No. 405  |  May 19, 2013   DC RealTalk   Catechism   STUDY   The Church   Cover   Christian Living   The Ministry   Zion   Donate

We refer to him as John The Baptist but he is more accurately described as The Prophet John. This is what he was—a prophet, the last one sent by God before the end of the Dispensation Of The Law.  He stood at the precipice between Law and Grace. His ministry represents the end of an age, the changing of a channel. John baptized Jesus, a wholly symbolic gesture as Jesus had no sin to renounce. Jesus' baptism was an act of obedience to God. The act, marked by John's exclamation, Ecce Agnus Dei! (Behold the Lamb of God) marked the end of John's ministry and the beginning of Christ's. John is one of the most unique and yet most overlooked characters in the bible. Yet, without him, none of Christ's ministry on Earth would have been possible.

The last prophet sent by God

before the end of the old age was a man named John. An odd character, John, the son of respected Levitical priest and prophet Zechariah, spent most of his time in the desert wilderness surrounding Judea and Galilee. His father was favored in God's eyes, Luke describing both Zachariah and his wife Elisabeth as being found "blameless" in observing the commandments and ordinances of the Lord. Zachariah had important duties in the temple, and John himself was of the High Priest lineage, entitled by birthright to take his seat among the ruling councils of the religious hierarchy. He could easily have followed in his father’s footsteps, living a life of relative safety and comfort, taking a portion of the temple offerings for himself, marrying and raising a family. John could have been a typical church pastor. Dental coverage and 401k. Joining the ranks of so many other church pastors in the relative safety of conservative religious practice. Making no waves. Taking no chances. Instead, John rejected his father’s profession, possibly joining with a group of extremist evangelical Jews known as the Essenes. The radical Essenes sect at Qumran placed great emphasis on purity and purifying rites, and they may have used baptism as part of their conversion ritual, initiating Gentiles into their community. John The Baptist may have been raised among the Qumran Essenes, baptizing Gentiles into the Jewish faith.

John lived his life in the wilderness surrounding Judea, dressed in clothes sewn from camel hair and eating grasshoppers and honey. Today, he would look like a homeless man. Emaciated, stinky, dirty, unshaven; a wild man out in the weeds. The fool on the hill. John spent his days proclaiming that the end of the old order was near, and that the Kingdom of God was soon to come which, as things turned out, it was. We refer to him as John The Baptist but he is more accurately described as The Prophet John. This is what he was—a prophet, thee last one sent by God before the end of the Dispensation Of The Law. The resurrection of Jesus Christ ushered in the Novus Ordo Seclorum— the New Order of The Age— kind of like a new television season, switching channels from the condemnation of the dispensation (time period) of the Law to this new thing, the Dispensation of Grace. You and I exist now in the tail end of that new dispensation, a time period which is by all evidence drawing to a close. The Law was about crime and punishment. Grace is about mercy and forgiveness. The following dispensation will be about judgment, our period of amnesty and clemency coming to a turbulent end.

In those times, the Jewish religious order behaved in many ways like today’s Church Folk. They were immersed in religiosity, in their own sense of self-righteousness and entitlement. They'd built an insular society comprised of their own laws and customs, even while subsisting within the powerful, vast, pagan Roman Empire. Jews were permitted a certain level of autonomy but were still answerable to the state. The Roman politics of the day seemed to be an official policy of pacification: allow the Church Folk to practice their religion but don’t allow them to arm themselves or amass any real political power. This is why, when the Jewish leaders needed to violate their own Law in order to perform a political lynching of the man Jesus, they turned to the state. The could not kill Jesus, a citizen of Rome, on their own without defiling themselves or risking punishment through the Roman legal system. Not that these guys cared about defiling themselves—they did that every day—but that they were concerned about how things look than how things actually are. They're more concerned about appearing holy than actually living holy. Appearance, to the Jewish leadership, was everything. They needed the state—the Romans—to condemn Jesus so they could claim bloodless hands. The Jews, who’d normally have not much to do with the Romans, violated their own Law by taking their internal religious disagreement with the man Jesus to a worldly court. This is what our churches do today—claim Christ but sue each other in worldly courts, violating our own covenants at will and turning to the world for “justice.” [I Cor. 6]

John The Baptist was of minimal concern to the Jewish leadership. If anything, I imagine they were grateful Zechariah’s son had, apparently, lost his mind and would rather spend his days shouting at passing caravan traffic than to take his rightful place among them. He posed no threat to them, none to the state. Let him do whatever he wants. But, something strange happened: John began to draw a crowd. Not only were caravans stopping, gathering to hear John’s preaching, but people within the surrounding towns, Church Folk these Jewish leaders allegedly ministered to, were beginning to travel out of town to hear John as well.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that, in the bible days, traveling outside of your town was a risky thing to do. The few roads winding through the Galilean wilderness were often populated by thieves, called Highwaymen, who would routinely attack travelers, robbing, raping and killing them. For protection, people tended to travel in groups, the larger the better. A commitment to journey out of town, presumably taking a day off from work and requiring virtually your whole family to travel with you, to hear some crazy itinerant preacher suggested John’s preaching was so anointed, so powerfully different from the religion most of these people, most of us, had been settling for for years.

With the crowds building, John was now becoming a threat. If John was preaching some radical new religion, was converting people to the idea that the Messiah’s arrival was imminent, that message undermined the teaching of the Jewish leaders. What they really cared about was the potential for John to amass political power, turning these folks away from them, and putting their fat paychecks at risk. Even worse, John’s preaching could be received as an act of sedition against the Roman state, which had allowed these religious fat cats to operate relatively unharrassed. John was an uncompromising man of faith. He pulled no punches and he didn’t play politics with the Word of God. He didn’t condemn sin over here and soft-pedal it over there. To John, sin was sin, and he spoke truth to power, something few of us can do.

Even worse, he was right. People hate people who are right.

The Road Less Traveled:: Too many "ministers" just want to be seen on Sunday morning.
People truly called of God will follow wherever He leads, even if that is no place at all.

An Imperfect Ending

There are, to my experience, two kinds of people: those who say they are anointed and led of God and those who actually are anointed and led of God. Here’s the difference: people who say they are anointed and led spend an awful lot of time whining about not being asked to preach enough and fighting to be seen and heard. People who actually are called of God just get up in the morning and do things people don’t understand. They act, for then most part, anonymously. They are humble and broken. They do not seek recognition, money or power. Church Folk are usually aware, on some level, of what these people do but see only a part of it, Like icebergs, the great, vast majority of what truly anointed people do remains unseen, unnoticed, unrewarded; hidden well beneath the surface.

The folks with the opera—and I’ve been guilty of opera myself—are more invested in self than in what God told them to do. The folks sitting, year after year, under some pastor, some bishop, some husband, some wife, some cousin, waiting for permission to do what God has ordained them to do, are like the trash-talker. He’s not interested in a fight. He’s a showman. A clown. A guy who wants to fight you doesn’t come out in the street and start hollering, putting on a show, trash-talking. Most guys who do that are trying to work their nerve up or are really not that invested in trying to fight you. A guy who wants to fight you just comes up and punches you in the face. No commentary. No opera.

The religious leaders of the day sent a delegation to go meet John out in the weeds. The leaders did not go themselves but did what Church Folk do: assembled a committee. This council of bishops, in our parlance, sent a group of pastors out to meet John: find out what was going on, and report back. John was out there, on his own, unsupervised, stirring up mess. Turning heads and preaching some new “Good News,” none of which the council cared about. What they were concerned about was John was drawing a crowd, a crowd of people that kept these guys in power. They saw these people not as souls but as numbers. Fake pastors are always more concerned about numbers, obsessed with math. Head count equals power. And they wanted to know exactly what this nut in the camel suit was saying to "their" folk.

The Jewish leaders violated their own Law by sending this committee. By lineage and birthright, John was a powerful priest. He was also a prophet, though the leadership never considered him such. It was against custom and a violation of protocol for these high priests to send their guys out to meet John. You don’t send a bunch of sergeants to reprimand a general. It was an insult to John’s royal priesthood to send these guys in the first place, and the Sanhedrin (the Jewish religious leaders) knew that. But they didn’t want to be seen meeting with John (obsessed about how things look) because that would give John that much more credibility.

So, they sent their committee to go visit John, to try and shut John down. Here are the orders from the head office. And this is where things got interesting. This week, check out Luke 1-8 and Mark Chapter 6.

Christopher J. Priest
5 June 2011
editor@praisenet.org
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Next: Chapter Two: The Reasons Why