The Spirit of Truth and the Spirit of Error
1 Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits u to see if they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.
2 This is how you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh v is from God, w 3 but every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, x which you have heard is coming; even now it is already in the world.
4 You are from God, little children, and you have conquered them, because the one who is in you y is greater than the one who is in the world. z 5 They are from the world. a Therefore what they say is from the world, and the world listens to them. 6 We are from God. Anyone who knows God listens to us; b anyone who is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of deception. c
Knowing God through Love
7 Dear friends, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been born of God d and knows God. 8 The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent e his one and only Son f into the world so that we might live g through him. 10 Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that he loved us h and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice ,i for our sins. 11 Dear friends, if God loved us in this way, we also must love one another. j 12 No one has ever seen God. k If we love one another, God remains in us and his love is made complete in us. 13 This is how we know that we remain in him l and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit.m 14 And we have seen and we testify that the Father has sent his Son n as the world’s Savior. 15 Whoever confesses o that Jesus is the Son of God—God remains in him and he in God. 16 And we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us.
God is love, and the one who remains in love remains in God, and God remains in him. 17 In this, love is made complete with us so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment, p because as he is, so also are we in this world. q 18 There is no fear in love; instead, perfect love drives out fear, r because fear involves punishment. So the one who fears is not complete in love. s 19 We love because he first loved us. t 20 If anyone says, “I love God,” and yet hates his brother or sister, u he is a liar. v For the person who does not love his brother or sister w whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. 21 And we have this command from him: The one who loves God must also love his brother and sister.
A. Those who deny Jesus’s humanity are false prophets and antichrists (4:1–3). While the first antichristic threat (1 Jn 2:18–25) involved the splitting off of Johannine Christians, likely to rejoin the local Jewish community, the second antichristic threat involved the crisis of false prophets coming to their church with a troubling message, that Jesus had not come in the flesh. These traveling Gentile Christian ministers likely sought to negotiate a middle path between the Jewish Christian rejection of “worldly” behavior and an accommodation of standard religious, political, and moral practices within the pagan Greco-Roman world.
B. Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world (4:4–6). John’s readers would have been surrounded by reminders of Roman domination, but the author here assures his audience that “the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world” (4:4). The worldly origin of the adversaries explains why the worldly listen to them (4:5), but the elder contrasts himself and his audience with the antichrists and their cohorts. Claiming to be from God, those who heed the elder show themselves also to be knowers of God; conversely, those who are not rooted in God turn a deaf ear to the Johannine leadership (4:6a). The parallel to the interpretative reflection on the reception of Jesus here is clear. Just as the response of Jesus’s audiences to him and his message exposed the degree to which they were “of truth” and knowers “of God,” the same measure is now extended to the elder’s audiences. The spirit of truth and the spirit of error are distinguished, from the elder’s perspective, in the telling response to his corrective word (4:6b). Those who do not heed his word do not know God; the responsive ones, however, do.
A. We love because God has first loved us (4:7–10). The first appeal to love one another roots its persuasion in the essential character of God, which from beginning to end is love. Not to love is not to know God, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God (4:7–8). God’s love, of course, must be extended, and the means by which God has done so is the sending of his Son so that the world might live through him (4:9).
B. The perfecting of love in us (4:11–17). The elder’s second appeal for his audiences to love one another moves the locus of the revelation of God’s love through Jesus as the Son of God to the lives of believers (4:11). The perfecting of God’s love in the Christian life becomes the locus of the ongoing revelation of God’s love in the world, and it thereby is of world-changing significance (4:12). Our love for one another is a direct implication of God’s love for us, and it becomes the truest evidence of the believer’s mutual abiding in God (4:13, 16).
C. To love God is to love brothers and sisters (4:18–21). 4:18–19. The third strategic attempt to motivate loving action and character among the elder’s audience involves an appeal to the believer’s aspirations and identity. The human-divine relationship is rooted not in fear but in love; after all, perfect love casts out all fear (4:18). Again, our love as a response to God’s love is emphasized (4:19) as an echo of verse 10. While the saving initiative of God’s love is the central hope of the gospel, that reality evokes an irresistible human response of love for God.
4:20–21. And how can one claim to love God, whom one has not seen, without loving one’s brothers and sisters in faith, whom one has seen (4:20)? The appeal to the believer’s identity and aspiration is a winsome move. One cannot authentically claim to love God without also loving those God loves—brothers and sisters within the beloved community of believers. This makes the original commandment of the Lord that much more compelling: those who love God must love Christian brothers and sisters (4:21). To refuse to embrace the beloved of God is to deny, in effect, one’s love for the Father.