The word at the opening of John is, "As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God." And it struck me yesterday, how very blessedly all the cases in that gospel illustrate this, and show us, that all who were called to Jesus, received from Him a spirit of liberty and strength; not the spirit of bondage or of fear, but such a spirit as became those who had the power or the privilege to become the sons of God.
I trace this throughout, and will show you what I mean, that you may judge it in the exercise of your own spiritual senses, or the mind of Christ in you.
Andrew spends the remnant of a day in the unknown, solitary dwelling of Christ, but he leaves it in a spirit of full liberty, for he finds his brother Simon, and at once, as out of the abundance of his heart, bears witness of his new-found joy.
Philip, in like spirit comes forth after he had been called by Jesus, and tells Nathanael of Jesus, as Andrew had told Simon.
These may be minute features or traces of the mind that was in these earliest disciples, but they tell the secret of the heart very clearly. We find the spirit of liberty, such as became sons and not servants, to be in them.
Nathanael appears next to Philip. He had been under the fig-tree, I surely judge, under such convictions and visitations of soul as had separated him, [as conviction always does (Zech. 3)-] but being brought to Jesus, and addressed by Jesus, his soul rises from the place of conviction to that of admiration and worship-he is full of Christ, and not as before, of himself, and out of the abundance of his heart speaks of His glories.
The Samaritan is seen issuing forth from the simple homestead, so to speak, or the scene of the duties and occupations of every-day domestic life. She does not come, like Nathanael, from the place that had witnessed religious exercise of conscience, she is simply a careless child of nature, or a citizen of the world, a dweller in this defiled earth of ours. But she meets the One whom Nathanael had met, and she leaves Him, in the bright sunny freedom of a delivered heart, to tell all her neighbors, like Andrew and Philip, of her new-found joy; and her neighbors catching the joy, in their turn, like Nathanael, have their mouths, by the abundance of their hearts, opened to speak of Jesus, and of Jesus and His glories only.
All is of a piece in these cases, and how precious to you and me, that we may take our place in so happy a group; and if we taste not an overflowing cup, it is because we are straightened in our own bowels. But further.
Peter, in his turn, witnesses the same. The multitude had receded from the Son of God. (A sample of His condition in this divine gospel, for Israel had refused Him, and the world. He made had disowned Him.) But all alone as He was, He appealed to the twelve. He turned to them, as much as to say, I am left a solitary one on the earth-will you also give me up? Peter, in depth of affection, (affection inwrought in His spirit by grateful recollection of all he owed the Lord,) answers that He was more to Him than the whole creation of God, his eternal life, and that he knew Him to be so.
No questionable or challenged blessing, no fear or suspicion, as if he knew not the air he was breathing or the place be was filling, but his spirit owns eternal, life, and eternal life for himself, in the blessed Son of God. (chap. 6.)
The convicted adulteress, then, continues the same tale of the wonders wrought out for the soul by the receiving of the Son of God. She is seen under the fiery hill. She is not merely as a child of nature, just come forth from the scene of domestic duties like the Samaritan, or even from the place of conviction or the laborings of a troubled conscience like Nathanael, but, detected, convicted, exposed, she is dragged under the very thunders and fire of the righteous burning mount, and there she lies ready for judgment. She can say nothing, and she does not attempt it. Jesus, the Lord of the hill, whose hand alone could hold and guide its thunders, pleads her cause, and so pleads it, as to divert the lightning from her head to the head of her accusers, and they are forced from the ground. But how is she? Is she any longer at the foot of the fiery hill? When Jesus and she are alone and together, what is the frame of her spirit? What fills her? The spirit of bondage, or the glory that is full of grace and truth? She can stand His presence though in her scarlet sin, and she is dismissed in the fullness of forgiveness. The "light of life" sent her away in peace.
The blind beggar comes after her, and suited witness of like grace he is, and in due season follows the convicted sinner. He is found in the place where the thunders of the Church had put him, a terrible place to nature; none more so. The adulteress was under mount Sinai when Jesus met her, but this poor Israelite is outside the camp. The one was condemned by the law, the other was cast out by that which called itself the Church. And I may say, nature, or flesh and blood, the heart of ignorant, religious man will as deeply quail before the last as before the first. It is a place terrible to the natural mind. But again, I ask, what does that place become to this poor outcast? Is it to him any longer the place of an outcast? Was the presence of Christ a place of condemnation to the sinner of chap. viii? Is that same presence a place of separation, the place of a heathen man and a publican to this poor Jew? Receiving the Son of God, he worships. His spirit is in a sanctuary. It is at liberty. It is in heaven. It has entered the temple with thank-offerings, and peace-offerings, and sacrifices of praise. He is not on praying ground surely, but at an eucharistic feast. He worships as those only can who know the presence of the Son of God in its redeeming, healing, peaceful virtue.
What secrets-what tales of the heart are told in these simple narratives-what pulses of the hidden spirit are felt here! Every case exhibits, in those who had received Jesus, a spirit not of fear, but of liberty. But I only, as it were, suggest, having, however, tasted that this is a goodly theme. I do not instance Nicodemus of chap. 3 because he does not illustrate one who had received the Son of God. He did at the end, I am sure, but not in chap. 3.