Faith and spiritual growth: I am not writing you a new command but an old one, which you have had since the beginning. 1 John 2:7

During the early days of the Christian faith, the transmission of the gospels was oral, and the faith was also beginning to mix with strange mystical doctrines that were very fashionable at that time, such as Gnosticism, which imposed strange ascetic doctrines and denied the very divinity of Jesus, considering him an angel or a semi-divine being. This is why, faced with this fact, the apostles had to do a very important job, preserving the faith as it was transmitted by Jesus.
The letters of the apostles and in particular the first epistle of John addressed to various Churches of Asia Minor reflect the need to preserve the faith free from heresies, that is, from the teaching of error.
In the first epistle of John, the apostle most beloved by the Lord, to strengthen the faith of the first Christians, he wrote what life in the grace of God consists of, and what it does not, to differentiate between those who live according to the spirit and those who live according to the flesh, there were many false teachers and John wanted to expose them.
And so John taught about a very important topic, the relationship of the new commandment with faith, for Christian spiritual growth, with these wise words: "We are sure that we know Christ if we obey his commandments. The person who says, ´I know him,´ but doesn't obey his commandments is a liar. The truth isn't in that person" 1 John 2:3-4.
But this fulfillment of the commandments is not a merely formal requirement because without the spiritual gift of fear of God (constancy, firmness, devotion, and equanimity) any imperative is null; the gift of fear of God is the good soil on which the seed of faith falls, as Jesus taught in the parable of the sower (Matthew 13:1-9).
But later in his teaching John was more precise, and he referred to the summary of the law of Moses, the love of one's neighbor, and thus explained that this precept is not an exclusive novelty of Christianity because it already comes from the Pentateuch: "I am not writing you a new command but an old one, which you have had since the beginning" 1 John 2:7.
The love of God, which is the love of one's neighbor, is the love that makes faith genuine and that allows men to know Jesus as he is. This is ultimately the message of John in his letter.

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