What Does 1 John 4:7 Mean?
Beloved, let us love one another, for love comes out of God, and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.THE KEY
The verse begins by calling you “Beloved” and then asks you to love: the love you give grows from love already spoken over you.
THE MEANING
Love is already the name given to you, and it takes shape in how you love others now. That love comes from God and reveals that your life is born from God. Knowing God is lived and recognized in this love.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
This undoes the belief that knowing God can be separated from how you regard other people: here, love is the visible sign of that knowledge and of life from God.
THE ROOT
ἀγάπη
agapē
GROWS FROM
ἀγαπάω
agapaō
To love, cherish, or regard with affection.
The verse opens with “Beloved” and moves straight into “let us love”; both come from the same Greek word family. English separates the name received from the love expressed, while the Greek holds them together: being beloved is already present as love begins to move between people.
ALSO GROWS
agapētoi: beloved
ἀγαπητοί
The opening address names the readers as loved before the verse speaks of their love for one another.
agapōmen: let us love
ἀγαπῶμεν
This is the shared action that grows from the identity named at the verse’s beginning.
γεγέννηται
gegennētai
GROWS FROM
γεννάω
gennaō
To beget, give birth, or bring forth.
“has been born of God” in this verse is gegennētai. The word translated “is born” is a perfect form: it presents birth as an origin whose result remains. Love is therefore described as the expression of a life from God, not a way to earn that life.
ALSO GROWS
gennētos: born, begotten
γεννητός
This form makes explicit the birth relation carried by the verse’s description of one who loves.
gennēma: offspring, fruit, produce
γέννημα
The image of what is brought forth illuminates love as the visible fruit of life from God.
γινώσκει
ginōskei
GROWS FROM
γινώσκω
ginōskō
To know, recognize, or perceive.
“knoweth” in this verse is ginōskei. The verse places knowing God beside loving others, joining perception to a lived relationship. What is known of God becomes recognizable in the love that moves among people.
ALSO GROWS
gnōsis: knowledge, knowing
γνῶσις
The related noun shows that the verse’s knowing belongs to a wider family of knowledge and recognition.
gnōrizō: make known, reveal
γνωρίζω
This branch illuminates how love makes the reality of knowing God perceptible in a relationship.
THE PATTERN
Love from God takes visible shape in care between people, making its divine source recognizable.
He executes judgment for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him bread and a cloak.By this all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.No one has ever beheld God. If we love one another, God remains in us, and his love has been made complete in us.THE THREAD
The one who does not love has not known God, for God is love.The next verse repeats the same Greek roots for loving and knowing, then identifies God with love itself. Together, the verses make love both the sign of knowing God and the nature from which that knowing comes.
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