The Guy Under the Fig Tree

John 1:45-51

The next apostle in our study is Nate. Sorry…Bart. Ok, technically it’s Nathanael Bartholomew. And he was close to Philip. Not unlike Peter and Andrew who were together as brothers, or James and John who were together as brothers, you find these two, not brothers, but close companions in all the listings of the apostles they are identified alongside each other. They are Philip and Nathanael Bartholomew.

John 1:45 is the only place where he's identified in the New Testament.  We pick up the story of Jesus in the time in which He was calling disciples.  John the Baptist had pointed to Christ as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.  The ministry of Jesus then officially began.  Jesus called Simon and Andrew in the prior passage to be His disciples.  Later on they would become Apostles.  At this point He just called them to be disciples.  And then on the very next day after He had done that, He purposed to go into Galilee and He found Philip.  And He said to him, "Follow Me."  Now Philip, it says in verse 45, found Nathanael. 

Now this is the first introduction we get to Nathanael.  What matters to Nathanael is Scripture.  Philip doesn't say to him, I found a man who has a wonderful plan for your life.  He doesn't say, I found a man who will fix your marriage.  He doesn't say any of those kinds of things that might appeal to some other element of the personality of Nathanael.  He hits him where he lives. "We have found the one who is spoken of by Moses in the law and the prophets."  I really believe that with the exception of Judas Iscariot, all of the apostles were to some degree seekers after divine truth.  That is, their hearts were right before God.  They were sincere in their love for God and their desire to know the truth and to know the Messiah.  In that sense they were very different than the religious establishment which was dominated by hypocrisy.  They were the real thing.  And so Philip finds his close friend, Nathanael Bartholomew, and he tells him, "We have found the one about whom we have studied so long."

His spiritual side was strong and faithful and diligent, honest, but he was human.  And here's his response, "Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?"  Now that, folks, is just prejudice.  If it said, "You know, as I read the Old Testament, I read Micah the prophet, Micah says the prophet has to come from (where?) Bethlehem, not Nazareth."  He could have said, "But, Philip, Messiah is to come from Bethlehem."  Or he could have said, "But, Philip, Messiah has to be identified in Jerusalem because He's going to reign in Jerusalem."  He could have said, "Philip, this is impossible, the Messiah can't come from Nazareth."  But he's flawed just like everybody else.  He just flat out says, "Could anything good come out of Nazareth?"

That's not rational, that's emotional.  Now he didn't live in such a hot town himself, Cana. Unless you were looking for the “house” where Jesus turned water into wine, you wouldn't go there.  Cana was in walking distance from Nazareth but it was off the beaten track and Nazareth was at a crossroads.  It was a rough town. It was an unrefined town. It was an uneducated town.  It is still the same, much the same way.  It has a nice setting on the slopes of the hills up there in Galilee, but it's not a memorable town still and it wasn't in those days.  The Galileans even looked down on the Nazarenes and the Judeans looked down on the Galileans and so they really looked down on the Nazarenes.

And again, you get this idea that God finds some pleasure by not only using the commonest of people but having them come from the most despised locations so that essentially they have nothing going for them, except that they're used to transform the world and in the end the only explanation for that is God, so He gets all the glory.

It is inconceivable to Nathanael Bartholomew that the Messiah would come out of that tacky place called Nazareth. Prejudice is an ugly thing.  It's uncalled for generalization based on feelings of superiority, not based on fact.  But prejudice is very effective in cutting people off from the truth.  In fact, I suppose in one sense we could say that the whole nation of Israel rejected their Messiah because of prejudice.  They didn't believe their Messiah should come out of Nazareth either.  They didn't believe their Messiah and all of His apostles could come out of Galilee.  And they mocked the apostles as uneducated bumpkins. 

John Bunyan understood this when he wrote a less famous allegory, The Holy War, which pictures God coming down to save a soul. He tells about Immanuel coming to town.  The enemy, Diabolos, directs his assault at the Eargate on one side of town, called that because faith comes by hearing.  Bunyan writes, "Old Mr. Prejudice assisted Diabolos and put under his power sixty men called Deafmen."  And the gospel in Bunyan's view was stopped by prejudice.  Very vivid.

Men's ears are often closed to the gospel by prejudice, racial prejudice, social prejudice, religious prejudice, whatever.  And this effectively caused the Jewish nation to remain deaf to the Messiah.  That is why when Jesus came into His own synagogue and spoke the truth, they were deaf to it and tried to throw Him off a cliff.

It's still that way today.  Here’s the vivid imagery of Paul, "The god of this world has blinded their eyes."  Deaf and blind by their prejudice against the truth, against righteousness, they miss the message.

Was Nathanael influenced by that?  Sure.  We all draw prejudicial conclusions about certain people and certain classes, and certain societies.  And we make these crazy generalizations which are sinful.

But, Philip said to him in verse 46, "Come and see."  You know, that's the way you deal with prejudice because prejudice is not objective, it's subjective.  It's not based on fact; it's based on feeling.  It's not based on reality; it's based on sense of superiority.  And Philip knew that the solution to his friend's prejudice was, "Come and see."  You don't need to have this prejudice, you can have reality.  "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?"  Come and see.

And he went.  A prejudiced mind, but I think a seeking heart and his seeking heart overpowered his prejudiced mind.  And now we learn about him the most important thing and we hear it from the lips of Jesus. I can't imagine a more wonderful thing than to have one's commendation come out of the mouth of Jesus.  Verse 47, "Jesus saw Nathanael coming to Him and He said of him, 'Behold, an Israelite indeed in whom there is no guile.'"

What a statement.  It would be one thing if that at the end of your life, you know, you hear this at a funeral, somebody dies and the preacher says, "Well, they're going to heaven where they're going to hear, 'Well done, good and faithful servant.'"  That's a nice epitaph. But how would you like that compliment at the beginning?

This man was pure from the outset.  Oh sure he was human, sure he was flawed.  We're all flawed and one of his flaws was he had prejudice.  But it was also true of him that he was a sincere man of integrity.

What's He talking about?  What do you mean he's a true Israelite?  He's an Israelite who is true because in him there's no guile.  This is a contrast to the original Israel [Jacob], who was a deceiver. That's what defines it.  Guile is deceit, deception.

What Jesus is saying is, you know, for the most part the Israelites are not the real thing. 

Romans 9:6

For they are not all Israel, which are of Israel:

Romans 9:6 says: "Not all Israel is Israel." 

Romans 2:28-29

²⁸ For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly… ²⁹ But he is a Jew, which is one inwardly;

Most were outward Jews, including the religious leaders. Here was an inward Jew.  There was no hypocrisy and this is very unusual.  When Jesus indicted the religious establishment of Israel, He indicted them as hypocrites. 

Here was a man who was a true Israelite … on the inside. 

v. 48 a      He's questioning whether this man can be the Messiah. He just can't believe it.

“No guile? Are You just flattering me?  How do You know me?  Are You just trying to add me to Your followers by this flattery?  How can You possibly say that?  That's a pretty straightforward come on.  I mean, how in the world could You say that about me?"

I think he sees it as a just a little schmoozing of Jesus to bring him into His group.  And Jesus answered and said to him, "Well, before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you."  Oh. Now this is a whole different deal.  Now we're not talking about flattery, we're talking about omniscience.  "Before Philip ever came to find you, I saw you under that fig tree."

Jesus wasn't there, Nathanael knew that.  Jesus not only saw his location, but he saw his heart.  “I knew the sincerity of your heart because I saw right into you when you were under the fig tree.”

Well, that was enough for Nathanael. 

v. 49        By the way, this is something that even three years later Philip hadn't yet understood because Philip, as we saw last time, says to Jesus, "Show us the Father."  And Jesus says, "Have I been around so long and you still don't get it?  If you've seen Me, you've seen the Father."  Philip didn't get it till the end.  His friend Nathanael Bartholomew got it at the start.

Jesus knew the real thing when He saw it and He saw it in this Israelite named Nathanael.

v. 50         There's no question mark here in the Greek. It's better a statement than a question.  “You believe because of omniscience.”

Then He adds, "Thou shalt see greater things than these."  You think this was something?  You haven't seen anything yet.  All it took was one incident of omniscience, and that was enough to convince Nathanael this was the Son of God and the King of Israel.  That's all it took.  He didn't need a lot of proof, just one thing. 

And you know what He's saying to him?  "Nathanael, from here on out everything you see is just going to enrich and enlarge your faith."  The other disciples, the things that they see, they're going to struggle with.  They're not going to understand. 

And that's the way it was.  He was doing miracle after miracle, raising the dead, healing the sick, creating food, walking on water. Everything He did, everything He said, all the supernatural elements of His life, like casting out demons, and you could just see Nathanael nodding and the faith in his heart getting enlarged by it all.  How wonderful to see someone so trustworthy and trusting from the very beginning so that the whole three years with Jesus was just this unfolding panorama of supernatural reality.

v. 51        What's that?  That's just a metaphoric or symbolic way to say you're going to see heaven come down on Me, angels, supernatural revelation, supernatural power, you're going to see it and you're going to understand it.

Of all the apostles, Nathanael seems to me to be the one who gained the most from his time with Jesus, because at the outset he knew exactly who He was.  And everything after was just icing on the cake, a bonus.  And maybe Jesus was kind of playing off that familiar Old Testament passage in Genesis 28 where Jacob dreams about a ladder from heaven and revelation coming down that ladder. 

Nathanael enjoyed the fullest and richest and most complete blessing from his time with Jesus. Judas, he got nothing.  What a stark contrast.  That's all we know about him.  But that's really enough. 

I'm consistently amazed at how God has always used weak people, how He can go into the gutter and into the horrible pits of the world and find the worst, the lowest, the most degraded and save them and then make them the means of somebody else's salvation. In the case of Paul, the Savior can make an apostle out of a publican. He can make a woman of virtue out of a prostitute as He did in the case of Mary Magdalene.  I mean, all through history God has been using flawed, sinful people.  And we've seen it in these men.

I was “The Guy Under the Fig Tree.” How about you? I didn’t know Him, but He knew me! He saw us with all our flaws, and wanted us. But what about your own life?  If you are available, the Lord can change you and use you to change the world.  That's what He's been doing.  And He's still doing it.