Jesus' First Sign Series

Introduction

The movie Signs tells the story of a former Episcopal priest named Graham Hess (played by Mel Gibson). Graham lives on a farm in rural Pennsylvania with his children. His younger brother, who was a former minor league baseball player, has been helping the family since Graham’s wife Colleen died in a traffic accident six months earlier.

One morning, Graham finds a large crop circle in his cornfield. Initially, he blames vandals. But then other crop circles begin to appear all around the world.

What do the crop circles mean?

Are the crop circles the work of vandals? Or, do the crop circles point to something else?

As the movie unfolds, we learn that the crop circles are signs pointing to an alien invasion. Later, there is indeed an invasion of space aliens.

Fortunately, we don’t encounter such signs in our daily lives.

But we do encounter signs all the time. In fact, it would be very difficult to live in this world without signs. We have signs telling us which road to take, where we can find a gas station at an exit off the highway, and where the nursery is.

Signs also play a significant role in the Bible.

Like the signs we see every day around us, the signs in the Bible point to something beyond themselves. The difference between our daily signs and Biblical signs is that Biblical signs point to spiritual truths. When God gives a sign, he wants people to learn something about an essential spiritual truth.

Today, I am going to begin a series of sermons on the meaning of the seven signs in John’s Gospel.

But before we look at the first of those seven signs, I want to say something about the purpose of signs in the Bible.

The signs in the Old Testament most often involved God performing a supernatural event, sometimes through a human servant.

One of the best examples of signs in the Old Testament was just before the Exodus. God sent ten plagues through Moses to cause Pharaoh to let God’s people go (see Exodus 7:14-12:32).

God gave other signs through many of the Old Testament prophets. For example, God gave a sign through the Prophet Isaiah when he told him to walk naked and barefoot for three years as a sign of judgment against the nations of Egypt and Ethiopia (see Isaiah 20:2-3).

Whether the signs in the Old Testament were miraculous or mundane, the purpose of the sign was the same: The signs served to authenticate God’s appointed messengers so that people would believe the message they brought.

When we get to the New Testament we discover that there are plenty of signs in the New Testament as well.

However, signs play a very prominent role in John’s Gospel. The seven signs appear exclusively in the first half of John’s Gospel. The seven signs are:

1. Turning Water into Wine (John 2:1–11)

2. Cleansing the Temple (John 2:12–17)

3. Healing the Nobleman’s Son (John 4:46–54)

4. Healing the Lame Man (John 5:1–15)

5. Feeding the Multitude (John 6:1–15)

6. Healing the Blind Man (John 9)

7. Raising Lazarus (John 11).

Before we examine the first of the seven signs, I want to mention two more introductory comments.

First, the seven signs have two features in common:

1. The signs were performed in public in the presence of witnesses. They were not done in secret. They were meant to be seen by the public.

2. The signs were specifically called “signs” in John’s Gospel. Some form of the Greek word for “sign” (semeia) was used by John in referring to each of the seven signs.

And second, similar to the purpose of signs in the Old Testament, the seven signs in John’s Gospel have two main purposes:

1. The signs served to authenticate God’s appointed messenger, in this case, the Lord Jesus Christ. But, more than testify to the authenticity of Jesus’ message, the signs also testify to the reality that Jesus himself is the divine message.

2. The signs were given so that people would believe the message that Jesus brought. Specifically, the signs were to persuade people to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and the only Savior of sinners. At the end of John’s Gospel, John tells his readers why he wrote John’s Gospel. He wrote in John 20:30, “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book.” John selected just seven of Jesus’ signs to incorporate into his Gospel. And then he goes on to tell us why he did so in the very next verse, “But these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31).