Matthew 3.4-6

Let's start off by reading the passage:


⁴ John’s clothes were made of camel’s hair, and he had a leather belt around his waist. His food was locusts and wild honey. ⁵ People went out to him from Jerusalem and all Judea and the whole region of the Jordan. ⁶ Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River.
 ⁷ But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to where he was baptizing, he said to them: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? ⁸ Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. ⁹ And do not think you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. ¹⁰ The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.
 ¹¹ “I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me will come one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not fit to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. ¹² His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”


After talking yesterday about the different political parties that were in existence during this period, now we see a new man, one who no one really knows where he belongs. John the Baptist did everything right to create a stir.


He wore the right clothes. 


In verse 4, it said that his clothes were made of camel's hair and he had a leather belt around his waist. This kind of outfit resembled that of another famous prophet in the Old Testament named Elijah. And, according to Malachi 4.5-6, the Jews were waiting for "Elijah" to come again. This is what it says:


⁵ “See, I will send you the prophet Elijah before that great and dreadful day of the LORD comes. ⁶ He will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers; or else I will come and strike the land with a curse.”


And this man, John the Baptist, was not only dressed like a prophet but resembled that of Elijah. Now, not only did he wear the right clothes, he ate the right food. 


his diet was locusts and wild honey. This is the kind of food that a desert dweller would eat. But not only that, this kind of food and the fact that he was living in the desert, points to a sort of denial of one's own physical desires. Men who would call other men to repentance, to change the way they were living because they were in sin, would require some right to be able to call people to repentance. He needed to be ultra-spiritual, in the eyes of the Jews. So John the Baptist was wearing the right clothes and eating the right kind of food. 


He was also at the right place. 


He went out in the wilderness, and was baptizing people in the Jordan River. Now why would he go to the Jordan River, all the way out in the wilderness to baptize people?


If he was concerned with finding a good watering hole for people to get baptized in, the northern Sea of Galilee would have been more convenient. If he was trying to draw larger crowds, then Jerusalem would have been a better location as well. But these were neither of his purposes for baptizing people in the Jordan River. The reason he went there, was he wanted to draw on the image of a new entry into the Promised Land, into Israel at the Jordan River. 


You see, Jesus is paralleling what happened to the Israelites all the way back in the book of Exodus. If you remember, that is why he went down into Egypt after he was born, so that God could call him out of Egypt the same way he called the Israelites out of Egypt. And now, John the Baptist is saying to the people of Israel, "We need to start over. We need to go to the very beginning, when we came into the land after wandering through the desert for 40 years, and we need to try this again."


This reminds me of those times when I would say something stupid to my wife, or treat her with a really bad attitude out of nowhere, and she would say, "Let's try this again." And so we would go back to the beginning of the conversation and start it over and both try to handle the situation better than the time before. 


This is kind of what John the Baptist is doing. He is saying, let's do a redo. And he is calling the people of Israel back to the Jordan River, the River that they crossed thousands of years ago to enter the promised land, and he is saying that the last time we were to bless the nations and live in the promise land, we messed it up. But things are starting over. The Messiah is coming and he is making a new covenant with us, so we get a chance to redo what we messed up last time. 


So not only did John wear the right clothes, eat the right food and go to the right place, but he did the right thing. 


He was baptizing people. 


Now where did this idea of dunking people in water come from? Doesn't that just seem strange? Well it all started with the fact that there were many washings in the Old Testament that the priests and even the people would do to cleanse themselves from impurities. This transformed into the practice that Jews wold baptize, literally immerse, Gentiles who wanted to part of the Jewish religion. It was more of a baptism of entry into a community than a baptism of repentance like we have here. This Jewish baptism was a lot like pledging to a fraternity. Before you are a part of the fraternity, you got to do these things, then you are in. Also, the Essenes, that monastic community in the desert, practice baptism as well. But it was not a one time deal, it was something that you did on a regular basis to keep yourself clean and pure. 


So this idea of water being spiritual had been around for awhile, but there was something very different about this baptism of John's. It wasn't just a cleansing act, and it wasn't initiation into a community, it was for repentance. 


Repentance is a big word to some of us, and sometimes we throw it around and don't really know what it means. The basic idea is that there is a change of mind and heart. You thought and did one thing, and now you repent, and think and do something else. This is at the heart of John's baptism.


The Israelites thought and did one thing, maybe thought that the Pharisees were right in how to be the people of God, or maybe the Sadducees were, or the Essenes or maybe the Zealots, but whatever you thought or were doing, John is saying that you were wrong. And his baptism was saying that I'm changing my mind and behavior from that old way of life, to a new way of life. 


John created quite a stir. And let me be frank with you for a second. When we truly repent, and call others to repentance, we create quite a stir. 


As you will see tomorrow, the religious leaders of the day came all the way to see what he was doing. the whole region of Judea went out to see him!!!! 


So why aren't we creating quite a stir?


Why aren't we baptizing people daily and calling people to repent, to leave their old lives and live new lives? Why aren't the religious leaders of our day coming out to see us baptizing people by droves in rivers and creeks?


Maybe, just maybe, we haven't truly repented of our old way of life. 


Repentance is a change of mind and behavior, it says that my old life was junk, I am no living a new, completely different life. 


Have you truly changed your old way of life before Christ? What are you holding on to? 


As Christians, we are called to create stirs. Are we doing that through our repentance?