Matthew 3:1-12 | A Strange Man with a New Message

This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Isn't it a wonderful treasure to know you are forgiven?

It is my prayer that you will know that you are forgiven.

If you do not know at this moment, it's my prayer that by the end of our time together you will know.

Because it's possible to be forgiven because Christ paid the price.

I would like you to take a Bible this morning, if you have it, and open it to the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 3.

Matthew 3 · chapter mention

We've been working our way through this book since Christmas time.

This morning we're going to begin the third chapter.

Perhaps a familiar passage to you.

If you have grown up in Sunday school, you probably have images in your mind that picture this text.

Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

For this is he who was spoken of by the prophet Isaiah when he said, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.

Now John wore a car garment of camel's hair, and a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey.

Then Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region about the Jordan were going out to him, and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.

But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his baptism, he said to them, You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?

Bear fruit worthy of repentance, and do not presume to say to yourselves, We have Abraham as our father.

For I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham.

But even now the axe is laid to the root of the tree.

Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.

I baptize you with water for repentance.

But he who is coming after me is mightier than I.

Whose sandals I am not worthy to carry.

He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.

His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.

Amen.

What would motivate you to pack up your family for a trip to the desert?

Think about that for a moment.

Snow?

Yeah.

I should have anticipated that.

There's snow there, isn't there?

Yes.

Snow in Phoenix.

So maybe a midwinter getaway, right?

A spring break trip, perhaps.

If you if you love baseball, maybe you want to go to Arizona and catch some spring training games.

A vacation to the desert might be spent pursuing some historical sites, maybe some museums or aquariums, or maybe some outdoor adventure in the desert of some kind.

Maybe you just want to spend time relaxing by the pool or out on the golf course.

Would you go to the desert for a life-changing experience?

What if that life-changing experience required traveling by foot, perhaps several days travel, to hear a prophet preach and take a dip in a muddy river?

The answer to that is likely to be, well, maybe I should think about that.

We will put ourselves out quite easily for a vacation or for a sporting event or some other exciting opportunity, but walking into a dusty desert to listen to some guy preach would not be at the top of our lists.

Besides, we've we've learned to be skeptical of those kinds of people, right?

We might think that someone preaching in the desert has been out in the heat a little too long.

Now, those sorts of things are just the beginning of the strangeness in this passage.

This account might be so familiar to you that you miss how odd it is.

Especially if you've grown up in church.

But it is important for us to grasp the strange elements that are included here in order to see, feel, and respond the way that Matthew wants us to respond.

Now, this chapter begins in those days.

That's Matthew's way of sort of resetting the stage.

So the curtains have been pulled, and behind the curtain, he's clearing the stage and setting up a brand new stage behind the curtain.

And as the curtain pulls back, we are now approximately 30 years later from the end of chapter 2.

Chapter 1 and chapter 2 are the birth narratives of the Lord Jesus.

Now we span another 20 to 30 years' time to John the Baptist.

John was about six months older than the Lord Jesus.

But now in this chapter, both of them are adults, being about 30 years old.

So we've moved then from the birth of Jesus to the beginning of his ministry.

When you think about it, there was nothing usual about Jesus' conception and birth.

Nothing usual.

In fact, it was the epitome of unusual.

And that distinction is significant.

God orchestrated all events in his world to bring about the birth of Jesus, the birth of Emmanuel, God with us, in an extraordinary way that perfectly fulfilled God's promises.

And we, through Matthew's writing, are called to see that only God would do something like this.

Understanding the unusual is intended to make us pause and ask with eager anticipation, who is this child?

What will he be like?

What is he going to do?

If his conception and birth, that is, of the Lord Jesus, were as described in chapter 1 and chapter 2, then we should not be able to wait to read the rest of the story.

So thirty or so years later, a man named John the Baptizer came preaching.

Preachers of many kinds were quite normal in John's day.

There were even some unique Jewish groups who had settled out in the wilderness in the desert locations.

But an individual preaching in the lesser populated areas of the country, in the desert, that was still a bit odd.

It's also strange that this desert preacher is someone that Israel should have expected.

They should have expected someone out in the wilderness, proclaiming the word of God, because Isaiah wrote in Isaiah chapter 40, Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.

Isaiah 40 · chapter mention

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned.

Because a voice cries, In the wilderness, prepare the way of Yahweh, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

They should have known that this strange event was going to take place.

You see, Israel was to anticipate a time when her sins would be forgiven.

A time in which God Himself would come by a highway in the desert to forgive the sins of his people.

So in preparation for that time, someone would come speaking to Israel in the desert.

John's father, Zechariah, spoke of that as well.

He said prophetically in the birth narrative of John the Baptist in Luke 1, and you, child, speaking of John, you will be called the prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare his way.

John had one purpose.

Go out into the desert and preach.

John himself would say when he was asked if he was the Messiah, he said, No, no, I'm the voice of one crying in the wilderness.

Make straight the way of the Lord.

God spoke of a prophet in the desert.

Israel was to expect that odd event.

But the suddenness of John's appearance in the desert is a little bit odd as well.

You see, the last prophetic statement given by God to his people was through the pen of the prophet Malachi.

And in Malachi chapter 4, in the second to last verse, it says, Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of Yahweh comes.

Malachi 4 · chapter mention

And they waited and they waited and they waited.

They waited not for one generation, not for two generations, not even for ten.

They waited for 400 years.

400 years in which God was silent.

There were no dreams or visions from God, no prophets proclaiming God's messages, no scriptures being penned, silence.

Put that into perspective for a moment.

One of our saints in our fellowship here turned 100 years old last year.

This year we will have, Lord willing, another one turn a hundred years old.

That seems like an awfully long time.

Praise God for that long life.

Israel waited four times that long to hear from God.

If we say the average lifespan is 80 years old, that's five lifetimes of waiting.

The United States of America has lasted approximately 243 years.

Israel waited for God to speak almost twice that long.

Let's put it in perspective.

400 years ago, bricks finally became a common building ingredient for homes.

400 years ago, glass windows were considered a luxury.

400 years ago, chocolate tea and coffee were introduced to the world.

What did they do before that?

400 years ago, Galileo was arrested and convicted for his belief that the earth revolved around the sun.

400 years ago, 75,000 people died in the Great London Plague.

400 years ago, Protestant Christians were burned as heretics.

For 400 years they waited for Elijah.

Waiting had become the norm.

You know, when you wait that long, it's just it's just normal.

That's just life.

That's just life.

But it was odd then to suddenly experience the voice of a prophet in the wilderness.

All of a sudden, a prophet had arisen, God was speaking again.

Out of the silence comes this strange prophet with a strange message.

Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

It's here, John said.

God's kingdom is here because the king is here.

If the king is present, then the kingdom is present.

And if the kingdom is here, then the king must be here.

That's what we're celebrating, right?

They had waited for centuries for that day.

But they weren't expecting to need to repent.

See, the teaching of Judaism of that time didn't include much repentance.

They were already in the kingdom.

They were already the people of God.

What did they need to do for repentance?

Honestly, it sounds like a lot of Christians today.

We're good church people, right?

You came out in a blizzard warning to worship God.

Why would we need to repent before participating in God's kingdom?

It's interesting that this odd message moved scores of people to brave the travel and the desert heat to hear a message of repentance and be baptized.

If we announced a Sunday evening service of repentance and baptism, I wonder how many we would get.

See that baptism part?

That's another part of this odd account.

Because Jews didn't participate in baptism.

They had all kinds of forms of cleansing for purity purposes in their religion, but only converts to Judaism were baptized.

Only Gentiles who came to faith in Judaism were baptized.

This wasn't the regular purification cleansing that Jews pursued.

This was a one-time dunking in connection with the confession of sin, of their need for God and their trust in a promised redeemer.

Of course, John's clothing and his diet were odd.

That's most of the oddness that we remember from this text, I think.

Sometimes goat hair and camel hair was woven together into an almost waterproof outer garment.

Locusts, by the way, you can look that up in Leviticus, they were a kind of grasshopper that was an approved kosher food.

They were often dried and either eaten whole as a dried insect or ground up into a kind of flower.

Those two images, the camel hair and the locusts and honey, those are the images of the poorest of the poor.

In the same book, we will come to find that those who are in the courts of the kings, those who are in the nice houses in the cities, they wear fine clothes, soft clothes, they wear the best of clothing and they eat the finest of foods.

But John is of the poorest of the poor out in the desert.

He refused to take on the trappings of worldly success.

And by doing that, his food and his clothes silently preached against the indulgences of his day.

That only adds to the image that we have here, doesn't it?

There's a lonely prophet out in the desert, appearing like a very poor person.

And he's preaching for people to repent.

To acknowledge their sin, to confess that sin to God and trust in him for salvation and follow him in obedience.

It's an odd picture.

One more odd element is the public reaction.

Says in verse 5, by the way, notice, notice all of the alls in this verse.

Then Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region about the Jordan were going out to him.

Matthew takes pains to be to be very broad and inclusive.

He said, There's a tons of people coming out to the desert to see this strange-looking guy preach a strange message.

This isn't a football game or a hockey game.

This is hearing a strange-looking man preach about repentance in the desert.

Merely being in his presence would make you uncomfortable, most likely.

But in spite of that, people flocked to hear him preach and get dunked in some muddy river water.

That's strange.

It's strange in part because being God's mouthpiece got Joseph sold into slavery and imprisoned.

Moses was God's mouthpiece, and he was exiled in the desert for 40 years, and then he was forced to lead a grumbling, complaining, dying group for 40 years.

Being God's mouthpiece got Jeremiah thrown into a cistern.

He took great pains to write a book of what God said, and he gave it to the king, and the king then read it and had it torn in strips, and he fed it to a fire.

Your work wasted.

Being God's mouthpiece doesn't always turn out so well.

Think of the mouthpieces listed in Hebrews chapter 11.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

It says there that they suffered mocking and flogging, even chains and imprisonment.

They were stoned.

They were sawn in two.

They were killed with the sword.

They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated, people of whom the world is not worthy because they wandered about in deserts and in mountains and in dens and caves of the earth.

But here, multitudes of people are flocking to an odd man in an odd place to hear an odd message, to participate in an odd practice.

All of that is very strange, don't you think?

But by this time in Matthew's gospel, we ought to be used to strange events.

You see, God causing a virgin to conceive is not normal.

God being with us in terms of Emmanuel was not normal.

A star in the sky drawing foreigners to Palestine to worship an infant king was not normal.

One infant, one infant fulfilling multitudes of biblical promises is not normal.

None of this fits our categories of normal.

So everything here challenges us and causes us to wonder, what's going on?

What is God doing?

Why should I keep reading?

Why should you not?

This is an interesting story.

Why should I listen to this desert prophet?

God was doing something.

Look at the first couple of chapters through Matthew's eyes.

You're left sort of shaking your head at all of the odd events.

But do you see, do you see what effect that has?

If we step back from our familiarity with these accounts, we begin to see that Matthew is either concocting some pretty crazy stories, or there was something truly amazing taking place.

There's no middle ground.

That's true with the birth narratives of Jesus, and it is true with the ministry of John the Baptizer.

Matthew was either into something that moved his mind to another realm entirely, or God was acting in a way designed to get our attention.

Now we might be able to approach the people's response to John and say, hey, they were curious.

You know, sort of like driving along the highway and there's a wreck, and so what do you do?

You stop and you watch.

You're curious, you want to see, you're interested.

Maybe we could explain these crowds in that kind of way.

But if we look carefully, we are not allowed to view the popular response to John the Baptist as piqued curiosity.

No, what we see is genuine participation in the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And genuine participation in the gospel of Jesus Christ does not occur without the work of God in the hearts of people.

Crowds flocking out to the desert to hear an odd man preach an odd message in an odd time, in an odd place, is only a work of the sovereign God in the hearts of people.

They were flocking to participate in the gospel.

What does genuine participation in the gospel look like?

Well, take a look at these crowds.

Verse 6, they responded to the call for repentance with an acknowledgement that they had sinned, that they needed cleansing, they needed God's forgiveness.

They needed the promise of God's forgiveness that came in Isaiah's prophecy of John the Baptist.

It didn't matter if the water was muddy.

In baptism, they acknowledged their need to be changed, to be a part of God's kingdom.

And they did so with trust in the work of God.

They were trusting that what John was telling them was true, that the king was coming, the kingdom was here, and they wanted to be in it.

But sin kept them from it.

What we see here is conversion.

Genuine repentance is conversion.

It's a recognition of my own sinfulness with a confession of that sin before a holy God that forms a new allegiance to him.

My old loves are passed away, they're put aside, and now I have a new love that focuses everything on him and begins to result in a changed life.

It's the miraculous work of God to open blind eyes and deaf ears so that we might see and hear what he has done and begin to follow him in new life.

God was doing an amazing work through this man called the Baptizer.

But was it all about John?

No.

God was preparing the way for his son.

John's preaching was preaching about Jesus.

God drew people to repentance, to faith, and these people believed that God was working.

And through his work in them, they recognized God's power in a strange man in a strange place, proclaiming a strange message.

That's why many of you are here this morning.

At some point, God's Spirit showed you the amazing truth of Jesus Christ.

And God moved you from a place of doubt, of skepticism towards strange stories to a place of faith that now sees how all of this works together in God's purpose and plan.

Who now see that, yes, Jesus is the king, and I want to follow him.

And through that faith, you came to him confessing your sins, being baptized in repentance of your sins, and now you follow him, bearing fruit of new life, and so you show up in church on a Sunday morning because you love him.

You see the power and the grace and the truth in his word.

You see the fellowship and the encouragement of being with other believers.

You feel the need to feed upon the word of God, and so you come.

You come because of what God has done in you.

You're strange.

Not all saw John that same way.

And not all in the church of Christ come with faith.

You see, along with these crowds, there were Pharisees and Sadducees.

Both of those groups were generally opposed to Jesus.

And whenever you see them coupled together in the gospel of Matthew, it intensifies their opposition to the work of God.

Remember that they were the religious people of the day.

They were the faith leaders and teachers, the examples.

They would be the ones included in the president's religious council.

Every time we see them in the Gospel of Matthew, they are presented as opposers.

They are in opposition.

They are opponents.

They would read all of Matthew chapter 1 and all of Matthew chapter 2, and with the king of Jeremiah's day, they would tear it up and feed it to the fire, saying, ah, bah humbug, that's trash.

Matthew 1 · chapter mention Matthew 2 · chapter mention

Just burn it.

The image that we are given of them is not one of grief over their sin.

It is not one of faith in God's work.

Instead, it's curiosity at what was drawing the people.

They saw all this strangeness and they thought, we don't get it.

But they better check out what all the hullabully was about and this John guy in camel clothes.

They better be on top of it because they're the religious leaders.

Maybe they were a bit standoffish.

Sort of standing off and looking at John's ministry down by the Jordan River.

We don't really know.

What we do know is that John knew them and he calls it like it is.

He says they are like a bunch of venomous snakes among children.

John saw the religious leaders of Israel as a danger to those who, like children, were coming with repentant hearts.

He says, You're just like a bunch of baby snakes.

Incredibly dangerous.

Why would he say that?

Well, he says that because they're hypocrites.

They didn't come because they were fearful of God's judgment on their sin.

They didn't come because they felt a need to confess their sins and get right with God.

They didn't come because they felt a need to get into God's kingdom because they were on the outside.

No, there was no sign of any of that.

There was no sign of change in them.

Because genuine repentance, repentance that comes from a humble impact of the gospel on the soul, results in fruit that is worthy of that repentance.

Now, you could take a dying tree that is not dead, but in very poor health, and cut it back, fertilize it, carefully water it and care for it, and it could be restored to life and produce quality fruit.

That's in essence what God does with every sinful soul.

But the only fruit coming from these religious leaders was the kind that would poison their followers.

They came to John's preaching, but unlike the others, they were not converted by it, they were repelled by it.

There's a reason for that.

The call for gospel repentance converts the humble, but it repels the calloused.

Now, knowing that they would hang their hats on being Jewish, John immediately undermines that thought process.

He says, just being a descendant of Abraham doesn't bring you into the kingdom of God.

Yes, the king is a descendant of David, but that doesn't mean you're automatically a part of his kingdom.

If that's what it took, all God would need to do is raise up some children from some rocks by the riverside.

He could do that.

That's not how God designed it.

God has not made it so that coming to church on a Sunday, even in a blizzard warning, gets you into his eternal kingdom.

That's not how he does it.

Your parents being Christian doesn't make you a Christian.

Checking out this church thing doesn't change you.

Conviction of your sin, repentance, and faith in Christ is what makes you a child of God and a citizen of his kingdom.

You see, the gospel is divisive.

The gospel is divisive.

The good news divides.

It divides between those who humbly come to see what God is doing, hearing what he said, and believing in what he said, and dividing between those who refuse to acknowledge that God is at work.

Among those who come in faith, believing, like these folks pouring out to hear John, among those who come in repentance, God works a transformative work.

He gives the spiritually dead new life, so that by his power working in them, they now live transformed lives.

They have fruit in them that is worthy of repentance.

That's because they're now attached to a new stalk, a new root.

That doesn't mean they're perfect and never sin.

It means they grieve over their sin and they begin to live lives of confession and repentance and trust in Him alone.

For those who come to Christ in genuine repentance, the call to repent becomes precious to them because it is a call to be like Jesus.

But it repels the callous.

You might be careful with that.

You don't want to be among the callous.

Because those repelled by the call to repent, who never humble themselves, will find themselves facing the fire of judgment.

And look at the picture that Matthew paints for us.

God's work is demonstrated to us in an odd place with an odd prophet proclaiming an odd message.

It sounds just like the ministry of the gospel in the Lord's church.

It does.

It sounds just like what we do.

Think about it.

In 1 Corinthians chapter 1, the Apostle Paul said this God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise.

1 Corinthians 1 · chapter mention

Doesn't that seem strange?

God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.

That's odd.

God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.

That's all because the word of the cross doesn't make sense in a normal world.

He says earlier, the word of the cross is folly, it's foolishness to those who are perishing.

They're repelled by it.

But to those in whom God is working, those whom he is saving, it is the power of God.

God is pleased that the gospel is repulsive.

He is pleased to work through odd situations, through strange people and weird circumstances.

So thankful for that.

He wants us to see through Matthew's eyes, through Matthew's pen, that all of these unusual events, all of these oddities, all of these strange items surrounding the Lord's birth and the beginning of his ministry are God's way of showing his power.

Of making us see that only God would do something like this.

If you look carefully, it seems foolish and strange.

It seems, really?

Huh?

What?

That's God's way of saying, only I would do this.

Because I don't want any human being to glory in their strength.

I want them to glory in me.

And all of these unusual events and oddities point to the arrival of Jesus.

John's ministry, his preaching, his baptism was preparation for the ministry of Christ.

John's ministry was designed to point people to the coming one.

The king has come.

Drop all of your allegiances and trust in him.

Love him.

In hearing that word of the living God, you will be repulsed or repentant.

Repentance leads to the baptism of his spirit, his joining with you.

Repulsion leads to his fire, where he will judge the unrepentant with unquenchable fire.

In Acts chapter 19, the Apostle Paul told some people who were baptized by John.

Acts 19 · chapter mention

He said, John the Baptist, baptized with the baptism of repentance.

With this message.

He was telling those flocks of people, don't believe in me.

Believe in the coming one.

That is Jesus.

All of those strange, odd, unusual, not normal events.

God's way of saying to you.

Only I would do something like that.

Because that's my way of working.

And I want you to see all of these strange things as my way of pointing you to my son because I don't want you to trust in yourself.

I don't want you to trust in the church.

I don't want you to trust in your background.

I don't want you to trust in whatever you can dream up.

I want you to trust in me and in me alone.

And so I make all of my work through strange ways.

The unusual nature of this beginning in Matthew is designed to point you to Jesus.

How will you respond?

Will you respond in faith, acknowledging your sin, being baptized in recognition of your coming to him, and so follow him in new life, bearing new fruit for him?

Or will you remain like the Pharisees and the Sadducees, just an onlooker biding your time until the fire of judgment comes?

Because my friends, there's no middle ground.

Read these events and see that only God would do this.

Because, like a brilliant neon sign, God is saying to you, Here's my son.

Just like I said, he's come to offer forgiveness.

Trust in him.

That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.

Our mission is to declare the Word of God and disciple believers into mature, devoted followers of Jesus.

You can learn more by visiting our website at faithfree.com.