In an appendix to his very excellent book, The Church at the End of the 20th Century, Francis Schaeffer speaks of love as “the mark of the Christian.” His study is based upon John 13:33-35, in which Christ is recorded as having imparted a new commandment to His disciples: “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” Schaeffer’s point is that “only with this mark may the world know that Christians are indeed Christians and that Jesus was sent by the Father.”1 He is quite right. It may be added to this, however, that it is also by love that Christians may know that they are Christians. That is, a Christian may know that he has been truly made alive by Christ when he finds himself beginning to love and actually loving those others for whom Christ died.
This is the theme of the next section of 1 John. For it is in these verses (2:7-11) that the aged apostle develops the social test for whether a person who considers himself as knowing God actually knows Him or not. The first test is found in verses 3-6. It is the moral test, the test of righteousness. The third test is found in verses 18-27. It is the test of belief or sound doctrine. Here, however, the test is the test of love. Does the one who professes to know God love others? If he does, he can be sure that he has been made alive by God. If he does not, John says, such a one has no more right to consider himself a child of God than does the one who says that he knows God but disregards His commandments.
The section is divided into two parts: first, the law of love and, second, the life of love. The second part contains three contrasting applications of the basic principle.
In the preceding verses John has admonished believers to keep God’s commandments. But this was a general statement. Now he brings forward one command specifically: the command to love. It is true that verses 7 and 8 do not contain the word “love” and that, in fact, it is only mentioned once in the entire section (in v. 9). But the commandment to love is what John obviously has in mind, as the reference to the “new commandment” of John 13 clearly indicates. The progression of thought is that if a person knows God he will keep God’s commandments and that, if he keeps God’s commandments, he will love others in accord with Christ’s teaching.
There is nothing fundamentally new in all this, however. For John reminds his readers that the command is that which they have had from the beginning. It is possible to take this last phrase in at least two ways. It may refer to the beginning of Christianity, as the same phrase seems to do in chapter one. Or it may be taken as referring to the beginning of revealed religion, that is, to the commandment as it existed in the Old Testament era. It is probably best to take it in the latter sense, for it is easier to see an old-new contrast between the law of love as contained in the Old Testament and the law of love as restated by Jesus for Christians, than to imagine a contrast between what existed from the beginning of Christianity and what is nevertheless in some sense still new as John writes his letter.
1Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the 20th Century (Chicago, IL: Inter-Varsity, 1970), 153.