Partakers Christian Podcasts

Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 15

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 15: John 3:17 – 21
The journey of faith

Emphasis in this chapter has traditionally fallen on the beginning of the Christian life. Being ‘born again’ has concentrated attention on how we start. But the next few verses after the famous 3: 16 turn the emphasis onto the continuing life and the end of it. Here they are: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.”

Our Christian life is a journey – as indeed is every sort of life.

I like to think of the end of it as that part of a journey that is arriving in a foreign country or returning back home to one’s own country. At the airport there are two major hurdles to overcome. The first is going through passport control; the second is going through the baggage check area to make sure that we have only good and permissible things in our cases.

The first of these is a good analogy to being born again. Jesus said “no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again from above”. We want to enter the country that is our destination. We must have a valid passport. Paul says we are “citizens of heaven” (Phil 3: 20). We have dual citizenship! We have two passports. We are citizens of our earthly country and we are citizens of heaven. What a privilege!

But we must have the right luggage too. Our first and most important luggage is believing in Jesus. Three times the word ‘believe’ appears in verse 18. Positively – we must believe. Negatively - if we do not believe we are condemned to perish as verse 16 has said. What exactly perishing consists of we are not told and it is not really possible to work out the details from the rest of the New Testament. Perishing, hell, fire and other uncomfortable things are all mentioned – many of them by Jesus himself. It is certainly not that “being with Christ” that Paul says is “better by far” (Phil 1: 23). It is like being a stateless person, rejected from the country we want to enter and condemned to travel endlessly round the world, not finding anywhere prepared to take us in. Not a nice experience.

Our luggage needs to be light – not light in weight but glowing with light, radiant with light, bursting out through every crack in our case. Our deeds must be good. We must want to come into the light; not afraid that our deeds, which will be exposed at this grand final checkpoint, will be anything to be ashamed of. We must live in the truth – in the light of God and his Christ, so it may be seen plainly who we are and that we have walked in the light of God through the journey of life since we gained our passport for the kingdom of God..

My apologies if you have never travelled that far and flown into the airport of a foreign country; never needed a passport and never had the unwelcome experience of going through baggage control. I hope you still get the vision of how this illustrates our journey as Christians and encourages you to make sure you have your second passport with you and have packed your bags very carefully as you have lived the journey of the Christian life.

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 14

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 14 - John 3:16
Together or apart

"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." John 3:16

This verse is perhaps the best known and best loved in all scripture. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

Yet it raises several questions often overlooked. The first is that it refers to the ‘world’ not the individual, as the following verses continue to do. (It is not clear whether these verses are the words of Jesus or the comments of John. The latest NIV finishes the Jesus quote at the end of verse 15 so considering the following verses to be the comments of John. Other versions put the end of what Jesus said in different places.)

It was the nature of God that he was love (1 John 4: 8 says simply “God is love”). He could do no other than love the world that he had created. It is, and was, his essential nature to do so. He loved, and loves, this world. ‘World’ in this gospel means primarily the world of men and women, the human world, the world that had hated Jesus disciples (John 17: 14). It also means secondarily the whole wonderful world in which we live, the creation that Paul says is to be “liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.” (Romans 8: 21).

That is hard to understand! God gave his Son for the world and yet it is still full of evil. People are still prepared to blow others up in suicide bombings or massacre them with guns and we do not know what horrors they may yet unleash on each other. We may wish that he had placed tighter controls on mankind but such is the power of his love he has left us with the freedom to make decisions, to love him and each other, or to hate those who do not agree with us. That is a fundamental part of the power of the love of our God.

But there is another side to the power of his love. We may choose to believe in Jesus, who he was and is, what he accomplished by his life and on the Cross and all that he has gained for us. That is here described as ‘not perishing’ but having eternal life. This is the New Life from above that Jesus promised Nicodemus. It is not just a life that starts when we die and then goes on for ever. It is the ‘life of the ages’ that starts as we move into the New Life from above. Not a slight variation on our past life that starts when we are ‘born again’ but a life that continues for the rest of our time on earth and then goes on beyond this earth and our present concerns.

In human practical terms it is a new life with a deep and rewarding focus, with a purpose it did not have before, with a sense of solidarity with the Lord’s people it did not have before and a promise of ‘not perishing’.

That is no fewer than 4 things. Let me repeat them: a new focus to life with Jesus, a new sense of purpose in serving and honouring him, a new circle of friends in the Lord’s people and eternal life, that is a new quality of life in this world and a future afterwards.

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 13

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 13 - John 3:3
Again or Above

When we come to the well known encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus we find something strange. The NIV says, “Jesus replied, ‘Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.’” While the NRSV, another very accurate translation in English, says, “Jesus answered him, ‘Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.’” ‘Born again’ or ‘born from above’ – which is it? The rather surprising answer is ‘both!’. The Greek word translated in those two ways can mean either of them with equal force. Both translations give the other interpretation as a footnote but even that is misleading because it seems to indicate that the translation given in the text is primary and the other is secondary, but the word is distinctly ambiguous and can mean either or both. There is no word in English that can carry both meaning like that so the best we can do is probably something like ‘born again from above’.

Both translations go on to say that Nicodemus picked up the ‘again’ possibility and proceeded to comment on that. That would seem to suggest that he thought Jesus meant ‘again’ but he was a clever man and may simply have understood instantly that there are deeper problems with the ‘above’ option and carefully avoided it.

Exactly the same thing is true in our culture. To be ‘born again’ can mean nothing more than to return after a gap to something you used to do and enjoy. So you might be a ‘born again rock-climber’ if you return to that sport after giving it up on getting married and starting a family; but now they are grown up and you don’t feel the same deep responsibility for them so you return to that sometimes dangerous sport. But you cannot play any such tricks on the phrase ‘born from above’.

What did Jesus mean by what he said? Including what did he mean by talking about ‘seeing, or entering, the kingdom of God’?

It is a matter of dimensions. You may be stuck in two dimensions if you think only of being born again. The phrase can mean no more than I have decided to follow Jesus, or I have decided I am a Christian. But if you bring the third dimension into it things are quite different. If you are born from above you have clearly been touched by those who come from ’above’, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. In only a few verses down the page we shall read that Jesus said he was talking about heavenly things, and only a verse or two further and he is talking about how he will be ‘lifted up’. He will be lifted up on the Cross, which will take him out of our two-dimensional world into a greater world of three dimensions. And when we are born again from above we are being touched by the glory of the Cross; by its potent effect in carrying away our sin and broken relationship with the Father; by the way in which it released the Holy Spirit to encourage and empower us provided we are one of those who want to enter the ‘kingdom of God’.

That kingdom is not a place in any sort of worldly sense. It is a sphere of influence where the Triune God, God the Father, the Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit rule. You may live in one of the many countries of this world, divided up as they are by the whim of men, the results of history, by many a reason long forgotten by almost everybody. It doesn’t matter how big, how small, how rich or how poor your country may be and how much you have to participate in it for good or ill. You can be a citizen of heaven a member of the kingdom of God. WOW!

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 12

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 12 - John 2:13-25
Revising the Temple

This second story in this second chapter is as remarkable as the first. Here it is:

“When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, “Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!” His disciples remembered that it is written: “Zeal for your house will consume me.”

The Jews then responded to him, “What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?”

Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.”

They replied, “It has taken forty- six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?” But the temple he had spoken of was his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.

Now while he was in Jerusalem at the Passover Festival, many people saw the signs he was performing and believed in his name. But Jesus would not entrust himself to them, for he knew all people. He did not need any testimony about mankind, for he knew what was in each person.”

It causes even more puzzlement amongst the experts than the first story of this chapter. Clearing the Temple is recorded in all 4 Gospels but in the other 3 it occurs near the end of Jesus’ ministry where here it seems to be at the beginning. Or has John put it here because he wants us to read and hear the rest of his book with this in the background? I think he has. If a squad of Roman soldiers or temple guards allowed something like this to happen for a second time they would be in very serious trouble. The Philippian jailer was thinking of killing himself as the less painful option when He thought Paul and Silas had escaped from his prison. If Jesus had cleared the Temple early on He would have been a marked man every time He went to Jerusalem subsequently. No, again John has chosen a surprising passage for his introduction to the life of Jesus. Why? What did he mean by doing so?

The Temple was the very centre of Jewish life. Everyone who was able to visited it at least once a year as we are told Jesus and his family did for the Feast of Passover (Luke 4). They thought of God being there more than anywhere else. He had led the Israelites through the wilderness at the Exodus in a tent and then a tabernacle. He had been present in the Temple when Solomon dedicated it. Only later, when things went badly wrong in the life of the nation, had He ceased to be there visibly (Ezek 10). There was no visible proof that He was there in Herod’s temple but they still reckoned it was the place to be as often as possible.

John records: “When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts He found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So He made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; He scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves He said, “Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market.”

It looks as though He was annoyed by the way the merchants had set up a bazaar inside the outer courts. But there is much more to what He did than that. Mark is most helpful. He says that as Jesus and His disciples were approaching Jerusalem they saw a fig tree and Jesus went up to it to get some figs. A curious thing to do as it was not the right time of the year for it to have fruit on it. Then, even more surprisingly, Jesus curses the tree. They go down into the city, Jesus clears the temple, and they come back to find the tree had withered. What is going on and why?

Mark has put one story, the clearing of the temple, inside another, the death of the fig-tree. He does this sort of thing with stories quite often and clearly relates the two stories, one of them explaining the other. In this case He is saying the temple is done, finished, it is withered, it is dead. And, indeed, just 40 years later it was, pulled down and destroyed by the Romans at the sack of Jerusalem. That had already happened when John wrote this Gospel.

So what was to happen now? Answer, from Jesus: “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.” Which they don’t understand. They say, “It has taken forty- six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?”

John knows what the whole event means. He tells us, “the temple He had spoken of was His body. “
The Temple is done, gone, even if it hasn’t fallen down yet. But God is still with them, and with us, in the person of Jesus.
In fact, there is still more to come in the later teaching of the church. Paul says, “we are the temple of the living God. As God has said: ‘I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people.’”
That is you, assuming you have set out to follow Jesus, and me. Where is God these days? He is in you and me, and nowhere else in any special sense in the whole wide world. WOW!

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 11

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 11 - John 2:1-12
Extravagant Grace

Now we are into chapter 2 and we find that it contains two very remarkable and very different stories. The second must wait until next time, but this one is quite extraordinary by itself. Here it is:
“On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus’ mother was there, and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine was gone, Jesus’ mother said to him, “They have no more wine.”
“Woman, why do you involve me?” Jesus replied. “My hour has not yet come.”
His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”
Nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from twenty to thirty gallons.
Jesus said to the servants, “Fill the jars with water”; so they filled them to the brim.
Then he told them, “Now draw some out and take it to the master of the banquet.”
They did so, and the master of the banquet tasted the water that had been turned into wine. He did not realize where it had come from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew. Then he called the bridegroom aside and said, “Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now.”
What Jesus did here in Cana of Galilee was the first of the signs through which he revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.
After this he went down to Capernaum with his mother and brothers and his disciples. There they stayed for a few days.”

Jesus turned water into wine – and not just a reasonable amount, but about 600 litres or 150 gallons. Was it really such a good idea to produce so much extra booze halfway through the wedding celebrations? One gets a mental picture of many villagers reeling home thoroughly sozzled at the end of the day! Even if we guess, as we reasonably may, that this was a major wedding, that everyone in the village was invited, and so were many people from the surrounding villages (including Jesus, his mother and his disciples) so that there were hundreds of people there, this was still an amazing amount of wine.

All of which raises one huge question: why did John, who structured his Gospel so carefully, choose this story as the first to tell us about? OK, I know that he says this was the first one Jesus did. He says, “What Jesus did here in Cana of Galilee was the first of the signs through which he revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.” But that still does not answer the point. John did not have to start with this episode. Matthew, Mark and Luke didn’t start there. They all started with his temptation in the wilderness and then his teaching and healing ministry round the villages. The obvious conclusion we must draw is that John saw something very special in what happened in Cana and wants to make it a starting point for his whole Gospel. What was it?

I think he wanted to emphasize the generosity of Jesus. Nothing else he did was so unnecessarily generous. Nothing, that is, of the obvious things he was doing. But what about the gifts of new life, and of the Holy Spirit that he was going to give so liberally to everyone he met. You couldn’t see those, but you could see the wine. You could even drink it and it would cheer you up. Those great jars of wine stood for the extravagant generosity of Jesus, his extravagant grace to all he would meet in the rest of the story of the Gospel.

There is one other extravagant moment in the continuing story that we should perhaps link this one up with and that is the feeding of the vast crowd of people, 5000 men, plus women and children, by the Sea of Galilee. Remember that there were 12 baskets of pieces of bread left over when they had all finished. Extravagant bread, extravagant wine. Do they remind you of anything? Yes, of course: that so simple meal that Jesus told us to remember him by. In all probability you get only a small piece of bread or a thin wafer, and a small sip of wine, or perhaps not even that if you belong to the wrong church. Small bread, small wine, but from the same person who was so extravagantly generous on these two occasions. Remember that next time you take part in a communion service, breaking of bread, Eucharist or Mass.

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 10

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 10 - John 1:29-51
Names and guys

So far I have managed to keep each short study to one or two verses, but not this time. I hope you have a Bible handy in which you can read these verses. A many-coloured procession of different people come into contact with Jesus in these verses. And as they do we find the passage is full of a good many names and titles of Jesus. Counting in titles like ‘the Surpasser’ but not the equal names like Rabbi and Teacher I can find 13 of them. Here is the passage:

The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! This is the one I meant when I said, ‘A man who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me. ’ I myself did not know him, but the reason I came baptizing with water was that he might be revealed to Israel.” Then John gave this testimony:“I saw the Spirit come down from heaven as a dove and remain on him. And I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water told me, ‘The man on whom you see the Spirit come down and remain is the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit. ’ I have seen and I testify that this is God’s Chosen One.”

The next day John was there again with two of his disciples. When he saw Jesus passing by, he said, “Look, the Lamb of God!” When the two disciples heard him say this, they followed Jesus. Turning around, Jesus saw them following and asked, “What do you want?”
They said, “Rabbi” (which means “Teacher”), “where are you staying?”
“Come,” he replied, “and you will see.”

So they went and saw where he was staying, and they spent that day with him. It was about four in the afternoon. Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, was one of the two who heard what John had said and who had followed Jesus. The first thing Andrew did was to find his brother Simon and tell him, “We have found the Messiah” (that is, the Christ). And he brought him to Jesus. Jesus looked at him and said, “You are Simon son of John. You will be called Cephas” (which, when translated, is Peter).

The next day Jesus decided to leave for Galilee. Finding Philip, he said to him, “Follow me.” Philip, like Andrew and Peter, was from the town of Bethsaida. Philip found Nathanael and told him, “We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote —Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.”
“Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” Nathanael asked.
“Come and see,” said Philip.
When Jesus saw Nathanael approaching, he said of him, “Here truly is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.”
“How do you know me?” Nathanael asked.
Jesus answered, “I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Philip called you.”
Then Nathanael declared, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the king of Israel.”
Jesus said, “You believe because I told you I saw you under the fig tree. You will see greater things than that.” He then added, “Very truly I tell you, you will see ‘heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on’ the Son of Man.”

Have a go yourself. How many names and titles can you find? I put my list at the bottom of the page – don’t look until you have had a go yourself.

They range from the bottom of the pile, which is surely ‘son of Joseph’, son of his step-father, to ‘Son of God’ at the top of the pile. Some have deep Old Testament connections like ‘Messiah’ and ‘Son of Man’, while others are simply derived from what John the Baptist knew first hand.
The really interesting thing is what we see if we compare what is said here with what is said in the other Gospels at the call of the twelve disciples. Without exception the other Gospels are less detailed except they all say that the disciples were called to ‘fish for people’ or, in the older versions, to be ‘fishers of men’.

Why the difference? What does it mean?

The answer has to be that John is solely concerned with Jesus. The rest is incidental. As we shall find as we work through the rest of the Gospel John is completely Jesus centred, or Christo-centric as it is called. Because Jesus was, and is, God He could be all those things at one and the same time. He could meet each one of the men listed here: John, Andrew, Andrew’s companion, Simon Peter, Philip and Nathanael, and meet them at their point of need. That is what John is telling us. And he is going to go on and tell us that Jesus would meet many other people, all at their point of need, no matter how way out that might be. Before long we shall be in chapters 3 and 4 where Jesus meets at their points of need a senior professor in Jerusalem and a slightly dodgy woman in a country village. Rather different people. I wonder how successful any of us would be at being equally effective in conversation with such different people. Not many, I am sure. Certainly not me!
But turned round and looked at from the other direction this is enormously encouraging for us. It does not matter who we are, what our problems may be, what is our point of need, Jesus, because He is the Son of God can speak to us encourage us, forgive us, save us, for this life and the next. Hallelujah and hooray – many times over.

Names and titles: Lamb of God/the Surpasser/the One to be revealed/ the One on whom the Spirit had come/the Baptizer with the Holy Spirit/God’s Chosen One/Rabbi=teacher/ the Messiah=the Christ/Jesus of Nazareth/the son of Joseph/Son of God/king of Israel/the Son of Man.

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 09

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 9 - John 1:40
The Lamb of God

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 9 - John 1:40
Following The Lamb of God

John 1:40 “Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, was one of the two who heard what John had said and who had followed Jesus.”
John 1:43 we read “The next day Jesus decided to leave for Galilee. Finding Philip, he said to him, ‘Follow me.’”

One or other of the ‘follow’ words appears more than 70 times in the Gospels, nearly always as ‘follow me’ or ‘follow him’. So following is a very important and significant word about our relationship to Jesus.

There has been a very distinct and valuable turn by many people towards talking in terms of ‘following’ rather than any of the possible alternatives recently. Not so long ago the common term was ‘deciding for Jesus’ and before that it was ‘born-again’. But the first of these is a very imprecise and somewhat wooly term to use while the second has been taken over by all sorts of people just to mean somebody taking up again a sport or an activity that they used to take part in but had not done so for some time.

Instead of those terms many people are talking about those who are converted (yet another old and Biblical term that is no longer much used) as having set out ‘to follow Jesus’ and those who are going to church but have made no profession of faith as those ‘who are not yet following Jesus’.

There is considerable merit in this. ‘Following Jesus’ indicates not only the starting point of making a profession of faith but the setting out on a journey which will last for a long time – in fact the rest of life – and will include a commitment, therefore a life-long commitment, to following Jesus.

But the obvious question is ‘what does following Jesus’ or following anyone actually mean. We use ‘following’ in much the same sense when we talk about following a team in some sport, such as football. (Apologies here to American friends who have the curious idea that a game in which foot is seldom applied to ball is football! I am talking about what you call ‘soccer’ where foot and ball often meet up.) Those who ‘follow’ a team such as Manchester United act in certain fairly well defined ways. They go to meet – well, watch – their team as often as possible; they worship – well, cheer them on – as vigorously as they can; they rejoice visibly and audibly when they do something good, like score a goal; they identify themselves with the team by wearing their colours in a scarf or a shirt; they spend considerable sums of money to support their team and in various ways assert that support to their friends and other people.

We can parallel all those things in what we should do as we ‘follow Jesus’. We should meet with him, at church, in small groups, in our private prayer as often as possible; we should worship Jesus and the Lord God in our singing etc. ; we should identify with Jesus in many subtle ways – the ways we behave, the things we say, perhaps too the words we do not use, where appropriate in the wearing of small emblems indicating our allegiance; we will be prepared to use our resources to support the Lord’s work in many different ways.

Certain words have sneaked into those last paragraphs, almost without me noticing. Words such as: cheering on, vigorously, identify, support, assert, allegiance, use of resources. All those words have a place in our thinking about how we are to follow Jesus.

Not all of them can be found in this passage in John 1, but many of them can. Andrew was quick to identify himself with Jesus, to support him, to give him his allegiance, and to use his resource of time. Philip did exactly the same things in his search for Nathaniel. It seems likely that Philip was a rather ordinary sort of guy with no great leadership qualities yet evident, whereas Nathaniel was probably the village wise man. That did not stop Philip sharing his discovery of Jesus with a man he probably looked up to as very much his superior.

I’m sure I don’t need to labour the lessons for us that are so clear in this passage. Follow Jesus – it is by far the best way to journey through life and arrive at a worthwhile destination.

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 08

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 8 - John 1:29-31
The Lamb of God

John 1:29–31, “ The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, ‘Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! This is the one I meant when I said, “A man who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.” I myself did not know him, but the reason I came baptizing with water was that he might be revealed to Israel.’”

John, John the Baptist that is, must have used an expression that would be meaningful to those who heard him but we cannot be sure what that meaning was. Nowhere in the Old Testament is a lamb said to be ‘of God’. That John said a striking, important and memorable thing we cannot doubt – but what did he mean.

There seem to be 4 main possibilities. In Biblical order, but not necessarily order of importance, these are that he was thinking of:

1. the near sacrifice Abraham made of his son Isaac on Mount Moriah. When Isaac asked, “where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” Abraham replied, God himself will provide the lamb.”
2. the lambs that were sacrificed on the night of the Passover at the exodus from Egypt. The Lord told Moses, “it is the Lord’s Passover” and Paul uses the same expression in 1 Corinthians 5:7 when he said, “Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.”
3. the lambs that are frequently mentioned as sacrificial offerings in passages such as Exodus 29:38, 41 where we read, “This is what you are to offer on the altar regularly each day: two lambs a year old …a pleasing aroma, a food offering presented to the Lord.”
4. Isaiah 53, which clearly lies behind so much of what happened in the life of Jesus. It says, “the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.”

Which of these, or other possibilities, John had in mind as he called Jesus the Lamb of God – or all of them – we cannot tell. Rather amazingly these 4 possibilities point us to 4 distinctly different concepts. They are in order: obedience to the call of the Lord, determination to set out on a difficult journey, the forgiveness of sin and the complete provision made for us on the Cross.

They are not in sensible or logical order. What is that logical order? Stop for a moment and think it through for yourself before reading on. (This sentence is a simple place filler to ensure you don’t see what my answer is too quickly!)
I think: the last one must come first, Jesus is in all and through all that happens; then we have forgiveness of sins, the promise of new life as we embark on the journey of faith and finally we must learn to be obedient in all that happens.
What is really striking is what happened when he said the same thing the next day in the hearing of two of his (John’s) disciples. It is recorded that, “When he saw Jesus passing by, he said, ‘Look, the Lamb of God!’

When the two disciples heard him say this, they followed Jesus. Jesus saw them following and asked, ‘What do you want?’ They said, ‘Rabbi’ (which means ‘Teacher’), ‘where are you staying?’ ‘Come,’ he replied, ‘and you will see.’”

Is it possible to do a really good job of explaining something you don’t fully understand yourself? The answer has to be yes – when you are driven by the Holy Spirit of God. Because that is what happened to John the Baptist. He must have done a wonderful job explaining the Old Testament passages promising a Messiah, even although we know he was not himself fully convinced about Jesus at this time (Matthew 11: 2,3).

We too will never have complete knowledge, nor will we ever be sure that we are completely obedient, but like John we can have the key that unlocks all the best things in life: here is the Lamb of God – follow Him.

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 07

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 7 - John 1:18
Unseen – but known

What does God look like? We don’t know as this verse tells us very directly when it says: “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.” But that almost certainly won’t have stopped us from having some sort of mental image of God and of Jesus. The trouble is we are probably completely wrong!

I remember as a young boy seeing pictures of God or of Jesus on the walls of the room we had our Sunday School lessons in. God was always a very old, but big strong looking, man. Jesus was always a very good-looking young man with broad shoulders, blond hair and a small beard. He was usually surrounded by animals and children and had a lamb in his arms. You can tell from which part of the world I come from.

I want to share with you the moment when my mental picture of Jesus was turned upside-down. We were in Pakistan, near the bottom of a steep mountain path, when a Pakistani man went by. He was a medium small lithe fellow moving up hill with the easy grace of a mountain man. He wasn’t blonde; he wasn’t big; he wasn’t European. His clothes could have been cleaner, being covered with the dust of much walking. I suddenly realized that is what Jesus must have looked like.

Isaiah said (53: 2, 3), “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.”

Clearly there was something markedly different about Jesus: he was able to confront an angry crowd and walk away through it unharmed. He was strikingly different.

What is your image of Jesus like? Of course, it wont be accurate, but that does not matter. If you are American he will be American; if you are Pakistani he will look Pakistani; if you are Chinese he will definitely look Chinese; and so on. It does not matter how accurate you are. Jesus was everyone; he still is.

And, of course, I have swerved sideways from talking about what God is like to talking about what Jesus was like. That is deliberate. The most we know about God is Jesus. It is all too easy to have a mental picture of God in which he is basically a wrathful God full of judgement and reserve the idea of a concerned, gracious and loving person for Jesus. But that is not the way it is. Our God is the God of Love as well as of Judgement.

And so we come to the end of the Prologue, the Introduction, to John’s Gospel. We have come all the way from the Word who was with God to Jesus and the Father. God with us as Matthew says – Emmanuel.

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Gems in the Gospel of John - Part 06

Gems in the Gospel of John

Part 6 - John 1:16–18 - The great gift of Jesus

These verses say: ‘Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.’
Great stuff, but what does it mean. The problem is that ‘grace’ is, in English anyway, a very difficult word to pin down. My dictionary lists 17 different meanings for it ranging from the way a good dancer moves, to a prayer before a meal and the way one is supposed to address an archbishop or a duke!

However one of the meanings is ‘the free and unmerited favor of God shown to a human being’ and that is a reasonably good starting point for what it means in the Bible. The (different) words being translated in both Old and New Testaments both relate to what happens when a big guy helps a little guy through the goodness of his heart not expecting anything in return. So the gift given can be asked for, received without commitment, and even withdrawn but it cannot be demanded or bought. The giver may be honoured, thanked and even given a token thanksgiving in response but there is no possibility of buying or earning the favour.

All of which means, of course, that no one English word can convey all that is implied in the word ‘grace’. Different English versions have used ‘kindness’, ‘generous bounty’, even ‘love’ to try and get round the problem, but none of them are really satisfactory and we must stay with ‘free and unmerited favour’ clumsy though that is.

The new NIV has ‘grace in place of grace already given’, while other versions have ‘grace upon grace’, ‘grace after grace’, ‘one blessing after another’ or ‘grace for grace’. If from that you think that no one is quite sure what it means you might be right! One commentator says it ‘underscores the superabundance of the gifts available to the believer through the incarnate word’ and I think that is about right and says it all.

The problem is – what is the grace already given? The next verse makes it sound as though John is thinking about the grace given in Old Testament days, which the grace of Jesus now replaces, but I prefer to think of this more on a personal level. For each believer there is the grace given in conversion, when they turn, or rather are turned, from a life without Christ to one with him, their conversion, when they are born again. But we need to remember, and John here reminds us, that there is still more to come. The Lord does not leave any one of his people to struggle on alone. We will receive more grace, more generosity, more free gifts, more unmerited favour from him, through all the rest of our lives.

This is grace, rich grace, for each one of us. Who gets this grace, this richness, this incomparable gift? There is one little two letter word in this verse. ‘we’, ‘WE’ are the recipients of these good gifts from the Lord of Creation.

Sometimes it does not feel like it - things can go wrong. People can turn against us; we can struggle with illness and weakness, with things going wrong with our bodies or our minds. But whatever our current disaster or problem may be God is still our Father! Jesus is still at his side in heaven.

In the wonderful words of Isaiah 43: ‘When you pass through the waters,
I will be with you;
and when you pass through the rivers,
they will not sweep over you.
When you walk through the fire,
you will not be burned;
the flames will not set you ablaze.
For I am the Lord your God,
the Holy One of Israel, your Savior;’
He will be with us – He is with us! That is grace, super-abundant grace, and it is ours if we are His.

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