The Time Jesus Embodied an Image
Two men walk behind Jesus, and between them, they can’t work out how to approach Him.
Jesus stops. Turns around. And asks them the first question He asks anyone in John’s Gospel:
What do you seek?”
(John 1:38)
Now, that is a question with a floor that drops out from under you. What do you want? What are you actually after, down at the bottom of it?
And what these two manage is this: “Rabbi, where are You staying?” (John 1:38).
Where are You staying. Like they’re after His address.
But He doesn’t correct them. He doesn’t press. He answers the question they could manage with an invitation:
Come and see.”
(John 1:39)
And they spend the day with Him (John 1:39).
So what got them onto that road?
Their own teacher, John the Baptiser, had made a proclamation about a stranger:
Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”
(John 1:29 cf. 1:35–36)
And that was it. They left John the Baptiser and followed the Man he had identified.
One image. No explanation, no argument, no proof text. And two men changed direction.
That tells you what kind of image this is. Not an ornament. Not a turn of phrase. An image carrying the weight of fourteen centuries of Scripture, and it moved their feet before they had the words for it.
John isn’t coining a metaphor. He’s drawing on an image that has been shaped, sharpened and carried through the Scriptures long before he ever spoke it. His words land with the weight of a story already in motion, a declaration that only makes sense inside that story.
A Lifetime of Reading
The Scriptures are meditative literature—meant to be returned to across a lifetime. You don’t grasp everything on the first read. Written with layered symbols and imagery, connections emerge over time. What may seem simple, even strange, at first slowly reveals depth and design.
Take the imagery of the lamb. If someone with no exposure to Christianity walked into a gathering and heard people singing to the Lamb, they might assume the room was full of sheep-worshippers. The language would sound strange, even primitive, because they haven’t yet been formed by the story that gives the image its weight.
However, every follower of Jesus knows who the Lamb refers to because the image is seeded early—first glimpsed when Abraham assures Isaac that God will provide the lamb (Genesis 22:7–8), then given shape in the Passover story, where a lamb’s blood marks a people for rescue. The poets and prophets of the Old Testament then carry the image forward, using it to speak of innocence, sacrifice, deliverance and hope, until the image has become a thread woven through the whole narrative.
When the apostolic writers take it up, they don’t simply repeat the pattern; they make the connection explicit, identifying Jesus as the Lamb and reading the whole story through His redeeming sacrifice. It’s inside this story that John makes his declaration, “Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”, arresting his informed audience immediately.
And Andrew and his companion, standing there on the riverbank, are the first to feel it.
Most readers don’t consciously track that development. Some images become familiar simply through long exposure, but many only reveal their weight to those who keep returning to the text with attention and patience. And that’s the quiet brilliance of biblical imagery: introduced early, echoed often, and through immersion and diligence slowly forming a coherent world in the reader.
A Dragon in Scripture
Take another example—one far less obvious than the Lamb. The red dragon in Revelation is instantly recognisable to most readers (Revelation 12:3–17; 13:1–4; 16:13; 20:2), but if you pause for a moment, the strangeness of it becomes clear.
A dragon in Scripture!
And not the Smaug-shaped creature from The Hobbit, the winged, gold-hoarding lizard most people picture.
Something older and stranger.
The biblical image reaches back to Genesis 1:21, where God creates the “great sea monsters”—a brief, easily overlooked line, yet the only specific creature named in the creation account. That reference isn’t random. It quietly counters the Babylonian creation myth, where the world is formed through violent struggle with the goddess Tiamat, the primordial sea, who confronts Marduk as a monstrous sea dragon. Scripture takes that familiar ancient image and disarms it, placing the sea creature not in a cosmic battle but under God’s effortless creative word.
From there, the poets and prophets use the sea-monster image to speak of chaos, disorder and the human agents who embody them. And when the apostolic writers take it up, they push the imagery further still, using it to describe the devil—not because he is a dragon any more than Jesus is a lamb, but because the image carries the weight of everything it has gathered across the story.
That’s how biblical imagery works.
We read Revelation and glide straight past a dragon as if that were the most natural thing in the world, never stopping to ask why a creature like that appears in Scripture at all. We don’t push back. We don’t pause. We don’t even feel the strangeness of it. We picture Smaug without thinking, assume the image is obvious, and move on.
But if we had stopped—if we had asked where that dragon came from, why it looks the way it does, what story it’s carrying—we would have found ourselves standing inside a far older world. The sea-monster of Genesis. The polemic against Babylon. The prophets’ language of chaos and rebellion embodied in human power. The apostolic decision to take that ancient symbol and use it to speak of the devil himself. A whole lineage of meaning, threaded through the canon, waiting to be seen.
All of it was there. All of it was doing its work. All of its beauty, available to the diligent, questioning reader.
Come and See
So, do the work. Trace the imagery across the Scriptures. Ask the pointed questions of the text. Let the patterns accumulate. Read again.
And you discover that the layered symbols and images don’t sit there as decoration—they instruct, they confront, they shape, and so much of them gather their meaning in Jesus without exhausting their reach.
The imagery and symbolism of the Scriptures do not just ornament the story; they form a way of seeing and thinking about God’s nature and His purpose that only the Scriptures can teach.
And when the image finally lands, it does what it did on that riverbank. It turns you around and puts you on the road after Jesus.
