Even so all that belongs to the family, of wealth, fame, inheritance, distinction, vests distinctly in the head of the family, the father.  He stands for the whole family.  And so, too, all of this descends directly from the father at his death to his eldest son.  In some parts the father retires at a certain age, either really or nominally, and all becomes vested technically in his eldest son.  And if the son be an only begotten son, then literally all that is in the father comes into the son.  All the fame, the inheritance, the traditions, the obligations, the wealth, in short all the glory of the father comes of itself, by common action of events, to the son.

Now this is what John is thinking of as he writes, “we beheld His glory, glory as of an only begotten of a father.”  That is to say, all there is in the Father is in Jesus.  When you see Jesus, you are seeing the Father.  The whole of God is in this Jesus.  This is what John is saying here.

Grace and Truth Coupled.

And then John does a bit of exquisite packing of much in little.  He tells the whole story of the character, the revealed glory, of Jesus in such a few simple words,—­“full of grace and truth.”  Not grace without truth.  That would be a sort of weakly, sickly sentimentalism.  And not truth without grace.  That would be a cold stern repellent insistence on certain high standards.  But grace and truth coupled, intermingling.

Of course real grace and truth always are coupled.  They tell the exquisite poise that is in everything God does.  Truth is the back-bone of grace.  Grace is the soft cushioning of flesh upon the bony framework of truth.  It is the soft warm breath of life in truth.  Truth is grace holding up the one only standard of purity and right and insisting upon it.  And as we look we know within ourselves we never can reach it.  Grace is truth reaching a strong warm hand down to where we are and helping us reach it.

With God these things are always coupled. We get them separated badly, or would I better say, imitations of them.  There is a sort of thing we have called truth.  It is not so common now as a generation or more ago.  It is a sort of stern elevated preaching of righteousness, but with no warm feel of life to it.  I can remember hearing preaching in my immature boy days that made me feel that the man and the thing must be right, but neither had any attraction for me.  It was as though a man went fishing with a carefully-made properly-labelled metallic-bait at the end of a long stout cord, and said, as he dangled it in the sinful waters to the elusive fish, “Now, bite; or be damned.”

It was never put so baldly, of course, in words.  And I was only a child with immature childish imaginations.  Yet that was the feeling about the thing the child got.  But it’s scarcely worth while talking of that now except to point the contrast; things have swung so far to the other extreme.