924. John the Baptist: A Servant Chosen and Equipped

Welcome to The Daily Platform from Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. We're continuing a four-part seminary series entitled New Testament Servants. Today's message will be preached by Dr. Neal Cushman, Dean of the Bob Jones University Seminary. It is my privilege to be able to talk about John the Baptist, and I've subtitled his life, Just a Voice. And that's how Isaiah 40, verse 3 describes him, and the Gospel writers pick up on that subtitle, so to speak, but simply, Just a Voice. And what I'd like to do this morning is to isolate a particular portrayal of John the Baptist.

There's too much for me to try to cover what all of the Gospel writers said about him, and the things that are also included in the book of Acts. So, I'm going to confine this message to what Mark says, and what is his particular portrayal of this prophet. And it's contained, actually, in the very first portion of Mark, and then Mark chapter 6. And those two passages actually tie together in one cohesive message.

So, I'm really going to try to drive towards one single point for us to think about. So, when we look at the introduction to Mark's Gospel, that is contained in the first 15 verses. And he starts off with a title, The Beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It's a verbless title, and right away he launches into two Old Testament quotations. He cites Malachi chapter 3, and Isaiah 40.

You'll notice there in the slide that there's a textual variant there. If you have a modern version, you probably see that it says Isaiah rather than the prophets, which we could see how that might cause some confusion, because actually the first quotation comes from Malachi, and the second one comes from Isaiah. But it's a very simple answer when you consider the place of Isaiah among the prophets. It stands at the head, just as the Psalms stand at the head of the writing.

So, if somebody wanted to refer to the prophets, they would often just refer to it as Isaiah. So, as you look at this message here, there is something that stands out that is in common between the two texts. And that is, Prepare Thy Way. And that is the mission of the prophet named John the Baptist. His mission is to prepare the way for Isaiah, or for Jesus, sorry. So, the question comes, how do you do this?

What is the way that one would accomplish this? And we read this in Mark's Gospel. John did baptize in the wilderness and preached the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins, and there went out unto him all the land of Judea and they of Jerusalem, and were all baptized of him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins, and John was clothed with camel's hair, and with a girdle of skin about his loins, and he did eat locusts and wild honey.

It's quite a ministry description. So, here's a prophet whose assignment is to call Israel to repentance. We're talking here national repentance. Certainly, individual repentance is necessary for national repentance to occur. But, we're really looking at the entire nation falling to their knees, repenting of their sin, and confessing that Jesus is the Messiah. That is the mission of John the Baptist.

And it's interesting when you think about this, and about this plan, you know, you can just kind of imagine, you know, God speaking, I imagine that he spoke to John and said, okay, this is what I want you to do. First of all, I want you to have a suit made out of camel's hair, and that's what you're going to wear from here on out. Really? I got to wear a suit? That's like putting on that pink insulation and wrapping it around your body.

I mean, it's going to be itchy the rest of my life, and it's probably got fleas and so forth. So, he's got to wear this like really weird clothing, but not only that, his diet is, I think this is the keto diet. He's going to have to eat locusts and get stung by bees, because that's what happens when you go and you try to get wild honey. So, he's going to really live an ascetic life, and we see that later on, right?

You know, that the followers of Jesus live, you know, they're accused of being gluttons because they're being compared to John's disciples. So, that doesn't sound too exciting, but the plan's not over yet. You've got to go live in the wilderness. You don't get to go to the towns.

You don't get to go to the cities. You're going to go where there are no people dressed like this crazy person, eating crazy food, sleeping out in the wilderness where there are lions and who knows what, and that's your ministry, and the nation is going to come to you. That is just a crazy plan. So, when we think about that and the things that God asks us to do, we really should never question why, right?

Because it actually did work. People did come from every direction, and they came, and many, many individuals repented. But let me kind of summarize this. Here we have, according to Jesus, the second greatest human being who ever lived, right? Doesn't Jesus say that? The second greatest human being who ever lived is going to live in the wilderness, be all alone, eat insects, and get stung by bees, and his job is to call the whole nation to repent, lower class, middle class, upper class, governors, even the tetrarchs, the individuals who inherited the kingdom from Herod the Great, and that is the plan. So, now think about this in terms of what he's not going to do in life as a result of his calling. He's not going to college. He's not going to seminary. He's not going to get married. He's not going to raise children.

He's not going to buy a house, or even rent one for that matter. And actually, in terms of fulfilling his calling, he's not going to succeed, because, I mean, he succeeds in what God wants him to do, but as far as the nation repenting, they don't. Individuals repent, but as epitomized in the religious leadership of Israel, they do not repent. And, in fact, he's rejected in the end to the extent that he is executed as a criminal.

He is beheaded, but so was his Lord. And so were probably most, if not all, of the apostles. So it's interesting, as I look at Mark, and I see Mark cite Isaiah 6 verses 9 through 10, this passage is paradigmatic of Israel's rejection. All of the Gospel writers cite Isaiah 6, this passage. This was the calling of Isaiah, of course. So, just as in Isaiah's day, the nation rejected the Lord, so they did in the life of Jesus, and Paul even quotes this in Acts chapter 20, 28.

So, national repentance did not take place. But also, a final point, and that is that he wasn't going to live very long. John the Baptist's life was going to be brief. His ministry extended maybe two years, and as soon as John the Baptist was arrested, that signaled really the beginning of the preaching ministry of the Lord Jesus. Another function of John the Baptist is he's tasked formally with introducing the Messiah to Israel. Jesus is baptized by John to validate John's ministry of baptism, and to call the people to repentance.

So that was, of course, the most important aspect of his ministry, and it tied together with his mission to call the people of Israel to repentance. So, as we're reading through the first 15 verses of Mark's Gospel, we come to this very strange clause in verse 14. Now, after that, John was put in prison. And when we read that, and you know the story, but when we read that, if we're the original reader of Mark's Gospel, we think to ourselves, wow, what happened? Here he had this ministry, he's calling the people to repentance, seems like things are going fairly well, and now we find out that Mark has been placed in prison. And Mark doesn't give us any hint of why he was arrested, what supposed crime did he commit, where did they take him, who's responsible for his arrest, there's just all kind of questions that go through the reader's mind, but this technique that Mark uses here creates suspense. We want to know the answer, and Mark makes us wait six chapters before he answers those questions, and we find out.

But I need to give you a little bit more background material, if you will bear with me here. There are two overarching concerns in the Gospel of Mark. The first concern relates to who is Jesus. And Jesus was the long-awaited for Messiah, the Son of God, and it was necessary for him as the Son of God to die a sacrificial death for the people.

So Mark can be neatly divided into two segments related to those two main points. Mark 1 through chapter 8, verse 30, which establishes Jesus as the Son of God, and Mark 8, 31 through chapter 16, it was necessary for him to die. The climax of Mark's Gospel occurs in the crucifixion chapter, but in particular and oddly with this Roman centurion, a pagan who watched Jesus die and said, surely this man was the Son of God.

Out of all the individuals in this Gospel, he is the only one who recognizes how those two things come together. The disciples themselves do not recognize how these two things come together until after the resurrection. If indeed Mark writes to churches in Rome, this makes this statement all the more startling. How could God's people, the Jews, totally miss the message? So Mark writes to prove that Jesus is the Son of God or deity and that he came to redeem Israel and Gentiles through his sacrificial death.

But Mark has another concern, and that is the preparation of the Twelve. And as we read through Mark and we're introduced to these Twelve men who would be entrusted with this crucial task of taking the message of Jesus throughout the entire world that they knew of at that time, it was the task of Jesus to select these individuals and to teach them and to test them and to get them ready for this task over a three-year period of time. These individuals on the whole had no formal education. As far as we know, they did not sit at the feet of Gamaliel or any other rabbi.

These individuals never left Palestine. They were monocultural. These men were mostly from common or low occupations, and yet Jesus chose them.

That is a phenomenal thing to think about. And when you think about the requirements of the Great Commission, which was to take the Gospel and to press out into every known place where people lived to share the Gospel with them, that's quite a thought that these untrained, unprepared disciples would have. But the day would come when they would be expected to walk, to ride on donkeys and camels, to take voyages on the sea, and these ordinary men who had never left Palestine were supposed to leave home, enter new cultures, and boldly tell people who Jesus is. Jesus told them that they'd be rejected, they would be mocked, and they would be treated as the off-scouring of the earth. They would be beaten and killed for bringing this message. But they didn't need to fear because he was going to be with them.

It sounds like an amazing plan. But Mark's portrait of the Twelve is not favorable. Compared with the other Gospel writers, Mark portrays the disciples as failures. He shows us that they don't understand the most basic truths. Their understanding was so elementary that Jesus had to explain everything to them. Mark 4, verses 33 through 34.

And even then, they still couldn't understand the things that he was saying. Mark illustrates this problem by describing what happened when Jesus put the disciples in a life-threatening situation in Mark 4, 35 through 41. A huge storm threatens to sink their ship, and they accuse Jesus of not caring. They have no faith that Jesus can fix the problem in verse 40, even though they've seen him do hundreds of miracles up to that point in time. So Jesus calms the storm, and the disciples learn one more thing that Jesus can do, and then they quickly forget that. In other episodes, they see him raise the dead, multiply bread and fish, heal the blind, make paralytics walk, not to mention provide for their every need every single day. But the next time they find themselves in a crisis without Jesus in the boat, in a storm, they have no faith again. And the one who promised to always be there for them, Mark 6, verses 45 through 52. Mark says at the conclusion of that episode that their hearts were hardened, just like Pharaoh. It almost seems like the disciples misunderstand everything that Jesus says. So Jesus comments, are you so dull?

How would you like a teacher to say that to you? Do you still not understand? Are your hearts hardened? And then do you still not understand again in chapter 8? So I think we've noticed that the discipleship plan of Jesus is filled with encouragement and rebuke. Jesus deliberately put the disciples in situations where they had to respond, good or bad. We might be encouraged with Peter's amazing confession in Mark 8, 27 through 30, but then when Jesus teaches his disciples about the crux of his mission, Peter rebukes the Lord and Jesus retorts, get thee behind me, Satan. In fact, on three occasions in Mark's Gospel, Jesus instructs the disciples about his death. In each instance, it's followed by a major failure of the disciples and then a teaching about true discipleship. In the second prediction, the Mark 9 passage, James and John want to sit on his right side and his left side in the kingdom. And in Matthew's Gospel, Mom gets involved. But Mark puts the blame squarely on James and John. They want to be bigwigs in the kingdom.

They want to rule and they want to be important. At the hour of Jesus' death, following the betrayal of Judas, the eleven forsake Jesus and run away, Mark 14. Peter, the leader of the disciples, is unwilling to stand for Jesus as he observes the Lord being mocked, being beaten.

He can't even speak the truth in front of a little girl. Are these the men who would change the world? Are these the men who are going to stand before kings? Rather, no one stands with Jesus and he goes to the cross as a solitary figure. So it would appear that plan A, training twelve disciples, sending them out, is not working. But we know the story and we know that Christ resurrects and the Holy Spirit comes upon the disciples and they change. They become different people. So you might wonder about this point again. So what does this have to do with Mark's theme and the training of the twelve?

Let me point out two correlations in Mark. We look at the preaching of John the Baptist. What's his message? Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand. What's the message of Jesus? Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand. What's the message of the disciples?

Repent, when they are sent out. So Mark is trying to help us to see that the message is the same. The responsibility of preaching the message is the same.

But there is also a second correlation and that is when you do, you will be rejected. So we see the rejection of Jesus in chapter six verses one through six. We see the rejection of the twelve, chapter six verses seven through thirteen. And we see the rejection of John the Baptist epitomized in his execution. So this is the execution passage. And it's hard to fathom that a birthday party would lead to the death day of John the Baptist. And certainly that happens because Herod and his guests are pleased by the dancing of a daughter who is part of an illegal marriage.

And so she pleases them and her mom, Herodias, makes one request because of the foolish oath of Herod. And so John the Baptist is executed through the process, the ultimate rejection. So in Mark's gospel we see the sandwich structure.

Sorry about that picture. It's got bacon and everything. So Mark uses sandwich structure often to help you because when you have the part A and then you have the part B in between the A and the A prime, Mark intends us to read those things together and to be informed through those things together. So when we look at this passage in Mark chapter six, we see the sending out of the twelve to preach and Jesus tries to prepare them for rejection. Then we see an embedded passage, an embedded story, the beheading of John the Baptist, the ultimate rejection.

Then we come back and we finish the story of the twelve when they come back in return. So what's the message here? Well, it is that the servant of the Lord will experience rejection. And surely if you are going to serve the Lord and you are going to faithfully share Christ and try to reach people, try to help people, you will experience rejection as a servant of the Lord. Now we know that the world will reject us, but I want to challenge you about that too.

That maybe you are going to get a job at Starbucks at some point for instance. So you enter this job and you want to get to know your co-workers and you want to be liked. You want to be friendly with them, but you also want to share the gospel with them. And so as you do that, sometimes it is easy to slide into kind of a post-modern way of sharing the gospel.

I will just kind of share my message and you kind of share your message and we are all kind of right. Sometimes we walk away from those encounters and wonder if we really did give the truth. It is quite a temptation for us to fall into that. Because if we come in conflict with someone else's views, it is likely you will not be liked. We have to resist that temptation. But also you and I will experience rejection with people in our churches.

People that we love, that we invest our lives in, who we care for. We will experience rejection. If you serve long enough, you will know the pain of someone in your church who attacks your wife. And says some things about your wife. Or someone who says something about your children. Or some kind of harmful, personal attack on you as an individual. And you love people that love you, but it is difficult to love people who reject you.

So we need to prepare ourselves. This message to Mark's audience who live in Rome is they rejected Jesus. They rejected John the Baptist. They are going to reject you. It is going to happen. And you need to be strong in the Lord. You have been listening to Dr. Neal Cushman. This concludes our four part series on New Testament Servants. Join us again tomorrow on The Daily Platform.