could remain abstract: easily affirmed, easily qualified, easily reduced to a feeling about God. John refuses this abstraction. The love of God was made manifest (made visible, made concrete, brought into public view) in a specific action. God sent His only Son into the world. This is not a feeling God had or a disposition God maintains; it is a historical event. At a particular moment in time, the Father sent the Son from the eternal communion of the Trinity into the fallen world of suffering humans, for a specific purpose: so that we might live through Him.

Not That We Loved God

John emphasizes the direction of the love. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that He loved us. The initiative is not ours. Before any of us responded to God, loved God, or sought God, He loved us and acted. Paul makes the same point in Romans: while we were still weak, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. God shows His love in this, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. The love that reaches us is not a response to our love. It is the ground from which any love of ours proceeds. We love, later, because He loved us first. But His love is not contingent on any of ours. It came first, and it came when we were far from loving Him.

This reorients everything about how Christians should understand the Christian life. The Christian is not the one who impresses God with her devotion. She is the one who has received a love she did nothing to deserve and is now being transformed by what she has received. Many Christians live under a false version of their relationship with God: imagining they must earn His favor by their performance, maintain His love by their consistency, protect His goodwill by their holiness. John’s teaching cuts through all of this. The love was given before we sought it. It remains the ground of our standing. It is not something we maintain by our works; it is the foundation on which our works rest. If we are being faithful in our Christian lives, it is because His love is producing faithfulness in us. Not the other way around.

The Propitiation Returns

And John says something we met in chapter two, now unfolded more fully. He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. The same word we encountered earlier: hilasmos, the sacrifice that turns away wrath, the offering that satisfies what holiness requires. Now John makes the striking claim. This, the propitiation, is where love is most fully seen.

This deserves careful attention. Some modern theologians have wanted to pit love and propitiation against each other: as if propitiation implies a harsh God whose anger must be appeased, incompatible with a loving Father. John rejects this opposition directly. The propitiation is not contrary to God’s love; it is the supreme demonstration of God’s love. The love of God is not love that overlooks the reality of sin and its just consequences. It is love that addresses those consequences, at God’s own infinite cost, by providing the sacrifice that satisfies His holiness while also rescuing His creatures. The Father is not opposed to the Son in this work; the Son is not the forced victim of an angry Father’s wrath. The Triune God together accomplishes salvation, the Father sending, the Son coming willingly, the Spirit applying, all for the sake of those who did not love first.

The cross, then, is the deepest revelation of love we possess. Anywhere else we look for love, we find partial and imperfect expressions. At the cross, we see love in its fullness: costly, just, holy, rescuing, unearned. And John’s point is that our understanding of love must be calibrated by the cross. Whatever we think love is or should be, the cross is the measure. If the cross seems harsh, our understanding of love must expand to include what the cross accomplished. If the cross seems inadequate, our understanding of sin must deepen until we feel the weight of what the cross answered. The cross defines love. Not the other way around.

Because He First Loved Us

John draws the consequence. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and His love is perfected in us.

The logic is simple. If God so loved us (loved us in this specific, costly, propitiatory way), we ought to love one another. The obligation arises from the gift. Christians are not generally to love because love is a nice thing to do, or because it makes society function better, or because it produces good emotional outcomes. Christians love because they have been loved in this particular way, and the love received must flow through them to others. This is the ethical core of the Christian life, and it is grounded entirely in what has been received, not in what is being demanded apart from gift.

No One Has Seen God

The parenthetical observation is worth noting. No one has ever seen God. This is something John has said in his Gospel as well. The Father is invisible. We do not have direct, unmediated visual access to Him. But we do have something that serves in place of that direct access: the mutual love of Christians, in whom God is abiding through His Spirit. The invisible God becomes visible, in a sense, through the love of those in whom He dwells. Christian love of brother is the visible manifestation of the invisible God.

This is a striking claim with great pastoral consequences. When Christians love one another well, they are making God visible in the world. The world does not see God directly; the world sees God in the love of the Christians who have been loved by God. This is both a high calling and a serious responsibility. Where Christians love one another well, the Gospel becomes visible. Where Christians do not love one another (where bitterness, division, contempt, or indifference dominate Christian community), something else becomes visible instead, and the witness to the invisible God is badly compromised. The quality of Christian community is not incidental to Christian witness. It is the primary way the world sees or fails to see the God whom no one has seen.

His Love Perfected

John adds another use of teleioo: perfected, brought to its goal, completed. If we love one another, His love is perfected in us. Not the sense that we perfect His love by our obedience; that reverses the direction John has just established. Rather, the love of God that has come to us reaches its intended goal when it flows through us to the brothers. The love was given not to terminate in us but to move through us to others. When it moves through, it is completing what it was sent to do. When it terminates in us, when we receive it but do not let it flow, it is incomplete in us, not because the love itself is insufficient but because it has not yet accomplished the full work it was sent to do.

This is a useful framing for the Christian’s experience. The love of God flows in to us through Word and Sacrament, through fellowship, through prayer, through every means the Spirit uses to reach us. And it flows out from us through our love of the brothers: in deeds of service, in bearing with one another, in forgiveness, in the ordinary patience and kindness of Christian life. When both movements are present, the love is doing its full work. When only the receiving is present and not the flowing out, something is off. The Christian who is genuinely receiving God’s love will also find herself, progressively and by the Spirit’s work, becoming a channel through which that love reaches others.

He Has Given Us of His Spirit

John now marks the way the Christian knows this mutual indwelling is real. By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, because 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. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us.

The confirmation is the Spirit. He has given us of His Spirit. This is the same teaching we met in chapter three, where John said we know He abides in us by the Spirit whom He has given us. The Spirit’s presence is the objective ground of the Christian’s assurance that God abides in her. This is not primarily about spiritual experiences: feelings of the Spirit’s presence, dramatic manifestations, remarkable answered prayers. It is about the ordinary reality of the Spirit given in Baptism and continuing to work through Word and Sacrament, producing the confession of Christ and the love of the brothers that John has been describing.

The Apostolic Witness

John includes a brief but important claim. We have seen and testify that the Father has sent His Son to be the Savior of the world. The we is the apostolic we we have met throughout the letter. John and his fellow apostles have seen, heard, touched, and now testify to what they have experienced. The Christian’s faith is not rooted in inner spiritual impression alone; it is rooted in apostolic testimony. We know the Father sent the Son because the apostles saw and tell us. And this apostolic testimony, received by faith, is the ground of the Christian’s confession of Christ.

This grounds Christian confidence in something outside the self. Christians sometimes struggle because their inner experience fluctuates: sometimes faith feels strong, sometimes weak, sometimes certain, sometimes clouded. If assurance depended entirely on the consistency of inner experience, it would be a fragile thing. But John roots assurance in something more objective. We have seen, we testify, the Father has sent the Son. The apostolic witness does not fluctuate. It stands. And the Christian whose faith rests on this witness has a ground that does not shift when her feelings do.

Knowing and Believing the Love

John gathers the section into a beautiful summary. So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. Both verbs matter. To know: by acquaintance, by experience, by ongoing relationship. To believe: by trust, by the confession of faith, by the commitment of the self. These are not opposed; they are two aspects of one response to what has been given. The Christian both knows the love and believes it. The knowing comes from the Spirit’s work through Word and Sacrament; the believing is the trust that receives what has been known.

And the content is simple. The love that God has for us. Not a general idea of divine benevolence, but the particular love that sent the Son to be the propitiation for our sins, that has been made manifest in Christ, that is at work in us by the Spirit. Christians know this love and believe in this love. And this is what the Christian life ultimately is: the ongoing reception of this love, the ongoing trust in it, the ongoing flowing of it outward to others. Everything else is derivative. This is the core.

God Is Love

John now repeats the central claim, with an added consequence. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.

The repetition is deliberate. In verse 8, he said God is love, with the consequence that anyone who does not love does not know God. Now he says God is love, with the consequence that the one who abides in love abides in God. Not-loving and loving are the two possibilities, and each carries its spiritual reality. To abide in love is to abide in God, because God is love. To refuse love is to remove oneself from the life of the God who is love.

Abide in Love

The language of abiding has been central throughout the letter. To abide in Christ, to abide in His word, to abide in the anointing, to abide in what was heard from the beginning; all of these have been developed as the settled dwelling-place of the Christian life. Now John adds another. To abide in love. To settle into love as the place where we live, to make love the atmosphere we breathe, to dwell in love as our ongoing pattern rather than passing through it in occasional bursts. This is what abiding in God looks like, because God is love.

The practical implication is significant. A Christian who visits love occasionally but lives in some other atmosphere most of the time (bitterness, self-protection, resentment, fear, cynicism, indifference), is not abiding in God, whatever her verbal claims. The Christian who lives in love, even imperfectly, is abiding in God. This is not about perfect performance; it is about direction and atmosphere. Where does the Christian live, most of the time, in the patterns of her heart? If the answer is in love (in the orientation toward the welfare of others, in the active goodwill that characterizes the children of God), she is abiding where John has said Christians belong.

Confidence for the Day of Judgment

John now develops an implication that brings the assurance theme to a particular height. By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as He is so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because He first loved us.

The day of judgment is mentioned directly. At the end of the age, Christ will return, the dead will rise, and all humanity will stand before Him. This is universally promised in the New Testament. And yet John says the Christian may have confidence for that day. Not reluctant hope. Not nervous wishing. Confidence. Parrhesia again, the same word we met for the confidence of the one who abides in Christ. The Christian who has been shaped by the love of God can stand before the judgment seat of Christ without fear, because the love that will meet her there is the same love that has carried her all along.

Because as He Is, So Are We

The reason John gives is striking. Because as He is, so also are we in this world. The Christian has been united to Christ in such a way that what is true of Him is, by grace, true of her. His righteousness is hers. His standing with the Father is hers. His relationship with the judge is hers, because He is the judge. The Christian who stands before Christ at the last day does not stand as one whose fate is still in question. She stands as one who has already been united to the judge by grace through faith, who shares His Sonship, whose case has already been decided in His death and resurrection.

This is why the Christian may have confidence. Not because her own performance has been adequate to the judgment. It has not. Because the one she will face is the one who has already saved her, loved her, died for her, and been raised for her. The judgment is not a contest whose outcome depends on her. It is a revelation of what has already been settled in Christ. And the settled outcome is mercy and welcome, not wrath and rejection, for the one who is in Him.

Perfect Love Casts Out Fear

John now makes one of his most beloved statements. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.

The fear John is addressing is specifically the fear of judgment, the fear of punishment, the fear of standing before God and being condemned. This kind of fear is incompatible with the love that has been received. The love of God that has reached the Christian, that has made her His child, that will meet her at the last day, this love has no place in it for fearful punishment-dread. Perfect love, love brought to its goal, casts out that kind of fear.

Several things should be said carefully. First, John is not saying all forms of fear are incompatible with Christian love. The fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom, is a biblical and appropriate attitude for Christians. This is not punishment-dread; it is the awe of the creature before the Creator, the reverence of the child before a Father who is holy. Second, John is not saying Christians will not experience anxiety, apprehension, or concern in the ordinary course of life. These are human emotions appropriate to various circumstances. He is saying the specific fear of judgment (the fear that God will punish us, reject us, find us wanting at the last day) has been cast out by the love that has reached us in Christ. Third, John is not saying Christians always feel this confidence. He is saying it is theirs by right of what Christ has accomplished, and when they are walking in the love they have received, the fear gives way to the confidence that properly belongs to them.

We Love Because He First Loved Us

And John summarizes the whole section in a single line. We love because He first loved us. This is the shape of Christian love, in one sentence. We are not the originators of love; we are recipients and conduits. The love that moves through us comes from the one who first loved us, while we were far from Him, sending His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Everything flows from this primary fact. The love we are called to show the brothers is not something we manufacture; it is something we receive and pass on. The Christian who understands this is freed from the burden of generating love from her own resources and is free to rest in the love she has received, letting it flow through her to others.

This also shapes how Christians deal with the times when love is hard. When loving the brother is costly, when forgiveness is difficult, when service is unwelcome, when presence is unreturned, the Christian does not need to summon love from within her own reserves. She returns to the love she has received. She remembers the Son who was sent for her. She abides in what was given. And out of that abiding, love for the difficult brother becomes possible again, not because she is a naturally loving person, but because the love of Christ is at work in her.

The Final Test

John closes the passage with a stern final test. If anyone says, I love God, and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from Him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.

The test is the same we met earlier in the letter. Love of the brother cannot be separated from love of God. They come together or they fail together. The one who claims to love God while hating his brother is lying. Not exaggerating, not being inconsistent, lying. The claim is incompatible with the reality, and it cannot be both held and truthful.

The Argument

John gives a logical argument for this. The brother is visible; we have seen him. God is invisible; we have not seen Him. If we cannot even love the brother whom we can see (with all his faults obvious to our eyes, all his limitations on display, all his ordinariness visible to us), how will we love the God whom we cannot see at all, whose infinite perfections exceed our capacity to take in? The brother we can see is the easier case. If we fail at the easier case, the harder case is beyond us.

This is psychologically and theologically penetrating. The love of God sometimes feels easier than the love of brother, because God is far away and the brother is close. The love of God can be abstract, warm, uncomplicated. The love of the brother is concrete, demanding, requiring forgiveness of specific offenses and patience with specific failures. Christians sometimes deceive themselves into thinking they love God deeply while refusing the love of brother that love of God actually requires. John exposes this deception. The love of God and the love of brother are not two separate things. They are one love, with two directions. And when one direction is refused, the other is refused as well.

The Commandment

John gathers the teaching into the single commandment. And this commandment we have from Him: whoever loves God must also love his brother. The two are inseparable. Christ has given us one commandment with two aspects, and the Christian life is the ongoing working out of both. Love of God that does not result in love of brother is not the love of God. Love of brother that is not rooted in love of God eventually loses its ground. Both matter. Both are required. Both are gifts of the same Spirit, flowing from the same love that first loved us.

Gathering the Threads

John has given us, in this passage, what is perhaps the fullest New Testament treatment of the love of God. The claim that God is love: absolutely, essentially, eternally. The demonstration of that love in the sending of the Son as the propitiation for our sins. The consequence that we should love one another, because of the love we have received. The Spirit as the confirmation of our abiding in God. The confidence for the day of judgment that perfect love produces. The casting out of fear by the love that has reached us. The inseparability of love of God and love of brother. All of this is gathered here, in one passage, for the sake of the assurance that is the letter’s pastoral heart.

For the Lutheran Christian, this passage connects to the deepest realities of what the Reformation recovered. The love of God precedes our love for Him: pure grace, unearned, given while we were sinners. The propitiation is not something that limits or contradicts the love of God; it is the fullest expression of that love. The Christian life is the reception of what has been given, and the flowing of that gift outward to others. And the confidence for the day of judgment rests not on the Christian’s performance but on the Christian’s union with the one who is Himself the judge. This is the Gospel in its richest form, and it is the ground of the assurance John has been building across the letter.

For every Christian in every age, the passage is a well to return to. When fear rises, return here. When the demands of loving the brother feel impossible, return here. When you wonder whether you really belong to God, return here. The love of God that has been poured out in Christ, that is present in you by the Spirit, that will meet you at the last day, this love is the ground on which you stand, and it is adequate for every day between this one and the day you see Him face to face.

For Discussion

The following questions are for group discussion or personal reflection.

God is love. How does this statement shape the way you understand the Trinity, the Father, Son, and Spirit who have eternally loved one another before any creation existed? Does grasping this change how you think about God’s love for you?
John says love is defined by the cross: ‘in this is love, that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.’ How does this definition of love cut against the cultural definitions you’ve absorbed? Where do you need to recalibrate?
‘We love because He first loved us.’ If you really lived from this foundation, if you understood that you are not the originator of love but the recipient, how would your relationships change? Where do you most often forget this?
Perfect love casts out fear. What fears of judgment still haunt you despite the Gospel you have heard? What would it mean, practically, for these fears to be cast out by the love you have received?
The invisible God is made visible in the love of Christians for one another. When you look at the Christian community you are part of, what does the world see of God in it? Where is the witness strong, and where is it compromised?
The final test, you cannot love God whom you have not seen if you do not love the brother whom you have seen, is pointed. Is there a brother right now whom you are struggling to love? What does John’s teaching require of you there?

Looking Ahead

Next week we move into the first half of chapter five, where John brings several themes to their climax. He will connect faith in Jesus as the Christ to the new birth, to the overcoming of the world, to the keeping of God’s commandments. And he will reach the important passage on the water and the blood and the Spirit as the three witnesses: a passage we will treat with particular care, drawing out, with care, its sacramental resonance for Lutheran readers. Here the letter’s historical argument and the Church’s sacramental life meet.

Before next session, read 1 John 5:1–12 at least twice. Pay attention to how John moves between faith, overcoming, and testimony. The three witnesses (Spirit, water, and blood) are the pivotal passage in this section, and coming to class having thought about what they might mean will deepen what you receive.

Closing Prayer

Father of love, who are Yourself love in Your eternal being, and who have loved us in the sending of Your Son to be the propitiation for our sins, teach us to abide in this love and to let it flow through us to the brothers You have given us. Cast out the fears that rise in us at the thought of Your judgment, replacing them with the confidence that belongs to those who stand in Your Son. Make Your invisible self visible through the love we show one another. And bring us, in the end, to the day of judgment unafraid, because the one who will meet us there is the one who has loved us with an everlasting love. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.