The Ministry of John the Baptizer

I'm going to explain that at the end of the sermon. It was a legitimate time. It was a legitimate time, yes. Actually Portuguese, but who's counting? Welcome to our guest today. Good to have all of you with us here on this beautiful and somewhat cooler Sabbath day.

In case you're wondering, the noise is not part of today's programs. I say noise. When I sat down here before services, Connie said, What's that noise going on? I said, Well, there's a jazzercise class going on down here at the gym. She said, Oh, that can't be pretty. And I assured her that it's not. So try not to think about that. Hopefully we'll keep your attention here with what's going on. But we have background for some of you.

We have a number of guests here with us today. So I thought I'd give a little background. This is an introduction to the material we'll be covering today. For about the last seven or eight months now, we've been going through a class on the harmony of the Gospels, going through the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, going through the four Gospels in chronological order.

We've distributed earlier a harmony of the Gospels in the New King James Version, which is our standard version for the Bible. And this is a 142-page book. And we're going through it literally line by line here. And you can tell how much detail we're going through this, because we started this in January or February.

And we're up to page eight today. So it's very detailed. A lot of information we're covering there, and we're going into a great deal of detail. By way of background, too, what has prompted this study is where you'll be. Hearing a fair amount of new information today. Starting about 15 to 20 years ago, I would say, a group of American scholars who were Bible believers started interacting. Some of them actually moved to Jerusalem and started studying with Hebrew scholars there.

Scholars who made a lifetime of studying the books of the Bible, the culture of biblical times, and so on. And as these Christian scholars and Jewish scholars started interacting with one another, they began finding all kinds of insights on the New Testament from things that these Hebrew scholars had known for years and years. Part of this goes back to the cultural shift going back to the early centuries, the second century, third century, and so on, when the supposedly Christian church separated itself from Judaism and actually turned around and started persecuting the Jews.

Because of that cultural shift, religious shift back almost 2,000 years ago, the Jewish roots of Christianity have been condemned, looked down on, ignored, and that has persisted on up until recent decades when some of these scholars have been really digging into and looking at the culture of the first century. And as a result of that, there's all kinds of things that start coming to light in the Gospels. I've been studying this material for about the last five years or so myself in preparation for re-continuing the Bible reading program, which, if you recall, was put on hiatus several years ago due to other external factors there.

I need to update a number of our booklets and so on. But we've continued studying this material in that time period anyway, and there's just a wealth of new material that's coming out that gives us a deeper insight, deeper understanding of what's going on in the Gospels and actually reinforces our beliefs much more.

And as we go through this message today, we'll be covering some of that material. And so, yeah, we have these classes twice a month on the first and third Sabbaths of the month here in Denver and Colorado Springs. And then on the fourth Sabbath of the month, they go up to Loveland and actually give two of them up there on that Sabbath. So with that as background, so you kind of understand where we're coming from.

And also, I might mention in conjunction with that, we've also changed our setup here to using tables because we did an informal survey of the people a number of months back. And we tried it both ways, our regular chair setup. And with tables, the members overwhelmingly preferred having the tables just sit there and take notes and have the harmony of the Gospels out before them in their Bibles and so on. So we've switched to using that kind of physical setup in the hall for that reason.

So in case you're wondering about those things, that's what's going on. By way of format, too, as I do this, I'm presenting it more or less as a college-level class.

So consequently, if you have questions about anything I say, feel free to raise your hand during the message time and we'll address those. And also at the end of it, if you have questions afterwards, feel free to come up and ask me about anything I've said. Some of this material by virtue of time, I'll go through pretty quickly here. But I do try to allow time for questions and answers and comments there as well. So today we will be continuing with our classes and discussing the ministry of John the Baptizer. And why do I call him John the Baptizer? Scripture refers to him as—or he's commonly known as—John the Baptist. But I don't really care for that term because Baptist is a religious denomination, whereas John is a man who is performing the right of baptism.

So I prefer the term John the Baptizer because that's a more accurate description of who he was and what he did, his mission. You can also call him John the Immerser. Occasionally you'll find him referred to by that term, John the Immerser, because that's what the Hebrew and Greek words that relate to baptism mean, to completely submerge someone in water so that they are completely covered by the water. So when I use the term John the Baptizer, I'm trying to help us better understand how John would have been perceived and identified in the culture of that day back in the first century.

John is a pretty enigmatic figure in the Bible. There's not a whole lot said about him. I'll just find a little bit about him that we'll be covering today and a few other scattered references in the Gospels. What is said about John in these books can be pretty puzzling at times. There are a lot of popular misconceptions about John. Many people have the idea that he's kind of this strange wild man who's off living in the desert doing strange things, eating strange foods, and all of that. Is that the case? Well, we'll go through and address some of those questions and issues today and understand what's really going on.

Because when we understand what's really going on, it does make a lot of sense there. By way of review, since several months have passed, since we covered the angel Gabriel's announcement to Zechariah the priest that he would have a son, I thought it would be good for us to go back for a few minutes and look at that as a reminder and to set the stage for what we'll be covering today.

So let's go back to Luke 1 and verses 5 through 17 now and review this quite quickly here. Here we read about the announcement of the coming of John the Baptizer to his father Zechariah. It tells us here, There was in the days of Herod, Herod the Great, the king of Judea, a certain priest named Zechariah of the division of Abiah. His wife was of the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth, or Elishaibah, in Hebrew. And they were both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless. They were righteous people, in other words.

They were keepers of the commandments, kept God's law very scrupulously. But they had no child because Elizabeth was barren, and they were both well advanced in years. So it was, verse 8, that while he was serving as priest before God in the order of his division, according to the custom of the priesthood, his lot fell to burn incense when he went to the temple of the Lord. And the whole multitude of the people was praying outside at the hour of incense. And when we covered this earlier, we talked about how a part of the prescribed prayer that was offered as part of the incense offering by the priest on duty at that particular time, one line of that prayer was this, Send us the one who will prepare the way for the coming of the Lord.

Now think about that for a minute. Zechariah is in the temple, standing a few feet away from the Holy of Holies, where the incense altar is, and part of the prayer that he offers is, send us the one who will prepare the way for the coming of the Lord.

And I think it's at that exact instant that we read about what happens next in the account. Verse 11, Then an angel of the Lord appeared to Zechariah, standing on the right side of the altar of incense. So what's going on here is this elderly priest, Zechariah, is offering the incense there inside the temple, and he knows that he's supposed to be all alone in there, because that's the way it was done.

He's all alone there, and suddenly this angel appears there, beside him, before him, there in the holy place, and to be blunt, Zechariah is scared to death. And we know that because of what happens next, or what we read next. So continuing on in the account, verse 12, And when Zechariah saw the angel, he was troubled, and fear fell upon him.

But the angel said to him, Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer is heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name Jahan, or in Hebrew, Yohanan, and you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth. Verse 15, For he will be great in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink neither wine nor strong drink.

He will also be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother's womb, and he will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God. He will also go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.

And as we discussed earlier when we read this, this is quoting from Malachi 3, verse 1, and Malachi 4, verses 5 and 6.

And for lack of time, we won't go through that today, but again, that's Malachi 3, 1, and 4, 5, verses 5 and 6. So John the Baptist, we read here, was one who, as it says here, came to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.

So John would indeed prepare the way for the coming of Jesus the Messiah by telling people that one greater than he was going to come and urging people to repent and to be ready for that coming. This was John's mission and his purpose. So with that background, now let's move forward in our study to Luke 3, and we'll read verses 1 through 14 today, covering some new ground that we have not covered before. So picking up the story here, Luke 3 and verse 1, Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, Herod being Tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip Tetrarch of Iteria and the region of Trachonitos, and Lysanias, Tetrarch of Abilene, and let me interject here for a few minutes and discuss who these people are.

As we talked about in the introduction background to the Gospels, Luke is a meticulous historian, and it shows here in the amount of detail that he gives. Earlier in Luke's Gospel, when he's talking about the circumstances of the birth of Jesus Christ, you may recall that Augustus was the Roman emperor, Caesar Augustus. And Herod the Great was the king of the Jews.

And now about thirty years have passed. We're now up to AD 27, probably. And both Caesar Augustus and Herod the Great are dead. And new people are in charge. Tiberius, Emperor Tiberius, has succeeded, Augustus, as Emperor of the Romans. And Herod the Great has died, and his kingdom, as we mentioned earlier, was divided into four parts upon his death. And this is what is being described here. Each part is being ruled by an official with the title Tetrarch, as we read here. Tetrarch means governor of a fourth part. And they were given that title because Herod's kingdom was divided into four pieces, four components there.

Later on, the Tetrarch came to be a more generic title for a governor or ruler, but at that time it was specifically referring to a ruler of a fourth part. So who were these four? And Luke lists them here for us. One of Herod's sons, when his kingdom was divided by the name of Archales, was such a bad ruler that he was in office only a few years before the Jews complained so much about him to Rome that he was removed, removed from power.

That's why we don't see him talked about in the New Testament there. He was replaced by an individual that we read here by the name of Pontius Pilate, who of course is notorious for his role in the crucifixion of Jesus that we read about later in the Gospels here. And this is how the Romans, incidentally, came to be directly ruling over the area of Judea in the time of the Gospels.

Before that, it was part of the kingdom of Herod the Great, and it was because the Jews pleaded to have Archales removed that the Romans established a governor, installed a governor there, to directly rule the province of Judea. The Herod that is mentioned here, Herod being Tetrarch of Galilee, this is one of Herod's sons.

This is not Herod the Great. The Gospels can get kind of confusing because they use the term Herod for Herod the Great, as well as his offspring here. And this Herod is Herod Antipas.

And he is a son of Herod the Great, as is his brother Philip. And Philip is another son of Herod the Great. Again, his kingdom was divided primarily among his sons. There's another individual mentioned here, Lysanias, Tetrarch of Abilene. And we really don't know anything about him. He was not a descendant of Herod. And the only thing we know from historically is that his name is mentioned on a few inscriptions that have been found, but there's no other record of him than that.

Now, you might turn, if you have your harmony with you, to the back of it. We'll look briefly at what these areas are talking about. The area that Pontius Pilate came to rule over is this darkest area here, which encompasses Judea here in the middle, Idumea, territory of the Edomites, and Samaria, territory of the Samaritans up here.

This darkest area is all governed now by Pontius Pilate. To the right of that area, in a little bit lighter shade, we see an area called Peria. And to the north, up here toward Galilee, that is the area that is administered by Herod Antipas, the other one mentioned there. And to the north of Galilee, here along the Mediterranean coast, we see a lighter area. That's the area that was governed by Lysanias that's mentioned there. And then off to in the upper right corner here, let's see, yeah, including the territory of the city of Caesarea Philippi.

That's the area that was governed by the Philip that is mentioned there. So these are the four areas, administrative areas and rulers, during the period that is being talked about here. In case you ever wondered why these are broken up, that's what this way. That is why. And again, you'll see that reflected in the color key up here in the corner of the harmony as well. So again, Luke is very specific about the rulers mentioned, about their specific titles, and the specific areas that these men ruled over. And all of this can be verified historically from other historical records, which verify that Luke knew what he was talking about.

A lot of people think the Gospels were written up to several centuries after the first century. And what they don't take into account, or what they ignore in most cases, is there is so much historical detail in there that would not have been known to a writer writing several centuries afterwards. So this is proof that the Gospels were written during the time period during which these events occurred.

So Luke here has given us the political background, you might say, of the events that he's talking about. And now he gives us the religious background. So continuing in verse 2, he says, While Annas and Caiaphas were high priests... Now, has anybody noticed anything odd about that statement there? I sent out a number of study questions last night. Yes, yes, Tony and Paul. Yeah. Two high priests. But wait a minute.

Yeah, it doesn't compute because what were the biblical instructions about a high priest? Well, there's one high priest, and he is to serve for life. And also he used to be a descendant of Aaron, the brother of Moses there. Those were the rules that God set down. So, how, why is Luke telling us there were two high priests at that time? What's going on here? And this is where an understanding of the culture and history of the time helps us put a lot of pieces of the puzzle together to understand what's going on here and also with the ministry of John the Baptizer and with Jesus Christ as well.

It helps explain a lot of things that are going on in the Gospel, and we'll touch on some of that now. So let's take a closer look at these two characters, Annas and Caiaphas, here. In the approximate 60 years leading up to this time, about 60 years, there were no fewer than 28 different high priests.

28 over a period of about 60 years. You know, do the math, and that averages out to one high priest every other year on average. So what's going on? If this is supposed to be a hereditary lifetime position, why are these high priests being changed out so often? Well, here's how you need to understand the history of that. Herod the Great was appointed king of the Jews by the Roman Senate in the year 37 BC.

That's where the 60 years comes from, approximately 60 years, 37 BC. And the Romans, who appointed Herod—Herod was not a Roman, he was an Idomian, Edomite from Idomia. There's on the south part of your map on the back there. So the Romans and some of the Jews saw this as a good opportunity to make some money. So the Romans, or Herod more specifically, started selling the office of high priest to the highest bidder. So they had a good thing going here. Herod and his backers got the money from whoever bid the most to become the high priest.

And no doubt, a lot of that money made its way back to Rome to support Herod's supporters back in Rome. And no doubt, some of it made its way to the Roman emperors as well because there was a lot of bribery, a lot of corruption, graft, and that sort of thing. And the Jews who bought the office of high priest had a good thing going too as well because whoever bought the high priesthood was able to gain control of the temple and the different businesses associated with it. We talked about this a little bit before, but by way of review, what did that mean? Well, when Jesus Christ cleanses the temple, and He does it twice, once at the beginning of His ministry, once at the end, what does He do?

What does He do? If you remember the story, He overturned the tables of the money-changers and He drove out, He made a whip and drove out the animals, the animals that were there for sacrifice.

Why those two things? Well, think about it. The money-changers, the way the system worked, there were all kinds of different coins minted in the Roman Empire, and there were people coming from all over the Roman Empire to worship at the temple. You can read about that in Acts 2. In the beginning of the church there, it lists all these areas, 12, 13 different areas people are coming from during the day of Pentecost. So they would have to change...let me back up a minute. There was only one kind of coin that was acceptable currency in the temple, and that was called the Tyrian Shekel.

I have one at home, I'll bring it someday and pass it around and let you all look at it. That was the only accepted one because it was very high pure silver content there, minted in the city of Tyre, which is actually up here on your map as well. So these people coming in from all the different areas of the Roman Empire would have to change their local currency into the only type of coinage that was acceptable at the temple.

And the money changers would, of course, use as an opportunity to make profits. So they would charge an exorbitant rate to change your Greek coins, your Egyptian coins, your Turkish coins, your Babylonian coins, wherever in the Roman Empire you came.

They would make a very hefty profit and markup on that. Same thing with the animals, essentially. People would come with their lamb that they have raised up from birth to offer as a sacrifice or their pigeons or whatever. And the priest would say, well, that lamb doesn't quite cut the mustard. It doesn't pass mustard. He's got this little tiny blemish here. It's got one brown hair here. So they would reject it and force the people to then pay for an official temple-approved lamb or pigeon or whatever that may cost them three, four, five times as much.

So it was a money-making racket. And it was all controlled by the high priest. The high priest was the one who would appoint or give people the franchises, you might say, to operate the money as money changers and as animal sellers here. So there's a great deal of corruption going on. But this is also why I say it was very lucrative for both the Romans and for the Jews, because, again, the high priest was given, the office was given to the highest bidder.

And they would give a high bid knowing that they could make a lot of money off the money-changing and the animal sacrifices there. So the only people that it wasn't good for is the average person who's coming to worship at the temple because they're getting ripped off. What did Jesus say to the money changers and the animal sellers when he cleansed the temple? He said, My father's house shall be called a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves.

And that's why, because they were stealing from the people coming there to worship God. So that's why Jesus had such harsh words for these people here. And this helps us understand, without that understanding and that context of things, we're really puzzled by a lot of things that are going on here. So that's what's going on here by way of background here. And Annas, the individual mentioned here, is one of the individuals who had bought the office of high priest. And he himself was high priest from the years AD 6 to 15, and he made himself very wealthy from that.

So wealthy, in fact, that he made it more or less a family franchise. Because after he ceased being high priest, he was followed by one of his sons and then by a son-in-law. And the son-in-law is this Caiaphas, who also shows up during the trials of Jesus Christ. And after Caiaphas, he was followed by three more sons of Annas and eventually by a grandson.

So this was a family business for a very long time there. And they're making an enormous amount of money off of this. As a matter of fact, Josephus describes Annas as, quote, a great hoarder up of money, end quote, which tells us something about Annas' motivation and character, what kind of individual he was. So by this time, just to sum up here, by this time, the office of the high priest and the Jerusalem religious establishment, by that I mean the Sadducees, the Sadducees were the party of the temple. They were very closely associated with the priesthood and they would have been involved in a lot of this corruption as well.

And they had all become totally corrupted by this system here. And the reason that Luke mentions both Annas and Caiaphas here is that Caiaphas is officially the high priest in title.

But Annas is the power behind the scenes there. He's the one, again, the family patriarch who is really manipulating the system, getting his sons and son-in-law here installed and controlling this whole business of extorting and stealing money from the people coming there to worship God. So, of course, Jesus then comes along three and a half years later and what do they do?

They're threatened, so they have Jesus murdered to protect their power, to protect their source of income. If you don't understand all of this background, you really don't have a clue as to what's really going on during the Gospels. But it's a thread that we'll see repeated a number of times throughout the Gospels here.

Continuing our story now with that background, while Annas and Caiaphas were high priests, the Word of God came to John, the son of Zechariah, in the wilderness. As we discussed earlier, Zechariah and Elizabeth were quite elderly when John is born, and now thirty years have gone by and they have no doubt passed from the scene. So it's time for John to begin his mission of preparing the way for the coming of the Lord. John went into all the region about the Jordan, about the Jordan River Valley, which you can see on your map there, preaching a baptism of repentance for the remission of sins.

Actually, I got out of sync with my photos. Here's a depiction of Annas and Caiaphas from the movie Passion of the Christ. It gives you some idea of what they would have looked like here. This gives you some idea of what the area of the Jordan River Valley would have looked like. It's quite dry and hot, except for the Jordan River flowing down through the middle of it, surrounded by mountains on both sides of it there. This gives you some idea of how the people would have dressed, and what this would have looked like as we're going through this.

Yes, Paul? Could you spend just a moment wanting to hear what this might be? Do they speak to you from the Bible system versus the Lippot Catholic Church? What happens in the Bible? What happens in the Bible? The people would do it, right? Right. They aren't Jews. My understanding is that they were not the last people to be the ones that were brought to the church. Correct. Yeah, there were some. Moses and Aaron are from the tribe of Levi, the Levites, and the priests are a subset of the family of Levi.

They're going back to the instructions God originally gave. What has happened? Let's see. I'll try to give a brief answer to that. Good question there. Basically, you remember the northern kingdom, northern ten tribes, are taken away into captivity by the Assyrians. About 120 years later, the kingdom of Judah is taken away into captivity by the Babylonians. Levites went. If you go back and read the accounts, you'll find that there were enormous, proportionally, a very large number of Levites came back in the returns.

However, most of those of the kingdom of Judah actually stayed over in Babylon. It's something... Yes, yes, yes. Of course, in Babylon, there were a lot of good things that happened in Babylon, and a lot of bad things that happened in Babylon. One of the worst is the influence of Babylonian religion and so on, that infiltrated some strains of Judaism and exists to this day as well.

But then, after they return, which we read about in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, there's a whole other period that's not recorded in the Bible of several centuries there. That's the period of the Maccabees and so on. From Daniel 11, the kings of the north and kings of the south. Well, that whole area came under...

Let me back up a little bit more. How were the Jews allowed to return from Babylon to Jerusalem? Remember the story of Cyrus, or the prophecy of Cyrus? Cyrus was of the Medo-Persian Empire. They defeated the Babylonians, and Cyrus' policy was to allow the people that the Babylonians had brought in from parts of their empire to Babylon and its outlying territories to return to their homeland. That's part of the story and theme of Nehemiah. The Jews are allowed to go back and resettle Jerusalem and rebuild the temple and fortify the city and so on.

So you have this migration coming back. Now, some of these people had... Again, this is not recorded in Scripture, but we know it from other historical sources. There had been major power bases established in Babylon, and some of those transferred over to Jerusalem. And some of the corruption as well. The people who are basically setting themselves up as high priests, they're the ones with the money, because that's what they can bid for the office. But they more or less consider themselves the elite of all of the Jews. They're the upper crust, the one percenter, or whatever you might say.

No, not by God at all. Not by God. Assidually. That's where it's rooted in. So these wealthy families, some of them who came from Babylon, become the upper crust, the nobility, you might say. Not by God, because God chose them, but because they more or less established themselves. So that's the roots of it in there. There's more to the story. There's the Maccabean revolt that overthrows the Syrians and establishes a Jewish kingdom there, and then they are later taken over by the Romans when the Romans expand their empire into that area. That's the short answer. I can give you there.

I hope that's clear. That's where it came from. Again, not from God. God didn't establish this at all. God established it originally, but like everything, people corrupted it. A false religion? I wouldn't say a false religion, because on the false structure, they replaced God's structure of one high priest who's in office for life with this corrupt system there where they're buying and selling.

This leads to all the corruption and ultimately to the murder of Jesus Christ, because that's their motivation to preserve their power there. Good question there. Glad you brought that up. There's so much of that historical background in there that we don't understand. It has bearing on all of this.

It's a good opportunity to bring in some of that history that's not recorded in the Bible again. This gives you some visual picture of the area that John is baptizing. He's apparently traveling up and down the Jordan River Valley, which is approximately 100 miles from the Sea of Galilee in the north down to the Dead Sea. This is a major travel route, so there's a lot of people traveling back and forth, north and south, through this valley, as well as a few key points.

There are fords where they can cross the Jordan River, and there are major east-west routes going across there as well. That also is some of the areas of John's activities. Why is he baptizing those areas? Well, as we talked about in the sermon on Rimes, he's doing it. Well, actually, we'll get to that in a minute. He's also doing it because that's where the people are.

That's where the trade routes cross and intersect. He knows there's a constant stream and flow of people going back and forth in that time. So, where was I here then? So, continuing on in Luke's account, verse 4, As it is written—this is following up on John baptizing in the desert— As it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet, Seeing the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare the way of the Eternal, make his path straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill brought low. The crooked places shall be made straight, and the rough ways smooth, And all flesh shall see the salvation of God.

And this is a quote from Isaiah 40, verses 3 through 5. So, let's read that. And quoting from Isaiah 40, verses 3, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare the way of the Eternal, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill brought low. The crooked places shall be made straight, and the rough places smooth. The glory of the Eternal shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, For the mouth of the Eternal has spoken. So, what's this talking about? We've heard this. We've probably heard these beautiful words from Handel's Messiah. There's a beautiful, beautiful piece there in Handel's Messiah, quoting these words and song.

But what's this talking about? Both here and Isaiah, and as quoted there by Luke, It's using a physical metaphor to explain a spiritual truth, spiritual principle here. And the physical metaphor is this. In the days of Isaiah, as well as in the first century, when a new king was installed, and think about the parallels here, a new king is installed, one of the first things that a king would typically do is go out and make a tour of his kingdom. Kind of a state-of-the-union type thing.

He would want to go out, check the defenses, check the economy, talk with the local leaders, the mayors, you might say, of the cities and towns in his kingdom, and hear their issues and determine what he needs to address as king there. So as part of that, as the king is preparing to make his tour of his kingdom, the officials would then send out couriers to the villages and the towns and the cities of the kingdom where the king is going to be visiting, and they would tell the people to prepare for the coming of the king.

To, as it says here, to prepare the roads, prepare the way. It means roads. Make straight paths. What's this talking about? Well, to use it as a modern analogy, and you might think about President Obama's visited here in Denver a few times over recent months here, and if he comes to town, what are the mayor and the governor going to do?

Well, they're going to go out and they're going to patch the potholes. They're going to maybe even repay the streets that the limousine is going to drive on to make it look nice. They're going to restrike the lanes and all of this to make a good impression. And essentially, that's what Isaiah and Luke are talking about here when it talks about, prepare the way for the coming of the king there. So, what it's talking about is going out, smoothing out the roads, filling in the potholes, filling in the ruts, maybe straightening them where the roads go through the mountains, and they're very windy and curvy, and it's difficult to get the king's chariot or caravan to maneuver through some of these roads.

So, that's what it's talking about on the physical level when it talks about preparing the way, the road, the path for the coming of the king. Again, it's a physical metaphor, but there's a vital spiritual lesson in that as well. So, how does that apply spiritually? Well, we see that from John's message, which we'll talk about in just a minute here. What does he tell people to do? John gives a message of repentance. Repentance, in other words, to turn from their own way of life, from their own sins, to turn to God so they can be forgiven, and so their hearts will be right to receive the coming of the king.

That's the analogy, that's the spiritual point of what is being said, both by Isaiah and by Luke here. And this is how John would carry out his mission to prepare the way for the coming of the Lord. The Lord being Jesus Christ. It's not talking about straightening out physical roads, it's talking about straightening out human thinking. And human hearts and minds, so that they would be receptive to the coming of Jesus Christ.

Would be receptive to his message, a people that he could use. In other words, to found and start his church. So, a question, an obvious question for us to ask then is, how about us? How well prepared are we in terms of a road for God the Father and for Jesus Christ to use? In our lives, what kind of path are we presenting them to work on when it comes to working with us?

Do they find in us a road that is smooth, that is easy? Or do they find in us a road that is rugged, that is full of potholes and cracked and broken pavement, or so twisty and windy that it's difficult to negotiate? Very hard to work with. One of my favorite activities for years after coming to Colorado, which I hardly have time to do anymore, is to go up on four-wheel drive roads up in the mountains. How many of you have done that before? Yeah, okay, several of you here. Yeah, it's great fun if you don't kill yourself. But anyway, this is the way some of those roads look like here.

As I was preparing this message here and thinking about that, I was thinking back at some of the roads I've been on that are so twisty and windy, you think you're going to run into yourself because some of the curves are so tight there. I've seen some places where I've had some experience where I've scraped bottom and had to get out and look under the truck and make sure all the parts are still there and it's not leaking gas or oil or transmission fluid, which has happened to me before on some of those roads and so on.

But on roads where you can get up and look off the side and several yards down at the bottom of this canyon is the vehicle of a driver who wasn't so good down there. I can tell you some spots where you can find those. But is this the kind of road that we give God to work with as His people?

You know, are we a road like that that's rutted and full of boulders and holes big enough to swallow a tire and break your axle or things like that? Or do we give God a smooth road, an easy road that's easy for Him to work with in our lives? That's a spiritual lesson for us here. That's what Isaiah is talking about.

That's what Luke is talking about. And that's what John is talking about. And when they talk about preparing the way for the coming of the Lord, are we a people that God can use and God can work with easily in that way? So John's purpose, to sum up, his purpose and mission is to prepare the way for the coming of the Messiah, Jesus Christ, by preparing a people spiritually, by telling them to repent, to turn from doing things your own way, from your own pleasures, and turn to doing God's will, to making yourself a tool that God can use here.

John also knew that he was not the primary one. There he knew that he was the forerunner. He was the courier, you might say. He was the messenger to go out, who would go before the primary one, who was the Messiah, Jesus Christ. He would be secondary, John would, and the Messiah would be the primary one.

So that's why John never put himself in the forefront. He always knew what his role was to be. I'd like to point out somewhere now, going through the harmony, we come to a point here where we find the beginning of Mark's Gospel. If you remember back when we discussed the background of the different Gospel writers and how they wrote, their writing styles, and so on, this is where Mark begins his story here, the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. You may remember one thing I brought in that background is that Mark is a man of action.

He is a writer of action. That's because Mark is apparently, some people call Mark Peter's Gospel, because apparently Mark is essentially acting as a scribe or secretary, you might say, or assistant to the Apostle Peter. And who is Peter? Peter is a man of great action. He's always a guy jumping in headfirst without necessarily considering the circumstances there.

And we see Peter, in other words, as a man of great action, and we see this reflected in Mark's Gospel here as well. It reflects Peter's approach of action. So just notice, Matthew, how does he begin his Gospel? Begins it with the genealogy of Jesus Christ. How does John begin his Gospel? Begins it with a long chapter about the preexistence of Jesus Christ. And the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. It goes into this deep theological discussion. How does Luke begin his Gospel? He begins with the story of the announcement of the angel Gabriel to the priest Zechariah as part of the background of John the Baptizer. But Mark, no, he doesn't do that. He just watches right into the action. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. This is the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It's written in the prophets. The voice of one crying in the wilderness. And John came baptizing it.

That's why that's Mark's style there. It's just bam, bam, bam. Action, action, action. And that's why Mark's Gospel is the shortest of them all. It's just all action. No explanation, no detail. Just all action all the time there. So I just mention that because we'll see the different styles, the different personalities of the writers coming through as we go through the Gospels here. And Mark has a very distinctive style. John has a very distinctive style. I'm emphasizing miracles and deep theological concepts and ideas. Matthew and Luke are fairly similar. They're quite detail-oriented individuals. But this is just a reflection of that and a reflection of, frankly, the different individuals that God has used and can use and is using throughout history there. People of different personalities, different styles here. And he does that in the Gospels as well. So now let's go back and want to...well, let's see. Yeah. Here I want to introduce both Matthew and Mark at this point. You'll see this reflected in your in your harmony here on page 9 up here at the top.

And I'd like to touch on the concept of remes that I talked about in my last sermon here again. For those of you who did not hear that, remes is a Hebrew word. It's not found in the Bible. It's a more modern Hebrew word, but it means essentially hint or clue or echo. There's no precise English equivalent to it.

One that Pat Brandt told me, Sabbath or two ago, a good one is look back. That's another good definition of remes there. And what it is, it's...and we find the Gospel writers using it, all four of them using it. We find John the Baptist using it. We find Jesus using it. We find even God the Father using it in the Gospels, where they will refer to something that is supposed to make you think of something else, something earlier that's recorded. And the Hebrew Scripture is the Old Testament there. And that's why it means hint or clue or look back or echo of something that is gone before. And you're supposed to essentially fill in the blanks. And as we talked about in that sermon, if you don't know your Old Testament Scriptures, you miss a lot of the story here in the Gospel. So let's take a look at this one remes that I mentioned as an example in my sermon there. Matthew 3 and Mark 1 and verse 6 both tell us, regarding John the Baptizer, John himself was clothed in camel's hair with a leather belt around his waist. And Mark says essentially the same thing. Why do they both bring out that particular detail that John is wearing camel's hair with a leather belt around his waist here? And one of the points that I mentioned here is that what is unusual about this description is the leather belt. Because at that time, most people just wore a simple robe. And leather was fairly expensive. Leather was too important to be used as a belt. You would use it for sandals, for shoes, for that sort of thing. But you wouldn't waste it on a belt. You would just wear a cord or something like a rope to hold your robe together and keep it from flapping in the wind there. So that's the way most people dress. But John is unusual because he's wearing a leather belt. There's the message there that we talked about on that sermon there. And anybody remember what that message was? What is the message John is conveying? Yes, Gary?

Exactly! That's the way Elijah dressed. And refer us back to 2 Kings 1, verses 7 and 8. And this is a story here of King Amaziah and some messengers. And we'll tell you the whole story by just breaking into the conclusion of it.

So, Elijah was recognizable because he's hairy and because he's wearing a leather belt. Again, that's unusual. It was unusual enough that people recognized Elijah because of just this brief description. He's a hairy man. He's wearing a leather belt. That was distinctive.

To the point that, as we saw with Matthew and Mark, they both record as well that John the Baptizer is wearing a leather belt, as we see here. So why is John doing this, though? Well, who is John? Who is John the Baptizer? What's his role? What's his mission?

To review something we read just a few minutes ago, this is going back to the angel Gabriel's message, the Zechariah. I won't read all of it, but just down to verse 17, referring to John, He will also go before him, the Messiah, in the spirit and power of Elijah. So who is John? He is a second Elijah. And that's why he's conveying that through what he is wearing here.

And let's see, yeah, one other passage here. Let's look at this, Matthew 11, verses 11 and 14, and this is from Jesus Christ Himself. This is much later on, but he says, So again, we see that through the messages of Gabriel and of Jesus Christ Himself that John was to be a kind of a second Elijah. So what's he doing? He's dressing like Elijah with the leather belt, distinctive leather belt. He talked about it. He won't have time to go through it, the Scriptures, today. But again, where is John baptizing? There are two times in the Gospels where it specifically mentions places that John is baptizing. And why those two places? We know he was baptizing up and down the Jordan River, but why those two specific locations that are mentioned? Well again, one of them is the location where Elijah called Elisha and appointed him as his successor. And the second location that's mentioned down just north of the Dead Sea, John is baptizing there. That's actually where Jesus Himself is baptized. And why is John baptizing in that location? Well, that's where Elijah disappeared up into the sky in a fiery chariot. So John is conducting his mission in important places out of the life of Elijah. In Elijah places, you might say there. Again, he's reinforcing this tie between himself and Elijah because he is the second Elijah. Yes, David. I think it's kind of interesting to think that his parents probably passed his son to John to let him know that he was healed originally to the father of his son, so he might be standing in his room. Yes, yes. And there's been a lot of talk in that way, I'm sure, about two years ago when he was in the city. I would have had the experience of talking about that. Yes, good point. I think, especially considering their age, Zechariah is probably 70 to 80, I'm guessing. Yes, they know they don't have much time with their son, and they've got to teach him. So, yes, there had to be a pretty sobering responsibility for the parents there to teach their son knowing that mission that he was going to have and knowing they would not be around all that long for him to carry that out.

So, yes, I think that's a very good conclusion to reach regarding how John understood that mission there, too. And, again, he had God's spirit from the womb, too, so no doubt God worked with him, too, and told him when it was time to start this mission as well. So, yes, I think he had two factors that worked there with him. He's not going to get it from any other source, because probably not really anybody else other than a few relatives would have known about that. So, good point there. There's another remes that I came across just last night in preparing this that I hadn't tumbled to before, but as I was going through this, I came across that. And there's a second remes regarding the way that John is dressed, and I did not cover that in the previous sermon. Does anybody know what the second remes is? I had one last time. You did? What's that? Well, it's here. You had the word, you know, the scenery.

Yeah, yeah. That's close. That's about 80-90% of the area. Yeah, I actually researched just this morning the thought hit me overnight. Yeah, referring to Elijah as a hairy man. Does that mean Hebrew is a very limited language? Hebrew has only about one-eighth as many words in the vocabulary as English does. So words can mean a lot of different things. So I did a quick search this morning to find out if, when it says, Elijah is hairy, is that referring to his physical body that he has a lot of hair, or is it referring to what he wore? And I actually couldn't find the answer to that. But what Connie is saying could well be correct that it's referring to his overall appearance as a hairy man. But there is an interesting scripture, and this is one that is quite specific, Zechariah 13 and verse 4.

This again is breaking into the story flow here. The story flow here is that this is an end-time prophecy. Well, end time, or could refer to the period of the destruction. Well, let me back off from that. Basically, what is going on here is a condemnation of the false prophets who have condoned idolatry and worship of God and so on. And part of that condemnation, which is what we'll read here, God is talking about how they're going to be ashamed when they're shown to be false prophets and to have stated false things. And it says, And it shall be in that day that every prophet will be ashamed of his vision, when he prophesies, talking about their false visions that they prophesied, they will not wear a robe of coarse hair to deceive.

Now, what's going on here? Well, again, this is condemning false prophets, but how were the false prophets dressed? They're dressed in robes of coarse hair.

Why are they doing that? You don't find it anywhere else in Scripture, but apparently it was common for prophets to wear robes of coarse hair.

Animal skin, hairy animal skins, in other words. You might say that was the prophet's uniform, for lack of a better term.

That if you were a prophet, that's the way you dressed. And the false prophets, knowing that, they would dress up in hairy robes to present themselves as true prophets.

And God is here condemning them for that because it's all part of their overall description for that.

So apparently these false prophets are dressing up in hairy animal skins like the real prophets to add their credibility.

To say, see, I'm a real prophet. I've got on the prophet's hairy robe. And so on. That seems to be what is going on here.

I don't see any other reason that God would have spoken through Zechariah in this kind of detail here unless his true prophets were known for wearing robes like that.

And again, the description of Elijah is that he's a hairy man wearing a leather belt.

Again, was the hair referring to himself or was it referring to what he's wearing? I couldn't come to a conclusive understanding about that.

So this is, I think, another rim as here that John the Baptizer is wearing a leather belt and he's wearing a robe of camel hair.

And I've touched and felt camel. Some of you have ridden him. I know kind of you have. And it's pretty rough stuff there. It's a rough, scratchy, coarse animal hair there.

So apparently this is another rim as, a double rim as here that Elijah is doing. He's dressing like a prophet, as the prophets of old would have dressed with a hairy animal skin robe.

And he's also wearing the leather belt, more specifically tie himself in with Elijah.

And again, as I mentioned, where he is baptizing, the specific locations that he's baptizing in are places where Elijah was doing where great things happen in Elijah's work.

So he's conveying, he's not stating that he's the second Elijah, but by his actions he is making people think about the scriptures that refer to Elijah and the prophets and conclude for themselves that, yes, he is a second Elijah who has come here.

So now people, today we read that account here and how John dressed and they get the impression, again, he's some kind of wild man, he's dressed up like a caveman out here in the desert, somebody ought to be locked up because he's a danger to himself and other people around him and so on. But they miss the point. They miss the point that John is dressing the way he is, he's acting as he is, because he's a prophet.

And not just any prophet, but he is the second Elijah, the prophesied Elijah to come who would prepare the way for the coming of the Messiah, again.

Now, another point, I don't have the scriptures to show on screen, you can read them right there in your harmony, but Matthew and Mark, in those same passages we read earlier, say that John is eating locusts and wild honey. And that again makes people think, man, he's got to be crazy to be eating locusts out there.

So what's going on here? What does this mean? What's the real story, the background for this? Well, locusts, or grasshoppers, as it could be translated, they're the same Hebrew word applied to both, are designated as clean to eat. You can go back and read the lists of clean and unclean foods, and you'll find that grasshoppers are acceptable there.

And they have been eaten in that part of the land for centuries. Part of the research I was reading was from early travelers back in the 1800s, going up and down, exploring the Jordan River Valley, and they would find these better ones out there selling grasshoppers to other people passing by. It was just part of the diet to the point that they were even selling them to other people to eat.

And they've been eaten in that part of the world for centuries. And I don't know, I haven't tried them, but they're probably solid protein, I would guess. And there are plenty of them in that area, desert grasshopper, so they are a reliable food source.

And clean, according to the Bibles. That was something that would have essentially been free food for John there, free for the taking there in the desert.

Now, the honey that is mentioned here, there's a Hebrew word for honey, but it's actually referring to two different things, or one of two things, I should say. It can mean honey from bees, wild bees, which would have been a real treat.

Obviously, honey is something that's very nourishing, very good for us, and so on, in the right amounts here. But honey is also used, and this is something you probably don't know, it's used for a kind of jam made from dates, from date palms.

And over at Feast in Israel this year, the dates were just getting ripe, and they were delicious. We had dates for just about every meal there, just really delicious.

And one of our guides, I think it was, told us that the dates are essentially the perfect food. They're very nutritious, very good for you, very healthy food. They're just delicious.

We ate, I don't know, how many dates over there. But there was a kind of jam that was made from the crushed pulp of the dates, and it was, again, in Hebrew, there's one word honey, but it can mean this date jam, or it can mean honey from bees, either one.

So we're not sure which this is talking about here, which John the Baptist could have referred to either one, because the Jordan River Valley also has a lot of date palms in it, if you've ever been there before, particularly around Jericho. Lots of date palms there.

So it's possible he's gathering honey from wild bees. It's possible he's also eating this kind of jam from dates there. It could be either one. But again, it's essentially a free food source for it there.

Which tells us that John is really not, you know, think about who John is. He's an itinerant prophet, you might say. He doesn't have family to support him. He's got to support himself there.

And that leads into something else that is going on here as well, that helps give us some understanding of John and who he is and what he's doing and why he's doing some of the things he does.

So first of all, who is John's father? Zechariah. What is Zechariah's position? Occupation. He's a priest. He's a priest. So what does that make John? It makes him a priest. Yeah, because priests are hereditary by family there.

So John is a priest also. So if John is a priest, why is he out here in the desert instead of up in Jerusalem at the temple serving his priest? You ever wondered about that?

What's going on? I mean, priests, by definition, aren't they supposed to be serving at the temple? Or at least in the case of Zechariah, at least going up for his two weekly courses in the course of the year and going up for the pilgrimage feast?

And at cost, and feast of tabernacles? So why is John out here in the desert dressed like a wild man preaching a message of repentance? What's going on here?

Well, again, as we talked about earlier, I actually got ahead of myself on my pictures again. This is a depiction of how a prophet or John might have dressed with the hairy animals in there talking to a group of people. It's probably pretty accurate there. So, yeah, back to the subject of priesthood, the high priests, Annas and Caiaphas, and the rest of their ilk there.

The Jerusalem priesthood had become very corrupted here. And I say Jerusalem priesthood to draw a distinction because there are essentially two kinds of priests, for lack of a better word.

There are the priests like Zechariah, John's father, who live out elsewhere. They don't live in Jerusalem. They're scattered throughout the area of Judea. They've got their own little farms or businesses or whatever.

And they only go to serve in the temple. They're two weeks of the year, the course of Abijah that we talked about earlier, and during the three main feasts when all the priests go to serve at the temple.

So priests to them is a part-time job. But then you also have the Jerusalem establishment, I'll call it. And those are the high priests like Annas and Caiaphas that we talked about.

The Sadducees, who were allied with this group and who were apparently a number of them priests themselves. So you have the part-time priests, for lack of a better term, and the Jerusalem establishment priests.

And these are the ones who are corrupt. These are the ones involved in the buying and the selling of the priesthood and the money-changing franchises and the animal selling and all of this, and ripping off the people who are coming here.

I'm not saying I draw a distinction between those, because probably most of the other priests were not involved in it. Certainly some of them were. They would have been as greedy as some other people who have tried to take advantage of it. But generally, the Jerusalem establishment is very corrupt, as opposed to the rest of the priests, who are probably decent people, for the most part. Yes, Paul, you had a comment. These guys are the authors. And they're the priests, and they're the bishops.

No, it's the Sadducees. Sadducees. The priests were the priests, but it's the priests. They were the soldiers. Right, right. You don't find that spelled out in the Gospels, but we know it from other sources. It was basically the Sadducees who were very much allied with the priests. And the Pharisees actually appear more religious than they were. Actually, the way one teacher that I've learned a fair amount of this from described it is the Sadducees. And we find this reflected in the book of Acts as well. The Sadducees did not believe in angels, for instance. They did not believe in an afterlife.

Yes, a resurrection. Yes, which we see Paul pitting the Pharisees and Sadducees against each other, because the Sadducees didn't believe in a resurrection. So if you don't believe in an afterlife or a resurrection, this life is all there is, and you better get all you can while the getting is good. So, the Pharisees ran the temple. The temple.

The Sadducees ran the temple. Yeah, they were the Jerusalem establishment, again, as opposed to the outlying priests and the local people running the synagogues. Synagogues, I'm not sure, but it would not surprise me if the Pharisees weren't the ones who essentially ran the local synagogues. They were certainly heavily involved in that. They were probably the ones who had some kind of a power, because Christ was always banging on them, you said. So their power, you said, was the one who made the religion make the conqueror, and then you put some of that power in it. Right. Right. So they had to have some kind of a political power in that way.

I would express it this way. The Pharisees were more popular with the common people.

It would be like us. We're out here in Colorado, and we've got Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C. is where the national power is all concentrated. It doesn't necessarily have a whole lot to do with how we live our day-to-day lives out here in Colorado, to use a rough analogy there.

The Pharisees would have been the ones who were dispersed throughout the land. So the common people would have interacted with the Pharisees on a much more regular basis than they ever would the Sadducees. Sadducees would have been primarily concentrated around Jerusalem and the temple, and the priesthood there.

Well, again, it gets back to the Sadducees are, frankly, a pretty irreligious group.

So that's why you don't see Jesus debating with them over religious issues. They don't care. They just want their power and their money and their positions. They don't want to debate about religious issues. Whereas the Pharisees, that's what they love to do. They love to debate over religious issues. That's where they're... It's a long and involved story, but there's many gradations of Pharisaism, depending on which rabbi they followed. We find some of them mentioned in the Old Testament, like Gamaliel, Hillel, others like that. Sami, who had different schools of Pharisaism there, and slightly different beliefs or interpretations of how you apply the law. They all believed in the law. They all followed the law. But it was how they applied it in which commandments they considered more important than others. Actually, we find that as the source of a lot of the debates with Jesus Christ and the Pharisees. It isn't over whether you keep the law. It's which commandments are greater. That's why a young man comes to... a lawyer, a scribe, comes to Jesus and says, "'Teesher, Rabbi, which is the greatest commandment in the law?'" Jesus responds. There's a whole other discussion. I'll probably have to give a whole sermon on that, just to explain all the background of that. Let's see. David, I think you had your hand up next. Well, couldn't John the Baptist teach all of the hypocrisy that was going on? And also, you needed that priest who was willing to end the Jesus Christ would come to start up the Jesus Christ. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, actually, yeah, that's a good point. You're ahead of it. That's exactly where I'm going here in the next couple of minutes here. So, let's see. Tony, you had a comment or a question? When Jesus was doing his thing... Right. ...he was only working in Pharisee, not the same thing. For the most part, yeah, yeah, for the most part. Right. Yeah, another scripture just popped to mind where Jesus says, "...the scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses' seat." Well, actually, that's the verse just before, which you just quoted here. Scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses' seat. So, yeah, the Pharisees did have authority. In a Moses' seat, I'll show you a picture of them. It was actually a seat in the temple, and they actually found one at Corazin, which is mentioned there in the Gospels many times. It's a stone seat, and carved in the sight of it, and very clear Hebrew is Moses' seat. There, it's a physical seat in the synagogue. As here as we can tell, when they would teach from the law, they would sit in Moses' seat and teach from the law. That's why Jesus says, do as they say, but not as they do, because they don't do what they say there. So, yeah, that's part of this whole background and discussion there. But that's for about two or three years down the road, so we'll get there eventually. So anyway, let's see. Yes, we're talking about this corruption there among the Jerusalem establishment there. In the couple of decades leading up to this time, there was actually a religious movement there in Judea. There was an outgrowth of this. How many of you have heard of a group of people called the Essenes? Essenes, okay, just about everybody. Good. Good. Who were the Essenes? Well, they're probably best known because they were the ones who, as near as we can tell, wrote and hid the Dead Sea Scrolls. They were a monastic group. They lived out in the desert near the Dead Sea, not all that far from where John is baptizing here, no more than 10 or 15 miles at the closest point.

They had what you might call a monastery out there in the desert, kind of a compound there. They wrote and made copies of the books of the Bible, as well as their own commentaries on the Bible, and rules for it. The Dead Sea Scrolls are roughly a third each. Roughly a third are biblical books, copies of the books of the Old Testament. About a third are commentaries, and about a third are essentially internal documents, you might say, rules for how to live your life according to the rules of the community that they have established out here in the desert. These are the Essenes. I don't think there's any specific reference to them in the Bible, but they were an outgrowth of what we're talking about here, the corruption of the Jerusalem priesthood. Because based on these writings, scholars are reading the Dead Sea Scrolls, and they're concluding that a lot of these people who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls were priests, like John. And in protest against this Jerusalem religious establishment, they said, I don't want to become corrupted like these guys are. I'm going to go live out in the desert with the others who believe like I do. We're going to establish our own community, our own priesthood, if you might say, out here. And we're going to live as God tells us to live. We're not going to become corrupted like these guys in Jerusalem. And apparently, this is the origins of the Essene movement there, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, and so on. Apparently, a number of these are priests, like John, who have rejected the Jerusalem establishment and moved out into the desert to do their work there, and to follow God, and to obey God, and to draw close to God, and to teach a message of repentance. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying John is an Essene. Some scholars see the parallels here and conclude that John is an Essene, and I don't believe that. The Essenes had stuff that screwed up. They had their own weird ideas about a number of things. But there are a number of close parallels there. And the key point, the key thinking behind this movement that established the Essenes is that they had rejected the Jerusalem establishment there. So what is John doing? John, again, is a priest. He's the son of a priest. But is he serving with a priest in Jerusalem? No, he's not. He's out in the desert preaching. And what is he preaching? He's preaching a message of repentance. Prepare the way for the coming of the Lord. Prepare your lives. Repent and turn to God so that God has a straight path to work with in your life, essentially.

So John is not an Essene, but is he disavowing and is he turning his back on the Jerusalem priesthood? You bet he is. He absolutely is. You could even so that even though he is a priest, he has set himself up as, you might say, the anti-priest. That's not a term you'll find in the Bible. It's my own terminology. But the anti-priest, everything the Jerusalem priests are doing, he's doing the opposite of.

Let's think about that for a minute. What is the Jerusalem religious establishment like? They're very wealthy, extremely wealthy, of all this money they've made ripping off people coming to the temple there. Here's an artist's illustration. And some of you who've been to Jerusalem may have been to the priestly house it's called. O'Connie and I toured it back in 1998. This is an artist's reconstruction of this house there that has been excavated back in the 60s and 70s there.

Beautiful mosaic floors and frescoed walls and elaborate stone vessels and so on, like you see over to the right-hand side of the frame and so on. Looking out in the background, you can see the temple off there in the Mount of Olives, outside beyond the balcony there. So this is an actual house that has been excavated there in Jerusalem and they identified it as a priest because, well, actually a lot of archaeological things don't have time to get into.

But yeah, they believe this is a house of one of the wealthy priests, possibly even Anna, a psychiatrist, somebody like that. So they are very wealthy. This is how they live, a very lavish lifestyle there. How does John live? John lives out in the desert, probably doesn't even have a tent to sleep in at night. The priests were, according to Josephus, the finest linens imported from Babylon, as their priestly attire there, according to Josephus again.

What does John wear? There's a robe made out of camel hair. Pretty rough and pretty scratchy there. The priests ate lavishly on the finest of foods there, all kinds of beautiful, luscious foods. What is John eating? Grasshoppers and wild honey. Well, he can scavenge for himself out of the Jordan Valley there. So that's why I say John is essentially the anti-priest. Whatever the Jerusalem priesthood is doing, John is doing the opposite. The way they're living, he's living the opposite. The way they're conducting their lives, he's doing the opposite there. So whether this is just a matter of circumstances, or whether it's a matter of deliberate choices, is John sending an unspoken message by what he's doing?

He can't prove it one way or the other, but I think in light of other things we see about John, how he was sending these messages by where he baptized, by what he wore, sending these messages there. I think he's probably doing that as well, through his lifestyle here. Whatever the Jerusalem priesthood is doing, he's doing the opposite there, because he has totally rejected that religious establishment there in Jerusalem here. And again, to use the example of Jesus Christ, what did Jesus Christ do?

He went into the temple, cleansed it, overthrew the tables of the money changers, cast out the animals that are being sold there for sacrifice. And what does he do? He calls them a den of thieves there. So both Jesus and John clearly rejected the Jerusalem religious establishment there. So I don't think it's a stretch to say that John is deliberately presenting himself as the anti-priest, as the opposite of the corrupt priesthood there in Jerusalem.

Again, I can't prove it, but I think this is quite possibly a good explanation for why John is doing some of the things that he's doing. So I hope that helps us maybe understand some of John's motivation and what's going on here. So getting back now to John's message, back here in Luke 3 and verse 7. So the people are coming to John, and here are some of his messages to him here.

Then he said to the multitudes who came out to be baptized by him, brood of vipers who warned you to flee from the wrath to come.

One commentary I read talked about the setting, again, cultural setting for this. What is this talking about? And he described it as a picture of what happens in the Jordan River Valley. And you might think of some of the places out in Utah or western Colorado where it's pretty dry. There's nothing but sagebrush, dry, brushy, brittle grasses, broken, craggy rocks and sand and that kind of thing.

There are a lot of parallels between the terrain out in western Colorado and Utah and the Jordan River Valley here. The Judean wilderness is part of this is called here. And sometimes, from time to time, there will be a lightning strike that will catch the desert on fire. Or some careless camper whose campfire gets out of control and starts burning the desert. That would happen back there in Jesus' time, or John's time here, as it happens here today.

And when that would happen, the brittle grass starts burning and the brush starts burning and all of that. And out of that, to flee the fire, these desert vipers would start crawling out of the rocks and crevices trying to escape the flames. So essentially, what's John saying here? And this gets back to the point David brought up just a minute ago here. John is warning them to flee from the wrath to come here.

So basically, John is saying there's a fire coming. It's going to destroy your whole religious establishment here. But you, who are coming out here, are like a bunch of snakes who are fleeing the fire. It would be very similar to what would happen in a fire here in Colorado again. The only difference would be it would be rattlesnakes here as opposed to the desert vipers here. And that's what they were there. They were pretty...this appears to be the analogy that John is using here.

That a fire is coming, and these people are like a bunch of poisonous snakes trying to flee that and save their own skins. It's not a pretty picture, but it's a very graphic one here. And Matthew adds a detail...I won't show it on screen here... but he adds a detail in Matthew 3 and verse 7 that Luke leaves out. And he says that this is in response to the Pharisees and the Sadducees who came out to be baptized of John. Again, the two groups that we talked about earlier here. Why them in particular?

Again, we're familiar with the Pharisees and Jesus' debates and so on back and forth with him. But the Sadducees, as we talked about earlier, are very heavily allied with the temple establishment there. So the Sadducees, I think, the more I look into it, were probably actually worse than the Pharisees, in terms of their actions and their corruption. This, I think, is why John has such choice words for them, calling them a bunch of vipers who are fleeing the fire that's going to come and destroy everything there.

So what does he tell them? Going back to verse 8 now. Therefore bear fruits worthy of repentance, and do not begin to say to yourselves, We have Abraham as our Father. For I say to you that God is able to raise up children to Abraham from these stones. Now, what does that mean? Why are these people defending themselves by saying, We're sons of Abraham? One of the study questions I sent out last night. Well, basically, in their theology of that day, they believe that because they are descendants of Abraham, and Abraham is the one given all the promises by God, promises eventually of salvation, that basically they had it in good with God because as descendants of Abraham, they would kind of automatically be granted salvation.

It didn't matter what you did, how you lived, if you were a son of Abraham, you received salvation by birthright. Not by what you did or how you lived your life or anything. It was your birthright to be saved. And what does John say? He says, Well, you think you're sons of Abraham? See these rocks scattered all around? If God needs sons of Abraham, He can raise up these rocks and make sons of Abraham out of them. God doesn't need you. As Connie tells me from time to time, you can be replaced. In other words, so...

Actually, Connie hit 50 and she stopped saying that, but I heard it. It's been burned into my brain many times. You can be replaced. And that's essentially what John is telling them. You think you're so great because you're descendants of Abraham?

You can be replaced by these rocks laying around all over on the ground here by us. That's his point. It doesn't matter who you're physically descended from. It depends on how you live your life and the kind of relationship you have with God. Whether you're humbly submitting to Him, whether you are of a truly repentant attitude and you want to change your life and you want to become like Him.

That's what counts. Doesn't matter your physical genealogy there. That's what he's saying here. And verse 9, And even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Therefore every tree which does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. And again, his point is that if you're not bearing fruit of a repentant life, a life that's turned from yourself and turned to God, what good is that? What good is a tree like that? It's good for nothing but to be chopped down and thrown into the fire and burned for fuel.

There. Later we'll see that Jesus Christ uses this exact same analogy in His teaching. About this time, you might be thinking, who does this message sound a lot like? Who does it sound like? It sounds like Elijah. I mean, who is Elijah? He comes and he's very blunt, tells it like it is, doesn't mince words, tells people they better repent or they're going to suffer the consequences.

So here we see a recorded example of John's teaching, and it's very much like Elijah. Again, because he's the second Elijah coming. Yes, David. It just really strikes me in the words that are said and written on about the name of the tree. Well, here it's the priesthood that's opposed to the people, and they're not. And later on, in the 54th Jesus was going to the earliest one, I think there's a pretty close association here with the fig trees, the first and the second one. Of course, all of us are in the teens and teens and greats, but we first evolved, but it's also a relationship to this priesthood that is failing in what they can do.

Yeah, excellent point. And the point of the fig tree is that it looked great on the outside, should have had fig, should have been bearing fruit. Jesus looked at it, and there was no fruit there, so he curses it. Why does he do that? Well, most people believe, and I think that he's doing it as an example of the priesthood there, the religious establishment we've been talking about. Yeah, they should have been feeding, nourishing, providing for the people, and they're not. They're just lining their own pockets there, stealing from the people instead. So yeah, very, very good point there, good analogy. Yeah, and as the tree should have been nourishing people, but there's no fruit, so what good is it? So it's going to be cut down. John says that, and Jesus again uses the same message later on.

And again, there's a prophetic message there. The axe is even now laid at the root of the tree. It's ready to start chopping. And I think this is a clear prophecy, too, of what would happen in 70 AD with the Romans coming along as well. I think that's unstated, but I think that's clearly what he's referring to there. So we see from this example, or this, and what we'll read next, that actually John addresses three different groups of people.

There's the common people, the multitudes, as it's described here in verse 7, and then there's two other groups that he addresses. And those are the tax collectors and what are called the soldiers. So let's read about here as we're close to wrapping this up. So verse 10, so the people, or the multitude, ask him, saying, What shall we do then?

And you might remember an example where somebody else asked that when they heard a message. What shall we do? Think of it in Acts 2. Peter and his sermon on the day of Pentecost, the people ask, What shall we do? And Peter gives them the same response that John gives here, a repent. Change your life. Be converted.

Transform your life into a way of loving, loving your neighbors as yourself. Verse 11, then he gives some examples of that. He answered and said to them, He who has two tunics, let him give to him who has none. And he who has food, let him do likewise. Now, the tunics here, I've heard that misapplied at various times. The tunic that John is referring to here is kind of an undergarment. Night Church used to be popular. This would be the closest analogy I can think of to it. They would wear this under and outer robe. And they would wear this inner garment for warmth and hygiene as well. But the reason somebody would have two tunics, two undergarments like that, is for warmth from the cold air, because the desert nights could get pretty cold there. So John says, You who have two undergarments to keep yourself warm, what about the man who has no undergarment and is sitting over your shivering? He says, What you ought to do is take off one of your two undergarments and give it to the guy who has none. So you may both be a little cold when you're sleeping at night, but that would be better than you being nice and toasty warm and him sitting over here shivering all night long. That's the point, the analogy that he's using here. He says, The same thing goes for food better that you both be a little hungry than that you have plenty to eat and your neighbor here not have anything to eat. It's the same basic message Jesus Christ would give later on to love your neighbor, to share with others who don't have anything. There's the point that he's making here, very reminiscent of the teaching of Jesus Christ later on. Verse 12, Then tax collectors also came to be baptized and said to him, Teacher, what shall we do? And he said to them, Collect no more than what is appointed for you. Notice what he did not say. He didn't say, Stop collecting taxes for the Romans. Or don't collect taxes. No, they could continue to their profession, but they were to do it ethically, and not as it was commonly done in that time.

What was commonly done at that period is that the tax collectors would also bid for their office, like the high priesthood we talked about earlier. They would bid knowing that they could then extort or collect more in taxes and not what was legally owed and everything above what was legally owed they could keep for themselves. So a lot of tax collectors are very wealthy as a result of that.

So this is the point there. They would do that unethically. And what John says is, Collect only what is legally owed and stop lining your pockets off the hard work of your fellow people here. In other words, stop stealing from people and take only what is legally due to you. Likewise, verse 14 here, Likewise, the soldiers asked him, saying, And what shall we do? And John said to them, Do not intimidate anyone or accuse falsely, and be content with your wages. I should point out here that there are two kinds of soldiers that are mentioned in the Gospels. We read that and we tend to automatically assume they're all Roman legionaries. That's not true. There were Roman soldiers there to keep order as representatives of the military forces of the Roman Empire. But there was another category of soldiers, too. And these are the local military forces that, again, to use a modern analogy, it might be a combination of police and state troopers and National Guard, you might say, and sheriffs. They would perform the local policing keeping order functions there. They would be answerable not to the Roman governor and not to the Roman Empire, but to the local magistrates, the leaders of the local towns, cities, and so on like that. And because of their positions, because they had this authority, like the tax collectors, they had ample opportunity to abuse the local people as well. They could bully people around. They could make false accusations, as John mentions here.

What did that mean? They could say, well, I saw you out in the field stealing Isaac's corn or wheat or something out there, and just make a false accusation like that and extort money out of the person. If the guy wouldn't pay up, he would go to prison or be fined an outrageous amount or something like that. So they would use commonly extort from people in this way here. They could use their authority to take bribes of people. Okay, you want to stay in business here? You don't want your barn to burn down in the middle of the night? Well, you pay me one shekel a month, and everything's cool. You know, the old extortion rackets, this kind of thing. And obviously this is going on because John wouldn't say these things unless it was going on commonly. And this was the kind of reputation that the tax collectors and the soldiers had. So these people had earned a bad reputation because of these kinds of things. So this is why John says the things that he does. So this is all we have time for today, so we're going to stop it here and pick it up next time with a number of other important questions and issues. One big thing we haven't even talked about is where did the idea of baptism come from? Did it drop down out of the sky with John?

No. There are actually clear historical roots that go back far earlier than this. There were different kinds of baptism. And what did baptism signify? What did it mean? What did it symbolize? There is the baptism we're familiar with, but there were different kinds of baptisms with different symbolism associated with them. We'll talk about that a bit next time. So any questions in closing before we wrap this up? Anyone? Yes. Yes, Paul.

No, that's fine. I'm not sure. I would assume it came from the Pharisees because, again, they were the ones who really loved digging into and debating the law and that sort of thing.

And they were more religious, yes.

It did. It did, indeed, yes. I know that's been some difficulty. We've heard about 300 years later that the folks fought back and all that kind of stuff. Right. And it started adding to the whole thing. Right. Somebody added to it. Right. Yeah, true. They added, well, we see debates between Jesus and the Pharisees about how you keep the Sabbath, for instance, in there. And they had, in the time in Babylon, they knew from Ezekiel, for instance, who said repeatedly, the reason you were taken into captivity was because of your idolatry or Sabbath breaking. So to prevent that from ever happening again in Babylon, they established all these traditions that we find in the Gospels later on. Well, we find obliquely referred to in the Gospels. It's part of the debates between Jesus and the Pharisees over their picky little rules about the Sabbath. They built a fence around the Sabbath to prevent anybody from possibly breaking the Sabbath. And that involves things like, to give you a few examples, you couldn't spit on the ground on the Sabbath because your spit might disturb the soil, and that was plowing in their minds. That's how crazy some of this gets. You could not wear sandals that had nails in the soles because you were carrying an additional burden on the Sabbath. If your house was on fire, you could put all the layers of clothes on that you could and run out of your house, but you couldn't scoop up your clothes and carry them out because that was carrying a burden. This is some of the religious debates that the Pharisees and these rabbis are having. That's how absurd some of it gets. Some of the historical authors, also, didn't come to the faith, and I think it's true, it's just not true, but say that they actually value the sermon, and some of the things that were more than the God-given system. That was the big problem. They did more than the beginning.

Very good point. I was going to get into this later on when we find the terms mentioned, but for instance, Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, You have heard it said...and there's another phrase that shows up, the traditions of the elders. That is referring to what was called the oral law, or the Talmud.

What the Talmud is, is later, after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, and the destruction of the Jewish nation, the Pharisees and these other rabbis and so on got together, and they collected all of this oral law and put it in written form. That became the Mishna and so on. There's also the Babylonian Talmud, which dates back to Babylon, which we were describing earlier. There are actually two sets of these documents and writings, the Babylonian material and then the material that was written around 100-200 AD. Actually, that's a lot of the material. When I say that Christian scholars and Jewish scholars have been looking and comparing notes, that's where a lot of this information is coming from. I'm not saying it's accurate. I'm not saying it's inspired or so on. There's a lot of weird stuff in there as well. A lot of influences from Babylonian religion. But historically and culturally, there's a lot of good information in there that sheds a lot of light on what we see and read about in the Gospel. Yes, Pat? It's a day in Israel that the elevators are set to stop every single prayer, and they're not supposed to turn on or off in light switch. Right. Right. Yeah, for the Sabbath, because Pat's comment was that in Israel, the elevators are programmed to, on the Sabbath, stop at every floor going down or up. So, yeah, one feast in Israel we were staying on the 11th floor of a hotel or something, and it took us 45 minutes to get down and 45 minutes to go up.

We ended up taking the stairs there because this program is stopped. Because punching the button creates an electrical spark, and that is starting a fire on the Sabbath. And you're not allowed to start a fire. That's why you can't flip on a light switch. They actually sell programmed lamps in Israel that you program ahead of time to go off or on at certain times so that you are not kindling a fire by pressing an electrical switch or light switch on the Sabbath.

Yeah, this is very much done just at the feast this year. I was chewed out by an Israeli—I'm not sure what her role was. She was dressed in a paramilitary uniform at the Western Wall because it was about a half an hour before sundown on a Friday night. I'm taking pictures of the Jews gathering at the Western Wall to celebrate the coming out of the Sabbath. And this Israeli tourist police order comes up and starts berating me, telling me to put my camera away. And the reason she was doing it is because when I press the shutter, it's a digital camera. It creates an electric spark to record the image in there. So that's kindling a fire on the Sabbath. I had a little debate about her and almost got myself locked up until Connie thought the better of it and stopped. But yeah, that's how those debates are going on to this day in Israel. So, okay, with that, we'll wrap up services with another hymn. And if you have any other questions, feel free to check with me later.