Triple Fire Emojis
December 12, 2021
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
Scripture Reading
John 1:6-8
6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7 He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him.8 He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light.
In a dark room, it helps to have someone to follow, someone to show the way. And in a dark world, God intends for us to have faithful men and women who we can admire and emulate—but in our day, it would seem, so few leaders finish well. This morning, we’ll look at the life and death of a man who witnessed to the light in a way we can admire and emulate. Before we talk about him, let’s pray. “Dear heavenly Father . . .”
Introduction: A Ray of Light in a Dark World
There would be many ways to describe the darkness of the world that first received Jesus. One way to describe just one aspect of the darkness of the world that first received Jesus would be to describe the fractured nature of the only true religion, namely, the Old Testament faith or Hebrew faith or Jewish faith. The Hebrew faith was the only true faith, the only true religion, but if we were to be alive at the time of the birth of Christ, our experience of the one true faith would not have been singular or monolithic, meaning we would not have experienced the Hebrew faith as one experience and one voice. Rather, our experience would have been fractured, an experience of tribalism and differing factions within the one true religion. God is one, but his people were many—and not in a good way. Everyone had their favorite news channel; everyone had their favorite church denomination—and in some cases there might not have been much difference between the secular political views you held and the religion you practiced. You might not be aware of this religious splintering if you’re only casually familiar with the world of the New Testament, with the world of Israel and the Roman Empire in the year of our Lord, so let me help.
First, there were the Pharisees—the most well-known group, perhaps, because of the way Jesus and the Pharisees continually locked antlers. Which might lead you to believe that the Pharisees were, therefore, the worst manifestation of the Hebrew faith. I’m not so sure. Some point out that they were the best and biggest of all the Jewish denominational options, which is the reason why Jesus went after them the hardest. The Pharisees took the law of God seriously. And rather than repeating the mistakes of others who came before, the Pharisees built precepts on top of laws and rules on top of statues just so that they would not repeat the liberal, wishy-washy falling away of many who came before them and currently were around them.
Speaking of being liberal or progressive, there were also the Sadducees. They tended to be less serious about God’s Word, not believing in a resurrection or angels or several other doctrines. The Sadducees tended to be wealthy and, where it suited them, were more willing to collude with the Romans.
Speaking of Rome, there were the Jewish Zealots who wanted to overthrow the Roman occupation of Israel and at times made attempts to do so.
Then, on the far other end of the Zealots, were the Jewish tax collectors who worked for Rome to abusively extort their own people of Israel. When I say Jewish tax collectors, it was not, strictly speaking, so much of a religious aspect of the Hebrew faith but more of a non-aspect of religious faith. These Jews were only Jewish in ethnicity and nationality but held their spiritual and national identity so lowly that wealth was more important than God. (Jesus, by the way, when he called the twelve disciples had at least one Zealot and at least one tax collector, which made for some interesting small group Bible studies, I’m sure.)
There were the Essenes, who we don’t read about much. And there’s a reason for that. The Essenes looked at all the darkness and all the fracturing around them, and they bailed. They went to live in caves and form alternate communities of faith and schools in the hope that they might find purity through abstention, purity through withdrawal. They were, maybe we would say, monks and nuns.
Finally, there was a faithful, believing remnant of Hebrew people, a remnant mingled among these factions or outside of these factions, a remnant who longed for the Messiah to come. By calling them a remnant, by definition, they were not many, but we do read about many of them in the Christmas story in Luke 1 and 2, women like Elizabeth and Anna and Mary and men like and Zachariah and Simeon and Joseph. I presume many others in the remnant go without mention.
Again, one way to describe just one aspect of the darkness of the world that first received Jesus would be to describe the fractured nature of the only true religion, namely, the Hebrew faith or Jewish faith: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Zealots, Jewish tax collectors, the Essenes, and the faithful, believing remnant.
To highlight the darkness further, I’ll mention that there was no line of Davidic kings ruling over Israel. Instead, a group of men with the family name Herod ruled over Israel (Herod the Great, Herod Antipas, Herod I, Herod II, and others), but they were awful.
And to highlight the darkness even more, there had not been an authorized prophet of the Lord speaking the pure, Inspired Word of God in over four hundred years. The intertestamental time, as we call it, the time between the end of Old and beginning of the New Testament, was not a time without activity, but it was a time without a prophet of the Lord with a Word from the Lord. From the book of Malachi—which Pastor Ben read at the start of the worship service—to the New Testament, there was four hundred years of silence. We can talk about awkward pauses of silence in a conversation. This was four centuries of awkward silence in the conversation with God.
Until… until God began to speak through a prophet and a wildman named John. We often call him John the Baptist because of the way baptism featured prominently in his ministry. But it would be better, perhaps, to call him John the Witness,[1] for that’s how our passage identifies him. Look again with me at our passage, at John 1:6–8.
There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light.
Into the darkness, God sent a man to witness, to preach light and heat to a people in great darkness. Amid all the fracturing—even we might say all the shattering of the only true religion, the Hebrew faith—God began to call his people back to himself through one voice, one ray of light shining on the east side of the Jordan River who challenged the people to keep the main thing the main thing, namely, the promise of God’s strong, firm, holy loving-kindness through the coming of the Christ or the Messiah.
That’s how God used John. And when I look at all the fracturing in our world, in a way, that’s what we still need: faithful human witnesses who point away from themselves to the beauty of the Messiah. We need women and men who keep the main thing the main thing, men and women who witness to Jesus as the light and faithfully shine out the implications of the light for our lives.
So, why pay attention to John the Witness? Why in the introduction to this gospel is there such attention on John the Witness? God wants us to pay attention to John the Witness because John shows us, in our fractured world, faithful human witnessing to the light. And, oh, we do we need that today. My words are intentional when I say faithful and human witnessing. Those are the only two points I want to make about him. First, John was a faithful witness and, second, John was a human witness.
A Faithful Witness
When I say faithful, what I have in mind is a love of God that led to a love of truth that led to boldness. John the Witness had a love of God that led to a love of truth that led to boldness. And that is part of what God used to get people ready to embrace the light. And it still is.
Now, a few weeks ago, I sent an email to the whole church about the new job openings we have at church. When I use the email service we use, it suggests that you put an emoji in the subject line, which I typically ignore. But that time I put the little smiley face with cool dude glasses. No one complained. Then, I sent an email last week after church with a ton of information, and I forgot to update that part of the subject line. In the office, the guys were dogging me as “that old guy” who needed to stop with all the emojis in the church emails. Not cool, bro, they said. Well, that’s fine. But I did, despite their negativity on my emoji game, title this sermon “Triple Fire Emojis.” My contention, which I shared with the staff, is that if the sermons of John the Witnesses had been captured on YouTube, everyone would have shared them with fire emojis. People would have titled sermon clips from John the Baptist the way people title sermon clips on YouTube: “John the Witness OWNS the Religious Leaders.”
I’ll give you two examples of John’s boldness. The first comes from Luke 3, and a snippet of his preaching out in the wilderness. At one time or another, we’ve probably all seen someone in an urban context stand on a street corner and draw a crowd, a street preacher. John was so sent by God that people went out into the middle of nowhere to hear him preach not from a stepstool on a street corner but rock on a river’s edge in the desert. To those who came to hear this is what he shouted at them,
You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits in keeping with repentance. And do not begin to say to yourselves, “We have Abraham as our father.” For I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham. Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. (Luke 3:7–9)
When John says, “Don’t say to me, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’” we might say instead, “Don’t tell me you know God because as a kid your father brought you to church. Show me your living faith by how you live—because God has poured gas into the chainsaw, and he’s primed the pump, he’s set the chainsaw the base of the tree, and he’s hunched over and ready to pull the starter rope and cut down to a stump anyone who does not live for God.” Fire, fire, fire.
John shows us what it looks like to be a faithful witness. He shows us what it looks like to have a love for God that leads to a love of truth that leads to boldness. It was needed. It still is.
So, Luke 3 gives us one example of the triple fire. In Matthew 14, we get another glimpse of John’s light shined into a dark place, although more narrowly focused.
Herod had seized John and bound him and put him in prison for the sake of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, because John had been saying to him, “It is not lawful for you to have her.” (Matt. 14:3–4)
That’s a mouthful. But essentially a Jewish political leader named Herod had an affair. Again, he wasn’t simply a Roman leader and thus a secular politician but a Jewish leader. That detail is important. Perhaps we would say Herod was a politician who claimed to be a Christian or at least grew up in the church. And John the Witness told this married politician that it was wrong for him to take the wife of another man. You shall not commit adultery, he said. And Herod threw him in jail.
This is part of what it means to be faithful. In a climate of political correctness, we must still say to those who claim to be Christians that conduct matters, especially if you’re a public figure. We shouldn’t have public figures who claim to be Christians and yet also commit unrepentant adultery. We shouldn’t have public figures who claim to be Christians and yet also promote homosexual marriage as morally equivalent to heterosexual marriage—because according to God, homosexual marriage is not morally equivalent to heterosexual marriage. We shouldn’t have public figures who claim to be Christians and yet also promote transgender ideology… or abuse power… or stoke racial division… or promote policies that allow for the murder of the unborn… and so on and so on.
But before any of you share your fire emojis, John the Witness would say the chainsaw is at the root of your tree because he’s seen way too many people who would say “amen” to every one of those statements but are also engaged Christian couples who think they can have sex just because they might be married someday. John has seen too many who would “amen” every one of those statements but look at pornography every week or who would “amen” every one of those statements but haven’t been an active member in a local church for years, a church where they are known and loved and serve and tithe but, oh boy, do know how to tell those people out there how to live for Jesus.
The ministry of John the Witness was not to say the chainsaw sits at some tree over there but to say it lays at the root of the Christian forest and, to quote him, “Every tree… that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire” (Luke 3:9).
I describe John the Witness as a faithful witness rather than merely a bold witness because he knew what the moment called for. In other words, boldness is not the only tool in the toolbox. Christians also have tears. King David once wrote, “My eyes shed streams of tears, because people do not keep your law” (Ps. 119:136). Prophets like Jeremiah and, at times, Jesus also had tears to plead with people. But I do love that John knew when it was time to swing the hammer or, as it were, the axe.
A Human Witness
But we need to see John not only as a faithful witness, but also as a human witness. I mean something specific by this. He was not the light but bore witness to the light. He was not God but bore witness to God. And John knew this. John knew he was a human witness. It’s really good to know who you are and who you are not.
Note the flow the beginning of this gospel, what is often called the prologue. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made” (1:1, 3). Then we read in v. 6, “there was a man sent from God.” What is the implication? In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . And there was a man…”? What’s the implication? John the Witness ain’t God. John is only a human witness. For all his faithful, bold preaching, he’s also limited and weak and had doubts. And in this way, he also shows us what it looks like to be a faithful human witness to the light.
We see some of his humanness in Luke 7. After John was put in prison for his comments about Herod’s adultery, John began to become disillusioned and began to have doubts that Jesus was the Messiah. So, John sent two of his disciples to Jesus to ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?” (Luke 7:19). Essentially, John is saying to Jesus, “Are you the light, or did I mess this up?”
“Jesus,” John says to him, “I’m in prison. I’m here because I’m following you. I’ve done nothing wrong. Are you the Messiah or not? My experience of your rule and reign neither looks like I think it should look nor even how the Bible seems in some places to say it will look.”
Some of us might say, “Jesus, I have cancer. My experience of your rule and reign neither looks like I think it should look nor even how the Bible seems in some places to say it will look.” Others might say, “Jesus, I have lost my job. My experience of your rule and reign neither looks like I think it should look nor even how the Bible seems in some places to say it will look?” Others might say, “Jesus, my parents are getting a divorce, and I don’t want to split time between them. I want them to love each other, and I want us to be a family (just like you want us to be!). My experience of your rule and reign neither looks like I think it should look nor even how the Bible seems in some places to say it will look.”
How will Jesus answer the questions? Here’s what we read after John’s disciples ask Jesus.
In that hour he [Jesus] healed many people of diseases and plagues and evil spirits, and on many who were blind he bestowed sight. And he answered them, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who is not offended by me.” (Luke 7:21–23)
I find it interesting that Jesus doesn’t answer John’s concern—not directly anyway. If I were at an airport, and I saw someone who looked like Michael Jordan, and I went up to him and said, “Excuse me, are you MJ?” The person could answer me with a “Yes.” Or, I suppose, the person could unzip his athletic warm-up to reveal a Chicago Bulls uniform, and then he could grab a basketball from his bag—and when he does, you notice his fingers are covered in NBA Championship rings—and then he could start dribbling down the airport terminal and then jump over three people pretending to dunk the basketball on a ledge that looks 12 feet high, all while doing it in his iconic Nike jumpman pose. That, I supposed, would be one way to answer the question, “Are you Michael Jordan or should I look for another?”
“Jesus,” John, asks, “are you the one who is enough for every need we could ever have?” Jesus answers: “Well, I could tell you a simple, Yes, but why don’t I spend an hour or two doing many of the things that the book of Isaiah promised the Messiah would do (various passages, but especially Isaiah 61:1ff). I’ll heal the sick and the lepers, give sight to the blind, raise the dead, and preach the good news to the poor.” In short, Jesus says, “I am the one who was to come. I am the light of the world. And I am enough. I’m enough for you when you are in jail or when you have cancer or when parent’s divorce.”
The point I want to stress is that when John has doubts, he brings them to Jesus. Actually, he gets other believing friends to help him. Your doubts about God are not dangerous unless you let them become dangerous. If you hide your human doubts or ignore your doubts or cultivate your doubts or never confess your doubts with others church members, then, yeah, your doubts will grow. But when brought into the light, when shared with others, when confessed to Jesus, your human doubts might be the very means for you to know God better.
Ultimately, John dies in prison. He’s beheaded. We read in Matthew,
And his disciples came and took the body and buried it, and they went and told Jesus. Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a desolate place by himself. (Matt. 14:12–13)
Conclusion
And that brings us full circle. The language of “witness” evokes the image of trials and court rooms. Witnesses bear witness—it’s what they do. It’s what John did. But as the gospel of John goes on, a question develops: who is really on trial? At first, it seems as though Jesus is on trial. But as the gospel goes on, the attention of the book shifts. It’s not Jesus who is on trial, but readers of the gospel of John who are on trial. The evidence is clear; witness after witness shows that Jesus is the Messiah who saves his people.
And so the question comes to you and I, “Now, dear reader, what will you do with the Light? Will you receive him and believe in him and follow him? Or will you reject him?” John the Witness is not putting Jesus on trial, but us. Into our dark fractured world, even a dark fractured world of Christianity with so many different hot takes about so many different topics, John the Witness asks us if you believe Jesus is the light. Look at our verses again.
There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. (1:6–7)
God’s desire is that all might believe. To be more concrete, that you might believe and in so believing, that you might also become faithful, human witnesses to the light in a dark world. The light of Jesus Christ spreads when he lights our lights and then we spread that light to others, very much the way light spreads at a candlelight service on Christmas Eve—one lit candle lighting another candle and lighting another and another until the world doesn’t feel so dark. You have a role to play, the role of a faithful human witness to the light.
Let’s pray . . .
[1] John Piper does this in his sermon “John Was Not the Light, but a Witness to the Light” at Bethlehem Baptist Church on October 12, 2008.
Family Discussion Questions
John seems to be worked up about all the people who claim to be Christians but don’t act like it. How do know if you are a Christian or not?
What doubts to you have about God? Are you doing things to help those doubts grow (e.g., hiding your doubts or ignoring your doubts) or are you doing things to help your doubts shrink (e.g., bringing them to other believers who help you bring them to God)?
While John is not the light or the Messiah, Jesus is. How might it encourage you to know that you don’t have to be Jesus but that Jesus is Jesus?
