John finally says, "I'll tell you who I am, who I really really am."

John 1: 21                                           February 15, 2021

¹⁵(John testified to him and cried out, ‘This was he of whom I said, “He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.” ’) ¹⁶From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. ¹⁷The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. ¹⁸No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

19 This is the testimony given by John when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, ‘Who are you?’ ²⁰He confessed and did not deny it, but confessed, ‘I am not the Messiah.’ ²¹And they asked him, ‘What then? Are you Elijah?’ He said, ‘I am not.’ ‘Are you the prophet?’ He answered, ‘No.’ ²²Then they said to him, ‘Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?’ ²³He said,
‘I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness,
“Make straight the way of the Lord” ’,
as the prophet Isaiah said.

24 Now they had been sent from the Pharisees. ²⁵They asked him, ‘Why then are you baptizing if you are neither the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the prophet?’ ²⁶John answered them, ‘I baptize with water. Among you stands one whom you do not know, ²⁷the one who is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal.’ ²⁸This took place in Bethany across the Jordan where John was baptizing.

            So there is a strain of thinking that wants to brand the gospels as fraudulent.  Basically, what this thinking argues is that the writers of the gospels were knowledgeable about the Old Testament, so they took all the prophecies that they found pointing to a Messiah, and they stitched together a ‘fiction’ that accounted for them as they wrote the story of Jesus.  John the baptizer is one of these frauds, “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness…”  There was no John, there was no voice crying in the wilderness, this is just the biggest fiction written about Jesus since Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code”. 

            OR this is John.  He is in the wilderness.  Connoisseur of locusts and wild honey.  Scratchy leather fashion statement.  Enjoyed dunking people in the River Jordan for religious reviving reasons.  John tells us, “Make straight the way of the Lord.”

            John is not the Messiah.  John is not Elijah.  John is not THE prophet.  John is the one who makes the way straight for the Lord.  Or this is a pack of lies.  Entertainment wrapped up as religious literature.

            This is the trouble.  Doubt gets in your head, doubt creeps into your heart.  Read the Bible, be filled with the hope, and then have that hope turned aside.  I do not believe the Gospels are some fiction-writer’s attempt at a giant hoax.  I believe that Jesus is the fulfillment of the promises made across the bible in regards to the Messiah.  What I also believe is that the Messiah is something more than then writers of the Old Testament knew.  Revelation from God is progressive, meaning more is revealed as time goes on.  So when John says he is to make straight the way of the Lord, what that means, in part, is that the plan of God is going to be revealed in a way that the glimpses we have been given to date cannot fully explain.

            He is quoting Isaiah here and this is what a prophet does, he or she prophecies things.  They speak in God’s name about things are going to come to pass, and those things come to pass.  

            Otherwise, the “fiction” approach to the gospels is dependent upon the ‘prophecies’ of the Old Testament being fallacies.  And if the Old Testament prophecies are fallacies, then God did not give those predictions to God’s prophets.  Maybe they were high or something.  But it is a systematic undercutting of the entire Bible. 

            Some people like the ‘ethical’ Jesus that they find in the Bible.  Love neighbors and things like that.  So instead of taking the whole gospel, they need to edit it down to their preferred bits.  President Thomas Jefferson did this.  Did not like ‘the divine’ bits so he cut them out.  But here is the problem.  If you only take the ethical bits as what you believe about Jesus, then Jesus is insane.  Because here it claims that he was at creation, in the beginning, with God.  And now, he’s got his crazy cousin involved, who is now quoting a guy whose been dead for seven hundred years or so, and saying that this connects to Jesus.

            Except that John says he is the voice of one crying in the wilderness to make straight the way of the Lord, to cut through the ‘selective’ love of Christ to lay out the whole package for us.  Jesus, the Word, the Messiah, the Christ, the whole bowl of salad. 

            Then, as now, there were people trying to figure John out.  The priests and Levites had their categories, “messiah”, “Elijah”, “the prophet”.  We have our categories today, full on dismissal of the gospel truth, picking and choosing what bits of Jesus one likes the best.   Take the gospel of John.  Some like to cut it away from the other gospels because it is the one that refers to Jesus as God.  Well, it is the one that refers to Jesus as God the most, but those references are elsewhere in the gospels.

            These priests and scribes have come to John because they do not know what is going on.  People come to the bible, to the gospels for answers, which means they have questions they cannot answer, which means they do not know what is going on.  And there is a world of sin out there that is going to do whatever it can to pull those who take their bible seriously away from that truth and away from Christ. 

            Far too many people do not even bother with their bibles, do not even bother to explore God’s revelation for themselves and are most easily led astray by the next story or theory or debunkment that comes along.  But that is not going to work.  Because John the baptizer is the voice in the wilderness crying out to make straight the way of the Lord.

Pastor Peter