Yesterday, we concluded by speaking of the first two factors that enable us to measure God’s great love for us in Christ.
The final factor is that God gave His Son to die for sinners. As John says, “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (v. 10). Who are those for whom Christ died? Not lovely people by God’s reckoning, but sinners, those who had rebelled against Him and hated Him. Indeed, they were those who would crucify His Son out of hatred. And such are we all. Consequently, the measure of God’s love is seen in the fact that He gave His Son to die for such as ourselves.
The term of endearment (“beloved”) with which John begins this last verse takes us back to the identical term with which he began this section in verse 7. It is as though, in exhorting his readers to love one another, John indicates that the exhortation is no less necessary for himself and that he must love and indeed does love them.
The third reason why Christians are to love one another is seen in God’s present and continuous activity of love. It is not just that love constitutes God’s eternal nature or even that it is revealed definitely in past history at the cross of Christ. It is also that love is continuously present as God continues to work in and through His people. It is this about which John speaks in verse 12, saying, “No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.”
That no man has ever seen God is evident. The Old Testament theophanies, including how it is expressed in Exodus 24:10, did not involve the full revelation of God as He is in Himself but only a suggestion of what He is in forms that a human being could understand. But how, then, is a person to know Him? The reply of this verse is almost breathtaking, for it is John’s clear statement that altogether God cannot be seen in Himself; He can be seen in those in whom He abides and in whom His love is perfected. “How are men and women, who do not yet know God, to know Him?” He seems to ask. The answer is: “When we who do know Him love one another.”
Bruce writes well on this point, saying,
The love of God displayed in his people is the strongest apologetic that God has in the world. When his love is planted in their hearts, and he himself thus dwells within them, his love is “perfected” in the complementary response which it finds in them, towards him and towards their fellows. It is in this way that they are not only holy and merciful as he is holy and merciful but, as enjoined by their Lord in the Matthaean version of the Sermon on the Mount, “perfect” as their “heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48), and all through that perfection of love poured out for them in the sacrifice of the cross.1
1F. F. Bruce, The Epistles of John (Old Tappan, NJ: Revell, 1970), 109).