John 01 Round Two: Logos, Johnny B, and Sitting Under a Tree

Start with wonder, not assumptions: John opens by taking us back before time, presenting Jesus as the Word who was with God and is God, the source of life whose light the darkness can’t extinguish. We share why this Gospel is our favorite to hand to new believers and curious skeptics alike, and we map the big picture—authorship, audience, Ephesus roots, and the driving purpose that you would believe and have life in His name.

From there, we move through the prologue’s rich themes—Logos, creation, Trinity—and watch John the Baptist step into his role as witness, not rival. His cry, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” frames Jesus’ mission with Passover power and points to a salvation that is more than advice; it’s rescue. You’ll hear how the Spirit’s descent marks Jesus as the chosen one and how the earliest followers respond with a simple, transformative rhythm: hear the witness, come and see, stay and learn, then bring a friend.

We also talk about skepticism and surprise through Nathanael’s story—“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”—and how one moment of being truly known flips doubt into confession. Along the way, we introduce John’s structure of seven signs and seven “I Am” statements, a design that reveals not just what Jesus does but who He is: Bread of Life, Light of the World, Good Shepherd, Resurrection and Life. This isn’t a distant theology lesson; it’s an invitation to encounter the Lord who sees you where you are, renames your future like Peter’s, and offers grace upon grace.

If you’re ready to move beyond a vague idea of Jesus into a living relationship with the Lord and Life-Giver, hit play and join the journey through John. If this conversation helps you, subscribe, share it with a friend who’s curious about faith, and leave a review to help others find the show. What stood out to you most from John 1? We’d love to hear.

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The More We Dig. The More We Find.

Scripture quotations taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation (NLT).
Copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation.
Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage For John
• 2:10 Why John Wrote And For Whom
• 4:15 Theme: Jesus As God
• 6:45 The Word And The Trinity
• 9:05 Light, Life, And Rejection
• 11:20 John The Baptist’s Witness
• 14:30 Behold The Lamb Of God
• 16:30 First Disciples And “Come And See”
• 18:40 Nathanael’s Confession And Promise
• 20:00 Personal Takeaways And Prayer

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome to the Bible Breakdown Podcast. Every day, we take one chapter of the Bible, dig deeper, and discover that the more we dig, the more we find. You can find out more at the BibleBreakdown.com. Now let's grow in God's Word together. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Bible Breakdown Podcast with your host, Pastor Brandon. Today is the day. I've got to go ahead and tell you as we get ready to jump into the Gospel of John. I almost skipped it. And it's not for the reasons you would think. The reason why I almost skipped the Gospel of John is because, like, I don't know if we're going to be able to do this gospel justice. This is my favorite of the four. Now, I love God's Word. I love all of God's Word. I love all four of the Gospels for different reasons. But when I say I love the Gospel of John, I'm I love the Gospel of John. And I love it so much that there's just, there's no way that we could do the Gospel of John justice because I mean, people write entire like series and volumes of books just on this gospel. So I want to highly recommend to you that when you have any kind of extra time, I would love for you just to take some next steps when it comes to every one of these chapters. I'm going to talk very briefly about a lot of the different theological ideas in the Gospel of John. But anytime you have a question, make a note of it and write it down somewhere and go back into this because the Gospel of John is so theologically rich that it is just is beautiful and it is wonderful. And as a matter of fact, when someone gives their life to Christ to make a decision to follow Jesus, and they come to me as a pastor and say, What should I read? I always tell them to start with the Gospel of John because it is just so amazing. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take about five minutes and give you kind of an overview of who it is that wrote this gospel, why they wrote it, and then we're going to dive into chapter one. And it's possible the first five verses in the Gospel of John might be the most important verses in the entire New Testament. And we're going to talk about why in just a moment. But first of all, who wrote this? Well, it was written by a guy named John, of course. And his name is not actually mentioned in the Gospel of John. He's going to refer to himself over and over again as the disciple whom Jesus loved. And we don't know from this who that was. What we realize, and I love this, is that's where he's finding his identity. He's saying, My identity is that I am loved by God, which is amazing. But let's also go ahead and say, it's awesome when you can go ahead and say, by the way, I was Jesus' favorite. And what we believe happened within the context of the Gospels is the Gospel of John was written not to talk about the blow-by-blow account of a biography of Jesus, but it was written to talk about the message of Jesus. And that's why John is not interested in giving you all the details as to who he is and all this. He's really trying to focus on Jesus. Now, the reason why we know that it was John was because, number one, most all scholarly uh people say that John was probably the closest to Jesus. You had the 12 disciples. Then Jesus had the inner three, James, John, and Peter. And then he had John as kind of like his right hand man. But also, unanimously, just about every early church father, the people that lived during the time when the apostles were still alive, almost unanimously they give the credit for this gospel to the apostle John. So we know that John wrote it. The next question would be when did he write this? There's two schools of thought on this. And John was not as interested in writing the date down, so we don't know exactly. One group of people put this very late, around 96 A.D. And those people say that John would have written this right before he died, and he was seeing the narrative going on in the early church, and they were reading the other gospels, and he wanted to just zoom in on the message of Jesus. That's what some scholars think. There's a growing list of scholarship that says that John may have been written around 60 to 65 A.D. And there's not really a good reason for either one. You could go either way. John was not interested in saying anything about himself, he was interested in spreading the message of Jesus. So we simply don't know for sure when he wrote it. We just know he wrote it obviously within his lifetime. Now, where did John write this? John wrote it from the city of Ephesus. Ephesus became John's kind of ministry hub. And we we're gonna read later in John chapter 19 that when Jesus was dying on the cross, he looks at John and says, John, will you take care of my mother Mary? Because I'm gonna, I'm, you know, this is my situation is about to change, right? I'm gonna die and rise again. And so history says that John moved Mary to Ephesus and spent the rest of uh she spent the rest of her life there, John taking care of her. So it would have been in Ephesus. And then who was he primarily writing to? Well, in the book of Revelation, also written by John, we see that that the Holy Spirit speaks to the seven churches. Those seven churches were likely the seven churches that John oversaw and was a bishop over as well. And so most scholarship is that John was primarily writing to these seven churches to spread the message of what Jesus said when he was on this earth. And if you were to look at the overall narrative of the Gospel of John, John surrounds everything around seven signs that prove that Jesus is God. And there's seven times when Jesus says, I am, I am the way, the truth, and the life. I am the resurrection and the life. I am the door, I am the good shepherd. And so he is telling everybody who he is, and he would work a miracle, and then that miracle will get everybody's attention, and then they would hear the message. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna rally around this theme. The overall theme of the Gospel of John is to let the reader understand that Jesus is God. The book of Matthew talks about Jesus as the rightful king of the Jews. Mark talks about Jesus being a miracle worker and a suffering savior. Luke talks about Jesus as the healer and the and the Messiah. John goes a whole nother step and he says he's not just an earthly king, he's not just the awaited for deliverer, he is God all the way back to Genesis when God said, Let there be light. And so what John is going to do from the very beginning is he is gonna use this example of the word as a a word to describe Jesus, saying that Jesus is the divine, the Greek word is logos, the divine word of God. And so he goes all the way to the top and he says, Don't get it twisted. Jesus wasn't just a righteous man, he is God all the way back from the beginning. And so the key verse of the gospel of John is John literally tells you why he wrote this gospel, and he says this, John chapter 20, verse 31. But these are written so that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing in him, you will have life by the power of his name. So the reason why John wrote this was that you may believe that Jesus is God, and that that believing will give you life and power in his name. So that's the whole reason why John has done this. And it's very important for us to grapple with this. In a world we live in, where Jesus is thought of to be either not real or not divine, John is saying he is both real and divine. I love how C.S. Lewis said it once. He said, Jesus cannot be everything you think he is. He is either a liar, he is a lunatic, or he is Lord. So, in other words, the things that Jesus said, when he said, I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father except by me. That's a pretty bold statement, if you think about it. So either he's lying, he's crazy, or he is Lord. He really can't be all three. And so, what I'm interested in as we read this together is to become reacquainted with Jesus, not just as the Savior, but as Lord and as God all the way from the beginning. And so I'm just gonna gush about this. This is my favorite gospel. And so, what I want to see kind of in my mind, rather, is you and I sitting across the coffee table. We're sharing a cup of coffee, we've got our Bibles open, and we are just gushing about God's words. We're gonna stop along the way and try not to do too much. I don't want all of these podcasts to be like an hour long, but just so much good stuff. And so we're just gonna, I'm I want to be your tour guide and kind of reintroduce you to Jesus, not just as savior, but as divine sovereign, as king and as Lord. And as we learn about him, he is gonna breathe fresh life and give us power to live in our world. So I love this. Let's jump in, okay? Finally, here we are, chapter one, verse one. Now, I'm gonna go ahead and tell you the first five verses. John is gonna give some of the most elegant, some of the most beautiful, and some of the most careful wording in the entire New Testament. Because what John is going to do is he is gonna try to find a way to just very carefully, almost like a surgeon, very, very carefully as he's inspired by the Holy Spirit to tell you, and he's gonna say the word, he's talking about Jesus, that Jesus is God, but at the same time, he is not the Father, he is not the Spirit, He is the Son, the divine Trinity, that we have the Trinity, you have Father, Son, and Spirit, same in essence, as far as they're all God, different in person. The Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, but they are equal in power and divinity, separate in person. And so he's going to say this very, very carefully. And so I want you to hear this and hear it as though you've never heard of Jesus before. And all of a sudden, John says, Let me tell you the best news you've ever heard. Here we go. If you got your Bibles open, your coffee ready, John chapter one. In the beginning, the word already existed. The word was with God, and the word was God. He existed in the beginning with God. God created everything through him, and nothing was created except through him. The word gave life to everything that was created, and his life brought light to everyone. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never extinguish it. And so what John is doing is he's pulling all the way back to Genesis 1, verse 1 through 3, because Genesis 1 says, In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters. So you have God created the word, everything that we see. And so he is saying, Jesus and the Father and the Spirit are separate but one. It's just mind-blowing, it's ridiculous. But he says it to say, hey, you got to understand, every everything I'm about to talk about about this person, he's not just a man, he's God. Okay, here we go. Verse 6. We're gonna talk about the forerunner, the guy I lovingly call Johnny B. Here we go. God sent a man, John the Baptist, to tell about the light so that everyone might believe because of his testimony. John himself was not the light, he was simply a witness to tell about the light. The one who is the true light, who gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He came into the very world he created, but the world didn't recognize him. He came to his own people, and even they rejected him. But to all who believed him and accepted him, he gave the right to become children of God. They are reborn, not with a physical birth, resulting in human passion or plan, but a birth that comes from God. So the word became human and made his home among us. He was full of unfailing love and faithfulness. We have seen his glory, the glory of the Father's one and only Son. Pause for a moment. So once again, John is saying, remember that word from the very beginning, that is the Son of God. The Son came to the earth, he entered into our time and space, born as a man, clothed himself in flesh, still God, but yet housed in flesh. The divine mystery of how God was able to be God and man at the same time. All right, verse 15. John testified about him when he shouted to the crowds, This is the one I was talking about when I said, Someone is coming after me who is far greater than I am, for he existed long before me. From his abundance, we have all received one gracious blessing after another. For the law was given through Moses, but God's unfailing love and faithfulness came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but the unique one who himself, who is himself God, is near to the Father's heart. He has revealed God to us. This was John's testimony when the Jewish leaders sent priest and temple assistants from Jerusalem to ask John, Who are you? Who gave you the right? And he said, I am not the Messiah. Well, then who are you? They said, Are you Elijah? No, he replied. Are you the prophet we are expecting? No. Then who are you? We need an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself? And then John replied in the words of the prophet Isaiah, he's saying, I am a voice shouting in the wilderness. Clear the way for the Lord's coming. Then the Pharisees who had who had been sent asked him, If you aren't the Messiah or Elijah or the prophet, then what right do you have to baptize? John told them, I baptize with water, but right here in the crowd is someone you do not recognize. Through his, though his ministry follows mine, I am not even worthy to be his slave and untie the straps of his sandals. This encounter took place in Bethany, in an area east of the Jordan River where John was baptized. And now pause for a moment. The reason why John, the writer of this, would have such information about John the Baptist is because a lot of historians think that John was originally a disciple of John the Baptist. That's why not only would he have the message like the other gospels do, but he's also going to know where it was as well. And what John the Baptist just got through doing is he was quoting a scripture that was saying that before Messiah will come, there will be a forerunner, a hype man who will prepare the area for the Messiah to come. And so what John is saying is like, I'm, I am not all these other people. I am just a messenger to tell you, get ready, because the king is coming. Can you imagine? You imagine John saying that. The disciples of John and everybody around would have known what he was talking about. So you imagine they're looking around, going, the Messiah's here among us? The Messiah's here. And just the excitement. And it makes you wonder if Jesus was in the crowd, just kind of, just kind of nodding, going, Yeah, buddy, you got this. You got this, just cheering him on, knowing his time was going to come. All right, verse 29. The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. He is the one I was talking about when I said, A man is coming after me who is far greater than I am, for he existed long before me. I did not recognize him as the Messiah, but I have been baptizing with water so that I might be, so that he might be revealed to Israel. Then John testified, I saw the Holy Spirit descending like a dove from heaven and resting upon him. I didn't know he was the one, but when God sent me to baptize with water, he told me, The one on whom you see the Spirit descend and rest is the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit. I saw this happen to Jesus, so I testify that he is the chosen one of God. So two things here. Number one, why did John baptize people? You ever wondered? Like, why did he do that? Well, you see, the reason why he did that is because he did that so that he could find the Son of God. So he's doing this to help everyone get ready, but at the same time, he said, I did this so that I'm the Son of Man might be revealed to all of us. The second thing is, you imagine how you ever been in a situation where someone across the way is waving at you and you think they're waving at you, rather. And so you wave and you go, Oh, oh, not me, the guy behind me. Sorry, sorry, and it's a little embarrassing. Can you imagine John is preaching and all of a sudden he he looks at Jesus and he points in that general direction and he's like, Behold, the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world. What if, what if there was some poor soul who was standing right in front of Jesus, and he and he didn't say Jesus right at first, he just said him, you know? Imagine that. And imagine that person is going, Me? I'm the oh, oh, my bad. Yeah, yeah, probably, probably him. Yeah. It's kind of the way my mind works. Like for a like a moment, someone was like, Oh, okay, not me. All right. Anyway, all right, verse 35. The Bible says, on the following day, John was standing. Oh, wait, I've already read that. No, yeah, here you go. Sorry. I'm so excited. Verse 35. The following day, John was again standing with two of his disciples, possibly one of them being John, who later wrote this. As Jesus walked by, John looked at him and declared, Look, there is the Lamb of God. When John's two disciples heard this, they followed Jesus. Jesus looked around and saw them following. What do you want? He asked them. They replied, Rabbi, which means teacher, where are you staying? Come and see, he said. It was about four o'clock in the afternoon when they went with him to the place where he was staying, and they remained with him the rest of the day. Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, was one of these men who heard John and said, and then followed Jesus. Andrew went to find his brother Simon and told him, We have found the Messiah, which means Christ. Andrew brought Simon to meet Jesus. Looking intently at Simon, Jesus said, Your name is Simon, son of John, but you will be called Cephas, which means Peter. The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, Come, follow me. Philip was from Beseda and Andrew and Peter's hometown. Philip went and looked for Nathaniel and told him, We have found the very person Moses and the prophets wrote about. His name is Jesus. He is the son of Joseph from Nazareth. Nazareth, exclaimed Nathaniel. Can anything good come from Nazareth? Now, the reason why he would have said that is this is kind of backwater small town. Think of, think of like the most nowhere town you can think of. That's Nazareth. And so the answer to this was, Come and see for yourself, Philip replied. And as they were approached, Jesus said, Now here is a genuine son of Israel, a man of complete integrity. How do you know about me? Nathaniel asked. Jesus replied, I could see you under the fig tree before Philip found you. Then Nathaniel exclaimed, Rabbi, you are the Son of God, the King of Israel. Jesus asked him, Do you believe just because I told you I had seen you under a fig tree, you will see greater things than this. Then he said, I tell you the truth, you will all see heaven open and angels of God going up and down on the Son of Man, the one who is the stairway between heaven and earth. Man, oh man, we are in a treat. In for a treat. Over the course of the Gospel of John, Jesus is going to perform seven major signs, and seven major times he is going to say, I am. And he's going to tell us he is not just a man, he is not just a miracle worker, but he is God from the beginning. And I can't wait to jump into this. And so I'm curious for you. What about this that shows you that Jesus is God? What from this can you gain hope and trust that Jesus is not just our Savior, but also our Lord? You know what I love is I love that Jesus saw Nathaniel where he was. I love that he didn't have to just wonder, but he said, I saw you even before you came to me. I had my eyes on you. And that brings me so much hope to realize that my King and my Lord sees me no matter where I am, and he sees you too. I can't wait to get into this. Let's pray, and we're going to read our scripture, and then we're going to be done for today. Father, thank you so much for the beginning of this journey. I'm so thankful, Lord, that you see us and you know us, you are with us and you are for us. And I pray, God, that we will just enjoy this journey of knowing you, not just as our Savior, not even just as a King, but the Lord of Lords, the King of Kings in all things. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. God's word said the reason why John is even was even written, inspired by the Holy Spirit, is these were written that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that believing in him, you will have life by the power of his name. I'll see you tomorrow for John chapter two.