Then with a few swift touches of his pen he says, “This was Jesus before He came among men, the man Jesus whom we know.”  In the earliest beginning the whole heart and thought of God toward man was outspoken in a person.  This person, this outspeaking God, it was He who later became known to us as Jesus.  Jesus, away back before the farthest reach of our human knowledge, was God speaking out of His inner heart to us.  This Jesus is God speaking out His innermost heart to man.  Did you ever long to hear God speak?  Look at Jesus.  He’s God’s speech.  This One was with God.  He was God.  It was He who spoke things into being, that creative span of time.  Only through Him could anything come into being.  All life was in Him, and this life was man’s light.  It is He who came into our midst, shining in the darkness that could neither take Him in nor hold Him down from shining out.

Every now and then as he writes John’s heart seems near the breaking point, and a sob shakes his pen a bit, as it comes over him all anew, and almost overcomes him, how this wondrous Jesus, this throbbing heart of God, was treated.  Listen:  “He came to His own possessions, and they who were His—­own—­kinsfolk—­and the quiver of John’s heart-sob seems to make the type move on the page—­His own kinsfolk received him not into their homes, but left Him outside in the cold night; but—­a glimpse of that glorious Face steadies him again—­as many as did receive Him, whether His own kinsfolk or not, to them He gave the right to become kinsfolk of God, the oldest family of all.”

God’s Spokesman.

John has a way of reaching away back, and then by a swift use of pen coming quickly to his own time, and then he keeps swinging back over the ground he has been over, but each time with some added touch, like the true artist he is.

John’s statement, “the world was made by Him,” takes one back at once to the early Genesis chapters.  There the creating One, who, by a word, brings things into existence is called God.  And then, that we may identify Him, is called by a name, Jehovah.  The creator is God named Jehovah.  And this Jehovah, John says, was the One who afterward became a Man, and pitched His tent among men.  And as one reads the old chapters through, this is the God, the Jehovah, who appears in varying ways to these Old Testament men, one after another.  He talked and walked and worked with Adam in completing the work of creation, and then broken-hearted led him out of the forfeited garden.

Then to make his standpoint unmistakably plain to every one, before starting in on the witness borne by the herald, he makes a summary.  All that he has been saying he now sums up in these tremendous words, “God—­no one ever yet has seen; the only begotten God,[7] in the bosom of the Father, this One has been the spokesman.”  In what He was, and in what He did as well as in what He said, He hath been the spokesman.  Here is a difference made between the Father God, whom no one has seen, and the only begotten God, who has been telling the Father out.