The text is an exhortation to us to love one another. We may not miss the connection that where there is no love that is because there is no truth. Yes, the text is also about the truth and that this truth brings with it the glorious virtue of love. All who are begotten of God and know God also love. To know God is the knowledge of the truth. Where there is no love then, that is because there is no truth.

The Lord has given to us the truth again. Do we not hear that on Sunday? Do we not see that in the sacrament of baptism and taste that in the sacrament of the Lord’s supper? Do we not rejoice in that truth as it sets us free from the law of sin and death? What is the truth? The truth is that God sent his only-begotten Son into the world to be the propitiation for our sins that we might live through him. So also, then, the truth is Christ himself. He said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). This is the truth: God chooses who will be saved, God saves them, and all others are excluded and perish according to God’s sovereign will. The truth in short is that salvation is of the Lord by grace alone and not at all of man and his works. Where that is neither received nor believed there cannot be any love. Then neither can someone say, “Let us love one another.” But where the truth is received—where they know God because they are born of God—there also can they say, “Let us love one another.”

That there is love in the church is the church’s chief glory and crown. “There is nothing greater than love,” says the apostle Paul. Not even faith or hope is greater than love. During the time of the early church, love caused the church to stand out as a beacon of light against the dark backdrop of Rome’s cruelty and barbarity. The ungodly said about the church members, “See how they love one another!”

There is no love in the world. Remember that even the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel. What passes for love in the world is only a devilish imitation of love; and after a single trial, it proves itself to be no love at all. There is no love outside of God. God is love, and all love is of God. Being without God, the world and the false church are without love.

Knowing God, because we are born of God, let us love one another. This exhortation has a solid ground. The ground is God’s love of us and God’s love in us. I make a distinction here as John does in these verses. God loved us, and God’s love is revealed in us. You can describe that as God’s love for us and as God’s love in us.

In a way entirely antithetical to the popular and Arminian ground of the exhortation, John declares God’s love to be the ground of his calling to us to love. The Arminian exhortation is an appeal to the emotions, a kind of persuasion of the sinner. The sinner is moved to see how much God loved him and then is persuaded to love God and to love the neighbor. Such is not John’s exhortation. The love of God is sovereign. The love of God is eternal, unchanging, omnipotent. The love of God certainly accomplishes its purpose. The exhortation to love is grounded in that sovereign love of God.

When we speak about love, we are talking about God. The one who loves not knows not God because God is love. To contemplate love is to contemplate the lovely and loving being of God. Love is who God is. From the infinite depths to the infinite heights of God’s glorious being, from eternity to eternity, in all that he is and in all that he does, God is love. In his whole divine life, God is love. God does not merely possess love. He is love. For God not to love, for his love to change, would be for him not to be God.

You must begin here to understand the sovereign love of God. Whatever you say of love, you say of God. If your kind of love hates the truth, and if your love endures and excuses iniquity, then that also is your god. If your kind of love fails, your god fails. If God’s love changes, God changes. Those who have a false species of love also have a false, idol god fashioned in the image of their false love. God is love. God is love. God is love. God is love. And God’s love is also then eternal, unchanging, omnipotent, and sovereign.

That God is love speaks first of God’s love for himself. God does not need another to love or to have love. God has himself, and he loves himself. God’s love of himself is his perfection according to which God delights in himself as the only good and ever-blessed God and seeks his glory in everything.

You must conceive of that in the light of God’s triune being. Love must have another. Love must have an object to love. There is the lover and the beloved and the love between them. And that is true first and eternally in God. There is the lover and the beloved and the love of the lover toward the beloved within God himself. A god of one person, a god who is not triune, cannot love. God is love because God is triune. In God are three who are God, and that explains the love of God. There is nothing outside of God that he needs in order to have love or to love. He is love in his very being and in all of his divine life as the triune God. And therein is the love of God: God loves God with God. God is the love of God toward God and back toward God. This is simply to say that God the Father loves—the Spirit—God the Son, and God the Son loves—the Spirit—God the Father. God loves God in God. The triune God is love. And more specifically to say that God is love is really to confess the deity of the Holy Spirit. He is the personal love of God for God in God.

And what is love?

Love is out of God. There is no love apart from God. There is no love but God’s own love. To understand love, then, you must understand God. John gives no definition of love. “God is love.” This is as close as scripture comes to a definition. Love is God, and God is love. But if we may venture a definition: love is a panting after or a desiring of another and a delight in the other as precious. Love is ardent, passionate, fervent desire. Love is an act of the will, wherein the lover determines to do good to the beloved. Love is also then doing good to the beloved. Love does. Love does good, and love does no evil. And love establishes fellowship with another and communes with that other. The end of love is the delightful and blissful fellowship and friendship of the covenant. Covenant and love are inseparable. Love aims for and is fulfilled in covenant fellowship and friendship.

So God loves in himself. He delights in himself as the only good and ever-blessed God. He delights in himself as the God of all wisdom, all power, all grace, and all goodness. He determines to glorify his holy name. He lives in himself in that covenant fellowship of love: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

And all love is of God. That the Holy Spirit insists on. All love is of God! When John says, “Love is of God,” he refers to our love of one another. Let us love one another! That love is also of God. When John says, “of God,” he means not merely that love is a gift of God so that God causes us to love one another, but John means that love is God’s own love in us as that love extends out to the beloved. We share in God’s love, and in his love we love one another. Even our love of one another is of God and is God’s own love. And if that is true, such is the argument, then all love is of God. All love is God’s own love, and there is no love apart from God’s love.

There is the love of God in God.

There is the love of God to us.

There is the love of God in us.

There is the love of God in us for God.

There is the love of God in us for each other.

But all love is of God. God is love, and there is no love but his love.

Thus John says that God loved us. This is the first instance of the outgoing love of God. The manifestation of the love of God is that he loved us.

Consider that for a moment. God did not need to love us. He had perfect love in himself. God did not need us to love him. He had perfect love in himself. He loved us freely. He would reveal himself as the God of love, and in that he would reveal also the character of his love. In that love he chose those whom he loved, and he appointed them to salvation.

We also have to say that in Christ God both loved us and chose us. Christ is centrally the beloved, and we are loved in Christ as we are one body with him. God conceived of his people as perfect and as perfected in Christ. We must understand that God’s love of us is a love of us as perfected. What I mean is that in his counsel God loved us as those whom he eternally willed to be perfect as he is perfect and as those whom he beheld in Christ crucified as eternally perfect. Yes, in our sins! So that the objects of God’s love have no claim on his love and so that the graciousness of his love stands out, and yet as sinners perfected in Christ crucified, God loved us.

God would reveal his love through the way of sin and grace in order to show the character and power of his love toward us. It is a love undeserved. He loved us as redeemed from sin and death, as adopted children, as those who were washed from sin and made perfect. And God’s love accomplished all those things. He loved us as the called, the justified, and the sanctified. He loved us as those in whom the whole counsel and will of God for our salvation is fulfilled, and God is glorified in his love.

It is the love of God! That love is as unchangeable and immutable as God. He does not fall in love. Eternally he loves. His love never changes. His love burns ever fervent from eternity to eternity. His love does not wax or wane. His love does not increase or decrease. With his whole being, he is love; and with his whole being, he unchangeably loves his people. Them God desired to have, and them he surely will have. We were ever his delight. We were the objects of his desire. God willed to have us as his own and to cause us to know him and to enjoy him as our covenant God. He willed to do us good, and he willed to reveal himself to us that we might be included in the sphere of his fellowship and taste the power and the fervency of his love.

It is the love of God! God’s love of us is independent; it is unilateral; it is one-sided, absolutely one-sided. The love of God is of him and motivated by him and his eternal good pleasure alone. This is what John means when he says, “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us.” This speaks of the sovereign, free, and independent character of the love of God. We cannot understand love by looking at our love of God. Rather, we must look at God’s love of us. There we see that God’s love is independent, unilateral, absolutely and sovereignly one-sided.

God’s love is strictly unilateral, not only in origin but also in its continued operation. God’s love does not consist in this: that we love God and because of our love, he now loves us. Nor is the nature of God’s love such that we—God and us—simultaneously bring our love to each other. It cannot even be said that love is established between God and us by Christ’s position between God and us, so that Christ kindles the flames of God’s love for us. Neither is love to be conceived such that God causes us to love him, and then he loves us in return.

Love is of God! Before we loved God, he loves. Before Christ was sent into the world to be a propitiation for our sins, God loves us. He is attracted to us and draws us to himself. God longs for us and causes us to long for him. God delights in us and causes us to have our delight in him. God seeks us, and we are found, and he causes us to seek him! God does not rest until he possesses us and gives himself that we may possess him! “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us.” Love is the living current of divine goodness that has its source in the triune God, touches us, and takes us up into its stream of everlasting delight. Out of God his love flows to us through our hearts to return to him. Of God, through him, and unto him is love!

Christ is the demonstration of the character of God’s love: its one-sidedness, its burning fervency, its absolute sovereignty, its eternal immutability. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son into the world to be the propitiation for our sins! There, there at the cross; there in Christ, in the astounding wonder of grace that God became flesh; there in all of Christ’s lifelong obedience; and there in all his sufferings is the love of God for us manifested to us. We cannot understand and know, we cannot grasp, the love of God toward us in all its power and all its glory apart from the cross of Christ.

You must know who Christ is to grasp this love of God. Christ is the only-begotten Son of God. Christ is God. Christ is of the same essence of the Father. In the blessed love life of God, Christ is in the bosom of his Father, the delight of his Father and delighting in his Father. Christ is the eternal delight of his Father. And being of the same essence of the Father, Christ took and united to himself sinful flesh, and he came unto his own.

And Christ came to be a propitiation for our sins. Oh, it means that we were enemies of God, dead through trespasses, standing in proud and wanton rebellion against the living God. It means that we were guilty, worthy of damnation, rightful objects of the wrath of God, and that, in God’s justice, he could only inflict the punishment of eternal desolation upon us. It means that there was absolutely no way for the love of God to reach us but through the perfect satisfaction of God’s justice, that is, through the very depths of hell. It means that we could not, nor would, ever travel this way of hell in perfect obedience of love, as we were required to do in order to make this satisfaction, and become the objects of God’s love and favor.

As far as we were concerned, the situation was hopeless! God sent his Son to be the propitiation for sins! This means that there is a covering for all our iniquities! It is not a covering in the sense that now our sins are hidden from before the face of God, though the sins are still there, but it is a covering that took away sin. The damage done by our sins is completely covered. Sin is paid for. The justice of God is satisfied. The way through hell has been traveled in the perfect obedience of love for us, in our stead, and in our behalf by Jesus Christ; and perfect righteous and everlasting life have been accomplished by him.

God sent Christ in eternity; for in God’s eternal good pleasure, he ordained Christ to be the head of the church, the firstborn among many brethren, the Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world. God sent Christ in the fullness of time, in our flesh and in our blood, in the likeness of sinful flesh, that he might be like unto his brethren in all things, sin excepted. God sent Christ all along the way of his humiliation and suffering. God sent Christ loaded with our iniquities to the place of judgment and to the bitter and shameful death of the accursed tree. God sent Christ into the depths of hell to pay the price, to respond with his perfect yes, instead of our wicked and wanton no, to the unchangeable justice of our God, and in all his suffering to love God perfectly for us.

To be a propitiation for our sins! What does it all mean? Oh, to be sure, it declares unto us that the love of God is amazing, unfathomable, adorable. Yes, but this is the all-important point: it is the revelation of sovereign, of independent, and, therefore, of unquenchable and absolutely irresistible love! Before Christ died, God loved us! Christ’s mission, his cross, is the revelation of God’s love! God charged Christ with our salvation. God gave us to Christ. God put our salvation in Christ’s hands, and Christ loved us and laid down his life for us as the manifestation of the eternal love of God for us and to accomplish the whole will and counsel of God for our redemption.

All about us and within us, there is darkness and that too the darkness of wrath and condemnation. Our present night is a revelation of the wrath of God: in sin bearing more sin; in corruption advancing to deeper corruption; in death giving birth to eternal desolation; in debasement upon debasement; in slippery places on which men hasten to destruction. We behold and are crushed under the burden of God’s holy and terrible anger against sin. “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness” (Rom. 1:18). In this darkness of wrath and death and desolation, there shines the one light of divine love, penetrating the universal gloom, swallowing it up, reaching down into our very hearts: the cross of the Son of God! In the darkness light shines! And that love of God reaches out to his people as they sit in darkness and in sin. God seeks them. He comes to them to realize the purpose of his love in them.

The whole history of this dispensation is the unfolding, the manifestation, and the revelation of the sovereign purpose of God’s love. When God made Adam, God already had Christ and his people in view. And Adam fell into sin in the service of this purpose. The love of God would be revealed in the way of sin. God’s love is not revealed in the way of the obedience of Adam but in the way of sin, in the way of the failure of Adam, and in the way of the failures of God’s people. The law came for that purpose, not to make us better but to reveal the sinfulness of sin and the hopelessness of the sinner’s condition. So the law teaches that all that man is and all that man does is sin and that he cannot be right with God in order that God’s love might be commended to sinners.

And the purpose of God’s love is fulfilled by the wonder and power of grace. In the darkness, sin, destruction, and misery that is the world fallen in sin and lying under the curse, the love of God reaches to realize the purpose of his love, to save his people from their misery, and to cause them to taste that the Lord is good.

God comes to speak to his people and to reveal his purpose. In the garden of Eden, God realized his purpose and spoke of Christ. In all the sacrifices and ceremonies of the Old Testament, God testified of his love for his own—not for all Israel but for his own. In that too God is love. He does not love all Israel, but he hates as an aspect of his own love and his own determination to glorify his name to the highest. God promised, and he pictured that in Christ he would make the way into God’s presence plain. And in the fullness of time, God unfolded the purpose of his love in Christ. God reached out in eternal love for his people into the womb of Mary and into the lowest parts of the earth and down into the deepest reaches of hell when the Son of God cried out in agony, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” And God reconciled us to himself, realizing the eternal purpose of his love, while we were yet enemies and sinners against him. God takes away our guilt and removes the barrier of our fellowship with him. In Christ we are reconciled, and in Christ the way to God is made plain. In Christ God sought us, and in Christ we are drawn unto God by the cords of his love.

And God comes to us as we sit in our own darkness, in the darkness of our sins and guilt and the misery and condemnation of our sins; God comes in his love to deliver us and to cause us to know that Jehovah is gracious. Thus John speaks of the love of God in us when he says, “In this was the love of God manifested in us.” I know that the King James Version says, “toward us,” but the meaning is in us. The love of God was manifested in us because God sent his only-begotten Son into the world that we might live through him. That is the love of God manifested in us. God’s love does not remain outside us. God’s love comes to us. The love of God lays hold on us, and the love of God manifests itself in us. God’s love takes us out of darkness and into God’s marvelous light. We are dead in our trespasses. We are bound in our guilt. And the love of God is manifested in us by causing us to know the coming of Christ and the cross of Christ and by causing us to live in Christ.

The love of God manifested in us is to taste by experience, to feel the embrace of, and to know the power of the love of God manifested in Christ in the cross of Calvary. The love of God in us is to taste the power of Christ to forgive sins. The love of God in us is to taste the power of Christ to free us from the bondage of sin, to cause us to see our sins, to hate and flee from sin, and to walk in the light. The love of God in us gives us joy in our forgiveness and thankfulness toward God. And that by the Holy Spirit given to us. The love of God in us is the Holy Spirit. He is love in God, and the Holy Spirit is the love of God manifested in us. The Holy Spirit shows us Christ and his cross, gives to us the knowledge of the forgiveness of our sins, and causes us to hate sin and to walk in the light. The love of God is spread abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given to us.

Again, surveying that wondrous cross and its revelation of sovereign, independent, and never-ceasing love of God, we know that we may and that we do love God and that his love will be perfected in us. The truth that God sovereignly loved us does not make us careless and profane. That truth does not induce us to say, “Let us sin that God’s love may abound.” On the contrary, that truth is exactly the mighty power of God’s love that draws us; that truth is the unquenchable flame of God’s love that kindles its own response in our hearts; and that truth will do so until we shall forever dwell with God in love!

Beloved, let us love one another!

First, you love God. Not you must; you must; you must. But this: if you do not love God, then the love of the neighbor is impossible. If you love the neighbor, then there is the sure evidence that you love God. The one who does not love his brother, whom he can see, and says that he loves God, whom he cannot see, is a liar, and there is no truth in him. Our love of one another is rooted in love for God. When John says, “Herein is love, not that we loved God,” the apostle does not mean to teach that we do not love God. The apostle teaches that we cannot search for and find the idea of love, the source and origin of love, the full expression of love, in our love for God but that our love of God is God’s own love of himself in us. It is God’s love. Love is of God. Ever our love of God is of God. Our love is God’s loving himself in and through us and embracing us in the fellowship of his love.

Second, and loving God—God’s own love for himself—we love one another. That is God’s love too. God’s love toward us and God’s love in us has this fruit: that we love God and that we love one another. God’s love is absolutely one-sided and absolutely sovereign, and it absolutely and automatically accomplishes the object of its desire, and we love one another.

So beloved, let us love one another because love is of God, and all who love have been begotten of God and know God, and whoever does not love does not know God. I say this to you: If you love not God’s truth, if you love not the brethren, if you love not one another, then I do not know who you are; but I know that you are not begotten of God, that you do not know God, and that you are not known of him.

Beloved, let us love one another. I can say that to you not as an emotional plea, not as an effort at persuasion, but because you know God and the love of God, and you have experienced the power of that love in yourselves.

Let us love one another. Love in the family, love in marriage, love in the church and among the saints. A self-effacing, self-sacrificing, self-crucifying love. Such is the love of God.