So now we’re gonna talk about John the Baptizer. It’s not John the Baptist. John wasn’t a Baptist. He’s a baptizer. Story starts. He had a dad. He had a mom. Most kids, that’s where the story starts. John’s dad, Zechariah, was a priest, served the temple, full-time ministry. John in some ways is a pastor’s kid. John’s got a mom as well. Her name is Elizabeth. Elizabeth is an old woman, and Zechariah is an old man, and they’ve had no kids. They’re barren, and there’s no hope of them having kids anytime in the near future, and it caused them some deep grief and some strife. You get the impressions as you read the accounts. What I’m going to do for you today is take basically the four Gospel accounts and compress them together into one story before we get into John’s Gospel, but I did write the verses down for you in the notes so you could check and make sure I’m not a heretic and all those good things.
You can do that. You can read this. We get the impression from the narratives that Elizabeth, his mom, was really grieved about not being able to be a mother, and that would make sense. In that culture, they had a way of thinking about family and children that is really antithetical to the way our culture views childrearing and kids. In our culture, children are an inconvenience that you postpone as long as possible, and if by chance you happen to have one, you do all you can to either adopt it out, abort it, or get rid of it. You don’t want to have kids because kids impinge upon your freedom, not in the Hebrew world. The Hebrew world, children are gifts from Almighty God. You’re happy to have a child. The more children, the more God obviously loved you, and so big, enormous families were the norm, and the more children a woman could have, the more blessed she felt by God, and so Elizabeth, at this point, has got a Godly husband who loves the Lord.
She loves the Lord. She’s never had a baby. She really would love to have a baby until one day Zechariah goes to serve with his division of priests at the temple, and his name gets chosen to go in and offer incense to the Lord. He’s offering incense to the Lord. He’s all by himself. All the other priests are outside praying, and something amazing happens. An angel of the Lord shows up to have a little conversation with Zechariah. He tells Zechariah, “Don’t worry. God’s gonna answer your prayers. You’re gonna have a son. You’re gonna have a little boy. He’s gonna be filled with the Holy Spirit from his mother’s womb. He’s gonna be a prophet like Elijah. He’s gonna go out and preach to the entire world. He’s gonna reconcile families. It’s going to be unbelievable, and you’re supposed to give him the name John,” and Zechariah, maybe he had become optimistic on a few occasions and lost his hope. I don’t know what had happened to Zechariah, but Zechariah, for some reason, doubted almost like Abraham and Sarah. He just is at this moment where he can’t believe that God would give him a child, and so because of his doubt, the angel then reveals his name. He’s talking to the angel, Gabriel. He’s talking to the Michael Jordan of angels. It’s this great day for Zechariah. If you’re an old priest that’s lived sort of a dull life, and you get to meet the angel, Gabriel, that is Super Bowl Sunday, and Zechariah is just overcome. The angel then tells him, “But here’s the deal. Since you didn’t believe this was possible, you’re not going to be able to speak for the duration of your wife’s pregnancy. You’re gonna be silent. You shouldn’t have uttered words in unbelief. Now you won’t utter any words at all.”
And so for the duration of his wife’s pregnancy, he can’t say a word, and so he goes back, and Elizabeth ends up conceiving. She gets pregnant. This amazing thing happens, and I can imagine Elizabeth. I just was thinking about this in my head, this older woman being like, “Well, Lord, thank you for the two gifts. Thank you for the healthy child and the mute husband. Thank you, Lord, for both wonderful gifts,” because there’s nothing better than being pregnant with a husband who can’t say a word. That’s the best combination of all right there. She probably thought, “Thank you, Lord. You’re such a kind God. My husband’s quiet. My baby’s healthy. That’s all I ever wanted.” So Elizabeth has her dreams come true. She’s pregnant with a quiet husband, and something very interesting happens that she has a relative named Mary, young teenage girl that lives in a dumpy rural town called Nazareth.
She goes to meet her relative, Mary, and Mary has become pregnant through miraculous conception. The spirit of God has come upon her, and she has given conception not through any man’s contribution, but just through a miracle of God, and as they come together, Elizabeth is this older woman that is so happy to be pregnant. Mary’s this younger woman that’s just kind of overwhelmed with what God is doing in her own body. As they come together, John the Baptizer’s in Elizabeth’s womb, and Jesus Christ is in Mary’s womb, and that’s the first time that these cousins come together to meet, and as they do, it says that they leap in their mothers’ wombs, this beautiful picture that the boys first meet in their moms’ wombs, and John, as the Scripture says, is filled with the spirit of God in his mother’s womb from the moment of conception.
It goes on then that ultimately John is born a few months before Jesus Christ, and Zechariah, the father, and Elizabeth, the mother, do as God instructed. They take the boy out and they raise him in a way that he would come to know and to love God and understand the Scriptures. They also were told that he is not allowed to drink any alcohol and that he has to be raised in a particular way, and it makes sense to me why John wouldn’t be allowed to consume any alcohol because John is a complete freak and a guy like that, the last thing he needs is a couple drinks in him. Think about this. If you look at John, John is a freak. Have you ever been down to like West Lake Center and you see sort of this stinky under the overpass prophet? That guy, you know what I’m talking about? He’s just – he’s not speaking in full sentences.
He’s not making a lot of sense. He kind of stinks. He kind of – and you look at him, and you go. I remember walking with a buddy of mine. They said, “You know, that would – how could that possibly be a prophet of God?” I said, “You know what the scary part is? That’s exactly what they look and smell like. They look and smell just like that guy.” That was John. John lives out in the woods. John is mountain man Jack. You ever see that show? This will date me. I’m an old man, gray hair, four-door vehicle, mortgage, but did you ever see that old show Grizzly Adams? I loved Grizzly Adams growing up as a kid. I used to go to bed at night, “Dear Jesus, let me grow up, leave the city, be Grizzly Adams, and have a big bear as a pet. Amen.” Grizzly Adams is a freak.
He lives up in the woods. That’s John. John lives out in the woods, and it says in one of the accounts that he wears clothes made of camel’s hair with a big leather belt. You just get the feeling like John is just one of those guys. You know, John lives out in the woods, and I just got this picture. I don’t know why. I’m gonna get to heaven. I’m gonna see, just this big, insane afro, just this disheveled beard, just this crooked smile, just this freaky look in his eyes, and what’s it say his diet consists of? Locusts and honey, bugs and sweets. I mean you can’t raise a kid on that kind of diet and get a real stable kid. You know what I’m saying? Here’s some bugs and sugar. You know, why is their kid a little off kilter?
I don’t know. Maybe diet has something to do it. John lives on bugs and sugar. John’s a freak, lives out in the woods, and then, all of a sudden, around the age of 30, John decides it’s time to start preaching. So John walks out of the woods just looking freaky. I mean, you know, probably barefoot, camel’s hair, leather sachet around his waste, this big afro, bugs sticking out of his teeth, kind of crazy looking, got a bad case of the shakes from all that honey, and what’s he yelling at the top of his lungs? “Repent.” That’s John. That’s the man of God. “No, that guy needs a round room. He’s gonna hurt himself. He’s just a little off kilter. That’s John. John is a bigger than life complete freaky WWE nut job. That’s John.
That’s John, and so he comes out of the woods, and he is just – he is screaming for repentance. He wants everyone to know that they are wicked and sinful and evil and an enemy of God and that God is upset and that things need to simply change and John just declares that the world now has a center and that is wherever Jesus happens to be standing, and everything else is supposed to revolve around him, and that’s John, and so we read the accounts. John comes before the political leaders. He says, “You’re in sin. Knock it off. Quit lording it over people.” He goes toward the religious leaders. He says, “You’re all self-righteous hypocrites. You don’t really love God. You don’t have anything together.” He goes to the leaders in the army, and he says, “You know, you’re extorting money from people. You’re – you all need to knock it off. God’s really angry, and God’s coming, and you don’t want to be an enemy of God.”
John’s not afraid of anyone. John is – there’s a fine line between going crazy, and John walks that ragged edge. He’s not afraid of politicians. He’s not afraid of the army. He’s not afraid of the religious leaders. He could care less. He can’t be bought. He has no obligations. He belongs to no one. He just serves God and does what God tells him to do. That’s John, and what he does then is he calls people to own the darkness in their life, and what does he do with those people? He baptizes them. He takes them down to the river, and he throws them under water, ceremonial cleansing showing that they need to be cleansed. There had been 400 years of silence. A prophet hadn’t been raised up. They’ve been waiting to see if the Messiah was gonna come and what in the world was gonna happen, and there’s this sort of – this bubbling anticipation to see what might happen, and John shows up.
And then, hundreds of people come out to see him, and if you can imagine, there’s this long line of people coming down to John, and John, the Scripture doesn’t tell us, but it seems to me that John asks two questions. “Do you want to see God? Then, tell me all your sins.” When you go to tell him all your sins, he actually expects you to do that, and the funny part is people do. Well, you know, it’d be like all of us right here like one at a time. “Come on up. You want to see God? What did you do you – what did you do?” It’s almost like your freshman year on the football team, and the coach is in your face just like, “Okay, I hit somebody. I stole some stuff.” “Give it to me. Give it all to me. Give. Don’t lie to me. Give me it all.” John’s just freaking people out. They’re confessing their sin, and everybody else is in line laughing like, “I can’t believe he did that. That was a terrible thing,” and you’re laughing until you get up and it’s your turn to sit there and have a little chat with John.
All of a sudden, John’s like, “Aw, you look a lot more wicked than that. Don’t lie to me. Give me the rest. Give me the rest, sexual, financial, all of it. Give it to me. What did you do?” Boom, in the Jordan River, out you go. “Next.” Hundreds of people come out for this. I mean I got to tell you. I like my job, but that sounds like a pretty wonderful job. I would love that. I’m half tempted to go down to the pier right now and just see what would happen, but you can imagine. There’s certain people that are liberated like, “Finally, I get to confess my sin. I get to own my sin. I get to be brought into a moment of cleansing by a prophet of God,” but there’s other people, as you can well assume. They didn’t really like John’s methodology. They really didn’t like the way that John was dealing with things, right? A lot of suburban people. “He’s a little rough. You know, I’ve got a counselor, and they listen. John, he needs to work on his listening skills. He’s not very good at that. I try to talk about my feelings, and the next thing I know, he was spitting on me, and those bugs in his teeth. I mean hygiene issues. He should pray about that. John seems very – he’s unusual. I mean he works cheap, and I appreciate that, but he’s just not very understanding.”
So all these people come, but some people hate what John has to say, and you can imagine. There is a crowd of people that really dislikes this guy. One of them is one of the political leaders. His name is Herod. He comes from a long family of punks and thugs and losers. They’re kind of like the Roman equivalent of a mafia is basically what they are, and Herod did something bad. He had a brother with a beautiful wife. So he took his brother’s wife, and now you know John had to poke him in the eye for that. I mean John, you know, there’s Herod. There’s a sharp stick. There’s his eye. It just seemed like the natural thing to do. So he starts preaching against Herod. “Herod needs to come down to the river and stand before Almighty God and give up that adulterous relationship with sleeping with that woman that’s married to his brother. He’s a sick man. Somebody go tell Herod I’m a little bent out of shape.”
Mountain man Jack wants to confront the President – Herod. It says in one of the accounts that Herod had two things going on that kind of messed him up. One, he really hated what John had to say, and he really didn’t feel like giving up this woman because he liked sleeping with her. But the other account, he was kind of scared of John’s followers. He was a little worried. I mean this guy’s a little half crazy, and he’s got a bunch of people, and sometimes, those people are a little unstable. You don’t want to get them going the wrong way. It says in one of the accounts that he also kind of liked John’s teaching. He was intrigued by it. He never heard anybody say the things that John was saying, and so he wouldn’t go and take John’s life.
He wouldn’t kill John, but the woman that he’s sleeping with, she really hated John. If you can imagine it, some women don’t like being called whores in public. This woman happened to be one of those kind of women. She really didn’t appreciate John saying that she was just this big adulterous, sexually deficient, sick woman sleeping with the wrong man. She got to the point where that started to trouble her in some very intimate ways, and so she kept pressing her lover Herod. “You know, we need to kill that guy. We need to shut him up,” and Herod’s like, “Nah, he’s got a lot of people. He may be a prophet of God. I don’t have the courage to do that.” Then, she devised a scheme. There’s a big party thrown. Herod was the host. All his buddies show up. She sends her daughter in, probably some attractive young gal, scantily clad, underdressed. It’s the Roman version of Hooters.
She dances a little dance, does her little thing. Herod’s real happy to see this half-naked little girl dancing for him. All the guests love her, and like every man who sees a half-naked woman, he goes completely insane, loses his mind, and says, “I’ll give you anything you want up to half of my kingdom.” Yeah, well, that’s what a guy does. That’s a guy. Herod’s a guy. Herod pulls a full on classic guy move. He decides to give away half of everything that he’s ever had, the entire history of the Herod mafia, because one young gal happened to dance fairly nice at a party after he had had a few drinks, and so she now has this opportunity to have one wish granted, and so she goes to her momma, who’s a completely conniving woman, and she asked her momma, “Momma, what do you think we should ask for in our wish?”
She says, “Oh, I know what I want. I want John the Baptist’s head on a platter. I want that guy shut up for good.” So she goes back to Herod in front of all the guests, little girl does, and she says, “My momma wants John the Baptist’s head on a platter.” Now Herod’s in this difficult place. He had just given his word publicly. He had given an impetuous vow that he shouldn’t have made that kind of promise, but he’s obligated to it. So what he does is he sends his servants down to the prison where they had been holding and beating and mistreating John the Baptizer, and they cut his head off. They take his head. They put it on a nice serving tray, probably with a top over it, and they usher it out to the banquet, and ta da, and the woman couldn’t be happier because there it is. Finally, they shut the prophet up by cutting his head off.
And John, there was the end of the family line. There was Zechariah and Elizabeth’s great hope, their only son. There’s the last prophet of God, the final conclusion of the Old Testament. There he sits, his head on a platter. He didn’t even get a year in. He didn’t even get to yell at people for a year. I’ll tell you guys what. If you just walk around telling everybody their sin, I won’t see you in a year either. Somebody will kill you. That’s exactly what happened to John. All they could handle was a little less than a year of John opening his mouth confronting people’s sin, and they killed him. Years pass, John had many disciples. His disciples went on to follow Jesus. Some of them scattered and didn’t know anything about Jesus, and you read through the book of Acts.
There’s certain people that he has baptized that didn’t know that Jesus had come yet. So they find out about Jesus a little bit later on in the story. What happens is that then the Gospel accounts are written, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and they’re telling the story of Jesus, and they include the section on John the Baptist, and then, John, the beloved disciple, writes last. He’s writing in light of all of this information that I just gave you. The reason I give you that is so that when you read John, you can be like his hearers, like his intended original audience, and you can know the story of John the Baptizer, and so John writes this account, and begins his story in the Gospel of John telling us about Jesus, God becoming a man and joining us on this planet, that light comes into darkness, and that truth comes into lies, and that life comes into death, and that God comes to us in Jesus.
The next thing we will investigate together is that then he talks about John the Baptizer and how John responded to Jesus, and I believe in so doing, what he has done is he has shown that as Jesus comes into the world, people have to respond, and one of the best ways to respond is the way that John did. John is this quintessential example, and so that’s where we pick up the story in John 1:19. Now this was John’s testimony when the Jews of Jerusalem sent priests and Levites to ask him who he was. Of course, what’s gonna happen here. The religious leaders are gonna come and ask John, “Well, who the heck are you? I mean you’re yelling at people, quoting Scripture. Your daddy’s a priest. You have genetically the lineage to become a priest. You claim to be a religious leader. Who are you?”
And you can’t really fault the religious leaders for this. If some freak showed up in Seattle and started screaming his lungs out and thousands of people showed up and he was throwing them into the Puget Sound, I would go check it out, right, and some other people would go check it out. I had the weirdest experience yesterday. I was studying this section, and I walked out of my house. I live right down by Husky Stadium. Everybody’s coming there for the game, and I see this group from Topeka, Kansas just across the street from my house. They think they’re functioning as an Old Testament prophet. They have big signs that are decrying sin and calling people to repentance, but it’s very interesting. Unlike John, who believed that everybody was bad and needed to be cleansed, they were only picking on one specific kind of sin.
The first sign I saw said, “Aids cures fags.” The other one I saw said, “Fags die. God laughs,” and then, the other one I saw was Matthew Shepherd, that boy that was – the young man that was killed in Laramie, Wyoming. He was murdered. It says, “Matthew Shepherd is in hell.” Okay, and I saw this, and I thought, “You know, those people think they’re functioning like John the Baptizer. They think that they are calling people to repentance, but they’re not. Those people are self-righteous and arrogant, hypocritical. Those people don’t recognize that they have their own sin, and they’re assuming that one particular sin is worse than another kind of sin, and rather than calling all people to repentance like John did and pointing all people to Jesus, they just want everybody to be condemned and go to hell because they don’t believe God’s grace can cover certain sins.”
And it was sad because I thought, “You know, in their mind, they probably read a guy like John the Baptist and say, ‘Yeah, we’re just like he is.’ No, you’re not.” See John’s purpose wasn’t that people would die and go to hell and be enemies of God. John loved people. He wanted them to recognize their sin so that when Jesus would come, they would be ready to receive him and get the cleansing that would come spiritually as demonstrated through the washing of the water. John didn’t hate anybody. John just wanted them to change. He was sick of people being slaves to bondage of sin and death and chaos, and just like these religious leaders came to check out and see what the crowd was all about and what was going on, I walked out of my house to see the same thing, to see were these really prophets of God or are these false prophets.
These are false prophets. We’re saved by grace, not because we’re smart. We’re saved by grace, not because we have it all figured out. Maybe they are children of God. I don’t make those decisions, but had they been real prophets, they would have realized that all have sinned and all have fallen short of the glory of God and everyone needs to be cleansed, not just a few people that have done a few bad things, and they would have shared good news, not just condemnation, and so the Levites and the priests see the same thing. they’re curious about John. Is this a real prophet? Is he really speaking for God? Is he really telling the truth? We need to go check this out. So they come to investigate John, and John’s got this very precarious situation in which he finds himself. See John at this point in his life is more popular than Jesus Christ. Not a lot of people can say that other than the Beetles.
John’s got a big crowd. Lots of people like him. All of a sudden, John’s gone from being some freaky country hick with bugs in his teeth and sugar in his veins and an afro on his head to being a player at a very crucial time in human history. The political leaders are listening to him. The religious leaders are listening to him. The common people are definitely listening to him. The military leaders are listening to him. He has everyone’s ear. His thundering is the prophetic conscience for an entire nation, and so they come to John, and they want to know, “Well, who are you? Who do you think you are?” And John has this very precarious situation because now, he and his pride could say, “I am a prophet of God. I speak for God. I serve God. Everyone listen to me.” He’s finally got some leverage. He finally has some prominence. He finally has some legitimacy, and how he responds really shows you the condition of his heart, and so we’ll look at what he has to say.
Verse 20, “He did not fail to confess, but confessed freely, ‘I am not the Christ.’” John says, “I am not it. I’m not the Messiah. I can’t heal people. I can’t forgive people. I can’t save people. I can’t fix people. I am not the answer. If you’re waiting for that guy promised through the entire Old Testament that would forgive our sins, and then, change the world, that’s not me. I’m not him.” So then, they asked him “Are you Elijah” because they had this concept that maybe Elijah would come back. You remember Elijah was a prophet that didn’t taste death. He was taken up into heaven. They had this concept. “Well, maybe Elijah will come back. So are you Elijah?” Can you imagine how tempting that would have been? Could you imagine if John would have said, “Yes, I’m Elijah. Yes, Elijah. Elijah, that’s good. Yes, Old Testament, that was me. I’m Elijah.” Can you imagine the entire nation of Israel would have flocked to him?
John had this wonderful opportunity for his pride. He said, “I am not. Nope, I’m not Elijah.” “Are you the prophet?” Back in Deuteronomy Chapter 18, Moses had made this promise that one day, a prophet would be raised up from the Hebrew people that would be like him, and maybe they were wondering. “Hmm, you know, Moses led his people from slavery and bondage in Egypt to freedom. We’re under the Roman boot. We hate being under Roman authority. Maybe this is the prophet that will be raised up like Moses and will liberate and deliver us. You here for political purposes? You gonna free the people?” He answered, “No.” Finally, they said, “Who are you? Give us an answer to take back to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself? Who are you?” I love this. They want to know, “John, who are you?” This issue now becomes John has never really spoken anything about himself. John has never exalted himself. He’s never elevated himself. John doesn’t seem to be consciously aware of a deep self-identity.
John isn’t really worried about John, but now they want to know. “John, we want you to not just speak about all the things that you believe. We want you to identify yourself. John, who are you? Self-identity, who do you see yourself to be?” And he goes back and he quotes Isaiah 40:3. I love that, and I was thinking about it today. I told the morning service that most good theological thoughts come in conversation with your children and your wife, at least for me they do. I was driving here today. I was driving this morning to church with my wife, Grace, and my son, Zachariah, and my daughter, Ashley, and we’re talking, and I was just telling the story a little bit about John, and it struck me. How in the world did John know at this moment to quote Isaiah 40:3? Where did John learn this verse? Where did John learn so much of the Scripture that he understood what a prophet was and what a prophet was supposed to do and that a prophet wasn’t to be governed by arrogance and pride, but a prophet was just supposed to love God and speak the truth and confront sin and point people to God, not toward himself.
Where did John learn all of that, not to mention memorizing some verses in the Scriptures? He learned that from his mother and father, from his mom and dad. If Zechariah was a priest, Zechariah, I’m sure, sat down day after day, night after night after he had seen the angel, Gabriel, and was told what his son was gonna do and said, “Son, I’m gonna teach you about God. I’m gonna teach you about God. I’m gonna teach you about God. Memorize these verses. Learn these stories. Know these things.” I did that same thing with my daughter today. I would tell the fathers here today, “Your family is your responsibility.” If you are planning on being a father, you are the pastor of your home. You are the priest of your congregation. It is not the job of the elders of this church. It is not the job of a youth pastor to tell your kids about God. It is the responsibility of the parents, particularly the fathers, and I’ve got to believe that Zechariah is a priest who looked the angel, Gabriel, in the eye and was told, “Your boy is gonna be a prophet. You don’t let him drink any alcohol. You don’t let him get out of control. You tell him about God. Make sure that he’s ready.” Zechariah did his job.
Zechariah loved God. Zechariah loved his son. Zechariah told his son about God, and it’s not just that you have to. It’s that you get to. A lot of the problems that the church has in our modern world is that parents aren’t’ doing their job. So they want to employ is lots of youth workers. I just saw a conference this week down in southern California. There was 3,000 youth pastors there. When I got up in session, I asked some of these pastors. I said, “Why in the world are you doing things that parents are supposed to do? You need to go to the parents and say, ‘It’s not my job to teach your kid to pray. It’s your job. It’s not my job to teach your kids a few verses. It’s your job.’” It is the parents’ responsibility, and the parents just can’t pay people to come in and be surrogate parents to hundreds of kids. Zechariah didn’t live in that world. Elizabeth didn’t live in that world. They didn’t consider their son a burden that was taking up their free time.
They considered their son a blessing from God. They waited their whole life for. “We got a son. Let’s pray with him. Let’s teach him some Bible. Let’s make sure that he loves God. Let’s invest in this guy. We don’t know what God will do for him,” and John goes on to be this man of tremendous humility and servitude and sacrifice and simplicity. Where did he learn that? I believed he learned that at home from mom and dad. His father, Zechariah, seemed to be a Godly man who lived a simple life and loved his wife and raised his son and did some things because he cared for God, and John got that same sweet spirit, I believe, from his father. I believe he was like his dad. “I’m not a prophet. I’m not important. I’m not anything. Here’s what I am.” Isaiah 40:3, “I’m the voice of one crying out in the wilderness. Make straight the way for the Lord.” That’s what he says. “Who am I? I’m just a voice. My self-identity, I’m just a voice. Don’t pay any attention to me. Just listen to what I have to say. I’m not a person. I’m just a mouth. I’m no one,” and the concept there is that in those days, the roads were unkempt between cities and nations.
They didn’t have the super highways of our day. So as a king would go out or a prince would go out to visit a town, they would send out a herald in advance to say, “The king is coming. The king is coming. Make straight. Make ready the way of the Lord, the one who rules and sits in authority,” and so the people would fill in the potholes, and they would clear the debris, and the roads would be open, and then, all of a sudden, the people from all the towns would come, and they would stand along the road, and they would cheer for the prince or the king, and they would all wait in attention in eager anticipation, hoping to get a glimpse of the ruling authority that was coming in their midst. John says, “You know what I am? I’m the guy who’s running down the potholed road, the crooked path, and I’m just saying, ‘He’s coming. He’s coming. He’s coming. Get ready.’”
That’s all John is, just a voice. That’s exactly what he says. Verse 23, “John replied in the words of Isaiah the prophet” – Chapter 40, Verse 3 – “I am the voice of the one in the desert. Make straight the path for the Lord. Some Pharisees who had been sent questioned him. Now, let me ask you this. Were the Pharisees the good guys or the bad guys? Yes, that’s the problem with the good guys. They’re always the bad guys, and that’s the problem with the bad guys. They always think they’re the good guys. That’s always the struggle. The Pharisees started out as the Back to the Bible club. Does that scare you? That should scare you if you’re a person who believes that God speaks, and the Bible’s true, and we should do what it says. You could be a Pharisee. Pharisees were guys who said, “You know, we’re sick of people not reading the Bible. We’re sick of people not obeying God. We’re sick of people not respecting God and doing what he says. People need to get serious.” You one of those guys? There’s a lot of those guys.
Is that bad? That’s not bad, but can it go too far? Yeah, because God makes the rule, and you say, “Well, now we’re gonna make rules to explain God’s rules, and then, we’re gonna make rules to explain the rules that explain God’s rules,” and before you know it, you have rules that explain the rules that explain the rules that explain the rules that explain the rules that explain God’s rules, and you think that all of them are equally important as God’s rules. So something like Jesus with his men are walking on the Sabbath. One guy reaches down and plucks a head of grain. They say, “Oh, that’s work. You’ve sinned. You’ve offended Almighty God.” Well, God said not to work on the Sabbath. Now, does this look like gainful employment? I mean this seems fairly minimal. You know, they came up with rules like if your ox falls in a hole on the Sabbath, you can’t take him out, unless the ox is going to die or broke its neck.
And it’s just like, really, do we need rules about, “How you doing, ox? I got to know. Are you an ox I can pull out of the hole or do I need to leave you in the hole until tomorrow? How’s your neck doing?” It got to the point of complete insanity, but the Pharisees cared. They wanted people to obey God’s Word, and so they come to John. They come to Jesus later, and they always have fights with Jesus. If you want to read some funny things, you got to understand this, too. As you’re reading the Bible, if you don’t believe in irony and sarcasm, you will never understand Jesus and the Pharisees. You have to read it like a Monty Python movie. You have to read it like that. You can’t look at it overly serious. You have to look at it funny. If a legalist with an agenda comes at you and they come at you, they go, “Here’s my theological argument. Wow, what do you think?”
Don’t you just love to go, “Right back at you.” Don’t you love that? Well, why would you ask that, and you don’t answer anything. You respond to a question with a question, and then, just watch them have a complete meltdown. You know, just like the witch in the Wizard of Oz. Just “I’m melting.” Just watch them come undone. Jesus does that with the Pharisees. He loves doing that because he wants to get to the spirit, not just letter of the law. He wants to get to the heart. “Why you guys making all these rules, and why you trying to control people? Aren’t you leaving any room for the spirit of God?” And so they come to John, and they want to have a theological argument with John. “Okay, John. Here we are. We’re the theological dream team right here. We’re the Olympic caliber theologians. You want to get it on? We’re gonna get it on, John. Buggy, sugar-filled, afro freak, we’re gonna talk some theology now. Come out of the words. You’re in a big city now. Gonna talk to some Hebrew scholars.”
Verse 24, some Pharisees who had been sent question him. “Why do you baptize if you are not the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the prophet?” Well, what are you doing? Who do you think are you? You just can’t go, “Yes, baptisms, baptisms. I’m starting a baptismal ministry.” You can’t just do that. You’re a priest. Your dad’s a priest. You’re a Jew. You can’t just go around dunking people in the river, and they would have been particularly offended by John because the Pharisees believe that non-Jews, Gentiles, dirty people from mixed races like you and me, we need to be baptized because we didn’t come from the wrong pedigree, and we need to be cleansed of our sin and of our own nationality and become Hebrew people and adopt into that nation and to that religion, but John wasn’t just baptizing Gentile people.
He was baptizing everybody. “Religious leaders, you’re sick. You need to get baptized. The Jewish people, good Hebrew mothers, dunk them in the Jordan. Why? We’re all wicked and depraved.” Well, wait. You’re saying that everybody’s equal? That’s exactly what John was saying. Everybody needs cleansings, especially and even the religious people. “I baptize with water,” John replied, “but among you stands one you do not know. Jesus is here, but you guys don’t even know who he is. You think you have a problem with me. You haven’t seen anything. I’m the guy singing the national anthem before the game. I am nobody. We haven’t even started, and about this one whom is coming. He is the one who comes after me, the sandals of whom I am not worthy to untie.” The most common and menial job for a slave was to untie his master’s sandals. That was the worst job, and you’re like saying today, “I’m not even good enough to take out his bed pan.”
John says, “You think I’m important. You think I’m a prophet. I’m not a prophet. I’m not Elijah. I’m not Jesus. I’m nobody. I’m the janitor. That’s what I am.” And John had this tremendous understanding of his own humility in light of Jesus. John wasn’t arrogant, self-righteous. John was real simple and straightforward about things. “I’m nobody. I’m a voice who’s not good enough to be a janitor for Jesus Christ.” This all happened at Bethany on the other side of the Jordan where John was baptizing. The next day, John’s out baptizing people, and you got to just get this picture in your mind. You got to look at this like a filmmaker. You got to see it. John’s down by the river just in people’s face, bugs hanging out of his teeth. “What did you do?” “I did this and this and this and this.” “Don’t do that anymore. God’s coming. Don’t you know?” He’s just got this big line of people stacked up. Everybody’s checking him out, and Jesus walks over the hill. John looks up, sees Jesus, his cousin.
He says, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” Now for a Jew, that was earth shattering. John in particular is a priest boy. He knows that the sacrificial system in the temple and the priesthood and the offerings have been set up for all of these years, and that if you went to the temple guys and you saw a sacrifice, it was not an elegant thing. It wasn’t like going to the butcher shop. It was a bloody mess. You’re taking living animals, throwing them up on an alter, and then, cutting them open, and they are just dying on the spot, and their blood is flowing as a river out the back of the temple to the degree that it would have stank and looked just like a river of blood. I mean it is unpleasant. I’m sure there was a stench that existed around the temple and just enormous amounts of flesh just being shucked out of the temple, and the issue is, “Well, how in the world is that gonna fix anything?”
Well, the issue is, “You know what? That won’t fix anything,” but that’s the picture. You say, “Well, how do we deal with our sin? How do we get cleansing?” Well, you know what? This innocent, naïve, pure, unblemished lamb gets brought up to the priest, and the priest brutally slaughters him, and his flesh is broken, and his blood is shed, and that’s supposed to be something that we do all the time so that one day, when Jesus comes, like Isaiah 52 and 53 says that he was like a sheep before it’s shears, that he came as the Lamb of God, that Jesus is gonna lay there, and his body is gonna get broken, and his blood is gonna get shed, and the forgiveness, not of just the couple little things we’ve done, but the sin of the whole world and the totality of everything that you and I have done past, present, and future, everything was laid upon him as a substitute, and he was crucified, died in our place, that this blood was shed, that his body was broken, and John looks up as he’s dealing with people’s sin.
How do we deal with our sin? How do we get cleansing? And he yells up to Jesus. “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” John knew. You want to get clean. That’s what you need right there. You need that guy to die for you. You need his blood to be shed for you, and John cries out to Jesus. Verse 30, “This is the one I meant when I said a man who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.” John says, “You know, I was born a few months before Jesus, but he’s eternal. He’s timeless. He just happened to come into the earth at a particular time and place. He is far greater than I. I myself did not know him,” John says. “We were growing up as kids playing Little League, hanging out. I was wrestling with God.” They’re cousins. Can you imagine John looking back going, “Man, remember that day I suplexed him. That was God. We were only nine, but I suplexed God.” John says, “I had no idea. I feel really bad now.”
You know, you got a kid, and he’s your cousin, and he’s about your same age. It’s this alpha male thing. You got to take him on. I’m sure that at certain points, John and Jesus growing up as kids came together, maybe around ceremonies or temple or festivals or Passover, and John says, “I had no idea.” Well, you wouldn’t, you know. You wouldn’t know as a kid that your cousin’s God. Like Elizabeth would be like, “Now, John. Don’t suplex because, you know, that’s God, and he’s your cousin, and if you kill him, we don’t know what will happen. You got to be careful. Be nice.” John says, “I had no idea. I didn’t know this. I myself did not know him, but the reason I came baptizing with water was that he might be revealed to Israel.” John says, “Now I know what was going on. All of what I was doing, all of what I was preaching, all of what I was proclaiming, that was just so the people could see Jesus. That’s all.” Then, John gave this testimony.
He goes back and he says, “You know, I know Jesus is God because I was there, and something wonderful will happen.” John tells this day where he was baptizing people, and then, he got to baptize someone of great importance. He got to baptize Jesus, and the issue and the encounter is Jesus comes to John, and John’s like, “Why do you want me to baptize you? You should be baptizing me. You haven’t committed any sin. You’re perfect. Why do you need to get baptized?” It’s interesting. I think that Jesus was baptized. There’s a lot of speculation in this. I think Jesus was baptized to identify himself with John’s ministry. At that moment, the ministry transitioned from John to Jesus. The baton had been passed. John had gone preparing the way, and now the king had come, and so Jesus was giving credibility and credence and validity to John’s baptismal ministry, and then, he was carrying it forward to not just bring cleansing with water, but spiritual cleansing and total healing to the people who had been trapped in their sin, and so Jesus comes to John.
And John baptizes Jesus, and as Jesus comes out of the water, the account that we’re told is that the Spirit of God descended upon him like a dove, and that God, the Father, cries out from heaven, “This is my son. This is my son,” and in this great moment, you see the totality of the one true God, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, in this moment joined together commissioning Jesus into his public ministry to pick up where John is going to leave off, and that’s exactly what he says. Verse 32, then, John gave this testimony, “I saw the spirit come down from heaven as a dove and remain on him. I would have not him except the one who sent me to baptize with water told me.” So he heard the voice of God, the Father, the same voice that came to him at some point in his wilderness living and said, “You’re gonna be my prophet, and you go prepare the way. You’re gonna be Isaiah 40:3. You go baptize people, and tell them they need to be cleansed.” He heard that same voice. John knew that voice.
John had heard it once before, and he had never forgotten that voice. That was God. God spoke to me twice. He told me to go, and he told me that this was the Son of God. The man on whom you see the spirit come down and remain is the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit. “I’ve seen and I’ve testified,” John says, “that this is the Son of God, that God has come down to be one of us, and you know I baptize you with water, and I get you wet. He’s gonna give you the Spirit of God, the power of God, the presence of God will be imparted into the children of God to cleanse them from their sin to make them new creations to give them new life so that they will totally experience complete cleansing from sin, sin that they have committed against others and sin that others has committed against them. Complete and total cleansing will come through this one, Jesus God, who has come to give us the Spirit of God.”
In Matthew 11:11, Jesus later on in his ministry says something very interesting about John. He says, “Of those born of women, there is none greater than John.” He says, “There’s nobody greater than John.” That’s quite a compliment. That’s quite a compliment. Maybe Enoch and Elijah and Moses and Jeremiah and Abraham, maybe they were equal to John, but Jesus says, “No one is greater.” I started thinking about it. I was mediating on this, just kind of letting it run around in my head for a little bit. I thought, “Well, really, what did John do that was so great?” He lived in the woods, came out as a freak, yelled at people and got them wet for about a year, and then, got his head cut off. That’s what John did. We could do that. I mean you could be a freak who gets killed. That is not that complicated. You could do that fairly simply, but I think what Jesus was referring to, at least what I see in John, I would ask you to take that question with you. I’ll give you my thought. Maybe this will be your point of contemplation for the week. What made John the greatest man who ever lived?
I wonder if it wasn’t this miraculous combination of courage and humility. First of all, I don’t see any man that’s as courageous as John. John has no bodyguards. He has no allies. He has no protection. He has no funding. He has no platform. He has nothing, except for God’s call in his life, God’s spirit in his soul, and the Scriptures just rattling around in his brain about the Messiah who’s gonna come, and everyone needs to have their sin dealt with, and so John has this tremendous courage to completely poke the entire government, the entire military, and the entire religious establishment right in the eye. I mean John is just fearless. He is not scared of anyone or anything. He could care less, and his courage is just unbelievable. I mean one guy with no resume walks out of the woods and takes on the entire world, everyone, fearless. Within that, John has this tremendous humility. John doesn’t say, “I’m special. I’m important. I’m gifted. I’m skilled.”
John says, “I’m not even a person. I’m just a voice. I’m not good enough to untie Jesus’ sandals.” He says later, “I must decrease. He must increase. I need to go die now so that all the people can now and follow Jesus.” Because see I think one of the reasons that God had to have John killed was because people start to worship their heroes, and John wouldn’t have wanted to be anyone’s hero, but a lot of people would have loved John. We even do that in our own day. “I go to So-and-so’s church.” No, that’s Jesus’ church. “So-and-so is my pastor. So-and-so is my favorite Bible teacher. So-and-so is my favorite commentator. So-and-so is my favorite.” No, Jesus is the object of our faith, but what happened with John is he was such a larger than life personality that he could have really used that if he was an arrogant and proud man to really take a lot of attention off of Jesus. To be honest with you, at that moment, John was bigger with more attention and a larger following than Jesus Christ.
What if John would have been an arrogant man and viewed Jesus as a threat and not as a blessing? What if John was unwilling to die that he wanted to be the king? John could have been a tremendous problem, but he wasn’t. John loved Jesus. John knew that his whole goal was to confront sin, and then, disappear because he couldn’t do anything about sin. He could raise the issue. He could prick the conscience. He could surface the conviction, but he couldn’t heal. He couldn’t forgive. He couldn’t redeem. He couldn’t do anything. So all he would do is then point to Jesus and hand it over to Jesus, and you guys need to know as your pastor, I come to you in the function of John. I need to tell you that you’re sinful. You’re wicked. You’re terrible. You’re worst than you could possibly believe. I always tell you that total depravity is for optimists. We are bad. We are very bad people.
Why is the world a bad place? Because people are in it, and all those people are bad, and that we all need cleansing. We all need healing. We all need forgiveness. We all need Jesus, and none of us is able to heal the other, but at our best, those moments of spirit usefulness, God will allow some of us to do like John did and to point other people to Jesus, and then, that’s where people get healed. That’s where people get saved. That’s where people get cleansed, released, forgiven, renewed. Jesus, that’s the point. John knew more than anything. He didn’t get confused in the cloud of opportunity. I’m sure it was difficult for John looking at his mother and father saying, “You know, the way things are going, I’m gonna die, and the family line is gonna die, and your son is gonna die. The son we’ve been waiting for for so long, he’s gonna die,” and I’m sure as he looked at the political leaders, they told him, “Look, John. You join our team. Bring your followers. There will be some opportunity here.”
The religious leaders, I’m sure, said, “Look, you’re a priest’s son. You can be a priest. Just come back into the fold. Don’t be talking so much about sin. Kind of let things settle down. There’s a good long future for you just like there was for your dad,” and when the military leaders, and I’m sure there were zealots in his day who said, “You know, if you would just back off on us a little bit, we could provide you a little support. You can be a king. You can take over the government. You can do whatever you want.” John had this tremendous humility. He wasn’t interested in any of those things because John wasn’t interested in the self-exultation. John just wanted people to know that they were sinful and Jesus would take it away. That’s all he wanted people to know, and so if you’re here tonight, I want you to know that same thing, that you have to be courageous like John, confessing and recognizing your sin, and telling it to God just like John said.
Repent. Recognize those areas of our life that are crooked. Recognize those areas of our life that are dark. Recognize those areas of our life that we are not participating in what the spirit of God would desire for us, and then, also recognizing you can’t heal yourself. You can’t fix yourself. You can’t forgive yourself, renew yourself, heal yourself, cleanse yourself of the sins that you’ve committed and those that have been committed against you, but Jesus can because he’s the Lamb of God who takes away all of the sins of the world, and the burden is lifted, and John says, “Light comes into darkness, and truth comes into lies, and freedom comes into slavery, and life comes into death.” So that’s my invitation to you all tonight. It’s good to repent like John, but then, it’s really good to celebrate and have some joy and to be happy that Jesus has done what needed to be done, that God became one of us.
Our sin was placed on him. He died for our sins, and he rose from the dead, and he cleanses, and so as God came into the world in Jesus, John the Baptist responded by giving of himself for the purposes of Jesus, that Jesus would be seen, and so I call you tonight as our church to respond through giving of your finances, through giving of your repentance, through giving of your song, through giving of your prayer, through giving of your life as you go out, to be honest about sin and have the courage that John had, and not to be a self-righteous hypocrite, to be honest about our own as well, not so that we could condemn or crucify people, but so that we could point them to Jesus so they could be loved and healed. So I will pray. Then, we will collect our offering. You’re welcome to take communion after you’ve had a time of doing what John would instruct us to do, and that’s confession and repentance.
Communion is set up at the sides. It is intended for those who believe, and so God, we come to you tonight thankful for our dear friend, John, just a larger than life crazy out of control Christian brother that he is. God, we thank you that you raised someone that was completely unanticipated and completely disconnected, and God, we thank you that with all of this peculiarities and all of his oddities that he loved you, that he was filled with your Spirit, that the Scriptures rattled around in his mind, and that he didn’t get confused with power and might and religion and politics, that he kept a sharp and clear focus that the issue really was sin and that people needed to be healed and cleansed and loved and forgiven and changed, and that that couldn’t be done through the government and that couldn’t be done through the priesthood and that couldn’t be done through the sacrifices and that couldn’t be done through the military and that couldn’t be done through business, but that had to be done through Jesus.
And thank you, God, that he pointed all of his followers to Jesus, and God, I pray today that we would all have his courage to confront the darkness in our own lives and to speak into other people’s lives that we love with tears in our eyes and compassion about their sin, knowing that that truly is the issue, and that, God, we then would have the humility not to be self-righteous and arrogant and mean-spirited and condemning, but loving and gracious and kind, that we would be like Jesus looking over our city, seeing people who are harassed and hounded. They’re like sheep without a shepherd. They’re being beaten and abused, and God, they’re turning to everything but Jesus for solutions. God, may you use us like John to be a lamp through which your light shines and through which Jesus could be seen, and so, Jesus, we love you. We recognize that we are some sinful people, and we recognize that you died for that, past, present, and future, and that we have been, as John says, adopted as your children and you are now our Father, and for that, we come to celebrate in Christ’ name. Amen.
