1 John 2:5

John has just written that God is light and that fellowship with him means walking in the light and confessing our sins (1 John 1:5–10). He has told us that when we sin we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, who is the propitiation for our sins (1 John 2:1–2). Now he gives the evidence of that fellowship: “And hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments.” The word “hereby”, en toútōi in Greek, points ahead to the condition that follows. This is the way we can tell.

The verb ginṓskō means to know, come to know, perceive or understand, and in everyday Greek it very often means simply having information about something. Here its object is a person, “him”, and the test John attaches to it shows that he means knowing God himself, a knowing that shapes how a person lives. John uses the word twice in one breath, “we do know that we know him”, and so the verse speaks of a knowledge we can be certain of.

The small word eán, “if”, sets out the condition. The question it raises concerns our knowledge of God, and God’s knowledge of us stands firm throughout. If we keep his commandments, then we may know that we know him.

To keep, tēréō, means to guard, observe, preserve and hold fast to. It describes careful and continuing obedience, the way a person watches over something precious, and it grows out of love and devotion. The commandments, entolḗ, are charges given with authority, what God has commanded. They express his character and his will for our good, and in the New Testament they center on the commands Christ gave, summed up in love for God and for our neighbour.

Jesus taught his disciples the same link between love and obedience: “If ye love me, keep my commandments” (John 14:15), and “He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me” (John 14:21). The obedience John looks for is the work of God’s Spirit in us, as God promised through Ezekiel: “And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes” (Ezekiel 36:27). That is why this verse gives assurance. John says later that he wrote the letter so that believers “may know that ye have eternal life” (1 John 5:13), and a life of keeping God’s commandments is one of the plain, visible grounds of that knowledge.

“He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him.” The claim is spoken aloud, “I know him”, and the life contradicts it. John’s word for liar is pseústēs, from the verb to lie: a falsifier, one who says what is untrue. It is a strong word, and he uses it as a verdict on the claim itself. This person’s life shows that what he says about his relationship with God is false.

“The truth is not in him” means that God’s truth, embodied in Christ and made known in his commandments, is absent from this person. Jesus called himself “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). Where his truth lives in someone, it changes how they live, and a life of steady disobedience shows that it is missing.

John speaks this way throughout the letter, setting light against darkness and truth against falsehood. At the start he wrote, “If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth” (1 John 1:5–6), and he promised that those who walk in the light have fellowship with one another and are cleansed by the blood of Jesus (1 John 1:7). Jesus gave the same warning: “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven” (Matthew 7:21). James says the same of faith: “Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone” (James 2:17), and he works the point out at length in James 2:17–26.

“But whoso keepeth his word, in him verily is the love of God perfected: hereby know we that we are in him.” The verse opens with dé, “but”, turning from the false claim to the true believer. John speaks now of God’s word, lógos. Here it covers all that God has revealed, his commands, his teaching and his character as made known to us, above all through Christ. To keep it is to hold fast to it and live by it.

“Verily”, alēthōs, means truly. The verb teleióō means to complete, to bring to an end, to make perfect or to bring to maturity. In the one who keeps God’s word, the love of God reaches its goal and its full expression.

Believers differ on whose love “the love of God” means here. Some take it as God’s own love living and working in the believer, brought to full effect in obedience. Others take it as the believer’s love for God, which answers his love and is made complete as we keep his word. On either reading, love and obedience belong together, as Jesus said: “If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love” (John 15:10). John returns to this later in the letter: “If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us” (1 John 4:12). The love at work in us is God’s gift, for “the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us” (Romans 5:5).

“Hereby know we that we are in him” points back to what John has just said, the keeping of God’s word and the love of God perfected in it. To be “in him” is to be united with Christ and to live in fellowship with him. Through this visible fruit of a changed life, believers gain real and settled assurance of that union.

“He that saith he abideth in him ought himself also so to walk, even as he walked.” The verb for saith, légō, is the ordinary word for saying something, and once again John weighs a spoken claim against a life.

To abide, ménō, means to stay, dwell, continue, endure or remain. It is one of John’s great words, and “abideth in him” (menō en autō) describes a settled, lasting union with Christ, in which Christ lives in the believer and the believer lives in Christ, drawing life, strength and guidance from him. Jesus spoke of this when he called himself the vine: “Abide in me, and I in you” and “I am the vine, ye are the branches” (John 15:4–5). Such a union bears fruit in a matching way of life.

“Ought”, opheílō, is the language of obligation, even of debt. Whoever claims to abide in Christ is bound to live a certain way, and the obligation follows from the relationship itself. “Himself also” lays the duty on each person. To walk, peripatéō, means to walk or walk about, and figuratively to live or behave, so Scripture often calls a person’s conduct his walk.

“Even as”, kathṓs, means just as. The “he” who walked is Jesus, and his life on earth is the standard, with its obedience to the Father, its sacrificial love, its humility, purity and truth. Paul says the same: “And walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us” (Ephesians 5:2), and “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5). Jesus made his own love the measure of ours, “as I have loved you”, and said that all men would know his disciples by their love for one another (John 13:34–35).

This walk is lived in the strength Christ gives. “Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh” (Galatians 5:16), and the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22–23 is the character of Christ growing in his people.

Every part of this passage points to Jesus. He kept his Father’s commandments perfectly: “I do always those things that please him” (John 8:29). He came to fulfil the law and the prophets (Matthew 5:17), and “became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (Philippians 2:8). He is the Word, the lógos, who was God (John 1:1) and who “was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). In him the love of God was fully shown, most of all in his death: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29).

So the One whose walk we follow is first the One who saved us. “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21), and the righteousness of God comes by faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe (Romans 3:21–26). Christ promised and sent the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth who dwells with his people and in them (John 14:16–17). By that Spirit “the righteousness of the law” is “fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit” (Romans 8:4). Our keeping of his word flows from our union with him. It is his own life showing in us, for Christ is our life (Colossians 3:4).

These verses hold together two things every believer needs. They search us. When we say “I know him”, John asks us to look at our lives and see whether they are turned toward God’s commands, toward his love and toward the way Jesus walked. They also comfort us. Our salvation rests on Christ and his work, and these marks of his work let us see it. When you find in yourself a real love for his word and a desire to obey him, even through stumbling and confession, that is the love of God being made complete in you.

Obedience then becomes a glad and willing answer to the One who loved us first. The call to walk as he walked comes with his Spirit to make it possible, so we can take it up each day with hope, and our walk can match our words before a watching world.