Who Are You? (John 1:19–28) — A Sermon by R.C. Sproul

2:21 Let them hear it. Shall we pray? Again, our Father, we thank You for Your Word that comes to us from Your own lips. And we pray that we may hear this day the testimony of John, for we ask it in Jesus' name and for His sake. Amen. Since last week in the prologue to John's gospel, we considered the question of the identity of Jesus. After John gives us that background to set forth his portrait of Jesus, he then moves from the prologue immediately to a brief summation of the ministry and testimony of John the Baptist. As I've said to you in the past, unfortunately in the life of the church, John the Baptist is one of the most neglected personages in all of sacred Scripture, which was certainly not the case in the first century. This man attracted enormous attention from his contemporaries of the Jewish people in that time.

3:47 And amazingly, the secular historians of the first century gave more ink to John the Baptist than they did to Jesus. And that was because Israel's history of having prophets sent from God had ended with the last canonical prophet of the Old Testament whose name was Malachi, and for four hundred years there was not a peep out of God. The whole office of prophecy ceased until it was renewed again with this strange and bizarre figure coming out of the desert, the traditional meeting place between God and his prophets beginning a new and radical prophetic ministry. And in a very short period of time, John the Baptist's activity attracted the interest and the attention of the religious authorities in Jerusalem, and so they sent a delegation to find out what he was all about and who he was.

5:03 Now just this further word of preface. Among the Jews in the intertestamental period, there was the practice of proselyte baptism to which I've spoken before in here, and that was in the case of Gentiles who converted to Judaism. Gentiles were considered unclean so that they had to go through a purification rite to take a bath, as it were, to be welcomed and received into the covenant community of Israel. Now in that procedure of proselyte baptism, the baptism for converts, it was the convert himself who baptized himself. He was not baptized by the priests or by the Levites.

6:02 All other purification rites in Israel were done by the priests. And so here we have somebody who's not a Gentile convert, who's not a priest, and yet he is involved in this some kind of activity of baptism. The only other place where we find baptism in this period of history was among that sect that you've heard something about called the Essenes who were that monastic community that lived near the caves of Qumran and who were responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls. They practiced a form of baptism that had what is called eschatological significance. Now, I know that's a seventeen dollar word, but the term eschatological has to do with the eschaton.

7:05 That should explain it, which is the Greek word for the last times or the last things, so that those Jewish people who looked to the future for the coming of the day of the Lord, they associated in their ideas and in their beliefs this practice of baptism. And here's what it was about. John comes as a Jew to Jews and calling the people of Israel to receive this rite of cleansing while he's making his sermonic announcement, repent for the kingdom of God is at hand. preached on this before, remember what John is saying is a crisis moment in history is at hand. His fan is in His hand, the ax is laid at the root of the tree, that the coming of the Messiah is not going to be in some distant unknown future, but He's at the door.

8:08 Any minute He's going to come. And what He's saying to Israel is this, you're not ready for him. You're unclean. And He calls Jewish people to submit to a ritual of cleansing that heretofore was limited only to pagans, to Gentiles. And so you can imagine how upset the rulers were. Who does this guy think he is that he's calling us, the children of Abraham, to a cleansing rite?" So they want to know what's going on. So they send this delegation out to him and listen to this interrogation and how John responds because it's very important for the whole gospel of John that we understand this particular passage.

9:07 So they come, they said, "'Who are you?' Now notice the awkward construction of verse 20. He confessed and did not deny, but confessed. I mean, isn't that awkward? It's even worse than the Greek if you look at it. It's hard to even translate it. It's so convoluted. He confessed and did not deny. Let me give you a sense of that. When Martin Luther was brought before the Diet of Warms in the sixteenth century and was interrogated about his writings and his teachings, he was called to recant of his views of justification. And when he tried to explain his views, he was cut off in mid-sentence by his interrogators, And they said, Brother Martin, answer us directly, non corneutum.

10:05 without horns. That is, without any evasive techniques, without any craftiness, just give us a straight answer. And so it was at that time that Luther said, if you want an answer, non-canutum, without horns, here it is, unless I'm convinced by sacred Scripture or by evident reason and so on. Well, that's the same thing that John is saying here in this convoluted passage when it says, he confessed and did not deny. This is the strongest way the Greek can give to us of how emphatic John the Baptist was in saying, I am not the Christ. In fact, He had come onto the scene of history to make a confession, a public confession about who was the Christ.

11:06 And only a few moments after he says this, he says, there's one in your very midst and you don't even know Him yet. He's the one who comes after me, who is before me, but I'm getting ahead of myself. So he says emphatically, I am not the Christ. And they said, okay, then who are you? Are you Elijah? Why did they ask him that? Again, we said that the last canonical prophet in the Old Testament was Malachi, and in the very last chapter of the book of Malachi, in the last paragraph of the book of Malachi, The very last prophecy in the book of Malachi, the very last prophecy in the Old Testament, Malachi says what?

12:01 That the day of the Lord is coming, but it will not come until God first sends Elijah to announce it. That's why the Jewish people were waiting for the return of Elijah because the Old Testament said the Messiah can't come until Elijah comes back first. So they see this guy now acting as a prophet, looking like Elijah, behaving like Elijah, and they said, are you Elijah? And what does he say? No. And that produces a problem because when Jesus spoke about John the Baptist, what did He say?

12:53 He said to His disciples, if you can bear it, this was Elijah who was to come. And elsewhere in the gospel we're told that John the Baptist came in the power and in the spirit of Elijah. And because He was endowed with the power of Elijah and came in the spirit of Elijah and fulfilled the ministry of Elijah, Jesus said with that cryptic introduction, if you can bear it, that is in a special sense, this was Elijah. This is the fulfillment of that Old Testament prophecy even though John the Baptist personally was not Elijah. So So he's not lying here when he answers them, no, I'm not Elijah. And they said, okay, if you're not Elijah, are you the prophet?

13:51 Now notice that the question here is not, are you a prophet? rather are you the prophet? Who's that? Well, to answer that you have to go back to the book of Deuteronomy where the Word of God tells us that in the last times God will raise up a prophet like Moses. And so again, for centuries the Jewish people were not only waiting for the return of Elijah, They were also looking for that special prophet who would be like Moses. And remember the uniqueness of Moses, that Moses was not only a prophet, but he was the mediator of the Old Testament. And so they were waiting for one like Moses, and they looked at John and they said, are you the one like Moses?

14:53 He said, no, I'm not the Christ, I'm not Elijah, and I'm not the prophet like Moses. Well then who are you? Well, I think it's fascinating how John finally answers the question. They had gone to the Old Testament looking at Malachi, looking at Deuteronomy, and now John goes back to the Old Testament and quotes directly from the prophet Isaiah from the fortieth chapter. And I think it's significant for this reason, that when Jesus gives His first sermon, His first recorded sermon, He comes into the synagogue and He's invited to comment on the prophetic reading from the scroll of that day from the prophet Isaiah. And you remember they stand up and they read the scroll, and the scroll says, the Spirit of the Lord is upon Me. He's anointed Me to give release to the captors, to preach the gospel to the poor, to heal the sick, and so on. And so after the scroll is read, Jesus is invited as the visiting rabbi to give a sermon on the text, shortest sermon ever.

16:17 Jesus comes to the front and He says, this Scripture today is fulfilled and you are missed. That was the end of the sermon. What was He saying? I'm the one who has been anointed to be the Messiah. Well, before he reads from Isaiah 61, John quotes Isaiah 40, and he said, you want to know who I am? I'm the one that the prophet Isaiah talked about in his book when he said, I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord. Have you ever been to Israel? Ever seen the sand dunes blown to and fro daily by the winds, even lowering them out valleys, raising them up into hills?

17:22 And the prophecy of Isaiah was this, that before the Messiah would come into the world, He would send His messenger, and the messenger would proclaim to the people, build a road. Tunnel if necessary. Knock down the hills. Fill in the ditches. Make the road straight that is the highway for our King. Build the King's Highway. And God had promised His people that someday the King's highway would be built as the King would enter into the midst of His people. John said, you want to know who I am? That's who I am. I'm here to tell you to build the highway of the King. And then he goes on to say this quickly.

18:21 They asked him, why are you baptizing if you're not the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the prophet? And he said, I baptize with water, but there stands one among you whom you do not know. It is He who is coming after me, is preferred before me, whose sandal strap I'm not worthy to loose. That's an idiom, a little expression that the Jews had, loosing the sandal, the strap of the sandal. Here's the significance of that. If you were a disciple of a rabbi, like Jesus' disciples were in His rabbinic school, you not only attended the lectures of the rabbi and learned the lessons that he taught, but And you notice, for example, you will notice later on that Jesus sends the disciples into town to get food, to make sure that a room is reserved when He has the communion in the upper room.

19:22 They, when they enter into a rabbinic school and attach themselves to a rabbi, take upon themselves the role of a servant. The disciple actually functions as the personal slave of the rabbi. And these people take care of all of his needs, make his housing arrangements, get his food, do all of these things. But the one thing that differentiated a disciple from a rabbinical school from an actual bond slave was that the disciple was never required to take care of the shoes or the sandals of their teacher. This could be reduced to that humiliating task, but not the disciple. And John said, I'm not even worthy.

20:23 to unstrap His sandals. He said, don't look at Me. I'm lower than a disciple. I am lower than a slave. I am not even worthy to untie His shoes, to take off His sandals, to clean his feet. Don't look to me. Look to him. And that's why John puts this right at the beginning of the gospel, because he's focusing our attention not on John the Baptist, but on the one that John announces and telling his people it's time to make straight the highway of our God. And again, we are here this morning because we are His disciples.

21:27 We are not worthy to untie His shoes. And yet He has given of Himself to us body and blood. And we are here this morning to celebrate that, our exodus from bondage to sin, for Christ our Passover has been slain. And I remind you that the night in which He was betrayed, our Lord took bread, and when He had broke it, He blessed it, and He said, now this is My body broken for you. And that after He had supped in like manner also He took the cup, and He said, this is now the cup of the new covenant. It is the cup of My blood shed for the remission of your sins. And as often as you eat of this bread and drink of this cup, you show forth the Lord's death until He comes.

22:29 And so again, I invite you to come to His table to be nurtured by Him. All who are Christians, all who are not under the discipline of a church, all who put their trust in Christ and in Christ alone for their redemption can now come and receive the strength and the nurture of your souls that He offers to us in this sacrament. Let us pray. Father, before we come to this most holy table, we ask that by the power of Your Holy Spirit You would take these common elements of bread and wine and set them apart, consecrate them to a holy and sacred usage, that they may be for us the sign and the seal of our Lord's death and resurrection. And we pray that in this hour we may enjoy the sweetest mystical communion with Him in His presence at the table. We ask this in His name. Amen.