"For you shall go out with joy, and be led out with peace; the mountains and the hills shall break forth into singing before you, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands." Isaiah 55: 12

Who Are You?

"Now this is the testimony of John when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, "Who are you?" " John 1: 19

How did John answer this question? He told them that he was not the Christ. He also told them that he was not the resurrected Elijah, nor the Prophet. Well then, they asked, "Who are you, that we may give an answer to those who sent us? What do you say about yourself?" (vs. 22)

John answered, "I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness: Make straight the way of the Lord." (vs. 23) And then he told them who he was in relation to Jesus. "I baptize with water, but there stands One among you whom you do not know. It is He who, coming after me, is preferred before me, whose sandal strap I am not worthy to loose." (vs. 26 - 27) John tells them twice, in verses 31 and 33, that, at first, he did not know in an absolute way that Jesus was the Son of God. The Messiah's identity was revealed to him. God the Father had told John the Baptizer to be watching for One upon whom the Spirit descended and remained. (vs. 33) We can be sure that John did so diligently and with great hope. God did not tell John to try to "find himself". He told John to find the One.

In modern society, with the Gospel in print before us, our tendency is to be sure we've already found Jesus and know the whole of who He is. We "advanced" folk spend a lot of time and energy trying to figure out who we are, but not much time trying to figure out who He is. Should our efforts be so different from John the Baptist's or all those other Jews who waited expectantly for the Messiah? I don't believe so. They didn't have the written gospel to read as we do, and perhaps, in a way, we take Jesus and His revelation for granted because His message is so readily available to us. As Americans, we can open a Bible and read it anytime. And even if we do read it often, Jesus is so much more than a book we can open and close at will. He's infinite and cannot possibly be confined to, or summed up by one book. He's not just words on a page, He is the Word, the Living Word who moves and works in us and our world. It's not that the Bible isn't enough, it's that it's not all. Even if we could learn and comprehend everything written about Jesus in the Bible, there would be more to know, more to watch for, more to anticipate.

"And there are also many other things that Jesus did, which if they were written one by one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. Amen." John 21:25

If we spend our lives asking the question, "Who am I?" what have we gained, even if we're successful in our quest? Only ourselves. But if we spend our lives asking the question, "Who is Jesus?" and come to know even a fragment of that answer, we have so much more. Then we,"looking at Jesus" (vs. 36) will tell the people around us who we are in relation to Him, and will delight to say, "Behold the Lamb of God!"

Daye Phillippo

December 2008