Straight to the Heart of John

60 bite-sized insights

Phil Moore

• Publisher: Monarch Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857213174
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

John wrote his gospel to give us a ringside seat from which to watch the Galilean carpenter whose message changed the world. Mark writes to tell us WHAT Jesus did, and Matthew and Luke write to explain WHY Jesus did it, but John's main concern is to help us discover WHO Jesus is and what it means for us to follow him today.

God inspired the Bible for a reason. He wants you read it and let it change your life. If you are willing to take this challenge seriously, then you will love Phil Moore's devotional commentaries. Their bite-sized chapters are punchy and relevant, yet crammed with fascinating scholarship. Welcome to a new way of reading the Bible. Welcome to the Straight to the Heart series.

Part One:

Look at Jesus Alone

(Chapters 1–4)

First Word (1:1–18)

In the beginning was the Word…

(John 1:1)

If you aren’t shocked by John’s opening verses, it probably means you haven’t understood them. John writes them very carefully to capture your attention, regardless of how well or little you know the Bible.

Mark had connected with his Roman readers by starting his gospel in the thick of the action with the coming of John the Baptist. Matthew had connected with his Jewish readers by beginning with Jesus’ family tree back to Abraham and with King Herod’s shock discovery from a group of foreigners that the true King of Israel had just been born in his backyard. Luke had connected with his Gentile readers by beginning with a Roman census, with Simeon’s prophecy that Jesus would save many non-Jews and with a family tree that traced his ancestry back to Adam. John didn’t think there was anything wrong with those beginnings. He just didn’t think that any of them went back far enough in Jesus’ story.

That’s why he starts his gospel with the words “in the beginning”. He knew that anyone familiar with the Greek Old Testament would instantly recognize them as the opening words of the Jewish Scriptures. They would know the Genesis account of God creating the universe from nothing – solely by the power of his spoken Word and of his Spirit.¹ John tries to shock us by telling us that Jesus’ story started long before an angel appeared to Mary or she laid her baby in a manger. It started before the dawn of time because the baby born in Bethlehem’s filthy stable was the eternal Word of God.² Jesus is the one who revealed himself to the Israelites as Yahweh, and there never was a time when he was not.

Not everybody knew the Greek Old Testament, of course. John lived in Ephesus, the vibrant capital city of Asia, where his mainly Gentile readers were more familiar with the thoughts of the pagan Greek philosophers.³ Accordingly, he chooses a word which he knows will shock them too. Heraclitus, the great Ephesian philosopher, had used the Greek word Logos, or Word, in around 500 BC to describe the divine force of Reason which governs the universe.⁴ His teaching was so influential that we still refer today to biology, geology, cosmology and astrology, so John chooses this word to grab the full attention of the Greeks as he did the Jews. He tells them that the divine Reason which Heraclitus groped for in the darkness was not just a principle but a person. Long before Jesus became a baby in a stable, the best Greek minds had sensed his presence as the ruler of the universe.⁵

We can see how shocking the Jews found this message by flicking forward a few pages to John 10:33. When the Jews grasped that Jesus was claiming to be Yahweh, they picked up stones and tried to lynch him for blasphemy. That’s why John tells them in verse 17 that Jesus is greater than their great leader and lawgiver Moses because he fulfils the Law with grace and truth. It’s why he tells them in verse 18 that what Moses saw on Mount Sinai was nothing compared to the way that Jesus has made God fully known. ⁶ It’s why he takes the word for Moses’ Tabernacle in the Greek Old Testament (skene) and uses it as a verb in verse 14 to tell them that God truly tabernacled (skenoo) on the earth in the flesh and blood of Jesus’ body. Remember, the Jews didn’t kill Jesus for healing people and telling pithy parables. They killed him because they knew he was telling them to look at him and see the Living God.

We can also see how shocking the Gentiles found this message by flicking forward a little further to Acts 14. The Lystrans liked Paul and Barnabas when they thought they were preaching that the gods were just like them. Things turned nasty when the Lystrans grasped that they were challenging their Greek idols and urging them to “turn from these worthless things to the Living God”. Epictetus, another great philosopher from the vicinity of Ephesus, summed up the Greek view that the spirit is good and the body is bad when he wrote that “You are a little soul, burdened with a corpse” ⁷so the idea that the Living God had taken a human body was so offensive to the Greeks that they stoned them. They were happy with the inoffensive message peddled by the Gnostic false teachers that Jesus had merely seemed to be a human,⁸ but they angrily refused to surrender to a message about God’s incarnate Son.

We can be like the first-century Jews and Greeks if we let our own cultural baggage divert our gaze away from who Jesus really was. The villains in John’s nativity story aren’t Matthew’s jealous King Herod or Luke’s overworked innkeepers. They are the entire human race which wants to force-fit Jesus into the domesticated role of a mere prophet or good teacher.⁹ That’s why the Greek word katalambano in verse 5 has a deliberate double-meaning – either to grasp in the sense of understanding a mystery, or to grasp in the sense of overcoming an enemy. John tells us that few people understand who Jesus is, but that none of those who oppose him can succeed in domesticating the Living God. He calls us to surrender to the fact that God has come to earth to save all those who will receive him as he really is.¹⁰

If you are prepared to look where John is pointing; if you are prepared to humble yourself and step out of the darkness into God’s light; if you are prepared to respond with faith to the crucified carpenter who called John to follow him on the shore of Lake Galilee – then John promises to guide your footsteps through his gospel. He promises to help you to look and see the Living God.

Good Man Isn’t God-Man (1:19–34)

Among you stands one you do not know. He is the one who comes after me, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.

(John 1:26–27)

John wasn’t the only one who drew a lot of unwanted attention from the celebrity chasers at Ephesus. They still held John the Baptist in such high regard that when Paul’s church-planting team arrived there in 53 AD, they found the foremost Christian preacher in the city telling the Ephesians to be baptized into John the Baptist instead of into Jesus.¹ The desert preacher who revived backslidden Israel in 27–28 AD was still held in such high regard by the early Christians that an Arabian merchant named Muhammad would even list him as a prophet alongside Jesus over five centuries later in the Qur’an.

John had more reason than Matthew, Mark or Luke to give in to his readers’ desire to place John the Baptist on a pedestal. He is the unnamed disciple in verses 35–40, so he and his fishing partner Andrew had been some of John the Baptist’s earliest disciples. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that he spends much of chapters 1 and 3 clarifying what his former teacher’s message was. He, more than anyone, knew that John the Baptist was a good man, but he is alive to the danger that our admiration for a good man may actually distract us from obeying his call to look and see the God-Man.

John has already told us in verses 6–8 that John the Baptist was simply a witness sent from God to prepare the Jewish nation for its Messiah.² He called them to be baptized, which was not new in itself because Gentile converts to Judaism were baptized at the same time as they were circumcised as part of their entry into the People of God. What made John’s baptism new was that it was a baptism for Jews as an outward sign of their inner repentance and their confession that Jewishness was not enough to save anyone. When some Jews refused to be baptized, he warned that being descended from Abraham didn’t change the fact that they were the “offspring of vipers” until they surrendered to the Lord.³

Now, in verses 19–28, John clarifies his former teacher’s message further. He tells us that John the Baptist freely confessed that he was not the Messiah predicted by Moses when he talked about the coming of “the Prophet” in Deuteronomy 18:15–19.⁴ Even though the three synoptic gospel writers rightly link him to the prophecy in Malachi 4:5–6 that a man like Elijah would lead Israel in revival before the Messiah came, he insists in verse 21 that he is not Elijah in the sense that most Israelites assumed. The prophet who had ascended to heaven in a chariot of fire without dying nine centuries earlier in 2 Kings 2 had not returned.⁵ John the Baptist was merely like Elijah in his calling to turn Israel away from false objects of worship in order to see the Living God.⁶ Those who truly honour John the Baptist as a good man are those who gaze beyond him to the God-Man whose shoelaces he was too unworthy to untie. “Look!” he directs our gaze in verse 29, “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” ⁷

John knew that many of his readers were so in love with their human hero that their admiration stopped them from doing the very things he said. Therefore he does not tell the story of Jesus’ baptism like Matthew, Mark and Luke, but tells us in verses 30–34 what John the Baptist finally realized when Jesus came up out of the water. They were close relatives and had known one another from early childhood,⁸ but he hadn’t guessed that Jesus was the Son of God until he saw the Holy Spirit descend on him at his baptism and remain on him for ministry.⁹ At once, he recognized his own frail limitations and beat a hasty retreat out of the limelight so that Jesus could take centre-stage. The Bridegroom gets noticed and the groomsman gets forgotten, he insists in 3:29–30. “He must become greater; I must become less.” He refused to let a good man take the focus off the God-Man.

To help us, John tells us in verses 35–39 that he has already had to walk the road he is telling us to travel. He had once fixed his eyes on John the Baptist with all the eager devotion of a young disciple, but he had learned to honour his teacher by doing what he taught and shifting his gaze from the messenger and onto the Messiah. “Look, the Lamb of God!” John the Baptist had told him, and John had started following a new rabbi instead. Unlike the star-struck...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the Straight to the Heart Series
• Introduction: Look and See the Living God
• PART ONE: LOOK AT JESUS ALONE
• PART TWO: LOOK AT WHO JESUS REALLY IS
• PART THREE: LOOK AT WHAT JESUS HAS GIVEN YOU
• PART FOUR: LOOK AT JESUS AND WIN
• Conclusion: Look and See the Living God