“There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love. We love Him, because He first loved us, If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? And this commandment have we from Him, that he who loveth God love his brother also” (1 John 4:18-21).
We have noticed that perfect love is not something which is found in us. No Christian, no matter how devoted, how mature, has ever in himself manifested perfect love. There is some selfishness, some jealousy, some envy, some self-seeking in the heart of every child of God. Sometimes people imagine that they have gotten beyond all this, but circumstances soon bring out the fact that they have not. When we look for perfect love, we find it in our blessed Lord Jesus Christ, and we see that it was manifested when He in infinite grace gave Himself on the cross for guilty sinners such as we. It is the contemplation of this that banishes all our fear.
“There is no fear in love.” You see, if it were a question of our own love, that could not be said, for every honest Christian would be continually in fear if he thought that his final acceptance depended upon his own inward perfection in love. He would say to himself, “Well, I have trusted the Lord Jesus Christ, and I hope everything is coming out all right at last, but my love is sometimes so cold, it is sometimes so low, that really I fear when the Lord makes inquisition He will find so much in me contrary to His mind that I will not be accepted at all.” But, thank God, we are turned away from ourselves and from our experiences and directed to the full manifestation of perfect love in the cross. God says, as it were, “There you see love triumphant.” Love manifested in all its fullness, reached down to the deepest depths and lifted up poor sinners utterly lost and ruined and undeserving, and so, depend upon it, He will never give you up. “Hang loved His own which were in the world, He loved them unto the end” (John 13:1).
“There is no fear in love.” Watch a little child who really believes that you love it with all your heart, and how trustful that little one is. If you believe that “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life,” how can you ever fear that you may perish? How can you dread being shut out of heaven, for “perfect love casts out fear?”
“There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear; because fear hath torment.” This word torment is used elsewhere in Scripture; it speaks of a grief, of a form of pain and anguish, of spiritual and mental distress which unsaved men and women have in this life, and which will go on eternally, if they leave this world in their sins. I have often tried to make something clear which I am afraid I seldom succeed in making as plain as I should like to do, for every time I speak of it, I find somebody has misunderstood, and yet at the risk of being misunderstood, I am going to say a word about it. The Holy Scriptures plainly teach that if men and women die in their sins, they, are going to suffer consciously under the judgment of God for all eternity. Now that is a very solemn thing, and it is a very sad thing. It is not something over which any of us gloat; it is not something in which any of us glory. It moves our hearts to their deepest depths and might well stir us up to weep over lost men and women as the Lord did when He said, “Ye will not come to Me, that ye might have life” (John 5:40). We read in the Word of God, “These shall go away into everlasting punishment” (Matt. 25:46), and, “Shall be tormented day and night forever and ever” (Rev. 20:10). There is no hint that their suffering will ever come to an end. But now having said that, I want to say that while the Word of God plainly teaches the eternal punishment of Christ-rejecters, it never even so much as hints at the eternal torture of lost men. I say that because I think it is well that we should keep God’s character clear. There is nothing vindictive about God. He has no desire to inflict any unnecessary pain or anguish on men; He has nothing to “take out on” men, and so, Scripture never speaks, as preachers sometimes do, of eternal torture. That word is never used. God will never torture men, He will never permit the devil to torture them, He will never permit demons to torture them, and they will not be allowed to torture one another.
Hell is not a kind of pandemonium where wicked men and lost angels torture one another and sin against God for all eternity. It is God’s well-ordered prison-house where men who never behaved before will have to behave at last, where “every knee shall bow...and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:10, 11). Satan will not torture men, and he will not reign as king in hell. He will be the most abject being in the pit of woe. Hell was created for the devil and his angels, and it is his prison-house, where he will be in the lowest depths of the lake of fire, suffering for the sins he has committed throughout the ages. And so, every man will be judged according to his own sin and will suffer according to his own transgression. No statement is ever made in the Bible of the torture of lost souls. While Scripture never teaches that, it does teach the eternal torment of men who die impenitent.
I know that our English words, torment and torture, come from the same Latin root, which means to writhe and twist in anguish, but torture suggests the infliction of physical suffering, and torment is used for the suffering of the mind. “Fear hath torment.” You know the awful anguish of mind that fear can throw you into. When you dread some terrible calamity, you know the torment into which you are cast. Here is a man who has shut his eyes to the perfect love of God, refused to believe the gospel testimony, and he sees rising before him the Great White Throne, and knows he must answer for his sins. He is rightfully filled with fear, and “Fear hath torment.” If that man refuses to bow in repentance before God, and to accept the Lord Jesus Christ as his Saviour, and goes out of this life spurning the grace of God and trampling upon the precious shed blood of the Redeemer, then he goes out to be tormented forever. I think the most awful torment that can come to a lost soul in the pit of woe will be to think of days gone by, to remember mercies rejected, to meditate upon grace despised, and cry in the anguish of his soul, “Jesus died for me, and I knew all about it; He shed His precious blood for sinners, and I heard about it over and over again; He died for me, and I rejected Him rejected His mercy, and here I am shut away from the light and joy of God for all eternity, and it is my own fault. I might have been saved, I might have been washed from my sins, but I refused to trust the Saviour that God provided, and now His wrath rests on me forever.” I cannot imagine anything worse than that; and that, as I understand it, will be the very essence of the torment that lost men and women must endure for eternity.
We remember the word of Abraham to that once-rich man, “Son, remember!” All is wrapt up in that word, remember—remember for all eternity! Psychologists tell us that we never forget anything that we have ever known; it is all stored away in our minds. We may think we have forgotten, but you know how things will come to the surface when you least expect them. They come up before us when we are not even thinking of them, and so it will be with men in a lost eternity. Every sin, every iniquity, every transgression, every disobedience, will come up some day, and will remain throughout all the ages to come. Men will remember the follies of this life and how foolishly they treated God’s offer of mercy. “Son, remember!”
I cannot leave that word without reminding you that for the righteous, too, that word, remember, has its place. We read, “Thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led thee” (Deut. 8:2). Memory for the child of God—what a blessed thing! Memory for the lost soul—what a fearful thing! God grant if you are still unsaved that in the light of the perfect love manifested in the cross, all your fears may be dissipated, that your torment may disappear, and your heart made to sing, “He loved me and gave Himself for me.” This is the love that casts out fear.
Now John goes on to say, “He that feareth is not made perfect in love.” Here is a little group of High School scholars in a Latin Class, and they know that next Monday there is to be a Latin examination. All day Saturday some of them have been cramming and cramming and endearing to get ready for the test, and they cannot even get their minds quieted on Sunday. What does that tell? It tells that they are not made perfect in Latin, and that they know that they are not. They would not be cramming or worrying if they knew their lesson. Here is another student in the class, a bright young girl who is neither cramming nor worried. One of the others meets her and says, “Don’t you realize you have a Latin examination on Monday?”
“Yes.”
“Well, don’t you feel worried?”
“Not at all.”
“Well, why is it that you are not anxious?”
“Because as the days and weeks have gone on I have been getting my lessons perfectly every day. I am thankful to have a good memory, and it is all stored away and so I am not afraid now.”
The one who is “perfect in Latin” is not afraid; the one who is not perfect in Latin is afraid. If we are made perfect in love, we have learned our lesson and our fear is gone. It is not my love that keeps; it is His love.
Now we come to the practical side in verse 19, and here I shall have to lift a word out of the text, for if you will consult the Greek you will find that one word does not appear. It is omitted in all the older manuscripts. Correctly we read, “We love, because He first loved us.” Maybe some of you feel that you have lost something, you like to think, “We love Him, because He first loved us.” But take it just as the Spirit of God originally wrote it, “We love, because He first loved us.” Think it over, and you will see how much more precious that is after all. Many a one will talk about loving Him who has not very much love for His! How easy it is to talk about loving Christ and loving God, and yet be cold and unkind and discourteous toward those for whom Jesus died. The test of whether we really love Him is found in the way we behave toward His, and what a test that is! You say you love Him, but you do not love Him a bit more than you love the child of God of whom you think the least. Just try to think who that is, that cantankerous, cross-grained person who always seems to upset you, and yet you know that that one belongs to the Lord Jesus Christ, that he is a member of Christ’s Body. You do not love Christ any more than you love His members, and so, “We love, because He first loved us.”
When our hearts are occupied with His wondrous love, we remember that He loved us when we were unlovely, and some of us are not very lovely now; we remember that He loved us when we were unlovable, and some of us are not very lovable yet. If He could do that when we were rebellious, and if that same love is now shed abroad in our hearts, we ought to be able to love those who are sinful and unkind and selfish. It is love triumphing in the midst of evil. “We love, because He first loved us.”
Here is the last of the tests that John brings before us, “If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” John uses very strong language sometimes. A great many people have a wrong idea of the apostle John. Many of the ecclesiastical pictures present him as a fair and effeminate-looking individual, and some think of him as one of these white-livered, milk-and-water sort of people, rather than a real vigorous man. That is a wrong idea. He was probably a young man about eighteen years old when he and his brother James came to Christ, for you know John was the youngest of the disciples. He died about A.D. 96, and at that time he was an aged man and could look back to the days of his youth when he walked with Jesus. Long after Paul and Peter and all the rest were with Christ, John was still ministering the Word at Ephesus, and afterward he was sent to Patmos because of his faithfulness in witnessing for Christ. He was true to the name given by Jesus long before. As the Lord looked at those two brothers, James and John, in their earnest youth, He said, “I am going to give you another name, I am going to call you Boanerges, the sons of thunder.” There is nothing effeminate about that, and that is Jesus’ own name for them.
On one occasion as they were going through Samaria James and John were so stirred up by the action of the Samaritans that they said, “Lord, wilt Thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them, even as Elias did?” (Luke 9:54). You see the Samaritans at first were desirous to see them, but when they noticed that Jesus was anxious to get on to Jerusalem, they would have nothing to do with Him. They did not know that He was eager to go there in order to die for them, but thought He was not interested in them but rather in the people at Jerusalem, and so did not want Him. And because of this John and his brother would destroy them. But Jesus said to James and John, “Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of” (Luke 9:55). There was nothing gentle about wanting to call fire down from heaven! John was not an effeminate kind of a young man; he was strong, vigorous and red-blooded.
Notice the strong language John uses. Turn back to chapter 2, verse 4, “He that saith, I know Him, and keepeth not His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him.” In verse 22 of the same chapter we read, “Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ?” And now in verse 20 of chapter 4, John uses no fancy words but says, “If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” The way you treat your brother, then, is the test as to whether you really love God.
“And this commandment have we from Him, that he who loveth God love his brother also.” If you do not keep His commandments, you are not walking in obedience to His Word. “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another” (John 13:34). We need to remember the word, “Let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth” (1 John 3:18). Think of this the next time you feel provoked with somebody. Say to yourself, “How often I have grieved the Holy Spirit, but He loves me still. How often I have provoked the Lord, but He loves me still. How often I have dishonored the Father, but He loves me still. Blessed God, by Thy Holy Spirit let that same divine all-conquering love be shed abroad in my heart, that I may never think of myself but of others for whom Christ has died, and be ready to let myself out in devoted, loving service for their blessing.” This is Christianity in practice.