John Preaches

When John the Baptist started preaching in the wilderness, there was a sense of urgency to his message. The crisis is right now. Don't wait till tomorrow.

You may not have it tomorrow. The axe is at the root of the tree, and every tree that doesn't bring forth fruit is worthy only to be cut down and thrown in the fire. And the response to John the Baptist's call for repentance was impressive. Throngs of people, we're told, followed him into the wilderness to hear him preach.

Today on Renewing Your Mind, we return to Dr. R.C. Sproul's sermon series from the Gospel of Luke. And as we open to chapter 3 today, we'll see that in preparing the world for the Messiah, John the Baptist proclaimed a message that's just as true and just as urgent today. Try to imagine in your mind's eye, if you can, thousands upon thousands of people gathered at the Jordan River. They're seeking to undergo baptism by the hands of this strange new prophet who has come to them out of the desert. We're told by historians of the first century that John the Baptist's notoriety and fame at this time of the first century was greater even than that of Jesus. So, multitudes flocked to the Jordan, probably tens of thousands from every walk of life, the common people, the Amhorets, the people of the earth or the land, also the scribes, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, rulers from the local Sanhedrin who governed Jewish affairs, even Romans who were represented by the military, and tax collectors also gathered.

And so, in this huge throng of people milling around, pushing up against John the Baptist, he's ready to preach to them. And how does he begin his address? Does he say, ladies and gentlemen? No. Nor does he say, dearly beloved? No. Nor does he say, friends, Israelites, and countrymen, lend me your ears.

He doesn't use that form of address either. Instead, he sees all these people in front of him, and he looks at them, and he says, you brood of vipers. You den of serpents. You nest of poisonous snakes. Vipers in the land at that time usually didn't grow to be more than two feet long, that they were deadly with their venom. They would often stretch themselves straight out on the ground and be mistaken for sticks, and people would pick them up as we read in the book of Acts, or as was experienced by a member of this church who picked up a pit viper last year to her everlasting remorse.

But this is how John the Baptist violated every principle of political correctness and Mr. Carnegie's book on how to win friends and influence people. He said, I'm talking today to a bunch of snakes, and they have the poison of asps under their lips. And he says to them, who warns you to flee from the wrath to come? Is that why you're here? Are you coming to be cleansed because you know that wrath is coming and somebody has warned you and suggested to you that you flee from this wrath?

Who told you that? John, of course, was certainly not denying that wrath was at the gates and that it would be a good thing to flee from it. And it's amazing to me that there were that many people in that day who considered it a matter of urgency to flee from the wrath of God because we live in a time today where it seems that nobody in our culture has any great fear of the wrath of God. And even in the church, there is a calloused sense that God gives love unconditionally, and we have nothing to fear from His wrath, but there are people who are in this room right now who should be fleeing with all of their might from the wrath of God that will certainly come because there are inevitably people in this house this morning who are not converted. And if you are not converted to Christ, then you will experience the wrath of God.

So if you have any wisdom in you, flee as hard as you possibly can. How do you know if you're a candidate for that wrath? How do you know if you're converted and safe from that wrath? Well, we can learn something from John the Baptist here. He says, therefore, bear fruits worthy of repentance. Beloved, there were people who came to be baptized by John and understood that He was saying to them, repent and be baptized. Take a bath.

You're not clean. And that the whole symbolic significance of His baptism was to point to a cleansing from sin and forgiveness to all of those who would repent. But we know in theology to distinguish between different kinds of repentance. There is what we call contrition, the kind of thing that was manifested by David in his prayer of contrition in Psalm 51 when he was pouring out his heart before God and that his sorrow for his sin was genuine and deep. But there is also attrition, the kind of repentance your children show when you catch them with their hands in the cookie jar and they say, please don't spank me. They are repenting to get a ticket out of punishment. And their repentance is not genuine.

It doesn't come from the heart. And so masses of these people came to the Jordan to get the latest theological and ecclesiastical provision to cover their sins, but they went into the water with no real sense of repentance, and they came out unconverted. And so John said, if you're converted, show me. Bring forth the fruit worthy of repentance. He wasn't saying the fruit will convert you or the fruit will save you or the works will justify you, but he's saying if your faith is real, if your conversion is genuine, then you can't help but have fruit. And so I ask you this morning, do you have the fruit of repentance in your life? Do you have evidence in your life of your conversion? That's a question that each one of us has to ask ourselves pointedly and honestly, because true conversion always, inevitably, necessarily brings forth the fruit of repentance.

So now the lecture turns into a Q&A. As those who have heard this warning, now before that he says, and don't start talking to me about Abraham. When I tell you about fruits worthy of repentance, don't tell me who your father was or your grandfather or your great-grandfather. Don't tell me that you're children of Abraham. And so if you're children of Abraham, you're saved from the wrath that come, and if you're children of Abraham, that's like saying, I'm a church member. My parents were Christians. I was raised Christian. I don't have to bring forth fruits of repentance.

John said, don't talk to me like that. Don't you know that God is able to raise up children of Abraham from these stones right here? I mentioned that John was familiar with the stones of the wilderness, the pebbles, the stones, and the rocks.

They were everywhere. And what he's saying to these people, he says, is that God made Adam out of the dirt. He can make children of Abraham out of the stones. And He can make a child of Abraham out of the stone that is your heart. And then came the Q&A.

Not yet. I still am running ahead of myself. Before we get to the Q&A, he goes on to say, even now the axe is laid at the root of the tree. Again, it's not that the woodsman has gone to the barn and picked up his axe and started honing it to a sharp edge, nor has he started chipping away at the outer bark of the tree. He's already penetrated to the very pith, to the very core of that tree, one more swing of the axe, and the tree comes crashing down. That's how urgent it is, John is saying. The axe is at the root of the tree.

The crisis is right now. Don't wait till tomorrow. You may not have it tomorrow. The axe is at the root of the tree, and every tree that doesn't bring forth fruit is worthy only to be cut down and thrown in the fire. What do you do with a dead fruit tree in your yard? Did you just let it there for decoration for twenty years?

Of course not. If it's not bearing fruit, you cut it down, break up the branches, throw it in the fire. You want to let the garbage collector take it away.

You need to get rid of it because it's worthless. And so is everyone who brings forth no fruit from their conversion. They're like that tree that's worthy of being cut down and cast into the fire. Now John has their attention, and he opens the class for questions. So the people asked him, saying, What shall we do then? He answered and said to them, He who has two tunics, let him give to him who has none, and he who has food, let him do likewise. John the Baptist didn't ask Herod to institute a redistribution program or a welfare state whereby the granting of relief from poverty would be forced upon the people.

No. The message of the gospel is voluntary compassion, voluntary giving to those in need. And if the church would do what the church is called to do, we wouldn't have the government interfering in this matter the way they do. As John says, one of the fruits of conversion is compassion. If you're a converted person, you can't see somebody naked and not give them something to clothe them. If you saw somebody hungry, you give them food. Once I had a man say to me, R.C., have you ever seen anybody die of hunger?

And I said, No, I haven't. He said, I'm glad you said that because if you would have said you had, I would have said, What kind of a man are you who would watch somebody die from hunger? Now, the fruit of conversion is a heart that loves people, our neighbor, whether they're believers or unbelievers, whatever they are. If they have AIDS, we don't ask them how they got it. If they're in the gutter, we don't ask them how they fell there. We get them out of there. That's what converted people do.

They show compassion. Then the tax collector, they have their question. Tax collectors came to be baptized and said to him, Teacher, what shall we do? And John says to them, Collect no more than what is appointed for you. You have your job.

It's not a very popular one. You're supposed to collect the taxes from the people, and the taxes may indeed be oppressive, but you add to the oppression by clipping the coin and taking a little extra for yourself and lining your own pockets by virtue of your authority as a tax collector. What's John saying to them? He's saying, Stop stealing. You're stealing from people. Paul tells us in his epistles, Let him who steals, steal no more. So, one of the fruits of conversion, beloved, is you don't steal. Then the soldiers asked their question, asked their question, and they said, What should we do?

John said to them, Don't intimidate anyone or accuse them falsely and be content with your wages. Yesterday, Bess and I were driving down one of the streets in Altamont Springs in a police car from Altamont Police Department, pulled alongside of us. Fortunately, he didn't have his red light on. But I looked over, and I strained my neck to see if it was one of our church members who's an officer with the Altamont Police Department. I couldn't really tell, but the policeman in the car looked very nice in his fabulous uniform. You know how soldiers look when they're all dressed up in their dress blues and so on, and the policeman with their spit and polish uniforms? They can be scary.

They can be intimidating, and they can use the power and the force of their office to falsely accuse people. But John the Baptist was doing the Mirandizing before it was even fashionable in the United States. He says, Don't use your office to intimidate or to extort people or to accuse them falsely. And oh, by the way, another fruit of the conversion is to be content with your wages.

Content with my wages? Now John's not preaching. He's meddling. People aren't always content with their wages, and when we're not content, we have a tendency to shake our fists in the face of God, saying, God, you and your providence have not been kind enough to us.

If you were really a good God, you would make us more prosperous than we are. It seems like John here was pretty much covering the gamut, but we're not done yet. After he had the discussion with them as to whether or not he was Jesus or the Messiah, which we'll look at, God willing, next week, we're told almost as a footnote at the end that John was shut up in prison. Why? Why did Herod shut him up in prison and subsequently kill him by cutting off his head?

Let me tell you why. Because John, following a long list of prophets of God, was engaged with what we call in theology prophetic criticism. He had the audacity publicly to criticize the tetrarch, the ruler of that territory, Herod, for his illicit marriage to his daughter-in-law.

And so, John the Baptist called him out publicly. I see the difference between Republicans and Democrats in America as a difference in degree and not of kind. I don't see any party really committed to just economic policies, to just taxation policies, or to morality of the sanctity of life. Now you say, what in the world are you talking about that from the pulpit floor? We're not supposed to be discussing politics. Yes, we are.

Let me tell you why. The office of the preacher, the office of prophetic criticism, it goes through the whole of sacred Scripture, beginning when Moses went up and knocked on the door of Pharaoh and said, God told me to tell you to let my people go, because what you've done in your government of Egypt is wrong. And Moses was God's prophetic voice to Pharaoh, as Elijah was to Ahab and his consort who were trying to impose paganism on the house of Israel. Or Isaiah as he went before the kings, calling them to repentance, as Nathan confronted David in his sin, which was a sin not just against Uriah but against the nation he ruled.

Or think of Daniel, Ezekiel, challenging the kings of Babylon for their evil all the way through the history of the church. It has been the function of the church not to be the state, but to be the conscience of the state. God establishes government for the main reason originally of sustaining, protecting, and maintaining the sanctity of human life. And when a government, any government fails to do that, it has been demonized, and it is the responsibility of the church to stand up to that government and say, stop it, to scream bloody murder, and to say we won't tolerate you people who have no more regard for human life or ethics.

This kind of corruption will destroy this people and all of our institutions with it. Again, it is not the duty of the church to be the state, but it is the duty of the state to be the state. And when we speak to the state about abortion, we're not asking the state to be the church. We're asking the state to be the state, to do what they're held accountable by God, to do, protect human life. This isn't Russia. This isn't the Third Reich.

This is the United States of America that kills and sanctions the killing of one and a half million babies every year. And where is the church? Intimidated, terrified, cringing. Before the first service this morning, somebody asked me, I had just finished reading The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He said, R.C., he said, have you ever read that book?

I said, yes, of course. He said, I read it. He said, and I couldn't understand why you hadn't written the foreword to it. He said, you write the foreword to everything else. I said, actually, I didn't even know how to write when Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that book and paid for it with his life.

Because while the rest of the German churches were intimidated, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said to Adolf Hitler, no, you have to go and your administration in the name of God. He who has ears to hear what John the Baptist says, he said not only to first-century Jews, he says to us this morning, let him hear. Teaching a pointed lesson drawn from John the Baptist ministry, that's Dr. R.C.

Sproul. He's taking us verse by verse through the Gospel of Luke here in the Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind, and we're glad you could be with us. We have been studying in this great book over the past several weeks, and I hope you'll make plans to join us each Sunday as we learn about the life and ministry of Jesus.

The careful study that we hear from R.C. each week here on the program can also be found in his commentary on Luke. Contact us today with a donation of any amount, and we'll be happy to provide a digital download of this nearly 600-page commentary. Our offices are closed on this Lord's Day, but you can give your gift and make a donation online at renewingyourmind.org. Before we go today, I'd like to remind you that RefNet is available 24 hours a day, and we'd like to invite you to tune in. We feature the ministries of faithful men like Alistair Begg, John MacArthur, Stephen Lawson, and of course, Dr. Sproul. Plus, you'll hear Bible readings, music, and Christian audiobooks.

You can listen for free at any time when you go to refnet.fm or when you download the free RefNet app. Have you ever wondered why Jesus insisted that John the Baptist baptize Him? Jesus was perfect, so why did He need to be baptized? Dr. Sproul will tackle that passage from Luke's Gospel next Sunday, here on Redoing Your Mind.