“Look, Mark, the moon is moving!” I yelled across the lawn for my brother to look up at the moon. I was perhaps all of six and full of sass. “No, it’s not. The CLOUDS are moving”. An argument ensued, which I of course, lost. Eventually I could see it, the clouds were actually moving! He was my older brother. He knew these things. He knew everything!

Lately I’ve been pondering a lot over the difference between absolute truth and personal truth. My personal truth that night told me emphatically that the moon was zipping so fast across the sky we likely wouldn’t see it again anytime soon. I needed a personal revelation to drop in on my senses and shift my perspective.

I had one of those “shift” moments not long ago as I was reading through the book of John and intentionally absorbing the passage slowly. Chapter one introduces us to the testimony of John the Baptist. I recalled how we learn in the gospel of Luke of the early encounter between John’s mother, Elizabeth, and Jesus’ mother, Mary. John leaps in Elizabeth’s womb at the sound of Mary’s voice. Was it the presence of the Holy Spirit moving upon her that caused John to leap in the womb? Might he have had a revelation of who Mary was carrying?

But by the time we get to John chapter 1 that moment between Elizabeth and Mary has long passed, and both John and Jesus are now adults. Imagine my surprise then, to see the tension between this strong early connection and the statement we read in chapter 1 verse 31. Of Jesus, John the Baptist says:

“I myself did not know him, but the reason I came baptizing with water was that he might be revealed to Israel”.

What did John the Baptist, who is Jesus’ cousin, mean when he said “I didn’t know him”? Surely they knew one another as children, so why would John refuse to rely on family connection and what I’m guessing he may have learned or heard from his mother many times when he was young? Shouldn’t he have known already that Jesus was more than just a cousin?

But in that moment he was choosing to push aside familiarity, speculation, tradition, here-say, and instead wait for God’s direct confirmation. Interesting! John was asked by the priests and Levites who he was and without hesitation he, quoting from Isaiah, said “I am the voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way for the Lord‘”. So he knew who he personally was, and he knew the purpose he was to fulfill, but it isn’t until verse 32 that we learn that the Holy Spirit must personally testify to John who Jesus really is – the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world! In this moment I realized,

Truth is established by REVELATION!

I needed a revelation of truth about the moon when I was a child. Even John the Baptist needed fresh revelation from God to make sure that what he thought he saw was in fact reality.

There’s a difference between knowing about Jesus and seeing Him for who He really is. God often allows even those closest to Him to move from familiarity to revelation not because truth isn’t there, but because He wants it to be received, not assumed. This is why we can read the bible again and again and gain new revelation from what we read every single time!