1 John 4:8

ὁ μὴ�. For the μἡ comp. 1 John 3:10; 1 John 3:14; 1 John 2:4. οὐκ ἔγνω. Literally, knew not God, i.e. never attained to a knowledge of Him. Comp. 1 John 3:1; John 16:3. We have here a remarkable instance of S. John’s habit of not making the second part of an antithesis the exact counterpart of the first, but an advance beyond. Instead of saying ‘is not born of God’ he says ‘never knew God’, which is much stronger. Not to have known love is not to have known God.

ὁ Θεὸς�. This is the third of S. John’s great statements respecting the Nature of God: ‘God is Spirit’ (John 4:24); ‘God is light’ (1 John 1:5), and ‘God is love’. See on 1 John 1:5. Here, as in the other cases, the predicate has no article, and expresses not a quality which He possesses, but one which embraces all He is. This is clear from S. John’s argument. It does not follow, because God is full of love, that one who does not love cannot have known God: all that follows from this is that his knowledge of God is very incomplete. Only if God is love, i.e. if love is Himself, is the statement true, that to have no personal knowledge of love is to have no personal knowledge of God. And here we may remark that to attain by experience to a knowledge of God (γινώσκειν τὸν Θεόν) is a very different thing from knowing something about Him (εἰδέναι τι περὶ αὐτοῦ). The Gnostics knew a good deal about God, but they did not know Him; for instead of loving those brethren who did not share their intellectual attainments, they had an arrogant contempt for them. They had recognized that ‘God is spirit’, and to some extent that ‘God is light’; for they knew Him to be an immaterial Being and the highest Intelligence: but they had wholly failed to appreciate that ‘God is love’. And yet of the three great truths this is the chief. The other two are incomplete without it. The first, ‘God is spirit’, is almost more negative than positive: God is not material; ‘He dwelleth not in temples made with hands’. The second might seem in making our idea of Him more definite to remove Him further away from us: God is perfect intelligence, perfect purity, perfect holiness. The third not only makes His Nature far more clearly known, but brings Him very close to us. The spirit is shewn to be personal, the light to have warmth and life.

If no previous religion, not even the Jewish, had attained to the truth that ‘God is light’, still less had any attained to the truth that ‘God is love’. To the heathen world God is a powerful, a terrible, and often a cruel being; one whose fierce wrath needs to be deprecated and whose ill-will needs to be propitiated, rather than one on whose love men may rely. To the Jews He is a just and a jealous, if also a merciful God, of whose inmost being all that was known was I AM THAT I AM. To the Christian alone He is known as LOVE.
As already stated, this truth, God is love, dominates the second main division of the Epistle. In no Book in N.T. does the substantive ‘love’ (ἀγάπη) occur so often as in these two and a half Chapter s (1 John 3:1 to 1 John 5:12); and in no Book in N.T., excepting the Fourth Gospel, does the verb ‘to love’ (ἀγαπᾷν) occur half so many times as here. No wonder that the writer of this Epistle has been known in the Church as ‘the Apostle of Love’. “If nothing were said in praise of love throughout the pages of this Epistle, if nothing whatever throughout the other pages of the Scriptures, and this one thing only were all we were told by the voice of the Spirit of God, For God is Love; nothing more ought we to require” (S. Augustine).