"The Good News?"
John the Baptist #2
Luke 3:1-20
December 7, 1997

Text Comment

v.2 Luke is writing to educated Gentiles of the Greco Roman world and must face the initial difficulty they have with the gospel, namely in believing that the ultimate truth for all of mankind is to be found only in a member of a despised race who lived his brief life in a distant province of the empire and who was executed as a criminal by the Roman authorities. So he begins boldly proclaiming that the events he is about to narrate are, in fact, a part of world history. They took place in the time of Tiberius Caesar.

v.19 Herod had married his brother's wife, which was forbidden by the law. One of Alexander Whyte's favorite phrases was "generalia non pungunt," "generalities do not prick or penetrate." Herod heard John gladly until he descended to particulars and made an issue of Herod's particular sin.

An entirely new chapter of world history began when John, that strange, other-worldly man, came out of the desert and began to preach that men everywhere should repent because the day of the Lord was near. And it all came to pass as it did, we read in v. 2, because "the word of the Lord came to John in the desert." We read in Luke 1:80 that John had lived in the desert since he had become an adult. He was an ascetic, something like a hermit apparently. He never touched wine because the angel had told his father, when he had announced to Zechariah that John would be born, "he is never to take wine or other fermented drink." This was a mark of his entire devotion to the Lord. It was part of the Nazarite vow in the Old Testament.

Whether John had simply applied the spirit of that commandment to other things or whether, in some other way, the Lord had also revealed this to John's parents as the rule for their son's life, John lived apart in the desert. Matthew tells us (3:4) that he wore clothes of camel hair with a leather belt around his waist. His food was locusts and wild honey. And, so we gather from Luke 1:80, he had been living in the desert for some time. He was just a few months older than the Lord, remember, and the Lord Jesus did not begin his ministry until he was about 30 years of age.

And John would have continued living in thee desert, a man apart, wearing his strange clothes and eating his strange food until he died had not the word of the Lord come to him. But when it came, John came out of the desert and gave himself to that word and at least for a period of some months his preaching of repentance and the dawning of the day of the Lord created a sensation in Judea. His meteoric rise to fame and great influence was matched only by the suddenness by which he disappeared from the scene after his arrest by Herod Antipas. We do not know how the word of the Lord came to John but it was destined to change John and the entire world.

Now what all of this indicates in a particularly powerful way is that John was a prophet, a spokesman for God; indeed, as the Lord Jesus himself would later say, he is the greatest of all the prophets, greater than Isaiah, than Jeremiah, than Ezekiel. All of this is designed to establish that fact in our minds.

"The Word of the Lord came to John." That is what is said about all the prophets. That is how they got their ministry, in the same way John got his. The Word of the Lord came to them. Remember that John is the second Elijah, the one who will prepare the way of the Lord according to the prophesy in Malachi 3. Well, that is how Elijah's ministry began as well, as you can read in 1 Kings 17:2: "the word of the Lord came to Elijah." What is more Elijah spent a great deal of his time in the desert; he too came out of the desert with the word of the Lord upon him. Even more interestingly, Elijah wore clothes made of animal hair and a leather belt around his waist. John the Baptist was modeled after Elijah so that no one would miss the fact that he was a prophet of the Lord, in Elijah's spirit. That the mantel of Elijah was upon him. And all the way through

the Gospels we read that that is exactly what the people took John to have been, a prophet of the Lord. The first one since Malachi, four centuries before. That is why the Jewish leadership had to tread so lightly in their antagonism toward the Lord Jesus; they could not take a step that was regarded by the people as a repudiation of the message and preaching of John the Baptist because the people considered him to have been a prophet.

But there are other ways in which John was revealed to be a prophet. He lived his life alone and apart. Like Elijah and Jeremiah before him the word of the Lord rested heavily upon this man. He never married, like those great men before him. He'd had no wife or children. His life was entirely devoted, first to his preparation and then to the ministry of the word of the Lord that had come to him.

But there is one further way in which John is like the great prophets who came before him. His message was like theirs. Full of thunder and lightning, full of warning and the threat of doom, full of the promise of divine wrath and judgment upon the impenitent.

We are well acquainted with this characteristic of the preaching of the OT prophets. It is what can make them, God forgive us, so tedious to us when we read them in our bibles, Lords Day after Lords Day. Long sections of unrelenting judgment, accusation, and condemnation. Hosea, like a prosecuting attorney, proving Israel's violations of God's covenant, point by point by point, and then enumerating the various curses of the covenant that are now to befall her for her unfaithfulness -- 20 of the 27 various curses mentioned in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 are repeated by Hosea, and only one-tenth of his book is devoted to the promise of the restoration of God's people in some future day. It is worse with Amos. Only the last five verses of the last of his nine chapters have any hope or promise of salvation in them. All the rest is doom. And what of Jeremiah, the prophet of tears, whose message of impending judgment was not only almost his exclusive subject in preaching -- almost all the hope in his book of 52 chapters is found crammed together in chapters 30-33 -- but his message for many years, for Jeremiah had a long ministry. It was unpopular, he was resented for his preaching such a gloomy word, and, like John, he was required to live his life apart -- without a wife or family to relieve the sense of loneliness and alienation from others that resulted from his being given such an unpopular message to preach.

Remember his lament in Jeremiah 20:7ff?

O Lord, you deceived me, and I was deceived; you overpowered me and prevailed. I am ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me. Whenever I speak, I cry out proclaiming violence and destruction. So the word of the Lord has brought me insult and reproach all day long. But if I say, "I will not mention him or speak anymore in his name, his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed I cannot."

John's life was like that. We must not make of him a stone. He was a man of like passions with us, just as James will later tell us that Elijah was, that prince of the OT prophets. He had a great effect upon the crowds, and many came to hear him gladly, but, you can well imagine what kind of

response many others made to the message John was preaching.

"You brood of vipers; who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" Don't give me this about you being the sons of Abraham!

Or, "...one more powerful than I will come.... He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat up into his barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire."

The fact that his ministry was like the grass, springing up in the morning and then gone again by the evening, is proof enough of what reception he received. There was no record of a general outpouring of protest when Herod threw John into jail. He died in some dungeon at the whim of some dancing girl he probably didn't even know. Even the largest part of the congregations who came out to hear him preach, and where baptized by him, did not apparently continue in that faith. When in the clamor for Christ's crucifixion, when the time came, there is no record anywhere in the gospel of a large community of followers of John, who were determined to protect the Savior during the course of his ministry. All of this tells you something of the burden of this prophet, preaching such a message as God gave him to preach.

But did you notice what is said about that message, John's preaching, in v. 18? Did you notice what it is there called, this message about repentance or else, about vipers and their false assurance, about the axe being laid to the root of the tree and every tree that does not bear fruit being cast into the fire, and about the Messiah with his winnowing fork, ready to burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire? It is called the gospel, the good news. Read this summary of John's preaching to a non-Christian friend of yours; see if it sounds to him like good news.

This isn't the only place in the Bible where a message that concentrates so much on sin and judgment and the wrath of God is called "the gospel." In Revelation 14:6-7 we read:

Then I saw another angel flying in midair, and he had the eternal gospel to proclaim to those who live on the earth -- to every nation, tribe, language and people. He said in a loud voice, "Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come." That doesn't sound like good news to most people!

There are different ways to take this, to take John's ministry and its relationship to the gospel of salvation in Christ, a salvation offered to unworthy sinners if only they will believe in Jesus.

We can look at John, in his relation to Jesus as part of that historical pattern that God has woven into salvation history as one way of revealing to us the nature of salvation. He wrote it on the great landscape of the history of salvation in the same way that he writes it, in many cases, on the heart of an individual human. Jonathan Edwards explained it this way:

"There is...reason to suppose that God deals with particular believers as he dealt with his church, which he first made to hear his voice in the law, with terrible thunders and lightnings, and kept her under a schoolmaster to lead her to Christ; and then comforted her with the joyful sound of the gospel from Mount Zion. And it seems to be the natural import of the word "gospel," "glad tidings," that it is news of a deliverance and salvation after great fear and distress."

In this way, John comes first then Jesus comes second, as the law precedes the gospel in

the order of salvation and the general order of experience. Of course it does not always do so -- in the case of multitudes of Christian children it does not do so -- but it regularly does in the case of those who come to faith in Christ from a life of unbelief, and theirs is the pattern of gospel experience in the Bible. Paul's conversion and experience teaches us the nature of the gospel, a man who was brought to faith from unbelief, much more so than, say, Timothy, who knew the Scriptures from his infancy and whose faith lived before him in his mother and grandmother. The case of someone who first undergoes the conviction of sin, the sense of doom, and the terror of God's judgment, but who then, by God's grace is overcome by the sight of Christ and believes in him as Redeemer, and finds deliverance from his guilt and his fear, that is the kind of experience that the Bible uses to teach the nature of the gospel. News about deliverance from sin and guilt, through Jesus Christ.

And so it is part of God's way, the nature of salvation by the way in which that message is proclaimed in the world and particularly in the order in which it is proclaimed. John come thundering the law, that law that shows us our sin and our guilt, that warns of the wrath to come as preparation for the appearance of the Lamb of God who would take away the sins of the world. John's message is the gospel, then, because it prepares for the gospel and makes us ready for the gospel and enables us to understand it. And, of course, even for those of us who never lived the life of an unbeliever and so were never brought into the faith of Christ through a period of terrible anxiety and fear on account of our sins, this pattern is still meaningful, still, in a different way, agrees with our experience. For, as Alexander Whyte once put it, "every day that Christians live in this world, it is, as if, they were converted from sin and death all over again....

"...we are always returning home from the far country, and we are always saying, 'Father, I have again sinned.' And our Father is always saying over us, 'Bring forth the best robe and put it on him.' Every morning you rise put on again the best robe. And every returning night lie down again in it. Go out to your day's work always wearing it. Make it your morning coat and your evening dress. Be married in it, if you would be married in the Lord; and make it your winding sheet, if you would die in the Lord. Die in it and awake in it and go up to judgment in it. Stand at the right hand of the great white throne in it, and enter heaven shining like the sun in it."

In other words, what we begin with in the Christian life, is what we live by every day we are Christians. Whatever our experience may be precisely in the beginning of our salvation, we all have the same salvation and every day its character and its nature as deliverance from sin, guilt, judgment and the wrath of God is illustrated and demonstrated all over again. So what the man or woman experiences who is terrified by John's preaching and becomes a believer when he sees the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world, is what every true Christian experiences every day of his life. His continuing sin, and conviction of sin, and sense of his sin and guilt, and his continuing need for forgiveness recapitulates his first conviction and his first forgiveness and the faith by which he began to be a Christian is the same faith by which he continues to be one day after day.

But there is another way of thinking about John's message of sin and judgment and doom as part of the good news. John, of course, has some of the hope and promise of salvation in his preaching, as we read in vv. 3, 6, and v. 17. He preached forgiveness, though he preached it in the context of terrible warnings.

Here we are reminded, as in so many other places in the Bible, that the height of the mountain is measured from the depth of the valley. That you cannot know how "good," how unspeakably good, the good news is, unless and until you know full well in your own heart the terrors of God's law, the truth about your sin and the wrath of God against sinners.

In Joseph Hart's great line: "What comfort can a Savior bring to those who never felt their woe?"

Or, to put it another way, you cannot have heaven without hell. For that is what John the Baptist is really talking about with his trees and chaff being thrown into unquenchable fire. You cannot know heaven without hell. C.S. Lewis wrote, in one of his Letters to Malcolm [p. 76]:

"Servile fear is, to be sure, the lowest form of religion. But a god such that there could never be occasion for even servile fear, a safe god, a tame god, soon proclaims himself to any sound mind as a fantasy. I have met no people who fully disbelieved in Hell and also had a living and life-giving belief in Heaven."

That is, there is no gospel, there is no good news, without bad news. You cannot bring the one without the other, you cannot preach the one without the other. They are the two sides of one coin.

If there is no Hell, then all roads lead to the same place and it makes no difference what road you take. But, if the roads lead to infinitely different places then it makes an infinite difference which road we take. And then it becomes good news beyond belief that a way has been made for us, a road to heaven has been laid for us, and someone has come to show us where that road might be found and how to walk it, otherwise we would never have seen it, never have recognized it and never would have been amoungst those few, Jesus said, go in by the narrow gate and walk the narrow road, the only road that leads to life.

That is good news! To find the way to the only road that leads to life. And to feel ones feet on that road. There is forgiveness with God that he may be feared! But until you are sure you need to be forgiven, what interest will you have in news like that?

So John came out of the desert to convince men that they are sinners needing forgiveness so that when the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world appeared, they would recognize Him as their Savior and believe in him.

As a wise man once said, "the kingdom of God is not for the well-meaning, it is for the desperate." How hard it is for men to feel that way about themselves -- that they are desperate sinners in desperate need of deliverance from their sins, which they themselves can not supply and how necessary that they come to see that truth about themselves and feel the terrible force of it within themselves hard as it is to face -- all of that is proved by the ministry of John the Baptist before the appearing of the Savior of the World.

You know, most people in our culture, in our irreligious, self satisfied, sin tolerating, and sin affirming culture. In this culture that has so much difficulty with the idea of punishment and judgement. Most people in this culture believe in the existence of hell. A vast majority, only one percent of those people think they themselves have any danger of going there. What is that?

That is sentimentality. Its what we see about ourselves all the time, and what we see about everyone else all the time. Everybody believing, what they want to be true. Cruel, mean, unkind, disrespectful, neglectful husbands and fathers who are nevertheless deeply offended when anyone has the temerity to suggest that there may be something wrong with the way they relate to their loved ones. Lazy, grasping workers. Who resent any suggestion whatsoever from management, that perhaps this work could be done better than it is being done. Students who complain about teachers, teachers who complain about students. Parents about children, children about parents. Friends about friends. Citizens about government, government about citizens. And everyone all the while accusing one another of sins of which each one of us is entirely and completely guilty of everyday we live in the world. Where does this conscience we have come from? And where does this uneasy conscience, this knowledge that we don't live up to our own standards?

And that is why, if you would be a Chrisstian, you've got to get over this, you have got to get past this. You have got to get away from this drawing back from the truth you yourself know. But which you so dislike admitting about yourself. If you would be a Christian, if you would ever see, really see and embrace, "... the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world," and find in Him the forgiveness of your sins and that delicious experience of eternal life already in this mortal body; you've got to heed John the Baptist when he talks about vipers and trees that don't bear good fruit, and the Messiah coming with his winnowing fork so that he might throw the chaff into unquenchable fire. You've got to hear John, in order to follow Jesus. In fact, you've got to hear John just to find Jesus. Which is why he came and preached what he did. Amen.

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