Who is Jesus? What's your verdict?

Please be seated. Let’s pray;

Father open our hearts, minds and wills to your message this morning. Amen

I remember my first court case; the Judge in her robes sat on the bench, the evidence was brought forward, witnesses were called, issues were highlighted, now a verdict was required. Should this couple be allowed to adopt this child? We’d filled out questionnaires, had medicals, produced evidence of income, had visits from specialist social workers who had written reports. Now it all hinged on the court’s decision, the verdict. It needed to be the right verdict. Lives would be significantly changed by it. It’s quite a nail biting experience. So much hangs on the verdict, and we went through it twice, voluntarily!

Even if you have never been in court yourself you have almost certainly encountered the process in literature or on the screen. Courtroom scenes make for gripping reading and viewing simply because usually so much hangs on the outcome. We are continuing our series on the early chapters of John’s Gospel, but before we get to today’s passage, turn with me to page 907 of the church Bibles, to John 20.30-31:

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these 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.

Reading John’s gospel is like listening to a court case being built by a brilliant lawyer. He’s marshalling evidence, referring to historic precedent and calling in witnesses. He’s selective. He wants just the right evidence so that the jury can decide because so much hangs on the outcome. It’s all for one purpose; to get a life-changing verdict. And you are the jury (John 20:31):

These 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.

That’s his closing statement. It’s his summary of the argument. And it’s the first of two twists in the case. Usually a jury’s decision affects the subject of the trial; a child gets adopted, an accused person goes to prison or is found not guilty and set free. But the decision we (as members of the jury) make about Jesus determines our destiny, our life, our eternity. We need to get the verdict right! Thankfully John has built his case well to help us.

We’ve just heard the closing argument but we need to get back to the beginning of the case. Last week Ian took us through John’s opening argument where he outlines where he is going with the case and why it is so important for us as a jury to pay attention. Come to the right decision about Jesus Christ and you get adopted into God’s family, you enjoy life, light, grace and truth. Today John calls his first witness. So let’s turn to John 1.19-34 in our Bibles to explore the evidence. It’s on page 886 of the church Bibles. I have three headings: 1. The Witness. 2. The Testimony. 3. The Verdict. So first of all:

1. The Witness

John’s first witness is also John! The other gospels call him John the Baptist, but in John’s gospel the focus is mostly on his witness, his testimony about Jesus rather than the baptisms. So he doesn’t use that title. Two Johns. To avoid confusion, from now on I’m going to refer to them as John the Lawyer and John the Witness. John the Lawyer doesn’t call John the Witness into the courtroom. Instead, he takes us to the banks of the river Jordan where John is baptising great crowds of people who have become conscious of their wrongdoings and are publically expressing their desire for change.

To establish John the Witness’s credentials, John the Lawyer recounts what happened when he was cross-examined by the religious authorities of the time who had become concerned about his rapidly growing influence. Because of time we can’t unpack all the details so here is a brief summary. People were longing for a promised anointed leader from God known as the Christ, or messiah (it’s the same thing in two different languages), basically a God appointed king who would rescue them. John makes it very clear he is not the Messiah. Nor does he see himself as fulfilling a couple of other roles associated with the Messiah’s coming.

So who is he? Ian mentioned last week that he was effectively the last of a long line of prophets going back through the long years of promise recorded in the Old Testament. John himself sums it up (John 1.23) with a quote from one of those prophets, Isaiah:

I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord.’

His mission was simply to prepare people for God’s rescue plan and to point to the one who is to come, who will fulfill that plan. It’s all about someone much greater than John (John 1.15):

He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.

And so we come to:

2. The Testimony

John 1.29-34:

The next day he saw Jesus coming towards him, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks before me, because he was before me.’ I myself did not know him, but for this purpose I came baptizing with water, that he might be revealed to Israel.” And John bore witness: “I saw the Spirit descend from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but he who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, this is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ And I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God.”

The next day John the Witness points to Jesus and says three incredible things about him:

1. He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world
2. He is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit
3. He is the Son of God.

John the Lawyer is going to develop our understanding of these three as we go forward. Today I want to focus mainly on the first and just touch briefly on the others two.

Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

These are John’s first words about Jesus (John 1.29). Just a dozen words or so, but they are incredibly powerful and profound because they address our most fundamental problem. What is mankind’s fundamental problem? What is your deepest problem and mine? Our Old Testament reading put it very neatly (Isaiah 53.6):

For there is no one who does not sin

And, in the New Testament (Romans 3.23):

All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned – every one – to his own way

And that is at the heart of our problem. We have turned our backs on God, rejected our Creator and made ourselves the centre of the universe. And out of that rebellion comes all sorts of wrongdoing and moral depravity. The Bible calls this sin and it ultimately destroys everything – our relationship with God, our relationships with one another, our relationship with nature and in the end it tears us apart. And it affects all of us, so in the Old Testament (2 Chronicles 6.36):

For there is no one who does not sin

And, in the New Testament (Romans 3.23):

All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God

We try to deal with it in all sorts of ways but we can’t. Sin is like a tiny drop of extremely toxic poison in the glass of our lives. We try to add more water because water is good for you, right? That’s like doing good works, going to church, looking after the environment, trying to be nice to people. It’s not that these are bad things. They might dilute the poison so people notice it less but it is still there. It’s still going to kill you. It needs to be taken away. How is that possible? Who can solve the problem of sin? John the Witness tells us (John 1.29):

Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!

A lamb! How can a cute woolly quadruped solve the problem of sin? Here in the UK we think of lambs as basically having two purposes – growing up and providing wool for jumpers or getting eaten as our Sunday lunch! So we don’t immediately get what John is talking about, but John’s original hearers would. Lambs had another purpose for them, more profound than food and clothing. Our good friends, Jock and Katy are working with a dedicated team from one of the many local languages in Indonesia to translate the New Testament into their mother tongue. They are getting really close to finishing what has been the focus of their life’s work. The people of that language group also need help in understanding the significance of the lamb. I asked Jock for a back translation into English of John 1.29 in that language:

The next day, Yohanis looked and he saw Yesus coming to where he was. So he said to the people who were there, "Look, The Person I spoke about, here is he coming now! This Person is the Young Sheep that God has prepared so that he will be killed on our behalf, so that he will cause the wrongdoings of we the people of the world to be gone from us, just like we Israel people kill a young sheep to pay for our wrongdoings so that they may be gone from us.

This expanded translation points to a quite different purpose for the Lamb. Throughout the period of the Old Testament there were animal sacrifices, often those were lambs and in many cases the purpose of the sacrifice was thought to deal with the problem of human wrongdoing, sin. People would be aware of their wrongdoing and choose one of their prized animals to be sacrificed for them.

There are two things I want to say about these sacrifices. Firstly they tell us that sin is deadly serious. The wages of sin [says the apostle Paul] is death. The penalty for rebellion against God, which is what sin is, is death. And the point of the sacrifice was that a life had to be substituted for that of the one who sinned in order for God’s justice to be fulfilled. God loves us but he cannot let injustice, and rebellion, go unpunished. So another life must be substituted. The second thing to say is that these animal sacrifices in the Old Testament were really only visual aids preparing us for the one and only, once for all, sacrifice that can truly remove our sins. The sacrifice, not of one of our prized possessions, but of the One who is most precious to God himself, God’s Lamb – Jesus. Listen again to how, in our Old Testament reading, Isaiah looked forward to Jesus 700 years before he came. Jesus was (Isaiah 53.7):

Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter

Isaiah 53.6:

All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned – every one – to his own way: And the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

Isaiah 53.5:

He was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed

Right at the start of the gospel John the Witness is saying that Jesus is going to die and in doing so he is going to take our place, suffer the punishment that we deserve and by doing that he will remove all our sin from us so that we can be made right with God. So that we can become part of God’s family again and experience life, eternal life with Him. That is why Jesus, God’s son died on the cross; to take away your sin and mine. And this truth is for anyone who wants to respond to it. It doesn’t matter what your background or how you compare morally to other people. It doesn’t matter where you are in the world, what your status is, what your ethnic or cultural background is. You might be in Mburi, Kenya or Shanghai in China, or in Mexico City or in Jesmond or Benwell. The Lamb of God takes away the sin of the World (including yours). But, briefly John has more to tell us. Jesus who died for us is also going to baptise us with the Holy Spirit (John 1.33):

This is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.

That is, he is going to pour out the Spirit upon everyone who believes or trust in Him. That is the fulfillment of another Old Testament promise (Ezekiel 36.26-27):

I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules

And this promise comes true after Jesus has died for us and risen from the dead. God comes and dwells in us by his Spirit to enable us to live for him and love others. We get the power to live God’s way as the Spirit of God leads us. Not only that, John says Jesus is the Son of God (John 1.34):

I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God.

Now this is a title that, at the very least, means that Jesus is the identified as God’s rescuing king – the Messiah or Christ, but there is more to it than that. John the Lawyer tells us time and time again that Jesus made it very clear that he is fully man and fully God and that we can fully trust him with the leadership of our lives (John 1.1 & John 1.14):

The Word was with God, and the Word was God…and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us

Lamb of God, Baptizer with the Spirit, Son of God. Yhat’s the testimony. So what about:

3. The Verdict

John the Lawyer has begun building his case and the evidence of his first witness is already a powerful indication of the importance of the conclusion to which the evidence is leading. Sooner or later each of us needs to come to a verdict about Jesus. Is he the Son of God? Will he fill us with the Spirit so that we can live as God always intended? Is he really the Lamb of God who takes away not only your sin and mine but the sin of the world? I encourage you to check the evidence; continue reading the gospel of John, consider joining Christianity Explored on Tuesday. But perhaps you realise that you already have enough evidence to come to a verdict. If so why put it off? Why not make May 1st 2022 the day when you say ‘Yes’ to Jesus. When you let him take away your sins, fill you with His Spirit and lead you as your King?

Well I must close, but I mentioned that there were two twists. What is the second twist? I’ve shared with some of you before about my last haircut in Taiwan and how I discovered that the hairdresser was a new believer in Jesus who had come to faith through Beitun Banner church a multisite congregation of Taichung Banner Church, the church we had helped start 20 years before and how she asked me to pray for her because she had already seen five customers come to faith in Jesus in her first year as a believer and now she wanted to see ten come to faith in her second year.

John the Witness had a unique role in preparing the way for Jesus but anyone can point others to Jesus as the solution to their most fundamental problem, as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. And so here’s the second twist; when you come to a verdict to follow Jesus you move out of the jury box and onto the witness stand. New faces take your place in the jury – friends, family, acquaintances, strangers who will later become friends. You get to share with them your evidence about Jesus and you help them come to a life-changing verdict. You don’t have to have a degree in theology you just have to know Jesus. We can all point others to the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

Many years ago, a young high school student in Taiwan, a new believer, decided to dedicate his whole life to the task of helping others to find forgiveness for sins and eternal life in Jesus. Not only would he share the gospel himself he would call and train others to do that, thousands of them, to go and start churches all around the world. 27 years ago we had the privilege of joining Samuel Shau, his wife May and a small team to start Taichung Banner Church. We had his support when we left to plant what is now Kaohsiung Banner Church the first of many plants, including, later, the one where my hairdresser came to faith. That small group of 13 adults and 5 children has now become over 10,000 believers dedicated to pointing others to Jesus. Two weeks ago, on Easter Sunday morning, Jesus welcomed Samuel home to heaven after an 18-month battle with an aggressive brain tumour. During that time he continued to preach and speak calling others to Jesus and encouraging them to then go and call others. A week or so before he died his wife May told us that his only regret apart from the grief of those who loved him most, was that still so many people did not know Jesus.

John the witness will be recalled to the stand later in the case but the evidence he has provided today is clear. He testifies that Jesus name is far greater than any other name. That He is the Son of God. That he takes away our sins and that he will fill us with His Spirit. In a moment we will have a chance to stand and respond to God’s word as we sing Charles Wesley’s great hymn Jesus the name High Over All but before we do that let’s bow our heads.

I ask you to consider the evidence for Jesus. Members of the jury, have you reached your verdict? And if you have already come to a verdict and trusted in Jesus, who are you going to be a witness to this week? Are you ready to spend your life pointing others to Jesus and saying, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”?