4:7 Dear friends, let us love one another, because 1 love is from God, and everyone who loves 2 has been fathered 3 by God and knows God. 4:8 The person who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 4
4:11 Dear friends, if God so loved us, then 5 we also ought to love one another. 6
4:20 If anyone says 7 “I love God” and yet 8 hates his fellow Christian, 9 he is a liar, because the one who does not love his fellow Christian 10 whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. 11 4:21 And the commandment we have from him is this: that 12 the one who loves God should love his fellow Christian 13 too.
1 tn This ὅτι (Joti) is causal, giving the reason why the readers, as believers, ought to love one another: because love comes from God. The next clause, introduced by καί (kai), does not give a second reason (i.e., is not related to the ὅτι clause), but introduces a second and additional thought: Everyone who loves is fathered by God and knows God.
2 tn As in 2:23 and 3:4, the author uses πᾶς (pas) with the present articular participle as a generalization to describe a category of people.
3 tn The verb γεννάω (gennaw) in this context means to be fathered by God and thus a child of God. The imagery in 1 John is that of the male parent who fathers children (see especially 3:9 and 5:1).
4 tn The author proclaims in 4:8 ὁ θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστίν (Jo qeo" agaph estin), but from a grammatical standpoint this is not a proposition in which subject and predicate nominative are interchangeable (“God is love” does not equal “love is God”). The predicate noun is anarthrous, as it is in two other Johannine formulas describing God, “God is light” in 1 John 1:5 and “God is Spirit” in John 4:24. The anarthrous predicate suggests a qualitative force, not a mere abstraction, so that a quality of God’s character is what is described here.
7 tn Grk “and.” The Greek conjunction καί (kai) introduces the apodosis of the conditional sentence.
8 tn This is a first-class conditional sentence with εἰ (ei) + aorist indicative in the protasis. Reality is assumed for the sake of argument with a first-class condition.
10 tn Grk “if anyone should say…”
11 tn “Yet” is supplied to bring out the contrast.
12 tn See note on the phrase “fellow Christian” in 2:9.
13 tn See note on the phrase “fellow Christian” in 2:9.
14 sn In 4:20 the author again describes the opponents, who claim to love God. Their failure to show love for their fellow Christians proves their claim to know God to be false: The one who does not love his fellow Christian whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.
13 tn The ἵνα (Jina) clause in 4:21 could be giving (1) the purpose or (2) the result of the commandment mentioned in the first half of the verse, but if it does, the author nowhere specifies what the commandment consists of. It makes better sense to understand this ἵνα clause as (3) epexegetical to the pronoun ταύτην (tauthn) at the beginning of 4:21 and thus explaining what the commandment consists of: “that the one who loves God should love his brother also.”
14 tn See note on the phrase “fellow Christian” in 2:9.