The people must have turned one to another, as he spoke. What! Had the Messiah come! It could hardly be. There had been no prodigies in earth or sky worthy of his advent. How could He be amongst them, and they unaware! But it was even so, and it is so still. The Christ is in us, and with us still. There may be no transcendent symptoms of his blessed presence, as He stands in the little groups of two and three gathered in his name; but the eye of faith detects Him. Where others see only the bare cliffs of Patmos, or the mines with their gangs of convicts, the anointed gaze beholds a face brighter than the sun, the purged ear catches the accents of a voice like the murmur of waters on the still night air. Remember how He said, "He that loveth Me shall be loved of my Father; and I will love him, and will manifest Myself to him." As the Holy Spirit revealed Him to John, so He will reveal Him to us, if only, like John, we will be content with nothing less, and wait expectant with the heart on the outlook for the manifestation of the Son of God; for so He promised, saying, "He shall take of mine, and shall declare it unto you." And when the child of faith speaks thus, with the accent of conviction, of what he has seen, and tasted, and handled, of the Word of life, it is not strange that the children of this world, whose eyes are blinded, begin to question and deride. What is there to be seen that they cannot see? What heard that they cannot detect? Ah, "the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him, neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned." "There standeth One among you," said the Baptist, "whom ye know not."
II. THE BAPTIST'S WITNESS TO THE LORD.--Six weeks passed by from that memorable vision of the opened heaven and the descending Spirit, and John had eagerly scanned every comer to the river-bank to see again that divinely beautiful face. But in vain: for Jesus was in the wilderness, being tempted of the devil, for forty days and nights, the companion of wild beasts, and exposed to a very hurricane of temptation.
At the end of the six weeks, the interview with the deputation from the Sanhedrim took place, which we have already described; and on the day after, when his confession of inferiority was still fresh in the minds of his hearers, when some were criticising and others pitying, when symptoms that the autumn of his influence had set in were in the air, his eye flashed, his face lit up, and he cried, saying: "This is He of whom I said, 'After me cometh a man who is become before me, for He was before me.' Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world."
Did all eyes turn towards the Christ? Was there a ripple of interest and expectancy through the crowd? Did any realize the unearthly beauty and spiritual power of his presence? We know not. Scripture is silent, only telling us that on the following day, when, with two disciples, he looked on Jesus as He walked, and repeated his affirmation, "Behold the Lamb of God," those two disciples followed Him, never to return to their old master--who knew it must be so, and was content to decrease if only _He_ might increase.
Let us notice the successive revelations which were made to John, and through him to Israel, who, you remember, held him, as they had every warrant for doing, to be in the deepest sense a prophet of the Lord. This conviction has been definitely endorsed by succeeding ages, which have classed him as one of the six greatest men that ever left their mark on the world.
(1) _He rightly conceived of Christ's pre-existence_. "He was before me" (John i. 30). The phrase resembles Christ's own words, when He said: "Before Abraham was, I am." In John's case it developed soon after into another and kindred expression: "He that cometh from above, is above all" (John iii. 31). With such words the Baptist taught his disciples. He insisted that Jesus of Nazareth had an existence anterior to Nazareth, and previous to his birth of the village maiden. He recognised that his goings had been of old, even from everlasting, that He was the mighty God, the Father of the Ages, and the Prince of Peace. As for himself, he was of the earth, and of the earth he spoke; as for this One, He came from above, and was above all. It is not surprising, therefore, that one of his disciples, catching his Master's spirit, wrote: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him."