1 John 2:15

15. Love Resumption of the topic of love from 1 John 2:11. To that verse John had impressively taught us to love our brother; he will now teach us what not to love.

The world There are aspects in which the world should be loved.

1. With a love of affection which desires its well-being not only as a whole, but for the beings that inhabit it. Even “God so loved the world;” and so requires us to love; and this includes the love of our brother in 1 John 2:3-14.

2. We are to love in due degree the enjoyments which God has provided for our rational natures. We may enjoy life as a scene of duties, mercies, and gracious gifts of God. Yet are we so to enjoy as to not love it in any superiority over, or competition with, that better world for which it is our preparatory. He who enjoys this world in accordance with a constant faith in a higher and holy world to come “makes the best of both worlds.” A two-fold happiness makes him both fearless and doubly cheerful. But there are three aspects in which the world is not to be loved.

1 . As a material solid residence it is under divine reprobation, and is vanishing and doomed, and if we bury ourselves in its materialities we are liable to be doomed with it. 2. As a mass of unregenerate beings, to whom, however we may wish well, yet we know that it “lieth in wickedness,” and must not sympathize with its unregeneracy. 3. As a mass of depravities and errors, of immoralities and false doctrines, there is a world of thought and character for which we must have no moral approving love. These are unfolded in the triad of the next verse. In these aspects the love of the world is incompatible with the love of the Father. The errorist may believe that his lawless appetites for the world are at one with the Father; the Christian knows better. Of these three the first is most properly the world.

Love of the Father The word Father here, as in 1 John 2:1, designates God the Father in his relation to the Son, and so as head of the system of salvation. The love of the Father is, then, our love for God as the prime source of our salvation, the author of the blessed heaven, the Father of Christ. It is the love inspired by the Spirit in consequence of our faith in Christ.