The Expositor's Bible: The Gospel of St. John, Vol. I — John Shaqi
The Expositor's Bible: The Gospel of St. John, Vol. IDods, Marcus
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The Gospel of St. John, Vol. I
Dods, Marcus
Bible. John; Bible. John -- Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Sixty years after, when one of these men wrote this Gospel, he
remembered as if it had been yesterday the very hour of the day when he
followed Jesus into His house. His whole life seemed to date from that
hour; as well it might, for what could mark a human life more deeply and
lift it more surely to permanent altitude than an evening with Jesus?
They felt that at last they had found a Friend with human sympathies and
Divine intelligence. How eagerly must these men who had of late been
thinking much of new problems, have laid all their difficulties before
this master-mind, that seemed at once to comprehend all truth, and to
appreciate the little obstacles that staggered them. What boundless
regions of thought would His questions open up, and how entirely new an
aspect would life assume under the light He shed upon it.
The astonished satisfaction they found in their first intercourse with
Christ is shown in the bursting enthusiasm with which Andrew sought out
his brother Simon, and summarily announced, “We have found the Christ.”
That is how the Gospel is propagated. The closer the tie, the more
emphatic the testimony. It is what brother says to brother, husband to
wife, parent to child, friend to friend, far more than what preacher
says to hearer, that carries in it irresistible persuasive power. When
the truth of the utterance is vouched for by the obvious gladness and
purity of the life; when the finding of the Christ is obviously as
_real_ as the finding of a better situation and as satisfying as
promotion in life, then conviction will be carried with the
announcement. And he who, like Andrew, can do little himself, may, by
his simple testimony and honest life, bring to Christ a Simon who may
become a conspicuous power for good. The mother whose influence is
confined to the four walls of her own house may lodge Christian
principle in the heart of a son, who may give it currency in one form or
other to the remotest corner of the earth.
The language in which Andrew announced to Simon his great fortune was
simple, but, in Jewish lips, most pregnant. “We have found the Christ!”
What his people had lived and longed for through all past ages, “_I_
have found” and known. The perfect deliverance and joy which God was to
bring by dwelling with His people, this at last had come. Taught to
believe that all evil and disappointment and thwarting were but
temporary, the Jew had waited for the true life of man—a life in the
presence and favour and fellowship of the Highest. This was to come in
the Messiah, and Andrew had found this. He had entered into life—all
darkness and shadow were gone; the light shone round him, making all
things bright, and piercing into eternity with clear radiance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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