Today’s Passage: 1 John 2:3–17
Chapter 2 opened yesterday with an advocate and an atoning sacrifice already in place, and now John turns almost immediately to a direct test: does a life show the marks of actually knowing God? Two movements make up today’s passage. The first tests knowing God by keeping His commands, especially the one command to love a brother (2:3–11). After a brief, warm pause where John addresses his readers by stage of life (2:12–14), he turns to a sharper warning: loving the world’s value-system cannot coexist with loving the Father (2:15–17). Notice the letter’s method plainly at work here. John is not building a legal case toward a single verdict. He keeps offering tests, one after another, for a reader to hold up against an actual life and answer honestly.
As you read, hold this: Knowing God shows up as obedience, not as a feeling. Loving the world’s values is the one thing that can’t coexist with loving the Father.
1 John 2:3–6 (BSB)
³ By this we can be sure that we have come to know Him: if we keep His commandments. ⁴ If anyone says, “I know Him,” but does not keep His commandments, he is a liar, and the truth is not in him. ⁵ But if anyone keeps His word, the love of God has been truly perfected in him. By this we know that we are in Him: ⁶ Whoever claims to abide in Him must walk as Jesus walked.
Word study "Know" and "keep" — ginōskō / tēreō (1 John 2:3–5)
Greek: γινώσκω (ginōskō) and τηρέω (tēreō), pronounced ghin-OH-sko and tay-REH-oh. Strong’s G1097 / G5083.
John sets these two verbs side by side deliberately: “we know that we have come to know Him if we keep His commands” (v. 3). Keeping is not the price of knowing God; it is the visible evidence of it, the way warmth is evidence of fire rather than the cause of it. Ginōskō carries forward the same knowledge-by-experience John named in yesterday’s opening: not a fact held at arm’s length, but a relationship a person actually lives inside. Tēreō means more than obeying a rule handed down from a distance; it means guarding something the way a person guards what they consider worth keeping.
“Whoever claims to know Him but does not keep His commandments is a liar” (v. 4), blunt language that matches the letter’s test-based method throughout. Keeping His word is what “perfects,” completes and matures, the love of God in a person (v. 5). And to claim to abide in Him carries an obligation with it: to walk as Jesus walked (v. 6). The claim and the walk cannot be separated.
1 John 2:7–11 (BSB)
⁷ Beloved, I am not writing to you a new commandment, but an old one, which you have had from the beginning. This commandment is the message you have heard. ⁸ Then again, I am also writing to you a new commandment, which is true in Him and also in you. For the darkness is fading and the true light is already shining. ⁹ If anyone claims to be in the light but hates his brother, he is still in the darkness. ¹⁰ Whoever loves his brother remains in the light, and there is no cause of stumbling in him. ¹¹ But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness. He does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes.
Word study "Commandment" — entolē (1 John 2:7–8)
Greek: ἐντολή (entolē), pronounced en-toh-LAY. Strong’s G1785.
A directive with authority behind it, a command or commandment, not a suggestion. John uses this exact word to hold “old” and “new” together in the same breath: the same entolē his readers already had “from the beginning” is also, somehow, being given to them fresh. The content has not changed; the force behind it has.
Study notes An old command that's also new
The command to love is “old.” John’s readers already had it “from the beginning,” arguably reaching back to Leviticus 19:18, or at least to the earliest apostolic teaching they had received. Yet it is also “new,” true both in Christ and now in believers, because the darkness is fading and the true light is already shining. The same author gives the fuller version of this new command in his Gospel, from that same last night in the upper room:
"A new commandment I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you also must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are My disciples, if you love one another." John 13:34–35 (BSB)
The old command is renewed, given fresh force, by having actually been lived out in Jesus. What was old in its content becomes new in its measure: not simply love your neighbor as yourself, but love one another as He has loved you.
The passage closes hard: whoever hates a brother is still in darkness, walks in darkness, does not know where he is going, blinded by the very darkness he is walking in (v. 11). Light and love are inseparable in this letter. A reader cannot claim one without the other.
1 John 2:12–14 (BSB)
¹² I am writing to you, little children, because your sins have been forgiven through His name. ¹³ I am writing to you, fathers, because you know Him who is from the beginning. I am writing to you, young men, because you have overcome the evil one. I have written to you, children, because you know the Father. ¹⁴ I have written to you, fathers, because you know Him who is from the beginning. I have written to you, young men, because you are strong, and the word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the evil one.
A brief pastoral pause between two harder passages. John addresses “little children,” “fathers,” and “young men,” three stages of life within the same congregation, each already given a reason for confidence: sins forgiven, a settled knowledge of Him who is from the beginning, having overcome the evil one. This is not a ladder to climb; it is a description of what is already true of those who belong to Him, a warm breath before the passage’s harder turn in verse 15.
1 John 2:15–17 (BSB)
¹⁵ Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. ¹⁶ For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, and the pride of life—is not from the Father but from the world. ¹⁷ The world is passing away, along with its desires; but whoever does the will of God remains forever.
Word study "World" — kosmos (1 John 2:15–17)
Greek: κόσμος (kosmos), pronounced KOS-mos. Strong’s G2889.
Not the physical creation God made and loves; John’s own Gospel uses this same word positively, “For God so loved the world” (John 3:16). Here kosmos names the God-opposed value-system organizing itself around human life apart from Him: the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, and the pride of life. Loving that system, not the created world itself, is what cannot coexist with loving the Father.
Context An echo from the very last series
James said it just as bluntly, one series ago: “You adulteresses! Do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore, whoever chooses to be a friend of the world renders himself an enemy of God” (James 4:4). Quoted here in full, as a direct and deliberate bridge: this app has now said the same thing twice, in two different apostles’ voices, within its first nine Library series.
"You adulteresses! Do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore, whoever chooses to be a friend of the world renders himself an enemy of God." James 4:4 (BSB)
James and John, writing to different congregations under different pressures, land on the identical verdict. Friendship with the world’s system and friendship with the Father cannot both be true of the same life at the same time.
“The world is passing away, along with its desires; but whoever does the will of God remains forever” (v. 17), menō (remains, abides) again, the verb this passage has already used three times (vv. 6, 10, 14), and the letter’s most repeated, already named on Day 1 and picked up fully tomorrow. A third New Testament author reaches the same conclusion from a different angle: “the world in its present form is passing away” (1 Corinthians 7:31). Three apostles, three letters, one settled verdict about where lasting weight actually lies.
Personal Application
- Proof or performance? Does obedience to Christ currently feel like the visible evidence of a relationship that already exists, or like a performance kept up for someone watching? What would help you notice the difference in your own life this week?
- Naming what’s loved. Not the world itself, but its value-system: the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, the pride of life. Is there one place, named honestly rather than vaguely, where that system, rather than a person or a thing, has quietly become something you love?
- Weighing what remains. If the world and its desires are passing away, but whoever does the will of God remains forever, what does that change about how you weigh a short-term want against a lasting one, the next time the two compete for the same hour?
Pray to Close
The truth to carry forward: knowing God is proven by keeping His word, especially His command to love, and loving the world’s value-system is the one thing that cannot coexist with loving the Father. What does not pass away is worth loving above what does.
Praise: that the darkness is already fading and the true light is already shining, and that whoever does the will of God remains forever, past every passing thing this world offers.
Confess: any claim to know Him that has not yet shown up as keeping His word, and any quiet love for the world’s desires, of the flesh, of the eyes, or of status, that has crowded out love for the Father.
Ask: for a love for fellow believers that proves itself in more than words, and for eyes that see clearly enough to tell what is passing away from what abides forever.
Worship for Today
I Will Follow · Chris Tomlin
This song answers the passage’s core test with a resolve rather than an argument: not what love feels like, but where love actually walks. Its central image, a willingness to go wherever God leads and stay wherever He stays, echoes the very shape 2:3–6 names as the visible evidence of knowing Him, obedience that walks as Jesus walked rather than sentiment alone. A love for the world’s fading desires cannot survive alongside a resolve like that; a love for what abides forever finds itself expressed the same way this passage does, one obedient step after another.
Listen: