Verse 43: Here we have a new day in the flow of the narrative in which Jesus decides to go to Galilee. As we saw in our passage last week, Jesus called his first disciples, Andrew, an unnamed disciple, and Simon Peter. As this new day begins, Jesus continues the work of making disciples as the text tells us that He found Philip and said to him, “Follow me.” What a wonderful thing it is to be found by Jesus. It may seem like a minor point in the context of the passage as a whole, but it is not a minor thing to be found by Jesus. Jesus is beginning his mission to seek and save the lost (Luke 19:10). Jesus came into a world of people groping around in the darkness of sin, lost as can be, and He came to find them. He is the light of the world that the darkness cannot overcome. He is a finding light. He is a revealing light, revealing God to us in a saving way. As Jesus found His first disciples it was the beginning of Him finding us. As the disciples then went and found others and made disciples who made disciples, and on and on; and in this way Jesus finds us. Jesus didn’t just randomly decide to go to Galilee. This decision was not a spontaneous whim. He went on purpose. He went to find. He went to get disciples. He finds us in our darkness and sin, and when He finds us, He tells us, “Follow me.” He commands we follow Him. This means we obey Him, we learn from Him, we stay near to Him and walk in His ways. I love the verse from the great hymn, And Can It Be:
“Long my imprisoned spirit lay
Fast bound in sin and nature’s night;
Thine eye diffused a quickening ray,
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;
My chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.”
Verse 44-45: After having been found by Jesus, Philip goes out and finds Nathanael. This is how the gospel advances in the world. We come to Christ and we go and tell others, they come to Christ and they go and tell others – disciples who make disciples, who make disciples. This isn’t just some theoretical idea. This is how it really happened. One of the purposes of a verse like verse 44 is to testify that these are real historical people who really lived in time and history and did these things.
What Philip tells Nathanael here is incredible. “We have found him of whom Moses in the Law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.” Often, when you see these terms together like this, “the law and the prophets,” it is a reference to the entirety of the Old Testament. So Philip tells Nathanael, “we have found the one whom the Scriptures spoke of!” Then when he says, “Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph,” Philip is simply identifying who this person was. In those days, that’s how you identified someone – stating who their father was and where they were from. In this, we again see that the Lord Jesus Christ, according to the witness of the apostles and the Scripture, was a real historical person. He truly was the Word made flesh, who truly dwelt among men – God in flesh, coming into the world into time and space to seek and to save the lost. Again, as we saw with the two disciples last week, apparently, Philip had spent some amount of time with Jesus listening to Him and talking with Him in order to come to this conclusion that He is the one of whom the law and the prophets wrote.
I can only imagine what it would be like listening to Jesus explain that He is the Messiah using the Old Testament. That’s one of the things we see throughout Jesus’ teaching and ministry is that He constantly taught about Himself from the law and prophets. We’ve got people today like Andy Stanley who claim that Christians need to unhitch themselves from the Old Testament because we’ve got Jesus. What? He must not know Jesus very well! Jesus hitched himself to the Old Testament! The fallacy there of course is that the OT and NT are separate scriptures that you can hitch and unhitch from one another – that is not so – they are one. Scripture is one unit. It is unbreakable. Nevertheless, our Lord Himself was and is the one of whom the Scriptures speak. Good Israelites would’ve been waiting and looking for such a one. Philip says, “we’ve found Him!”
Verse 46: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” This is Nathanael’s response to Philip. What an interesting response and question. Why would he say this? Nazareth was a small town in Jesus’ day. It was greatly despised. No one else liked Nazareth. As the common image of the Messiah was to be a great conquering King in a political sense to many Jews of the day, Nathanael naturally questions “How can our King come out of Nazareth, let alone anything good at all!? We’re supposed to have a conquering King! Kings don’t come from Nazareth.”
Nathanael looked at the immediate and surrounding context and circumstances – the disgrace and the mess that was Nazareth and said, “No way. Something good from that? How can it be?” Do you ever feel that way? Do you ever look at your life and your circumstances and think, “How can anything good come out of this? I have done nothing but make a mess and disgrace of my life; I am nothing special, I mess up everything I touch; I can’t do anything right, I’ve hurt people, disappointed people, and my life is a cesspool of sin and disgrace; what good can come out of my life?” Or maybe it’s not so much self-loathing as it is looking at the circumstances and situations of your life and thinking, “Can anything good come out of this? Nothing ever goes my way. I have been left unwanted, I’ve been abused, I have nowhere to turn; and this situation in my life is too big and too bad, and all I see is negative outcomes. How can anything good come out of this?” Nathanael ends up changing his mind about the situation; and it’s not because he finds out that Nazareth really isn’t all that bad after all; it’s because he meets Jesus. “Can anything good come out of my life and out of this situation?” You say. My friend, “Have you met Jesus?” “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Yes! Jesus came out Nazareth! Forgiveness came out of the cross! Life came out of death! Jesus came out of the tomb! Because He lives, He says to us now, “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28).
What was Philip’s response to Nathanael’s question? He simply said, “Come and see.” In other words, “I know it doesn’t make any sense; I know it seems impossible; but you just have to see for yourself.” That’s so often the difference; we just need to see Jesus. When we start thinking, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” It’s because we’re just staring at Nazareth – we are just fixated on our problem – and we aren’t seeing Jesus. The whole gospel message is essentially a message about how good came out of bad. The whole Bible is filled with little stories telling the story that good comes out of bad. You might say, “That’s nice, but you’re young and idealistic and you don’t know my life!” To that I say, “True. Come and see Jesus.” Come and see. Jesus is the difference. Look at the two criminals crucified next to Jesus. Both in the same dire situation – dying by crucifixion. One presumably died and went to hell, the other to paradise. What’s the difference? They both made a big stinking mess and disgrace of their life that lead them to this point! What’s the difference? One saw Jesus. That’s the difference. I think of the hymn Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus:
“Turn your eyes upon Jesus
Look full in his wonderful face
And the things of this world will grow strangely dim
In the light of His glory and grace.”
Verse 47: So Nathanael agrees to go see Jesus and Jesus sees him coming and says kind of a strange thing to him. What is Jesus talking about? No deceit in Nathanael? Jesus isn’t saying, “Look a perfectly honest man!” But as John MaCarthur puts it, “Jesus’ point was that Nathanael’s bluntness revealed that he was an Israelite without duplicitous motives who was willing to examine for himself the claims being made about Jesus.” We will see in verse 51, but I believe Jesus is also referencing Genesis 28 which contains the story of Jacob’s dream where he saw heaven open up and angels descend and ascend upon the ladder, or stairway, from heaven to earth. With Jesus referencing this, He is contrasting Nathanael, an Israelite, with Jacob who was later called Israel. Jacob we know was quite the trickster and deceiver in his day. Nathanael is said to have no deceit here in his intentions. So in some sense, Jesus is putting Nathanael in Jacob’s place. As we’ll see in v. 51, Nathanael will see not a stairway, but Jesus as the one on whom the angels descend and ascend between heaven and earth.
Verse 48: Intrigued by such a statement, Nathanael says, “How do you know me?” Jesus, much like He did with Peter, gives a glimpse of His deity to Nathanael as He tells him that he saw him under the fig tree! This fig tree was obviously somewhere out of the physical sight of Jesus, but not out of His true sight; which of course amazes Nathanael, as it would to any of us in such a situation. Take yourself, for a moment, back to that verse 46 situation in your life where you are asking, “Can anything good come out of this?” There you are under the fig tree, asking this question because you can’t see Jesus. Maybe you can’t see Jesus where you’re at with your eyes; but that doesn’t mean Jesus can’t see you. It’s like covering your head with a blanket to hide from someone and thinking that since you can’t see them, they can’t see you. That’s obviously silly. When you’re in that situation unable to see Christ, He is not so limited as you. He sees. If we can live in those times knowing that Jesus sees, regardless of the darkness that we are shrouded in, then maybe we can live in those moments believing that someone good did come out of Nazareth and Jesus is the Christ, and that something good can come out of our situation. That’s faith in the Christian life. We get to live life, going through the valley of the shadow of death, knowing that the Psalm ends with us dwelling in the house of the Lord forever.
Verse 49: Nathanael responds in faith. This response of faith gives us more reason why we can say that good can come out of bad – no matter how bad the bad is in whatever it is that we are going through, the One who sees us, is the King. He governs and rules all things. Making good out of bad is what He does. He’s King. Isn’t it wonderful that our Savior is not one who is on a secret mission to rescue us out of this world and the devil’s clutches? In other words, He’s not an undercover CIA agent, but He’s King. He rules out in the open. This is His world!
Verse 50-51: Jesus’ omniscience in knowing and seeing Philip was just the beginning. The disciples are going to see things that are greater than that – and that was pretty great! I believe Jesus is simply referring here to the entirety of His ministry that the disciples will witness: His miracles, healings, teachings, life, death, resurrection, ascensions, and even the coming of the Holy Spirit as the gospel went forth in power with signs and wonders in that first century.
Jesus then makes this very interesting statement: “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.” What is Jesus talking about? I let the cat out of the bag earlier, but I believe Jesus is referencing, or playing off of the story in Genesis 28 of Jacob’s ladder (Genesis 28:10-17).
What’s the difference between Genesis 28 and Jesus’ reference to it? In Jesus’ reference to it the Son of Man replaces the ladder. Now what’s the point of Jesus being the truer and better ladder in reference to Genesis 28? Notice that the angels are ascending and descending. The point is that Jesus is the way that God reveals Himself and relates to mankind in a saving way, and also that Jesus is the only way to the Father. Jesus is the access point between heaven and earth. God does not come down to us on a ladder, He comes down to us in Jesus Christ. This is one of the great themes of John’s gospel that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father but through Him. The gospel writer vividly sets this theme before us, as we enter into his gospel.
So in the context of Jesus’ conversation with Nathanael, what is Jesus saying? He is essentially saying, “I’m not only going to tell you all about yourself (which is what He did when He said that He saw Nathanael under the fig tree), but I’m also going to tell you all about the Father. I’m not only going to reveal things you didn’t know about you; but I am going to reveal heaven to you.” How about that? Just like Jacob experienced supernatural or heaven-sent revelation, so the disciples will experience even greater heaven-sent revelation.
I believe there is another slight element to what Jesus is saying here. When he puts himself in the place of the ladder in Genesis 28, part of what He could be saying is “You are going to see me in all the Scriptures.” He says that’s the greater thing. That’s huge. That means that when we see Christ in the Scripture we are seeing greater things…
Conclusion: So, as we move out of the opening chapter of John’s gospel into the rest of it, it’s as if the writer is inviting us to come and see. Come and see the eternal Word made flesh, dwelling among us, rejected by some yet also received by some. Come and see the light of the world, the Messiah according to the Scripture, the Son of God, Son of Man, as He comes to make good out of bad and reveal heaven to us!
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