NOTES for Joh 1:29-34
In bearing witness to Jesus, John notes an astonishing feature of the Kingdom in its relation to our world, which is being transformed but is not yet completely transformed. He speaks of Jesus as the One who has gone ahead of him, although He came after him. Of course, traditional Jewish ideas about the Messiah are reflected here as well, since according to those ideas the Messiah was conceived by God before the creation of the world.
But the matter, it appears, is not only Jewish tradition, but first of all the very nature of the Kingdom. From the point of view of our earthly history, the Kingdom comes at the end of time, after that history is completed. For God, however, it is neither "before" nor "after" history; rather, if we resort to the space-time concepts familiar to us, it is "above" it. It is greater than the space and time familiar to us; it embraces them and includes them in itself, after first transforming them and radically changing their very nature. And the Messiah, who brought the Kingdom into the world, belongs to our world only insofar as this world becomes part of the Kingdom.
That is why His coming becomes an event that does not fit within the framework of earthly history, while people who belong to that history entirely can see only a small part of what is taking place. But to those who, like John, understand what is really happening, it becomes clear that the One has entered the world who has enclosed all earthly history in Himself, so that no one is given a place ahead of Him.