The Voice in The Wilderness

Luke 3:1 – 6

 

I love to read. From a young age I always enjoyed reading. I was one of those kids who always looked forward to the Scholastic Book Fair at school so I could buy another book or two to read at home.

 

When I was about my boys’ age my brother bought me what became my favorite fictional book series. One book at a time he bought and mailed to me J.R.R. Tolkien’s classics, first The Hobbit, and then each of the books of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Wonderful books with such character and plot depth through an absolute gift of storytelling.

 

While fiction isn’t real, the greatest novelists use the pages of a powerful story to peel back our own layers of personal fiction, our self-deception and hypocrisies and they drive home a great truth. Now, this isn’t the kind of truth you get from historical writing or legal reports, those truths are factual data of real events that actually took place.

 

The truth revealed by fiction is moral truth, or truth about human nature. There are people who tend to view the New Testament Gospels only in that same way. They feel that the real historical facts about the events that really took place are somehow less important, or unimportant to the story. They say that what matters is the moral truth revealed in the gospels, the insight into human nature.

 

If the Gospels were merely just stories meant to inspire, if the human authors who wrote the Gospels intended to write fiction, that would be an appropriate view to take. But that’s not the case. You cannot read what Luke wrote, this Gospel and Acts, and miss that he intended for you to know that this stuff really happened.

 

Luke speaks my language, being a doctor, he was an academic. His attention to detail and historical facts really stands out in his writing. God uniquely created each of us for His purposes, and Luke is no exception.

 

With the beginning of chapter 3 we have the beginning of Jesus’s ministry on earth. And as was promised by God, we see the forerunner to Jesus, His cousin John the Baptist, beginning his ministry first. Let’s read about in God’s Word together: Luke 3:1 – 6.

Our passage begins by placing the beginning of John the Baptist’s ministry, and Jesus’, squarely in the flow of history by listing off seven real rulers and leaders in history. Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate, Herod (Antipas) and his brother Philip, Lysanias, Annas and Caiaphas.

 

We’re given the year, in the 15^th year of Tiberius Caesar, who came after Augustus Caesar. History places his rule beginning around A.D. 14, which would place John and Jesus beginning their ministries around A.D. 28, plus or minus a year.

 

During this same time, Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea. We’ll see Pilate again later when he plays an actual role in the story, but for now he helps set the window of time for these events. He ruled there from A.D. 26 – 36. Being a history nerd, I love it when history corroborates the Bible. A famous inscription discovered at Caesarea in 1961 showed that Pontius Pilate was a real Roman prefect in Judea.

 

Herod Antipas was one of the sons of Herod the Great, the one from Jesus’ birth story. Herod was tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip was tetrarch of Ituraea and Trachonitis (NW & NE of Galilee). Antipas ruled Galilee as tetrarch from 4 B.C., when his father died, to A.D. 39. Philip reigned until A.D. 34. Lysanias ruled the region of Abilene, which bordered Syria, also to the north.

 

Then lastly, we have Annas and Caiaphas. Caiaphas was the actual high priest at the time, but Annas, his father-in-law, was the high priest from A.D. 6 – 15. Despite Caiaphas becoming the high priest, Annas continued exerting a strong influence in Israel’s religious life after A.D. 15.

 

Describing the start to John the Baptist’s ministry like this is like someone saying to you in 50 years, that Manny Silveira came from Hilmar to First Southern Baptist Church of Delhi, when Donald Trump was in his second term as president of the United States, Gavin Newsom was governor of California, Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff were U.S. Senators from CA, Lloyd Parreira was the Merced County supervisor for district 4, and Pete Ramirez was the executive director of the CSBC.

 

For most of you, that would give you a good time frame to place when I came to this church, and that’s precisely what Luke was doing for Theophilus, who many believe was Roman official himself.

So, when you read verses 1 and 2 here, you see how these accounts were as real as the person sitting next to you. The time, place, and events recorded in Scripture are not creations of the writers’ imaginations meant to exist only in the mind of the reader, but they are a part of the stream of human history.

 

When you look at the entirety of Scripture, you can trace that scarlet thread of salvation from the beginning of time in the garden of Eden all the way through to the end of Revelation. When you look at history, you can see how the story of God’s redemption didn’t end with the biblical writers but has continued throughout all of history.

 

It continues through today and will continue until Jesus comes back, fulfilling God’s Word in its entirety. You can see, and believe, that salvation history is indeed world history, and as world history that means that salvation is not meant for a specific group of people but is meant for people from all over the world, Jew and Gentile alike.

 

This is tremendous on two levels. First, to the people of Israel at the time this would have been offensive! They were the children of Abraham, the children of the promise, the land which was tied to their salvation and deliverance in their minds, was for them and only them.

 

But God’s vision was always bigger. That means that second, salvation was indeed to come through the Jews, but it was never intended to be limited to them, and that is the point to demonstrating how these events that took place in Israel 2,000 years ago are instrumental in world history. Man’s salvation was meant to be seen by all mankind.

 

That doesn’t mean that all of mankind will be saved though. The Bible speaks about believers being chosen, predestined by God to become His children through Christ. And the Bible also speaks of many who reject Jesus and salvation, choosing to trust in themselves instead.

 

I don’t have all the answers to the argument between predestination and free will, but I do know this: the gospel is meant to be taken to the ends of the earth, to be shared with all. Who believes and how is up to God, not us. It’s our job to make Him known. And He will be known, because Scripture says that when Jesus comes back every knee will bow, and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord.

 

Whether someone is joyous about it or terrified of it doesn’t change the fact that God’s salvation was meant to be seen by all.

 

So, the beginning of John’s ministry is set in history, among real people and in real places. During the fifteenth year of Tiberias’ reign, around A.D. 28, and emerging from out of the wilderness into the region around the Jordan River, comes John with a mission.

 

What makes this event truly significant has less to do with all the historical facts surrounding it, and more to do with the last part of verse 2. “The Word of God came to John the son of Zechariah.” Like all the prophets of the Old Testament, John’s authority and power came not from himself, but from God.

 

Luke 1:15 said he was filled with the Spirit from his mother’s womb, and now he comes to preach with a word from God and in the power of God’s Spirit. In Matthew 11:11 Jesus said that among those born of women there has not yet risen anyone greater than John the Baptist.

 

John was the last and greatest prophet, effectively bridging the OT and the NT. And as a prophet, with a word from God, we ought to listen because it is God’s message, and there is nothing we need more in this life and on our Christian walk than a clear word from God.

 

Verse three tells us that John went into the region around the Jordan preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Back in chapter 1 the angel Gabriel told Zechariah what John’s ministry would be, and his words there help explain what Luke means by repentance here in verse 3.

 

In 1:16 – 17 the angel said that John, “will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God, and he will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and [turn] the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready for the Lord a people prepared.”

 

Notice the repetition of the word turn: he will turn many of the Israelites to the Lord their God. He will turn the hearts of the fathers and turn the disobedient. That is the meaning of repentance: a turning of the direction of our life and the desires of our heart, so that our entire being becomes oriented on God and the things He loves, instead of ourselves.

John preaches the forgiveness of sins in response to their repentance, in response to their turning to God, but he calls them to demonstrate the seriousness of their turning by accepting baptism in the Jordan River, just as God calls us to demonstrate the seriousness of repentance by our public acceptance of baptism by immersion in water.

 

Don’t mistake baptism here as a ritual that brings forgiveness. Baptism by itself does nothing for anyone. But baptism is not to be isolated from repentance, and it is not to be isolated from faith either.

 

Even the Jewish historian Josephus stated that John’s baptism required a “cleansed soul.” The blood of Christ is the only thing that can wash away your sin, that can cleanse your soul, and that comes through genuine faith alone. That must come before baptism in water can mean anything.

 

But for John’s fellow Jews, what he was preaching to them was a remarkable demand. In the context of first century Israel, baptism had one main significance among them: it was the symbolic ritual that converts to Judaism had to go through to become Jewish. This made John’s baptism very offensive to his fellow countrymen.

 

It implied that unless the Jews were willing to repent, they were not really Jews and could not count on the promised blessings that God had made to His chosen people. Let me put it another way, in calling Jews to accept a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, John was telling them that they cannot rely on their Jewishness for salvation; they must be changed from within, in their heart, toward God.

 

Luke’s Gospel is said to be the gospel to the Gentiles. Theophilus, the guy he’s writing to, was a Gentile, and you can see throughout his Gospel how he explains Jewish tradition where the other gospel writers don’t and it is most evident in Luke that the salvation God worked through Christ is for all peoples.

 

And the understanding of John’s baptism shown here is that it implied that the way was open for Gentiles to repent and be forgiven too. If being Jewish doesn’t save, then being a Gentile doesn’t necessarily condemn: the issue is repentance toward God. The way that we see that John’s baptism and preaching carried this significance is in the way Luke cites Isaiah 40 here.

When an OT Scripture is cited by more than one NT writer, it’s important to ask ourselves if the quotations are the same or different, and if they’re different then what is different about them. Matthew, Mark, and Luke both quote Isaiah 40:3 here when talking about John the Baptist and his ministry, and the apostle John quotes John the Baptist citing this verse himself, “The voice of one crying in the wilderness: prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”

 

However, Luke is the only one who goes on to quote Isaiah 40:4 – 5 too, “Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked become straight, and the rough places shall become level ways, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”

 

Why the larger quote? There’s significance to that. The words in Isaiah referred in the first place to the redemption that God brought to His people with their return from exile, but they nevertheless point in their fullest sense to the great forerunner of Christ, with their culmination in Christ Himself.

 

The wilderness is often a quiet place. Some of the quietest moments outdoors that I can remember came while irrigating corn at night and generally during any other nighttime emergencies I dealt with on the dairy. But the wilderness, far away from people and cities, can be quite lonely and very quiet.

 

Maybe it’s because of the quiet that I prefer the sea to the mountains. I can remember how quiet it was in the mountains during sixth grade camp, and it was eerie. By the sea there’s the constant crash of the waves that I find comforting. However, something shatters the quiet of the wilderness in our Scripture today, and that is the voice of John the Baptist crying out, prepare the way of the Lord.

 

John came to prepare the way for Jesus Christ. He came to call God’s people to repentance, to change how they lived. In light of the cross of Christ, this repentance, this turning from their sinful lives back toward God would require being humbled by God, mountains made low, and the lowly brought up, the valley filled in.

 

God would make sinful man’s crooked ways straight; the rough parts of life God will make level. John prepared the way for the Lord by calling on the people to turn back to God who does all of this.

With very few exceptions, first century Israel truly expected an earthly, political Messiah who would save them from their pagan oppressors. They had no realization of their own sinfulness and of their need for a Savior who, above all, would bring spiritual deliverance.

 

And this larger quote from Isaiah speaks to the reality of the state of all mankind, not just Israel. All flesh shall see the salvation of God because all flesh needs the salvation of God. John was beginning to preach and the salvation that Jesus will bring is for all flesh, not just for Israel.

 

The mountains of sinful pride are lowered, the crooked ways of sinful man are straightened, the rough ways are smoothed, so that all flesh, all people, might see and have access to salvation. There’s a really cool confirmation that this is what is being said here.

 

The Greek word for salvation used here in Luke 3:6 is not the more common one, but a rare one that is used only three times in Luke – Acts. Here, back in 2:30, and in Acts 28:28. The point in each occurrence is to stress the now salvation is being made clearly available for Gentiles as well as Jews.

 

In Luke 2:30 – 31 Simeon says of the baby Jesus, “My eyes have seen your salvation that you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,” and at the very end of Acts in 28:28 Luke wrote Paul’s words saying, “’Therefore let it be known to you that this salvation of God has been sent to the Gentiles; they will listen.’” So, Luke begins and ends his two-volume work with this truth: the salvation that Jesus brings is for all mankind.

 

You must actively prepare your heart for the coming of Jesus Christ through genuine repentance and commit to proclaiming His truth to the world around you.

 

Christ will come again or will you meet Him before He does. Preparing your heart for Him means genuine repentance for the forgiveness of sins, for salvation through Christ.

 

Being a pious and religious person is no guarantee of salvation. The ruling religious elite of Israel were very pious and religious, and they missed the boat on salvation.

 

Being a terrible sinner, chief among sinners as Paul describes himself, is also no hinderance from salvation. What matters is repentance for the forgiveness of sins. God is actively preparing hearts for salvation through genuine, heartfelt repentance and faith.

 

Now, believing in Jesus Christ for your salvation, that moment of regeneration, being born again, requires genuine repentance and happens once. Baptism as a demonstration of your genuine repentance and saving faith in Christ only needs to happen once. But there may be times in your life where you recommit to Christ, and another public declaration is warranted. But genuine repentance however is a lifelong posture.

 

Humbly CONFESS your sins to God. One of the hardest things you’ll ever do in life is humble yourself and admit that you are sinner. We don’t like to admit our shortcomings, but we must. You cannot have genuine repentance if you’re holding anything back from God, which is pointless by the way because He knows everything.

 

Confidently PLACE your faith in the only one with the power to save. When you realize that every historical event in the Bible has truly come to pass or will come to pass, that salvation history is world history.

 

When you recognize that all of what’s in God’s Word is more than just moral truth, but real factual truth, then you realize that our triune God alone is worthy of all worship and devotion. You realize that He alone has the power to forgive and save you, and that you can trust Him and place your faith in Him to do so.

 

Boldly PROCLAIM God’s truth. Proclaim the truth that Jesus Christ is Lord who brings salvation. When you experience the forgiveness of sins that comes from genuine repentance. When you finally live in the freedom from the power of sin because you now you live in Christ and Christ lives in you, you cannot help but proclaim that truth to the whole world around you.

 

Sharing the gospel and making disciples is command, but it is a command that you should be eagerly lining up to obey. Make Him known, be that voice crying out from the wilderness of this life, prepare the way of the Lord.

 

Let’s pray.