God Made Known - John 1:1-18Sample

Read John 1:6-8

John now changes his focus, telling us about his own time and place. He introduces us to another John: John the Baptist. John was a preacher and huge crowds came to hear his message. We’ll see more about him later in John’s Gospel.

For now, we learn three important things about John the Baptist. First, he was given his job directly by God. In many ways John is the last Old Testament prophet – someone chosen by God to carry His message about the promised King, or Messiah. John is an important man... he is the one who first points to Jesus in chapter 1.

John the Baptist is a great prophet. But, secondly, he isn’t the light himself. John’s job is to be a witness to the light. Just as a witness in a court case wants to explain clearly what has happened, what is true, to testify to the facts, John’s great task is to point to the light.

Thirdly, we can see why John was given this job. He is witnessing so that all can come to believe, to put their trust in the light that has come into our dark world.

This means that we should know from the start that this gospel is written with a clear aim in mind. Both John the writer and John the Baptist were convinced that Jesus was no ordinary person but God Himself, the Messiah that God had promised over thousands of years. At the end of his gospel, John tells us that Jesus did lots of things that didn’t make it into his book, but that ‘...these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name’ (John 20:31). John the Baptist’s aim is exactly the same: that we believe in Jesus as the light and have life in His name... whether that’s for the first time or to grow in our faith.