Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3544
“Jesus said to Him, I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man comes to the Father but by Me.” John 14:6.
JESUS had been speaking about the Father, about His going to the Father, about the Father’s house and about going there. And He was asked by Thomas this question, “We know not where You are going, and how can we know the way?” We are to understand this verse as being an answer to that question. He tells him where He was going, namely, to the Father, and also the way to the Father, namely, by Himself.
Now this verse has been read and read, too, with a great deal of profit, without always being read correctly. For instance, suppose I were to divide my sermon into three parts, tonight, and show that, first, Christ is the way? Secondly, that He is the truth? And thirdly, that He is the life? I do not think I should be able to give you the meaning of the text, for you will observe that He is not speaking about three things—He does not say, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life”—He is speaking about only one thing, namely, that He is the way, and then the two words, truth and the life, are put in to explain what He means by the way. So I think.
Luther, taking the first meaning and putting in an, “and,” for it is necessary to put one in to make it out, says Christ is the way, that is, through Him men begin to be Christians. Secondly, He is the truth, that is, through Him they are instructed further in the faith. Thirdly, He is the life, that is, through Him they enter into eternal blessedness in the life to come.
Now it is very true, but it is not the Truth of God taught here—at least, we think not, certainly if we follow the strict analogy of the language. Augustine read the passage this way, “I am the way, the true way and the living way.” But that is not quite it. There is truth in that and it is more correct than Luther’s reading—but we cannot see the sense without some considerable violation of the language. It is true, but not the Truth of God taught here.
What we want to do is not only to preach about the Truth of God, but the Truth of God that is in our text. It appears to us that this was our Lord’s meaning—“I am the way to God.” That is the great teaching—“No man comes to the Father but by Me and I am the way in this respect—that no man can come to know the truth with regard to the Father except He knows Me as the truth. And, secondly, no man can possess the life by which He comes to the Father except He receives Me as the life. I am the way to the Father in a double sense—of being the truth which teaches men about the Father and being the life which enables men to come to the Father and have practical communion.”
Believing that to be the meaning of the text, we will try and work it out. First, then, Christ is the way to the Father as He is the truth. Secondly, He is the way to the Father as He is the life. And, thirdly, taking the general statement with which the verse closes, He is altogether and in all respects the only way to the Father—“No man comes to the Father, but by Me.”
To begin, then—I. CHRIST IS THE WAY TO THE FATHER SO FAR AS HE IS THE TRUTH. He is so in this respect—nobody knows the Father until, first of all, He knows Jesus Christ. God the Father is to be seen in Nature. He has painted every flower and He it is that hangs every blade of grass with the glistening pearl of dew. But so dim are our eyes and, after all, so little of the more spiritual parts of His Character could God reveal in mere materialism, that man does not behold God there. We are often told that we are to go from Nature up to Nature’s God—just about as easy to go from the higher pinnacle of the Alps to the stars! The step is too long for human nature. Men have never taken it. Those men of old who ransacked Nature—the old philosophers and teachers of the heathen—did not discover God. “The world, by wisdom, knew not God.”
Oh, what a maze of deities they had—what strange gods! What strange characters they gave to God! Our very chil-dren—in their classical learning in schools, get their minds polluted by reading the deeds of beings that were called gods among the heathens. If a man does not form the same false conception of God the ancient heathen did, it is partly to be accounted for by the almost unconscious effect of Christianity upon men’s minds! Men cannot form such ideals of God living in England as they could, living in Greece, before the Gospel had been preached there—yet every idea of God that is not drawn by men from Revelation and is not brought to men through Jesus Christ, the Mediator, is sure to be a false one, a lopsided one—an ideal of God in which some one virtue preponderates to the destruction of others. It is not God at all! It is a gross caricature of God. It is, in fact, no more God that men think out by reason than the golden calf was God which came out of the fire when Aaron had thrust gold into it. They did not know God.