1 John
1Jo 4:11-13 - How Do You Know You Know God?
by Joe Holder
Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us. Hereby know we that we dwell in him, and he in us, because he hath given us of his Spirit. (1Jo 4:11-13)
John continues his emphasis on the believer's intimate and knowable relationship with God. He addresses a frequently asked question. If God is immaterial and His glory so great that I can't see Him, how do I know He exists? Christian philosophers and thinkers have addressed this question from the beginning and have developed thoughtful answers that we do well to study. But John surpasses even those rich answers with a simple and personal evidence of God's existence.
Foundational to John's teaching on assurance in the prior chapter is our conduct. We have assurance of our salvation and of a secure relationship with God in direct proportion to our faithfulness in conduct. Our conduct does not save us, but it provides the basis for assurance, our conscious awareness of salvation. John will not ignore this truth. He remains consistent to it throughout his writings.
Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. Don't forget John's definition of love. It relates to our conduct, not to our feelings. If God loved us so as to act on His love by sending Christ in the incarnation, we should imitate His love. How do we imitate God's love? We may protest and try to negotiate God into expecting less of us but at the end of the day He prevails and His expectations remain upon us. God's love appears in conduct, in specific and sacrificial deeds that prove His love for us. Does anyone think God would send Christ into the world, to live as a man and to die an ignominious death, for people whom He really didn't love at all? The thought is ridiculous. If you ever doubt God's love for you, look at the incarnation!
We follow God's exemplary love when we commit our lives to specific and sacrificial deeds for others. The Christian world is full of people who will show love if they know they are in the spotlight and their deeds will bring accolades of praise from others upon them. But if the spotlight shines elsewhere and their deeds go unnoticed, they will act differently - in fact indifferently - to the same people to whom they feigned love when they knew the spotlight was on them. Give them assurance of praise and publicity for their good deeds and good deeds will flood from them. Take away the likelihood of public praise and the good deeds vanish. This attitude clearly reveals its motivation. They do not find sufficient grounds in God for good deeds. They crave praise for themselves.
But the person who responds to John's exhortation finds every motivation necessary for goodness in Christ's example. He cares not for the spotlight or praise from others. His eye and heart center on Christ, and all the praise he seeks will fall on Christ, not on himself.
At first glance, the next statement appears strangely out of place here. No man hath seen God at any time. In both testaments we find this thought frequently repeated. At times the idea appears in terms of the threat of God's supreme glory. If a mere mortal were to stand in God's presence today, the glory would melt him into ashes.
Add the dominant factor of the Docetic gnostic error John opposed throughout this letter, and you find a strange combination of reasoning. The gnostic teachers agreed with John that they could not see their chief god. They also taught that they could not know him or his will. They must content themselves with lesser truth from lesser gods until they realized their own deity and became gods in their own right. But even then they had no hope of ever knowing or seeing their chief god. At the point of not seeing God in our mortality, John and the gnostics agreed, but that is about as far as their agreement went. The gnostics must resign themselves to this mystical ignorance of their god forever. John taught his readers and us the exact opposite. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us. Keep John's definition of love. Don't slip back into the soft sentimentality of emotional roller coaster love here. If we show our love for each other through specific and sacrificial deeds, God dwells in us and perfects His love in us. Does this imply that we know God? It certainly does! By these deeds God grows His love in us to a state of maturity, perfection. It doesn't remain infant love in mere words and thoughts. It grows from thoughts to words to deeds. It grows up! It matures and reaches more the model of God's love as manifested in the incarnation.
Our God does not dwell forever hidden behind the clouds of mystery. Unapproachable as He is in His glory to us now, when we grow His love to maturity through unselfish deeds toward others, we come to know Him experientially and to realize His presence and blessing in our lives.
How do we know this? John reminds us that we know through the Spirit Who reminds us that God in the Person of the Spirit dwells in us and we in God. We must not forget that the Holy Spirit is not an impersonal force or power, but a vital personal dimension of God Himself. When Peter confronted Ananias and Saphira in their lie to God, he equated lying to the Holy Spirit with lying to God Himself. You don't lie to a force or a power; you only lie to a living intelligent being. When God grieved at the sin in the world immediately before the flood, He said His Spirit would not always strive with man. An impersonal force or power does not strive spiritually, mentally and morally with people. And when Paul taught the Corinthian church the truth of spiritual gifts, he reminded them that regardless of the diversity of the gifts, they all came from God, from one Spirit, according to His will. (1Co 12:11) An impersonal force or power has no will. Thus the indwelling of the Holy Spirit within us is factually God Himself dwelling in us. Paul makes this exact point in 2Co 6:16. He makes this the premise by which we no longer keep personal scores and live according to our carnal self-absorbed appetites. We no longer belong to ourselves; we belong to God! What sense does it make with this perspective to become offended at others who may not treat us as we prefer? Why bother with the destructive selfish protection of personal turf and interests? Why react to threats of loss with carnal insecurities and hostilities? We belong to God! He commands us to be good stewards of His blessings to us, but He does not command us to be good prison wardens of those blessings. We ensure our enjoyment of blessings by sharing them with others, not by a greedy protection of them for ourselves alone. Fits of insecurity that often destroy far more of the truly good things in our life thrive on a false and sinful worldview, a view that ignores our standing with Christ. We have enthroned in our major theological doctrines the "eternal security of the believer." We view this doctrine as an essential to our faith. We celebrate its blessing. But until we remove the word eternal and broaden the doctrine to include our present security in Christ, we have robbed the doctrine of a major Biblical component. And we have robbed ourselves of the joy of that truth. How, logically and rationally, can a believer in Christ celebrate eternal security while reacting in fits of insecurity toward others in life, particularly in God's family? This senseless contradiction should keep us awake nights until it forces us to rethink our view of God and of His truth in Scripture. If we truly embrace Scripture as our guide and view God as our security, both for time and for eternity, we have no reason for insecurity and worry.
Does this mean that nothing bad will ever happen to believers? Not at all, but it does mean that God is greater than the trials we will face. While we should reject that God causes all things, particularly evil things, we should remember that everything that happens to us must pass through His permissive will before it reaches our life. And with its entrance into our life we have His promise of blessing and grace. We may lose our retirement investment in the stock market, but we will not lose our blessing with Him. And He can turn bankruptcy into riches in a moment if he pleases.
God has charged us to view our life as a stewardship before Him. Good stewardship means that we view everything in our possession as actually belonging to Him, not to us. And we invest and use everything in our charge wisely and for His honor. Doing that, we may trust Him to guide the outcome of events in our life for our benefit and for His glory. They may not fall as we wish or prefer, but they will fall within His providential hand and power to govern. To Him be the glory!
1Jo 4:14-16 - Which World? How do We Know? Part I