Is it surprising that John’s Gospel has been pitched upon as the critics’ chief battle-field of the New Testament?  Battle-field is a good word.  The fire has been thick and fast, needle-guns—­sharp needles—­and machine-guns—­Gatling guns and rattling—­but no smokeless powder.  The cloud of smoke of a beautiful scholarly gray tinge has quite filled the air.  Men have been swinging away from a man, the Man to a book.  But no critic’s delicately shaded and shadowing cloud of either dust or smoke, or both, can hide away the Man.  He’s too tall and big.  The simple hearted man who will step aside from the smoke and noise to the shade of a quiet tree, or the quiet of some corner, with this marvellous bit of manuscript from John’s pen for his keen, Spirit-cleared eye, will be enraptured to find a Man, the Man, the God-Man.

Whom Moses Saw.

What did Jesus say about Himself?  The critics of the world, including the skeptical, infidel critics, seem to agree fully and easily on a few things about this Jesus on whose dissection they have expended so much time and strength.  They agree that in the purity of His life, the moral power of His character, the wisdom of His teachings, the rare poise of His conduct and judgment, the influence exerted upon men, He clear over-tops the whole race.  Surely His own opinion of Himself is well worth having.  And it is easy to get, and tremendous when gotten.  It fits into John’s conception with unlabored simplicity and naturalness.

According, then, to Jesus’ own words, He had come down out of heaven, and, by and by, would go back again to where He was before.  He had come on an errand for the Father down into the world, and when the errand was finished He would go back home to the Father again.  He had seen the Father, and He was the only one who had ever seen Him.  He was the Son of God in a sense that nobody else was, a begotten Son, and the only Son who had been begotten.  Therefore He naturally called God His Father, and not only that, but His own Father, making Himself equal with the Father.

This statement it was that swung the leaders over from silent contempt to aggression in their treatment of Him.  The Jews understood this perfectly and instantly.  They refused to accept it.  Reckoning it blasphemous, they attempted to stone Him.  They were partly right.  If it were not true, it was blasphemous, and their law required stoning.  Yet they were fools in their thought, and not even keen fools.  For no blasphemous man could have revealed the character and moral glory that Jesus constantly revealed before their eyes.

Then follows one of John’s exquisite reports of Jesus’ words in reply.  In it run side by side the essential unity of spirit between Father and Son, with the absolute life-giving or creative power invested in the Son.  A sweet, loving, loyal unity of spirit is between the two.  It is love unity.  There can be none closer.  In this unity the Son has full control of life for all the race of men, and final adjustment of the character wrought out by each.  At His word all who have gone down under death’s touch will come into life again, and each by the character he has developed will go by a moral gravitation to his natural place.