But men’s eyes got badly affected.  They didn’t let the light in, either clearly or fully.  The light was there, but it was not getting in.  Something had to be done to help out those eyes.  So the law was given.  It was merely a mirror to let a man see his face, what it was like.

Here’s a mother calling to her little son, “Come here and let me wash your face.”  And he calls out, “It isn’t dirty.”  “Yes, dear, it is very dirty, come at once.”  “Why, no, mother, it isn’t dirty; you washed it this morning.”  And the child’s tone blends a hurt surprise and a settled conviction that his mother is certainly wrong this time about the condition of his face.

And if the mother be of the thoughtful brooding kind, she says nothing, but gets a hand mirror, and holds it before the child’s face.  That will always get a child’s attention.  And the boy looks; he sees his dirty face reflected.  The blank astonishment on his face can’t be put into words.  It tells the radical upsetting revolution in his thought on that subject.  How could it have happened that his face got into that condition!  And the washing process is yielded to at least; possibly even asked for.

That’s what the law did and does.  It showed man his face, his heart, his need.  It brings upsetting revolutionary ideas regarding one’s self.  There it stops.  That’s its limit.  Then the Man who in Himself is grace and truth does the rest.

The Spokesman of God.

Then John quietly, deftly draws the line around to the starting point in that first tremendous statement.  He completes a circle perfect in its strength and beauty and simplicity, as every circle is.  If we follow the order of the words somewhat as John wrote them down, we find the bit of truth coming in a very striking, as well as in a fresh way. “God no one has ever, at any time, seen.”

That seems rather startling, does it not?  What do these older pages say?  Adam talked and walked and worked with God, and then was led to the gate of the garden.  God appeared to Abraham, and gave him a never-to-be-forgotten lesson in star study.  Moses spent nearly six weeks with Him, twice over, in the flaming mount, and carried the impress of His presence upon his face clear to Nebo’s cloudy top.

The seventy elders “saw the God of Israel, and did eat and drink,” the simple record runs.  And young Isaiah that morning in the temple, and Ezekiel in the colony of exiles on the Chebar, and Daniel by the Tigris at the close of his three weeks’ fast,—­these all come quickly to mind.  John’s startling statement seems to contradict these flatly.

But push on.  John has a way of clearing things up as you follow him through.  Listen to him further:  The only-begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father—­He has always been the spokesman of God.  Look into that sentence of John’s a little.  It seems quite clear, clear to the point of satisfying the most critical research, that John wrote down the words, “the only-begotten God.”  The contrast in his mind is not between “God,” and the “only begotten Son.”  It is a contrast whose verbal terms fit with much nicer exactness than that.  It is a contrast between “God” and the “only-begotten God.”