Messiah

He first found his own brother Simon and said to him, “We have found the Messiah” (which means Christ). John 1:41

The name Messiah comes from the Hebrew word, Mashiach, meaning ‘the anointed one’ or ‘the chosen one’, and Christos (Christ) is the Greek equivalent of Messiah.

According to John 1, Andrew had been a disciple of John the Baptiser and had heard his message of the coming Lord. He was waiting in anticipation to see the One foretold by the prophets and now by John. Can you imagine Andrew’s excitement when he heard John cry out, “Behold, the Lamb of God!”?The first person he went looking for was his brother, Simon. I picture him running as fast as he possibly could, grabbing Simon by the shoulders and through panting breath exclaim, “we have found the Messiah! He’s here Simon, he is finally here!”

Not everyone was convinced that the carpenter’s eldest son, was, in fact, the long-awaited Deliverer. Was this man really going to deliver them from their Roman oppressors and establish a new Jewish kingdom? They remembered it had been declared by Zechariah the prophet, “Behold, your king is coming to you: righteous and having salvation is he” but some of them had tuned out the next bit, “humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey”.

Isaiah had proclaimed, “Who has believed what he has heard from us? And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?” The majority of the Jews then went on to actually fulfil the following part of that prophecy – “as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not” (Ch53). Their lack of understanding and misinterpretation of scripture blinded them to the truth of Jesus’ purpose – to deliver them from the bondage of sin and prepare them for the Kingdom of God.

There are so many that are still searching today – for what or for whom they may not know. We do know, so let us not be shy in going out with the boldness of John and the excitement of Andrew and share the good news of the One who came to deliver us out of darkness, into His glorious light.