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May 7, 2023
Matthew 3:1-17 & Luke 2:41-52

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The Title of the Sermon is “Jesus’ and John the Baptist’s Ministry Validated”

OUTLINE
1 Jesus increased in wisdom.
2 John the Baptist’s ministry validated.
3 God’s approval for His Son.

In Luke 2:52 we see, "And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man."

• How did Jesus, being the all-knowing God, increase in wisdom?
• Jesus emptied Himself, so that He could increase in wisdom.
• Philippians 2:5-8 Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
• James 5:17, Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth.
• Dogmatic, orthodox theology is Christ is fully God and was fully man.

We tend to discount the fully man part because of the miracles He did.

• We need to remember a few things to help us to understand that Jesus placed Himself as a fully human man on the earth.
• Verses
• 1 John 5:13-15, I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life. And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.
• John 14:12, “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father."

So we need to remember:

• Firstly, God has always done miracles through His people; God will continue to do miracles through His people.
• We have to be in tune with God for the miraculous.
• Jesus promised we would do greater things than Him.
• How? Jesus’ time was limited.
• God does the miraculous.
• We are fully His children.
• God’s miraculous power is still available to His children.
• The trouble is we often live and stay in our compound of our predicable human lives.

Turn back to Matthew 3

• Chapter two of Matthew closes with Jesus as a child. Chapter three opens when Jesus is most likely 30 years old (around 26 AD).
• What happened in the interim?
• Jesus grew up in a devout home.
• “Jesus was fulfilling the duties of an eldest son. It seems most likely that Joseph died before the [children] had grown up” (Barclay). >>
• Joseph is not mentioned in Jesus’ adult years, and the Apostle John took Jesus’ mother into his home after Jesus’ death after being instructed by Jesus to do so (John 19:25-29). >>
• Jesus did not trust His mother with His brothers as He neared His death, perhaps because of where His brothers were spiritually at the time,
• So it would seem that as an adult Jesus became a craft person in and around the area of Nazareth to support his mother and His four younger half-brothers and His half-sisters (cf. Matthew 13:55-56). It is very possible that He learned some of these skills from Joseph His step-father.

APPLICATION

• Jesus is the example for all young people to follow.
• He grew in a balanced way and grew in stature with God and men (Luke 2:52).
• If someone grows in stature before Christian men then he has put away the childish and embraced the things of both manhood and God.
• He knew how to listen and learn and how to ask the right questions.
• He worked and was obedient to His parents.
• All of this as the “Jewish religion was at an all-time low.” Israel was governed by the Gentile Romans, “and society was in a state of fear and change.” (Wiersbe, p 2:145 f)

Image being a Jew, growing up are hearing all the things God has done and said in the community of God’s people, then asking, “What has God said lately?” And your mother replies, "God has not spoken through His prophets for 400 years. (cf. Barclay)

• That is the exact scene in which God raises up John the Baptist.
• Verse 3:1 In those days John the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness of Judea, 2 “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” 3 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.’”

Who was John the Baptist?

• First, I want to say that, I still read commentators, smart people, who think that John the Baptist didn’t understand Jesus’ ministry until Jesus’ baptism. This is false and I find this utterly baffling.
• Jesus was related to John. Their mothers knew exactly what each of their sons were to each other. Elizabeth knew that Mary was pregnant with Israel’s Messiah. Mary knew that Elizabeth was pregnant with a great man of God. (Luke 1)
• Did Jesus and John not know these things? Yes they did.
• John the Baptist was saved in a unique way: he was born again in the womb of his mother (cf. Luke 1:15).
• John ministry was due east of Jerusalem, just above the Dead Sea.
• And John’s voice was chosen by God to pave the way for Messiah’s ministry.
• It was a common practice in the first century for forerunners to make ready towns and people for important individuals’ visits. “For example, when a king would visit a town in his realm, his emissaries would go before him to announce his visit.” They would also sure that the towns to be visited were in good condition.[250, Walvoord, p. 29]. “John not only prepared the way for Jesus, but he also announced Him as an important person and implied His royalty” (Constable).
• But again, the emergence of John the Baptist brought in the sudden prophetic voice that the nation had missed.
• God chose John to bring a message of repentance to the capital city of Israel to prepare them for the contract change for humanking.
• The most important person was about to arrive into His ministry and God wanted them ready.
• What is repentance?
  • OT repentance = turning from sin.
  • NT repentance = changing your mind with actions to follow.
  • John’s message, verse 2, “Repent for the kingdom of God is at hand.”
  • There are many, many views on this sentence.³
  • I think scholars are guilty of tripping over their own feet at times and come up with unnessesary, complicated answers for things.
  • I would say first, The kingdom of God is always at hand. >>
  • Everyone is one honest sentence was from the kingdom. Today it is, “Jesus save me a sinner.”
  • Also, the fuller kingdom of God is always at hand in regard to God’s plans. Each saved person is their generation away from experieincing God’s kingdom physically.
  • Furthermore, the kingdom of heaven is only possible --for all people-- only through Jesus’ death and resurrection, which was three years or so away from this John the Baptist’s announcement.

Matthew though it important to record for his audience that John lived a separated life, a type of monastery lifestyle, a monastic lifestyle. Verse 4.

• 4 Now John wore a garment of camel’s hair and a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. 5 Then Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region about the Jordan were going out to him, 6 and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. 7 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? 8 Bear fruit in keeping with repentance. 9 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. 10 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.

• John came teaching and preaching.

  • In his dress, food choices, demeanor and message, “John associated himself with the poor and the prophets—particularly Elijah (cf. 2 Kings 1:8; Zech. 13:4; Mal. 4:5). … Elijah had called the Israelites back to God at the time of their most serious apostasy. John called them back to God on the eve of their greatest opportunity.” (Constable)
  • And many people responded to John’s message because they believed that he was a genuine prophet with an important message from God. >> (cf. Constable)
  • John’s preaching was heeded by many of the people in the region as well.
  • Confessing sins … this continues to be the way we initially “get right” with God, but it also is the way we keep our relationships healthy. Confession is a key religious action throughout the Church age (cf. 1 John 1:9).

• John came baptizing.

  • We see John performing baptisms of course. But when did the practice start?
  • Baptism = transliteration of the Greek word baptizō = VERY COMMON WORD WITH MANY DEFINITIONS. To be immersion or to wash or a ritual cleansing later other Christian meanings were added by context (e.g. baptized with fire).
  • The history of baptism. Washing for worship on Mt. Sinai … mikvah …

• Deffinbaugh wrote:

• If Jesus were to preach at a football stadium in Dallas, Texas, who would you expect to introduce Him? I can assure you that John the Baptist would not be at the top of the list. Indeed, I doubt that John would have been on the list at all. In a sense, one could say that John’s mission in life was to introduce Jesus as God’s promised Messiah, the hope of all the ages. But who would have ever thought that God would have chosen a man like John the Baptist for this task? To say that John was “unique” would be an understatement. He was a “wilderness man,” a man who from childhood had lived “in the wilderness until the day he was revealed to Israel” (Luke 1:80).66 He wore clothing made of camel’s hair and ate locusts and wild honey (Matthew 3:4). His message was not polished, but blunt and to the point. Rather than receiving all who would come, he verbally attacked some of those in his audience. And yet this was the man whom God had chosen to introduce His Son, the Messiah.
  ^{(Robert L. (Bob) Deffinbaugh; https://bible.org/seriespage/4-john-baptist-and-jesus-matthew-31-17)}

We see the ones John attacked in verse Verse 7.

• Matthew’s first reference to the Pharisees which means “separate ones” and Sadducees which means “righteous ones” (Constable, cf. Thayer). John was very antagonistic toward them because be discerned them to be hypocrites.
• Where did the Sadducees and the Phaisees come from?
• Both groups developed during the 400 years of silence between the Testaments.
• The Pharisees were initially called the “Chasidim” (meaning saints) and they strived to keep the people reverent towards the Law who were returning from the Babylonian captivity. “This movement degenerated into the Pharisaism of our Lord’s day.” They developed thousands of commentary on commands and expoundings on the Law and they placed their writtings on par with the Law as well “(cp. Mt. 15:2-3; Mk. 7:8-13; Gal. 1:14).”[287, The New Scofield …, p. 995]
• The Sadducees were an odd religious, Jewish sect. They not only denied the existence of angels and other spirits but also all miracles and especially the resurrection of the body. “They were the religious rationalists of the time (Mk. 12:18-23; Acts 23:8), and were strongly entrenched in the Sanhedrin and priesthood (Acts 4:1-2; 5:17).” The Sadducees were identified with no doctrine of their own, but were nay-sayers and “deniers of the supernatural.”[287, The New Scofield …, p. 995].
• John’s rebuke of this group of Pharisees and Sadducees is telling: he starts by calling them vipers! >>
• John was not a people pleaser.
• The importance of their appearance here in our passage has to do with the fact that John is the forerunner of Jesus. So the attitude that John takes toward the leaders “is predictive of the attitude that Jesus will assume toward them.” [289, Kingsbury, p. 117.]](https://www.planobiblechapel.org/tcon/notes/html/nt/matthew/matthew.htm#_ftn289)
• John didn’t mince words. He told them that they were a part of the coming wrath of God as they listen to him.
• Their problems was two-fold:
  • 1 They had no fruit.
    • Sure they looked religious. They sure they sounded religious, but they had no fruit.
    • John’s message: bear fruit in keeping with repentance.
    • They were confident in the presumptions of their testimonies.
    • And John warned them, “If [they were] not fit for fruit, they are fit for fuel.”[295, Henry, p. 1212]
  • 2 They believed they were naturally born into a privileged state before God due to they ancestry to Abraham.
    • Paul continually addressed the same theological deficiencies as well.
    • This was a huge hang up for the Jews. They would say, “I am born a Jew therefore I am good with God.”
    • Paul said it best in Roman 9:6b, “For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel.”
• John knew this, so they were commanded to bear fruit that lined up with repentance.
  • Everything they were thinking, saying, and doing was not acceptable before God.
• We know from the accounts of the Gospels that the leaders were self-righteous.
• They, therefore, faced not only rebuke from John the Baptist, but especially throughout Jesus’ ministry as well.
• John was the first to start their sobering warnings.

APPLICATION

• False ideas for salvation:
  • My family ties.
  • My family’s religion.
• Fruit is a must.
  • John 15:1 “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. 2 Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. 3 Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you. 4 Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. 5 I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. 6 If anyone does not abide in me he is thrown away like a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.
• Fruit. The fruit of the Spirit.
• All people entering heaven will have some fruit.
• Fruit is the changed lives of others possible through the work of God in us in sanctification.

11 “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. 12 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.”

• John had the lesser ministry. > Water for repentance.
• John had perspective: he was not worth to carry Jesus’ shoes.
  • The rabbis teachers taught that, even a Jewish slaves shouldn’t loosen “another person’s sandal.” For it was beneath their "dignity."⁴ So by John saying he was unworthy to carry Jesus’ sandals, “John meant that he was unworthy of even the most humiliating service of Jesus” (Constable).
  • That’s perspective!
  • We remember our standing apart from God’s work from Psalm 8:4, “what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?”
  • God served man even though the truth remains; we are not worthy to carry God’s shoes. But He loves us.
• John foretold that Messiah would baptize the people of faith with the Holy Spirit and fire.
• And what John also made clear is that Messiah will divide people into two groups.
  • Wheat and chaff. COMMENT
  • The wheat of God, the saved people of faith were to be baptized with the Spirit.
  • This of course being the shift at Pentecost.
  • The Holy Spirit came post-resurrection to dwell in His people forever.
  • AND EVERY BELIEVER HAS THE SPIRIT BAPTISM.
  • Romans 8:9, You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him.
• John said they would also have a fire baptism.
  • NOTE: I tend to remain flexible in these interpretations where we are not sure of the author’s intent. There are many possible interpretations here but I will note only two:
  • 1 possible answer is that when the people were baptized with the Spirit, what appeared to be tongues of fire came on the people at Pentecost.
  • 2 Another possible interpretation is that one group gets the Holy Spirit and the other group gets judgment for their sin. This looks more likely to me because of the immediate context.
  • As Jesus ministry is starting, God is already placing new prophecy in the mouths of his prophets concerning the last days and judgments.
  • John also described God separating the true people of faith from the pretenders, the repentant and the unrepentant, in a future judgment. So the barn probably refers to the kingdom, and the unquenchable fire to the agonizing nature of punishment for unbelievers. (Constable)

13 Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to John, to be baptized by him. 14 John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” 15 But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. 16 And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him; 17 and behold, a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

• Monotheism vs. Modalism. The latter is disproved here.
• Jesus didn’t need to be baptized, but was to place a stamp of approval on John’s ministry.
• Let it be so now, for this is fitting to fulfill all righteousness.
• Jesus created John. Jesus sent John with a message. Yet, Jesus submitted to John’s baptism for this was the proper message for the people to see.
• Toussaint said it best, “The King, because of His baptism, is now bound up with His subjects.”[312, Toussaint_, Behold the …_, p. 73. Cf. McGee, 4:20.]
• Jesus’ life with what I always say is what our focus should be: making the next right decision. John’s baptism was just that.
• There is always a bebefit to obediance. >>
• After Jesus’ baptism we see a message from heaven.
  • “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”
  • The heavens were opened.
  • The Holy Spirit came down in the form of a dove.
  • We see here The Trinity at work in the world.
• God is still working in the world. The question we need is, are we producing fruit?

Notes

¹ From Constable: Tracy L. Howard, “The Use of Hosea 11:1 in Matthew 2:15: An Alternative Solution,” Bibliotheca Sacra 143:572 (October-December 1986):325. This article evaluated several other proposed solutions to this difficult citation. See also G. K. Beale, “The Use of Hosea 11:1 in Matthew 2:15: One More Time,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 55:4 (December 2012):697-715.

² There highways were know by various names. The Coastal Highway (also known as the Way of the Sea) along the coast, Road of the Patriarchs along the mountainous ridge line through Israel, and the Rift Valley Road that ran from the Dead Sea to the Sea of Galilee. Sourced from Satellite Bible Atlas’ YouTube channel (https://youtu.be/DH4PC9BBkLE?t=84).

³ See Constable’s sources and comments on vv. 3:1-2.

⁴ Contable cited The rabbinic writing Mekilta de Rabbi Ishmael, Nezikin 1 on Exod. 21:2, cited by Darrell L. Bock, Jesus according to Scripture: Restoring the Portrait from the Gospels. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House; and Leicester, England: Apollos, 2002., p. 83.

Works Cited

Scripture quotations [unless otherwise noted] are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Click here to access the works cited web-page for this document, save those marked as “Notes” or “Other Works Cited”–if any. Most of these cited works correspond to the verses they are outlined with. In the case of general background information and references, one will find cited material with the Bible books the citations are associated with. ¶ Furthermore, there may be numbered notes that are URL linked; these are usually retained numbered notes from Thomas Constable’s, “Dr. Constable’s Expository (Bible Study) Notes.” These links are preserved “as is” at the time of this work’s formation and sometimes include other citation information from Constable.

Other Works Cited

Blomberg, Craig L. Matthew. New American Commentary, vol. 22, ed. David S. Dockery, et al., Broadman Press, 1992. Sourced from archive.org.
(https://archive.org/details/matthew0000blom)

________. Preaching the Parables: From Responsible Interpretation to Powerful Proclamation. Baker Academic, 2004. Sourced from archive.org.
(https://archive.org/details/preachingparable0000blom/page/82/mode/2up)

Bradley, Marshell C. Matthew: Poet, Historian, Dialectician. Studies in Biblical Literature, ed. Hemchand Gossai, vol. 103, Peter Lang, 2007.

Evans, Craig A. The Bible Knowledge Background Commentary: Matthew-Luke. Victor, 2003. Sourced from archive.org.
(https://archive.org/details/bibleknowledgeba00crai/mode/2up)

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