N no part of scripture is the Lord presented so personally as the great object of faith, and withal so variously, as in the final Gospel. How strikingly this applies to the verse before us! "I am the way, and the truth, and the life." Let us consider it.
Since sin came into the world, and man was driven out of paradise, the earth morally became a wilderness wherein is no way. When innocent, he needed none, as in fact we hear then nothing of the sort. The garden which the LORD God planted in Eden was stocked with every tree pleasant to the sight and good for food; and a river went out of Eden to water the garden. There was man put, not to eat bread in the sweat of his face as when fallen, on ground cursed for his sake, bringing forth thorns and thistles to him, but to dress and keep it in its unstained beauty and unrestricted fruitfulness. A tree of life was in the midst of the garden whereof to eat and live forever; but there was a tree forbidden him, the tree of knowledge of good and evil of which he must not eat on penalty of death. It was the test of his obedience. Alas d he disobeyed, and all that primeval state of things ended. "So He drove out the man.”
But God revealed another, the Second man, and Last Adam. In Him was life: a truth distinct from, and far higher than, that all things came into being through Him, though this was so exclusive that apart from Him not one came into being which has come into being. In Him was life for the fallen and sinful, and the life was the light of men. They had departed from God and needed a way back to God through that dark and dangerous world where death reigned thenceforth. The old ordinance for man innocent was debarred to man guilty. There was no return possible to the tree of life. In fact man innocent never did eat of it, and man fallen was precluded by the flame of a sword which turned on every side to keep the way of the tree of life.
To Him that should come, the woman's Seed, faith was directed. The bruised One, to come of woman distinctively, should bruise the serpent's head. Thus only could fallen man return to God. Who clothes the naked with a covering founded on the death of another. On this Abel acted in the great crisis of his history. He took the way of grace and of divine righteousness, owning his ruin as a sinful man and his faith in a Savior from God that should suffer but destroy the destroyer. By faith he brought, not of the fruit of the ground cursed for man's sin, but of the firstlings of his flock, a slain offering, for acceptance. He did not go in the way of Cain, whose offering was of merely natural origin, with no sense of sin, and with no acknowledgment of Him that was to die for sinners, Himself the unblemished sacrifice rising up from the fire as a savor of rest to Jehovah. And Jehovah had respect to Abel and to his offering; but to Cain and to his offering He had not respect. To Abel Christ was the way. Cain took a way of his own.
Again, when Noah emerged from the ark, (he and his wife with his sons and their wives, and with every living creature preserved from destruction therein), he built an altar to Jehovah, and took of every clean beast, and of every clean bird, and offered burnt-offerings on the altar. Thus did grace work in Noah to begin the world that now is with his striking and solemn acknowledgment that salvation is of Jehovah, and that blessing hangs on a holy sacrifice acceptable to Him. Christ was the way, that Jehovah should not again curse the ground any more for man's sake, evil though the imagination of his heart is from his youth.
Then in Abraham the place of faith is clearly seen: the word of Jehovah came, and he believed Jehovah, Who reckoned it to him for righteousness. That Christ is the way no less appeared in the only son provided as God's lamb, dead and risen as Hebrews 11 explains.
It is not otherwise when God redeemed to Himself a people, Israel, as we read in the book of Ex. The paschal lamb is the basis of their exemption from divine judgment; the passage of the Red Sea is their manifest deliverance. Christ is still the only way; and there is none other. For these things happened to Israel by way of type; and they were written for our admonition upon whom the ends of the ages are come. The blood of the Iamb, sprinkled on the doorpost of each house, alone screened them and their household; and the power of God thereon made the sea a path of life for them, and of death for the Egyptians who without the lamb's blood essayed it in vain.
No religious profession, no sacraments, can avail without faith in Christ, the Lamb of God. Therefore as a guilty sinner behold Him. Israel went astray no less than the nations. All sinned, each turning to his own away. Christ is the only way to God, Who is now revealed as His Father and our Father, His God and our God. None can truly say so but those that believe on the Lord Jesus; it is theirs to know it then and rejoice.