1 JOHN IV. 14-21.
And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world. Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him, and he in God. And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment: because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love. We love him, because he first loved us. If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar; for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen! And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also.
THE question presented itself to us in the last Lecture, ‘When St. John bade the disciples at Ephesus love one another, did he mean that the world beyond their circle was to be excluded from their love?’ I was not in haste to answer this question. I contented myself with hinting that the exercise of love is most difficult towards those with whom we are most in contact. St. John, however, does not leave us long in suspense. ‘We have seen,’ he says, ‘and do testify, that the Father sent the Son (to be) a Saviour of the world.’ That is the truth which became evident to the little band of disciples while they were showing love one to another; that is the witness which they were bearing; they existed only to bear it. The blessing which they were inheriting was a blessing for the world. He who was the ground of their fellowship, the author and finisher of their faith, was the Saviour of the world.
Let us consider this testimony of theirs more attentively. The name ‘Saviour’ was not with them, if it is with us, a technical name, a name out of which the life had departed; a Saviour was one who saves,—saves from actual misery and bondage. What actual misery or bondage had they been saved from? Is it not a misery that men of the same flesh and blood should be living as if they had nothing in common, nothing to bind them to each other, as if each stood in the other’s way? They had been saved from this misery; they had found a common interest, a common Lord. They had looked upon God as far off from them, in the hours when they felt most they could not live without Him; they had found Him sometimes fearfully near, when they wished they could drive Him to an infinite distance. They had been saved from the thought that God and they were separated; they had been saved from the wish that He should be separated from them. The name God with us had become the dearest of all names to them. And yet the reverence for God, as the perfect Goodness, as the great enemy of all that was not good in them and the universe, had become immeasurably deeper than it had ever been. Why? Because the Father had sent the Son; because they had believed that He who was with them, their helper and deliverer, was the Son of God; the Son in whom that Being of absolute goodness delighted; because they had learnt to call Him, in Christ, their Father. This was salvation; what more did they want?
They did want something more; but it was implied in what they had already seen and felt. Their Lord was the Lord of the world; they had a right to tell the world so; they had no right to suppress the proclamation. For this end had the Father sent the Son, not simply to gather a little body out of the world which should have His love and not the world’s love in it, which should obey Him and not the world; but by that means to save the world. Strange as the message sounded in other ears and in their own, He was the Saviour of that world which treated them as aliens and outcasts. Its curse was their curse. Its members were divided from each other. The Father had sent the Son to save them from that division. He was the head of every man; the centre of human beings. The majority regarded God as afar from them; even though their consciences told them that it was death to be away from Him; they dreaded lest He should approach them; lest that should be their death. The Father sent the Son to save the world from this death; in the Son He reconciled the world unto Himself.
Supposing St. John had not been at liberty to use this language; supposing he had been obliged to tell the Ephesians, ‘The Father has sent the Son to be your Saviour, not to be the Saviour of the world,’ think what the effect would have been on the testimony which they bore in the world! The very word testimony would have been inapplicable. They might have argued with men to convince them that Christians were right and they were wrong, that Christians were happy and they were miserable; but they could not have testified, ‘We have found the King to whom all in heaven and earth owe homage; we can tell you what He is.’
They might have spoken of a scheme of salvation, and explained most learnedly how different parts of it fitted into each other. They could not have testified as St. John does in the next verse: ‘Whosoever confesseth that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him and he in God.’ That is the message of a man who believes, as St. Paul told the Athenians—men given to idolatry, frivolous men,—that ‘God is not far from any one of us, for in Him we live, and move, and have our being.’ For he added, ‘Certain of your own poets have said, We also are His offspring.’ If they believed Jesus to be the Son of God, the barrier which divided them from Him in whom they were living and being—the barrier of ignorance, discord, hatred, was broken down; they were brought into the proper state of men; ‘God dwelt in them, and they in God.’ If they believed that Jesus was the Son of God, the dream of the poet was found to be a true dream. They were the offspring of God; God had created and chosen them in His only-begotten Son; they could call Him their Father.
Was there, then, no blessing, no privilege, in the condition of Christ’s flock? Might they just as well have been still a portion of the denying world? St. John shall answer, not I: ‘And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us.’ This was the blessing, this was the privilege. The infinite misery of the denying world was, that it did not know and believe the love that God had to it; that it believed Him to have no love to it; that it refused all communion with love. That neither the belief of the Church or the unbelief of the world, affected the nature and being of God in the least, he affirms in the next clause, where he repeats the sentence I spoke of in the last Lecture: ‘God is love.’ This is not an accident of His character, but its essence; not an aspect which it wears at certain times or to some fortunate persons, but that which is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, that which has no respect of persons. But here is the difference: ‘He that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God, and God in him.’ By dwelling in love, that love which Christ had manifested, by entering with heart and soul into it, by permitting it to govern them, they dwelt in God and God in them; they became partakers of His nature instead of aliens from Him, at one with Him instead of at war with Him.
I have spoken of a strange contradiction which there is in men’s minds when they think of God. They feel as if it would be a dreadful thing to lose Him, and yet as if it would be a more dreadful thing to be brought near Him, to be in His open presence. If you consider how you have spoken yourselves, how you have heard others speak of the day of Judgment, you will understand what I mean. We complain that the world is not at all what it ought to be; that there is tyranny and injustice in high places; that there is not merely misery here and there, but a predominance of misery; that sickness and death seem as if they were stronger than health and life; that truth and honesty are often despised by those who pass with the highest reputation, even with a reputation for religion; that even men, whom we are bound to think sincere and good in the main, have much alloy mixed with their gold. We cry in our hearts, if not with our lips, ‘When will the Lord of the earth set these things right? When will He put down those who abuse His Name and His power to the sanction of foul deeds? When will He restore peace, and drive out war? When will He put an end to hypocrisy, and vindicate that which is simple and pure?’ What are these cries but repetitions of the Psalmist’s prayer, that God will rise and judge the earth? And yet if any one should say to us, ‘The day of Judgment, or even a day of Judgment is at hand,’ what shivering and shrinking there is at the sound! How the very report of a comet being seen in the heavens shakes the minds of poor ignorant people who have a notion that perhaps it may have some commission from God against the earth! What a secret cry there is in the heart, ‘O Lord, not yet! We would not meet Thee now! Leave the world and us to our sins and falsehoods, just a little longer.’
You know that this is so. Ought we to wish that it was otherwise? Not if, by losing either of these inconsistent tempers of mind, we lost any part of the truth for which it is bearing witness. Not if, by parting with the desire that God should appear and rectify the disorders and caprices of the universe, we lost the feeling that it is His purpose to do this; that every one who has any office or ministry whatever among men must give account of it to the great Householder, that every widow may cry to Him, ‘Avenge me of my adversary,’ with the certainty that He is not an unjust Judge, and will hear His elect, though He bear long with them. Not if, by parting with the dread of His appearing, we lost the feeling that whatever is hateful or untrue must be exposed to His clear eye, must be confronted with His perfect Love and Truth. Both these convictions are necessary to us; the misfortune is, that each should weaken and counteract the other; so that, except at certain crises in our lives, the judgment-day should be an object neither of distinct hope nor of distinct terror, only of an emotion which is compounded of what is poorest and least honest, least capable of producing any moral effect, in both hope and terror.
St. John grapples with this subject in the 17th verse. ‘Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of Judgment, because as He is, so are we in this world.’ Our translators have deviated from the exact rendering of the first clause in this verse. They did so in hopes of making the sense more clear. I am not sure that they have not made it less clear. He had been telling us that if we dwell in love, we dwell in God and God in us. However difficult and wonderful this language sounds, we may see, after a moment’s consideration, that he could not have given a ‘perfect’ account of love, if he had resorted to any other. Take a very simple analogy. I want to describe the act of seeing. I speak of it as an act of my eye. That is true so far as it goes; but it is imperfect. Seeing cannot be considered only in reference to the eye. To describe it perfectly, I must take in the object upon which it is exercised. If the eye does not rest in that, does not lose itself in that, I do not really see. The law of love must be the same. I may describe love in the lover; but that is an imperfect description. To the perfection of love it is necessary that it should be both in the lover and in the object beloved. St. John tells us that herein, i.e. in this union of ourselves with God, our love, (more strictly the love that is with us,) is perfected. This is the completest idea of love, the only complete idea we can have. And he shows, at the same time, that it is the only practical idea of love; that no other will stand the great test of all. If I look forward to God’s judgment, relying upon the love that I have to Him, I must be continually haunted with the thought that all the weakness and wretchedness of my love will be brought to light, all the failures of every day and hour towards Him and towards my brother. A death-bed makes a man conscious of these failures more than of any others, nay, resolves all others into these. And suppose I could increase that love ten thousandfold, still counting it mine, still saying, ‘It dwells in me,’ the terror of that judgment would not be sensibly diminished. I still cannot wish to be brought face to face with a Love which must show me how utterly unworthy and wretched mine is, how utterly unlike His before whom I stand. But if I give up altogether speaking, or thinking, or dreaming of love as mine, if I sink myself, lose myself in a love which is altogether above me, which comprehends me and the universe, if it is the very love which will be revealed at the last day that I am dwelling in, and that is dwelling in me, may I not have boldness to meet that judgment, may I not long to meet it?
‘Because,’ St. John continues, ‘as He is, so are we in this world.’ Our battle with evil is His battle; whatever is right and wholesome in us is simply derived from Him. Why, then, may we not hail the termination of the battle, the obtaining of the victory? What interest have we in justifying that which we have been taught to feel is our plague and curse? How can we shrink from the manifestation of that perfect goodness, about which we have complained so bitterly that it was hidden from us? I am paraphrasing the words very feebly; but even what I have said may enable you to see the ground of St. John’s confidence that the Judgment day was a day which could not make him ashamed.
But is it possible to be wholly rid of that fear of this day, which is so natural to us? St. John answers, ‘There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear; he that feareth is not made perfect in love.’ The first proposition is at variance with many which are familiar to us. Love is often represented as anxious, timid, jealous. And there is truth in the representation. The affection which is on one side, which is not certain of a return, is and must be of this character; precisely because it is not the perfect or perfected love which the Apostle is speaking of. In every case that perfected love which each lover realizes in the other casts out fear. The torment of doubt and suspicion is over; there is no balancing to ascertain who has most; there is no mine or thine. Supposing such love to exist between the Creator and the creature, the Father and His children, there would be no fear of any fuller manifestation of His glory; only a continual hope of it. ‘He that feareth is not made perfect in love.’ ‘Perhaps not,’ you may say; ‘but at least he is humble; and surely God honours the humble.’ There is a mistake, I think, here. A man who doubts whether he does not love God better than God loves him, is not humble. A man who fancies that he loves his fellowcreatures better than God loves them, is not humble. He is giving himself credit for the very highest qualities; he has not learnt that he has no good thing—certainly, therefore, no love, which is the best thing—in himself. Blessed are the poor in spirit; therefore he must be stripped of those notions of his own riches, before he can be blessed.
’These words of St. John about the perfect or initiated man, like some which I considered in a former Lecture, were designed, I believe, to undermine the self-conceit of those who boasted of their great wisdom and great love, and despised the little children of the flock, who felt that they were very poor in both. He would have the Ephesians understand that, if they thought they knew anything, they knew nothing yet as they ought to know; that, if they thought they had any love, they were not yet confessing the source of love, and drinking entirely from that.
For ‘We love Him, because He first loved us.’ Let no one cheat you of the simple force of these words by persuading you to understand the Apostle as saying that we love God out of gratitude for the love He shows to us. Some ethical writers are wont to talk much of the motives, to which, they say, man’s nature is subjected; this motive of gratitude, they affirm, is one of the chief. I do not wish to argue the point with them; but I say they have no right to impute these notions to the Apostle, to make him put motives in the place of God. And which is the most elevating doctrine, theirs or St. John’s? They would make me the slave of a certain set of influences which I feel I ought to control. He represents God as acting upon me that I may be free, and may not be the tool of this motive or that. Let us, therefore, receive these words in that sense which is most agreeable to the context; let us understand the Apostle to say, ‘We love God only because that true original love which is in Him is moving us and inspiring us; we could not love secondarily and subordinately if we had not loved primarily and absolutely.’
Taking these thoughts along with us, we shall understand much better the next verse. ‘If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar; for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? And this commandment have we from Him, That he who loveth God love his brother also.’ The man says, ‘I love God.’ St. John meets him with the question, ‘What do you love? An unseen being, if it is the true God whom you love: but an unseen being who has declared that the beings you see, you converse with, are made in His image; a Father who has said, “These are my offspring.” And these images of His have nothing that attracts you! this offspring of His you positively hate! There is but one word for such profession, from whomsoever it comes,—It is a lie. If the love does not descend, the hatred must ascend. If you have an aversion for the human likeness, you must have an aversion for the divine prototype.’ And then he recurs to his old language: ‘Love to the brethren is not a fancy, a taste, a sentimental preference. It is obedience to a commandment. It is doing what God says you are to do. To divide the love of God from the love of your brother, is to divide the love of God from obedience to God. It is substituting something else for the love with which He first loved you; and that something else cannot be love at all.’
I have tried to show you in these Lectures that St. John explains himself to us more clearly than I or than any commentator can explain him; that if we are really wanting help, he will afford it us. The mistake which students of the Scripture generally commit is this—they fancy the words are very difficult, and they must get some one either to untie or cut the knots which are in them. They do not consider that the knots in books would signify very little, if our own lives were not full of knots; that these are what we need to have untied; that if the Bible fulfils its purpose it will enable us to do that work which without it we have been unable to do. One who has blundered very much himself, who has been tormented with a great many practical riddles which he could not solve, is not, I hope, arrogant if he says to his fellow-men, ’This book has cleared up perplexities in my experience. I think they are essentially the same as those which you are meeting with. Shall we try together whether we can make out the oracles which it utters? I fancy that what the Apostle says—nay, that the whole Bible—must look dark to us till it has cleared away some darkness of ours. I have found in St. John a light upon many dark passages in my own history and in the history of the world. I learn from it why religion and morality have so often appeared to be at variance, what errors destroy right practice, how evil practices have given birth to errors and nursed them into maturity; what the first lie was which has expanded itself into a series of lies. And I believe this teaching has an especial worth for our time; that it meets us even more directly and sharply than it met our forefathers; that it may tell us plainly, if we will listen, the secret of our weakness as well as of our strength.
The Psalmist says, ‘Do not I hate them which hate thee, O Lord?’ ‘Yea, I hate them right sore: I do count them mine enemies.’ St. John says, ‘He that saith, I love God, and hateth his brother, is a liar. Are these two passages inconsistent? Does St. John pronounce his inspired ancestor a liar? Must we say that there is to be no hatred any longer, seeing that God is love? I am afraid we are saying or fancying this, and that it is one cause why there is so little love amongst us, why our love is so effeminate a quality, with so little of zeal and fire in it; why, therefore, it is so little like the love which was in Jesus Christ, the love which brought Him through His baptism of fire, the love which it is promised that He shall shed abroad in our hearts, when it is said, ’He shall baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire.’ If we do not hate that which is contrary to love—that which is contrary to the nature of God—we cannot truly and earnestly love. If we do not wish to see what is contrary to love extirpated and destroyed, we cannot truly and earnestly love. That daintiness of ours which cannot bear such expressions as those of the Psalmist, must hinder for ever any real victory of good in us over evil, of the divine life over the death that steals so steadily and rapidly over us. For what are the enemies which rise up against us continually? Are they not bitter, spiteful, murderous thoughts of each other? Do not these torment us? Do not they very often get the mastery over us, and lead us to cruel words and deeds? Is it disobeying the new commandment by which St. John tells us we are bound, to hate them right sore, to hate them with a perfect hatred? Are we not bound to cherish such feelings in ourselves, to be awakening them on all occasions, on purpose that we keep the commandment not in the letter but in the spirit?
I know that there is always a danger of the hatred which we ought to cherish in our heart of hearts against everything which is cowardly, base, insincere, unlovely, passing into that hatred of men which is a breach of the commandment; yes, the danger often seems to be greatest in the strongest, most earnest minds. They are most eager for actual reforms; they cannot bear merely to be fighting with principles; they must denounce them as they see them embodied in acts and persons. No doubt this was a temptation of reformers in other days. They launched forth their denunciations against men, some of whom we cannot help regarding with respect and affection. They could not stop to measure one part of their character against another; they saw them only as apologists for that which their conscience told them was accursed, as opposers of that which they knew it was worth while to die for.
God give us their zeal, for their zeal was all good and loving! God teach us not to judge their fierce words, though we may not imitate them, though we may sometimes lament them! For we should ask ourselves very seriously whether our calm, measured, demure phrases may not conceal more scorn than is meant to wound the heart of the man we are censuring—more of what is essentially diabolical—than those which we call them bigots and savages for uttering; just because we do not loathe the essential evil as they did, because we do not care as much for the essential good. This self-inquiry is, as I have hinted already, the true way to a distinction between a hatred of principles and a hatred of persons. ‘To see the evil, first of all, in our own acts, in our own selves; to recognise it as marring our sincerity and worth—as degrading us from the level God intends for us—this is a security which we can obtain in no other way for our loving the man whose wrong doings we hate.’
But then, how is such self-inquiry to be carried on? Is it not likely to be treacherous? Is not the judge on the side of the criminal? Not if St. John speaks truly; not if we dwell in God and God dwells in us. Then He is the judge Himself. Then when our acts, and words, and thoughts come up before our consciences—and some of them have a very clear brand of malignity and hatred upon them,—it is He who is bringing them to light; it is He who is saying, ‘Thou art not loving thy brother whom thou hast seen; how canst thou be loving Me whom thou hast not seen?’ And then it is not a vague wish which rises in us to be different; it is not a vague wish that we might love our brother; it is His own voice which is saying, ‘Do this, for I am doing it; Be this, for I am love.’
While, therefore, I do find in these pages of St. John a condemnation of all experiments of Christians in ages gone by, to persecute their brother in the name of God and for His glory; whilst I do find here a very clear, authentic declaration, that, if we attempt any repetition of such courses, we are rebelling against Him and are setting up a false god in His place,-I do also perceive that a very awful obligation is laid upon us by the claims and boasts which we put forward to be specially tolerant, and merciful, and charitable. I say that to make such pretensions and not to fulfil them, or only to fulfil them by a lazy indulgence which permits any kind of wrong in others, which stirs up no life or energy in us, is to place ourselves far below the cruelest fanatics who had in them some zeal for human beings as well as for God, however it might be perverted by their selfishness and pride. But I say also that God would not allow us even to dream of such an honour for ourselves as the use of these titles and of these boasts implies, if He did not wish us to have the dream turned into a reality. We may have more charity, a deeper charity than we have aspired to, when our aspirations have been the grandest. For we may abandon the thought of having a charity or love of our own, and so may be perfected in love. We may yield ourselves to that love which passes knowledge, that love which is a consuming fire to destroy the grovelling, petty desires, the party spirit, the self-seeking that have made us a world of sects instead of a church of brothers. And so while some are fancying that they shall banish persecution from the world by banishing all thoughts of God from it, we shall find that it is only by giving glory to Him in the highest we can have peace on earth or good will among men.