Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the leaders notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. Dr. Rutland is a world renowned leadership expert. He is a New York Times best selling author and he has served as the president of two universities. The Leaders Notebook is brought to you by Global Servants. For more information about Global Servants, please Visit our website, globalservants.org Here is your host, Dr. Mark Rutland.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: Now let's talk about John the Baptist. If you have your Bibles, take those if you will, and turn to the book of Luke. Luke, the second chapter.
And it came to pass that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was the governor of Syria. And all went to be taxed, everyone to his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee out of the city of Nazareth unto Judea under the city of David, which is called Bethlehem. And because it was of the house and lineage of David to be taxed with Mary, his espoused wife, who was great with child. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you and praise you for your goodness and your mercy us ward and for your prophetic truth.
We thank you for it and we believe you for it. In Jesus name, the strong Son of God. Amen.
The magnificence and beauty and sensitivity and wonder of the Christmas story is so lovely in every way and so engaging. The angelic presence, the beauty of the newborn, the angels singing, the shepherds coming, the wise men, that sometimes we can forget the story that went right before it.
And that story was the story of John the Baptist, the book of Genesis that begins with this hopeful verse. In the beginning, God created the heavens and earth ends in a coffin in Egypt.
The Old Testament itself that begins with the creative power of God, God speaking light into existence.
The entire Old Testament ends the earth with a curse.
From the end of the Old Testament, from the end of the the book of Malachi, there is about a 400 or 500 year gap, a silence, if you will.
And in that, in that silence there is a huge transition in turmoil among the Jewish people. Indeed, go back 500 years before that.
From the death of Solomon, the thousand years until the coming of Christ, that millennium.
There's the fall of the. There's the division of the nation of Israel into the northern kingdom of Israel, the southern kingdom of Judah. There's the Babylonian captivity, there's the Assyrian captivity, there's the return, there's the rebuilding of the temple, there's the stories of Nehemiah and all of that Ezra, it all happens in that millennium between the end of Solomon's unified kingdom and the return basically to Israel, which then kind of settles in under the Roman domination. The Roman Empire now having replaced the Babylonians and the Assyrians and the Greeks, the Roman Empire becomes the preeminent geopolitical reality of the Mediterranean Basin. Indeed, the extended world from, from what is now England all the way to Egypt and to Mesopotamia and, and all the way in the Levant.
Israel, modern Israel, everything is under Roman domination.
And during that period of time, the, the Romans.
The Romans don't want war.
If you want war, they'll give it to you, but they don't want war. What they want is peaceful world domination and collect the taxes.
That's what they really want. So they're willing for these little countries to have their own kings.
It's just that they get to choose who's king.
And that king has to show absolute loyalty to Rome.
So the king, so called, of Israel with this kind of quasi nationhood. It is Israel, but it's a, it's a subject state of the Roman Empire.
And there is a, a Roman civil servant who is positioned, who's positioned there. He's called a procurator, and that's the real military power.
But there is also.
Israel has always had kings, so they want him to have a king.
So there is an Edumian or we might say Edomite, an Edomite family that the grandfather in this family has converted to Judaism. He's not technically a Jew. There's some intermarriage, Jewish wives here and there. But this Edomite family called the Herods become very connected to the power in Rome.
Indeed, Herod himself becomes close, intimate friends with two emperors.
And he is appointed by Rome as the king of Israel.
He is tolerated because of one big thing that he does.
He rebuilds the temple in order to curry favor with the Jewish people, who on the other hand, yes, we want the temple. Yes, we need a king. Yes, yes, yes. But on the other hand, they hated him and despised him. He's incredibly cruel, a vicious king, a psychopath.
Caesar said one time, it is safer to be Herod's pig than to be his, a family member.
The implication being that if you Herod's pig, he might or might not eat you because he's claiming to be Jewish. But, but if you're in his family, he is. He's a mass murderer of family members.
And this, this Herod family, Herod the Great and then Herod Antipas. This, this Herod family are the dominant local authorities under the Dominion of the Roman Empire and under the watchful eye of a series of Roman procurators.
And so it's a, it's a tension that, that happens in the middle of all that.
There is a small town in the hills. The Bible doesn't tell us the name of the town.
It just says a small village in the hill country of Judea.
However, we do know it must be fairly close to Jerusalem because the man who lives there, a man named Zechariah, is also a priest. And he has to go to Jerusalem and do his work, his duty when it's his turn in the temple. So it'll be fairly close. So many people today speculate that the village is Anarim and it is still there and still near. It is in the greater Jerusalem area.
So he is married to a woman named Elizabeth. They're elderly and she is barren.
How many, how many stories in the Bible think connect to an issue of God supernaturally correcting barrenness in order to further his will and purpose?
So Zechariah is in the temple, and it's his responsibility to light and burn incense.
And the angel Gabriel appears to him and says, your. Your wife is going to have a baby. Now, I just want you to pause a moment. Let's talk about the angel Gabriel, just briefly. I don't want to spend a lot of time, but there are only two angels, or archangels, if you will, that are mentioned in the Bible. Michael, who tends to be more of a militant angel.
Michael is more associated with the sword.
And Gabriel, who is more associated with messages. He seems to be the. The archangel that God sends to send huge messages, messages of. Of tremendous importance.
So Gabriel appears to Zechariah in the temple and says to him, your wife is going to have a baby.
Now, this may seem like splitting hairs, but his answer irritates the angel. And let me just say something to you, that's not something you want to do.
We, we think of angels as the, you know, golden haired, effeminate creatures that hang on Christmas trees.
That is 100% not a biblical view of an angel. Every appearance of an angel in the Bible, the first thing they say to all the people is, first, fear not.
So he says to Zechariah, fear not, your wife is going to have a baby. And Zechariah says, how can I know this is true?
And the angel says, I am Gabriel, who stands in the presence of God, and I have come to you with an, with a message from God.
And therefore, until the baby is born, you will be mute.
You will not be able to speak. You said the wrong thing. So now you don't get to say anything.
So just to show you something, the same angel appears six months later to Mary in Nazareth and says to her, you're going to have a baby.
And she doesn't say, how can I know this is true?
She says, how can this be possible?
I'm a virgin.
So that's a reasonable answer to the angel, how can you do it? He says, with God, all things are possible.
She doesn't doubt the message. She just doesn't understand how it can be accomplished.
Zechariah says, how do I know you're telling me the truth?
And the angel says, try this.
So he comes out and by making motions, it.
I don't mean to make light of it, but it says by the hand motions that he makes, they realize he saw an angel. And I would like to.
I would like to know what that was, you know, sounds like you know.
So indeed, nine months later, the baby is born. Now, the angel tells Zechariah the baby is to be named John.
So evidently, somehow he also communicates that to his wife, Elizabeth. So when the baby is born, they say, you're going to name it Zechariah?
And she says, no, his name is John. Well, they're horrified because it's not as ironclad in contemporary Western culture, but in ancient Jewish culture, you named the kid for his father or his grandfather, but it was. It was a family name. David ben David. David, the son of David. It was you. You wanted to. So to say, John. Who's John?
But they rushed to.
To Zachariah. And this is the second.
Maybe I don't think this is supposed to be funny, but it tickles me. It says they make motions to him, asking him what the baby should be born. But it seems to me, he says, I'm not deaf. I'm mute.
Why are they making motions to him? He can hear, he just can't speak. It just. The passage is just an odd passage. They make motions to him. What do you want to name the baby?
And he writes, John. And immediately he can speak again.
Now that.
That's the beginning of the story of John the Baptist.
And we know nothing else about him until.
Except one thing I'm going to come back to. We know nothing else about his childhood, I should say, until he appears as a prophet.
John Baptist stands as a biblical colossus of Rhodes because he has one foot squarely in the Old Testament.
What is the purpose and function of an Old Testament prophet to Speak to the coming of Messiah. Messiah is coming.
So he says that make straight the way of the Lord. Prepare ye the way of the Lord. Messiah is coming.
But on the other hand, he has a foot squarely in the New Testament because that message ceases midstream. The first of his message is all, messiah is coming. Messiah's coming. Repent, Turn from your sins. Get ready for Messiah. But suddenly, one day, as he's baptizing in the Jordan river, that message stops. There's an end to that message. He never says it again.
He says, he points at Jesus in the bank of the river and he says, behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world.
Behold the lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world.
And the whole message of John changes. He's here.
This is he. One standeth among you whom you know not. And he now is. Now is immediate. Now he's not saying messiah is coming. He's saying, messiah is here.
Now let's talk a little bit about John's character and nature. I've told you in each of these, I want to talk some about the person themselves.
So first of all, there's no getting around the eccentricity of John Baptist.
He comes in out of the desert dressed like a hermit. He's wearing a leather coat and belt. He's living on things that he can find in the desert. And, and he's. He's kind of a wild man, kind. Comes out of nowhere out of the desert.
All we know is he went off into the desert and encountered God and came out with a word, Messiah is coming.
And he is. He is an eccentric. Now here's this needs to be said.
It was pure.
God sent, God wrought. God caused eccentricity. It looked eccentric to the people around him because he didn't look like them. It was not manufactured.
He wasn't trying. He didn't say to himself, if I'm. If they're going to believe me, I need to put on my prophet costume.
So therefore, I just want to say this word of caution.
Those who think to imitate John the Baptist by imitating the way he dressed, you know, I'll just put on sandals and a leather coat and a belt and carry a staff and everything, and I'll. I'll look like an authentic prophet. They just look like neurotic imitations.
John's an original, and he is in the stream of that prophetic authority, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, that did exactly what God told them to do and didn't care what anybody else thought about how they looked.
And that is. That is John Baptist.
What electrifies his message.
There's no explanation for it except the, the pure, unalloyed anointing of God.
It's a guy, he doesn't have a band.
He, he doesn't, he doesn't have a.
He didn't have a show, nothing.
He just preaches. Turn away from your sins. Messiah is coming.
And somehow, by the power of God, it, it just shoots through the nation until the coming of Jesus.
For going back 400 years from the end of Malachi, he is the preeminent spiritual reality of Jewish history for a period of four to 500 years.
And he is hugely known in his own day. It's not that we celebrate him now in retrospect.
The whole nation was talking about John the Baptist, and it basically says people went out there. It doesn't say in the, in the numbers, but there must have been thousands. It says people from all over Judea, all over Israel, and even from Jerusalem. They went where, where? Out into the desert to, to the bank of the Jordan river. And they're being baptized. And he is.
Jesus was what I would call I, I when I teach preaching. Jesus is what I would call an illustrative preacher. He gives illustrations. There once was a man that had two sons. There once was a woman that lost a coin.
John the Baptist has no time for that.
He's.
He's what I would call an application preacher.
He says, repent. Let me show you how you soldiers quit extorting money from people. You, you politicians quit taking money that you don't deserve. Oh, God, send that message.
And so he. He simply says getting ready for Messiah is, is your number one responsibility. He's coming. He's coming right now. And this is how you do it. Repent of your sin. Clean up. Now, what about baptism itself?
Because this, there's a lot of discussion about it. Now I'm going to tell you where eye lineup.
I do not think that this is a variation on the Jewish ritual of mikvah.
Mikva has some similarity to baptism. Both of them happen in water.
But mikva is a ceremonial thing. It has. Has nothing to do with repentance of sin. It's not for changing your life and getting ready for Messiah. It has to do with different things for women, has to do with the menstrual cycle and things like that. But it's cleansing by water.
This is a different thing.
This is baptism for repentance of sin. I repent. I'm through. I'm finished. With that. And he. He baptizes them in the Jordan river and the people stream down here to hear what he has to say.
He's not. He's not fancy, he's not tidy, he's not.
He's not particularly clever. His message is. His message is not a scalpel. It's blunt force trauma.
And he. And he doesn't care who he offends.
So Herod has taken his sister in law and his own sister in law as his wife and is living with her as husband and wife.
And in his own subtle way, John the Baptist preaches against him publicly.
This is not a tactic designed to engender love from kings and politicians.
So he denounces him and makes no bones about it. It's a sin. He said, this is sin. And you, you can't have it.
He is bold, he's practical.
He is a prophet in the Old Testament sense getting ready for Messiah. He's totally unconcerned with creature comfort or with the opinions of others.
He is absorbed with his message and his ministry. Totally.
He has no siblings, he has no family. I think by this time almost certainly Zechariah and Elizabeth are dead. They were quite old when he was born.
He has one thing. His life is about one thing. His prophetic calling.
Nothing else matters to him now.
He himself had been prophesied.
So Isaiah, Malachi had prophesied, there will come someone who will preach repentance, call people back to God and to each other. Restorations of families, restoration of people to God. And he will be a voice crying in the wilderness.
He'll be the one. So John Baptist himself is prophesied hundreds of years, hundreds of years before he comes. He is prophesied. And we know that this is who he is because it says some will. Someone will come in the spirit of Elijah.
So later on, the disciples of Jesus say to Jesus, we thought Elijah would come before Messiah came. What about Elijah? And Jesus says Elijah came.
So he's not the reincarnation of Elijah. We don't believe in reincarnation. He is the visitation of the anointed minute prophetic ministry of Elijah. He is the Elijah in a figure, if you will, a prophetic anointing. So he has been prophesied about.
He is a prophet of the coming of Messiah. And he is the first person to clearly enunciate. This is he.
Now the second thing is this our third or fourth. I have no, no idea where I am.
The next number is that he re.
He reimages the Messianic mission.
So he, he states the mission of Messiah in a way that it has, has not really clearly been done before.
So think when he announces, behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world, he announces him, he is going to be our paschal lamb. He's going to be the sacrifice.
I want you to think for a moment how that must have felt to Jesus.
That language is not obscure. It may be to us somewhat, but to a first century Jew that language is not obscure. That's the sacrificial lamb that will be slain, killed for the sins of the people.
So when he points into Jesus face and he says, behold the Lamb of God, think how that must have felt to Jesus.
He so he's understanding the Messianic mission as a mission of redemptive sacrifice.
This was not the prevailing notion of Messiah at the time of, of John the Baptist and Jesus. The prevailing notion of Messiah was, was that he would come like a kind of a 1st century Moshe Dayan with a patch over his eye, standing up in the turret of a Sherman tank and that he was going to blow the Romans out of the water and reestablish the Davidic dynasty.
They saw Messiah as a liberator, a re. Establisher of Israeli power.
And he says, no, he's, he's not going to lead us. He's going to die for us.
The second thing is John, in his next declaration about Jesus, hearkens back to a verse of Scripture which is.
It's one of the prophets, it's a prophet of Joel. I'm not saying people didn't know it or quote it or that the rabbis didn't study it or believe it, but it, it kind of laid on the clipping room floor of, of Judaic theology because it didn't make any sense.
It just, they, they just couldn't understand it. They could read the words.
But is this after the coming of the just one, Joel says he will pour out his spirit upon all flesh.
Upon all flesh. No, that, that's not right.
He pours out his spirit on kings and warriors and heroes and judges.
Not everybody.
But as though Joel wants to even make that cleaner. He says women too.
That doesn't sound shocking to us, but you have to, you have to hear what I'm telling you. In a synagogue 500 years before Jesus, God's going to give the Holy Spirit to women just like he does to men.
No, we don't know what that means, but it can't mean. That must be some kind of a prophetic statement.
But he says, no, that's not all to young people, just like to old people.
Boys and girls are going to prophesy.
And so everybody knew that.
But then he goes further. He says, even the servants in your household, those servants would almost certainly not be Jews. It would be Gentiles.
So Joel said it. It's there, yes.
Nobody knows what it means.
But John the Baptist says, another cometh after me, the latchet of whose shoes I'm not worthy to loose.
And I indeed baptize you with water, but he shall baptize you with fire and with the Holy Ghost.
So he re images the messianic mission as the sacrificial lamb having been raised from the dead, who is our baptizer with the sanctifying fire of the Holy Spirit.
Indeed, what we believe to be true about the. The ministry of Jesus of Nazareth in our lives personally was stated by an eccentric prophet waist deep in the Jordan river before he ever saw.
Before he ever saw the fulfillment of the prophet of the prophetic ministry of Christ is an astonishing man, an astonishing man who saw something that nobody else, nobody else in his generation saw.
Not one other person. There's no other prophetic voice. There hasn't been a prophetic voice since the death of Malachi.
He is a singular person in his generation, the last of the Old Testament prophets and the first to declare this is the Messiah.
Now they are related.
Jesus and John Baptist are related.
While Elizabeth is pregnant with John the Baptist, the angel Gabriel also appears to Mary in another town, tells her Elizabeth is pregnant. Go there. And there is this fantastic interaction between Elizabeth and Zechariah, between Mary and Elizabeth, we have this interaction. I won't go through all that.
But one wonders, it is not recorded.
She must have stayed with her some time.
Wouldn't you love to have heard the conversation between the woman that's carrying John the Baptist and the woman who's carrying the Son of God? Wouldn't you like to have had breakfast with those two women?
What did they talk about?
One part of that encounter is recorded when Mary calls out, elizabeth, are you home?
It's your cousin Mary.
And Elizabeth says, the baby jumped in my womb at your voice.
So there is even in his mother's womb the impartation of the prophetic ability to identify Messiah.
So I said to you, when he says to Jesus on the bank of the Jordan river, there's. There is the Lamb of God.
He's identifying that we have no indication that they ever meet again, that they ever meet after both of them were born. We have no indication that they only met womb to womb.
That's the only indication we have. But there is upon John this wonderful ability to recognize Jesus.
If you want to pray for something, you want to ask God for something in your own life, ask God for the anointing to see Jesus in whatever is going on.
I think so often we live our lives wanting Jesus to enter.
I'm, I'm broke, I'm sick, I'm hurting, I'm sad, whatever it is, can you come and help me? But if we can see Jesus in it, if we can get that spirit of identity where we can identify Jesus is in this, Jesus is operating, Jesus is doing something. Jesus is here.
I feel Jesus. I feel Jesus when I've mentioned him before. But the old man that had, I say old man, he was younger than I am now, but the old man to me, old man, when I was in my late 20s and early 30s, was an independent non denominational Pentecostal missionary in Mexico who was eccentric himself, he walked with a limp, he was, he did missiologically. He did everything wrong, you could do wrong. He did everything. He lived in Mexico 25 years. He never learned to speak Spanish. It was pathetic.
But he built.
He built dozens and dozens of churches, won thousands of people to Christ. Apart from that, he was a complete failure.
And.
But what I learned from Jim the most was it seemed like no matter what was going on, I could identify the crisis or the problem or the trouble. He saw Jesus.
Jesus is in this used to say all the time, Jesus is in this. God's doing something.
I'd get overwrought about something. He'd say, what are you upset about, Mark? Let's wait and see what God's doing.
See what he's doing.
That anointing of a newly conceived baby only a few months along in the womb from a voice outside the house to identify the presence of a brand new conceived Jesus in the womb of another person and leap with joy.
I mean, wow, that's, that's absolutely. It is. It's just a shame that we don't recognize the, the magnitude of John Baptist.
Now having said that, let's quickly bring it on toward the the end of his life.
So as Jesus comes to him and says, all right, I want to be baptized, John, John says, I'm not baptizing you. I want you to think about this. He knows who he is.
He says, I shouldn't. I need you to baptize me.
And Jesus said, no, let's do this right.
Let me just humble myself. And you do this.
But John has this sense that he will, that he will see the anointing of God in some physical form, rest on Messiah.
So he baptizes Jesus. And as Jesus comes up out of the water, this, this is an event that is more celebrated in classical art than it is in contemporary preaching.
But as Jesus comes up out of the water, the Holy Spirit descends upon him in the form of a dove. And the audible voice of God says, this is my beloved Son, in whom I'm well pleased.
Now, basically, that's kind of the end of John's ministry. It doesn't end abruptly. He goes on doing what he's been doing.
But from that moment on, the, the thing shifts to Jesus.
Some of John's disciples begin to be Jesus disciples. John doesn't try to hold on to him. It's not a competitive thing. It's just that, that everything that John said begins to happen. He said, I must be less and less, he must be more and more. Well, that happens.
It's happening right there. From that moment on, it's happening.
John kind of just fades.
But Herodias, the woman who is living with her brother in law in incestuous sin, hates John for calling her out.
So she eggs her husband on until he arrests John, puts him in prison.
He is Flavius Josephus tells us that he was not imprisoned in Jerusalem, but across the Jordan river at a, at a palace that Herod had across the Jordan in what would be modern day Jordan at another prison there.
Herod had these palaces and things all over Israel.
So where, whatever it was, he's in prison.
Then Nerodius, I mean, this is really a nice family.
She gets her daughter to dance a dance so sensual that she inflames the lust of her uncle who is married to her mother because her mother puts her up to it. She basically is pimping her daughter out.
And so Herod says, I will give you anything, ask me anything, up to half my kingdom. So she runs to her mother and says, what should I ask for? She says, ask for John the Baptist's head.
Isn't this nice?
So the girl comes back to her uncle and says, I want John the Baptist's head on a platter.
Herod doesn't want to do it.
He's. He's afraid about John. He doesn't know everything, but he's also afraid of the people in the room. So he sends somebody down. They cut John's head off right then and they bring it on a platter to, to this teenage girl.
And then she takes it and presents it to her mother. Isn't that, isn't that a tidy story?
And that, that is the physical end of John Baptist.
While he's in prison, knowing almost certainly that this is not going to end well, he sends people to Jesus and he says, are you the Messiah or should we wait for another? Isn't that a poignant thing?
It would be easy. I think, I think it might be easy to blame John for a diminution of his faith.
He's identified Jesus, he prophesied Jesus, he's reimagined him, reimaged him and express the messianic mission. All that now all of a sudden in prison. But I. I think we have to say this is, this is an old man on the face, on the place of death. He knows this is not going to end, right? And he's alone and, and his disciples have gone with Jesus and, and I just think it's the most natural and human thing in the world. Just tell me, just tell me that I can die. I just want to die happy. Are you the one?
Are you the one?
And Jesus, characteristic of Jesus, he, Jesus seemed to absolutely hate yes and no answers.
And Jesus says to the guys who come to him, tell him what you see. Tell him the blind are made to see, the deaf hear, demons are cast out, the poor have the gospel preached to them. So what is he saying?
Tell him you've seen the prophecy of Isaiah fulfilled.
This is the prophecy of Aza fulfilled. Go and tell him.
And with that in his heart, John the Baptist is executed.
So as we close us, let's close with this question.
That's an ex. That's an astonishing life.
That's a huge life.
Is he. Is he an Old Testament prophet? Yes.
Is he in squarely in the New Testament? Yes.
Does he say something new and unusual about Messiah? Not really. But he makes it clear he's going to die for us, rise from the dead and baptize us with the Holy Ghost and sanctifying fire.
He's huge. He's huge.
But here's the question.
Was he a success or a pathetic failure?
He's lying headless on the floor of the prison of a psychotic mass murderer and his ministry is over.
Is he a failure?
He's only a failure if you define success and failure in terms of anything that the world calls success and failure.
But if success is to identify the mission that God has for your life and fulfill it without variance and with faith under the anointing of God, however physically that ends, you are a success.
John Baptist is a giant in Scripture, too often read past and read over.
But that would not offend him because he said from the very beginning, I must be less and less and he must be more and more.
Well, let's pray.
Heavenly Father, thank you for the ministry and mission of this man whom you chose.
I thank you for his miraculous birth, for the visitation of Gabriel, for the tutelage of his parents, and for the spirit of identification that you placed upon him in his mother's womb and the boldness, the boldness God to say and preach, no matter what the truth.
Lord, help us that we may, in this crazy and sinful world in which we live, point others to Jesus said, we are nothing, we have nothing, we contribute nothing.
But he and he alone is everything.
God grant us this, that at the end of everything, whether others judge us to be successes or failures, someone might say he knew Jesus and pointed others to him in Jesus name, Amen.
[00:44:08] Speaker A: You've been listening to the Leader's Notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. You can follow Dr. Rutland on X at Dr.markrutland or visit his website, drmarkrutland.com where you can find information about his materials and his app. Join us next week for another episode of the Leader's Notebook.
