Come and See

We did not plan to meet in a living room that evening. And some of you did not plan to be reading this today. Somebody sent you a link. A friend, a family member, maybe somebody you fish with or work with said, "Read this," and here you are. Whatever you expected, it may not have been this. That is exactly how the church of Jesus Christ began. No building, no program. One man turned to another and said, "Come and see."

Everybody has an opinion about Jesus. Ask ten people and you will get ten answers. A good teacher. A prophet. A myth. A crutch for weak people. I have heard it all in my ministry. But have you ever asked what the men who actually met Him said? The men who ate with Him, walked with Him, saw Him with their own eyes?

In seventeen verses of the Gospel of John, the men who met Jesus call Him the Lamb of God, Rabbi, the Messiah, the One Moses wrote about, the Son of God, the King of Israel, and the Son of Man. Seven titles. One Person. And every single one of those men ended up saying some version of the same thing: come and see for yourself.

When a sinner truly sees who Jesus is, he follows Him, and he cannot keep quiet about Him.

So reads the infallible, the inerrant, the all-sufficient Word of the Living God.

Behold the Lamb

Look at verse 36 again. John "looked at Jesus as He walked, and said, 'Behold, the Lamb of God!'"

John the Baptist was the most famous preacher in Israel. Crowds walked out into the wilderness to hear him. Kings feared him. He had disciples of his own, men who had attached themselves to his ministry and his teaching. And what does he do with all that influence? He points away from himself. He sees Jesus walking by, and everything his ministry was meant to be compresses into five words: Behold, the Lamb of God.

That title would have landed hard on Jewish ears. I do not think we realize sometimes how bloody the Old Covenant religion was. It is easy to read about it in the Old Testament, but stop and consider how much blood was shed day after day, year after year, sacrifice upon sacrifice. Every morning and every evening a lamb died on the altar in Jerusalem. Every Passover a lamb died in every household. Isaiah had written of One who would be led like a lamb to slaughter, bearing the iniquity of us all. Fifteen hundred years of blood and smoke and substitution, all of it walking past John on two feet. Everything those sacrifices and types and shadows of the Old Covenant pointed to was standing right there. John is saying, there He is. The Lamb, capital L, that all the other lambs, lowercase l, were pointing to.

Notice what happens in verse 37. The two disciples heard him speak, and they followed Jesus. They left John. Think about that. John's own disciples walked away from him, and this was not failure on John's part. This is what he had been sent to do. This was his success. John was not there to make a name for himself. He was there to lose disciples to Jesus.

So here is the question for you, fellow saint. Is your witness like John's? When people look at your life, your speech, your priorities, where do you point? John said, I am a voice, one voice crying in the wilderness. He said he was not even worthy to be the slave who unties His sandal strap. If somebody spent a week around you, would they walk away impressed with you, or would they walk away asking about Him? John was content, even glad, to shrink so that Christ would fill the whole frame. Would you be content to be forgotten if it meant somebody you love followed Jesus? John was not there to make a name for himself, and neither are we. Whatever time we have, whatever influence we have, it is given to us to point others to Christ.

So two men leave the greatest preacher of their generation and start walking after Jesus. It is interesting that the text records nothing they said at first. Maybe they did not know what to say. They did not know what would happen. And Jesus turns around.

Come and See

Verse 38 gives us the first words Jesus speaks in the entire Gospel of John. If you have a red-letter edition of the Bible, they stick out like a sore thumb. "What do you seek?"

That question will break you if you sit on it a while, because He is asking it wherever you are reading this right now. What do you seek? What are you actually after in this life? I have lived long enough to know this much. Money runs out. Health gives way. The people you look up to and lean on will fail you or leave you or die before you do. You look around one day and realize you cannot pick up the phone and call them anymore. Jesus asks these two men the question underneath every other question, and it is the question underneath your life too.

Their answer sounds almost clumsy. "Rabbi, where are You staying?" They are not asking for His address. They are asking for access. Can we come near? Can we be where You are? And look at His answer in verse 39. "Come, and you will see." What wonderful words those are.

He does not hand them a scroll and send them home. He does not say, think it over and get back to Me. He opens the door. Come. And John records that it was about the tenth hour, ten o'clock in the morning. However long after these events John wrote his Gospel, he remembered the hour. He wrote it down. They stayed with Him the rest of that day, and whatever they heard in that house, it must have been wondrous. They came out convinced.

I have stood on the fishing pier waiting on a bite, and I can tell you the difference between hearing about fish and having one on the line. Secondhand reports only carry you so far. There comes a point where you have to see for yourself. That is what Jesus offered these men. Not a rumor about God. Not a secondhand story. The thing itself.

Maybe you are reading this with honest questions about Jesus. I want you to hear this: He does not ask you for blind faith. He never has. Christianity is not a shot in the dark. His invitation from the first day of His ministry all the way until now is the same. Come and see. Examine Him. Read one Gospel, this Gospel, the Gospel of John, start to finish, and watch Him with your own eyes. The record is clear in this Book. He can bear the inspection. No man ever came away from an honest look at Jesus Christ with a shrug.

Do not just read books about the Bible. Read the Bible. Do not settle for stories about Jesus. Come and see for yourself. And if you do not have a copy of the Gospel of John and need one, let me know. I will see to it that you get one. It is that important.

So Andrew spends one day with Jesus. One day. Watch what one day with Jesus does to a man.

We Have Found Him

Verse 41. "He first found his own brother Simon and said to him, 'We have found the Messiah.'"

Andrew does not organize a committee. He does not wait until a crowd gets mobilized. He does not enroll in a training course, and he does not wait until he is a seasoned theologian. He has spent one day with Jesus, and his feet carry him straight to the person he loves most, his own brother, and the words come out of him like water through a broken dam. We have found the Messiah. These men had read the Old Testament prophecies. They knew the Messiah was coming, and here He was. Andrew was a fisherman, and the first thing he ever caught for Christ was his own brother.

Then it happens again. Verse 45. "Philip found Nathanael and said to him, 'We have found Him of whom Moses in the Law and also the Prophets wrote.'" These men may not have known much yet, but they knew this one thing. They had found Jesus the Messiah, and they knew they needed to tell others about Him.

I want to slow down right here, because I run in circles where I know how some of my Calvinist brethren hear those words. We have found Him? There is a certain kind of brother who reads verse 41 and nearly chokes on his dentures. Found Him! Andrew, don't you know you were dead in trespasses and sins? Don't you know He found you? And that brother wants to stop the story, sit Andrew down, and straighten out his doctrine before he is allowed to say another word to anyone. This happens repeatedly in our circles, so let us hold up a minute and look at the text.

There is no mistake here. The Holy Spirit wrote these words down. Twice. "We have found the Messiah." "We have found Him of whom Moses wrote." Not one syllable of correction from heaven. Not a footnote. Not an asterisk.

Was Andrew wrong? Was Philip wrong? No, these young brothers were not wrong. And is sovereign grace at work underneath this whole chapter? Absolutely it is. None of this undermines the sovereignty of God or the doctrines of grace. Look at verse 43. "He found Philip." Who did the finding there? Jesus did. Philip did not stumble across Jesus. Jesus desired to go into Galilee, and He went and found His man. The divine initiative runs underneath every conversion on this page. But the experience of the man being saved, what does it feel like from inside? It feels like finding treasure. It feels like the search of your whole life is finally over. Both things are true at the same time, and the Bible is not embarrassed to say both. When a brother says "we found Jesus," do not be so quick to correct him. He found you, and you found Him, and heaven records that brother's joy without correcting his grammar. A man pulled from the ocean does not lecture himself on who did the swimming. He just tells everybody about the one who pulled him out. We get caught up way too much on grammar.

So do not let anybody's system, and I mean any system, no matter how much we believe it to be right, talk you out of the plain speech of a saved man, especially when he is out witnessing to others.

It would do well for all of us to get that into our hearts, our minds, and our practice. And the sooner we get it into our churches, the better off we would be, rather than being a bunch of dead orthodox people proud of having our T's, our U's, our L's, our I's, and our P's all in the right order.

Then comes Nathanael in verse 46, and Nathanael is the skeptic in the crowd. "Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?" Nazareth was a no-account town, and Nathanael almost dismisses the Savior of the world over a zip code. It is the same everywhere. When I was growing up in southern Ohio, I lived in McDermott, and people would say, can anything good come out of McDermott? And we would say, well, can anything good come out of Minford? Somebody else would say, can anything good come out of Wheelersburg? Throw your own small town into it. Everybody has ideas about places and people, and it was no different back then.

But notice what Philip does not do. He does not argue. He does not debate the merits of Nazareth. He repeats the exact invitation Jesus gave the day before: "Come and see." You do not have to win the argument, friend. You just need to make the introduction. Bring people to Jesus.

So here is the Andrew question, and I want you to answer it in your head right now. Who is your Simon? Put a name on him. Your brother. Your coworker. The man you fish with. The woman who cuts your hair. You do not need a seminary degree to say what Andrew said. You need one day's worth of acquaintance with Jesus Christ and enough love to walk across the yard. When is the last time you said "come and see" to anybody?

Philip brings his skeptic to Jesus. And what happens next turns a scoffer into a worshiper in the space of two sentences.

Greater Things Than These

Jesus sees Nathanael coming and speaks first. Verse 47: "Behold, truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!" Nathanael is startled. "From where do You know me?" And Jesus answers in verse 48, "Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you."

I do not know if figs in the Holy Land are the same as figs here, but being under the fig tree is a good place to be. I love figs. I am trying to grow two fig trees in my backyard. One of them I think is dead, and the other one never gives me any figs. But over at Fort McAllister, I love the history, but I will pay the admission just to go in and eat figs off that great big old tree spread out inside the fort. Being under the fig tree is a good place to be. But we do not know what happened under that particular fig tree. Nathanael did.

Whatever it was, whatever he prayed or wrestled with or hoped for in that private place, Jesus saw it all. No one had told Him. No one could have. Nathanael had been all alone, and when Jesus brings it up, that one sentence shattered Nathanael's skepticism like glass. The man who sneered at Nazareth now makes the highest confession in the chapter: "Rabbi, You are the Son of God; You are the King of Israel."

Jesus knew Nathanael before Nathanael knew Jesus. Mark that down, because it is the story of every convert in this passage, and it is the story of every believer who has ever come and gone or ever will be. Before you ever sought Him, He saw you, even when you were privately out under the fig tree, in your bedroom, in your car, wherever it may be.

But Jesus is not finished. Verse 50: "You will see greater things than these." Then verse 51, and here Jesus reaches all the way back to Genesis. "Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see THE HEAVENS OPENED AND THE ANGELS OF GOD ASCENDING AND DESCENDING on the Son of Man."

Every Israelite knew that picture. Jesus is the golden thread that runs through all the Bible, and the Bible is the best commentary on the Bible. Jacob, running for his life, slept on a stone in the wilderness and dreamed.

Jacob woke up and called that place Bethel, the house of God, the gate of heaven. Now stand back and understand what Jesus is claiming by quoting this verse. In Jacob's dream, the angels ascended and descended on the ladder. In Jesus' words, they ascend and descend on the Son of Man. Jesus is the ladder. He is the one meeting place between a holy God and sinful men. Bethel was a shadow. He is the house of God and the gate of heaven, standing there in sandals talking to a man from Cana.

There is no other ladder to get to heaven. Not your religion, not your baptism, not your good record, not your family name. One Mediator between God and men. If you would get to heaven, you go by Jesus Christ or you do not go at all.

This is why the men in this chapter could not keep quiet. They had not found a philosophy. They had not found a good story to tell. They had found the door between earth and heaven, and it stood open. Believer, do you still see Him that way? Or has He shrunk down in your eyes to a Sunday habit? Ask God to show you Christ the way Nathanael saw Him, and watch what it does to your mouth.

The Chain Has Not Broken

Trace the chain one more time. A preacher pointed. Two men followed. One of them fetched his brother. Jesus fetched Philip. Philip fetched a skeptic, and the skeptic ended up on his face confessing the Son of God. Seventeen verses. No buildings and no budgets. A church is being born in front of your eyes, and it is built one sentence at a time: come and see. Christ is the center of it all.

Two thousand years later, that chain has not broken. Somebody said "come and see" to the person who said it to the person who said it to you. Today the chain may run through a camera in a living room, straight to wherever you sit. It reaches you.

He Sees You

If you are reading this without Christ, I want you to see something in this text. Jesus saw Nathanael under that fig tree. Nobody else did. And He sees you the same way, right now, right where you are. He sees the things you have done, the things you have buried where no one else can find them, the secrets, the hidden things. All of them, He knows. He knows what you do, what you carry, what you are afraid of. None of us has ever had a private moment in our lives.

And here is the wonder of it all: knowing all of that, He still says come. The Lamb of God takes away sin. His blood was shed for sinners exactly like the one sitting in your chair, and every sinner who has ever come to Him has found the door open. But Nathanael almost missed Him over a sneer about Nazareth. Do not dismiss Him over something smaller than that. Do not miss Him because of a joke, a grudge, or a busy afternoon. Come and see.

And believer, take the comfort that is yours in this passage. He saw you before you saw Him. He found you before you found Him. The God who marked Nathanael under a fig tree marked you before you had a single thought of Him, and the ladder between your soul and heaven is not your climbing. It is His cross. You are known to the bottom, and loved anyway.

Go Find Your Simon

One assignment this week, and it comes straight from Andrew. Before Sunday, say "come and see" to one person, by name. Not an argument. Not a debate about Nazareth. An invitation. It can be as simple as sending somebody the link to this article or the sermon below, or handing them a tract. Andrew found his own brother first, so start close: a neighbor, the person you fish with, someone you work with. You thought of somebody while you read this. That is your Simon. Go find him. Tell him, come and see.

May God add a blessing to His Word.