I have not spoken of myself

With reference to John 12:48,49—Such discourse as this was an impenetrable enigma to the Jews. They did not recognize that "the words they heard were spirit" (John 6:63). They judged after the flesh (ch. 8:15), and therefore imagined that his words were flesh; that is, the mere utterances of the thinking of the flesh. But he told them that this was not so; for he said, "My teaching is not mine, but His who sent me;" and John also testified that "he whom the Deity had sent, spake the words of the Deity," as Moses had predicted in Deut. 18:18, concerning the Christ, saying, "I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him. And it shall be, that whosoever will not hearken unto my words which HE shall speak in my name, I will require it of him." And so when the Word became flesh, the Word-Flesh recalled attention to what Moses had written and said, "He that rejecteth me, and receiveth not my words * * * the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day. For I have not spoken of myself; but the Father who sent me, he gave me a commandment what I should say, and what I should speak" (John 12:48, 49), "the words of eternal life."

The words, then, that came out of the mouth of Jesus, are to be received as the direct teaching of the Eternal Spirit, and to be interpreted of him. When, therefore, the utterance saluted the ears of the disciples, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father," the Eternal Spirit was communing with them from upon the Mercy-Seat, from between two of the Cherubim upon the Ark of Testimony (Ex. 25:22). He was speaking of himself, and not of the flesh which he had anointed. That flesh was the caphporeth, coverlid, or propitiatory, to be sprinkled with blood, as the result of the condemnation of sin unto death in the flesh (Rom. 8:3). It was the Veil, which, in regard to the Elohim, Jesus and his Brethren, divides their present and future states. It was the veil rent in twain bv the stroke of death, in which the ETERNAL ELOAH "forsook" the Eloah Jesus; and they continued "twain" until his post-resurrectional ascent to the Father (John 20:17).