First John

The Source of Love

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: I John 4:19 – 21, The Source of Love

Genre: Sermon

Lesson: 13 of 16

Track: #13

Year:

Dictation Name: RR308G13

[Unknown Speaker] We have not a high priest which cannot be touched with the feelings of our infirmities, but was in all point tempted like as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore become boldly into the throne of grace that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need. Let us pray.

Oh most great and glorious God and heavenly Father we come before You in humble thanksgiving for Your goodness’s to us which are more than we can number. We stand before You as Your redeemed because of the blood of Jesus Christ in whose name alone we have standing before Your throne. We stand before You as Your adopted children by Your grace, we thank You for Your mercy and goodness to us. We thank You for the opportunity that we have to gather together in Your name. We thank You for the bond that we have because of Jesus Christ in our relationship to You. We ask that You would encourage us in our faith, help us to see everything in terms of the fact that we are Your redeemed, and Your children forevermore, that we have a responsibility to obey You in loving faithfulness. We ask that You would help us to see through the problems that we have in our personal lives, in our society, help us to see through the discouragement about us because of evil in the world, and help us to remain confident that You are still on the throne and that You, our heavenly Father, is the sovereign of the universe. We pray that You would encourage us in our family lives, we pray that You would encourage our young people, encourage our children to stay faithful to You in word and thought and deed. We pray that You would encourage us in our vocations so that we might see men return in faith to You, and then apply that faith in their personal lives, in their vocations, so that we see the result in our society. We ask that You would encourage us this time as we gather together as representative of the entire corporate body of Jesus Christ. We think especially of those who gather together this day who are persecuted for Your name. We pray that You would help those who are even now trying to assist them in their time of need and distress, and to give them aid and comfort. Bless now the time we have in Your word, we ask this in Christ our Savior’s name, amen.

This morning’s scripture is I John, chapter four, verses nineteen through twenty-one, and this morning’s lesson is entitled “The Source of Love.”

“19 We love him, because he first loved us.

20 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?

21 And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also.”

[Rushdoony] As we have seen thus far in our study of John’s letter he uses the word “love” very regularly and frequently from beginning to end. But we have a problem with this because at this one point our Bible translations are all faulty because the English language is faulty. There are in the coina Greek of the New Testament three words for love, we have only one in English. The three words as we have seen previously are first, eros which refers to erotic love, sexual love. The second is Phileo, as in Philadelphia; Philadelphia is made up of two Greek words, Phileo- love, and adelphos – brother. But the name “Philadelphia” is almost a definition of what phileo means, ordinary, brotherly, human love. The third word is agape, a-g-a-p-e, and it refers to the love that God has, it’s a selfless love, it’s a love in spite of what the person loved is. “While we were yet sinners” we are told “Christ died for us.” That’s an illustration of agape. Christ died for us not because we were deserving or that we had done so much for God that it was only natural for God to send His Son to die for us, no. While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us, that’s agape, it’s a selfless love. As Paul tells us “scarcely (rarely) would anyone die for even a righteous man” but even though we were anti-God, or indifferent to God, He died for us, God the Son died for us. That’s agape, it’s selfless, it is full of grace.

Now, this is the word agape that is used throughout John’s letter “we love Him, because He first loved us.” Because God first of all showed agape, this selfless love, toward us we therefore love Him in response to that. “20 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?” Agape in the Christian life has very practical consequences. It means that we show love in relationship to one another, love to those who are ungodly, really unlovable from any Humanistic sense, but what it means is that we manifest towards them the Love of God. We try to enable them by our living to show them that the Christian life is not “tit for tat” not “well you’ve done this; therefore I will do the same for you, good or bad.” On the contrary, we show towards everyone a patience, a kindliness, a readiness to help, to help even where they are undeserving because we were undeserving when God loved us and gave His only begotten Son to die for us.”

So, John says, here’s a practical test of faith. If you say that you love God and you hate your brother, or any of your fellow men, because brother is used in the broad sense here, you are a liar, which is plain speaking. And a lot of people who are in churches are liars, they profess to love God but they can’t get along with their fellow church members. So John doesn’t spare anyone, he says you cannot say you love God and hate your brother, you are then a liar & God hates liars because they revert, reverse the whole moral order. They try to turn a lie into the truth, and truth into a lie, they profess the faith and do not practice it. Or if they are Humanist they believe in love towards all mankind, but not towards the person next door.

John is very blunt. “For he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” Well for us that seems to reverse the natural order. We would say it’s easy to love something or someone we’ve never seen, we have no problems then. But it’s harder to love someone we see regularly and have problems and frictions with them, but not so John’s statement. He says love, agape, is a very active thing. In the Humanistic sense if you use love, or you mean it in the sense of phileo, brotherly love as in Philadelphia, well then you can love your brother, but you have not seen God, nor known Him. Whereas where it’s agape it is an active thing, you cannot say and claim to be a person whose life is full of agape love, that you love your brother, or a neighbor, or this or that person, when you dislike them.

Now love is here used, as we shall see in the next verse, in the sense of “we love” meaning we keep the whole of the law in relation to somebody. So you may not like your neighbor, but in the Biblical sense, as it is set forth in John, you love him if you treat him with respect, you do not destroy his property, or take it lawlessly, and if you are a good neighbor to him, whatever he is, then that is love. You treat people that way not because they deserve it, but because God requires it and because that’s how God has treated us. Not because we deserve what He has done or does now for us, because that’s His nature, that is why He loves us. Not because we’ve done something for Him, be we have not, He loves us and redeems us out of His love, changes us, makes us a new Creation in Christ.

“21 And this commandment have we from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also.” Commandment, or law. Now a great many churchmen and people outside the churches think that law and love are two different things, that they contradict each other. But what does John say? They are the same, and this is a commandment of God, that if we love Him we love our brother also. The modern tendency in the church and outside the church to often is to separate love and law, but look at the Ten Commandments for example. “Honor thy father and thy mother” you honor them because you love them. Or “thou shalt not steal, nor commit adultery, nor bear false witness” you do these things, these commandments; you obey them because God requires it and therefore instead of hating your neighbor, you love him. Instead of hating father or mother you love and honor them.

Love and law in the Bible go together, and this is what John is saying here very clearly, very plainly, you cannot separate the two. If you despise the Law of God there will be no love in you. How can you say “I love my neighbor” or “I love my fellow being” in the Biblical sense if you do not keep God’s commandments? Or see that to love in this sense is to obey God, to keep His law? So the whole of God’s law is the way of life, of love. You cannot have a society built on love and despise God’s law. This is why today because we talk so much about love in the Humanistic sense, and do not mean it, the world is falling apart. Never has there been more talk about love than in this generation, and yet look at a few simple things.

Not too long ago when I went to school, and sometime afterwards, one never heard of anyone bringing a gun to school or killing in any way a fellow classmate, that was unheard of. But today there’s so much talk about love in the humanistic sense, and yet so much hatred is all around us. Or as one prominent coach in athletics said just this last week “we have lost civility, we cannot even be civil to one another” he said, let alone keep the law in relationship to that. So he felt one of the great problems of our day was the loss of ordinary civility; dealing one with another with any kind of thoughtfulness.

But this is the commandment from God, from Christ, that he that loveth God, love his brother also. Well this means that there’s a real duty, a burden as it were, laid upon Christians and upon churches. They have an obligation to help others. We here at Chalcedon have, let me add, done much to further work in Africa and elsewhere because we receive from others, but we have a duty to share the blessings we receive with others also. “That he who loveth God will love his brother also.” So we love God because He first loved us. The source of our love is not in ourselves, we cannot help the needy, reach out to those who are hurt and in deep distress, and then say “Well, I’m a good purpose, I did these things.” No, we do it because God requires it and because we have the grace of God in us, a very important fact.

Thus when John speaks of love, as the whole Bible, it means it in the sense of agape, the kind of love God shows; for while we were yet sinners, not loving God, Christ died for us. So we can see from this that the Biblical requirements reverse the world’s. The world’s attitude is tit-for-tat, “I’ll do something for you if you’ve done something for me.” And it’s because it’s this humanistic attitude towards love that prevails today that we see life all around us going downhill.

I’m old enough to remember when things were so law-abiding you didn’t lock your house. You knew your neighbors and the community as a whole were law abiding. At the time most people I knew, neighbors around us and a mile or five miles away went to church, they were Godly, and that kind of standard, that kind of life, has now waned, so that even the forms are gone. The loss of civility, how can you be thoughtful of other people if there is no grace in you, if all you are concerned with is yourself? The reasons why people nowadays kill others is startling, the reasons are so appalling. They’re no reason at all, over trifles, because their whole life has become trifling.

“If a man say “I love God” and hate his brother, he is a liar.” That’s plain speaking, John who talks more about love than anyone in our generation, or in his generation, or in the generations in between, doesn’t hesitate to tell the truth. “If a man say, “I love God” and hateth his brother, he is a liar.” When you truly have love you’re plain speaking as well. You’re not full of hatred; it’s easy for you tell the truth with grace, to tell people what they are, not because you dislike them, but because you’re concerned about them.

I remember when I was young, being amazed regularly at an elderly man who could face anybody and tell the brother “you are very foolish” or “very unwise” or “very wrong” or “evil in this or that that you’re doing.” And it was so obvious that this man had no ill-will in him, that he was full of kindliness and grace and love, that not even the worst of person’s could lash back at him in anger. The man was so full of grace that it showed even to the ungodly. He was able to correct people because of this fact.

And so “we love Him because He first loved us.” Agape love begins with God, it changes our lives and therefore we are different, we can change the world then because the power of God is in us. Let us pray.

Our Father we give thanks unto Thee for this Thy word, we thank Thee our Father that Thy word speaks to our every condition, that Thy word alters our lives by Thy Spirit, and alters the whole of society. Teach us therefore to love as Thou hast loved us, in Christ’s name, amen.

Are there any questions about our lesson?

As you can see John’s letter is quite a revolutionary one and it is important that we come to know its meaning very well, and to understand that when he talks about love it is God’s love, agape.

Well let us conclude now with prayer.

Our Father it has been good for us to be here. Thy word is truth; it is a joy to our hearts and a guide to our lives. We thank Thee that we live, move, and have our being in Thee, and that Thy love for us has been manifested in Jesus Christ and surrounds us all the days of our life. And now go in peace, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always, amen.