Going Deeper: Meeting the Messiah in John 1-4Sýnishorn

Day 2: The Gateway to Heaven (John 1:35-51)

Read John 1:35-51

As if to prove John the Baptist’s point about who is really important, these verses show us him starting to hand things over to Jesus.

Two of John’s followers hear him say again that Jesus is the Lamb of God and start following Jesus. He invites them to ‘Come and see’ (1:39). The time they spend with Jesus must have been life-changing, because the first thing that one of them does is find his brother and tell him that they’ve found the Messiah (1:41). Notice that in verse 38 they call Jesus Rabbi, or Teacher, but just a few verses later Andrew is confident that Jesus is the long-promised King prophesied in the Old Testament.

Just a day later, Philip in turn finds Nathanael and tells him that Jesus is the one - the greater Prophet that Moses predicted. In other words, he also believes that Jesus is the Messiah. But Nathanael is not convinced. Nazareth was a northern town, full of different religious and ethnic groups. For people at the time concerned with religious purity, it was the last place that anyone would expect the Messiah to come from. Philip’s invitation is simple to Nathanael - ‘Come and see’ (1:46).

What follows blows Nathanael’s mind. Imagine meeting someone who knows exactly who you are and where you’ve been. Nathanael is totally convinced: only the Son of God, God Himself, could know this about him. But Jesus is only just getting started. He tells Nathanael that knowing where he has been is nothing compared to what is about to happen!

Jesus quotes a passage from the Old Testament to explain. The words in verse 51 come from Genesis, the first book of the Bible, where a man called Jacob dreams of ‘a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it’ (Genesis 28:12). Jesus says that He is that stairway. He is the bridge between God in heaven and people on earth. He is the one who brings God’s presence to earth, the one who makes God known (John 1:18). He is the Son of Man, the one to whom God gives ‘authority, glory and sovereign power' in the Old Testament book of Daniel (Daniel 7:13–14).

In 16 short verses, Jesus is given six amazing titles, rooted in the promises of God through the Old Testament. Is this the Jesus we know? Jesus’ invitation remains the same to us and our friends: to come and see for ourselves.