I Saw the Sign

My husband and I were traveling back home from a wedding we'd attended in Washington, D.C. several years ago. During the reception, a blanket of fog had descended along the entire northern portion of our state. As we started our journey home, we edged our car out of the parking lot onto the road and began to realize how perilous the situation was. We could see nothing but white soup. This was before GPS and nice little map-trackers on phones, so we were dependent on signs. Signs, unfortunately, were unseen ghosts in the fog soup.

We managed to get behind a tractor trailer truck, and we followed the driver's tail-lights onto I-66. The truck, unfortunately, pulled over sometime later, and we faced a looooonnnnngggggg drive on a road where we could barely even see the painted lines. The two-hour trip home would no longer be a two-hour trip. Our gas tank inched down to the E, and we realized we were going to have to stop for gas.

Unfortunately, we couldn't even exit signs. I remember sitting in the passenger seat, my forehead pasted against the window, straining to see the lines on the side of the road. I shouted as soon as I saw a break in it, which surely signified an exit. My husband pulled the car off the highway, and then it was an absolutely blind free-drive into nothingness as we held our hearts in our throats and hoped that this exit would be one with a gas station. What if it was just a country road into the middle of nowhere? At one point, our car left the road, dipping dramatically through some uneven ground before we found pavement again. 

And then, yes! The fog soup lightened just a bit, and as we drove through the fog toward the light, we could see the brilliant yellow letters set in a green BP sign. 

After we'd pumped gas, the fog thinned slightly, and we were able to get home, but what should have been a midnight arrival at the end of our journey didn't happen until nearly four in the morning, because we couldn't see the road clearly, nor the signs directing our journey.

John 1:19-34 discusses signage. The Jews of Jerusalem, priests, Levites are looking for signs of the promised Messiah. Students of prophecy, students of the Scriptures, they see a bit of a kerfuffle that surrounds this interesting persona of John the Baptist. 

Who wouldn't notice this guy? He eats wild honey for breakfast, and he dips locust biscotti into it. And he is an unauthorized teacher, teaching without a license.

Now I'm on the same page. I'm a teaching assistant, which means, I get to spend my days... teaching... just without the license. No worries, I'm going to school, and if the Lord is willing, I'll have my license next spring. Still, I get this.

So the priests and Levites come to John to seek clarity in the kerfuffle. Their intense interest in looking for signs of the promised Messiah becomes evident here as they present a series of questions to John the Baptist. "Are you the Christ?" 

The title "Christ" means "Anointed One," which is significant, because in the Old Testament, almost all cases of anointing occur as a symbolic gesture to appoint either a king or a priest. Looking at the Scriptures, looking at the big picture, we find Jesus, the King Priest. King of kings, the Priest who advocates before for us at the right hand of the throne of God. Jesus is the Christ!

But the guys coming to John don't know that yet. They're still looking at the signs. 

"Are you the Christ?" John the Baptist shakes his head. "Nope" (my paraphrase).

"How about Elijah? Are you Elijah?"

It's interesting to note here that in Matthew 11:14 and Matthew 17:10-13, Jesus does positively ID John the Baptist as Elijah, but John the Baptist denies it here. The difference is that Jesus is referring to John's Elijah-persona as being the spirit of the man, the nature of the prophet preparing the way for the Lord. John is denying being a physical reincarnation of the prophet here.

"Nope," says John. "Not Elijah. Guess again."

"Ooh, I know, I know. You're the Prophet!" 

Deuteronomy 18:15, 18 prophesies a prophet, raised up by God Himself, who will come to the nation of Israel and speak the words the Lord puts in his mouth. Christ, the "return" of Elijah, and the Prophet -- all three -- are associated with the coming of the Messiah, and these guys (the priests, the Levites, and company) all know it. 

So their eyes are wide and staring, looking through the soup, straining to see the sign they're hoping will come. 

John tells the whole kit and caboodle of them: "Among you stands One you do not know. He is the One who comes after me (He's slightly younger than I am), the thongs of Whose sandals I am not worthy to untie (He has surpassed me because He was before me; He's more important than I am)."

In the words of the comedian Bill Engvall: "Here's your sign."

And then, we get a glimpse of Jesus for the first time in this Gospel: "The next day, John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, 'Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! This is the One I meant when I said, 'A Man Who comes after me has surpassed me because He was before me.' I myself did not know Him, but the reason I came baptizing with water was that He might be revealed to Israel." 

Here's your sign.

John the Baptist gives testimony of the "Lamb of God," one of only two places in Scripture that Jesus is given this title: in John 1:29 and 1:36. It reminds me immediately of Genesis 22:13 where the Lord has tested Abraham by asking him to sacrifice his only son Isaac on an altar. Obedient Abraham begins to do so, and the Lord stops him. Abraham passes the test. The Lord provides, in Isaac's place, a replacement sacrifice. 

"Abraham looked up, and there in the thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son."

"John saw Jesus..." Not trapped in his position as sacrificial Lamb, but freely willing, freely present, there for the purpose of atonement sacrifice.

John the Writer (to differentiate between him and John the Baptist) does not record Jesus' baptism, though the other Gospel writers do. So this section seems to be after Jesus has already been baptized by John the Baptist. John the Writer's purpose is the testimony of the event rather than the event itself.

"Then John gave this testimony: 'I saw the Spirit come down from heaven as a dove and remain on Him. I would not have known Him, except that the One who sent me to baptize with water told me: 'The Man on Whom you see the Spirit come down and remain is He who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.'"

John ends his testimony with this unalterable, world-shaking, prophesy-fulfilling, time-without-end statement: "I have seen and I testify that this. is. the. Son. of. God!" (Punctuation my own.)

The entire purpose of John the Writer's Gospel is strongly evangelistic. John 20:31 bolds this purpose and throws a few exclamation points in for good measure: "But [all the miracles about which I've told you] are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing, you may have life in His name!" !!!

What a mission statement! What a thesis! 

That point where we believe... that's where the fog lifts. Faith = belief + obedience, and that's the center point of our encounter with Christ. So many look for the signs. So many see the fog brighten, but don't push further through the soup. So many need only to open their eyes in order to find the Source of the Light.

Both John the Baptist's and John the Writer's testimonies give way to the Son of God. I pray that my testimony gives way to the Son of God just as clearly. 

Which way are we looking? What signs are we reading? Are we looking at the prophets? At Elijah? At anything other than Jesus for our answers? 

You know, that fog soup didn't prevent the BP sign from being there. It didn't erase the existence of the gas station from the side of the highway. It only obscured what was already there; we just needed to clear away the fog in order to see what was right in front of us.

We drove by that area not long after, and there was the BP sign, straight and tall, and clearly visible from the highway, hardly even a hundred feet off of it. 

Jesus is so very near. It doesn't take blind groping, reaching fingers, straining muscles, clasping at the air.

All it takes is opening our eyes. The Sign is right in front of us.