'The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus
Christ.'—JOHN 1. 17.
There are scarcely any traces, in the writings of the Apostle John, of
that great controversy as to the relation of the Law and the Gospel
which occupied and embittered so much of the work of the Apostle Paul.
We have floated into an entirely different region in John's writings.
The old controversies are dead—settled, I suppose, mainly by Paul's own
words, and also to a large extent by the logic of events. This verse is
almost the only one in which John touches upon that extinct
controversy, and here the Law is introduced simply as a foil to set off
the brightness of the Gospel. All artists know the value of contrast in
giving prominence. A dark background flashes up brighter colours into
brilliancy. White is never so white as when it is relieved against
black. And so here the special preciousness and distinctive
peculiarities of what we receive in Christ are made more vivid and more
distinct by contrast with what in old days 'was given by Moses.'
Every word in this verse is significant. 'Law' is set against 'grace
and truth.' It was 'given'; they 'came.' Moses is contrasted with
Christ. So we have a threefold antithesis as between Law and Gospel: in
reference to their respective contents; in reference to the manner of
their communication; and in reference to the person of their Founders.
And I think, if we look at these three points, we shall get some clear
apprehension of the glories of that Gospel which the Apostle would
thereby commend to our affection and to our faith.
I. First of all, then, we have here the special glory of the contents
of the Gospel heightened by the contrast with Law.
Law has no tenderness, no pity, no feeling. Tables of stone and a pen
of iron are its fitting vehicles. Flashing lightnings and rolling
thunders symbolise the fierce light which it casts upon men's duty and
the terrors of its retribution. Inflexible, and with no compassion for
human weakness, it tells us what we ought to be, but it does not help
us to be it. It 'binds heavy burdens, and grievous to be borne,' upon
men's consciences, but puts not forth 'the tip of a finger' to enable
men to bear them. And this is true about law in all forms, whether it
be the Mosaic Law, or whether it be the law of our own country, or
whether it be the laws written upon men's consciences. These all
partake of the one characteristic, that they help nothing to the
fulfilment of their own behests, and that they are barbed with
threatenings of retribution. Like some avenging goddess, law comes down
amongst men, terrible in her purity, awful in her beauty, with a hard
light in her clear grey eyes—in the one hand the tables of stone,
bearing the commandments which we have broken, and in the other a sharp
two-edged sword.
And this is the opposite of all that comes to us in the Gospel. The
contrast divides into two portions. The 'Law' is set against 'grace and
truth.' Let us look at these two in order.
What we have in Christ is not law, but grace. Law, as I said, has no
heart; the meaning of the Gospel is the unveiling of the heart of God.
Law commands and demands; it says: 'This shalt thou do, or else—'; and
it has nothing more that it can say. What is the use of standing beside
a lame man, and pointing to a shining summit, and saying to him, 'Get
up there, and you will breathe a purer atmosphere'? He is lying lame at
the foot of it. There is no help for any soul in law. Men are not
perishing because they do not know what they ought to do. Men are not
bad because they doubt as to what their duty is. The worst man in the
world knows a great deal more of what he ought to do than the best man
in the world practises. So it is not for want of precepts that so many
of us are going to destruction, but it is for want of power to fulfil
the precepts.
Grace is love giving. Law demands, grace bestows. Law comes saying 'Do
this,' and our consciences respond to the imperativeness of the
obligation. But grace comes and says, 'I will help thee to do it.' Law
is God requiring; grace is God bestowing. 'Give what Thou commandest,
and then command what Thou wilt.'
Oh, brethren! we have all of us written upon the fleshly tablets of our
hearts solemn commandments which we know are binding upon us; and which
we sometimes would fain keep, but cannot. Is this not a message of hope
and blessedness that comes to us? Grace has drawn near in Jesus Christ,
and a giving God, who bestows upon us a life that will unfold itself in
accordance with the highest law, holds out the fulness of His gift in
that Incarnate Word. Law has no heart; the Gospel is the unveiling of
the heart of God. Law commands; grace is God bestowing Himself.
And still further, law condemns. Grace is love that bends down to an
evildoer, and deals not on the footing of strict retribution with the
infirmities and the sins of us poor weaklings. And so, seeing that no
man that lives but hears in his heart an accusing voice, and that every
one of us knows what it is to gaze upon lofty duties that we have
shrunk from, upon plain obligations from the yoke of which we have
selfishly and cowardly withdrawn our necks; seeing that every man,
woman, and child listening to me now has, lurking in some corner of
their hearts, a memory that only needs to be quickened to be a torture,
and deeds that only need to have the veil drawn away from them to
terrify and shame them—oh! surely it ought to be a word of gladness for
every one of us that, in front of any law that condemns us, stands
forth the gentle, gracious form of the Christ that brings pardon, and
'the grace of God that bringeth salvation unto all men.' Thank God! law
needed to be 'given,' but it was only the foundation on which was to be
reared a better thing. 'The law was given By Moses'—'a schoolmaster,'
as conscience is to-day, 'to bring us to Christ' by whom comes the
grace that loves, that stoops, that gives, and that pardons.
Still further, there is another antithesis here. The Gospel which comes
by Christ is not law, but truth. The object of law is to regulate
conduct, and only subordinately to inform the mind or to enlighten the
understanding. The Mosaic Law had for its foundation, of course, a
revelation of God. But that revelation of God was less prominent,
proportionately, than the prescription for man's conduct. The Gospel is
the opposite of this. It has for its object the regulation of conduct;
but that object is less prominent, proportionately, than the other, the
manifestation and the revelation of God. The Old Testament says 'Thou
shalt'; the New Testament says 'God is.' The Old was Law; the New is
Truth.
And so we may draw the inference, on which I do not need to dwell, how
miserably inadequate and shallow a conception of Christianity that is
which sets it forth as being mainly a means of regulating conduct, and
how false and foolish that loose talk is that we hear many a
time.—'Never mind about theological subtleties; conduct is the main
thing.' Not so. The Gospel is not law; the Gospel is truth. It is a
revelation of God to the understanding and to the heart, in order that
thereby the will may be subdued, and that then the conduct may be
shaped and moulded. But let us begin where it begins, and let us
remember that the morality of the New Testament has never long been
held up high and pure, where the theology of the New Testament has been
neglected and despised. 'The law came by Moses; truth came by Jesus
Christ.'
But, still further, let me remind you that, in the revelation of a God
who is gracious, giving to our emptiness and forgiving our sins—that is
to say, in the revelation of grace—we have a far deeper, nobler, more
blessed conception of the divine nature than in law. It is great to
think of a righteous God, it is great and ennobling to think of One
whose pure eyes cannot look upon sin, and who wills that men should
live pure and noble and Godlike lives. But it is far more and more
blessed, transcending all the old teaching, when we sit at the feet of
the Christ who gives, and who pardons, and look up into His deep eyes,
with the tears of compassion shining in them, and say: 'Lo! This is our
God! We have waited for Him and He will save us.' That is a better
truth, a deeper truth than prophets and righteous men of old possessed;
and to us there has come, borne on the wings of the mighty angel of His
grace, the precious revelation of the Father-God whose heart is love.
'The law was given by Moses,' but brighter than the gleam of the
presence between the Cherubim is the lambent light of gentle tenderness
that shines from the face of Jesus Christ. Grace, and therefore truth,
a deeper truth, came by Him.
And, still further, let me remind you of how this contrast is borne out
by the fact that all that previous system was an adumbration, a shadow
and a premonition of the perfect revelation that was to come. Temple,
priest, sacrifice, law, the whole body of the Mosaic constitution of
things was, as it were, a shadow thrown along the road in advance by
the swiftly coming King. The shadow fell before Him, but when He came
the shadow disappeared. The former was a system of types, symbols,
pictures. Here is the reality that antiquates and fulfils and
transcends them all. 'The law was given by Moses; grace and truth came
by Jesus Christ.'
II. Now, secondly, look at the other contrast that is here, between
giving and coming.
I do not know that I have quite succeeded in making clear to my own
mind the precise force of this antithesis. Certainly there is a
profound meaning if one can fathom it; perhaps one might put it best in
something like the following fashion.
The word rendered 'came' might be more correctly translated 'became,'
or 'came into being.' The law was _given_; grace and truth _came to
be_.
Now, what do we mean when we talk about a law being given? We simply
mean, I suppose, that it is promulgated, either in oral or in written
words. It is, after all, no more than so many words. It is given when
it is spoken or published. It is a verbal communication at the best.
'But grace and truth came to be.' They are realities; they are not
words. They are not communicated by sentences, they are actual
existences; and they spring into being as far as man's historical
possession and experience of them are concerned—they spring into being
in Jesus Christ, and through Him they belong to us all. Not that there
was no grace, no manifest lore of God, in the world, nor any true
knowledge of Him before the Incarnation, but the earlier portions of
this chapter remind us that all of grace, however restrained and
partial, that all of truth, however imperfect and shadowy it may have
been, which were in the world before Christ came, were owing to the
operation of that Eternal Word 'Who became flesh and dwelt among us,'
and that these, in comparison with the affluence and the fulness and
the nearness of grace and truth after Christ's coming, were so small
and remote that it is not an exaggeration to say that, as far as man's
possession and experience of them are concerned, the giving love of God
and the clear and true knowledge of His deep heart of tenderness and
grace, sprang into being with the historical manifestation of Jesus
Christ the Lord.
He comes to reveal by no words. His gift is not like the gift that
Moses brought down from the mountain, merely a writing upon tables; His
gift is not the letter of an outward commandment, nor the letter of an
outward revelation. It is the thing itself which He reveals by being
it. He does not speak about grace, He brings it; He does not show us
God by His words, He shows us God by His acts. He does not preach about
Him, but He lives Him, He manifests Him. His gentleness, His
compassion, His miracles, His wisdom, His patience, His tears, His
promises; all these are the very Deity in action before our eyes; and
instead of a mere verbal revelation, which is so imperfect and so
worthless, grace and truth, the living realities, are flashed upon a
darkened world in the face of Jesus Christ. How cold, how hard, how
superficial, in comparison with that fleshly table of the heart of
Christ on which grace and truth were written, are the stony tables of
law, which bore after all, for all their majesty, only words which are
breath and nothing besides.
III. And so, lastly, look at the contrast that is drawn here between
the persons of the Founders.
I do not suppose that we are to take into consideration the difference
between the limitations of the one and the completeness of the other. I
do not suppose that the Apostle was thinking about the difference
between the reluctant service of the Lawgiver and the glad obedience of
the Son; or between the passion and the pride that sometimes marred
Moses' work, and the continual calmness and patient meekness that
perfected the sacrifice of Jesus. Nor do I suppose that there flashed
before his memory the difference between that strange tomb where God
buried the prophet, unknown of men, in the stern solitude of the
desert, true symbol of the solemn mystery and awful solitude with which
the law which we have broken invests death, to our trembling
consciences, and the grave in the garden with the spring flowers
bursting round it, and visited by white-robed angels, who spoke comfort
to weeping friends, true picture of what His death makes the grave for
all His followers.
But I suppose he was mainly thinking of the contrast between the
relation of Moses to his law, and of Christ to His Gospel. Moses was
but a medium. His personality had nothing to do with his message. You
may take away Moses, and the law stands all the same. But Christ is so
interwoven with Christ's message that you cannot rend the two apart;
you cannot have the figure of Christ melt away, and the gift that
Christ brought remain. If you extinguish the sun you cannot keep the
sunlight; if you put away Christ in the fulness of His manhood and of
His divinity, in the power of His Incarnation and the omnipotence of
His cross—if you put away Christ from Christianity, it collapses into
dust and nothingness.
So, dear brethren, do not let any of us try that perilous experiment.
You cannot melt away Jesus and keep grace and truth. You cannot tamper
with His character, with His nature, with the mystery of His passion,
with the atoning power of His cross, and preserve the blessings that He
has brought to the world. If you want the grace which is the unveiling
of the heart of God, the gift of a giving God and the pardon of a
forgiving Judge; or if you want the truth, the reality of the knowledge
of Him, you can only get them by accepting Christ. 'I _am_ the Truth,
and the Way, and the Life.' There _is_ a 'law given which gives life,'
and 'righteousness _is_ by that law.' There is a Person who is the
Truth, and our knowledge of the truth is through that Person, and
through Him alone. By humble faith receive Him into your hearts, and He
will come bringing to you the fulness of grace and truth.