Hey everybody. Welcome back.
Thanks for starting the week with us as we continue through the Gospel of John.
We are making our way through the first chapter
and made the case late last week that we kind of
are beginning to move into the narrative or the story sections, and today
we pick that up in the 29th verse,
probably a little, background here.
John, early on chooses to focus on John
the Baptist is not unknown in the Gospels.
Mark does the same thing.
But John is doing this in a pretty interesting way.
We've talked a little bit about that, particularly maybe last Thursday
if you have a chance, maybe go back and pick up that episode.
So do we join the story today as John is actually
kind of on the scene.
And so we'll jump in here, verse 29.
Then we'll come back and try to unpack some of it.
The next day he John saw Jesus coming toward him
and declared, here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
This is he of whom I said, after me comes
a man who ranks ahead of me, because he was before me.
I myself did not know him, but I came baptizing with water
for this reason that he might be revealed to Israel.
And John testified,
I saw the spirit descending from heaven
like a dove, and it remained on him.
I myself did not know him,
but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, he on whom you see
the spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.
And I myself have seen and have testified
that this is the son of God.
And so a very nice interchange intersection here
between theology and story.
So as John tells the story the next day,
and John gives the story a little bit of urgency with that.
John the Baptist sees Jesus,
and in seeing him, he is led to proclaim.
Notice that in unlike we were just in the gospel of Mark yesterday in worship.
Mark keeps Jesus a secret, waiting
for the big reveal at the end with John.
That's not the case. To see Jesus.
To know Jesus is to proclaim Jesus.
There is this. This
intrinsic link
in the Gospel of John between seeing and saying.
So he he observes Jesus, and he therefore proclaims Jesus and he.
He quotes the line, we've already seen he ranks ahead of me.
He was before me.
I didn't know him, but he
he was revealed to me.
Notice again, we see in verse 32 the word testified
as he tells witness gives witness to what he has seen.
And just to remove all mystery, by the time we get to verse 34
at the end of this passage, I have seen and testify
that this is the Son of God.
So no, no prolonging Michael here, there.
No, you know, putting a guessing or kind of hinting around it.
John just comes right to the front with the declaration
of where we're going in this gospel and who Jesus is.
The introduction of Jesus in John is so fascinating
because we as a reader,
just throw ourself into this story, this huge prolog.
I I've said it many times
now, it's a little bit like a fireworks show at the beginning.
Just so much beautiful language.
There's some philosophy, some history, some theology,
some Old Testament, what we would call Old Testament, some Hebrew Bible.
There's so much packed in there.
And don't miss when we get the first human introduction of Jesus.
His title is The Lamb of God.
And those details would be so easy to just rush by. But.
But John is going to call Jesus the shepherd.
He's going to talk about Jesus being the one who leaves the flock
so that he can go get to the lost one and John is the one
who is also going to display for us throughout the course of the story,
how Jesus is God's redemptive action for all
who believe that there's this amazing introductory
kind of note that we find in that metaphor the lamb, because the lamb is
the thing that is sacrificed.
The lamb is the liturgical practice
of the Jewish religion which God gave them.
Jesus is going to be the fulfillment of that.
There's almost a Hebrews as kind of note to the introduction of Jesus in this book,
and it's an incredible nod to what Jesus is going to teach
and then to what Jesus is actually physically going to do.
And what I think is beautiful about is John the Baptist knows
it, and John the Baptist just says it and claims it right from the start.
There's not that marking hidden secret stuff here at all.
It's always on full display.
And from the very first introduction,
Lamb of God is supposed to resonate in our minds.
How is he the lamb?
Why all these references to lamb?
And we're going to see that fleshed out and really not just fleshed out.
We're going to see that becoming embodied in the story as we go on.
Yeah, we mentioned we mentioned last week, Michael, the the kind of.
Interplay
between John the Baptist and Jesus here.
And there's some very interesting threads.
I think, that move us in that direction as we get to a text like this.
First of all, notice that in John
the gospel there's not a mention of Jesus being baptized.
Now, if you know the other stories
from the other gospel, you can kind of infer that, right?
We get told in other places.
It's as it's in the baptism that this dove shows up.
But that's not explicitly said here.
And again, some would speculate that that's to minimize John the Baptist's
role.
It's not as though he has something over
Jesus or that he needed to do something for Jesus.
And again, we said last week, the speculation is that perhaps John,
the gospel is written to a group of people
who elevated John the Baptist pretty highly.
And so John, the gospel writer, is toning that down a little bit.
You see another evidence here.
I myself did not know him.
In other words, even John the Baptist has the Christ revealed to him.
It's not something that he understood or discerned on his own.
It was shown to him.
And so, just in these subtle ways, a way of elevating
Jesus and maybe moderating slightly John the Baptist role.
Although another interesting thing about this
introduction Jesus doesn't speak.
We get told that John has encountered him, but we've not yet heard from him.
That handoff, if you think of it almost like a relay,
that handoff is going to happen in tomorrow's passage.
But here the only voice we hear
is John's, and it's the voice of witness
and of faith and of surety.
I have seen I myself, and in Greek.
That's a way of intensifying the language.
I myself, I like.
I've really seen him, and I testify that this is the Son of God.
So a lot of threads coming together here, I think. Michael.
Well, note here, Clint, that the beautiful image that we have here
of the spirit in verse 33, so he on whom you see the spirit
descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.
And that's really, really important towards your point of humanizing John
the Baptist, making it clear that his baptism of water is for repentance.
But Jesus Christ baptism is something entirely different.
It has an entirely different kind of force.
And for all of the emphasis that we have put in John
on the singular importance of Jesus Christ, we really cannot over
estimate or over speak how significant Jesus
is in John's understanding of God's salvific work in the world.
But but that being said,
we already have that Trinitarian language being brought to bear here.
This idea of the Holy Spirit, God's presence
not only that, lives in His Son, but of course, we're going to see
in the book of acts
how that spirit takes up residence within the Christian community itself,
the Spirit of Christ that enables the church to go into the world.
To do what?
To baptize in the name of the father, the son and the spirit.
And and here we can see how the gospel writer
John is just effortlessly well, it's
with great effort, but to the reader it just seems effortless.
How we transition from Jesus Christ,
the one who's baptized and the one on whom the spirit descends.
This is the very one who sends his church into the world to baptize,
which should inspire within the believer a kind of resonance within ourselves.
To say we too should be drawn to baptism, the baptism of the Holy Spirit,
because in that baptism, in the moment in which we are cleansed by the water,
we are also indwelt by the power of the risen Christ.
But that.
So John is once again describing this thing that had happened,
giving teaching that includes who Jesus is and the Spirit of God
who lives on and in him. This Trinitarian language.
And also, Clint,
I would want to make the case points us ahead to the the future Christians
who will also be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ, and will do
so in the name of the Holy Spirit, and who will continue to live in that spirit
well beyond the days that this book was written?
I think simultaneously affirming what John has been doing and.
Essentially
suggesting that Jesus will do more, that
what Jesus does is above even what John has been doing.
John's been baptizing with water, but the work of Jesus will be different.
It will be Holy Spirit work.
It will be,
even more,
an announcement and a pronouncement of
who God is and what God is and what God is doing.
And I was doing a rough count, Mike, I think, you know, plus or -1 or 2 here
just in the first chapter, as we've gone through some of the John
the Baptist language, I think we've run into the word
testify or testimony six times.
And when you start a biblical book, the first chapter is a good place,
often to look for themes that are going to be important.
And bells that the author is going to ring repeatedly.
And you'd have a hard time missing this one.
I mean, if you get to verse 34 and you haven't noticed
what this word testify pops up a lot, well,
you're going to want to pay attention to that because this is
this is a fundamental thing that John is trying to do.
John himself is testifying, John the Baptist is testifying.
And later Jesus is going to call people
to testify and to say what they've seen.
That's one of the repeated themes that's going to work its way through this book.
So, Clint, that's one of the potential pitfalls of reading, John,
is that you get on autopilot because you can come into a section
like this and to your exact point, testimony, testimony, testimony.
And at some point, your brain just flips over into that mode
where you're reading words, but you're not really hearing those words.
And the real power of John's
clarity is to emphasize these themes in such a way that you understand
the force of them, and the force of testimony is so essential
because it is a ongoing, never ending Christian practice.
There's never been a generation of Christians that don't live
inside the testimony community.
We are those who give witness to what we have seen, and this book is here
to give us the the witness to who Jesus was, that we might have a testimony.
And I just think we should not
get to the end of this section, verse 34, without having slowed down
and just know this thing,
relishing maybe even pausing upon this idea.
I myself that intensification you spoke of.
I myself have seen and have testified,
this is the Son of God.
Jesus is not only the lamb, not only the redemptive one,
not only the one who will restore the world to right order.
He is nothing other than the Son of God.
We had that whole.
The word was with God in the beginning.
We weren't explicitly at that point yet talking about Jesus.
But when Jesus arrives, the connection is now firm.
It's unquestionable.
John has made it abundantly clear that word
capital W is the Son of God.
God has taken flesh, and his name is Jesus Christ.
Yeah. And I think to your point, Michael,
just trying to verify that this is accurate.
Verse 29.
Jesus, this is the first time I think we encountered the name.
Yeah. No. No backstory.
Just John sees Jesus coming, which again, kind of presumes that John is
less interested in the backstory,
probably writing to people who know the story he's telling.
He's not introducing where Jesus came from or how he got there.
Just he saw Jesus.
And when he saw Jesus, he testified, this is the Lamb of God, the one before me
and all of the rest, baptizing with the Holy Spirit and on and on.
So Jesus just kind of drops into the story in a really interesting way here.
And that's kind of characteristic of some of the stories that John will tell.
And we'll try to point them out when we get to them.
Okay.
So very, very, very briefly, this is a devotional turn
in the reading of this text.
This isn't what John is writing about, but I just I want to point out
and I think it's really interesting that there are no celebrity
Christians, though some traditions have saints and things like this.
But but John the Baptist sees Jesus for who he is.
He calls him the Lamb of God.
John is as bad as high in the Gospels as you're going to get in terms of the
the witness of faith.
And what's fascinating is how he, over and over and over again,
points back to Jesus and affirms with humility, I'm not the one.
I'm not put together.
I'm not able to do it myself. Right.
So the text, though John, is rightly
one who we could and maybe even should lift up
in his ability to see Jesus and claim Jesus.
Yet John is very intentionally willing to admit his brokenness.
I'm willing to admit when he doesn't have it right,
or put together, or can't go the whole way for himself and Clint.
If we were going to look at this devotional,
I think some of us could use that message again.
Sometimes we begin to take faith as a long list
of things that we need to and should do.
And the temptation of doing that is to forget
that none of us are capable of saving ourselves.
That none of us are John the Baptist.
We've never, I never will hit that level of faith in our lives.
And yet, not even the John the Baptist can live as a person of faith
without complete humility, to admit that I am unworthy to even untie his sandal.
Right?
That John recognizes that Jesus is first.
And because Jesus has done something for us, he's the lamb and we're not.
He's done something for us that we couldn't have done for ourselves.
And so maybe a way that we could read this text emotionally is simply to say that
while we should always be growing in faith, our expectation should never be
that we would outpace
the one who is the culmination of God's plan for us.
Jesus has done and is who we need to have as a Savior.
And there's not some kind of scorecard about whether you're good enough
or have ever arrived to the point of faith that you can then receive him.
Jesus is a gift to us.
Day one, and that's enough.
Right?
And, you know, similar to John, our our task
is to recognize him and proclaim him.
So. Yeah.
Well, thanks for being with us here today, friends.
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