Please read the passage before reading the commentary.
God is love. Here, love is not a noun, but a verb, an action word. God is love because God is loving. God is love in action. God creates because love is outgoing, and God is love.
God is love and therefore God sent God’s own Son because of God’s love for us. In no way could God have been so mad at us as to kill God’s only Son. This would have been contrary to God’s nature. Rather, when God sent the Son, God was loving the Son into human nature. The Son came because the Son has the same loving nature that the Father has.
Where there is love there is no fear. Love conquers all fear because love is creative, and fear admits the possibility of a lack of creativity.
In speaking about love, John emphasizes the mutual cooperation between Jesus Christ and the Father. Earlier in the letter, John had pointed out that the anti-Christ separates the Jesus Christ from Father. The Christian movement, however, always sees the Father and the Son, who is the Christ, together. The anti-Christ wants to separate Jesus and the Father. The anti-Christ does not have the love of God and does not have the Spirit of God.
We Christians, however, do have God’s Spirit because we accept the intimate close cooperation of Father and Son. We have the Son and the Spirit of God because we have the Father, and we know God’s love for us. For this reason, we have secure standing with John’s community, we love one another, and God remains in us, and we remain in God.