The next day John was there again with two of his disciples. When he saw Jesus passing by, he said, “Look, the Lamb of God!”
When the two disciples heard him say this, they followed Jesus. Turning around, Jesus saw them following and asked, “What do you want?”
They said, “Rabbi” (which means Teacher), “where are you staying?”
“Come,” he replied, “and you will see.”
So they went and saw where he was staying, and spent that day with him. It was about the tenth hour. Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, was one of the two who heard what John had said and who had followed Jesus. The first thing Andrew did was to find his brother Simon and tell him, “We have found the Messiah” (that is, the Christ).
And he brought him to Jesus. Jesus looked at him and said, “You are Simon son of John. You will be called Cephas” (which, when translated, is Peter) (John 1:35-42 NIV).
Andrew sure was swift in coming to a conclusion that Jesus was the Messiah. Why was he anticipating the Messiah in the first place?
First, anticipation of the Messiah had swelled due to a prophecy of Daniel. The angel Gabriel told Daniel: “Know and understand this: From the issuing of the decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Anointed One, the ruler, comes, there will be seven ‘sevens,’ and sixty-two ‘sevens.’ It will be rebuilt with streets and a trench, but in times of trouble” (Daniel 9:25 NIV).
Thus over 550 years earlier, Gabriel said the Anointed One is coming. (Messiah is the Hebrew word for anointed one, and Christ is the Greek word for anointed one.)
Plus, Gabriel gave a time period! The term “seven” translates to a period of seven years. (Sometimes the term is translated “weeks,” with a day symbolizing a year, so again, a “week” is seven years.)
So, wise Hebrews who adhered to the Scriptures anticipated the Messiah at that time in world history.
Second, Magi, a sect of Persians, had traveled from the east to worship a person they referred to as “king of the Jews,” about thirty years earlier. It is possible they knew of an anticipation of the Christ among the Israelites based on Daniel’s prophecy. Yet their direct motivation for traveling to Judea was the astronomical phenomenon of a mobile star in the sky. That visit by the Magi surely was remembered by wise Israelites.
Third, in a more “ground roots” manner, there were surely some people who remembered the testimony of the shepherds, again about thirty years earlier, who gave a witness regarding a revelation by an angel of the Lord. That angel told them about the birth of the Messiah, and those shepherds went and saw the baby in person. They were witnesses that the Messiah was born.
The more I ponder the book of John, the more I consider that such Messianic anticipation was strong. Take John the Baptist for instance. That gentleman was from the tribe of Levi with parents in the lineage of Aaron, thus he was in the priesthood lineage. He should have been serving in the temple. Yet he was living out in the desert eating locusts and wild honey, and then he started baptizing Israelites in water. Previously, baptism was a rare practice reserved for foreigners who were converting to Judaism. Seems to me most people would have avoided John the Baptist. Why were so many people attracted to his preaching and his practice of baptizing? I think it was due to the Messianic anticipation.
And that Messianic anticipation is just what led Andrew and a friend to become students of John the Baptist. And as his students, they listened to him proclaim that Jesus was the Lamb of God. And after spending only so many hours with Jesus, by about four o’clock in the afternoon modern Western time, Andrew was convinced Jesus was the Messiah.
Another person besides Andrew who was anticipating the Messiah was a Samaritan woman. Simply carrying out her daily routine of drawing water, that woman ended up having the conversation of a lifetime with Jesus. Near the end of their conversation, the woman stated: “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us” (John 4:25).
She was anticipating a Messiah, and she was not a Hebrew.
So were other Samaritans. When she was telling townspeople about her conversation with Jesus, as recorded in John 4:29, she said, “Could this be the Christ?”
Jesus ended up staying with those folks for two days. And as Scripture records: They said to the woman, “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world” (John 4:42).
Wow!
Thus some people, whose hearts were open to the truth of God, were prepared to hear the gentle statements by Jesus that He was the Messiah they had been waiting for.
Jesus is the Messiah!
Hunter Irvine
Scripture Love Blog
