And this is Jesus.  This is John’s simple tremendous picture.  This Man comes down into our neighbourhood, on our earth.  He sticks up His stretch of tent-canvas right next ours.  He insists on being His own true self in the midst of the unlikeliest surroundings.  The glow of His presence shines out over all the neighbourhood of human tents.  There’s a purity of air that stimulates.  Men take deep breaths.  There’s a fragrance breathing subtly out from His tent that draws and delights.  Men come a-running with childlike eagerness.

Grace Flooding.

And now as Jesus comes quietly down the river road where John’s crowd is gathered, John the witness points his finger tensely out, and eagerly cries out:  There He is!  This is the man I’ve been telling you about!  He that cometh after me in point of time is become first in relation to me in point of preeminence:  for He was before me both in time and in preeminence.

And then John adds a tremendous bit.  He had just been talking about Jesus being full of that great combination of grace and truth.  Now his thought runs back to that.  Listen:  “Of His fullness have we all received.”

There’s another translation of this sentence that I have run across several times.  It reads in this way:  “Of His skimpiness have we all received.”  I never found that in common print; only in the larger print of men’s lives.  But in that printing it seems to have run into a large edition, with very wide circulation.  Men don’t read this old Book of God much; less than ever.  They get their impression of God wholly from those who call themselves His followers.

They watch the procession go by.  Here they come crippled diseased maimed weakened in body, piteously pathetically crutching along, singed and burned with the flames of the same low passion that the onlooking crowds know so well, struggling, limping, crutching along bodily and in every other way.

And that’s a crowd with very keen logic, those onlookers.  It judges God by those bearing His name, very properly.  And it says more or less unconsciously,—­“What a poor sort of God He must be those people have.  No doubt He has a great job of management on His hands.  There are so many of them to provide for.  And apparently there can’t be any abundance, certainly no overflow, no surplus.  He has to piece it out the best He can to make it go as far as possible.”

“I think maybe I needn’t be in any hurry to join that crowd, at least till I have to, along towards the end of things here.  There would only be one more to carry.  He has such a crowd now.  And the resources are pretty badly strained, judging by appearances.”  So the crowd talks.  Poor God!  How He is misrepresented by some walking translations.  “Of His skimpiness—–!” Be careful.  Don’t take too much.  Be grateful for the crumbs.