The Sign of His Messenger

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Matthew chapter 3. We’re going to continue on this morning with the series we started last week about Jesus’ signs of His coming. And the signs that point not to His second coming, but to His first coming.

You know, if we’re going to be so sure as we ought to be that Christ is coming again, why would we believe that? It’s because the Bible tells us that He’s coming again. Well, why should we believe the Bible?

It’s because it got it right the first time about Him coming in the first place. And so as we prepare for the Christmas season, we’re going to look at not only His birth, but some things about His life that demonstrate to us that He wasn’t just an extraordinary man, but He was actually the Messiah sent by God. And this morning, I want to look at the sign of His messenger.

The sign of His messenger. I’m really enjoying this series. I don’t know about y’all, but I’m enjoying studying for the series because I’m learning things that I didn’t previously know that are signs that God gave through the Old Testament 400, 500, 700, 1,000 years before Christ came, pointing people to who the Messiah was going to be, who the anointed, promised one of God was going to be.

And one of those was that he was going to send a messenger in advance. Just in case they missed all the other signs, this messenger was going to come. He was going to be a prophet like Elijah, and he was going to point the people toward the promised Messiah.

And there’s a saying about saving the best for last, that we save the best thing for last. And that happens a lot of times, you know, in a big meal. You think about Thanksgiving that’s fast approaching in about a month from now. And you’ve got all these wonderful courses. You’ll have the, or maybe not courses, it’s not a French restaurant.

You’ve got it all out there in one course. You’ve got the turkey and you’ve got the dressing and the potatoes and all these wonderful things that we love to eat. And we eat all that and we stuff ourselves full of it.

And then comes the second course, the desserts. And I’m not a huge dessert person myself, but there’s always something there that I’m going to want to eat. Usually it’s the pumpkin pie and I just can’t wait for that.

But there’s always something there that people want even more than the meal. In my family, the women keep talking about why can’t we have the dessert first? Because everybody would be so sick by the time it came time for the real food. But we want the dessert.

That’s, in many people’s opinion, the best part of the meal. When you go to a concert, and I’ve not been to that many, usually too loud for me, even at my young age, but you go to a concert and they don’t send out the big person that you’re there to see at the very beginning, do they? They send somebody else to get the crowd warmed up. They send in some other musicians who may be good but are a little lesser known, and they get them out there and they play, and they get the crowd warmed up and ready for the one that they’ve come there to see.

Or you go to even, or you watch on TV the political conventions they have every four years, and the president or the nominee will come out, and everybody’s so excited, but what they don’t show you always on TV is that for hours, they’ve been there since early, early that morning, and they’ve been listening to speeches, and it gradually builds with more and more exciting people. They’ll always start out with, you know, the dog catcher in the morning and work their way up to governors and senators and congressmen, and they’ll each, their job is to go out there and be kind of a cheerleader, getting the people excited and pointing them toward the one that they’ve come there to hear, which is the nominee.

And so when whoever it is comes out, everybody’s already enthusiastic and excited because they’ve been warmed up by these people who were sent to prepare the crowd for the one they came to hear. There’s a long tradition in our society from Thanksgiving dinner to concerts to political conventions, many other things we could talk about where something else prepares us for what we’re really there to have, for what we’re really there to experience. Some of the best things in life we have to be prepared for, we have to be warmed up for.

And the greatest gift that God gave us, He sent someone to prepare us for. He sent someone to warm up the crowd, so to speak. And that person was John the Baptist. In Matthew chapter 3, we can look through here.

We’re just going to go through here real quick because we’ve got actually three passages, if we have time, we’re going to look at today that deal with the life of John the Baptist. But I want to, Instead of going to the prophecy first, I want to remind us of the story and then go back and see what God said about it 700 years before the fact. It says in Matthew 3, verse 1, In those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judea, and saying, Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. For this is he that was spoken of by the prophet Isaiah, saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his path straight.

And the same John had his raiment of camel’s hair and a leathern girdle, about his loins, and his meat was locusts and wild honey. So it says, in those days John the Baptist came out of the wilderness. He’d been wandering around in the wilderness or the desert, and he suddenly bursts onto the scene preaching.

And he’s not just preaching anything, but he’s preaching that they should repent because the kingdom of heaven, what they’re expecting, is about to be at hand. And it says even here in Matthew that he’s the one spoken of by the prophet Isaiah, the passage we’re going to talk about in a few minutes, that he’s the voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his path straight. And John the Baptist had to be an odd figure even for that day when they were used to prophets and people claiming to be the Messiah and just people that we would look at as lunatics nowadays.

He probably was the craziest looking of all of them because he stumbles out of the desert telling everybody to repent. He’s wearing camel’s hair clothes and a leather belt and he eats locusts and wild honey. And there’s been debate back and forth.

You know, when I was little, they taught us that it was bugs, locusts. And then somebody said, no, locust is a kind of fruit that grows in the Middle East. If I remember correctly from looking at the Greek word, I believe it’s actually a bug. Whatever it was, it was important enough, it was strange enough to point out here.

I mean, if I just ate fruit all the time, you may not. . .

If I really liked apples and you’re writing a biography about what I came up and preached today, you probably wouldn’t include, oh yeah, and he liked apples. But if I came to you and I was some crazy guy eating bugs and living in the desert, you’d probably write that down. So my assumption here is that we’re talking about he eats bugs and honey.

He was somebody who would have stuck out even in that time period. And then went out, verse 5, then went out to him Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region about Jordan. People were coming out of the woodwork to go hear John the Baptist preach, hear what he had to say.

and people were responding to this message, it says in verse 6, and were baptized of him in Jordan, confessing their sins. So maybe because of his appearance or in spite of it, people were coming out to hear this crazy guy who had stumbled out of the desert. It says all of Jerusalem and Judea came out in the region surrounding, and they came out to hear him, and they were hearing him, and something about his message was taking root, and they were doing something that they tended not to always do.

They were confessing their sins. they were realizing that they had sinned before God. And so something about John the Baptist’s message led these people to be convicted in their hearts, and they had to confess their sins before God.

And as a result of this, they were being baptized in the River Jordan. Verse 7, But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said to them, now this is incredible for somebody to say to the religious leaders of their time, O generation of vipers, calls them basically a son of a snake, You generation of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Tells the Pharisees and Sadducees, you haven’t been listening to my message anyway, and you’ve come to hear me.

Who’s warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Why else would you be coming to listen to what I have to say? Because he was not just telling people to confess their sins, he was telling them to repent because the kingdom was at hand.

In other words, like when we preach the gospel, repent, flee the wrath to come. And he’s telling the Pharisees and Sadducees, you snakes, who warned you to flee the wrath to come? Bring therefore fruits, meat for repentance.

Because the Pharisees and Sadducees were very religious, they had the appearance of being good people, and yet it didn’t show up as fruit in their lives. They didn’t walk the walk of somebody who had repented and had a heart that was tender toward God. So he tells them to bring forth therefore the fruits meet or suitable for repentance.

And think not to say within yourselves, we have Abraham to our father. For I say unto you that God is able of these stones to raise up children of Abraham. The Pharisees and Sadducees, their entire understanding of God, their entire understanding of who they were in relation to God and why God would love them was not based on God’s grace, was not based on forgiveness, but was based on their nationality, was based on the fact that they were the blood descendants of Abraham, therefore God has to love us.

Well, God had made covenants with Israel. God has made covenants with Israel that He would do certain things, that He would preserve them as a nation, that He would send the Messiah through them. But they were trusting for their salvation, not even on their own goodness, which would be wrong anyway, but most of the world trusts in its own goodness.

They were trusting in the fact that they were the blood descendants of Abraham. It’d be like saying, God loves me no matter what I do because I’m an American. I mean, we would never say that.

We would never think that. And yet here they are thinking that because they are descendants of Abraham, somehow God loves them more. God accepts whatever they do.

And he says, don’t think to yourselves, oh, but Abraham’s my father. He said, because God is able to raise up children of Abraham from these stones. In other words, you’re nothing to God.

Your birth to God in this time does not make you anything special. Where you’ve been, what you’ve done, does not make you acceptable to God. And he’s telling them instead to repent. And now also, verse 10, the axe is laid unto the root of the trees.

Therefore, every tree which bringeth forth not good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire. I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance. But he that cometh after me is mightier than I.

Notice what he’s telling them. He’s telling them, your descent from Abraham does not make you acceptable in the sight of God. As a matter of fact, he points out that they’ve been sinning against God because they’ve not been bringing forth the right kind of fruit.

And he tells them, every tree that does not bring forth the right kind of fruit will be hewn down and thrown into the fire. He said, I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance. And here he points to the remedy for their sin, for Israel’s sin.

But he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear. He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire, whose fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly purge his floor and gather his wheat into the garner, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire. So he’s in full view of the people.

He has just given the Pharisees and Sadducees the tongue lashing they so richly deserve and told them you’re trusting in your own, you’re trusting in your family history, you’re trusting in your nationality to make you acceptable to God when you have not been doing the works that are acceptable to God. You have a heart that’s far from God. And he points them toward Jesus and said, One comes who’s greater than I.

And the things that he will do, he will gather his people, he’ll separate the wheat from the chaff, and he’ll burn the chaff with unquenchable fire. Points to somebody who has power over life and death, not just in this world, but in eternity. Points to someone infinitely greater than himself.

And in verse 13 it says, Then cometh Jesus from Galilee to Jordan unto John to be baptized of him. But John forbade him, saying, I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me. Jesus comes to John wanting to be baptized, and John says, But I’m not worthy to baptize you.

I should be baptized by you, and yet you’re coming to me asking to be baptized. And Jesus said, Jesus answering, said unto him, Suffer it to be so, for thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness. Then he suffered him.

He says, it needs to be so because I have to fulfill the demands of righteousness here. And so John did what he asked. In verse 16, And then we don’t see so much of John the Baptist anymore in the Gospels.

He shows up here and there until the time that he’s martyred. But after this point, we don’t see him as such an important figure in the gospel accounts as he has been in the early chapters. And the reason for that is because John the Baptist’s ministry was not about himself and his following and his teachings.

It was about pointing the way to Christ. And once he’s pointed the way to Christ, once he’s told people, there’s one coming, and by the way, here he is, the one I’ve been telling you about, here he is, he kind of fades out of the scene. And in one of the gospel accounts, he tells the people, he must increase and I must decrease. John the Baptist’s whole reason for his ministry, an incredible ministry it was, but the whole reason for his ministry was to point the way to Jesus Christ. He had come in and he had done some remarkable things.

We can tell just from this passage. The people for four or five hundred years had been under the foot of the religious leaders who in many cases were even more corrupt than the political leaders. They had at one point done away with priests who were the descendants of Aaron that God said, you know, I’ve set it up this way, that Aaron and his descendants will be the priests.

And some of the pagan kings had come in and said, no, we’re just going to put whoever we want. It’s going to be a political appointee, and we’re going to put whoever we want so they will do as we tell them to do. And the priesthood had grown far from God, and it had grown corrupt, and it had grown to the point where this is just the first of many altercations with the Pharisees We see Jesus confronting the Pharisees and Sadducees all the time, or better said, they confront Him and He gets the better of them.

But they had grown up as part of a system that looked very godly on the outside, but in reality their hearts were far from God. They had become so entrapped in their own commandments and traditions. I think the Pharisees may have started out with good intentions.

I have no respect for the Sadducees because they completely went off in left field doctrinally. They denied the resurrection. All of these things that God had said are there.

The Sadducees said, no, you can’t take that literally. The Pharisees, I believe, started out with good intentions. You won’t hear that preached very much.

I think they started out with good intentions. Early on, they were so concerned about following the law of God, they said, we want to follow God’s law and make sure we don’t break His law, that they actually set up these hedges around the law. They said, okay, if God says, I can’t come, just as an example, I can’t walk down the stairs on Sunday, then I’m going to make sure that I don’t go past here on Sunday because I don’t want to get close to breaking God’s law.

Okay, God didn’t say don’t go down the stairs. It’s just an example. But I won’t come past here because I don’t want to break God’s law.

Well, then that commandment, that tradition became so important that if you pass this point, you were a sinner. And so they were keeping the people all the way back here. And it just gradually got built up more and more that they put these rings and hedges around the law so they wouldn’t get close to breaking them.

But the problem came in when it was no longer about following God and keeping His law. It was about their traditions and their commandments. And instead of doing the right thing, they did what they thought was best. And it all became about an outward appearance of being righteous.

And they kept the people down under this system. That’s why it was so deserved when they come to John the Baptist and he says, You brood of vipers. You generation of vipers.

Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? They were a big part of the reason that God’s wrath was coming. Because they had kept the people, instead of teaching the people to follow God, these were the people who were familiar with the law, instead of teaching the people to follow God, they had set up a man-made system and kept the people bound and enslaved to it.

They were no different than, say, the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages that said you’ve got to do these penances, you’ve got to do these rituals, and you’ve got to buy these indulgences. And instead of pointing the people through the Scriptures to God and following Him and the simple plan of salvation, they said, you’ve got to do these rituals and laws, these traditions that we’ve set up, and they kept people enslaved into darkness. The Pharisees were just like that.

And John the Baptist here, they walk out to meet him. I don’t know if they were planning to try to co-opt his movement and say, you know, we’re taking control here or whatever they were doing. They came out to see him, and he said, who warned you to flee the wrath to come?

You’re trusting in your system. You’re trusting in your nationality. you’re trusting in all of these things instead of following God, instead of seeking God.

And he said, there will come a day when you have to answer for these things. Therefore, repent because the kingdom is at hand. And the kingdom was being brought by the one that he pointed to who he said is mightier than I and whose shoes I’m not even worthy to unfasten.

Everything about John’s ministry, and as I said, it was an incredible ministry, that people from all over the area came to hear him speak, came to hear him preach. And not only did they come to hear him and say that was a good message, but they came and responded with confession of their sins and baptism to indicate that they were repenting. They came and responded in such a way, but it was not about, for John, it was not about him and his message.

He came for one very simple reason, to get the people ready for the coming of Christ. That wasn’t an idea he came up with. He didn’t wake up one morning and say, huh, I think I’ll pick out a religious leader and I’ll get things ready for him so that he can take over. This was something that God had foretold 400 years ago in the case of Malachi.

400 years ago then, before then. 700 years ago in the case of Isaiah had said, not only am I going to send this Messiah, but I’m going to send a messenger before him. Let’s look at these two passages briefly in the Old Testament.

Let’s just turn backwards. Let’s turn to Malachi first. Malachi is the last book of the Old Testament right before Matthew. I turned back too far.

just a few pages back, but 400 years in history. Malachi chapter 2. Malachi chapter 2, verse 17, and we’re going to look at two verses.

He says, Malachi, he was already dealing with the problem of the religious leaders who’d grown corrupt. That’s what a lot of the book of Malachi is about. And he tells them, Ye have wearied the Lord with your words, yet ye say, wherein have we wearied Him?

When ye say, everyone that doeth evil is good in the sight of the Lord, and he delighteth in them? Or, where is the God of judgment? So he tells the religious leaders and the people of Israel, he said, you’ve wearied God.

Or in other words, God is getting tired of you. You’ve about exhausted God’s patience here. You’ve wearied God, and yet you sit there and you ask, how have we wearied Him?

How have you made God tired? How have you exhausted God? He said, it’s when you say things like, everyone that does evil is good in God’s sight.

God looks at people who do evil and say, And God says, oh, that’s good. They would say things like that because they equated, like some people in our day, the idea that if you were spiritual, it meant material blessings. That if you were rich, if you were powerful, it was a sign that God had favored you and that you were doing the right thing.

And if you were poor and you were in distress, it was a sign that God was unhappy with you for some reason. I don’t find that in the Bible. I find sometimes that if we’ll follow biblical principles, it will be for our good, whether that’s spiritually, whether it’s in material things, anything else.

But it’s not just a quid pro quo system where God says, you do something good and I’m going to give you a dollar. It’s not a system like that. And yet they were saying that, and so they were looking at some of the most wicked people in their country and saying God must approve of what they’re doing, because look at how much money they have.

Or, where is the God of judgment? There were other people who were looking at this situation and saying, here the evil are being called good and the good are being called evil, and where’s God? Where’s God in all of this?

Why is He allowing this to happen? God’s abandoned us. Where’s the God of judgment?

And so people were either coming to the point of they were totally forgetting God’s principles and distorting them, or they were forgetting God’s promises, and they were totally losing their faith in God. And God had just about had enough with the people of Israel. Again, it says in chapter 3, verse 1, Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me.

And the Lord whom ye seek shall suddenly come to his temple, even the messenger of the covenant whom ye delight in. Behold, he shall come, saith the Lord of hosts. So Israel, because you’ve wearied God, because God is tired of this, not only is he going to send a Messiah to set things right, but he’s going to send a messenger to prepare you because you’re so far from God you can’t possibly hear from the.

. . None of you would believe it at this point.

You’re so much in darkness. Well, how do we know who this messenger is? Isaiah, about 300 years before Malachi, gave us some insight onto who the messenger was.

Isaiah chapter 40. I know we’re jumping around quite a bit today, but it’d be easy to take one passage out of context and make it fit what I want it to say. I’d rather you look at the whole thing.

Isaiah chapter 40, verse 1 says, Comfort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem and cry unto her that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned, for she hath received of the Lord’s hand double for all her sins. The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. And so in these five verses, he points out a little more in detail who this messenger is going to be, what he’s going to come to do. He starts out by saying, take comfort in this.

God says to his people, take comfort in this through his messenger. Tell the people of Jerusalem, tell them that her warfare is finished, her fighting is over. I believe this means spiritually because Israel is still at war today.

But tell them that their warfare is over, their iniquities are pardoned because she’s received of the Lord’s hand double for all her sins, that he would send the voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. And this is quoted in Matthew, that John the Baptist was not only a messenger of God, he was the one that was prophesied in Isaiah and Malachi to be the voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight a highway for our God. And in this passage from Isaiah, now that we’ve looked at the prophecy here in Isaiah and the prophecy in Malachi and its fulfillment in Matthew, and it’s in the other Gospels as well.

But now that we’ve looked at the prophecy and its fulfillment, we’re going to look at three things out of this passage in Isaiah very briefly this morning about the sign of God’s messenger. The first thing that we can see in this passage in Isaiah chapter 40 is that the messenger would prepare the people for the message coming by the Messiah. In verse 3, he would be the voice of him that crieth in the wilderness.

Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. As I looked at some of the older commentaries, trying to just soak up everything I could about this passage over the last week, there was a recurring theme in all of them, which tells me it tends to be right. All the commentaries have different opinions about things, but when they all say the same thing, it kind of is a good sign.

But they say that historically when a great king, when an emperor was traveling through his domain, they would send somebody ahead of the procession who would prepare, who would call all of the villages and all the farms and all the people along the way to call them to prepare themselves because the king was coming. And he would cry out to the people as he would go through, and they would have to go through and they would remove all the obstacles from the road, and they would make it suitable for the king and for his procession to pass through. And this is the role that God gives the messenger of the Messiah, to be someone who would come and prepare the way, who would call the people to make attention in their own little corner of the kingdom for the fact that the king was coming.

And from the darkness and the corruption of the spiritual leaders, it had bled through the whole of Israel over the 400 years in between, to where the people were so in bondage to the system, the religious system of their nationality and their good works and their traditions and all these things, they were so in bondage to that that they couldn’t have seen the Messiah. Or better said, maybe they wouldn’t have seen the Messiah. Even as it was, relatively few of them trusted Him as their Messiah, trusted Christ as the Messiah.

But it was the role of the messenger, it was the role of John the Baptist, He fulfilled it to come and be someone who would prepare those who were willing to listen, to prepare those who were willing to listen for the fact that the Messiah is coming. So the role of the messenger was to prepare the people for the message coming by the Messiah. John the Baptist suddenly had all this credibility with the people because he was not like the priests and the Pharisees that were in power then.

He was somebody different, but he was somebody sincere and somebody who believed what he was preaching. And he pointed to the fact that you’ve come to listen to me and you’ve heard what I’ve said and everything I’ve said is leading up to this man over here. And we know that people listen to Jesus because they listen to John the Baptist and he pointed in that direction because some of his earliest disciples, some of Jesus’ earliest disciples among the twelve were followers of John the Baptist who recognized Jesus as the one he’d been talking about and went and told their friends and their brothers and said, the one we’ve been looking for, the one that John’s been talking about is here and let me go and take you to him.

And so the people were prepared. Those who were prepared were prepared because God had sent John the Baptist as sort of this warm-up act to get them ready, to get them thinking, to prepare the way for the Messiah to come. And John the Baptist fulfilled that.

The second thing is in verse 4. It says, Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain. The second thing about the messenger is that the messenger would prepare the people for the upheaval coming with the Messiah.

Jesus Christ did not come just bringing a message. He brought upheaval. He brought total change. And John the Baptist as his forerunner, his messenger, did not come just bringing a message.

It came bringing upheaval. Jesus would not only preach and tell people be nice to each other, as so many people today think that he did. His message was just about be nice to one another. It was so much more than that.

It was about turning this religious system, this man-made thing, on its head. turning it upside down and saying, the way you’ve been taught, the way you’ve been thinking all this time has been wrong. You’ve misinterpreted what God has said.

And this idea about I’m going to get to heaven, I’m going to earn God’s acceptance through my connections or through my goodness is wrong. And John the Baptist came to prepare people for that. And he started even in Matthew chapter 3.

Even in his ministry, he began some of that process of upheaval. When he confronted the Pharisees and Sadducees, he told them, you’re wrong. Not only are you wrong, but he calls them a generation of vipers. These people were snakes because they had been misleading God’s people and leading them astray for hundreds of years.

And the doctrines they were teaching were deadly because they led people to trust in their own connections, their own goodness, their own merit, instead of in the grace and forgiveness of God. So this messenger, he tells the people of Israel that this voice in the wilderness, as a result of it, every valley will be exalted. The low places will be brought up, and every m

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