After a stretch on testing spirits, John turns to love. 7"Let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God." The two verbs differ in tense. The Greek for has been born is perfect, a birth that happened and keeps bearing fruit. The Greek for knows is present, a relationship that goes on now. Love is evidence of both.
8"God is love." The sentence is precise. John says God is love, which is stronger than saying God is loving, and he avoids the inversion that would make any warm sentiment divine. Everything God does is loving, and love is the nature of his being. That guards against two mistakes, treating God as a stern power with a soft side, and making the word love a blank check for anything a person feels strongly.
Then John points to an event. 9"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." The Greek for made manifest, *phaneroo*, means a hidden thing brought into view. The sending of the Son was God unveiling his heart, and the purpose was life. A church told by its departing teachers that life lay in secret knowledge hears that life is in a person who was sent.
Verse 10 holds the center. The love John means begins on God's side of the gap. Nobody climbed up to him. He came down, and the cost was the Son. The word for propitiation, *hilasmos*, is the one from 2:2, and it appears only in these two places in the New Testament. Love here is defined by a sacrifice that dealt with sin. The NIV Application Commentary adds that the Father himself loves us and sends the Son (2 Corinthians 5:19).
The conclusion follows. 11"If God so loved us, we also ought to love one another." The word if carries the force of since, and John builds an exhortation on top of a settled fact. The word ought returns for the third time in the letter, the language of a debt, and the pattern holds: what we owe follows from what we were given. John also says so loved, which echoes the most famous sentence in his Gospel (John 3:16).
Then comes something startling. 12"No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us." A community of people who love one another makes him visible. The Greek for perfected, *teleioo*, is in the perfect tense and means brought to its goal. God's love reaches its purpose when it moves through us to other people. It begins in God, arrives in us, and completes itself in the neighbor. That is a triangle of God, the self, and the neighbor, and no corner can be skipped.
Ask whom in your life God's love could reach this week, if it came through you.
Prayer
Father, you are love, and you showed your love by sending your only Son so that we might live through him. You loved us first and sent him to be the propitiation for our sins. Since you have so loved us, teach us to love one another. Let your love be perfected in us. In Jesus' name, amen.