The Herald: A Voice in the Wilderness.
Matthew Chapter 3
April 30th, 2006
We’re going to skip ahead in the book of Matthew just a little bit into the third chapter. In the first chapter we have the miraculous birth of Christ, born of a virgin and conceived by the Spirit. In the second chapter the wise men visit and the family flees to Egypt to avoid King Herod. As the second chapter concludes, Joseph has returned from Egypt with his family and settled in the town of Nazareth.
Then you have a huge gap. There is a tremendous void in the life of Christ from that early childhood time until he comes onto the scene in chapter three to begin his public ministry. Luke gives us the only glimpse into this time of any of the gospels and that’s only a short story of Mary and Joseph losing Jesus only to find Him in the temple courts with the teachers of the law, listening to them and asking them questions. Luke tells us that everyone was amazed at the understanding and wisdom of this child. Then we’re told that He went home with his parents, obeyed them, and grew in wisdom and stature with God and men. So, even as a child, there were glimpses of the man that He would become. But that’s all we know. The same is true for John the Baptist who we see here in the third chapter. We were talking about some bad people in the Bible once and Ethan kept saying that John was the worst, his Sunday School teacher said that John was the worst. We asked him a few more questions and finally I said who are you talking about and he said John the baddest. John may not be the baddest but he is one of the most interesting personalities in all of Scripture. We are told in Luke of the circumstances of His birth and then it tells us:
LK 1:80 And the child grew and became strong in spirit; and he lived in the desert until he appeared publicly to Israel.
That’s all we know until the time has come for him to fulfill what he was created and called to do. See, John was created to be a sign. He was created to point others towards something.
JN 1:6 There came a man who was sent from God; his name was John. 7 He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all men might believe. 8 He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light. 9 The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.
We don’t have a huge building here so there’s not a lot of need for signs inside that tell people where they need to go. We do have a sign, however, that shows where the nursery is. It hangs on the wall around the corner from the nursery and in big bold letters it proclaims the word “nursery.” When people see this sign, they understand that it’s pointing to something else. It is directing people’s attention to the nursery, pointing the way to get there. No one would look at that sign and think that it is the nursery, no, it was created to point to the way we need to go. The same was true of John, that’s why he came. He was not the Messiah, He had simply come to point the way to the Messiah. To draw people’s attention to the direction that they needed to go. John was not the message, he was the messenger. Jesus was the message, He was the king, John was the Herald of the king.
GOD went to great lengths to ensure that the coming of His Son would not be overlooked or missed. I am a big fan of ESPN. One of the things that they do well is to advertise well in advance what they have coming up. For months now they have been advertising Monday Night Football on their station. This doesn’t start until September but they have people thinking about it and waiting for it and expecting it and when it does come, I won’t miss it because I will have looked forward to it for a long time. GOD began to advertise His plan for salvation through the Messiah not months or years ahead of time but centuries beforehand. Through the prophets he would give bits and pieces of information to His people of what was to come. When Monday Night football does come to ESPN, I’m sure that they’ll kick it off with a bang. When God’s Messiah arrived, God trumpeted it from the heavens! The angels sang and rejoiced, the shepherds went and worshipped, the wise men traveled to see Him, what God had advertised throughout the ages was here. God took it one step further. He sent a man to prepare the way for the ministry of His Son. He sent a man to point people to Christ and to proclaim that God’s kingdom was at hand. In the days of kings, each king had Heralds, the Herald was the messenger. The herald would bring news from the king and would announce the arrival of the king. It’s fitting that as we look at the book of Matthew and the theme of “the Return of the King,” that this king too would have a herald, one to shout the news of his arrival and to deliver the news of His coming kingdom. The King had come and His Herald went out and shouted to all the world, the King is coming! Are you ready, the king is coming!
So, as we look at chapter 3, we see the story of this man. Read! We know this much about the Messenger:
I. The Messenger
First, he was:
A. A Miracle Child
We’re told in Luke that John and Jesus are relatives. Mary is related to John’s mother, Elizabeth. John’s father, Zechariah, was a priest. We looked at this story over Christmastime. Zechariah was an upright man who did what was right in the sight of God. He and his wife had prayed for a child but Elizabeth was barren and they were now well beyond the child bearing years. But that doesn’t stop God. An angel informs Zechariah that he will be a father and that the child will be great in God’s sight, that he will be filled with the Holy Spirit from birth and that his birth is for one thing only (the end of verse 17) -to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.
The gospels begin with the birth of two children, both miracles of God. One child is born to a barren woman who is well beyond child-bearing years, this one points to the other child, the Messiah, born of a virgin, the Son of God. So, John is a miracle baby, brought about by the intervention of God to further his plan and to fulfill what had been prophesied. See, the second thing we know about this messenger,
B. The Fulfillment of Prophecy
ISA 40:1 Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and proclaim to her that her hard service has been completed, that her sin has been paid for, that she has received from the LORD’s hand double for all her sins.
ISA 40:3 A voice of one calling: "In the desert prepare the way for the LORD; make straight in the wilderness a highway for our God.
This is a prophecy about the one who will precede God’s Messiah. Another prophecy, found in the last verse of the OT before God was silent, in the time between the Old and the New Testament, He leaves Israel with these words of what will come next:
MAL 4:5 "See, I will send you the prophet Elijah before that great and dreadful day of the LORD comes. God cuts off communication with Israel for 400 years to prepare them for the coming of the Messiah but in His great love He leaves them a sign to watch for so that they’ll know when He begins to visibly move and work again for the salvation of His people.
We don’t have to guess if this was the guy, if this was who God was pointing to, in our passage this morning, Matthew clears it up immediately. Verse 3 says that this was the one that Isaiah wrote about and it quotes the prophecy.
As far as the prophecy of one coming in the spirit of Elijah, John’s got that covered as well and Christ, himself attests to it in a couple of different places, one of those is:
Mt 11:12 From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has been forcefully advancing, and forceful men lay hold of it. 13 For all the Prophets and the Law prophesied until John. 14 And if you are willing to accept it, he is the Elijah who was to come.
So John was not only a miracle child, he was the one that the Scriptures had proclaimed would come to make ready God’s people for the coming of His Son.
The third thing that we know about this messenger:
C. A Single-Minded Preacher
We’re told that John lived in the desert until the time came for his ministry to be made public. He lived alone and isolated. I’ve seen some Christians who look funny and have strange habits but my guess is that John takes the cake. Matthew tells us that his clothes were made of camel hair and he wore a belt around his waist to secure the loose outer garment. These were the garments of the poor and insignificant. They were also the garments of the prophet Elijah, showing that John had a true knowledge of what he had come to do and would preach the same message with the same focus as Elijah had before him. These clothes would have stood out in stark contrast to the well dressed Pharisees and the teachers of the law that the people were used to. His diet consisted of locusts and wild honey. John was not one for outward appearances and his appearance must have made the people all the more curious as they listened to him preach, and it was his preaching that set him apart. The religious instruction of that day dealt mostly with the outside and making sure you had the appearance of holiness, John’s message was different and he preached it with a single-minded determination to say exactly what needed to be said. What was that message?
The second thing I want to look at this morning is what that message was.
II. The Message
The message was simple; his sermon consisted of 8 words. This may explain why he was a popular speaker. Eight words but they were words that carried a lot of weight and responsibility to the one who heard it. Repent! For the Kingdom of Heaven is near. He knew Christ was coming, as the Herald of the King he is announcing the coming kingdom, a time when God’s plan would reach fulfillment, the gates of heaven would be opened, and access to God would be available to all who believed. The kingdom was at hand, the time that every Jew had grown up listening to stories about and had waited for was here. And John wanted to make it clear that this kingdom would belong to those who turned from their sins and turned to God, to those who repented.
Repentance is a word that we don’t use a whole lot anymore. We emphasize the love of God and the forgiveness of God those aren’t bad things to emphasize, they’re the heart of the Gospel. But often we leave out repentance. We talk about confession and then God’s promise to forgive but John’s message went beyond confession. Repentance is a heart condition that sees our condition of sinfulness before God, it’s that broken heart that we talked about several weeks ago. And when we realize our condition and the depth of our sin, repentance is turning away from it and heading in a new direction. To repent literally means to turn around.
I have the worst problem getting out of mall and restaurant parking lots. If there are 20 paths that lead to the road that I want and one that dead ends into a snow bank, I end up face to face with the snow bank. My wife knows this and thinks its hilarious every time it happens and she used to be quick to point out the direction that I should have gone. She’s gotten better lately and she’ll keep her smart comments to herself until I finally figure the way out and we’re on our way home. This happened the other day at the mall in Big Flats. I began down a road and it became immediately obvious that it was the wrong one and I was going to end up at a dead end. I pulled into a parking spot, turned to my wife, and admitted that I had made a wrong turn. This is like confession for the Christian. We stand before God and admit that we went the wrong way and we know it. Now some Christians sit there for awhile kicking themselves for being so stupid. Some Christians back out and start driving towards the same dead end of sin. But repentance is backing out of the spot and heading in a new direction, a direction that is going to get you where you know God wants you to go. I backed out of that spot and ignored the smile on Erin’s face and turned 180 degrees to a new direction. That’s a picture of repentance.
John knew that those who would enter into this new Kingdom, into the realm of the King, of whom John was the Herald, anyone who would come into this kingdom must be changed. Not just aware of sin, all of the Jews were very aware of sin, but they must experience internal change and have a heart that will turn from sin and towards Christ. The message of repentance was about internal change. When John saw the Pharisees and the Teachers of the Law who came, he points out the contrast between God’s Kingdom and the lives that they were living. These were superficial men who only cared about appearances. Jesus called them tombs, nice on the outside but full of dead man’s bones. John says that their life should bear fruit according to their repentance. These men were outwardly repentant; they sought to look religious and holy before men. They were probably there to be baptized to look good for the people, but John rips into them and says that the outside doesn’t count in this kingdom, it’s the heart. And when the heart repents, the outside will bear fruit; people will see the repentance by the difference in your life. The Pharisees didn’t get it. See, as Christians we need to be more concerned with being good then with looking good. How many times are we more concerned about the way things look to others while our relationship with God is almost non-existant. We look good on the outside but the inside is full of sin and the ways of this world. John says to turn from that, to focus on the inside and bear the fruit that comes from repentance. That was John’s message. Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is near! We see in the next chapter that when Jesus began to preach, the message was identical. He preached to repent because the kingdom of heaven was near. So if repentance was the focus of the messenger and the fulfillment of that message, both, it must be something that God desires in our lives today. He wants to forgive, He will never stop loving, but He wants us to change, to turn from sin and towards Him. That was John’s message.
Finally this morning, I want to look at the response to this message.
III. The Response
The response was two-fold. First, there was:
A. Confession
Like we talked about, this is the beginning of repentance and verse 6 tells us that the people were moved by the message and came to John, confessing their sins. The Greek word that is used here for confess has an aspect of completeness and detail to it. They were not simply admitting that they were sinners, they were confessing specific and detailed sins in their lives and denouncing them, so compelling was this man and his message. The second response that we see is:
B. Baptism
The second half of verse 6 says that they were baptized by him in the Jordan. Baptism was not new to the Jews. If a non-Jew wanted to become a Jew there were three steps that they had to take. 1) They had to present a sacrifice 2) They had to be circumcised 3) They had to be baptized. Baptism was the final step, they went into the water a Gentile and emerged a new person, a Jew. But now, John was telling them that they all needed to be baptized to symbolize repentance and that it was available to them all without the hindrance of ceremony and ritual that usually accompanied it. One was coming who would give them a new life and baptism was a picture of that. John’s baptism was with water, it was symbolic of the cleansing of sins. It was a symbol of what Christ was going to accomplish on the cross, but he again points to the coming Messiah, the one who was coming to baptize, not with water but with the Holy Spirit. This baptism would be complete and would be a baptism into the salvation that Christ offers. So, the baptisms we are going to be celebrating in a few moments are like that of John, they are a shadow of the baptism that has already taken place inside the hearts of each person; a baptism of the Spirit that is for the salvation of the soul. The people heard the message and they responded by being baptized.
And then, at the end of the chapter, Jesus appears. The one that John is preaching of, the King that he is pointing towards, is standing before him. Jesus is ready to begin his ministry and though John protested, Jesus had come to be baptized. The sinless one, the one who needed no cleansing was embracing the humanity that he had taken on himself and setting an example for us all to follow. PHP 2:6 Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.
Here was God, humbling himself and being baptized as a man by a man.
As he went down into the water and was brought back up, all of the onlookers got a glimpse at what he had come to do. This event foreshadowed the death and resurrection that was coming through which men could truly experience cleansing and forgiveness of sins. And then the clouds opened and we get a beautiful picture of the trinity. God the Son standing on the banks, God the Spirit descending like a dove, and God the Father, unable to hold back his pleasure and letting everyone know that this was his son, that he loved, and he was pleased with him and what he had done.
Conclusion: John’s message of brought about confession, it went further than that and called for repentance and it resulted in people being baptized. God still calls for those same responses today. We know who it is that John pointed to and we understand that to enter into that kingdom of Heaven, confession is necessary and repentance must take place in our lives. The messenger has changed, John is gone and God has sent his Spirit to point us to Christ and to convict our hearts of sin, but the message won’t change until the Lord returns again. Repent! Turn from your sins and be baptized as a symbol of what has taken place on the inside. You have died to sin and been resurrected in Christ. The blood that was shed on Calvary has covered you and washes you as white as snow. Baptism is not the source of salvation, it is a symbol of it, a visible reminder of the reality of that salvation that we have through faith, and it’s a statement that publicly identifies you with Christ and speaks to the changes in your life. We do it because of Christ’s example, we do it because we are commanded, we do it to symbolize the new life we have in Jesus. We have seven people this morning who are going to take this step of obedience in baptism. As a church family, we get to be a part of this significant and exciting ceremony.
You can Clap!!! You can Cheer!!! They are doing it in heaven so we should be just as excited.
