Whereas verse 9 spoke of what made God’s love so manifest that everyone could see it, the present verse tells how God’s love has become the source of all true Christian love.

In this is love: the demonstrative pronoun points forward again. It is explained by the negative and the positive that clauses, which reinforce each other. The whole sentence may have to be restructured or adjusted; compare such renderings as “this is what love is: it is not that we have loved God, but…” (Good News Translation), ‘the true meaning of love is not that we have loved God, but…,’ or, where one has to shift from noun to verb, ‘Thus it is possible to know how God loves us. Not that we first loved God, but….’

Not that we loved God but that he loved us: in the Greek the first of these verb forms is in the perfect tense, and the second is in the aorist. The latter expresses the fact that God’s love for us was revealed in the historical event of the coming of Jesus Christ. To bring out this force of the aorist, New English Bible has “the love he showed us in sending his Son.”

The words we and God, and he and us, are emphatic because of their occurring in contrasting pairs.

For to be the expiation for our sins, or ‘that he should expiate our sins,’ ‘in order that our sins might be forgiven,’ see comments on 2.2. As long as man is sinful, he cannot participate in the true life; hence the doing away with sin is the necessary counterpart of the granting of life. For sin see comments on 1.7; the plural shows that the reference is to specific sinful deeds; see comments on “we confess our sins” in 1.9.

Quoted with permission from Haas, C., de Jonge, M. and Swellengrebel, J.L. A Handbook on The First Letter of John. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1972. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .