A Voice For God Series

Good morning. By a show of hands, how many of you have heard of the biblical character John the Baptist? Most of you have heard of him of course. When you think of John the Baptist, what kind of image comes to mind? A little wild. A guy running around the desert dressed funny and eating bugs mixed with wild honey and that sort of thing. We do stereotype John the Baptist. The stereotype really is not ungrounded because there is a verse out of the book of Matthew that describes John like this. It says that John’s clothes were made of camel hair and he had a leather belt around his waist. His food was locust and wild honey. All kidding aside, we tend to sum up John by this verse, which really isn’t fair to identify one man in the Bible by one verse because there are so many other verses in the Bible and especially in the gospels that really fill in the picture about who John the Baptist was. We find that in the birth narratives of Jesus Christ. You may recall, if you are familiar with the birth of Jesus, Jesus and John were second cousins. Jesus’ mother Mary was the first cousin of John’s mother Elizabeth. You also know that John, from the very beginning while he was still in his mother’s womb, had a very special relationship with Jesus. So much so that when Mary came to visit Elizabeth, John leaped in his mother’s womb. He filled his mother with the Holy Spirit so much so that she shouted out “Blessed are you amongst women and blessed is the child that you will bear.” Any Catholics in the audience? What is that the first line of? Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with you. Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now in the hour of our death. Amen. That is where they get that. They get that from that particular scripture. We find out about John in the Jesus narratives. Just as the birth of Jesus was foretold by an angel, the birth of John the Baptist was foretold by an angel. You may recall that John’s father Zachariah was a priest who had hoped to have a child. He thought his wife was barren and wasn’t able to have a child. He went into the temple and began to pray and he was visited by an angel. We see that in Luke 1:8-17. (Scripture read here.)

We learn a lot about John the Baptist from those few verses. Some things we learn about him include these seven things. He will be a joy and a delight to his parents. Many will rejoice because of his birth. He will be great in the sight of the Lord. He will never take wine or fermented drink. He will be filled with the Holy Spirit since birth. He will go before Jesus in the power of Elijah. He will turn many people back to God. What parent would not want to have a child with these character traits? But we remember him as somebody who dressed funny and happened to eat funny foods, which is really what most teenagers do nowadays anyway. We really don’t have a lot of information about the John the Baptist from his birth to his public ministry, but we do know from another scripture, Luke 1:80, that “The child grew up and became strong in spirit; and he lived in the desert until he appeared publicly to Israel.” That is where we pick up the story of John the Baptist today. We actually pick him up in the book of John; the book of John is the book of the apostle John where John the apostle references John the Baptist. If you were here last week, you might recall we read the first 18 verses of the book of John and that was called the prologue. John the Baptist gets a mention very early on. He is connected with Jesus, but this time he is spoken of being connected with the word of God. You may recall John 1:1-5 (scripture read here). Then in verse 6 is where he introduces John the Baptist. “There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.” This is where we get the introduction of John the Baptist. John the apostle is saying that John the Baptist came as a witness to the word. As a witness to the light.

We pick it up in verse 19 and we begin to see that not only was John the Baptist a witness to the light, not only was he a witness to Christ the word, he was a voice of God. We are going to pick it up at verse 19, but before we get there, I want to set a little bit of historical context of what is going on at this time because I think it is important. The more you understand what is going on, the more you will appreciate the ministry of John the Baptist. During that time you had a lot of religious and political turmoil going on. The religion of the Jews had been in place for centuries. The sacrificial system. Like many religions, after a while they can become institutionalized. They become very rigid. They can serve not the people but they serve the leaders of the religion. What happens then is the people themselves instead of feeling freedom by being part of that faith, they feel restricted. They feel a burden. They feel oppressed by a bunch of legalistic rules. That is what was going on in the religious side of things. If you wanted to fill that in a little bit, you look back in Matthew 23 where Jesus is slamming the Pharisees for what they made happen to the Jewish religion. On the other hand, you had the political problem going on. During that time, the area known as Palestine was controlled by the Roman government. They had set up these provinces around that area. They had governors that were in charge of the particular area. One of the responsibilities was to squeeze as much tax as they could out of the people. If the people would complain, the other responsibility they would have would be to clamp down on them. Make an example of the people that would revolt. So you had this highly charged religious and political environment where one spark could set things in motion. Not too much unlike what is going on in the Middle East today. In the midst of all that, you had people who would see this political and religious turmoil as some sort of a sign out there that something was about to happen. God was about to intervene. God was about to step into the situation and take care of it. This was a common view. In their history as the Jewish people look back that is what would happen. The people would go along for a certain time. They would do okay and then they would start doing some bad things and things would start getting worse. Pretty soon they would be taken over by the foreign armies and then they would be crushed and God would come in and restore peace. Once again, all this turmoil was a sign that God was about to step into the situation. He was about to put his hand in the situation. He would then also restore a king that would be followed by a period of peace and prosperity. All this would be preceded by a messenger. Somebody would show up and begin to speak as though he is the voice of God. That was what John the Baptist was doing. Basically, when they hear John the Baptist out there saying repent for the kingdom of God is near, he is drawing the attention of both the religious establishment and the political establishment. Their curiosity is up. The religious guys don’t want their institution to be upset and the Roman government doesn’t want anything to be upset because they are charged with keeping the Pax Romana, the peace of Rome. They hear John the Baptist saying all these things, so the Jews send out some people to visit him and find out who he is.