IF THERE’S ANYTHING I hate, it’s being accused of lying when I’m telling the truth. What I hate even more, however, is being accused of lying when there may be some truth in the accusation. While the former is maddening, I can at least take comfort in knowing I’m right. But the latter is embarrassing, even shame-provoking, because it strikes at my sense of integrity. Am I who I say I am? Am I the person I think I should be? That I need to be?

In previous chapters, the apostle John has not been shy of calling people liars. He does it again at the end of chapter 4:

Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister. (1 John 4:20-21, NIV)

That last part, certainly, is no surprise. Throughout his letter, John has repeatedly drawn upon Jesus’ so-called Farewell Discourse in the Upper Room. John remembers how Jesus told them that anyone who abides in his love will keep his commands, and has therefore reminded his readers more than once that Jesus’ number one command was to love one another.

But what does John mean when says that anyone who “claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar”?

IN A RECENT post, I suggested that although the New International Version translates John as speaking about “perfect love,” we should not read his words as fostering any kind of anxious perfectionism. He’s trying to encourage his readers, not discourage them further.

In the same vein, we need to be careful how we interpret John’s use of the word “liar” here. A perfectionist might take his words as a personal accusation, as if John were saying, So, you say you love God, but I think God knows better, and so do I. After all, God is love and the source of all true love. And he knows how often you fail at loving your brothers and sisters the way you should. So how can you claim to love God, you big liar?

Again, given how much John has already tried to bolster the confidence of his readers, this would be a very strange thing for him to suggest. It’s far more likely that he is again encouraging them by referring to the errors of the people who left the community. Remember how John said the following in chapter 1:

If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. (1:8)

And in chapter 2, he added:

Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates a brother or sister is still in the darkness. (2:9)

As suggested before, these are most likely statements about the beliefs and behaviors of the secessionists. With their Gnostic distortion of the gospel, they were making false claims about Jesus but fooling themselves into thinking they were true disciples who loved God — or at least, God as they understood him to be. They may have acted hatefully toward John’s readers even as they claimed to be without sin. No, John is telling his readers, don’t be fooled. There’s no evidence that they truly love God.

And what does John mean when he says, “For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen”? John seems to use this sentence as justification for the one that comes before it, but his meaning is unclear, and interpreters have put forward a range of possibilities.

Some, for example, suggest that John is saying something like, “If they can’t do something easy (like love someone they can see), then how can they do something hard (like love someone they can’t see)?” While it is possible that this is what John means, I somehow doubt that he’d want to teach that it’s easy to love our brothers and sisters or hard to love God!

Rather, I think the larger context of the statement may give us a clue. Remember what he said just a few sentences ago, in verse 12:

No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. (4:12)

And as we’ve seen, that statement in turn echoes what John said near the beginning of his gospel:

No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known. (John 1:18)

In other words, John’s reference here to the God who is not seen may echo his earlier statement that “No one has ever seen God.” I imagine that the secessionists, with their Gnostic ideals, may have taken that statement in John’s gospel and twisted it to their own purposes. That would make sense of John’s repeating the statement here in his letter, to correct any misunderstanding that might still be circulating in the community. His point, overall, is that while no one has ever seen the invisible God, the visible, embodied life of Jesus made him known. And by God’s design, with Jesus having returned to the Father’s side, the character of God is now made known in the love between his children.

As John has said, “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them” (1 John 4:16). A person can claim to love God, but if they’re not living in love, they’re kidding themselves, or loving some god other than our heavenly Father. The God who can’t be seen wills that if we love him, we will love our brothers and sisters whom we can see, the ones with whom we fellowship.

To live otherwise, John says, is to live a lie.