43 Preaching/Teaching: John 1:43-51
Will you role the DICE? : Fresh Vision of Discipleship!
“If sinners will be damned, at least let them leap to Hell over our bodies. And if they will perish, let them perish with our arms about their knees, imploring them to stay. If Hell must be filled, at least let it be filled in the teeth of our exertions, and let not one go there unwarned or unprayed for.” CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON
We roll the DICE when:
1. we prioritize presence (35-39).
They had a great teacher (35-37)
They asked for time (38)
The two disciples of the Baptist begin their response with Rabbi. The word literally means ‘my great one’, but was a common term of honour addressed by a student to his master, his teacher (as John’s explanatory aside points out, for the sake of his Greek readers).
We roll the DICE when:
2. We invite (40-42).
He invited those closest to him.
The first thing Andrew did (cf. Additional Notes) was to find his brother and announce, We have found the Messiah. He thus became the first in a long line of successors who have discovered that the most common and effective Christian testimony is the private witness of friend to friend, brother to brother.
We roll the DICE when:
3. We follow (43-51).
God wants us to follow him for a lifetime
Everyone is a candidate
God’s qualities are amazing
The Epilogue (Jn. 21:18–19) tells us a little of what would happen to Peter. Here in John 1, however, the focus is much less on what this name change means for Peter, than on the Jesus who knows people thoroughly (cf. vv. 43–51), and not only ‘sees into’ them (cf. 47–48) but so calls them that he makes them what he calls them to be.
That has been the foundational principle of truly Christian expansion ever since: new followers of Jesus bear witness of him to others, who in turn become disciples and repeat the process.
Philip’s witness is of a piece with Andrew’s (v. 41), except that he does not call Jesus the Messiah but the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote. That is the stance of this entire Gospel: Jesus fulfills the Old Testament Scriptures (cf. 5:39).
That Jesus refers to him as an ‘Israelite’ is not surprising; Palestinian Jews commonly referred to one another that way (K. G. Kuhn, TDNT 3. 359ff.). Jesus’ point is not that Nathanael is an Israelite, ‘true’ or otherwise, but that Nathanael is a certain kind of Israelite, an Israelite in whom there is no guile, no deceit (dolos; cf. J. Painter, in BETL, pp. 359–362). Nathanael may have been blunt in his criticism of Nazareth, but he was an Israelite without duplicitous motives who was willing to examine for himself the claims being made about Jesus.