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You’ll turn with me in your Bibles please to John chapter 1, beginning at verse 35.
The next day again John was standing with two of his disciples, and he looked at Jesus as he walked by and said, ‘Behold, the Lamb of God.’ The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. Jesus turned and saw them following and said to them, ‘What are you seeking?’ And they said to him, ‘Rabbi,’ which means teacher, ‘where are you staying?’ He said to them, ‘Come and you will see.’ So they came and saw where he was staying, and they stayed with him that day, for it was about the tenth hour.
One of the two who heard John speak and followed Jesus was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. He first found his own brother Simon and said to him, ‘We have found the Messiah,’ which means Christ. He brought him to Jesus. Jesus looked at him and said, ‘You are Simon the son of John. You shall be called Cephas,’ which means Peter.
The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, ‘Follow me.’ Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. Philip found Nathaniel and said to him, ‘We have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.’ Nathaniel said to him, ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ Philip said to him, ‘Come and see.’
Jesus saw Nathaniel coming toward him and said of him, ‘Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit.’ Nathaniel said to him, ‘How do you know me?’ Jesus answered him, ‘Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.’ Nathaniel answered him, ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the king of Israel!’
Jesus answered him, ‘Because I said to you, ‘I saw you under the fig tree,’ do you believe? You will see greater things than these.’ And he said to him, ‘Truly, truly I say to you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.’
From there we turn back to Genesis chapter 28, beginning at verse 10.
And Jacob left Beersheba and went toward Haran. He came to a certain place and stayed there that night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and laid down in that place to sleep.
He dreamed, and behold, there was a ladder set up on the earth and the top of it reached to heaven, and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And behold, the Lord stood above it and said, ‘I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring. Your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and in you and your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land, for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.’
Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, ‘Surely, the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.’
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray.
Heavenly Father, you give us your word, and so much of it at times seems familiar and strange. Help us to know your word better, to love it, to study it, to hear it for the consistency that it has—how it is one story, the story of you and the story of us and our redemption through your Son, Jesus. Help us to hear him speak to us, and let us hear and obey what he has to say. In Jesus’ name, amen.
So I ask the kids—I’ll ask you all—how many of the 12 apostles can you name off? And I’m confident that few of us—I see I think there are some of us who actually can stand up and name all 12, you know, from memory right now. I know that I couldn’t; I had to look them up.
There’s Simon Peter, Andrew, James, and John, Philip, Thomas, Matthew or Levi, Bartholomew or Nathaniel, James the son of Alphaeus, Thaddeus or Judas the son of James, Simon the Zealot, and Judas Iscariot. But really does it matter for us and for our faith to remember the names of the 12 apostles?
There are nice children’s songs written to teach us and help us remember such small details, just as there are songs to help us remember the 66 books of the Bible or to remember that Zacchaeus was a rather short man, or to learn who fought the battle of Jericho. However, once we’re adults and we no longer have fun childhood incentives to learn and remember such things, Bible trivia quickly filters out of our system, doesn’t it?
This might explain why last summer all three contestants missed a certain Jeopardy clue. Last year, the clue was Matthew 6:9, which says, ‘Our Father which art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name.’ All three people missed it. It made the news; it was all over the place last summer. It’s sad; it really is. It shows our lack of biblical literacy in our culture; it shows our lack of faith.
But back to this: part of what makes the apostles so challenging to remember is the fact that four of them are known by two different names—Simon and Peter, Matthew and Levi, Bartholomew and Nathaniel, Thaddeus and Judas. Also, because beyond the big three of Peter, James, and John, the rest are hardly ever mentioned again by name.
So here, the Apostle John introduces us to two of the least well-known apostles, Philip and Nathaniel.
The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. Again, this is shortly after John the Baptist was imprisoned by Herod Antipas. He found Philip and said to him, ‘Follow me.’ Now, Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. Philip found Nathaniel and said to him, ‘We have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.’ Nathaniel said to him, ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ Philip said to him, ‘Come and see.’
Now historically, the interpretation of Nathaniel’s reply has been thought of as an arbitrary dismissal of Nazareth and its residents. That feels rather lacking knowing that Nathaniel comes from the town of Cana, which is only a short two-hour walk away from Nazareth. This supports the impression of some kind of neighborly rivalry, but it’s not cause to justify a blanket condemnation of or a negative view concerning the town by most or all others because Jesus never downplays his Nazareth origin, being commonly known as Jesus of Nazareth. So he and his followers clearly felt no shame in it.
But regardless, his interjection here is better understood more simply as a justification of his reticence to immediately accept Philip’s testimony based upon his word alone. This reveals Nathaniel’s character through his expectation for others to try using guile against him.
What is most interesting in this dialogue is Philip’s declaration to Nathaniel: ‘We have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote.’ This is interesting because John has not shown any cause or reason for Philip to believe that yet his conclusion predates and parallels Peter’s profession at Philippi of, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God,’ leaving us to wonder why.
Why does Philip already believe this about Jesus, a man whom he has just only met? Is John the author merely foreshadowing the gospel of Christ and thus preparing us to accept the evidence that he’s about to present? Or perhaps is Philip’s conclusion here intended to come from and be the result of the whole prologue concerning the Logos?
These are very difficult and really impossible questions for us to answer, but what is certain is that Philip could not have made this declaration except through the affirmation and internal testimony of the Holy Spirit. Ultimately, Philip asserts that Jesus of Nazareth is the fulfillment of the law and prophets, confessing that the whole of Scripture testifies about who he is, what he came to do, and that he is the Lord’s promised Christ.
Things and reasons which, if true—and they are—are definitely cause for great excitement in everyone who knows and believes this. He’d also note that while Philip was surely believing what he said, he did not try to convince Nathaniel of it. He did not begin listing different proofs, evidences, and the reasons, or even trying to explain why he believes it. Instead, all he did was invite Nathaniel to ‘come and see,’ to come and meet Jesus for himself—to have a personal encounter with Christ—and then leaving the Holy Spirit to do all of the real work.
Philip merely set up Nathaniel’s pin for the Holy Spirit to come along and knock it down. Also remember that Andrew told his brother Simon about Jesus, and so probably James and John, and maybe even Philip too—telling them so that when Jesus said, ‘Follow me,’ they each already had good reason to say yes. They all heard the good news from someone else before they could respond to Jesus’s call.
So maybe evangelism is not really such a difficult thing to do after all. Maybe we only fear doing it because we’ve been thinking about it all wrong. Maybe we all just need to spend more time saying, ‘Come and see,’ while also praying that the Holy Spirit will move and change the hearts and minds of the people we talk to. What do you think?
Then Nathaniel went with Philip, and Jesus saw Nathaniel coming toward him and said of him, ‘Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit.’ This was so much more than just a nice compliment from Jesus; this was a definitive statement about Nathaniel’s character. While we might simply think it describes his truthfulness as if he were being compared to George Washington and his chopped cherry tree— ‘I cannot tell a lie; I cut it with my hatchet.’
It goes deeper than that. The word interpreted here as deceit may also be translated as guile. It was actually a technical term commonly used by fishermen—a term meaning bait. More evidence suggesting that Nathaniel might have been a fisherman by trade. So, more than just being truthful, Jesus implies that Nathaniel is not a person who would employ subterfuge or deception to achieve his goals. He would not resort to underhanded methods; he would do everything above board.
It further suggests that he was a straightforward and honest man who might well have been bluntly honest. That was unwilling to sugarcoat things. To me, that sounds like the ideal person to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We would not expect to hear any easy believism from him. We would not expect a bait-and-switch false Prosperity Gospel from him.
He would not tell people that if they choose to believe in Jesus, then God will bless them with everything that their hearts desire in this life, and that they will surely live their best life now. We would not expect him to present faith as a type of fire insurance. We would not expect him to engage in fire-and-forget evangelism, merely getting people to say the sinner’s prayer and leaving it at that, ignoring our continuing need for a life of discipleship, repentance, and progressive sanctification.
Instead, we can expect that he would explain the gospel plainly and straightly, telling us that Jesus Christ lived, died, and rose again to pay our moral debt of sin, thereby justifying us before the only perfectly holy Lord. That we may receive the benefit of such grace through faith in him and his work—our total trust, dependence, and reliance upon his merciful love.
That although God loves us as we are, he loves us too much to leave us in our same starry state, calling us through repentance to be transformed and renewed, changed and sanctified by his Holy Spirit and adopted as his beloved chosen children. And that being his children, we are now charged and commanded to love others as he loves us by sharing his love with them and bringing them to him so that they might also receive his mercy and grace.
That is the kind of person that is the character of a person which Jesus declares Nathaniel to have on their first meeting. I’m sure we’ve all known people like that, so we can understand how that might be considered a virtue, even while we might also find such persons to be obnoxious and annoying because of how they will tell us the truth, even when and especially when we don’t want to hear it.
But please notice that Nathaniel does not deny Jesus’s assertion, either showing false modesty or disagreement. Instead, he responded to Jesus’s insightfulness by asking him, ‘How do you know me?’ Now, asking him ‘How do you know me?’ is not the equivalent of asking, ‘Have we met before?’ His question of knowing is ‘ginosko,’ asking, ‘How do you understand me and comprehend who I am so well, even though we have never met before?’
Perhaps he wondered whether Jesus had heard people talking about him, because that might have been his reputation. Nor is his response really that surprising, since we’d ask the same thing when meeting someone for the first time, if they already knew so much about us and who we really are, wouldn’t we?
Jesus answered him, ‘Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.’ Now, were we to be given that answer, we might well think that Jesus had seen us off in the distance taking a nap under a shady tree, or that maybe it was just an educated guess on Jesus’s part, since taking a rest under a fig tree’s cool shade during the heat of the day is a very reasonable, pleasant, common, and ordinary thing to do—something that anyone might be expected to do.
There’s really nothing special about that answer that would seem to justify Nathaniel’s response of ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the king of Israel!’ We might expect such a vague answer from late-night TV psychics or carnival fortune-tellers, or from the mediums and spiritists that Harry Houdini was famous for exposing as frauds and fakes.
This is definitely not the kind of answer we would expect from Jesus. When Jesus said, ‘I saw you,’ he was not speaking about his human sight or vision. Instead, he was talking about perception, about the experiential sense of perceiving and of getting to know Nathaniel. That’s what Jesus meant, and that is part of what Nathaniel was understanding, which justifies his response. Nathaniel recognized that Jesus knew him and knew everything about him before he ever met him.
We understand this even more fully because we know that Jesus knows every one of us fully and completely before we are even born or conceived, that before we were formed in the womb, he knew us from before the foundation of the world, electing us unto salvation in his perfect foreknowledge according to his sovereign grace and mercy alone.
This is something which could only be known by the Son of God, while recognizing and understanding this could only come through the Holy Spirit’s revelatory work.
Jesus answered him, ‘Because I said to you, ‘I saw you under the fig tree,’ do you believe? You will see greater things than these.’ Responding to Nathaniel’s confession, Jesus asked him, ‘Do you believe me just because of what I said? Well then, you ain’t seen nothing yet.’
Now although John has not yet given any specific evidence to explain why these six men of Andrew, Simon, James, John, Philip, and Nathaniel responded so quickly and positively to Jesus—he hasn’t given us any evidence to suggest the totality of who Jesus is, the God-man—we must expect that there was a combination of Holy Spirit activity within these men, along with an obvious something special about Jesus which drew and held their attention, because Jesus was only just beginning to reveal his glory.
Finally, John records Jesus promising Nathaniel something wonderful, while also making his first outrageous and challenging statement about himself: ‘Truly, truly I say to you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.’
This echoes Moses’s description of Jacob’s vision, when he said, ‘And behold, there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven. And behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.’
Why was this so outrageous and challenging? It’s outrageous because Jesus compares the Son of Man with Jacob’s Ladder. Jesus is saying that the Son of Man is the bridge between Heaven above and the earth below—that he is the means for men to have access to God, the way by which we may come into His holy and exalted presence.
Jesus promises Nathaniel that he will soon receive a greater and more complete revelation. He will see the truth that Jesus is the way to God.
So what should we all take from this?
First, evangelism—once we encounter Jesus and believe, we have the responsibility to share the good news about him and what he has done for us. Yet evangelism should not be as difficult as we often make it. We do not need some clever system or a catchy program like Dr. Kennedy’s evangelism explosion, the Romans Road, or the three circles, although they can be beneficial to us in helping us understand and explain the Gospel.
All we really need to do is talk to people about Jesus and our relationship with him. Then we can invite them to come and see. I know that both things are hard for most of us; maybe they make us fearful. But take comfort by remembering that Jesus told the disciples, ‘Do not be anxious about how you should defend yourself or what you should say, for the Holy Spirit will teach you in that very hour what you ought to say.’
You should not worry about answering the questions which people might ask you about Jesus or the faith. Because you know how to find the answers you do not know, then you can invite people. And don’t worry or get offended if they say no, because it’s up to the Holy Spirit and to them whether they do come and see. Their response is not your responsibility; inviting them to come is.
That’s all evangelism is really: tell people about Jesus and then invite them to have an encounter with him. So when was the last time you invited someone to come and see?
Second, Jesus is calling. One of the biggest lies that the world tries to convince Christians of is that Jesus calls us into a life of peace and prosperity, of pleasant and joyful resting, of temporal triumph. There are countless false teachers and prophets who proclaim that every Sunday, but that’s not what Scripture teaches us.
Every instance when Jesus calls someone, he calls them to pick up and go. They stop whatever it is they’re doing and leave it all behind. Andrew, Simon, James, and John left their nets, their fishing vocation, and their families to go follow Jesus. Matthew left behind a financially lucrative position as a tax collector to go follow Jesus. And Nathaniel here was called away from the shady comfort of his fig tree—the archetypical biblical image of God’s providential peace, prosperity, comfort, and rest for his chosen people.
Micah 4:4 says, ‘But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid, for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken.’
Each of the apostles were called out of their safe and known routine lives to follow Jesus into a very uncertain present because of his certain and sure future. He promised none of them peace, prosperity, or rest in this temporary, transient life—at least not to the degree that we are promised and expect to enjoy in glory. And our calling is no different.
But when we start to believe that this is as good as it gets, or that we have arrived and that we can now just rest on our laurels and enjoy everything, we’re at risk of settling for Satan’s deception, of falling into an idolatry of self, and of beginning to worship a Christ that is not real.
That’s why the scriptural script is flipped from worldly expectations because those expectations belong to the Cosmos and are under the prince’s dominion. Jesus Christ calls us out of the worldly satisfactions which cannot truly satisfy us. He disrupts our worldly sense of peace and takes us away from all the worldly goods that are tainted by sin’s corruption. He calls us and brings us to himself, redeeming us from our bondage to sin, sanctifying us, and revealing to us the greater and more true reality of the Kingdom of Heaven.
Jesus calls God’s children to follow him. He calls us to leave the world behind, to come and be changed. He never calls us to remain the same as we are, and if we’re going to earnestly follow him, then we must go, because one cannot stay and see.
Third and finally, Jesus is the only way to God, period. It is only through faith in him that we may be brought into our Heavenly Father’s presence and stand as his beloved children because it’s only through this faith that we’re clothed by his Holy Spirit in Christ’s righteous robe, cleansed and washed by his blood.
The plain truth is that Jesus is the only way. That is the Gospel; anything else is a lie. If someone dresses that up or tries to make it seem more attractive, they’re just trying to sell you something because that is not the Gospel.
What really could be more attractive than God’s free gift of merciful love, the forgiveness of our sin, a new life united into Jesus Christ, and the expectant hope of the resurrection and a place in Christ’s Kingdom—living, loving, worshiping, glorifying, and enjoying God forever? I don’t know.
So go and act like Andrew, and be like Philip. Go and tell others about Jesus, and then invite them to come and see. Amen.