Who Are You?

They were waiting for one like Moses, and they looked at John and they said, are you the one like Moses? He said, no, I'm not the Christ, I'm not Elijah, and I'm not the prophet like Moses.

Well then, who are you? Who was John the Baptist, and how does understanding his identity help us view Jesus rightly? Hi, I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and welcome to the Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind. We're spending several weeks in the early chapters of John's Gospel.

So far, R.C. Sproul has considered what is called the prologue of John, and where the apostle John helps us see who Jesus is. And today, we'll move on to another John, John the Baptist, and the significance of his role. Before you hear from Dr. Sproul, don't forget that you can request a copy of R.C. Sproul's commentary on John's Gospel, really the fruit of his study and time preaching through this gospel.

You give a donation of any amount in support of Renewing Your Mind at renewingyourmind.org. Well, here's Dr. Sproul on John the Baptist. Our Scripture lesson this morning again comes from the gospel according to St. John.

I will be reading from the first chapter, beginning in verse 19, reading through verse 28. Now, this is the testimony of John when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, who are you? He confessed and did not deny, but confessed, I am not the Christ.

And they asked him, What then? Are you Elijah? And he said, I am not. Are you the prophet? And he answered, No. So then they said to him, Who are you that we may give an answer to those who sent us?

What do you say about yourself? And he said, I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness. Make straight the way of the Lord, as the prophet Isaiah said. Now, those who were sent were from the Pharisees, and they asked him, saying, Why then do you baptize if you're not the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the prophet? John answered them, saying, I baptize with water, but there stands one among you whom you do not know.

It is He who, coming after me, is preferred before me, whose sandal strap I am not worthy to loose. These things were done in Bethabara beyond the Jordan where John was baptizing. You have ears to hear the Word of God.

Let them hear it. Just as last week in the prologue to John's gospel we considered the question of the identity of Jesus. After John gives us that background to set forth his portrait of Jesus, he then moves from the prologue immediately to a brief summation of the ministry and testimony of John the Baptist. As I've said to you in the past, unfortunately in the life of the church, John the Baptist is one of the most neglected personages in all of sacred Scripture, which was certainly not the case in the first century. This man attracted enormous attention from his contemporaries of the Jewish people in that time, and amazingly, the secular historians of the first century gave more ink to John the Baptist than they did to Jesus. And that was because Israel's history of having prophets sent from God had ended with the last canonical prophet of the Old Testament whose name was Malachi, and for four hundred years there was not a peep out of God.

The whole office of prophecy ceased until it was renewed again with this strange and bizarre figure coming out of the desert, the traditional meeting place between God and His prophets, beginning a new and radical prophetic ministry. And in a very short period of time, John the Baptist's activity attracted the interest and the attention of the religious authorities in Jerusalem, and so they sent a delegation to find out what he was all about and who he was. Now, just this further word of preface, among the Jews in the intertestamental period, there was the practice of proselyte baptism to which I've spoken before in here, and that was in the case of Gentiles who converted to Judaism. Gentiles were considered unclean so that they had to go through a purification rite to take a bath, as it were, to be welcomed and received into the covenant community of Israel. Now, in that procedure of proselyte baptism, the baptism for converts, it was the convert himself who baptized himself. He was not baptized by the priests or by the Levites.

All other purification rites in Israel were done by the priests. And so here we have somebody who's not a Gentile convert, who's not a priest, and yet he is involved in this some kind of activity of baptism. The only other place where we find baptism in this period of history was among that sect that you've heard something about called the Essenes, who were that monastic community that lived near the caves of Qumran and who were responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls. They practiced a form of baptism that had what is called eschatological significance. Now, I know that's a seventeen-dollar word, but the term eschatological has to do with the eschaton. That should explain it, which is the Greek word for the last times or the last things. So that those Jewish people who looked to the future for the coming of the day of the Lord, they associated in their ideas and in their beliefs this practice of baptism.

And here's what it was about. John comes as a Jew to Jews and calling the people of Israel to receive this rite of cleansing. While he's making his sermonic announcement, repent for the kingdom of God is at hand. I've preached on this before. Remember, what John is saying is a crisis moment in history is at hand.

His fan is in his hand. The axe is laid at the root of the tree that the coming of the Messiah is not going to be in some distant, unknown future, but He's at the door any minute He's going to come. And what he's saying to Israel is this.

You're not ready for it. You're unclean. And he calls Jewish people to submit to a ritual of cleansing that heretofore was limited only to pagans to Gentiles. And so you can imagine how upset the rulers were.

Who does this guy think he is that he's calling us, the children of Abraham, to a cleansing rite? And so they want to know what's going on. So they send this delegation out to him and listen to this interrogation and how John responds because it's very important for the whole gospel of John that we understand this particular passage.

So they come. They said, who are you? Now notice the awkward construction of verse 20. He confessed and did not deny but confessed.

Confessed. I mean, isn't that awkward? It's even worse than the Greek if you look at it. It's hard to even translate it. It's so convoluted. He confessed and did not deny.

Let me give you a sense of that. When Martin Luther was brought before the Diet of Worms in the sixteenth century and was interrogated about his writings and his teaching, he was called to recant of his views of justification. And when he tried to explain his views, he was cut off in mid-sentence by his interrogators, and they said, Brother Martin, answer us directly non cornutum, without horns. That is, without any evasive techniques, without any craftiness.

Just give us a straight answer. And so it was at that time that Luther said, if you want an answer non cornutum, without horns, here it is, unless I'm convinced by sacred Scripture or by evident reason and so on. Well, it's the same thing that John is saying here in this convoluted passage when it says he confessed and did not deny. This is the strongest way the Greek can give to us of how emphatic John the Baptist was in saying, I am not the Christ.

In fact, he had come onto the scene of history to make a confession, a public confession about who was the Christ. And only a few moments after he says this, he said, there's one in your very midst, and you don't even know him yet. He's the one who comes after me, who is before me, but I'm getting ahead of myself. So he says, emphatically, I am not the Christ. And they said, okay, then who are you? Are you Elijah?

And why did they ask him that? Again, we said that the last canonical prophet in the Old Testament was Malachi, and in the very last chapter of the book of Malachi, in the last paragraph of the book of Malachi, the very last prophecy in the book of Malachi, the very last prophecy in the Old Testament, Malachi says what? That the day of the Lord is coming, but it will not come until God first sends Elijah to announce it. That's why the Jewish people were waiting for the return of Elijah because the Old Testament said, the Messiah can't come until Elijah comes back first. So they see this guy now acting as a prophet, looking like Elijah, behaving like Elijah, and they said, are you Elijah? Are you Elijah? And what does he say?

No. Now that produces a problem because when Jesus spoke about John the Baptist, what did He say? He said to His disciples, if you can bear it, this was Elijah who was to come. And elsewhere in the Gospel we're told that John the Baptist came in the power and in the spirit of Elijah, and because he was endowed with the power of Elijah and came in the spirit of Elijah and fulfilled the ministry of Elijah, Jesus said with that cryptic introduction, if you can bear it, that is in a special sense, this was Elijah. This is the fulfillment of that Old Testament prophecy, even though John the Baptist personally was not Elijah.

So he's not lying here when he answers them, no, I'm not Elijah. And they said, okay, if you're not Elijah, are you the prophet? Now notice that the question here is not, are you a prophet? It's rather, are you the prophet?

Who's that? Well, to answer that, you have to go back to the book of Deuteronomy where the Word of God tells us that in the last times God will raise up a prophet like Moses. And so again, for centuries the Jewish people were not only waiting for the return of Elijah, they were also looking for that special prophet who would be like Moses. And remember the uniqueness of Moses, that Moses was not only a prophet, but he was the mediator of the Old Testament. And so they were waiting for one like Moses, and they looked at John and they said, are you the one like Moses? He said, no, I'm not the Christ, I'm not Elijah, and I'm not the prophet like Moses.

Well then who are you? Well, I think it's fascinating how John finally answers the question. They had gone to the Old Testament looking at Malachi, looking at Deuteronomy, and now John goes back to the Old Testament and quotes directly from the prophet Isaiah from the fortieth chapter. And I think it's significant for this reason that when Jesus gives His first sermon, His first recorded sermon, He comes into the synagogue and He's invited to comment on the prophetic reading from the scroll of that day from the prophet Isaiah. And you remember they stand up and they read the scroll, and the scroll says, the Spirit of the Lord is upon me.

He's anointed me to give release to the captured, to preach the gospel to the poor, to heal the sick, and so on. And so after the scroll is read, Jesus is invited as the visiting rabbi to give a sermon on the text, the shortest sermon ever. Jesus comes to the front, and He says, this Scripture today is fulfilled, and you are missed. That was the end of the sermon.

What was He saying? I am the one who has been anointed to be the Messiah. Well, before He reads from Isaiah 61, John quotes Isaiah 40, and He said, you want to know who I am? I'm the one that the prophet Isaiah talked about in his book when he said, I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord. Have you ever been to Israel?

Have you ever seen the sand dunes blown to and fro daily by the winds, even lowering them out valleys, raising them up in the hills? And the prophecy of Isaiah was this, that before the Messiah would come into the world, He would send His messenger, and the messenger would proclaim to the people, build a road, tunnel if necessary, knock down the hills, fill in the ditches, make the road straight that is the highway for our King. Build the King's highway. And God had promised His people that someday the King's highway would be built as the King would enter into the midst of His people. John said, you want to know who I am? That's who I am.

I'm here to tell you to build the highway of the King. Then he goes on to say this quickly. They asked Him, why are you baptizing if you're not the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the prophet? And He said, I baptize with water, but there stands one among you whom you do not know. It is He who is coming after me, is preferred before me, whose sandal strap I am not worthy to loose. That's an idiom, a little expression that the Jews had, loosing the sandal, the strap of the sandal.

Here's the significance of that. If you were a disciple of a rabbi like Jesus' disciples were in His rabbinic school, you not only attended the lectures of the rabbi and learned the lessons that He taught, but you notice, for example, you will notice later on that Jesus sends His disciples into town to get food, to make sure that a room is reserved when He has the communion in the upper room. They, when they enter into a rabbinic school and attach themselves to a rabbi, take upon themselves the role of a servant. The disciple actually functions as the personal slave of the rabbi.

And these people take care of all of his needs, make his housing arrangements, get his food, do all of these things. But the one thing that differentiated a disciple from a rabbinical school from an actual bond slave was that the disciple was never required to take care of the shoes or the sandals of their teacher. Slaves could be reduced to that humiliating task, but not the disciple. And John said, I am not even worthy to unstrap His sandals. He said, don't look at me. I'm lower than a disciple. I am lower than a slave.

I am not even worthy to untie His shoes, to take off His sandals, to clean His feet. Don't look to me. Look to Him. And that's why John puts this right at the beginning of the gospel, because he's focusing our attention not on John the Baptist, but on the one that John announces and telling his people it's time to make straight the highway of our God. And that's where our focus should be too, on the one John the Baptist pointed us to, the Lord Jesus. This is the Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind, where each week we feature the preaching ministry of R.C.

Sproul. Dr. Sproul was the founder of Ligonier Ministries, but he also served as the first minister of preaching and teaching at St. Andrew's Chapel in Sanford, Florida. It was there that he preached the sermon you heard today. These sermons in John's gospel then form the basis of his expositional commentary, and you can request the hardcover edition of that commentary when you give a year-end donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org.

When we process your donation, we'll send you a copy of this popular volume as our way of saying thank you. Study John's gospel with R.C. Sproul as your guide in this pastoral commentary when you click the link in the podcast show notes or give your gift at renewingyourmind.org.

Thank you for your support and for helping extend the reach of Renewing Your Mind. So who did John the Baptist announce Jesus to be? As we'll see next week, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. What does that mean? So join us next Sunday to find out, here on Renewing Your Mind. you