1 John 4 — Test the Spirits; God Is Love

Today’s Passage: 1 John 4

The chapter moves in two connected movements. The first hands readers a checkable test for any claim to speak for God, a direct continuation of the crisis named on Day 4, when a group left this fellowship over exactly this question. The second is the letter’s highest peak, where we learn that love is God’s own nature. It is not merely one of His activities but what He is, and He demonstrated it first at the cross, long before any believer had loved Him back. Both movements serve a single claim: love starts with God, and every spirit is tested by the Jesus it confesses.

As you read, hold this: God is love, proven at the cross, and every spirit is tested by the Jesus it confesses.

1 John 4:1–3 (BSB)

¹ Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God. For many false prophets have gone out into the world. ² By this you will know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, ³ and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and which is already in the world at this time.

“Many false prophets have gone out into the world” (v. 1) picks up where Day 4 left off. The secessionists are still in view, but now the tool for testing (δοκιμάζω) dokimazō, pronounced dok-ee-MAHD-zo. Strong's G1381, to test, examine, prove genuine. The word pictures the examination of metal for purity, an assayer holding coin or ore to the fire to see what survives. John does not tell his readers to trust every voice that claims spiritual authority, nor does he tell them to distrust every voice on principle. He tells them to test, actively and on purpose. And he does not leave the test vague, for it turns not on how peaceful a teaching feels or how sincere a teacher sounds, but on a single, checkable claim. Does this teaching confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, in a real body, with real suffering and a real death? Anything less fails, whatever else it sounds like. them is in the readers’ own hands.

1 John 4:4–6 (BSB)

⁴ You, little children, are from God and have overcome them, because greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world. ⁵ They are of the world. That is why they speak from the world’s perspective, and the world listens to them. ⁶ We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. That is how we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of deception.

The warning is followed immediately by reassurance, the same rhythm this letter has kept from its opening pages: name the danger, then ground the reader’s confidence in something sturdier than the danger. “Greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world” is not a slogan but the reason a test can be applied without panic. The Spirit of truth and the spirit of deception are distinguishable, not an unsolvable riddle a believer is left to guess at alone.

1 John 4:7–10 (BSB)

⁷ Beloved, let us love one another, because love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. ⁸ Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. ⁹ This is how God’s love was revealed among us: God sent His one and only Son into the world, so that we might live through Him. ¹⁰ And love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.

This letter makes exactly two flat statements of the form “God is ___.” The first came on Day 2, “God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all” (1:5), and “God is love” is the second. Neither sentence says merely that God loves, the way a person might name one activity among others; each says this is what He is. Verses 9–10 make the direction unmistakable. God’s love was not a response to anything lovable He found in the world but was revealed by sending His one and only (μονογενής) monogenēs, pronounced mon-og-en-ACE. Strong's G3439, only, unique, one of a kind. This is the same word John’s Gospel uses for the Son (John 1:14, 18; 3:16, 18). It means not “created” and not “one of many,” but unique, the only one of His kind. God’s love was revealed by sending this Son, and the word will not let a reader treat Jesus as a prophet among prophets or as a power that merely visited a man. The Son who was sent is the Son who is one of a kind, and that is the Jesus every spirit must confess. Son, and the love itself “consists in this: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” Hilasmos again, the same word as 2:2, and love proved itself at a cross rather than in a feeling. Everything this chapter will say about loving one another is response and overflow; it is never the origin.

1 John 4:11–16 (BSB)

¹¹ Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. ¹² No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God remains in us, and His love is perfected in us. ¹³ By this we know that we remain in Him, and He in us: He has given us of His Spirit. ¹⁴ And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent His Son to be the Savior of the world. ¹⁵ If anyone confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. ¹⁶ And we have come to know and believe the love that God has for us. God is love; whoever abides in love abides in God, and God in him.

Verse 14 grounds the whole ethic in the same eyewitness claim that opened the letter, “We have seen and testify that the Father has sent His Son to be the Savior of the world.” This chapter’s love ethic and Day 4’s antichrist warning share a single root. God’s love was not demonstrated as an idea kept at a safe distance from matter and blood, but in a real Son sent into real flesh, which is exactly the fact the false teachers denied. Deny the incarnation, and the proof of God’s love disappears with it, for there is no version of “God is love” that survives without a real cross, and no real cross without a real body first laid in a manger.

“No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God remains in us, and His love is perfected in us” (v. 12). Believers become the visible evidence of an invisible God’s love. The world cannot see God directly, but it can see whether His people actually love one another.

1 John 4:17–21 (BSB)

¹⁷ In this way, love has been perfected among us, so that we may have confidence on the day of judgment; for in this world we are just like Him. ¹⁸ There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear, because fear involves punishment. The one who fears has not been perfected in love. ¹⁹ We love because He first loved us. ²⁰ If anyone says, “I love God,” but hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. ²¹ And we have this commandment from Him: Whoever loves God must love his brother as well.

“Perfected” here does not mean flawless from the start. It means brought to completion, carried through to its intended goal. As that love matures, it drives out the fear that has to do with punishment, the dread of a prisoner awaiting sentencing. That is not reverence for God but the fear of someone who does not yet know how the verdict will go, and matured love drives it out because the verdict is already settled in Christ.

The chapter closes on its bluntest test. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ but hates his brother, he is a liar” (v. 20). A love for the unseen God that produces no love for the seen brother is not merely incomplete; John calls it a lie. The chapter that began with a doctrinal test for spirits ends with a moral test for love, and both tests check the same thing, whether a claim to know God holds up against what that claim produces.