Mechanics
for Maturing Love; 1 John 4:12-15
1
John 4:12 NASB “No one has seen God at any time; if we love one
another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected [has been matured] in us.”
The word “perfected” is the Greek word teleioo,
and it has to do not so much with perfection in the sense of flawlessness or that which is impeccable, but it has to do with brining
something to completion or to maturity. God abiding in us means that His love
has been brought to maturity in us. Then he come back
to that concept of maturity in verse 17: “love is perfected with us” [nasb]—or, love has been matured
among us in this—“so that we may have confidence [boldness] in the day of
judgment…” The Day of Judgment is the judgment seat of Christ, and the theme of
this whole section is how the believer can have confidence at the judgment seat
of Christ (1 John 2:28) and not be ashamed at the
judgment seat of Christ. The key is maturing in love, i.e. love standing for
the adult spiritual life or reaching maturity in the spiritual life.
1
John 4:12 NASB “No one has seen God at any time…” In this point he
is simply referring to the fact that no one has ever seen God the Father. This
is the perfect middle indicative of verb theaomai
[qeaomai] which means
to see, to witness, to look intently upon, to perceive. John uses it again in
verse 14, so we see how this vocabulary intertwines through this section. How
did they know the Father? Remember that Jesus told Philip: “If you have seen Me you have seen the Father.” They knew the Father because
they saw Jesus. John’s point is that no one has seen God at any time. So how do
we know God? “… if we love one another, God abides in
us, and His love is perfected in us.” So he is going to lay down his argument
for the advanced spiritual life being exemplified in love for one another. What
he is going to say is that if you want to see God, you see it when believers are loving one another. That is when you see the character
of Christ.
First
of all we have to understand the nature of the condition: “if we love one
another.” It is a third class condition which means: If, maybe you will and
maybe you will not. Sometimes we love one another; sometimes we don’t. So John
is going to have a supposition here that if, assuming you will (but you may
not), under that condition God abides in us. The key word in this section is
the word “abide,” the Greek word meno,
which means to abide, to dwell, to remain, to stay. meno is used 24 times in 1 John. That
tells us it is a crucial word. It is used six times between verses 12 and 16 of
this chapter. That tells us it is a key concept here.
meno is a word that has generated a tremendous amount of
theological debate. There are those who argue that meno really means, or is very similar to, believe, almost
synonymous with believe; and they say all genuine believers, true believers,
abide. What they are saying is that if you are a true believer you are always
abiding, whereas we have taken the position that abide has to do with remaining
in fellowship or continuing to have fellowship with Christ, and when we sin we
stop abiding.
Abiding
1.
Abiding is a technical term in John for the believer who is
having fellowship with God, walking by the Spirit and walking in the light.
2.
Only the believer who abides in Christ can advance and
mature. When a believer is not abiding in Christ he is out of fellowship and is
controlled by the sin nature.
3.
As we abide in Him not only does he abide in us but His Word
abides in us and God abides in us. Abiding is mutual. The more we abide in Him
the more he abides in us; the more we abide in Him the more His Word abides in
us.
4.
Not all believers abide. Those who don’t abide will suffer
divine discipline in time and loss of rewards and shame at the judgment seat of
Christ.
So
abide is a term for fellowship and for someone who is spending time staying in
fellowship and growing to spiritual maturity. What we read here is, “if we love
one another God abides in us.” We can’t love one another unless God is abiding
in us; God won’t abide in us unless we are abiding in Christ. We are not going
to be abiding in Christ unless we stay in fellowship. We have to bring all this
together. The key is, we stay in fellowship, we abide in Christ, and then God
in turn abides in us, and He is producing something in us: His character. This
is exemplified by the fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22, 23. So love
doesn’t come automatically, it comes as a result of walking by means of God the
Holy Spirit. That means that in order to love one another we have some
preconditions. We have to be learning doctrine. We have to be using 1 John 1:9
to not only recover fellowship but then we have to be applying doctrine while we
are not sinning because when we are sinning we are out of fellowship.
Loving
one another brings into focus the aspect of the mutual ministry of believers to
one another in the body of Christ. This usually functions under the category of
spiritual gifts. Remember, there are two categories of spiritual gifts:
temporary and permanent. Love is not automatic in the spiritual life; it
doesn’t just happen. We have to go through the process. The last clause in
verse 12: “His love is matured in us,” is a perfect passive participle and the
perfect tense indicates emphasis on the present results of a past action. So
for the mature believer at X point in time, we see God in him. We see him
demonstrate God’s character and at that point he is following the command of loving
one another. This is the result of something that has happened in the past. The
past action is the completion of love, or maturity.
1
John 4:13 NASB “By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us,
because He has given us of His Spirit.” How do we know that we have reached
this level of maturity where we can be said to abide? When we reach maturity we
are spending more time in fellowship than out of fellowship and we can
therefore be said to abide in Christ in a more full sense. “… and he [abides in]
us, because He has given us of His Spirit.” In the English this looks rather
simple, it looks like He has given us His Spirit. He gave us the Spirit at the
instant of salvation but that isn’t how we know we abide. He is using abide now
in a more technical sense of almost maturity where the believer is spending
more of his time in abiding and loving. We received the Spirit when we were
saved, not when we get to maturity. So it is confusing. When we look at the
Greek, though, it is even more interesting. The main verb is a perfect active
indicative of didomi. The perfect
emphasises present reality. So He gave it in the past and it is emphasising the
present reality of it here. The active voice means the subject performs the
action: God gave the Spirit. The indicative mood is the mood of reality. He
gave the Spirit in the past to us. “To us” is a dative case and it is a dative
of advantage, meaning He gave the Spirit to us for our advantage or benefit. It
doesn’t just say “of His Spirit.” When we have phrases with “of” it indicates a
genitive construction. Too often a genitive construction is rather
superficially translated as of something or, let’s say, Peter’s confession (the
confession of Peter). But there are at least 35 different meanings to the genitive
case. We don’t get those meanings from the grammar itself, we have to look at
the context and think about it.
Then
there is something else here. That is, it is not simply “of the Spirit” in the Greek, there is a preposition in front of it, the preposition
ek, which is usually the
preposition indicating source or separation. The preposition always takes a
genitive case. There are five different shades of meaning to an ek plus the genitive. Which one you use
has to be determined by usage and by comparing and contrasting context. John
uses this phrase in one other place, in 1 John 3:24, “We know by this that He
abides in us, by the Spirit whom He has given us.” This is a slightly different
construction. The relative pronoun tells us that it is the Spirit that is
given. This relative pronoun is the subject of the aorist tense verb here and
in the English is appears to be the same. But in 4:13 it is a perfect tense,
and the subject of the “has given” is He, “has given to us.” In 3:24 the
subject of the verb is the relative pronoun “whom” which refers to “Spirit.” So
the Spirit is what is given to us in 3:24 but something else is given to us in
4:13. The something isn’t spelled out in 4:13, what we have is a genitive
clause. Notice something else. In 3:24 it says “by the Spirit.” That’s means:
“by means of the Spirit.” It is still ek
tou pneumatos, the same preposition and the same genitive construction.
There are four different meanings to ek;
one of the more rare or less common emphasis is means.
The translator nailed it in 3:24; it is means there, the context indicates it.
By means of the filling of the Spirit; that’s how we know that He has been
given to us, but it is not the normal en
[e)n] plus the
dative which is normally how means is expressed, it is a little different. But
in 4:13 he takes the same construction and the same phrase with the same
context and he translates it with this nebulous, meaningless “of the Spirit.”
1
John 4:13 should be translated: “By this we know that we abide in Him and He in
us, because He has given (something) to us by His Spirit.” What did He give to
us? What He gave to us is 1 John 4:12—love, the fruit of the Spirit. to love one another. So how do we know that we are abiding
in Him and He is us? By love for one another which is produced by God the Holy
Spirit. So the ek plus the
genitive in 4:13 is actually an expression of means—“by means of the
Spirit,” that love is produced.
We
have tied in 1 John 3:16 where we saw that by this we know love, that Christ
died as a substitute for us. We saw in 4:9 that “in this the love of God was
manifested that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world that we might
live through Him. So how do we know love? We know love by looking at the cross.
So now we have two verses that talk about love and then he is going to wrap
that third strand back as he continues to weave his theme.
1
John 4:14 NASB “We have seen and testify that the Father has sent
the Son {to be} the Savior of the world.” This verse
doesn’t mention love or abiding, it picks up a totally different
subject—salvation. It goes right back to the cross and reminds us of what
took place on the cross as the foundation for our understanding of what love
is. This is a strong verse for unlimited atonement. What we are talking about
here is loving one another, and that love for one another is a love that
doesn’t take into account sin, the failures of the person we love, so when John
says the Father has sent the saviour of the world he is reminding us of God’s
love for fallen, undeserving man; not a special kind of love in limited
atonement which is limited only to those who believe and who believe because
they are given that faith to believe. That is Calvinism.
Unlimited
atonement
1.
Unlimited atonement means unlimited in its extent. Jesus
Christ died for every single human being.
2.
Atonement is a summary term for all of Christ’s work on the
cross and it is based on the Hebrew concept expressed in the Day of Atonement
where kaphar means to cleanse or to purify.
3.
Atonement is substitutionary. Romans 5:5.
The
problem is that unlimited atonement has really been taught two ways. There is
what might be called classic unlimited atonement. This is potential
substitution. Almost every theologian that we read holds to a classic unlimited
atonement—as potential. What that means is that they will say Christ died
for the all but if the unbeliever rejects Him he will go to the lake of fire
and will pay the penalty for his sins because he has rejected Christ’s payment.
That is, it was only made potentially, it would have been his if he had
accepted it; but he didn’t accept it so now somebody has to pay for it.
But
that causes tremendous problems with the concept of substitution because there
is no such thing as potential or hypothetical or theoretical substitution.
Ultimately when the unbeliever ends up in the lake of fire and you go to him
and ask why he is in the lake of fire, what is he going to say? I’m paying for
my sins. If he is paying for his sins now in the lake of fire that means Christ
didn’t pay for them on the cross! If Christ didn’t pay for his sins on the
cross then that is limited atonement, isn’t it? That is one of the problems
with the classic formulation. The “real” substitution says that at the great white
throne judgment the issue is not sin, the sin was actually paid for. The issue
is human good and, is your righteousness good enough to meet the standard of
Christ’s perfect righteousness. If it is not good enough to meet that standard
then you are sent to the lake of fire, not because of your sin but because you
are not good enough to get into heaven. It is because you are a sinner but not
because of your personal sins.
John
3:16 NASB “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only
begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal
life.”
Acts
10:43 NASB “Of Him all the prophets bear witness that through His
name everyone who believes in Him receives forgiveness of sins.” “Believe”
there is in the subjunctive mood (potential).
2
Corinthians 5:14 NASB “For the love of Christ controls us, having
concluded this, that one died for all, therefore all died; [15] and He died for
all, so that they who live might no longer live for themselves, but for Him who
died and rose again on their behalf. . . . . [19] namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world [not
just the elect] to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and He
has committed to us the word of reconciliation.”
1
John 2:2 NASB “and He Himself is the propitiation for our sins; and
not for ours only, but also for {those of} the whole world.”
1
Timothy 2:6 NASB “who gave Himself as a ransom for all, the
testimony {given} at the proper time. . . . [4:10] For
it is for this we labor and strive, because we have
fixed our hope on the living God, who is the Savior
of all men, especially of believers.”