John 1:23-27

John said, "I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness." I will tell you right here again, this is another arranging of the relationship. This has (maybe) special meaning if we understand that by Jesus Christ's own witness there was nobody that ever lived that was any greater than John the Baptist. Maybe there were some on the same plane, but at least He says nobody was greater.

If there was nobody greater than John the Baptist, it's good to understand the relationship between John the Baptist and Jesus Christ, because our relationship to Christ can't help but be somewhat lower. Maybe the same as, but certainly at a lower stage than John the Baptist's.

John said he was the voice and he was witnessing for God. But Jesus was introduced in the book as the Word. Now which one was comes first, the voice or the word? If you're looking at it from man's point of view, the word is preceded by the voice. The voice seems to be there first, but let's think that through. There cannot be a voice unless there is first a sense—in other words what I am saying is there cannot be a voice unless first the word is inside the man who is speaking. In other words, the word has to be in first. Do you remember what Jesus said? "Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks." The mouth cannot speak what it does not already have inside.

So which comes first, the word or the voice? It's John's somewhat mystical way of again arranging the relationship. We're looking at God here. God came before John the Baptist. God implanted the word in John the Baptist even before he began preaching about the Word. All those years of preparation that John the Baptist went through, I am sure, sitting out in the wilderness somewhere, studying the Old Testament, but by a miracle God was putting the word, the sense, in John, and now here was John witnessing to the Word in the flesh.