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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 497. In the Wilderness
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In the Wilderness
Nor of the deeds of men, nor of kings' crowns:
Before the thought of God took hold of him,
As he was sitting dreaming in the calm
Of one first noon, upon the desert's rim,
Beneath the tall fair shadows of the palm,
All overcome with some strange inward balm.
So wrote the Irish poet, Arthur O'Shaughnessy, of John the Baptist; and so writing he touched two matters which are very important to any man who would understand the desert prophet. The first is that nature had a great share in making him. The sights and sounds of the solitary wilderness were for years familiar to him. The expansive sky above, the pure air to breathe, and all the wide outdoor life of the desert became a part of the very character of John. The physical health which nature gives to those who live on most intimate terms with her was his. The quick eye, the direct and incisive habit of mind, the freedom from all the graceful deceptions of civilization, the rugged, expressive speech which might have been taken fresh from the soil-all these were the contributions of that life in the desert which was a school to John.
1. In the meagreness of the historic record, no mention is made of the occasion on which John definitely left his home and betook himself to the open country of the southern borderland. But most probably it was on the death of one of his now aged parents. As a Nazirite, he was not to “come near to a dead body.” “He shall not make himself unclean,” said the Law, “for his father, or for his mother, for his brother, or for his sister, when they die: because his separation unto God is upon his head.” And if we suppose that he afterwards returned home, it would be but for the short time his other parent lived, on whose death he, having no near relatives or close personal friends (for he was, and probably always had been, of a solitary habit), and having, moreover, his manner of life shaped out for him, partly by his vow, and partly by those growing thoughts within him which drove him out, would finally leave “the hill country of Judæa.” Then he made his dwelling-place far from the homes and haunts of men, among “the deserts and mountains, and dens and caves of the earth.”
“Oh, how often, when living in the desert, in that extensive solitude which, dried up by the burning rays of the sun, offered a frightful dwelling-place to the monks, it seemed to me that I was in the midst of the pleasures of Rome.” Here in these brief words St. Jerome has revealed to us his abode, bereft of all the comforts which are needed for the miserable life of man! The ground dry and burnt up, without a vestige of verdure, no plants, no trees to afford a shade from the noonday heat. There were no towering cedars, no luxuriant palms, nor stately trees affording fruit, pleasing the eye by their beauty, no running waters, no refreshing streams to cool the air and afford a soothing murmur to the ear, no kind of rest or refreshment-in a word, a desert very much deserted of men. I mean men whose desires go no farther than the earth, yet as such even do not seek so unfertile a land. Here, indeed, did this great man fix his dwelling-place, he who pretends to no one thing of earth. Here did that divine youth imprison himself of his own free will, and here did that clear light of the Church bury the best and most flourishing days of his life, fully resolved upon spending it all here, had Heaven not designed otherwise, and brought him forth for the good of the world to be its great and most brilliant beacon of light. Nevertheless, we might well say that although the body was as a fact in so rough a place, yet the soul was in the enjoyment of supreme delight.1 [Note: De Sigüenza, The Life of Saint Jerome (ed. 1907), 146.]
2. Why did John go to the wilderness? Hermits went to the wilderness of Judæa, as Josephus tells us about Banus, who “lived in the desert, and used no other clothing than grew upon trees, and had no other food than grew of its own accord, and bathed himself in cold water frequently.” Josephus “imitated him in those things” for three years. Keim thinks that John also led a “hermit life.” Certainly he lived a solitary life, but, when he comes forth at last, it is not as a hermit or man of the woods. He did indeed lead “a rural life away from the capital,” but it is by no means clear that he was an anchorite, though many of them came to these regions. It has, indeed, been urged that John went into the desert, like Josephus, to study the doctrine of the Essenes, and that he became one. But there is no foundation for this idea. These cenobites had monasteries along the shores of the Dead Sea. They numbered some four thousand in all. The Essenes were an offshoot of Pharisaism with ascetic tendencies concerning animal food, marriage, and animal sacrifices, but with an admixture of the philosophy of Parseeism and Pythagoreanism, including the worship of the sun. But there is no real reason for thinking that John had any contact with them; certainly he did not accept their cardinal tenets about animal food (he ate locusts), or marriage, which he did not condemn, or about sun-worship, which he did not practise. He did practise the ascetic life, as was true of many others not Essenes, but he came forth and lived among men. “He preached the Kingdom of God; they preached isolation. They abandoned society; he strove to reform it.”
His predecessor Amos had been a herdsman and a dresser of sycomores in that very region eight centuries before. Like Amos, also, he would meditate upon his high calling better in this wild and desolate region. But John was no mere imitator of anyone. He was sui generis, and all the more so because of his grapple with himself in the wilderness. He went apart, not, as the usual monastic does, to gain merit with God, but to face his life problem and to adjust himself to it. His going was “an absolute break with the prevalent Pharisaic type of piety.” He went, not to stay, but to get ready to come back, to come back to save his people. But John “learned his lesson at the feet of no human teacher.” Reynolds has a fine word: “His education was the memory of his childhood and the knowledge of his commission, and was effected by the Spirit of the living God. His schoolmasters were the rocks of the desert of Judæa, the solemn waters of the Dead Sea, the eternal Presence that fills the solitudes of nature, the sins, the shame, the vows, the hopes, the professions of his countrymen.”
Over against the Baptist's desert and cave stands a contrasted landscape as attractive as the desert is repellent. It is the landscape of this natural human life, the life which the hand of God made when He made the earth and the creatures, and then made man after His own image and breathed into his clay the breath of life, and bade him dwell on the earth and eat its fruits and have dominion over all its living kinds. The life of man, even as we know it, strangely marred by some malign influence in things that make for famine, and mischance, and pain, and strife, even so has much of beauty and delight and interest in it. Are we not to enjoy this charm and joy? Did not God who made it look on it, and behold it was very good? Why indeed was human life, with its activities, concerns, and pleasures created at all if it was not to be lived, and lived at the best and fullest? Is it not to the glory of God that we men should exercise all our powers of body, although to exercise be also to enjoy; that we should taste all the savours of this earthly existence, perceive with eye and ear its beauty and its music; that we should let the mind range and the passion play, and not be scared from using these energies just because in them there is delight? We look on this landscape of the smiling human life, and the Baptist's desert and cave wear a most grim, squalid, repulsive look, and we cannot believe God meant these places for the residence of the human spirit, or designed that narrowed, starved existence of the ascetic for the life of His children.1 [Note: J. H. Skrine, Saints and Worthies, 47.]
3. With his principles fixed by long meditation, John came forth among men (as our Lord said), not a reed shaken with the wind, swayed this way or that by the opinions of others, but firm, even if he should be solitary, in his own opinions; not clothed in soft raiment, but a protest against the luxuriousness that ever threatens to smother our life, and a proclamation that a man's life consists not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth-one who, both by his appearance and by his words, drew men away from conventionalities to what was real and abiding in human life.
His appearance must have been very striking. His hair was long and unkempt, and his features were tanned with the sun and the air of the desert. Probably they were thinned, too, by austerity; for his habitual food was of the simplest order, consisting only of locusts and wild honey. Locusts, dried and preserved, form still, at the present day, an article of food in the East, but only among the very poor; people in the least degree luxurious or scrupulous would not look at it. Wild honey, formed by hives of bees in the crevices of rocks or in rifted trees, abounds in the desert-places of Palestine, and may be gathered by anyone who wanders there. The raiment of the Baptist corresponded with his food, consisting of a garment of the very coarsest and cheapest cloth, made of camel's hair. The girdle of the Oriental is an article of clothing on which a great deal of taste and expense is laid out, being frequently of fine material and gay colouring, with the added adornment of elaborate needlework; but the girdle with which John's garment was confined was no more than a rough band of leather. Everything, in short, about his external appearance denoted one who had reduced the claims of the body to the lowest possible terms, that he might devote himself entirely to the life of the spirit.
Some preachers derive a certain amount of influence from the impression made by their personal appearance. When, as in the case of Chalmers, on the broad and ample forehead there rests the air of philosophic thought, and in the liquid eye there shines the sympathy of a benevolent nature, the goodwill of the congregation is conciliated before the word is uttered. Still more fascinating is the impression when, as in the case of Newman, the stern and emaciated figure suggests the secret fasts and midnight vigils of one who dwells in a hidden world, out of which he comes with a Divine message to his followers.1 [Note: J. Stalker, The Two St. Johns, 204.]
4. The long silence of the desert was broken by a ringing call of no uncertain sound, the call of one sure of his message, and burning to deliver it. We can see the tall, gaunt figure of the roughly-clad recluse entering one of the scattered hamlets of the borderland, standing like an apparition as he cried out the short, sharp sentence which pierced each of its quiet homes, and penetrated every heart that heard it-“Repent! the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” We can see the groups of people too, children in the foreground, flocking round him wonderingly. To them he is a new embodiment of the Law and the Prophets. His “Repent!” is an appeal to the former, a demand for a moral “baring” until the bed-rock is reached upon which Jehovah can build; while his statement that “the kingdom of heaven is at hand” is a reaffirmation of old and cherished prophecies.
(1) “Repentance” is perhaps not the best rendering of the first note of John's message; “conversion” would be a more literal translation. It was for an entire change in the habits of thought and conduct that John called; and this change included not only the forsaking of sin but the seeking of God. Still, the forsaking of sin was very prominent in John's demands; for we are told how pointedly he referred to the favourite sins of different classes.
Nor has repentance in the mind of John to do only with the past, as his anticipations of the New Kingdom are conversant with the future. No: his preaching of repentance has to do with the future, and is full of animation and brightness, from the sight he has of the coming of Jesus Christ. Repentance with him means the personal equipment of the man for taking his part in the construction of this New Kingdom.
Also of John a calling and a crying
Rang in Bethabara till strength was spent,
Cared not for counsel, stayed not for replying,
John had one message for the world, Repent.
John, than which man a sadder or a greater
Not till this day has been of woman born,
John like some iron peak by the Creator
Fired with the red glow of the rushing morn.
This when the sun shall rise and overcome it
Stands in his shining desolate and bare,
Yet not the less the inexorable summit
Flamed him his signal to the happier air.1 [Note: F. W. H. Myers, Saint Paul.]
(2) The other note of John's preaching was the Kingdom of God. This was not a novel watchword. The ideal of the Jews had always been a theocracy. When Saul, their first king, was appointed, the prophet Samuel condemned the act of the people as a lapse: they ought to have desired no king but God. And when, in subsequent ages, the kings of the land with rare exceptions turned out miserable failures, the better and deeper spirits always sighed for a reign of God, which would ensure national prosperity. The deeper the nation sank, the more passionate grew this aspiration; and, when the good time coming was thought of, it was always in the form of a Kingdom of God.
Alongside the proclamation of the Kingdom was the uncompromising insistence on “the wrath to come.” John saw that the advent of the King would bring inevitable suffering to those who were living in self-indulgence and sin. There would be careful discrimination. He who was coming would carefully discern between the righteous and the wicked; between those who served God and those who served Him not; and the preacher enforced his words by an image familiar to Orientals. When the wheat is reaped, it is bound in sheaves and carted to the threshing-floor, which is generally a circular spot of hard ground from fifty to one hundred feet in diameter. On this the wheat is threshed from the chaff by manual labour, but the two lie intermingled till the evening, when the grain is caught up in broad shovels or fans, and thrown against the evening breeze, as it passes swiftly over the fevered land; thus the chaff is borne away, while the wheat falls heavily to the earth. Likewise, cried the Baptist, there shall be a very careful process of discrimination before the unquenchable fires are lighted, so that none but chaff shall be consigned to the flames-a prediction which was faithfully fulfilled.
In considering the wrath of God as always and at all times working with His love, the preaching of John the Baptist is a great assistance. The Jews, even in their most degenerate times, seem to have never doubted that all the tribulation which as a nation they had ever borne was part of that special care and government of God of which they were so justly proud. They acknowledged, not without awe and reverence, that a wrath to come was essentially bound up with their best hopes and their highest aspirations. They were to pass, as a people, through great suffering into noblest exaltation. We, under the Christian dispensation, have throughout our history greatly lost by inadequately realizing that same conception. In regard both of our individual and of our national life, we have even more reason than the Jews ever had to look upon Divine wrath as only the sterner and more solemn aspect of Divine love. “The wrath of God which is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men” (Rom_1:18) is a principal means whereby, in time or eternity, to bring sinners back to Him, and to prepare the way for the fulness of the Kingdom.1 [Note: C. J. Abbey, The Divine Love, 17.]
5. His words rang like peals of thunder over the mountains and reverberated down the wadys to the Dead Sea. They echo yet through the centuries, the words of this Voice in the Wilderness. It was mighty preaching that smote the hearts of men. Some were superficial, as always, and the words passed over their heads. Others had only a secular notion of the Kingdom, and began to dream of place and power in that Kingdom. The self-indulgent began to hope for change, for a new king who would destroy the Law and the prophets. The poor and downtrodden would hope for better times somehow. But the devout and deeply spiritual were stirred to the very heart. Men and women talked religion under the trees, by the river brink, on the rocks of the desert, by the roadside, at home. A new day had come to Israel; a real preacher of righteousness had spoken again.
True preaching struggles right away from formula, back into fact, and life, and the revelation of God and heaven. I make no objection to formulas; they are good enough in their place, and a certain instinct of our nature is comforted in having some articulations of results thought out to which our minds may refer. Formulas are the jerked meat of salvation-if not always the strong meat, as many try to think-dry and portable and good to keep, and when duly seethed and softened, and served with needful condiments, just possible to be eaten; but for the matter of living, we really want something fresher and more nutritious. On the whole, the kind of thinking talent wanted for a great preacher is that which piercingly loves; that which looks into things and through them, ploughing up pearls and ores, and now and then a diamond. It will not seem to go on metaphysically or scientifically, but with a certain roundabout sense and vigour. And the people will be gathered to it because there is a gospel fire burning in it that warms them to a glow. This is power.2 [Note: Horace Bushnell, Pulpit Talent, 187.]
(1) “Many of the Pharisees and Sadducees” came. These two religious parties disliked one another very much, but they are both deserving of John's condemnation. They will later be found working hand in hand to compass the death of Jesus. For the moment they bury their theological differences and rivalry for place and power in the common curiosity about John. By their distinctive dress, their separateness from the multitude among whom they slowly moved; by the superiority of their demeanour, and by that air of refinement which can come only from culture, although the culture may be narrow both in base and superstructure, the penetrative eye of John singled them out. Like the Master who came after him, he employs terms that are hot and scathing. “O offspring of vipers,-O viperous brood,-who hath warned you to flee from the coming wrath?” It was bitterly, it was uncourtly,-but oh, it was truly said! They were the offspring of vipers, for often had their fathers stung to death the benefactors, the saviours, sent from heaven to save the nation; and soon were the children to show themselves born in the likeness of their sires, by stinging with persecution and death that greater One whose shoe-latchet he was not worthy to unloose.
(2) While John has been anathematizing Pharisees and Sadducees, various questions have been rising in various minds as to the bearing of the Kingdom upon themselves, and what manner of men they ought to be to enter into it. Did they also come under the lash? “And the multitudes asked him, saying, What then must we do?” John's answer is plain, direct, and pointed: “He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none: and he that hath food, let him do likewise.”
(3) Then the publicans come with their question: “Teacher, what shall we do?”-by no means an idle question, put for the sake of hearing what kind of an answer the prophet will make in reply, but one that had behind it the sincere purpose of entering the Kingdom, for they came “to be baptized.” John's reply to their question was not a summons to Temple service or sacrifice, nor was it ascetic or revolutionary in its tone. “Exact,” said he, “no more than is appointed you.” Extortion was the fierce temptation of the class. It would have been easier for the publicans to keep all the ritual than radically to change the whole spirit of their lives. He tested sincerity in a manner at once definite and practical. His answer involved no doctrine of human brotherhood or Divine Fatherhood; it was a dogmatic appeal to the conscience of men who had laid their ethical sense to sleep. So they received their answer-one so complete and self-evident that from it there was no appeal.
(4) Then came the soldiers. Apparently careless, but alert, they move about in small groups among the people, and, coming near the prophet, break a lance with him: “And what shall we do?” His reply is personal, not national. The careless soldiers must have been surprised at its pointedness. Its three parts were short, sharp home-thrusts-“Do not extort money by threats or violence from any man.” It was not easy for quiet civilians to resist the demands, although unjust, of trained soldiers, strong in physique, and without effeminate pity for those from whom money might be extracted. Mercy, consideration for such had but small weight with them. “Do not cheat by false accusation; be too honest to act as mere informers; do not bleed people's purses by threatening to lay fictitious charges.” On the other hand, “Be content with your pay, and as you agreed to it, when you went into the service, let it serve you.”
This was the style of John's preaching. However various the classes of people or the types of character, his “exhortation” took them back to righteousness of conduct, to the first principles of ordinary morality. There was with him no slight or hasty dealing with sin; he required evidences of reform in character, in “good works.”
It was a solemn scene, doubtless, when crowds from every part of Palestine gathered by the side of Jordan, and there renewed, as it were, the covenant made between their ancestor and Jehovah. It seemed the beginning of a new age, the restoration of the ancient theocracy, the final close of that dismal period in which the race had lost its peculiarity, had taken a varnish of Greek manners, and had contributed nothing but a few dull chapters of profane history, filled with the usual chaos of faction fights, usurpations, royal crimes, and outbreaks, blind and brave, of patriotism and the love of liberty. But many of those who witnessed the scene and shared in the enthusiasm which it awakened must have remembered it in later days as having inspired hopes which had not been realized. It must have seemed to many that the theocracy had not in fact been restored, that the old routine had been interrupted only for a moment, that the baptized nation had speedily contracted new pollution, and that no deliverance had been wrought from the “wrath to come.” And they may have asked in doubt, Is God so little parsimonious of His noblest gift as to waste upon a doomed generation that which He did not vouchsafe to many nobler generations that had preceded them, and to send a second and far greater Elijah to prophesy in vain?
But if there were such persons, they were ignorant of one important fact. John the Baptist was like the Emperor Nerva. In his career it was given him to do two things-to inaugurate a new régime, and also to nominate a successor who was far greater than himself. And by this successor his work was taken up, developed, completed, and made permanent; so that, however John may have seemed to his own generation to have lived in vain, and scenes on the banks of Jordan to have been the delusive promise of a future that was never to be, at the distance of near two thousand years he appears not less but far greater than he appeared to his contemporaries, and all that his baptism promised to do appears utterly insignificant compared with what it has actually done.1 [Note: J. R. Secley, Ecce Homo, chap. i.]
6. The prophets of Israel were poets as well as preachers; and one way in which they displayed their poetical endowment was by the invention of physical symbols to represent the truths which they also expressed in words. Thus, it will be remembered, Jeremiah at one period went about Jerusalem wearing a yoke on his shoulders, in order to impress on his fellow-citizens the certainty that they were to become subject to the Babylonian power; and similar symbolical actions of other prophets will occur to every Bible reader. In the Baptist, ancient prophecy, after centuries of silence, had come to life again; and he demonstrated that he was the true heir of men like Isaiah and Jeremiah by the exercise also of this poetical gift. He embodied his teaching not only in words but in an expressive symbol. And never was symbol more felicitously chosen; for baptism exactly expressed the main drift of his teaching.
It has been well established, in the light of modern research, that John was by no means the originator of the rite of baptism, which has its counterparts in the Greek mysteries, in the religions of India, Persia, Egypt, Asia Minor. The washing of the body with running water expressed by a natural symbolism that cleansing from inward defilement without which there could be no access to the Divine Presence. Judaism itself affords several analogies to the rite of baptism. We need instance only the lustrations demanded by the Mosaic law, the ceremonial washings of the Essenes, the purification by water which was part of the ritual employed in the admission of proselytes.
It is more than probable that John ascribed a real validity to his baptism, apart from its symbolic meaning. He undoubtedly sought, in the first instance, to effect a moral change, and administered the rite only to those who professed repentance; yet the inward process required to be completed and sealed by the visible rite. When baptism meets us later in the New Testament, as an ordinance of the Christian Church, we find even Paul describing it as a mystery, by which the Spirit is, in some actual sense, imparted. He assumes that this view is shared, in still larger measure, by those whom he addresses; and it probably had attached itself to the rite from the beginning. Ancient religion made little attempt to discriminate between a symbol and its spiritual content. Just as the spoken word was vaguely identified with the person or thing that it designated, so the outward sign was confused with the reality, and was supposed to carry with it a religious worth and power. That a value of this nature was generally attributed to John's baptism may be inferred from the question with which Jesus, at a later day, silenced the priests and elders: “The baptism of John, was it from heaven or of men?” The question, it will be observed, refers to the baptism, not merely to the religious teaching, of John. It would have been meaningless if John had claimed to be nothing more than a preacher of righteousness, enforcing by symbol what he had taught in words. But he had offered his baptism as an actual means of obtaining a certain grace from God; and hence a controversy had arisen as to his sanction and authority.
Baptism, when administered to an adult, is a visible assurance of the same great blessings that it assures to a child. It does not confer on him the blessings of the Christian redemption, but declares that they are his. It is a wonderful gospel-a gospel to him individually. If he has genuine faith he will receive it with immeasurable joy. He will look back upon the day of his baptism as kings look back upon the day of their coronation. It was the visible, external transition from awful peril to eternal safety in the love and power of Christ. It divided his old life in sin from his new life in God. He will speak of the hour when he was “baptized into Christ” (Gal_3:27), was “cleansed by the washing of water with the word” (Eph_5:26), was “buried with [Christ] in baptism” (Rom_6:4; Col_2:12), and was “raised with him through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead” (Col_2:12). But kings are not made kings by being crowned; they are crowned because they are already kings: their coronation is only the assurance that the power and greatness of sovereignty are theirs. And it is not by baptism that we are made Christ's inheritance; it is because we are Christ's inheritance that we are baptized.1 [Note: The Life of R. W. Dale, 362.]
I think, perhaps, this trust has sprung
From one short word
Said over me when I was young,-
So young, I heard
It, knowing not that God's name signed
My brow, and sealed me His, though blind.2 [Note: H. H. Jackson.]