Sitting At The Feet Of The Rabbi Series

I have a question for you. How many of you can recall a favorite teacher that you have ever had either in elementary school, high school, or college? Easily. What would be some of the character traits? What would be some of the skills? What would be some of the things they would bring to the classroom that would make them your favorite teacher? Shout them out. Fairness. Competence. Passionate. Knowing the material. Kind. Fair and aware. Real. What if I said now think of your least favorite teacher? What would be their character traits? Mean?, Rude? When I think of one of my least favorite teachers it was my shop teacher. I hope I am not offending any shop teachers in the audience but shop teachers can be a little bit touchy at times and downright mean. My teacher defined meanness. I may be dating myself but does anybody remember the show Dobie Gillis? Who was the sidekick? Maynard. Looked like a beatnik. That was my teacher’s appearance, but he had the attitude of Charles Manson. You didn’t want to mess with him and every kid knew it except for one kid. He decided he was going to sit in the front row and in about the middle of the course he was going to pull open a magazine and start reading it. Sure enough, the teacher walked over to the desk, grabbed the magazine out of the kid’s hand, smacked him on the side of the head and then threw the magazine out. He picked the kid up, threw him across the workbench. The kid fell on the floor and he picked him up and threw him out the front door and gave him a kick to boot. Just think how bad it would be today if he was texting in class. They could get away with that stuff back then. I was so terrified of him I don’t think I ever took another shop class. There is a common denominator between teachers that are favorable and unfavorable. They leave a strong impression on your mind.

Today, as we begin to open up the book of John, we see another teacher who left a very strong impression on his disciples’ minds. Please open up your Bibles to the book of John 1. If you want to use the red pew Bibles, it is page about 1050. As a side note, we are going through the book of John. We can take as long as we need to. We are only on chapter 1 and it has been four weeks, so that will give you a clue how long we are going to be in there. If you would like, we have these handy gospel of Johns that are available for free. You can put them in your pocket. Go ahead and read through the gospel of John. Read through it several times to begin to understand the themes and anticipate some of those themes. Last week, we began to talk about another guy named John. It was John the Baptist. You may recall that John the Baptist was the one that was called to be the voice of God in the wilderness. He would be the one that would make straight the path of the Lord. More than that, we find out in today’s passage that John the Baptist was a teacher. He was a good teacher. We know he was a really good teacher because he knew that he could only take his disciples to a certain point before he would hand them off to a better teacher. Before he would hand them off to the master teacher, Jesus Christ. Our main passage is going to be John 1:35, but we are going to back up a little bit and start at verse 29 because I want to make sure we have gone through all the scripture and make sure we are keeping everything in context. So starting at John 1:29 and I will be reading from the New International Version. (Scripture read here.)

We know from this reading that John the Baptist was a teacher. We can look at verse 35 that says “The next day John was there again with two of his disciples.” In order to have disciples you would have to be a teacher. A disciple is really a student or a learner. John we know had some disciples just as Jesus had some disciples. We don’t know how many disciples John had. We don’t even really know what John the Baptist would have taught his disciples. But we know enough about John the Baptist to speculate a bit. To get an idea of what he probably was teaching them. He obviously probably would have taught them about the fact that he saw himself as the one who would declare and make straight the pathway to the Lord. He probably would have been someone who would have told his disciples about the coming kingdom of God and maybe would have tried to unpack it a little bit and help them get an idea of what that might look like. We also know that John the Baptist would probably take the time to sit down with his disciples and give them the big picture. Explain Jewish history and what went on in the Old Testament. He would explain that God had created man and woman in his own image. He created them in a way that was so special. He allowed them to oversee all of creation. That was basically their role. They were to oversee all of creation. They were supposed to do this while under submission to God and under the authority of God, which makes sense because God was the creator. As we know, man decided he wanted to go his own way. He didn’t want to submit to the will of God. Over the next hundreds and thousands of years, man decided to go his own way and we see the disastrous effects if we look back in the early books of the Bible. We see eventually that in the Nation of Israel things got so bad that they actually ended up in captivity under the wicked pharaoh making bricks without straw. For 400 years they lived as slaves. At some point, John would tell them that God decided to send a deliverer. God saw the plight of the Israelites so he sent a deliverer by the name of Moses to come in and take care of the situation and free them from the captivity of Pharaoh. That is what happened. When they left captivity, the first thing they were supposed to do was go back into a mode of worship. What happened is Moses got the commandments of God and built this sacrificial system that would allow the Jewish people to live a right and moral life and also a manner that they could continue to worship God.