I. 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, it tells us what we ought to be, but it does not tell us how to be it. And this is the opposite of all that comes to us in the Gospel. Law has no heart; the meaning of the Gospel is the unveiling of the heart of God. 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. "The law was given by Moses; grace and truth came by Jesus Christ."
II. Look at the other contrast that is here, between giving and coming. What do we mean when we talk about a law being given? We simply mean that it is promulgated either in oral or in written words. It is, after all, no more than so many words. 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.
III. Look at the contrast that is drawn here between the persons of the founders. 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 put away Christ from Christianity, it collapses into dust and nothingness.
A. Maclaren, Christian Commonwealth,Dec. 17th, 1889.
References: John 1:17. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxxi., No. 1862; Homiletic Quarterly,vol. ii., p. 558.