Luke 3:1-22

Scripture Introduction:

A few weeks ago we read Luke 1:76

Luke 1:76 ESV

And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways,

John the Baptist likely knew from a young age that he was to be the guy who goes before THE GUY. His ministry was going to be one of pointing. In some ways he is the picture of the role of every one of us—we point to Jesus and His kingdom. But there’s a special quality to John’s ministry. He’s supposed to pave the way. He’s supposed to get things prepared for the coming King. So I have a question for you…if this was your job how would you accomplish it? How would you pave the way? How do you get people ready for Jesus....can you get people ready for Jesus…?

What we have in our text this morning is the answer to that question for John…listen to his answer:

Luke 3:1–20 ESV

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the wilderness. And he went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. As it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet, “The voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall become straight, and the rough places shall become level ways, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’ ” He said therefore to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits in keeping with repentance. And do not begin 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. 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.” And the crowds asked him, “What then shall we do?” And he answered them, “Whoever has two tunics is to share with him who has none, and whoever has food is to do likewise.” Tax collectors also came to be baptized and said to him, “Teacher, what shall we do?” And he said to them, “Collect no more than you are authorized to do.” Soldiers also asked him, “And we, what shall we do?” And he said to them, “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or by false accusation, and be content with your wages.” As the people were in expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Christ, John answered them all, saying, “I baptize you with water, but he who is mightier than I is coming, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” So with many other exhortations he preached good news to the people. But Herod the tetrarch, who had been reproved by him for Herodias, his brother’s wife, and for all the evil things that Herod had done, added this to them all, that he locked up John in prison.

Sermon Introduction:

John called people into the wilderness. Now when I hear the word “wilderness” I have a tendency to think of trees, and bears, and forest. What doesn’t come to my mind is the desert. But for those in biblical times the wilderness and the desert were synonyms. The wilderness was an empty, abandoned, wasteland.

Now why in the world does the guy who is tasked with getting people ready for Jesus go out into the wilderness?

In the Scriptures the wilderness served two purposes. On one hand the wilderness is the place you do not want to go. It is referred to in Deuteronomy as the “great and terrifying wilderness” full of “fiery serpents and scorpions” and “thirsty ground where there was no water”. Not only does it simply stink to be in the wilderness because of your environment, the wilderness is also spiritually bankrupt. This is the place where the Israelite people would wander around for 40 years. It is often thought of as a place where demons dwell. In the world of the Bible, the wilderness is the place where one is stripped to a place of emptiness.

That doesn’t sound very fun, does it? Nobody likes to be taken to that spot where you are brought to nothing. Where you feel exposed. Empty. Broken.

But we can see the necessity of this in preparing for Jesus. The wilderness is a great place for preparation. Which is why as the OT story got closer to NT times the wilderness became a place of hope.

It became a place where God reveals Himself. It became a place where God’s provision is seen more clearly. The wilderness was a place of hope, of new beginnings. It is here in the wilderness that Israel will find God’s love for them and rekindle her own love for God.

So around the time of Jesus you saw many people living in the desert hoping for God’s rescue. It was widely held Jewish belief during this time that salvation would be found in the desert. Prophets like Ezekiel and Hosea foretold such a thing. So it’s not surprising that John starts here.

Luke 3 begins with some historical notes. But all these names aren’t here only to give us a date. If Luke wanted to do that he could have just mentioned the fifteenth year of Tiberius’ reign and we would have been all good. He is doing something else here.

There’s one big question over this sermon. It’s, I believe what was driving John’s preparatory ministry....how do you make way for Jesus? Well, you create an atmosphere where we are pressed by this question....Do you want Christ and His Kingdom or not?

And I believe this question is going to be asked from a couple different angles....or two sub-questions. “Does the kingdom come from a wilderness Word OR from the rulers and authorities? How is the kingdom going to come about? Who is going to bring it about?”

Secondly, Does the kingdom come about by outward performance or inner heart change? As we look at these questions in detail we’ll be introduced to one faulty response in Herod…and then we’re going to see how this question is calling for a response in our lives.

So that’s the BIG question for us to be asking our hearts this morning…do you want the kingdom of God or NOT? Do you want the kingdom of Christ?

This is why Luke mentions all those names there in the first two verses. Because he is setting the real gospel into a real historical situation. Every single one of the people mentioned in this text is going to have to make a decision about Jesus. A few of these figures are going to reappear in the gospel story.

So the gospel isn’t just breaking into history—it’s actually going to be calling for a response from these leaders.

But they are here to ask that question, “does the kingdom come from a wilderness WORD or from the rulers and authorities”?

The date here is somewhere around AD 28-29, likely. These are Roman rulers. These are Jewish leaders. These are the movers and shakers in the Jewish world in AD 28-29. But there is a bit of irony here. All these influential people are mentioned and then it says...

“the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the wilderness.”

As it has been said the word of God appears AMONG the powerful and prestigious, but not TO them. All those other guys have names and titles and come from important places. Not John. John lives in a place with no name—in the wilderness.

If you entered into some random Thursday morning in 28AD Jerusalem you’d have heard stories similar to ours today. The same type of hopes. The same type of temptations. They’d be talking about all these guys with important names and titles from the really important places.

And we care about those things because we know that their policies tend to have at least some bearing on our every day life. The policy that Pilate enacts would impact my own home. The high priests are going to be very much connected to our own relationship with God. Will they lead us well? Will they usher us into a better experience of God and His kingdom?

But nobody was talking about John....until everybody was. It was creating a stir. And why? Because the word of the Lord came to John. And so that’s a fitting question for us. Where are we going to set our hopes? What are we going to look to for rescue? For answers? What is the real mover and shaker in our life? Is it the word of God? Is that what we’re waiting on?

That’s what really matters is hearing God’s Word. And the message…from God…through John…to the crowds is a message of repentance FOR the forgiveness of sins.

Now if we aren’t reading this carefully we could get tripped up on verse 3. Notice how it says that John was proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. That could certainly sound as if Mark is saying that when people underwent this baptism of repentance then their sins were forgiven. But if we understand a bit more of what is taking place here then we’ll see that this is not teaching that the act of this baptism is what saves you.

For one thing, John’s baptism is not the same thing as Christian baptism. The closest thing to John’s baptism was the ritual cleansing by immersion that a Gentile would undergo upon becoming a Jewish proselyte. If you were a Gentile (that means non-Jew) who wanted to become a God-fearing Jew then you would undergo certain rituals as initiation into the people of God. These ritual cleansings were one of them. And so what John is doing here is calling people into a type of initiatory baptism which indicated the beginning of their new commitment. What was astounding is that this was something that John was calling Jewish people to do. What preceded this baptism then was repentance—a desire to begin a new commitment to the Lord.

In the gospel of Mark it says that the people who were being baptized were “confessing their sins.” So this baptism is repentance symbolized.

But what is repentance?

Repentance, simply put is turning away from sin. This is one of the primary things that happens in the wilderness. The wilderness leads us to a breaking point—a place where we are broken of our self-righteousness. God has to show us the emptiness of all that we trust in and live our lives for—so that we might desire true treasure. And so if you find yourself in the wilderness it could be that God is calling you to repentance.

Why is this necessary for preparing the way for the good news of Jesus? Why is this wilderness and repentance necessary?

Well imagine with me that I’ve got my hands full with groceries. If some guy on the street offers me $100, what do I have to do in order to grab that cash? I can’t hold both at the same time. I’ve got to drop the groceries right? In the same way a commitment to a life of sin is incompatible with commitment to life in Christ. You can’t have both.

And so what God does in the wilderness is break us of our suicidal quest to cling to the world. And he lovingly does this so that we have open hands to cling to the true treasure—Jesus Christ. This is why John is calling the people to repentance. He is announcing that this time of hope is here. But in order to be part of this repentance must come first. Turning from sin, forsaking sin, and agreeing with God about sin.

So the wilderness is meant to get us to look at our sin and our condition before God. It’s to lay us bare. But that’s not all. Ultimately the wilderness aims to make sin bitter so that Christ will be sweet. Can you imagine what balm this is when Christ does come and say, “Come ye sinners…poor and needy…weak and wounded sick and sore...” Can you imagine what balm?

But this word from John is doing something else too. Look at that quotes from Isaiah 40 in verses 4-6. That was a huge promise that God made…we looked at this quite a few weeks ago. It’s God calling the people into renewal. The time of difficulty is over…he’s crying in the wilderness the king is coming..and we see the mountains leveled, the crooked roads are made straight…all of this to say we’re making it to where the Lord can come quickly!

So let’s think about this for just a second. It’s true that God is able to level any mountain, overcome any hill, get through any sin, etc. Nothing will stand in the way of God’s desire to rescue us....BUT…If I really want to see God’s kingdom come…if I really want to have relationship…wouldn’t I want to clear a path. Would I want to make it easier for my love to get to me?

I can’t wait for you to come home and give me a hug. But the door is locked, if you get through that there are tacks on the floor, another barricade, and if you get through all this there’s a tiger that you’ve got to face. I’m starting to feel as if maybe you don’t actually want that hug. In the same way if I say, “I really want to see God’s kingdom come into my life. I want to have a thriving relationship with the Lord.” BUT we put up barricades of anger, lust, apathy, distraction, addictions, etc....I’m not sure we really WANT to see God’s kingdom come.

I know it’s a little more complex than this. We aren’t simple people. We are complex. It’s possible to really true desire the Lord but to have your heart so addicted or messed up or hurt or traumatized or stuck....it’s possible to be in such a conflicting state. So don’t overhear what I’m saying. But don’t under-hear it either. Repentance IS a reflection of our hearts desire. Remember what we just heard in the gospel of Luke....that Jesus is going to reveal what is in the heart of people. Well the ministry of John the Baptist is doing the same thing.

Repentance is saying I don’t want this thing because I want Jesus more. It’s saying I believe the kingdom comes through Christ—he is who I desire—His is the kingdom that has the answer to all my heart’s questions. It’s what happens when you’ve been out in the wilderness and you’ve seen the emptiness of all these other things, when you’ve been stripped to nothing, and somehow you hear that gospel call---”I still want you...” When the gospel does that work and you start to see hope....that’s what this repentance is.

But there’s a fake type of repentance…a religious repentance…and that’s the second big question we see.

Is the kingdom going to to come through outward performance or inner heart change?

You know you can get a bunch of snakes to get moving if you light a fire around them. They start to feel the heat and they’re going to move away from it. That’s the picture here from John the Baptist.

It’s such a crazy picture. All these people are coming to him and he says…who told you snakes to repent? What an amazing thing! If you held a special service and you had hundreds and hundreds of people come and say they wanted to be baptized would you respond like this? Wouldn’t you just be excited, baptize them, count those numbers and call it a movement of God?

But John doesn’t do that. Because he is concerned that the kingdom isn’t just something you do by outward show but it’s real honest heart change.

I think Tim Keller does a great job of showing the difference between religious repentance and gospel repentance:

In ‘religion’ the purpose of repentance is basically to keep God happy so he will continue to bless you and answer your prayers. This means that ‘religious repentance’ is a) selfish, b) self-righteous, c) and bitter all the way to the bottom. But in the gospel the purpose of repentance is to repeatedly tap into the joy of our union with Christ in order to weaken our need to do anything contrary to God’s heart.

We know that we’re in the right spot here because of what John the Baptist says next. After telling them to “bear fruits in keeping with repentance” he says, “don’t begin to say to yourselves, “we have Abraham as our father”. That’s John’s way of saying, “oh, don’t you even start....” What he’s talking about here is their propensity to believe they were born into a right standing with God. “I’ve always believed. I’ve always been a Christian. I’ve always identified this way.” But he’s saying no you aren’t children of God, children of Abraham by birth. It’s by responding to God’s gracious initiative.

Then he says that God is able to raise up sons for Abraham out of stones. What’s interesting in Luke

The Gospel according to Luke Luke 3:7–9

Abraham is mentioned fifteen times in the Third Gospel, playing an especially important role as the father of the family of salvation. Especially included in Abraham’s family are hurting people and outcasts: a woman afflicted for eighteen years is called a “daughter of Abraham” (13:16); Lazarus sits in the lap of father Abraham (16:24); and Zacchaeus, a tax collector, is called a “son of Abraham” (19:9).

The children of Abraham aren’t those by birth. It’s those who respond to God’s grace. And when that happens…change happens. This is what he means when he says “bear fruits in keeping with repentance.” This means bear fruit that’s connected with your heart change.

Jesus is going to use this same language later in Luke. A good tree doesn’t bear bad fruit, a bad tree doesn’t bear bad fruit. You’ve got to get to the source. And this is what John is saying. You can’t just fake it. There’s a beautiful illustration of this from Paul Tripp.

If you’ve got an apple tree in your yard and year after year it keeps producing nothing but rotten apples and your wife says, “why can’t you do something about that apple tree” the solution isn’t to grab a staple gun, branch cutters, and a bushel of apples and start stapling them to the tree.

It’ll look shiny and good from a distance perhaps. But you haven’t fixed a thing. As Tripp says,

“If a tree produces bad apples year after year, there is something drastically wrong with its system, down to its very roots. I won’t solve the problem by stapling new apples onto the branches. They also will rot because they are not attached to a life-giving root system. And next spring, I will have the same problem again. I will not see a new crop of healthy apples because my solution has not gone to the heart of the problem. If the tree’s roots remain unchanged, it will never produce good apples."

He goes on to say “change that ignores the heart will seldom transform the life. For a while, it may seem like the real thing, but it will prove temporary and cosmetic.”

The crowd then says to John the Baptist…what shall we do? And he starts talking about ethical responses. These are things that you do whenever real heart change has occured. Now we’d be wrong here to read this and think that what it really means to repent is to donate your clothes, don’t cheat people in your business, or don’t be a bully. That’s just being a good chap.

No John says these things because this for them would be fruit consistent with their repentance. It’s not just an outward show. It’s real heart change.

The people begin wondering if this prophet out in the wilderness might be the Messiah. And John does what every one of us is called to do…he points to Jesus. He’s the answer to the wilderness. He’s the answer to the emptiness. He is the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire. He’s the consuming one. He’s the one the story is all about.

I want to turn back to Keller because as he expounds upon religious repentance that is “bitter all the way to the bottom” he beautifully points to Christ.

Last, religious repentance is “bitter all the way down.” In religion our only hope is to live a good enough life for God to bless us. Therefore every instance of sin and repentance is traumatic, unnatural, and horribly threatening. Only under great duress does a religious person admit they have sinned-because their only hope is their moral goodness. But in the gospel the knowledge of our acceptance in Christ makes it easier to admit we are flawed (because we know we won’t be cast off if we confess the true depths of our sinfulness.) Our hope is in Christ’s righteousness, not our own-so it is not so traumatic to admit our weaknesses and lapses. In religion we repent less and less often. But the more accepted and loved in the gospel we feel the more and more often we will be repenting. And though of course there is always some bitterness in any repentance, in the gospel there is ultimately a sweetness. This creates a radical new dynamic for personal growth. The more you see your own flaws and sins, the more precious, electrifying, and amazing God’s grace appears to you. But on the other hand, the more aware you are of God’s grace and acceptance in Christ, the more you able you are to drop your denials and self-defenses and admit the true dimensions of your sin. The sin under all other sins is a lack of joy in Christ.

So as we wrap this up I want to point out two more things. Notice verse 19-20. This is one response to a wilderness messenger. A guy who says, “you need to get at the root of this thing. You need to see those idols topple. You need real change. You need stuff that YOU can’t do. You need to stop faking it. You need to stop pretending. You need the real thing.” Herod’s response is one…and a frequent response to this. “Kill the messenger. Stamp out that message.”

Why? Because it’s easier to fake it. It’s easier to pretend like we don’t need real deep down heart change. It’s easier to keep things going as they are. It’s easier to just keep the religious feel good system going…Herod would have been fine with that. Herod was fine with religiosity. Herod even built them a temple…a beautiful temple. But he couldn’t bear to hear the Word of God. He couldn’t handle the real thing and so he wanted to get John shut down.

Hell won’t lift a finger to fight you from religiosity. If you want to get more religious you won’t have a fight. Coming to church. Even casting out demons, performing miracles, sharing the gospel…but what you’ll see all the forces of hell come against is actual real heart change. Gospel work. The real stuff. The real encounter with Jesus stuff. That’s going to have all the forces of hell against it.

I want to close by putting our focus on verse 18. “With many exhortations he preached good news to the people”. How has this been good news? Doesn’t this sound like bad news?

Well…only if I want to continue in my sin. Only if I want to keep faking it. But if I’m at the end of my rope, and I’m saying I want deliverance, I want change, I want a Deliverer. I want to turn from all this. Well then this is incredibly good news. Because it’s calling us on our facade. It’s calling us into the deepest parts of our heart…the deepest place of our being…and Jesus is saying, “I still want you.”

"The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope". --Tim Keller

So who wants the real thing? Who wants to fake it?