1 John 3:13-15 - Do not be surprised

3:13

There is another clear reminder of the words of Jesus in John’s gospel, in this case John 15:18 where Jesus said if the world hates us we are to remember that it hated Him first. We need to remember that the world hated Jesus. Now many people flocked to Jesus, especially the outcasts and the ordinary people, but the “elite”, religious and political, hated Him, even to the point of putting Him to death. There are many places where there is direct and terrible persecution, but even if the hatred is non-violent the hatred can still be unnerving. Today in the West society, at least the political, social and often religious elite, are predominantly anti-Christian. The prevailing attitude in society is that to be a Christian is at best to be naive, and more often to be a bigot. We need to remember that there is nothing new or unusual about this.

3:14

John then reverts back to his theme of loving the brothers. While the world hates us, we have actually passed from death to life, and one of the outward signs of this is that we love our fellow Christians. This is not unrelated to the previous verse, for when we are under attack a natural reaction is to blame others. Suppose a fellow Christian is hated by the world, the world may be saying something like, “they are bigoted and full of hate, you’re not like that are you?”, or at least implying this, and our natural reaction is to not want to be thought of as a bigot, so we seek to distance ourselves from our brother. Instead, we need to stick together.

3:15

Yet another allusion to the word of Jesus, this time those from the sermon on the mount, Matthew 5:22. Hating our brother is like having murder in our hearts. This brings us back to John’s reference to Cain in 3:12. We need to root out hatred in our hearts. Of course, I would rather you just hated me, rather than actually murdered me! But what John (and Jesus means) is that the same root is in us if we hate each other. It is a sickness of the soul and it needs to be dealt with. John then talks about eternal life abiding in us. Eternal life is not just about life going on forever, it is also about the very nature of life. Eternal life involves a Christlike life, in all its aspects, and a key one of those aspects is love for one another.