John the Baptist: Sanhedrin Satisfied

After making sure John the Baptist didn’t have any illusions of self- importance, the Sanhedrin delegation considered their job done. They didn’t really want to know who the Messiah was.

John knew who he was and who he wasn’t.

He wasn’t somebody important with a reputation and a power base to protect. He was God’s servant, called to make everyone ready for the Messiah, for God Himself.

John didn’t have any illusions about his importance. I had to ask myself, how humble of a position am I willing to take in order to show my devotion to Jesus?
*Would I serve an enemy?
*Would I allow myself to be wronged and extend kindness and forgiveness instead of what I have a right to, or defending myself?

Because of his confidence in God and his humility, John couldn’t be intimidated, and he wasn’t worried about being embarrassed. Instead he was bold and spoke the simple truth.

If you are a believer, how well do you know who you are in Christ? How deeply do you identify with being God’s child, a free person, profoundly alive, filled with God’s Spirit? How deeply do you identify with being God’s servant, commissioned by Him to tell the people around you about Messiah?

Knowing who you are makes you ready to talk about who Jesus is

An honest life story that highlights God’s glory will draw attention to God, and not to myself. You and I are not the final authorities on spiritual things, we are witnesses to the final authority, Jesus Christ. We aren’t the light, we reflect the light and point to the source, Jesus.

How often do you and I make sure that God gets the honor He should have in the stories we tell about our lives?

In what ways have you and I arranged our lives to point to the goodness of God, to the forgiveness of Jesus?

In fact how often do you and I say we are seeing Jesus when we see Him?

How much confidence do you have in the reality of Jesus to pray with confidence for someone who doesn’t believe in Him, or to talk about Jesus’ part in your life stories?

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John the Baptist: Sanhedrin's Real Question

John the Baptist gave the Sanhedrin delegation the best credentials anyone could have, God’s word,

John answered in the words of the prophet Isaiah, "I am only someone shouting in the desert, `Get the road ready for the Lord!' "

He told them that all he was, was a voice. They shouldn’t be trying to figure him out, they should be looking to where he was pointing.

John looked like a prophet, he lived like a prophet and acted like a prophet. But the most important thing about John was that he was willing to say what a prophet says. A complete witness is not just how you and I live our lives. Yes, that’s important. But a complete witness has to have a voice, and courage to use it. Courage to say the hard things at the right time. How often do you and I have the courage to actually talk about Jesus?

Now we find out what’s really been bothering the Sanhedrin, and especially the Pharisees. The Pharisees were a very elite group of Jews who were sticklers for not just God’s Law but also the Mishnah, the Jewish laws added to God’s law. They saw themselves as being in the inner circle with God, as the experts and keepers of the law. If John the Baptist was a nobody, then ~

5) What’s going on with this unauthorized baptizing? John’s reply must have created quite a buzz. He was not a bit intimidated by all these officials. He was totally unconcerned with his lack of credentials, or the unorthodox use of baptism.

John told them, "I use water to baptize people. But here with you is someone you don't know. Even though I came first, I am not good enough to untie his sandals."

Someone I am too unworthy to even be the slave of is standing right here in the crowd.

Here was the Baptist going toe-to-toe with an official delegation from the Sanhedrin. Thousands of people, including his own disciples, were standing on their tip-toes taking it all in. And then John announces this. Can you picture chills going up and down thousands of people’s spines? Can you imagine thousands of people craning their necks and asking, Who is it, Who is it??

Did you wonder why none of that delegation asked John to point the Messiah out?

This more than anything reveals their real motives. They had not come with the attitude that maybe God was at work, but rather with a sense of being offended that John was disrupting their religious practices and interfering with their authority. For this scruffy desert preacher to imply that they, the Bible and religion experts, didn’t know about the Messiah being right there was just a little too much for their pride and sense of dignity.

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John the Baptist: Sanhedrin Inquiry

As John grew up, he grew strong in the Spirit. At some point John moved out into the desert and sort of dropped out of sight.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, John reappeared, now a grown man, rugged, dressed in a camel’s hair and leather, eating only wild honey and locusts, and preaching what we’d call hell, fire and brimstone sermons. His big message was that everyone was a sinner, even good Jews were sinners, and they needed to repent and get ready for the Messiah Who was coming very soon.

As an outward sign of their repentance John was baptizing people in the River Jordan – baptizing everybody Greeks, Roman soldiers and even Jews alike. That Jews were willing to do this is downright amazing, because no prophet or religious leader had ever done this. Before only people trying to become Jews went through baptism. But John was saying nobody was right with God, not even Jews.

This made him a very controversial figure and people came by the thousands, out to the desert to hear him preach and to get baptized because a great spiritual hunger during that time; they wanted to know God. It was also politically a very turbulent time, and the whole known world was expecting a Messiah. Not just the Jews. Everyone expected a great leader to emerge, who would be bigger than life, maybe supernatural

So the Sanhedrin, the Jewish religious leaders, sent a delegation to investigate John and his unorthodox baptism activity. These men were priests, who came from the extended family of the high priest, and other representatives from the tribe of Levi, who were also temple workers, and were Bible experts.

1) Who do you think you are? John was very forthright about not being the Messiah. Messiah means “the anointed one,” the king from David’s line who would be the everlasting king of Israel.

2) Are you Elijah? They knew that Elijah had not died, (2 Kings 2:11), and they believed Elijah was going to come back one day and announce, at the end of the Ages, that the anointed one, the Messiah, was coming.

John was very like Elijah, he dressed like him, he appeared suddenly, he was rustic like Elijah, having a similar lifestyle and preaching style, and he was full of the Holy Spirit; powerful. But he said no because it was not, literally, Elijah.

When the angel told Zechariah, John’s father, that he and his wife, an elderly and childless couple, were going to have this miracle baby, the angel said that John would come in the spirit and power of Elijah and prepare the way of the Lord.

Later, Jesus also said that John had come in the spirit of Elijah to announce the suffering Messiah – instead of the conquering Messiah King. One day Elijah will come and announce Jesus’ second coming as conquering King, but this was not that time.

3) Are you the Prophet? There was some confusion about Moses’ prophecy, whether he meant the Messiah, or some other great prophet, so the delegation was covering all their bases. John’s answer was very simple: “no.” The delegation was on the wrong track by pursuing John as anything special.

4) So who are you then? They wanted John to make a stand, religiously and politically. What did he stand for? Was he for or against The Sanhedrin and its interests? What authority did he think he had to run this big religious operation, as they saw it, in competition with the official religious authorities? They saw him as a threat to their establishment.

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John the Baptist: Sanhedrin Delegation

As John was preaching repentance in the desert, and symbolically washing people clean by baptizing them in the River Jordan, a bunch of Pharisees and Sadducees got into line for their turn to be baptized.

The Pharisees were the traditionalists, the conservative religious leaders of their day. The wealthy Sadducees were the liberals; they controlled the temple businesses that Jesus later cleaned out.

When John saw them, this is what he said:

You bunch of snakes! Who warned you to run from the coming judgment? Do something to show that you have really given up your sins. And don't start telling yourselves that you belong to Abraham's family. I tell you that God can turn these stones into children for Abraham. An ax is ready to cut the trees down at their roots. Any tree that doesn't produce good fruit will be chopped down and thrown into a fire.

Does that bother you to hear John speaking so forcefully to his religious leaders, those who were considered to be in spiritual authority over him?

I mean, after all, these were all the priests and ministers and seminary guys, they were supposed to be the spiritual giants, with deep spiritual responsibilities. They were important religious leaders who had made time to come clear out to the desert to meet with John. But God had given John a prophet’s discernment to see the truth about these men.

John’s message was a call to self-judgement. He urged the people to take sides with God against themselves.

But the Pharisees and Sadducees held that being descended from Abraham made them exempt from John’s call to repent. They thought they were already good enough to please God.

As The Message puts it, “Do you think a little water on your snake skins is going to make any difference? It's your life that must change, not your skin! And don't think you can pull rank by claiming Abraham as father. Being a descendant of Abraham is neither here nor there. Descendants of Abraham are a dime a dozen. What counts is your life. Is it green and blossoming? Because if it's deadwood, it goes on the fire.”

They didn’t have any sense of their own sinfulness, and they were offended by the very idea that they might need something more than their own righteousness, which they had worked very hard at to achieve.

They considered themselves faultless in their ability to keep all the rules they had written about how to obey God’s law. To suggest they might need to repent, that they were undeserving of God’s favor, was an affront to them.

Their intent was to tuck baptism under their belt for just in case, just to make sure they had dotted all their “i’s” and crossed all their “t’s” in terms of religious observance.

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