“There was a man sent from God, his name John,” He came to bear testimony concerning the light, yet in result of faithful and devoted service obtained such witness himself as had never been rendered to man. John was the burning and shining lamp, Jesus the light itself. Saviour and saint bare testimony the one to the other. “He that cometh from heaven is above all.” “Yea, more than a prophet... among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist.” Self-occupation always fails in its object. The voice that cried in the wilderness, “Prepare ye Jehovah’s way,” obtained what it never sought. Could he have thought in his lonely, desert life, nourished only from the resources of the wilderness, that he was treading the path that led to such results as these? Honor and praise from the lips of his rejected Lord; for they stopped their ears at the cry, and refused to make straight in the desert a highway for “our God.” This mutual praise, flowing from divine grace on one side, and through grace on the other, is most attractive. How each bore himself (the divine Master and His servant)—the way of the Spirit within—in the day of rejection (for the servant drank of the Master’s cup) we learn from Matthew 11 and John 4 “I thank thee, O Father.... All things are delivered unto me of my Father.” “The friend of the Bridegroom, which standeth and heareth Him, rejoiceth greatly because of the Bridegroom’s voice: this my joy therefore is fulfilled.” What do the “least in the kingdom of heaven” think of this character of communion? And now this honored servant waits for things as yet unseen; he shared His Master’s sufferings, he must share His glories also; for thus the counsel runs, “If we suffer with Him, we shall also reign with Him.”
But in divine things the hidden and inward is always deeper and more precious than the outward, that which is to be displayed than the display itself. (“There was the hiding of His power.”—Habakkuk 3:44And his brightness was as the light; he had horns coming out of his hand: and there was the hiding of his power. (Habakkuk 3:4).) The white stone, from the hand of Jesus glorified, tells of secret blessings, dearer even than the glory to be revealed to us, and of which we are to be partakers. But in this our day the desert life is shunned, the hidden manna out of mind; the “secret name of undisclosed delight” seems to have lost its attraction.
Verse 9. “The true light was that which, coming into the world, lightens every man.” When the light comes into the world, its rays reach out to the ends thereof; there is no speech nor language where its brightness will not shine. “What the law saith, it saith to them that are under the law.” But in this shining the Holy Land is found to be a very small part of the world’s surface, and a Jew no better than a Gentile. But if sin makes no difference, because all have sinned, grace will make no difference, because the same Lord is rich unto all that call upon Him. Next, we have His actual presence in the world, with the fact that it did not know its divine Creator, as Jerusalem did not know the day of her visitation. At the beginning of their history the nations thought it not good to have God in their knowledge, and so, when God was manifest in the flesh in the person of Jesus Christ, a Light to lighten the Gentiles (to show where they were), these were all found hidden away in the darkness of idolatry; as the Jews, hiding their faces from the Light of Israel; as Adam, when he heard the voice of the Lord God, hid himself amongst the trees of the garden. “Righteous Father, the world hath not known thee,” said the Saviour of the world. But there was to be a taking out of this present evil world, before the great ingathering of the nations for the millennial reign.
There were then those who received Him, but their history offers the clearest illustration of the solemn truth of the all-pervading darkness. The energy and will that brought them to Christ were wholly divine; on man’s side power and will were for evil only, being himself of the darkness. In Christ they were perfect. “If thou wilt, thou canst,” said the poor leper. “I will” (and can), said the Saviour, “Be thou clean.” “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem... how often would I... and ye would not.” To receive Him one must be born again; but this necessarily brings in God, rich in grace. “Of His own will begat He us with the word of truth.” To men He said, “Ye will not come unto me, that ye might have life.” No, they loved darkness (this was the world’s condemnation) rather than light, and why? But were their thoughts, the inward thoughts, of every one of them, better than their evil deeds? for from within, out of the heart of man proceed evil thoughts. See the long, dark roll, and show me any one thing of brightness, if you can. And Himself is ever the touchstone of their moral state. When He called, as we have seen, there was none to answer; when He suffered, none to pity. The “within” of the human heart was a mystery unknown as yet to the disciples themselves. “Are ye yet without understanding?” He said to them (they did not know themselves). He tells them the truth, as elsewhere He opened their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures; and, best of all, has given an —understanding to know Him that is true—to know Himself.
Verse 13. “Born, not of blood.” A Jew might have boasted of blood, of belonging by birth to the holy nation. Could he do so before God? Was it not a truth that in this city, the city of the great King, the holy city of our God, the great King and our God was rejected by the people of Israel, joined with idolatrous Gentiles in the bond of common enmity against Israel’s Messiah and the world’s Saviour?
“Nor of the will of the flesh.” The flesh is the moral principle of fallen humanity; it loves to reason, but hates to obey; cannot be subject to the law of God; they that are in it cannot please God; its mind, that it glories in, is enmity against God. It is the seed-bed of human theories and speculations, does not even pretend to give divine authority for them; it speaks from itself, the opposite of the way of the Holy Ghost. “He shall not speak from. Himself,” but only what. He hears shall He speak. He speaks but to glorify Jesus, taking of the things that are His. The Eternal Word speaks of God, the Son about the Father, to glorify Him. This was the mind of Christ: “If any one desire to practice His will, he shall know concerning the doctrine, whether it is of God, or that I speak from myself. He that speaks from himself seeks his own glory.” “The words which thou hast given me I have given them.” “I have given them thy word.” “The word which ye hear is not mine, but that of the Father, who has sent me.” “My doctrine is not mine, but that of Him that has sent me.” “Search the Scriptures,” He said. That is, in the mind of Christ the Scriptures are of equal authority with the words which the Father had given; and the word of God, He tells us, cannot be broken. His mind is ever the condemnation of that of the flesh. The believer is not born of that, nor of the will of man; it is a ruined race. It is a solemn and important word, meeting us here at the threshold of this gospel. Put negatively, it is true; but of its scope and bearing there can be no question. But many, it is to be feared, are willingly ignorant of its import. The world cannot receive this truth; the springs of human energy (the will of the flesh) would be broken, so that it would cease to be “this present evil world.”
In verse 12 it should be “children.” He gave those who received Him the right to be children of God. It is the word used almost invariably as expressive of intimacy in nature. They were begotten of God. “Son” gives more the honor and standing, in contrast to their position under the law. In Galatians 4 we find it contrasted with “bondsmen.” “Because ye are sons, God has sent out the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father. So thou art no longer bondsman, but son.” In chapter 12 we have “sons of light,” where the honor and moral dignity of such a place is in view. In Hebrews 12:88But if ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons. (Hebrews 12:8) it is easily seen that “son” only, and not “child,” could be used.
Verse 14. “And the Word became flesh.” It is not the Father’s counsels about Him, nor the Holy Ghost’s power—not what He was, nor what He did—that we find here. It is what He became. In the beginning eternity He was God, and with God; in the beginning of time, the Creator. “Thou in the beginning of time, Lord, hast founded the earth, and the works of Thy hands are the heavens.” Elsewhere we have His coming into the world presented in connection with the counsels of God, and with the Holy Ghost. “When the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth His Son, come of woman.” But here it is only His blessed self who is before us, and His relations to us. “Subsisting in the form of God... He emptied Himself, taking a bondsman’s form, taking His place in the likeness of men,” and was obedient in this place, “even unto death.” Here was a wondrous thing; paradise never presented anything like it. The innocent man, in the midst of the garden that the Lord God had planted for Him, falls before the first breath of evil; but here was a Man, holy in the midst of evil, on an equality with God in the divine nature, yet in a bondsman’s form; self-emptied, self-humbled, that blessed Self, obedient even unto the death of the cross. This was the mind that was in Christ, this the side of the sufferings of a love as boundless as the suffering itself, this the “within” of the heart of the Second Man. The unfolding of these depths within awaited the Spirit’s presence. The precious sufferings of Christ for love and for righteousness’ sake, and even those of atonement, were never understood by the disciples during the Lord’s presence on earth, any more than the Jews had been able to look to the end of that which is abolished; that is, the Person of Jesus Christ glorified. Without the Spirit’s presence they were as little able to understand His sufferings as to contemplate His glory.
Become flesh, he tabernacled amongst us (see Revelation 7, where we read, “He that sits upon the throne shall spread his tabernacle over them”—that is, the white-robed Gentile overcomers; and Revelation 21, “The tabernacle of God is with men”) full of grace and truth. I remarked that the disciples never understood these ways of Christ, whether outward ways or those of the Spirit “within.” Before redemption is known, and the sealing of the Spirit, there is no heart nor mind for such blessed studies as these. That He had a baptism of fire to pass through, all His inmost thoughts tried by that consuming fire, and, when tried to the utmost, yielding only a sweet savor to God, this they could not understand. “But his inwards shall he wash in water, and the priest shall burn all on the altar, a burnt sacrifice, an offering made by fire, of a sweet savor unto the Lord.”
Grace and truth were manifested. All “wondered at the gracious words that proceeded out of His mouth.” “He that hath received His testimony hath set to his seal that God is true.” And the evangelist states in a parenthetic sentence, “We have contemplated His glory, a glory as of an only-begotten with a Father.” It could not be that rays of such glory should not have reached them, even before the intelligence that the Spirit’s presence imparts had been given them. There were some who received His testimonies, however feebly, and we know that it was feebly until the Spirit of truth had come. To His own He presents Himself as the object of His Father’s counsels and affections; they all centered in Him, and revealed Him as that object in a glory as of an only-begotten son with a Father. “The Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into His hands.” “The Father loveth the Son, and showeth Him all things that Himself doeth.” The Father “hath committed all judgment unto the Son, that all men should honor the Son, even as they honor the Father.” “All things that the Father hath are mine.”
In Hebrews 1 He is presented as “the effulgence of God’s glory, and the exact expression of His substance.” In Colossians 1 as “image of the invisible God.” It is in Jesus only that God is known, as in Him alone we know the Father. R. E.