Prepare Ye The Way Of The Lord

John held a similar position, even though he was the son of a priest. He was led by the Spirit into the wilderness areas to prepare Israel for the coming Messiah. But unlike Qumran, “in the wilderness” was the place where the cry would come from rather than the place of preparation. He would call people out of Israel to repent, but when they did, they returned back to Israel rather than remain in the wilderness. The Christian community which he was called to prepare the people for was no monastic community in the desert, but rather a call to like for Christ in the wilderness of civilization, in the public eye.

The metaphor that Isaiah used was that of road building. People like straight roads without too many curves, undulating terrain like mountains and valleys, and potholes in the roads. The ideal street is level, wide, and straight. Engineers do their best to accommodate this desire, including going to expensive and difficult feats. I can think when Interstate 75 was build through Tennessee, they had to deal with mountainous terrain. Near where I live it White Oak Mountain. What the engineers did is blasted off the top of the mountain and took the dirt and rock to make a ramp of about two miles to gradually go up the mountain. The valley was filled and the mountain made about 300 feet lower. Because of this, the Interstate remains straight rather than having to resort to switchbacks up the mountain, which are a delight to motorcyclists, but fearsome to regular drivers.

But Isaiah was not giving a course on how to engineer physical roads but a moral and spiritual one. Mountains of pride and sloughs of despond had to be dealt with. People are perverse and crooked in their ways, and their lives are anything but smooth. The bride of Christ was to be without spot or wrinkle. Human lives are hardly a reflection of God’s glorious character. Our lives look more like the tortured Judaean wilderness from which John the Baptist cried, full of deep twisting ravines, and land of dry heat punctuated by flash floods, an abode of the dead rather than the living. A lot of changes had to be made.

Even though John cried in the desolate wilderness where few could hear, the word got out. They would come out to see the salvation of God. Some would believe, but many would not repent. But God was true to His Word. John the Baptist had come to announce the Way of Yahweh who would soon burst on the scene.

We know the rest of the story. Now we can fast-forward 2000 years to today. This same Jesus whom, John had announced the coming of, who lived, was rejected and crucified, buried, resurrected and ascended has promised that He would return for His bride. We can see from history that God’s sense of time is far different than ours. The passage of 2000 years is but a couple of days to Him. But for us, it seems to be an eternity. But God has broken into our sense of eternal waiting before and is about to do so again. This same Jesus calls us to prepare the way of this second advent. We have to be the John the Baptists of our day, even if it means that we have to shock them out of our sleep. It seems that we have been assigned to the ghettoes of the wilderness in which to make our cry. Is anyone listening? If we have to be voices crying in the wilderness, let us be faithful to the message John brought. God will cause the message to be heard. It is not time to rock people to sleep with smooth and empty religious words. It is time for shock and awe.