Outranked!

IntroductionWell, we are in our new Series on the Book of John entitled “The Story of Amazing Love.”This is the story of love come to rescue. This is the story of the Love of God intersecting the rebellion of men. It’s the greatest story ever told. It’s a story, that if believed, will give you life. And we need life. Life is not just binary. Are you alive or dead? We speak of a quality of life.Do you feel depressed, hopeless, or lacking purpose? You need life!Do you feel sickly in heart? Are you unhealthy in your marriage? You need life!Do you feel that your soul needs the toxins wrung out of it because of all the stress? You need life!Remember the purpose of John? These things are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God and that by believing you might have life in his name. What kind of life? The life that God has in him. Eternal life, perfect life, abundant life.Our theme for the year is “Life in his Love.” You need the book of John so that you can have life and have it abundantly. Life comes by knowing Jesus and that’s what this book is all about.Importance of HarmonizingWe are in the book of John which is just one of the four gospels. Why did God write four gospels instead of one? The answer is the same as why God gave you two eyes instead of just one. Seeing in stereo provides far more insight than any one eye no matter how good that one eye is.Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the synoptic gospels because they are the most similar. That word synoptic, the Greek preposition sun means with and of course optic means with vision. When you put the three books together you see with stereo vision. You have more clarity and insight.John is not a synoptic gospel. Why? Because it’s different. One of the things we observed in our opening message on the book of John is that John is over 90% unique.John was written last. The other gospels were in circulation by this time; he assumes you know the content of those gospels. He’s not trying to reinvent the wheel. His gospel is written for a very specific reason. But he can’t make that point unless you come to his gospel with Matthew, Mark, and Luke front-loaded in your brain.We’ve got to do the work of harmonizing the gospels. That’s the official term for piecing together the four different accounts of the life of Jesus into a single account. If we don’t do this, we are going to misunderstand, misapply, and under-appreciate so much of what John has to say.Let me give you some examples of what I mean by harmonizing:Today we are studying John the Baptist, so let’s observe how the four gospels treat this event. If you compare the four gospels, there are some events in the life of John the Baptist where all four gospels describe the same exact thing in a very similar way. For example, after Jesus is baptized, God the Father spoke to God the son. That event is recorded in all four gospels.By contrast, John’s preaching on repentance only occurs in Matthew and Luke.And John’s replies to the questions asked by the multitude is only found in Luke.So, a harmony of the gospels uses chronology as the backbone and then tries to lay out the events of those four gospels like ribs that intersect that chronological backbone. So, it might look something like this:And the point is look where the gospel of John begins:There’s a lot that has already transpired.The announcement to MaryThe Birth of JesusThe Shepherd, Wisemen, HerodThe Entire Christmas NarrativeToday we focus on the story of the John the Baptist. The reason I bring up this whole business of harmony is to alert us to the fact that when our text in the book of John speaks of John the Baptist, there’s a lot you are expected to know about; not just about Jesus but about John the Baptist himself.In verse 6 we read, “There was a man sent from God whose name was John.” By itself that would be super unhelpful. But he assumes you carry in your mental backpack everything said up to this point by Matthew, Mark and Luke about this man named John the Baptist.The other three gospel writers have already told us:The foretelling of the Birth of John the Baptist (Lk)The birth of John the Baptist.The initial ministry of John the Baptist. (Mt, Mk and Lk)So today we are going to tell the story of John the Baptist as told in the other three gospels to set us up for what we read here in John chapter 1.The ForerunnerSo, who is this man John the Baptist?We find John in the pages of our NT but we need to think about John the Baptist as an OT prophet. When you think John the Baptist, think Ezekiel, Daniel, Malachi, Nahum and think even more particularly, of Elijah the prophet. This is a guy whose entire ministry was predicted 400 years before it happened.Three times in the OT, the OT prophets anticipate the ministry of a prophet who would prepare the way for the Messiah.Now the best prophecy to describe this ministry of this future prophet is found in Isaiah 40:3-5. In Isaiah 40 God is speaking to a nation in captivity who is suffering for her transgression, and Isaiah is looking forward to a future day when Messiah will come.That comfort is coming in the form of a servant-messiah. But he will be preceded by a forerunner.What is meant here by this poetic paragraph? Who is this voice crying in the wilderness? I’ll explain with an example.I spent a little time in Ukraine visiting some missionaries that we supported. As we drove around the country my conclusion was that roads cannot get worse. There were potholes that would just swallow cars alive. Main thoroughfares with giant semis just crawling through these patches of payment in total disrepair. But I remember approaching Kiev and all of a sudden the road not only improved but became 10 times nicer than any highway I’d ever seen in America. It was like driving on a smooth sheet of ice. There were giant digital screens on the road. And I thought, what in the world? So, I asked, why is this section so nice? And they said, this is the section of road that connects the international airport to the U.S. Consulate. Dignitaries from the US didn’t get the average treatment.Now, Isaiah 40, believe it or not is referring to this phenomenon. In ancient times, if a dignitary or a king was coming to a town or city, before he would arrive, a forerunner was sent ahead of him. And that forerunner would cry out and say your king is coming. And that would create all sorts of excitement. Really? He’s coming to our town? Yes, but in preparation, lift up the valleys. What’s that referring to? It’s referring to potholes in your roads. Fill in the potholes, take off the tops of the washboard. For goodness sakes, get your roads in order, your king is on his way. Do the work to prepare your city to appropriately welcome a king.So, Isaiah 40 says, in the same way that a forerunner prepares a city for a king, this future prophet will prepare the nation of Israel for her deliverer/messiah. John the Baptist is going to explicitly take this passage and apply it to himself. We will see that in just a second.The Old Testament closes with a prediction. God is going dark. The shudders of divine revelation through the prophetic ministry are closing. God is not speaking through prophets. There’s going to be a 400-year famine of divine revelation. But when it reopens, it’s going to be through this prophet.So, every Jew who longs for Messiah has these words ringing in his ear as the OT closes. Every Jew who longs for this great and awesome day and is astute in the OT and is attentive to the prophetic timeline, this student is not looking for Messiah as the first event, he’s looking for the forerunner to Messiah.The Birth of JohnSo, as we open up John chapter 1, the Old Testament anticipation of John the Baptist is supposed to be in your mind. What is also supposed to be in your head is Mt 3-4, Mark 1, Luke 1, Luke 3,4 - all this material that is not in John but deals with the life of John the Baptist. Before we ever open up John chapter 1, a lot has already happened.First, we are told about his birth. Think about the circumstances that attended the birth of John the Baptist. His father was Zacharias who was an aged, righteous priest. There was so much corruption in the temple machinery during Jesus day. We see it everywhere, money changers, the way Caiaphas conducts himself, the way the Sadducees ingratiated themselves with Rome. But there were righteous priests and Zachariah was one of them.Being a priest meant that you were eligible to offer incense as part of the daily temple ritual. Every day, twice a day, temple sacrifices were to be performed, once in the morning and once in the evening. Now, in Jesus’ day, there were about 18,000 priests so it was a rule that you were only allowed to experience this honor once in your lifetime. You’d wait your entire life for this. It was the highest of honors. And you were chosen randomly by lot. Here’s how the process worked. Twice daily you have the whole burnt offering that was performed here.If your lot was chosen, you got to enter the holy place.Now your job was to scrape coals off the altar in the courtyard where the whole burnt offering was made (the yellow arrow) and lay those coals on the golden altar of incense. (blue arrow)You didn’t go into the holy of holies. That was only done only once a year by the high priest on the day of atonement.After laying down the hot coals on the altar of incense you then poured over those hot coals this rich, perfumed oil. It was a very special day. Now that operation shouldn’t take too terribly long. But in Zachariah’s case, the whole thing was interrupted. To his shock, delight, and horror, the angel Gabriel steps out of the Holy of Holies, opens his mouth and in so doing breaks the 400 years of silence of that intertestamental period.The angel Gabriel tells Zachariah that in their old age they are going to bear a child and that the child will be the forerunner of Messiah. He predicts some remarkable things about the boy.He will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother’s womb.Many will rejoice at his birthBut perhaps the most incredible thing Gabriel says to Zachariah about the birth of his son:So, the job of the spiritual forerunner, the job of this son of yours Zachariah is not to plow up roads, but to plow up hearts. John the Baptist is to run his plow through the hearts of the people of Israel so that the Messiah might come in and plant seed.Zachariah hears this but doesn’t believe him and is made mute. He can no longer speak. He comes out of the temple and for the next 9 months he must communicate via tablet. We all now do this by choice. But all these events surrounding the birth cause a great stir in the community.They are going to wait 30 years to find out what happens with this kid, but what I want to get out of this is that the birth of John the Baptist was God’s way of generating excitement about the coming Messiah. People saw this man and as he grew there was increasing anticipatory wonder and growing messianic expectation.The Beginning of John’s MinistryJohn’s ministry begins by preaching and baptizing in the Jordan river. Where he is baptizing geographically is important on a number of levels. The Jordan rift is a miserable place. It’s deep. If you live in Jerusalem, the religious and political capital of Judea, you don’t want to go down there unless you have a good reason because you got to climb your way back out. It’s worth it to just take a second to get your bearings. The Jordan river is only about 21 miles East from Jerusalem, but you have to really descend to get there. For reasons we won’t get into, John was almost certainly baptizing in this stretch of the Jordan river, the section right before it enters the Dead Sea. Here’s a way to visualize it. Here’s a cross section.Jerusalem is 2474 feet above sea level and the Dead Sea is 1400 below sea level. So, you are descending almost 4000 feet. Both the distance and the elevation change is almost identical to climbing from the Boise Valley to the top of Bogus Basin.And the text says that all Jerusalem went out. Now right there you know something is going on. That speaks of a laborious journey. John is demanding of something of you. You’ve got to work a bit to come see him. But even with that obstacle, people are wildly attracted to this guy. That is really important to understand.In every film I’ve ever seen depicting the life of Christ, John the Baptist is depicted as this wild man approaching insanity. That’s such a disappointing depiction of John the Baptist. He can’t be that? When are crowds ever attracted to lunatics? Why do films portray him this way? Because of the fact that he dressed in skins of animals and ate grasshoppers and wild honey.He wasn’t trying to shock people with his dress; rather, he was trying to contrast himself to the religious leadership of the day.John was everything the corrupt religious elite was not.They were all about image and appearance and robes and fineries. John wore camel skins.They were about the externals. John was about the internals.They were about keeping the law. John exposed their hypocritical breaking of the law.In this particular case, the attractiveness of John the Baptist was almost certainly a function of his contrast to the corrupt religious establishment of the day. Let me give you a parallel in our culture that might help.As a country we are growing increasingly disillusioned by the corruption in politics. Imagine if suddenly a farm boy in Nebraska started posting videos in his overalls commentating on the corruption. And the videos were filled with penetrating truth. The guy had an IQ off the charts. He could reason you into a corner in one second. He put to words what everyone was thinking and feeling. He wasn’t playing a game. He just was interested in truth. You could imagine videos like that going viral simply by virtue of the contrast. You have the slick, greasy politician alongside this incredibly articulate, intelligent, earthy, man of integrity - unwilling to argue, kind. You could imagine the attraction.John’s message was simple. Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. And if you agreed with that message, then I’ll baptize you.Why Baptism?Now why is he baptizing? This is an interesting question and harder to answer than you might like. I think the best way to go about answering this question is to ask, “What would the concept of baptism evoked in the minds of a 1st century Jew living in Palestine during that time?” Or to say it another way, what was the conceptual antecedent to baptism? Was there something in culture that John leveraged for his ministry?There are a couple of views on this. One popularized by Alfred Edersheim who is a famous Jewish convert to Christianity and wrote this giant work entitled Jesus the Messiah, says that John the Baptist was performing proselyte baptism. The last step by which a proselyte of Judaism could become a full-fledged Jew was baptism. So perhaps John borrows it for that reason. Maybe. It doesn’t seem to be a very well-known practice at the time.Something that was much more well-known was the concept of mikvah or ritual bath. What is a mikvah?Here’s a mikvah found at Qumran. I could be wrong, but I believe this is the first mikvah discovered. Here’s another with water in it.And the idea of a mikvah is ritual cleansing. You don’t bring your tote of shampoo and soap. You just disrobe, dip once, get out and you’re done. Now interestingly these Mikvah are not commanded anywhere in the Old Testament. They developed sometime during the intertestamental period.There are all sorts of rules that develop around them. There are rules on how they need to be built. There’s an entire tractate in the Talmud that describes how these are to be built and the rules accompanying them. For example,They had to be filled with water not born by man, in other words rain runoff of some sort. A river could work for this purpose because it met this requirement.You had to completely dunk yourself. No sprinkling for you Presbyterians. Women were instructed to keep their hair all bundled up so that a piece wouldn’t float up and stay dry.And again, this is ritual cleansing.There’s a lot of theories as to why these developed but the one that makes the most sense to me has to do with a practical problem that confronted an intertestamental Jew.Now to understand this problem let me ask this question, if you wanted to approach God during King Solomon’s day, what would you do?You would travel to Jerusalem, go to the temple that he built, and offer a sacrifice. You would never approach God without a sacrifice. It’s a way to atone for your sin so that you can be before a holy God. Well, the period of Kings comes to a violent end when first the Assyrians then the Babylonians come and haul the Jews off in 722 and 586 BC. Their temple was destroyed. So how do I approach God now? I’m thousands of miles away from the Jerusalem. And even if I was in Jerusalem, there no longer is a temple to visit.One of the theories is that these mikvah, these ritual baths spring up as a concession to the reality of dispersion and captivity. Since we can’t do sacrifice, it’s a way to keep the spirit of the idea that in order to approach God, I need to be clean.And it’s not like they pulled this idea out of nowhere. There is some biblical warrant for this concept of ritual cleansing. If you happened to touch a dead body in war, or in the course of life, there was a process of cleansing yourself which included ritual cleansing.And you also have the instructions to the leper who is made clean.However these mikvah started, by the time you get to Jesus’ day, these mikvah are everywhere in Israel. There’s something like 60 of them just below the steps of the temple mount. And they are there for an obvious reason. You are about to go up and approach God; get clean first.Very possibly, this is what lay behind John’s baptism. This is the conceptual antecedent that John leveraged. He took an idea in culture and used it to powerful effect. To what powerful effect?The Summary PointNow here’s the connection I’ve been trying to setup. I started by making the point that John’s message, by virtue of the fact that flocks of people are coming to him, must have been attractive. Away with the idea that he’s borderline schizophrenic. Jesus says that of all men born of women, none is greater than John the Baptist. That is not the description of a schizoid!John the Baptist was a man filled with the attractive fruits of the Spirit of God. Here’s a man of towering character and blinding integrity. His blameless and upright righteousness explodes off the pages of Scripture. Here’s a man who was is conducting a ministry that was prophesied 400 years earlier by the prophet Isaiah and Malachi.As a matter of fact, the Bible says explicitly that unlike many of the Old Testament prophets who were able to do miracles, John the Baptist never performed a miracle. So, if you are not attracting people with a magic show, what’s the only thing you have left? Your words. His ministry must have been absolutely compelling.And what was John’s ministry? What was so compelling that it brought out people by the hundreds to this God forsaken place? His ministry was dead simple: to prepare the hearts of the people to receive the Messiah he would identify. Now time out.I want to make a really important point right here that is lost on us because of our familiarity with it.We know the identification of the Messiah prophesied in the Old Testament. The Messiah is Jesus Christ.Further we know that Jesus is the God-man. The Messiah is divine.That’s so obvious to us. But every Old Testament saint, without exception, when he pictured Messiah, he was picturing a man. He was picturing someone like David or Solomon. A human king. A regular guy that God would use to deliver the nation. That is so important to what we are going to be talking about today.Log that away. Old Testament saint looking forward to Messiah. He was thinking a normal, specially anointed man.I think without question, John the Baptist as a prophet in the Spirit and power of Elijah, knew what we know. He knew that Jesus the Messiah was in fact God. He knew this was a piece of revelation so large, it would have to be received in stages and by degrees.John is going to identify the Messiah as a man, but he’s going to prepare their hearts receive him as God. And I want you to notice the masterful way in which he does this.John never preaches this explicitly. His job was not to say Jesus was God but rather to prepare the ears of people to receive it. And the first way he did that was through Baptism.John’s message was simple, “Repent.” Why? He gives a reason. The kingdom of heaven is about to appear. In other words, “The King is coming!” The Old Testament promised servant-king is about to come. And this promised King is of a nature that will send shivers down your spine.You have learned that before you approach God there must be a ritual cleansing. I’m standing in a mikvah. I’m telling you to purify yourself not because you are about to approach God but because God is about to approach you. You are not going into the throne room of God. The throne room of God is on that mercy seat up in there in Jerusalem in the Temple. God is stepping out of his throne room and coming to you.You see what he is doing is preparing in their minds a category of thought. In every other case in history, the worshiper prepared himself to go to God. Now they were supposed to prepare themselves to have God come to them? Do you feel the excitement in that? Do you feel how it would create wonder, suspense, an openness of mind?Do you see why John the Baptist deserves the title forerunner. Your King has left his palace and is coming to your city. Get your roads ready! Prepare your minds. Do you see how John is running his plow through the hearts of the people to prepare them for the coming Messiah?!John the Baptist salts and peppers the land with people who are already committed to this idea that God is coming to us. He’s plowing the soil for Jesus.John 1With that introduction, let’s launch into our text for today:In our reading for today, we pick up the story where John is several weeks or months into his preaching ministry. Both the manner and message of John are attracting huge crowds - Enough of a crowd to garner the attention of the Pharisees in Jerusalem. The Pharisees won’t lower themselves to go down themselves, so they send their messengers to find out what’s going on. And what we are going to see in this text is three or four ways in which John prepares the minds of the people to receive this notion that Jesus was in fact God.Now just an interpretive note. John the Baptist is a Jew. John the apostle is a Jew. But when he refers to the Jews, he doesn’t include himself in that group. The author quite clearly presents himself and those he represents as quite separate. Why? This is a technical term that almost always refers to the official religious establishment, the leadership. Sometimes the high priest and the Sanhedrin. Sometimes the Pharisees. But that’s the idea. We will see it over and over. So, the official Jewish leadership, in this case the Pharisees, send their delegation down to find out what’s going. They ask him point blank, “Who are you?”So, John connects his ministry to the Messianic forerunner. Now you have to imagine how that would have ruffled the feathers of the Pharisees. The gall. The audacity to say that you are the prophet predicted by the holy prophet Isaiah. Get real. They didn’t like his answer and you can tell by their response.I’m arguing that John the Baptist was not only plowing the hearts of the people in terms of repentance but also in terms of accepting the idea that Messiah would be God. We are so used to the idea that Messiah is God. Not a single Jew in Jesus’ day would have expected this. Not a single Jew. The shock to the Jewish mind that God could become a man cannot be overstated. Now I want you to think about the significance of what John says here in plowing the soil of the Jewish mind to receive this long-anticipated Messiah and accept the nature of who he was. John doesn’t outright say Jesus is God. He knows it; it has been revealed to him. But he’s preparing the mind. Think about the genius of how his words prepare their mind.What do we know about John the Baptist?He’s the first prophet in 400 years since Malachi.His conception was foretold by the angel Gabriel through a dramatic visionHis birth was accompanied by a tremendous prophesy from the mouth of his father Zachariah. Read it in Luke 1.Jesus says, among those born of women there is none greater than John the Baptist.That’s a pretty great man. And yet John says, “I’m not even fit to untie this guy’s sandal?!” That’s shocking. I don’t think that’s what they would have expected.Was this prophesied messianic deliverer going to be a king like David? What prophet had that kind of relationship with a king where the prophet would say, “I’m not even worthy to untie your sandal?” Nathan confronted David. He was the mouthpiece of God to David. He wasn’t bowing at his feet claiming he was unworthy. Do you see how this creates a category of thought that doesn’t explicitly say it, but prepares the mind? What kind of Messiah must this be?Here’s another rather explicit indication that John knew that Jesus was God. John says that Jesus came before him. In what sense?If you compared birthdays, who came first, Jesus or John the Baptist? John the Baptist by six months.If you compared the start of the ministry of John the Baptist and Jesus, who was first? John the Baptist.In terms of rank, who had more followers, John the Baptist, or Jesus. John the Baptist.By any metric you can think of, John the Baptist was before Jesus. In what sense was Jesus before John the Baptist? John knew that in the beginning was the Word and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. He’s leaking out hints.Now some of you may wonder, why in the world is Jesus getting baptized? If this is a Baptism of repentance, why in the world does Jesus need to get baptized?Well, you better come back next week.Closing Application.Now, let’s close with an application here. Do you want to know why Jesus is capable of giving you life? Do you want to know why Jesus can fix your problems? Because he’s God.This is the point that John is making over and over and over again in his book. And believing that Jesus is in fact the Son of God changes your psychological approach to life. Believing that Jesus is God will allow you to relocate your source of ultimate trust.Let me explain what I mean by this. How in the world did Einstein get the world to believe that time is relative? I mean, that is the most absurd concept. That is about the most unintuitive thing I can imagine. If anything is constant in my life, it’s time.The answer is not because you or I understand it. We don’t. It’s because we trust that the dude is really smart. Look at his hair. He has to be smart. We believe that his intellect supersedes our intuition, and his laymen explanations are sufficient.In the same way, if we believe Jesus is God, it changes everything about how we view his words. Jesus as God gives us the answers. Period. There is no discussion. The words of Jesus are no longer helpful ideas to put alongside helpful ideas of other wise men who have lived, Socrates, Gandhi, Confucius. These are the words of God. These become for you the words of life.You trust someone differently when you realize that they are God. No statement is questioned. No matter how unintuitive, you trust it. You believe it, not because it makes sense to you but because of who said it. You relocate the source of trust from your intuition to the authority of him who said it.And I want to challenge you to read the gospel of John in this way. As we come to his words, do not stand over his words as judge to see if they make sense to you. Let his words stand as judge over your heart to shape, correct, mold, and teach you. And you know what will happen? You will have life.