Only Begotten Son

Quiet Talks on John's Gospel by Samuel Dickey Gordon written over a hundred years ago in 1915, and still rings true today.

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

John 1:14

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Then John goes on quietly to explain about that glory, how it came. He says it was "glory

as of an only begotten of a father." The common versions with which we are familiar, the old King

fames, the English and American revisions, all say the, ''the only begotten of the Father." I suppose the translators wanted to make it quite clear that Jesus was in an exceptional way the very Son of God. 

And so they don't translate quite as John put it. They try to help him out a little in making his meaning clear. But you will notice that this old Book of God never needs any helping out in making the truth

quite clear. When you can sift through versions and languages down to what is really being said, you find it said in the simplest strongest way possible. 

Here John is saying, ''glory as of an only begotten from a father." It is a family picture, so common in the East. Here in the West, the unit of society is the individual. The farther west you come the more pronounced this becomes, until here in our own laud individualism seems at times to run to extremes. Custom in the East is the very reverse of this. There the unit of action is not the individual, but the family. The family controls the individual in everything. 

All that belongs to the family, of wealth, fame, inheritance, distinction, vests distinctly in the head of the family, the father. He stands for the whole family. And so, too, all of this descends directly from the father at his death to his eldest son. In some parts the father retires at a certain age, either really or nominally,

and all becomes vested technically in his eldest son. And if the son be an only begotten son, then literally all that is in the father comes into the son. All the fame, the inheritance, the traditions, the obligations, the wealth, in short all the glory of the father comes of itself, by commonaction of events, to the son. 

Now this is what John is thinking of as he writes, "we beheld His glory, glory as of an only begotten of a father. " That is to say, all there is in the Father is in Jesus. When you see Jesus, you are seeing the Father. The whole of God is in this Jesus. This is what John is saying here.