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1 John 2:3-11 - Knowing God by Obedience and Love

12 min read

St John has just refused concealment and given sinners Christ the Advocate. Now he presses the next question: what does true knowledge of God look like when the words sound right? The answer is not a cleverer sentence about God. It is keeping His commandments, remaining in Him so that His way becomes our way, and loving the brother in the light already shining.

Knowing God by Keeping His Word (1 John 2:3-6)

3 Now by this we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments. 4 He who says, “I know Him,” and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. 5 But whoever keeps His word, truly the love of God is perfected in him. By this we know that we are in Him. 6 He who says he abides in Him ought himself also to walk just as He walked.

St John begins with a test of claimed knowledge: “by this we know that we know Him.” The Greek pairs “we know” (ginōskomen, present) with “we have known” (egnōkamen, perfect): the present test concerns a knowledge already received.1 Knowledge of God here is not bare information. It is communion whose truth becomes visible when His commandments are kept.

The claim “I know Him” can be spoken with fluency. St John is not impressed by the vocabulary. The one who says he knows God and does not keep His commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him. The issue is contradiction between confession and conduct. Truth must enter the life, or the claim collapses.

Read apart from 1 John 1:8-2:2, this test could crush a sensitive conscience. St John has already denied sinless self-claims, promised cleansing to those who confess, and given Jesus Christ the righteous as Advocate when anyone sins. Now he says we must keep His commandments. These words stand together. Christ receives the penitent sinner, but He does not bless a divided life. Confession opens the door to healing; obedience is one of the first fruits of that healing. The tests are medicine for self-examination under mercy, not a scorecard for deciding who else has ever known God.

St John then deepens the language from “commandments” to “word.” Whoever keeps His word has the love of God perfected in him. The verb for keep can mean hold fast, observe, or guard; John widens the object from plural commandments to the singular word, so the issue is faithful reception of Christ’s teaching as a whole rather than selective compliance.2 “Perfected” means brought to completion or to its goal.3 Here love reaches its goal in a person who keeps Christ’s word. Obedience gives love its lived form: the person who loves the Lord begins to want what the Lord commands. God’s love bears fruit as a responding love for Him. Read beside St John’s call to confession, this is a summons to mature fidelity, not a declaration that the faithful never fall.

“By this we know that we are in Him.” Assurance is not manufactured by self-inspection alone. It grows where abiding takes visible form. The next sentence is one of the strongest in the letter: whoever says he abides in Him ought also to walk just as He walked. Abiding is remaining in Christ. Walking is manner of life. The one who claims union with Christ owes a Christ-shaped life.4

Gems from the Fathers 💎: Walking the way of the Cross

St Augustine joins commandment and love so that neither collapses into the other. “Let us see whether this same commandment be not called love.”5 He also shows how far love is meant to go: “To love even enemies, and love them for this end, that they may be brethren.”6 Walking as Christ walked is therefore not one isolated virtue. It is the life of the Crucified and Risen Lord shaping the Church’s way with God and neighbor. Augustine asks whether walking as Christ walked means walking on the sea. His answer is the way of charity: even on the Cross, Christ walked that way by praying for His enemies.6 The ordinary believer can follow Him there without possessing a miracle-worker’s gifts.

The Old and New Commandment (1 John 2:7-8)

7 Brethren, I write no new commandment to you, but an old commandment which you have had from the beginning. The old commandment is the word which you heard from the beginning. 8 Again, a new commandment I write to you, which thing is true in Him and in you, because the darkness is passing away, and the true light is already shining.

St John calls the commandment old because it was heard from the beginning. The Christian faith is not a private spiritual innovation. The commandment belongs to the apostolic message already received. Love of God and neighbor did not begin with novelty; it belongs to the word the Church has heard.

Yet the same commandment is also new because it is true in Him and in you. The darkness is passing away, and the true light is already shining. The present wording holds inaugurated hope: darkness is on the way out, while true light already shines.7 “True in Him and in you” is the hinge: the commandment is embodied first in Christ, then in the people who receive His life. His self-giving love becomes their way of living together. The newness is already present wherever someone answers injury with prayer, status with service, or another person’s need with mercy.

This protects the Church from two mistakes. We should not chase novelty as if the apostolic commandment had grown stale. We also should not treat the commandment as dead memory. In Christ, the old commandment shines with new life. The commandment is fulfilled in Christ, not discarded in favor of a better ethic that replaces Israel’s Scriptures. The Gospel measure is the love of Christ Himself: “as I have loved you” (John 13:34).

Gems from the Fathers 💎: The newness of Christ’s own love

St Augustine keeps the paradox intact: “Not another, but the selfsame which he hath called old, the same is also new.”8 St John Chrysostom, explaining the new commandment in John 13:34, locates its newness in Christ’s manner of loving:

He made it new Himself by the manner; therefore He added, “As I have loved you.”9

He then stresses that Christ began to love before His disciples had done anything to deserve repayment. His initiative becomes their pattern: love can begin without waiting to be owed.

Loving the Brother in the Light (1 John 2:9-11)

9 He who says he is in the light, and hates his brother, is in darkness until now. 10 He who loves his brother abides in the light, and there is no cause for stumbling in him. 11 But he who hates his brother is in darkness and walks in darkness, and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes.

Now St John makes the test concrete. A person can claim to be in the light and still be in darkness if he hates his brother. “Brother” here first means the concrete person in the Church, the one near enough to wound us, inconvenience us, or expose our lack of love. The letter will keep returning to this demand. The immediate term does not shrink Christian love into insider courtesy alone; perfected love, as Augustine said, presses outward until enemies may become brethren. But St John will not let us escape by loving humanity in the abstract while resenting the person in the next pew.

Hatred is not only a private emotion. It is a posture that blinds. The one who hates walks in darkness and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes.10 Hatred often feels clear-sighted from the inside. It can dress itself as discernment, zeal for truth, or justified distance. St John names the spiritual cost: the hater loses the very light by which he claims to see.

Love of the brother abides in the light, and there is no cause for stumbling in him. The Greek skandalon is a stumbling block or snare.11 Love frees the heart from the trap in which resentment turns every word into an accusation and every encounter into another reason to withdraw from Christ’s people. It also refuses to lay that trap for someone else through malice or gossip.

A wounded person may need time, protection, and trustworthy help. Grief, involuntary fear, and anger after injury are not identical with settled hatred, and love never requires concealing abuse or returning to danger. The struggle is to seek the other’s good before God without allowing the desire to destroy or humiliate the other to become the heart’s home.

St Augustine presses the examination inward: “Let each look to his own heart: let him not keep hatred against his brother for any hard word; on account of earthly contention let him not become earth.”12 He also asks, “What so blind as these who hate their brethren?”13 Hatred feels lucid when we are inside it; St John says it darkens the eyes.

The Church’s Voice in Worship ⛪

At Nayrouz, the Coptic New Year on Tout 1, the Catholic Epistle is 1 John 2:7-17, beside Luke 4:14-30, where Christ announces the acceptable year of the Lord.14 The turning of the year meets St John’s announcement that darkness is passing and the true light already shines. The Church enters the new year with an old commandment made living in Christ. A changed calendar becomes an invitation to renewed love, not merely another beginning for the same resentment.

On Thomas Sunday, the same 1 John 2:7-17 is heard beside John 20:19-31.15 The risen Lord comes among His disciples with peace; the epistle asks whether His light is becoming true in their life together. Thursday of the second week of the Holy Fifty Days reads the shorter 1 John 2:7-10. These readings overlap the second and third movements of this study, while verses 3-6 lie outside them.

Great Lent joins the passage to confession and Christ the Advocate: Thursday of the first week reads 1 John 1:8-2:11, and Tuesday of the third week reads 1 John 2:1-11.16 Mercy comes before the test of obedience. The Third Sunday of Kiahk and Second Sunday of Mesra also read 1 John 2:7-17, while Tout 21 and Tout 23 read 1 John 2:7-11.17 Across fasting, feast, and the annual cycle, the Church keeps hearing love as the visible life of the light.

Spiritual Fruit 🍇

Bring claimed knowledge under the light of a kept word. Notice where “I know God” has become vocabulary, identity, or correct opinion while a clear commandment of Christ is postponed. Name one concrete place of delay: speech, purity, honesty, mercy, reconciliation, or prayer. Keep Christ’s word there today, asking Him for the love that obedience trains.

Refuse to separate abiding from walking. If communion language is strong while the manner of life remains self-ruled, the claim of abiding is unfinished. Ask where your steps contradict the way of Christ: haste without patience, service without humility, truth without gentleness, or piety without cost. Bring the contradiction into the confession and cleansing of 1 John 1:8-10, receive again the advocacy of Jesus Christ the righteous in 1 John 2:1-2, and then take the next obedient step. A cleansed conscience is meant to become a changed manner of life, not a quiet settlement with old habits.

Interrupt the story that keeps resentment alive. Notice when you begin rehearsing a person’s faults to an imaginary audience. Stop the speech before it becomes another act of accusation. Name that person before Christ and ask for one good that would help them turn toward Him. Prayer can begin to loosen a hatred you cannot yet feel yourself released from.

Let love clear the path where pride wants a stumbling block. Ask whether your presence in the parish makes it easier or harder for another person to remain near Christ. Withdraw gossip, stop collecting allies against a brother, refuse the pleasure of being right at another’s expense, and practice one concrete mercy toward the person you find difficult.

Receive the old commandment as new light already shining. When love feels stale because you have treated the commandment as memory rather than power, or reduced it to manners, return to Christ. The darkness is passing; the true light already shines. Ask the risen Lord to make the apostolic commandment true in you again: old in faithfulness, new in living force.

Footnotes

  1. MorphGNT, 1 John 2:3, γινώσκομεν (present) and ἐγνώκαμεν (perfect). ↩

  2. Thayer, τηρέω, sense c, observing Christ’s word and commandments, including 1 John 2:3-5. ↩

  3. Thayer, τελειόω, sense 2, expressly including love in 1 John 2:5. ↩

  4. Thayer, μένω, sense 1.b, on 1 John 2:6, and περιπατέω, metaphorical manner of life. ↩

  5. St Augustine, Homily 1 on the First Epistle of John §9, NPNF1-7, CCEL. ↩

  6. St Augustine, Homily 1 on the First Epistle of John §9, NPNF1-7, CCEL. ↩ ↩2

  7. SBL Greek New Testament, 1 John 2:7-8, παράγεται and φαίνει. ↩

  8. St Augustine, Homily 1 on the First Epistle of John §10, NPNF1-7, CCEL. ↩

  9. St John Chrysostom, Homily 72 on John §5, NPNF1-14, CCEL. ↩

  10. SBL Greek New Testament, 1 John 2:9-11, hatred, walking, and blinded sight. ↩

  11. Thayer, σκάνδαλον, sense b.β, explicitly including 1 John 2:10. ↩

  12. St Augustine, Homily 1 on the First Epistle of John §11, NPNF1-7, CCEL. ↩

  13. St Augustine, Homily 1 on the First Epistle of John §13, NPNF1-7, CCEL. ↩

  14. Coptic Orthodox Katameros, Nayrouz, Tout 1, Catholic Epistle 1 John 2:7-17; Liturgy Gospel Luke 4:14-30. ↩

  15. Coptic Orthodox Katameros, Thomas Sunday, Catholic Epistle 1 John 2:7-17 and Liturgy Gospel John 20:19-31; Thursday of the second week of the Holy Fifty Days, Catholic Epistle 1 John 2:7-10. ↩

  16. Coptic Orthodox Katameros, Thursday of the first week, 1 John 1:8-2:11; Tuesday of the third week of Great Lent, 1 John 2:1-11. ↩

  17. Coptic Orthodox Katameros, Third Sunday of Kiahk and Second Sunday of Mesra, 1 John 2:7-17; Tout 21 and Tout 23, 1 John 2:7-11. ↩

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