Matthew 3.1-3

Hopefully you had a great weekend, doing some spiritual exercises and hearing a great sermon about the heart of Jesus this last Sunday. If you aren't finished with your personal mission statement and dreams, makes sure you work on those this week. Remember, Jesus came here to do something, and he has put us here with a purpose as well. Keep it at the forefront of your mind.

Now let's pick up where we left off. Last Time we saw Jesus, he was probably a toddler returning from Egypt and ending up in Nazareth in Galilee. That was now thirty years ago. Between chapters 2 and 3 of Matthew, 28 years of the life of Jesus has passed, and all we really know about this time is seen in a small passage in Luke 2.41-52. But in Matthew, there is nothing. After Jesus is born and barely escaped Herod's massacre, the next thing we see is a man in the wilderness, eating locust and honey and baptizing people in the Jordan River. Let's read our passage for today:

¹ In those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the Desert of Judea ² and saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.” ³ This is he who was spoken of through the prophet Isaiah:
   “A voice of one calling in the desert,
‘Prepare the way for the Lord,
   make straight paths for him.’”


So what is really going on?


I mean we got this weird guy out in the desert preaching about the "kingdom of heaven" and this causes a bunch of the people and the religious leaders to come out and see him?


In our day, he would have been picked up and taken to the nut house. But here is the thing, something is going on behind the scenes of this little passage that we as 21st century westerners are missing. 


Politics. 


This is what is going on. 


John in the wilderness would have been like a politician down at city hall, speaking on a stand about starting a new country. 


So is he a Democrat? Republican? Independent? Tea party? What party does this John belong to?


This is actually a very interesting question, and that's why everyone went out to see him. They wanted to know who he was siding with among the political parties of the day and what his purpose was for preaching about the "kingdom of heaven."


In the First Century, there were four different political parties among the Jews. Each of these parties' purpose was to be the pure people of God in order for the Messiah to come and save them. Each of the parties thought the Jews were not living correctly as the people of God, and they thought that if the Jews would live correctly, God when then send them the Messiah, or King, to literally "save" them from the oppression of the Romans. Yet each group had a different idea of how to be the true people of God, how to live correctly. 


First was the Pharisees. The Pharisees were very Conservative in their social lives. They didn't necessarily like the Romans ruling over them and the gentiles living among them, so they decided to separate themselves as much from the pagans as they could in everyday life. They thought that allowing the Gentiles, the people that weren't Jewish, into their daily lives was what was keeping God from sending the Messiah to rescue them from the Gentile oppression. So they would do special washings before dinner, and if you didn't wash your hands the way they did, you were a pagan and not a part of the people of God. They would hold all the laws as legalistic as possible to try to create a pure people of God in the daily lives of the people of Israel. And only until all of the Jews were living the kind of life they thought you had to live, then God would send his Messiah to save them. 


So we have the conservative, legalistic Pharisees. 


The second party was the liberal, aristocratic Sadducees. The Sadducees were made up of the men that served as the priests to the temple. They thought that they could usher in the kingdom of God, God's Messiah coming to reign again here on earth, not by daily devotion to religious, like the Pharisees, but by influencing Roman government. They tried to infiltrate the politics of Rome and thought that if they worked with the Romans instead of against them, they might be able to bring about God's reign here on earth that way. 


The third party was the monastic, ultra-right wing puritan Essenes. This group is very much like the Amish of today. Probably because of the compliance of the Sadducees, the leaders of the temple, with the Roman government, the Essenes saw not only the people of God impure, but also the temple. They believed this because they didn't agree with the leadership of the temple, specifically the Sadducees. So what they did was they left Jerusalem and went into the desert to form their own monastic-like community. They thought that if they completely separated themselves from all of the impurities of the people of God, that then God would send his Messiah to save his people from the oppression of Rome. This is where we get the Qumran scrolls, from an Essene community on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. 


So the Pharisees tried to separate themselves from the world by daily actions, the Sadducees tried to infiltrate the politics of Rome, and the Essenes tried to withdraw completely from society as a whole. 


The last political group are the Zealots. Now although this term was ascribed to this group till probably AD 67-68, this group came from another political party that had been going on since the time in between the Old and New Testament. The Zealots were people like the Pharisees who were against Rome, yet they took it to the next level. They said that being the true people of God was not just living a pure, separate life from the Gentiles, but actually overthrowing the Gentiles by force. They would carry these short swords into the temple and would kill Roman authorities. A lot of these rebellions were born in the wilderness in the north, around Galilee, and even in Judea. They took a more active approach, and instead of waiting for God to send the Messiah to save them, they thought that God was waiting for them to save themselves. 


And now we come back to our passage. We have John, this strange man, going out to the Desert, the wilderness were most rebellions started, and he was saying, "Repent, for the KINGDOM OF HEAVEN IS NEAR." He was saying a new kingdom was approaching. This is a political statement. All these four groups were waiting for the kingdom of God to be reinstated in Jerusalem and they all had committed their lives to bring about God's kingdom here on earth. So what group does this guy belong to? What is his idea on how to bring the kingdom back. And then is the OT quotation. Matthew quotes Isaiah 40.3. 


This was HUGE!!!!


This is what the passage says again:


 “A voice of one calling in the desert,
‘Prepare the way for the Lord,
   make straight paths for him.’”


The Jews believed that because of this passage, there would be someone to come before the Messiah, a forerunner, announcing that he was coming. And each political party thought they were those forerunners. The Essenes actually quoted this passage about themselves, saying they were ushering in the new kingdom of Jesus. Yet, as we will see, neither John nor Jesus was a part of any of these four political parties. Jesus brought about a kingdom that was completely different than any one of his day. 


And my question to you, today, is this: how are you trying to bring about God's kingdom here on earth?


Are you acting like a Pharisee and trying to follow a lot of legalistic rules to show that you are different than everyone else?


Are you acting like a Sadducee who is trying to influence the politics of the government surrounding them?


Are you trying to, like the Essenes, to get into your own little spiritual bubble, away from the rest of the world?


Or are you even trying to bring about the Kingdom of God by force like the Zealots?


Because, as we will see throughout the rest of the book, the way to bring about the kingdom of God is not by any of these political strategies, but simply to follow Jesus and live the kind of life he lived. 


Are you following Jesus today? 


Eat the Book, Follow the Leader.