08 What Does "Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven Is at Hand" Mean? (Matthew 3:1-12)

Krisan Marotta: Welcome to Wednesday in the Word. I'm Krisan Marotta, and this is my podcast about what the Bible means and how we know. Today we'll be studying Matthew chapter 3, verses 1 through 12. This is the eighth talk in our series on the Gospel of Matthew. Lecture notes for today's talk, which contain links to everything mentioned in the podcast and an outline of the main point. Those lecture notes can be found on the link below this podcast, or you can go to wednesdayintheword.com slash Matthew 8. Thanks so much for listening today. Well, we're continuing our series in the Gospel of Matthew today, and we're starting Matthew chapter 3, and we'll be turning our attention to John the Baptist. In the first two chapters, Matthew covered the early life of Jesus, explaining how Jesus came to be born in Bethlehem but raised in Nazareth. With chapter three, Matthew skips ahead many years. Jesus is now an adult and about to begin his public ministry. We're going to start with Matthew chapter three verses one through three. In those days John the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness of Judea. 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 path straight. Matthew is quoting from Isaiah forty verse three, and it seems to be a fairly straightforward quotation. Isaiah forty three reads, A voice is calling, clear the way for the Lord in the wilderness, make smooth in the desert a highway for our God. Isaiah says that someone will come proclaiming a message that the people should prepare for the coming of the Lord, and John the Baptist comes proclaiming a message that people should prepare for the coming of the Lord. There is one interpretive question in this section, and it's one we have to answer about Isaiah forty. First, just to set the stage, Isaiah was a prophet to the southern kingdom of Judah during the time of the divided kingdom. He dates his ministry to four kings who reigned from about seven hundred forty BC to six hundred eighty BC, which means his ministry spanned about fifty or sixty years. The first section of the book, chapters one through thirty five, is set against the background of the Assyrian Empire. When the Assyrians ravaged the northern and the southern kingdoms of Israel and Judah, eventually taking the northern kingdom into exile. The last section of Isaiah, chapters forty through sixty-six, is the section where we find this quote, and this section is concerned with the Babylonian captivity, and it's addressed to a group of people who lived about 120 to 140 years after Isaiah. So chapters 40 through 66 are set against the Babylonian exile. In this section, Isaiah is prophesying to the captives in Babylon, but at the time he is writing, they are not yet captives. So Isaiah is a unique prophet in that he not only ministered and prophesied to his contemporaries, he also prophesied to a generation who would come after him and would live through the Babylonian exile. So we find this quote in chapter forty. Let me read you Isaiah forty verses three through five. A voice is calling, clear the way for the Lord in the wilderness, make smooth in the desert a highway for our God. Let every valley be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low, and let the rough ground become a plain, and the rugged terrain a broad valley. Then the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all flesh will see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken. A voice is crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make straight a desert or a highway for our God. And the question we have to answer is what does the phrase in the wilderness modify? Is the voice crying in the wilderness saying, prepare the way of the Lord? Or is the voice saying, prepare the way of the Lord in the wilderness? You'll recall that a feature of Hebrew poetry is parallelism, where two lines of the poem work together, and there are lots and lots of ways for those two lines to relate to each other, but the most common way is for the two lines to say the same thing in different words. We call this synonymous. So the second line restates the same idea of the first line but in different words. Parallelism would suggest that the phrases are arranged like this In the wilderness is parallel to in the desert, prepare is parallel to make smooth. The way of our Lord is parallel to a highway for our God. The parallelism suggests that the wilderness is not where the voice is crying out, the wilderness is part of the message that the voice is proclaiming. At the time it was hard to travel through the wilderness. When a king wanted to travel from point A to point B, the king's people would go before him and they would make a road, they would clear out the obstacles and level it out so that the king could then travel easily and quickly and his path would not be obstructed. Kind of like today when the president goes through town and the police go before him and they turn all the traffic lights green in his direction and they stop all the cross traffic so that he can just travel straight down the road. When the king was traveling to another country, a large crew would go before him and prepare the roadway. They'd remove the obstacles, they'd smooth the road so that his chariot could travel unobstructed when it came later. That's the image here. Isaiah is saying to Israel, prepare the highway, prepare the roadway to meet your God. So Isaiah is presenting this metaphorical picture calling for a path to be made in the wilderness so that the wilderness can be transfersed easily because the king is coming. And that's what he goes on to say. Every valley should be lifted up, so in order to make it easy to travel, you level the ground, you bring the valleys up. Likewise, every mountain or hill made low, same idea, bring all the high places down to level ground so it's easy for the king to travel. Make all the uneven ground level, make the road straight and easy so that God can come and meet his people. The context of Isaiah forty is this metaphorical picture of clearing all the obstacles out of God's way as you prepare for his arrival. In the earlier chapters, Isaiah used the image of the highway to talk about the people going back to the land after the exile was over. Now in chapter forty, he's switching the metaphor to a highway for God to come and meet his people. And Matthew quotes this section with reference to John the Baptist, but there's a slight variation in Matthew's translation. The Hebrew Bible reads a voice cries in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord. And the question is, is the voice crying, quote, in the wilderness, prepare the way, so prepare the wilderness, or is the voice crying in the wilderness, quote, prepare the way of the Lord? In the Hebrew, the wilderness is the place where the highway is prepared, and we saw that with the parallelism with the next verse, but when this was translated into Greek in the translation that we know of as the Septuagint, which was a translation made around the third century BC, it was changed slightly. The Septuagint version reads In the wilderness a voice cries, quote, prepare the way of the Lord. So in the Septuagint translation, the place where the voice is crying is the wilderness, not the place where the roadway is being prepared, and the Septuagint actually omits that second phrase in the desert, so they locate the voice in the wilderness. Now Matthew quotes the Septuagint, which would have been the version his audience was familiar with. In fact, this passage gets quoted by all four of the gospel writers, and all four of them quote the Septuagint because that was the main translation people were using in their day. Now critical scholars like to claim that the gospel writers made a mistake here, or that they have some kind of devious motives, that they're quoting the Septuagint to make it sound like Isaiah is talking about John the Baptist, but really Isaiah's not talking about that at all. Or they claim the gospel authors are trying to stack the deck in their favor, making it sound like Isaiah was predicting John the Baptist when in fact he wasn't. And some say the Septuagint is a mistranslation of the original Hebrew, and so the gospel writers are quoting a mistake. So basically this is one of those places that critics of the Bible like to point to and say, see, it's an error. But I don't think it's an error. Matthew is simply quoting a different translation. That does not mean that Matthew made a mistake. We can decide that the translators of the Septuagint were right, or we can decide they were wrong, and it doesn't change Matthew's meaning. Someone is calling out to prepare a way for the coming king, and that's the role John the Baptist played. Matthew used the Septuagint because it was the translation at hand. It was the one that his audience is likely to know, and there's nothing wrong with that. I might quote the New International Version or any English translation of the Bible, and there might be places where I disagree with that translation. Looking at the parallelism, I think the Hebrew text is the more accurate understanding, and that the Septuagint messed it up a little, but I'm really not an expert in the ancient languages. Either way you take it, though, both Matthew and Isaiah are making the same point. Before the Messiah comes, someone is going to call out, prepare the way for the coming king, and Matthew is telling us that someone is John the Baptist. Isaiah's point is this is an announcement of comfort. This is an announcement that the exile will end and that God is coming to meet them again. A herald is calling that a king is coming and it's time to get ready. It's time to prepare to meet him. Isaiah's immediate prediction concerned the end of the exile, but John the Baptist is a fulfillment in the fullest sense of the word. He is the ultimate herald who announces the ultimate king who is coming and it's time to get ready to meet him. If exiled Israel is to humble herself to prepare to return to God because her period of judgment is coming to an end, how much more important is it that the people of John the Baptist's time prepare to meet the Messiah who has now come? So the voice is a herald, the king is coming, and his servants are to prepare the road so that he can come and meet his people. This is the herald announcing his coming, and that's exactly what John the Baptist did. God is coming to save his people, and a herald is announcing him. And this is very consistent in the way Matthew has been quoting the Old Testament up to this point. We have seen that most often he uses the idea of fulfillment in the idea of the fullest type or the fullest picture. And that's we've talked about that a lot in the previous podcast, so I'm not going to go over all that in detail again here. If you missed it, go back and listen to the last three podcasts. Notice that the voice in Isaiah is vague, obscure, almost unnoticeable. It doesn't call attention to itself because the message is more important than the messenger. What God wants them to pay attention to is the content of the message, not the voice saying it. John the Baptist, even though Jesus calls him the greatest prophet ever born, is given no title. He's given no designation in Isaiah because for Isaiah the important point is what the voice is saying, not who it is. I think the idea is that when the new king comes, his glory is so great that no other name need to be mentioned next to his. John the Baptist is like the best man at a wedding. He performs a very vital function, he's necessary to the ceremony, but he is not there to call attention to himself, and he most certainly should not go on the honeymoon. After summarizing John's message, Matthew then describes John and his popularity. This is Matthew chapter three verses four through six. Now John wore a 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 Jordan River, confessing their sins. So from three five we learn that John the Baptist was a very popular figure. The crowds accurately recognize that he is a prophet of God. There's been about four hundred years of prophetic silence, and now here is John the Baptist, and everybody wants to know what he says. Later in Matthew 21, we learn that even after John's death, the Pharisees fear saying anything bad about him because they were afraid of how the crowds might react, because he was still that well known and that popular. This is Matthew 21, verses 23 through 27. And when he entered the temple, this is Jesus, when he entered the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came up to him as he was teaching and said, By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority? Jesus answered them, I also will ask you one question, and if you tell me the answer, then I will also tell you by what authority I do these things. The baptism of John, where did it come from? From heaven or from man? And they discussed it among themselves, saying, If we say from heaven, he will say to us, Why then did you not believe him? But if we say from man, we are afraid of the crowd, for they all hold that John was a prophet. So they answered Jesus, We do not know, and he said to them, Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things. So notice they're afraid of the reaction of the crowd because John was very popular even after his death. In the Gospel of John, whenever John the Baptist is mentioned, the author makes a point of saying John the Baptist was not the Messiah, which seems to indicate that a lot of people thought he might have been. And the book of Acts reports finding disciples of John the Baptist around the Mediterranean years after John's death. Matthew tells us that he preached in the wilderness of Judea and that he baptized in the Jordan River. That doesn't mean he spent all his time in that one location. We know that he was eventually arrested by Herod Antipos, and Herod Antipas was in charge of the area on the east side of the Jordan, and John was arrested there. He wasn't limited to the area of Judea, but it was probably his main location. Now many scholars argue that his clothes indicate his prophetic role. Zechariah speaks of a time when there will be no more false prophets, and he says this in Zechariah 13 4. Also, it will come about in that day that the prophets will each be ashamed of his vision when he prophesies, and they will not put on a hairy robe in order to deceive. So scholars argue that there was a kind of dress code for the prophets, which included this hairy robe, and that's what Zechariah is referring to, that false prophets would put on a hairy robe in order to deceive the people into believing that they were true prophets, and that's certainly possible. I don't think there's enough evidence to be definitive. Perhaps dress code is too strong a word. Perhaps many prophets dress this way, but they didn't have to, but we don't really know. It sounds like though, if you wanted to look like a prophet, you put on a hairy robe. We find this description of Elijah in Second Kings one, seven and eight. He said to them, What kind of man was he who came up to meet you and spoke these words to you? They answered him, He was a hairy man with a leather girdle about his loins, and he said, It's Elijah the Tishbite. Now it's possible that when they say he was a hairy man, he was physically a hairy man, or it could be just that he wore a hairy robe, meaning he was a hairy man because he was wearing this hairy camel's hair robe, and if so, then this description here in Kings is very strikingly similar to the description of John the Baptist. We know that Elijah had a robe and that he passed that robe on to his successor Elisha. The Lord tells Elijah to anoint Elisha to be a prophet in his place, and he does that in part by casting his cloak or his robe on Elijah. This is first Kings nineteen nineteen. So he, that's Elijah, departed from there and found Elisha, the son of Shapat, who was ploughing with twelve yoke of oxen in front of him, and he was the tw was with the twelfth. Elijah passed by him and cast his cloak upon him. And it's possible that was a hairy cloak, and that this became then the tradition for prophets to wear this hairy mantle. It's also possible that Matthew included this description of John the Baptist's appearance to highlight the fact that he was a prophet because he looked like the prophet Elijah, because both were hairy. It's but it could be that many of the prophets traditionally wore this kind of hairy cloak, and John the Baptist is following that tradition. I don't think there's enough evidence to decide definitively one way or the other, and I'm not sure it matters, but it's interesting. Matthew also tells us that John was baptizing people with water, but one is coming who will baptize with the Spirit. Let's look at verses three through twelve. 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 in keeping with 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. Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees, 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 widowing fork 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. This idea that Jesus Christ will baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire, while John baptized with water is one of the few things that are found in all four of the Gospels. You're probably aware that the three synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are quite similar, and many of the stories we have are found in all three of them. But John's Gospel is much different. He wrote later he had a different agenda, and he didn't feel the need to repeat what the other three gospels contained. So very little that John says is duplicated. In the other gospels, but this idea that Christ will baptize with the Holy Spirit in fire while John baptizes with water is one of the few things that is in all four Gospels. I think John the Baptist is contrasting the outward water baptism that he practiced with the inward baptism of the Holy Spirit that the Messiah brings. Now, what's going on here? Both the Old Testament and the New Testament use water as a symbol of cleansing. It's controversial how much of what we think of as baptism today was going on prior to John. But certainly washing with water in a ritual way meant to symbolize ritual cleansing and purity that was going on. Washing with water symbolized the washing away of the guilt of my sins and leaving behind my old way of living and adopting a new way of living. Baptism is different. It's something you only do once, not something you would do repeatedly when you needed to become ritually clean. At the time, only proselytes were baptized. That is, those people who wanted to convert to Judaism were baptized, and their baptism was self-administered. This idea to baptize someone else is new. That's what John introduces, this baptizing others. And I think he's using this ritual in a new way to communicate something new to his fellow Jews. He's sending the message, you need to convert just like a Gentile. Now to be baptized is to commit yourself to the teaching of the one in whose name you're being baptized. The word disciple simply means student or one who learns from someone else. Disciples are those people who say, I want to hang around and listen to this teacher, this rabbi, because I think God has sent him with a message and I want to know what it is. There is this natural connection between the concept of being someone's student, being someone's disciple, and being baptized. This is how John did things. He gathered disciples. When they repented and began to follow him, he baptized them. And those students identified themselves as students or disciples of John the Baptist. So John the Baptist baptized his students as the symbol of new life and repentance and preparation for the coming kingdom. John was the last to have his own disciples, and he taught his followers to look for the Christ or the one who was coming after him. After Jesus comes fully into his public ministry, the apostles also teach their followers to be baptized, but they become followers of Christ, not of Peter or Paul or John. So baptism is a ritual that symbolizes your commitment to follow the teaching of the one in whose name you're being baptized. And John the Baptist's message is summarized as repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. And that phrase very succinctly captures two main themes in John's message repent and the kingdom of heaven is at hand. And I want to spend most of our time today then thinking about that. First, let's start with the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of God, those are synonymous phrases. It's a central topic in both of the testaments. So let's start with the Old Testament background on this phrase. The kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven refers to the rule or the reign of God as king. The kingdom of heaven is that time promised by the prophets when God will rule over all the earth. Now you say, isn't that already the case? Isn't he already ruling over all the earth now? Well, yes and no. Yes, in one sense he is ruling over all the earth, and that it all exists at his pleasure. He is the one true God and king, and all the others are counterfeits. We have rain because he blesses us with rain. We have peace and prosperity when he decides to bless us with peace and prosperity. He is the king of glory and he reigns now, and we see him very clearly on his throne in places like the calling of Isaiah in Isaiah six. But there is another sense in which the world does not recognize God's reign, and in that sense we are still waiting for him to reign. We are waiting for the day when every knee will bow before him and recognize him as Lord. And that day is coming. A day is coming when God's rule will be perfected over all the earth and all creation. When a good king is reigning well, there is peace and prosperity and blessing over his kingdom, and that day is coming for us. The day is coming when everyone will live in peace and righteousness and justice, when sin and death and corruption and futility will all be eliminated, and everyone will live under the reign of God and obey him. This is what we say in the Lord's Prayer Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. We're looking for that day when God's will will be established perfectly over all the earth. There will be no more rebellion, no sin, just like there is in heaven. So the kingdom of heaven is that time when all sin and rebellion is gone, and all God's people are blessed living under his righteous rule. For example, Zechariah predicts a time when all the world will align themselves against Israel, but God will rescue them and establish his rule on earth, and then he says this in Zechariah fourteen nine. And the Lord will be king over all the earth, in that day the Lord will be the only one and his name the only one. So yes, God is in fact king over all the earth now, but not everyone recognizes that to be true. However, a day is coming when that will change. A day is coming when God will rescue his people both physically and spiritually and establish his rule in a new way. Isaiah says something similar. This is Isaiah fifty two verses seven to ten. How lovely on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who announces peace and brings good news of happiness, who announces salvation and says to Zion, your God reigns. Listen, your watchmen lift up their voices, they shout joyfully together, for they will see with their own eyes when the Lord restores Zion. Break forth, shout joyfully together, you waste places of Jerusalem, for the Lord has comforted his people, he has redeemed Jerusalem. The Lord has bared his holy arm in the sight of all the nations, that all the ends of the earth may see the salvation of our God. So here the good news is announced to Jerusalem, and that good news is your God reigns. The Lord will comfort and redeem his people and restore Jerusalem, and all the nations will see it. It will reach even to the ends of the earth. And all this good news is captured by the phrase your God reigns. So even though he always reigns, his perfect will is not yet established on earth. He has intervened in history to bring salvation and restoration, to end sin, futility, and death, but he has not fully and finally brought that about. This is what the prophets mean by the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven, that time when God steps into history to establish his rule once and for all, to end sin, end death, end rebellion, and to fully establish justice, peace, and righteousness. It's the time when God establishes his perfect rule and law on earth. So that's the first aspect of the kingdom of God, but there's a second aspect we need to know, and that is how is God going to establish this kingdom? He's going to establish it through his Messiah. Remember that the word Messiah simply means anointed one, and that is a Hebrew word. The Greek word Christ also means the anointed one. So the Messiah is the anointed king of Israel, a son of David and a son of Abraham who will rule over all the earth. God promised that a king would sit on the throne of David who would rule over all the earth. David's kingdom was lost to the exile, his throne was lost to the exile, but the prophets promised that one day a son of David would come and rule on David's throne again and establish this peace and justice. And we saw this in the servant songs. We also see this in Isaiah nine, this is nine verses six and seven. For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us, and the government will rest on his shoulders, and his name will be called wonderful counselor, mighty God, eternal father, prince of peace. There will be no end to the increase of his government or of peace on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and righteousness from then on and forevermore, the zeal of the Lord of hosts will accomplish this. So a child will be born, he will sit on David's throne, and his rule will establish peace and justice over all the earth. Jeremiah twenty three verses five and six says the same thing. Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous branch, and he will reign as king and act wisely and do justice and righteousness in the land. In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will dwell securely, and this is his name by which he will be called the Lord our righteousness. So like a tree gets cut off at the base and leaves only the stump, the throne of David has been toppled and the people taken into exile, but from that stump a branch will grow, a new Davidic king who will reign wisely and establish peace and righteousness in the land. And then here's a different kind of prophecy, but it's the same idea. This is in Daniel seven. Daniel is having a vision, and he sees this in Daniel seven, thirteen and fourteen. I kept looking in the night visions, and behold with the clouds of heaven one like a son of man was coming. He came up to the ancient of days and was presented before him, and to him was given dominion, glory, and a kingdom, that all the peoples and nations and men of every language might serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion which will not pass away, and his kingdom is one which will not be destroyed. So he says, One like a son of man, in other words, a human being, is given a kingdom over which he will rule forever. So we see that there is a day coming when God will intervene in history to establish his rule. He will bless his people, he will defeat those who reject him, and he will establish his rule over all of creation through the Messiah, the anointed king of Israel. Now there's a lot more to this picture, there's a lot more Old Testament passages we could look at, but for now those are the two aspects that we need to know. God will establish his rule through a man, the Christ, the Messiah, the anointed son of David. And John the Baptist's message then is the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Why? Because the king himself, the Messiah, has come. And Matthew's readers would be very familiar with this concept of a coming Messiah. And Matthew has told us that Messiah is Jesus, the son of David, son of Abraham. We have been told this through his genealogy and the circumstances of his birth, but when John the Baptist first appears, he does not announce who the Messiah is, just that the Messiah is coming. Now in 311, as for me, I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, and I am not fit to remove his sandals, he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. The image of the sandal comes from the idea that when the master of the house returned, one of his servants would come, remove his sandals, and wash his feet. And this job was usually reserved for the lowest and most menial of servants. And John is saying, The Messiah is so much greater than I am that I am not even worthy to be his lowest, most menial servant. Then he says, Let's read eleven and then twelve, as for me I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, and I am not fit to remove his sandals, he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will thoroughly clear his threshing floor, and he will gather his wheat into the barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire. So John saying, I baptize with water, but the coming Messiah is going to baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire. And there is some scholarly debate over what exactly is being emphasized by this idea of fire. Fire can be and often is a metaphor for purification because fire burns away impurities, like you heat gold, and as you heat the gold, the impurities rise to the top, and then the goldsmith removes them, skims them off the surface. John the Baptist could be saying that Jesus will put his followers through a kind of purifying ritual. And we could speculate all day on the different nuances of what fire could mean, but I think the context gives us the clue we need and that we should see verse 12, the very next verse, as explaining the metaphor of what he means by fire. John tells us in the very next verse that he will gather the wheat into his barn and he will burn the chap with fire. And that suggests to me that the fire he's talking about is the fire of judgment and destruction. When grain was harvested, the first step is to break up the stalks and separate the parts that are edible from the parts that are not edible. And winnowing is this process of separating the wheat, the part you want to eat, from the chaff, the part that you don't want to eat. So winnowing involves throwing it all up in the air and the wind will carry the lighter chaff away while the heavier seeds and the edible parts fall back into the pile, thus separating them. The wheat then is the good part that you keep and you put in your barn, and the chaff is the useless part that you burn up and remove. So John is picturing mankind as being divided into two parts, those who accept the Messiah, the wheat, and those who reject the Messiah, the chaff. And the Messiah is going to separate all of humanity into two groups like wheat and chaff. And this explains, I think, the baptism language in verse 11. Those who accept him as the Messiah, he will baptize with the Holy Spirit. Those who reject him, he quote, baptizes with a fire of judgment, like the fire that burns the chaff. And this is an either or kind of baptism. You get one and the or the other. And this is the sort of king that John is announcing, and that squares with the picture that we have gleaned from the Old Testament. The Messiah ultimately holds your destiny in his hands, and that destiny will be either repentance and renewal and a place in the kingdom of God, or it will be judgment and condemnation. And that makes perfect sense with the other part of John the Baptist's message. Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. If you want to avoid that judgmental fire, if you want to avoid judgment and find a place in the kingdom of heaven, what must you do? Repent. Now repent means more than being sorry, and it means more than changing your mind. Repent means to do a one hundred eighty, to turn around, and more often than not the context means return to God. We need to stop denying God exists, stop denying that he is God, stop denying that he is Lord, admit we are sinners in need of a savior, and turn back toward God seeking his mercy. And the arrival of the king forces that choice. The time to decide is now. John could have said, The king's here, put on your best clothes, come on, cheer him on the road as he defeats the Romans, and that sort of king doesn't require any hard choice from me except to show up on parade day. But if you've read the Old Testament, you know the arrival of the Messiah is not going to be this way, and the way the Messiah arrives, God requires us to choose. Why didn't the Israelites prosper in the land? Because they chose to disobey the Lord. Why was the throne of David lost and the people taken into exile? Why was Israel under Roman rule at the time of Jesus? Because the people of Israel were faithless. They turned away from the Lord. Repentance is turning back to the Lord. The Old Testament makes it quite clear that there is a connection between faithfulness and blessing. If you want God's blessing, you have to follow Him and trust Him. You have to turn back from the direction of rebellion that you're currently heading and return to God and say, You are my God, I am your servant. The prophets announced that one day God would spiritually transform his people. And what does that transformation look like? Well, the very first step is repentance, turning back to God and following him. And this makes perfect sense. If you want a place in the kingdom of God, you need to turn back and repent. Now notice 3.6 says that they were confessing their sins as John baptized them. That's another part of this picture. In order to find a place in the kingdom of God, we need to have our sins forgiven, and that comes through confession and repentance, acknowledging that we are indeed sinful, that we have turned away from God, that we do indeed deserve judgment, but we want to flee from those sins and ask for grace because of the blood of the Messiah. Now, my understanding of the time period is that by and large the Jews of this day were not particularly devout, and we see this in John's words addressed to the Pharisees and Sadducees. Let's look again at seven through ten. 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? Flee from the wrath to come, basically that means repent, and then he tells them, Bear fruit in keeping with 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. Even now the axes laid to the root of the trees, every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Now he is talking to the Pharisees and the Sadducees. The Pharisees were a group who were particularly zealous at law keeping, and they looked down on everyone else, but they were very, very religious in their outward actions, and they saw the masses of people as being not so strict, a little slack and therefore impious. The Sadducees were a very different kind of group, although they often appear with the Pharisees in the text. They were the aristocrats and the leaders, they were the party of the rich and the high priestly families. They were in charge of the temple and its services, and they were very materialistic. They did not believe in resurrection from the dead or life after death, and they were very politically motivated. They seem to be coming here to actually be baptized. Now maybe they're just coming to watch and see what's going on. Maybe they just want to check out who this John the Baptist character is, or more likely, I think they realize how popular John the Baptist has become, and they want to appear like they are part of his tribe. However, John doesn't seem to think they have actually repented. And essentially, in his little tirade, he's calling on them to repent. He says, There is a wrath coming and you need to flee from it. In other words, judgment is coming and you need to flee th from it. But he doesn't believe they have repentance on their mind. I think that's what he means by who told you to flee from the wrath to come. Who told you that you need to repent, with the implication no one did, because that's not why you're here. Are you really here to flee from God's wrath, to admit that you're a sinner in need of a savior? Or are you just here to be politically correct? So John speaks harshly to them, calling them a nest of poisonous snakes, presumably because their influence is poisonous and dangerous. And he drives his point home with this verses in 3, 8, and 9. Don't think that being a physical descendant of Abraham is enough to save you. It's not enough to be born a child of Abraham. You have to be repentant. And if you are repentant, your lives are going to show evidence of that repentance. Repentance involves a change, a 180, and we should see that change. So if you have truly repented, your lives would show that you want to change, you want to know God, and you know you need to change, but their lives show that they're complacent and confident in the fact that they were born Jewish. And John says, that's no big deal. God could take these stones and raise up children of Abraham. So wake up and smell the coffee, guys, because the axe of judgment is already here, and those who don't repent and show evidence of the fruit of repentance are going to be cut down. So to summarize, John the Baptist was an important and popular figure. He was widely accepted as a prophet, and some thought he was the Messiah. His message had two parts repent, that is, turn back to God, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. The king has arrived, and now is the time to make your choice. The day of judgment is coming when the king will separate his people from those who are not his people, and the way to be among his people is to repent. Being Jewish is not enough. The king is coming, and it's time to turn back to God and follow his Messiah. You've been listening to the Wednesday in the Word podcast, and I'm so glad you are. My mission is to explain not only what a passage means, but how we figure it out. Your podcast speed may be limited to the last 20 or so episodes, but don't worry, you can hear all previous episodes, and there are about 500 of them by going to wednesdayintheword.com. There are no advertisements, I don't ask for donations, you'll only find podcasts and Bible study resources on my website, and it is free and there to help you improve your skills and understanding. If you want to thank me, join the mailing list, subscribe to the podcast, and most importantly, tell a friend what you learned and where you learned it. Our theme music is graciously provided by my friend Reggie Coates of heartfeltmusic.org. Thank you for joining me today. I'm Krisan Marotta, and I'll see you next week at Wednesday in the world.