Today's Reading:

Matthew 3
Mark 1:1-11
Luke 3
John 1:15-34

There are many hidden years of Jesus. Scripture gives us short, heartfelt tidbits of His early life: Jesus in the womb, as a baby, a child in a house given gifts, and with His family running in the night. Then the pages go quiet. We do not pick up with Him again until the age of twelve, when He had already grown full of wisdom at the temple. Once again, the pages go silent until He is about thirty years old and walks into the Jordan River to stand first, in our place.

The silence is not a gap or mistake in the gospel; it is part of it. Most of the Son’s earthly life was not preached, recorded, or celebrated. Jesus obeyed His parents and even learned a trade. Only Luke tells us about His increase in wisdom and that He was submissive in a real home. Grace chose that. The Father was already pleased with the Son during the unseen years, not just when the Spirit descended upon Him.

Sometimes we can treat God’s work as moments that can be picked out and dated: the birth, the miracle, the turning point. Jesus spent decades in ordinary life, just like we do: the hard Mondays, the boring Thursdays, repeated meals, and working hard. We must remember that the Word became flesh.

The long silence is mercy for those who feel late, unnoticed, or hidden. God can be fully present in your life even if no one is watching. The Child who was protected at the age of two, found at twelve, and announced at thirty, was not waiting to become the Son; He already was. Those were not wasted years. They were the grace from a Savior who does not skip the ordinary in order to save it.

Jesus spent most of His earthly life unseen after birth until about the age of thirty. Where do you recognize yourself in those hidden years as a child of God, and what would you change if you believed the Father was already pleased to call you His own?

In Matthew 3, John the Baptist was preaching, and Matthew referenced Isaiah 40:3 to describe John as “a voice of one calling in the wilderness.” Matthew also wrote that, “His clothes were made of camel’s hair, and he had a leather belt around his waist. He ate locusts and wild honey.” John’s identity was being compared to the prophet Elijah, when Elijah was described in 2 Kings 1:8 as a hairy man with a leather belt. The Jewish readers would have understood this. Also in the Old Testament, Malachi 4:5 promised that Elijah would return before “the great and dreadful day of the Lord.” Later, in Matthew 11:14, Jesus said that John the Baptist IS Elijah for those willing to receive it.

This was the first time in the New Testament that we read of the Pharisees (with their strict focus on laws and rituals) and Sadducees (priests and political leaders, who can be differentiated because they are “Sad-You-See” since they do not believe in the resurrection). Both the Pharisees and Sadducees were often greedy and dishonest to the poor. They had come to where John the Baptist was baptizing in the Jordan River. John saw them as wanting the appearance of repentance without the act of repenting. He called them a “brood of vipers” as an insult, like the serpent from Genesis 3. Baptism and words are not enough; fruit is evident in a changed heart when repentance is real through a changed life, such as justice, humility, and turning from hypocrisy.

 John was baptizing with water, which represented a public announcement of repentance; it does not complete the work. Jesus baptizes with the Holy Spirit and fire through judgment and purification for inner cleansing and a new life. Jesus had the fork already in His hand, meaning the work had already started. He is gathering wheat (the good fruit) and burning chaff (the unrepentant heart). Jesus was baptized by John, not because He needed repentance, which was why John tried to stop Him. He was sinless. He was baptized to identify with all sinners and for those to see that He takes your sin first; He takes your place in the river. This fulfills all righteousness by doing God’s will completely. It was the public start to His mission and validated what John the Baptist had come to do by preparing the way. Now the full Trinity has appeared. God the Son was in the water, God the Spirit descended on Him like a dove, and God the Father’s voice boomed, validating who the Son is, and the Father was pleased.

In Mark, the book started where Jesus started His ministry, at baptism. Mark wrote a fast-paced book and left out the birth for the Gentile believers. They needed to know who the crucified man is now: The man as the Son of God with power, suffering, and the cross, not necessarily the family history.

In the book of Luke, he called out the crowd in general for showing up at the baptism site, not just the Pharisees and Sadducees. Like Matthew, Luke reiterated that showing up to be baptized is not enough. The crowds had heard to produce fruit, and asked how? John the Baptist told them to stop the daily sins at work, which is practical. People had wondered if he was the Christ- no! But what got John in trouble was that he confronted Herod the tetrarch for taking Herodias (his brother’s wife) as well as for his other evil actions. That led to John being put into prison.

Luke explained that Jesus’s baptism was connected to His Sonship. He traced Jesus’ genealogy backward to before Abraham as a broader view. Luke wrote that Jesus is a real man with a real family, not just belonging to Israel, but to all of humanity, all the way back to Adam, the Son of Man, and the Son of God.

The book of John gives John the Baptist’s testimony. John the Baptist repeatedly said the One who comes after him was actually also before him. It showed that Jesus was pre-existent, pointing back to John 1:1, “In the beginning.” John the Baptist was interrogated by the leaders and denied being the Christ, Elijah, or the Prophet. John the Baptist only claimed to be the “voice crying in the wilderness,” which was a reference to Isaiah 40:3, the same verse that Mark and Matthew used. Matthew also wrote that John the Baptist dressed like Elijah. John the Baptist denied the title of “Elijah” and claimed that Jesus is the sacrificial Lamb. He said that Jesus will take away the sin of the world, not just Israel’s sins. The whole reason John baptized people at all was for Jesus to be revealed to Israel. John said he did not even know Him until the “dove came down on Him and remained,” and that Jesus was the Messiah. This does not contradict the story in Luke when the unborn John the Baptist leaped in Elizabeth’s womb upon knowing the baby in Mary was the Messiah. The book of John means that until the dove/Spirit sign, John was not authorized to announce Jesus. John waited for the sign that the Sender promised.

Today's Discussion question:

Click here to link to our Facebook group for discussion, questions, and additional content.