JOHN085 - Ya'll Are Gonna See Heaven Open

John 1:43-51

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast. Yesterday we were talking about that little speech I got as a first-time author where helpful people were like, this is the kind of stuff you're gonna see now. So get ready for that. And then we likewised that to something much, much, much, much, much more significant, which is the scene we get here in John 1, where we're wrapping up this initial week of Jesus being out and about and doing stuff, and Jesus is assembling the beginnings of his party, who he's gonna roll through this story with. And at the end of chapter one, he offers this cryptic but very exciting promise about all the stuff that the disciples are going to see. And I think if we look a little bit closer at the language behind the text, we're gonna see that that promise to the disciples, that you know you're gonna see some amazing stuff, is also a promise to the reader, to you and me. Maybe I'm stretching it, but I don't think so. Let's take a look at it. All right, this situation we got here. Toward the end of John chapter one, we meet Philip and Nathaniel. Now, we don't call Nathaniel Bartholomew here in John, but usually because of the way the list of disciples plays out, the historically Christians have associated Nathaniel and Bartholomew together. A lot of people had more than one name in Bible times. I mean, just the two sentences before we meet Nathaniel, we got a guy who has two names, Simon, Peter, but also really Cephas. So kind of three names. So not that weird. Probably the guy we're looking at here is Nathaniel slash Bartholomew, when you see him around the other gospels. And as we've discussed, Nathaniel has got a bit of a snarky streak to him. He's not from Beth Seda, up near Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee, where Philip and Andrew and Peter are from. We later find out that he's from Cana, which is pretty interesting because we're gonna go to Cana here at the beginning of chapter two, and there's gonna be a very famous wedding scene that occurs there. So maybe the snark we get from Nathaniel is nothing more than like a high school rivalry. You know, just think about whatever town is by the town you grew up in. They were terrible, they were awful. Does anything good happen at that dopey school? I mean, who knows? Maybe there was some larger thing that is lost to history that people thought was wrong with Nazareth that you know, we just don't know about anymore. But this is what we get to see from Nathaniel, and then Nathaniel gets dragged into the thing by Philip, and very quickly he flips and he sees it. And Jesus says, I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Philip called you. That moves the needle for Nathaniel. He says, Rabbi, you're the son of God, you are the king of Israel. We've spent the last few days discussing that confession in light of other confessions of Christ from around the gospels, and then we get into this last little bit of John chapter one. Jesus said, You believe because I told you I saw you under the fig tree. You shall see greater things than that. Now that kind of corresponds, it sort of bookends with what we looked at yesterday, with the stuff with Thomas at the very end about seeing and believing. And here to me, it kind of seems like the intonation that Jesus is making is you saw a sign, you saw a wonder, and that was compelling to you. And so you think you've seen something now, and so you believe. Well, just hang around. Do you really believe? Have you really seen Nathaniel? I mean, you're gonna see a lot more. I just I like it. I like that Jesus is always throughout the Gospels deflecting the idea of being some sort of purveyor of cheap tricks, of parlor magic, of little sights of hand and tomfoolery that can get gullible people to believe. He's always pushing back on that. I mean, at one point, people are demanding a sign, like, yeah, we'll believe. Just show us some stuff. And Jesus is like, it's a wicked and perverse generation that demands a sign. He isn't ultimately trying to compel people to believe in him because he can do miracles. And miracles is a perfectly fine term for what Jesus is doing. It's a biblical term for what Jesus is doing, but really, signs more conveys the meaning of the miracles Jesus does as they're presented in the gospels, because Jesus doesn't do stuff for no reason, he doesn't just do a miracle, and that's it. There's always theology to it. He's always teaching when he breaks the laws of time and space miraculously. So this is nice. It's a good start for Nathaniel, and at this point, we are kind of a proxy for Nathaniel as we're reading along. It's a nice start for us. You know, we're out of the gate, and Jesus has been affirmed prophetically. It even looks like he wields power that we as a reader might not totally understand yet in John chapter one. And we've got this contrast in our mind between the grand power of Jesus that is conveyed in the prologue, but then in the second chunk of John chapter one, we have a more muted version of Jesus. He seems impressive, but we're not seeing the fullness of that divinity and speaking existence out of non-existence and being the life and the light of men that we get in the prologue yet. So this tension is just here, it's lingering with us, and Nathaniel is a proxy for us. That tension is there for him as well. But Nathaniel's seen enough at this point to be like, I'm in. And I think it'd be perfectly reasonable coming out of John chapter one for us as the reader to be like, all right, um, I'd like to know more, but I'm in. But then there's something interesting that happens here linguistically between the first thing that Jesus says to Nathaniel at the end of the chapter and the final thing he says to Nathaniel at the end of the chapter. And that is, well, that I don't think he's talking just to Nathaniel anymore. Clearly, he's talking to Nathaniel when he says, You believe, because I told you I saw you under the fig tree, you shall see greater things than that. That is one-on-one, still chatting with the guy. And the the underlying language, the Greek, supports that. The two you's that appear in chapter 50, you believe, because I well, there's really three. You believe because I told you, I saw you under the fig tree, you shall see greater things than that. All the different forms of you that are employed there are singular in Greek. Pesteves and opse are both inarguably, I'm just talking to you language. Now in English, we don't have this distinction anymore between I'm talking to you as an individual and I'm talking to you as three kids or you as a group of people. Texas has tried to compensate for this by adding back into the language y'all. If any of you speak Spanish or even remember your first year of Spanish that maybe you took all the way back in high school or something, in well, Mexico doesn't do it, but other parts of the Spanish-speaking world, they will use the to form, which corresponds to the you form for us. But then they will also use a vosotros form, which refer which is a y'all form. In a lot of American Spanish, you don't learn the vosotros form, you just kind of learn that it exists. And if you want to talk to a lot of people at once, informally, you would just say to, and then you'd conjugate the verb to match that, or you would say ustedes, if you were speaking more formally to a group of people. Well, unlike English and like Spanish, the Greek of the New Testament era has a distinction between a singular you and a plural you. And after Jesus gets done talking to Nathaniel in verse 50, you believe because I told you I saw you under the fig tree, you shall see greater things than that. Then in the next verse in 51, he flips to the y'all form. The plural form of you being used here in the Greek is obsessed they. And again, it's inarguably plural, and so then we go like this. Jesus then added, I tell you, obsessed they, the truth, obsessed they, you shall see heaven open and the angels of God descending and descending on the Son of Man. So if we were all native first century Greek speakers and we were reading this in the original language, which in this hypothetical would be our heart language, old school Greek, then this passage would read we differently to us. We would picture it differently. We would very naturally intuit that Jesus has a group of people there, but he's making eye contact with Nathaniel. He's like, You believe because of the fig tree thing, but you will see greater things than that. And then in that moment, then Jesus steps back and he's like, Yeah, now I'm talking to all of you. And he kind of puts his hands out, gesturing to the whole group. And he says, I tell all of you the truth. All of you shall see heaven open and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man. I'm really uh enthusiastic about the English translations that you have, that I have, that we have in front of us and that we read from. But every language has strengths and weaknesses. And in this case, there's one little bit of nuance here that is a bit lost because of how we wield English now. And so occasionally we kind of have to dip back into the original language to understand the scene a bit better. Why is this important? Well, for one thing, I can't think of a scene where Nathaniel is on screen and he does see the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man or heaven open in a literal sense. So if we read what Jesus is saying in 51, the big final promise here at the end of the chapter, as being literal, well then Nathaniel definitely never sees that or it isn't recorded. So it's good to know that Jesus is talking to everybody, because if we take what Jesus says here about heaven opening and angels and all of this stuff happening as literal, then we could say, oh well, that kind of sounds like a description of the transfiguration. Peter and John, two of the people who were standing there, they were there to see that. So if this is an all y'all thing, like, you know, you're all going to see this or at least be adjacent to it, okay, that would make more sense then. Tomorrow, what we're going to talk about is the fact that I'm not sure this is meant to be taken literally. I think what Jesus is saying to them here is in keeping with the idea of if you've seen the Father, you've seen me. I and the Father are one. The Son reveals the Father, you know, at the end of the prologue, John 1.18. No one has ever seen God, but God, the one and only, who is at the Father's side, has made him known. Jesus reveals the Father. Jesus opens heaven to the inner circle of disciples, the wider circle of disciples, his distant followers who will come generations later, he opens heaven to you and me as well. I suspect that Jesus is making a larger spiritual point here about how he's going to open heaven and reveal the Father, and the things of heaven will be interacting with the things of earth. You know, it's kind of the angels ascending and descending. And I also think that this is a nod to Jacob and the vision in Genesis 28 that Jacob has when he lays down to go to sleep that night out in the desert. And I kind of want to cover it all right now because I just halfway did, but it deserves more time. And I want to finish chapter one right. So we're going to save some more of that for tomorrow. We also need to look at some things from Daniel to make sense of these final remarks from Jesus. So we'll just call this the halfway point and we'll finish out this set of thoughts next time around. Fun. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible now podcast. Let's do this again soon.