John lays out the arguments for assurance. The aim of this letter is true communion with Jesus and with Jesus' people. Do you know that God loves you? If so, how? If you say "I know God loves me because I can feel it." You are setting yourself up for disaster. The same thing is true if we base God's love upon our circumstances. There is a common ground of assurance of God's love is false truth claim -- I know God loves me because God loves everyone. I don't buy the premise that God loves everyone without exception. This is the issue that John is addressing in our passage. By this we know, not feel, not observe in our circumstances, not rationalize from our sinful mind. John uses the perfect tense. The perfect tense is used to present a state of affairs resulting from past action. It denotes the continuance of a completed action. That's the force of the perfect tense. It inseparably joins today with the past. The instrument of knowing love is an event in the past, that controls us now.
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