Hey, everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast, and right now we're in the

middle of a two-day conversation where we're summarizing all the big, bold, remarkable claims

that John the Baptist has made about Jesus. He says that Jesus will baptize with the Holy Spirit

and with fire. John the Baptist says that Jesus is the

Lamb of God who will take away the sins of the world, not just Israel, big claims. He says that

Jesus is more powerful than John the Baptist. John the Baptist says that Jesus predates him, even though

John the Baptist is, in biological terms, older than Jesus. And with that in mind, I'm going to have

my friend Jeff play some music in just a second, and then we're going to pick up with that

list, but we're also going to note that there's one claim that John the Baptist maybe

isn't quite overtly making yet, but that John, the author of the gospel of John, is overtly

making. We'll talk about what that is and why next. Okay, Jeffrey, music time.

Perhaps the boldest testimony of John the Baptist happens right here at the end of this scene that you and I have been working on for whatever, two or three weeks, and it goes like this.

Verse 34, I have seen and I testify that this is the son of God.

Ooh, that's very, very bold.

That might be enough right there for some people in that original audience that you'll recall

had become very sensitive to anything that even resembled idolatry.

If you turn the Bible back about this many pages and somebody made a claim like that,

a lot of people from Judah and Israel on any given day might have been like, yeah, whatever.

There are lots of gods, lots of sons of gods, you know, whatever.

That's fine.

Sometimes people say stuff.

But everything after the reforms of Nehemiah and Ezra in the 440s BC looks a lot different.

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