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Himself the argument, the appeal ; Himself the soul of the record ! Though all the books that the world could contain were written about Him the situation would still be the same. At the close when you have read them all, the one question would still remain to be answered : " After all you have read, after all you have heard, will you follow Me ? Will you obey Me ? Will you trust Me ? Will you put your soul in My hands ? " ^
n.
The Purpose of the Signs,
St. John tells that having selected certain signs for record he has written his Gospel for a purpose. The purpose is twofold : first, that we may believe that Jesus is the Christ or Messiah and the Son of God ; and then that, so believing, we may have life in His name. Let us consider (1) what we are to believe — that Jesus is the Christ, and that He is the Son of God ; (2) how the signs enable us thus to believe ; and (3) the effect of our belief — life in His name.
1. What does the Apostle, in writing this Gospel, want us to believe ? He brings before us One Jesus, and he desires to prove that He is the Christ or promised Messiah and the Son of God.
(1) Jesus. — Who can narrate all that that name has been, all that it is, to those who have known it ? " Jesus " is the subject of the four Gospels. Their one subject is the Life of Jesus. It is the Lord's human name ; the name by which His mother called Him, when He lay as an infant in the manger cradle, when He played as a little child on the cottage floor of Nazareth ; the name of Him who was the village carpenter ; the name of
Him who wont to stray A pilgrim on the world's highway, Oppressed by power, and mocked by pride, The Nazarene, the Crucified.
As we utter it we recall the scenes in the Synagogue and the Temple ; the sermon on the hillside among the lilies of the field ; the boat stirred gently by the silver ripples of the lake; the feeding of the multitudes as they sat in their many-coloured
1 H. Scott Holland.
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Eastern robes on the green grass ; the woman sobbing at His feet and wiping them with the hairs of her head at the banquet of the Pharisee ; the long night of prayer upon the lonely hill ; the life as an excommunicated fugitive with a price upon His head ; the madness of priests and scribes against the only human life ever lived of perfect love and sinless innocence ; the fury of the mob ; the last supper ; the disciple who became the traitor ; the agony in Gethsemane ; the cross ; the garden grave.
^ The designation " Jesus " gives Him a place in the history of the world, allocates and identifies Him with men, and forms a useful starting-point for all inquiries concerning His character. At once we meet with Him on the plane of human life, in the midst of the known and the knowable, a man like ourselves, grafted on the stock of common humanity, and in most essential respects identical with us. His name was not, an unfamiliar one at the beginning of the present era. There was nothing strange in it to the ears of His companions in the streets of Nazareth. Betokening Him through whom Jehovah sends salvation, it had passed into common circulation, and was often represented by the Greek Jason. In the list of seventy-two commissioners sent by Eleazer to Ptolemy, it is found twice. One of the books of the Apocrypha is attributed to Jesus the son of Sirach. A companion of St. Paul's at Kome was Jesus, surnamed Justus. According to St. Matthew the name was given to the Son of Mary because it fitly described the work He was destined to accomplish for men.
Certainly events have justified the prophecy uttered in the name. St. John regarded it, as appears from his First Epistle as well as from this Gospel, as fixing the real human personality of his Lord. It chronicled and reported the fact that He was made a little lower than the angels, that He had a manhood as veritable as our own. His name was not Gabriel or Michael, but Jesus — a common, human, historic name, fitting well the man whose place in the successions of the race of men it registers. " The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us." "He was made of a woman, made under the law." His human nature was real. There was nothing simulated or abridged about Him. He was the ful- ness of humanity in its depth and height, length and breadth. No one was ever more human than Jesus. Never was one so com- pletely and thoroughly man as He ! ^
(2) Christ. — The object of the Gospel was to teach us that this Jesus was the Christ — that is, the Anointed, the promised Messiah
* Jolin Clifford, Tlie Christian Certainties, 165.
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