<p>2:7 <em>Beloved, I write no new commandment to you, but an old commandment which you had from the beginning. The old commandment is the word which you heard</em>- The singular &quot;commandment&quot; is the &quot;commandments&quot; referred to earlier in this section; the plural of majesty being used to refer to the one great commandment, to love as the Lord loved us. This was &quot;new&quot; in that it could only have been true after the advent of the Lord. And it is that commandment which in another sense is &quot;old&quot; or 'original' in that this was the imperative from &quot;the beginning&quot; of the Lord's ministry (see on Jn. 1:1 for the reference of &quot;the beginning&quot;). The &quot;commandment&quot; was imperative in the whole encounter with the Lord. He was love made flesh, and His whole being demanded and still demands that from all who encounter Him. Love, in this &quot;new&quot; sense, is thereby predicated upon knowing Him; Christian love is therefore of an altogether different order from any secular version of 'love'. The idea of an old commandment being new may be another way of expressing the idea of how we can attain a second naivety, a meeting of Jesus 'again for the first time'. For John now repeats that &quot;new&quot; commandment (:8).</p>