June 27, 2000
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Luke 3:7-17 True Repentance
True Repentance: God's Highway to the Heart, Part 1
Luke 3:7-8
John speaks in verse 7. "He therefore began saying to the multitudes who were going out to be baptized by him, 'You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Therefore bring forth fruits in keeping with repentance and do not begin to say to yourselves, We have Abraham for our father. For I say to you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. And also, the ax is already laid at the root of the trees, every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.' And the multitudes were questioning him saying, 'Then what shall we do?' And he would answer and say to them, 'Let the man who has two tunics share with him who has none, and let him who has food do likewise.' And some tax gatherers also came to be baptized and they said to him, 'Teacher, what shall we do?' And he said to them, 'Collect no more than what you have been ordered to.' And some soldiers were questioning him saying, 'And what about us, what shall we do?' And he said to them, 'Do not take money from anyone by force or accuse anyone falsely and be content with your wages.'
"Now while the people were in a state of expectation and all were wondering in their hearts about John, as to whether he might be the Christ, John answered and said to them all, 'As for me, I baptize you with water, but one is coming who is mightier than I and I am not fit to untie the thong of His sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire and His winnowing fork is in His hand to thoroughly clear His threshing floor and to gather the wheat into His barn. But He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.' So, with many other exhortations also, he preached the gospel to the people."
This would be typical of John's preaching day after day after day. The encounter with the multitude, the tax gatherers, and the soldiers is not intended to be a one-time encounter but is routine, it's what John went through regularly. The form of the verbs indicate to us this was a continuous pattern. So here we have a sample of John's kind of preaching. And as verse 8 indicates, this is how he preached the gospel, that God will forgive your sins. That's what John was preaching.
John is a standard for how to preach. In some ways he's even a more easily understood standard than Jesus Himself because it's hard for us to emulate the preaching of Jesus since He is God in human flesh...but John is a man like us. We learn from John how to confront unbelievers with the message of the gospel...so he becomes the model, the standard for all who proclaim the good news of forgiveness to sinners. He called sinners to forgiveness. He told them good news, God will forgive your sins if you repent and receive Jesus Christ as Messiah and Savior. He was a preacher of repentance and a preacher of faith in the Lord Messiah, Jesus Christ. We can learn how to communicate the gospel to unbelievers by looking at the pattern of John.
One of the things that hits you immediately just in reading that is the lack of any kind of effort to win them over with smooth talk. In fact, he is harsh, saying things like, "You brood of vipers." Or saying things like, "The ax is already laid at the root of the trees, every tree therefore that doesn't bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire." This is a very strong, apparently on the surface, strong approach. But this again is the reproach of a man of God set apart to proclaim the gospel. I don't think that John was without love or without affection for the people, but he was clear as to the message. And that is the issue, clarity, straight-forwardness in giving the message marks John.
Verse 18 tells us that there were many exhortations with which John preached the gospel to the people. He was preaching for months and months out in the wilderness. What you have then in verses 7 to 17 is just an example or a sample of what John preached all day, every day, week after week, month after month. And as I said, it gives us a pattern for our own preaching.
If you remember that John was a preacher of repentance, that John said...as we learn in Matthew..."Repent, for the Kingdom is at hand," you will also then want to know that repentance is at the heart of his message, it is at the heart of any gospel message. You cannot truly preach the gospel of forgiveness, you cannot preach the gospel of grace unless you call sinners to repent. So repentance refines the substance of his message.
What is the character of true repentance? It is given to us here in wonderfully clear terms. John, in fact, from verse 4 through 11, if we include verses 4 to 6, the prophecy of Isaiah that related to John, from verse 4 through 17, verse 4 through 17, we really do have a definition of true repentance, the kind of repentance that saves the sinner. But at the same time, because it is such a clear definition of true repentance, it is also an exposure of false repentance, or shallow repentance, or non-saving repentance. And this is of great interest to any preacher and any Christian because people have always been and still are prone to shallow repentance, they are prone to a false repentance. The message, the modern message of cheap grace, as it's often called, just believe in Jesus, that's all you need to do, the modern message that's often called "easy believism" in fact invites such shallowness and is at one 180 degrees from the message of John the Baptist. There was nothing about John's message that was easy. There was nothing about John's message that was warm and fuzzy. It was harsh, it was strong, it was confrontational, it was devastating because John understood how prone the sinner is to a shallow, superficial repentance that does not save.
John knew that. And John knew familiarity among the Jewish people could make themselves think religious with just a superficial repentance. And so he endeavors to draw out the essence of a real repentance in his preaching.
The scriptures tell us that all Jerusalem and all Judea came out to see John. And there is a reason for that. I'm sure people knew about John. I'm sure the story had circulated through the 30-year period that an old priest by the name of Zacharias and Elizabeth were able to conceive a son miraculously and that Gabriel the angel told Zacharias it would happen and that the son would be the forerunner of the Messiah and that that son was alive and he was out in the wilderness and he was a prophet of God. I'm sure that circulated outside the family of Zacharias and Elizabeth and circulated around the related relatives, Mary and Joseph and their family, because they all knew the story. The story must have spread. The fact that Gabriel showed up, the fact that a miraculous birth had occurred, the fact that the Messiah's forerunner had been born must have been to some extent around so that people knew about it. And once John began to preach and announce the coming of Messiah, the people came out, they were curious, they were ready for the Messiah. They wanted the Messiah. They were compelled by their curiosity. They were compelled by the fact that this could be it, this could be true. I mean, how else can you explain Gabriel showing up? And how else can you explain an old priestly couple having a miraculous child? Maybe this is it. So the people desired to come and find out if indeed he was the forerunner of Messiah and if indeed the Messiah had come.
They were ready. They wanted to participate in the long-awaited blessings promised to Abraham and David. They were really weary of the oppression of the Romans. They were weary of never having independent authority and sovereignty and rule. They were weary of the way things were. They were excited with Messianic hope. They believed they belonged to God and were in the Kingdom. After all, they were the children of Abraham, after all they were the people to whom had been given the Covenants and the adoption, as Paul says in Romans 9, and they had received the Word of God and the prophets and everything else. They were the chosen people. When they came to John they were really asking John how to stay in the Kingdom, not how to get in. I think they believed they were in, they just wanted to be sure they could stay in the Kingdom. They wanted to be sure that they could get the best of whatever the Kingdom was going to bring by being on good terms with the Messiah. John announced to them that they didn't need to find out how to stay in the Kingdom, they needed to find out how to get in the Kingdom because they were on the outside and they were no better off than Gentiles and therefore they needed to acknowledge that and receive a baptism that really was a baptism for proselyte Gentiles who were becoming part of Judaism. He was saying to them...You aren't in, you're out and you need to get in by repentance and faith in the Messiah and demonstrate that you recognize you're outside by going through what amounts to a proselyte baptism, which would put you on the same ground as a Gentile.
The people were so compelled by this that they did it. They came, they heard John and they got baptized which was a great admission on their part. To some degree they were saying...We're outside, we've got to get inside and so we'll go through this even if it is an acknowledgement that humbles us, having to admit that we aren't in the Kingdom, we're on the outside, no better off than a Gentile proselyte wanting to become associated with Judaism.
All Jerusalem, all Judea come out, they're ready to get prepared for the Messiah. And if need be, they will be baptized with this baptism, though it is a humiliating affirmation. They begin to be baptized by John and they make some kind of confession of sin, some kind of confession of repentance. But as time goes on it becomes apparent that even with the strong preaching of John, even with the clear message of John, the repentance was, for the most part, shallow and false. We really don't have a difficult time in proving that because as the story of Jesus unfolds it becomes apparent that most people do not acknowledge Him as Messiah. In fact, they finally come to the place where even though they have celebrated Him as Messiah on Palm Sunday, they cry for His blood on Friday at the crucifixion. And when you get to the book of Acts and the believers in Jerusalem are gathered in the Upper Room, there's only 120 of them and that's after the full ministry of John and Jesus is completed.
There was a lot of superficiality going on. And John was preaching a strong message and still there was superficial faith. How much more superficiality is there when a very weak message is preached? John understands the reality of shallow faith. John understands the reality of shallow repentance, false repentance. And this sample of his preaching demonstrates that concern and it demonstrates the message that needs to be preached. And all across this country in churches all across this land a shallow message is being preached, a shallow gospel, a shallow call to repentance that is giving people the tragic and damning illusion that they are saved when they are not.
How can we recognize real repentance? How can we see the real thing and separate it from false and shallow repentance?
Let's look at this passage. In it John gives us six elements of a true repentance. This is a very notable portion of Scripture, not because it is a theological treatise on repentance, but because it is an example of the true preaching for repentance exhibited by this man of God. John gives us six elements of a true, genuine, saving repentance. John moves from harmartiology, which is the study of sin, through eschatology, to soteriology to Christology and to pneumatology, the study of the Holy Spirit...huge theological themes existed in his preaching. He was, of all things, a theological preacher.
He talks about sin. He talks about the end of the age and the coming wrath. He talks about salvation. He talks about within the framework of salvation, conversion, transformation, regeneration. He talks about Christ. He talks about the Holy Spirit. It is a sweeping treatment of theology. He was truly a theological preacher.
Let's look at the six elements then of true repentance. Number one, and we'll talk about true repenters. True repenters reflect on personal sin. John talks about heart preparation. Before there can be any national reception of the Messiah, there has to be individual reception of the Messiah. So he says in verse 5, taking the language of Isaiah 40, "Every ravine shall be filled up, every mountain and hill shall be brought low. The crooked shall become straight. The rough roads smooth. Then you'll see the salvation of God." If you want to experience the salvation of God individually and then collectively, as individual's believe, you must then make the path ready. And spiritually the pathway is through the wilderness of the heart. And I told you last time we talked about that, let's look at verse 5 and see how the imagery fits that. "Every ravine shall be filled up," that's analogous to the low things, the base things, the dark things of the heart. They have to be brought up, as it were to light. And then every mountain and hill is brought low...the high things of the heart, self-exaltation, self-will, self-fulfillment, all the pride has to be brought down. And then he talks about the crooked being made straight, the skolios, like scoliosis, curvature, anything perversed, twisted, deceitful, devious, lying, manipulating. All those matters straightened out. And then the rough road smooth, any kind of hindrance, any kind of obstacle, anything that clutters a clear and smooth path, anything that obstructs the Lord's entrance into the heart...could be self-love, apathy, indifference, lust, unbelief, etc., etc.
John then would come and he would be the voice, he would be saying...You need to do a real search of your heart. You need to reflect on your personal sin. You need to see the depth and the dark and the low and the gross and base elements of your life. You need to see the height and the high things and the proud things of your heart and the perverse and crooked thing and every other hindrance in your life for what it is...obstacles that prevent the King from coming into your heart. True repentance requires a complete and full admission of one's sinfulness...depth and height and length and breadth. That's essential to real repentance. Sin must be recognized and reflected upon in one's own life.
Secondly, true repenters recognize divine wrath. "He therefore began saying to the multitudes," because he wanted them to prepare their hearts, because he wanted them to deal with their sin, because he wanted them to do an honest inventory, as I just pointed out, "Therefore he tells them who were going out to be baptized by him, 'You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?'"
He wants them to do an honest heart-searching of their sin. He wants them to reflect on their personal iniquity. He wants them to see their sin at its depth, its heights, its length and breadth. He wants them to do that honesty and so naturally he warns them about divine wrath.
What he's saying to them is...You'd better deal with your sin because it has such immense and eternal consequences. True repentance comes out of the fear of divine wrath. This motivates it. People coming to John and seeking the baptism that he gave, having to confess the fact that they weren't in the Kingdom but outside, no better than a Gentile, and needed to come inside by repentance, they were willing to repent because they wanted to flee the wrath to come. You can be sure that John was a preacher of wrath, a preacher of judgment. Down in verse 9 he says, "The ax has already been laid at the root of the tree." When you're going to chop the tree down the first thing you do is take the ax over there and set it down while you get ready to pick it up and cut the tree. He says the ax is already there and God is about to swing it.
Now the Jews were very aware of that the Old Testament closed with the book of Malachi, actually the last of the Old Testament prophets before John. And then Malachi closes off the story prophetically, Malachi 3, the next to the last chapter in your Old Testament, "Behold, I'm going to send My messenger, and he'll clear the way before Me...that's the Messiah." So the Lord is going to come, He's going to send His messenger, John, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to His temple and the messenger of the Covenant in whom you delight, behold he is coming...says the Lord of host. Okay, the Messiah is coming and before Him is coming His messenger. And then verse 2, "But who can endure the day of His coming and who can stand when He appears for He is like a refiner's fire and He is like fullers, or the washer person, laundry person's soap...he's like a smelter, verse 3, and a purifier of silver." This is judgment. Verse 5, "I will draw near to you for judgment." And then in verse 1 of chapter 4, the last chapter in the Old Testament, "The day is coming, burning like a furnace, all the arrogant, every evil doer will be chaff. The day is coming, we'll set them ablaze, says the Lord of host, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch." There the ax will be laid at the root as stated by John the Baptist. Down further, the next to the last verse in the Old Testament talks about the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord.
The Jewish people knew that when Messiah came it would not only be for the fulfillment of Abrahamic promise and Davidic promise, but that it would also be for judgment. That is clearly outlined for them and I can't begin to take you through all of the passages that do that, but just a few sample passages. For example, Isaiah chapter 2 verse 10, "Enter the rock and hide from the dust from the terror of the Lord, from the splendor of His majesty, for the Lord of host...verse 12...will have a day of reckoning against everyone who is proud and lofty, against everyone who is lifted up that he may be abased." And then down in verse 19, "And men will go into caves or the rocks and the holes of the ground before the terror of the Lord, before the splendor of His majesty when He arises to make the earth tremble," and that, by the way, is a similar scene to what you see later on in the book of Revelation when people cry for the rocks and the mountains to fall on them and hide them from the face of the Lord. Verse 21 repeats the very same thing, the terror of the Lord is coming, the splendor of His majesty and the consequent trembling of the earth as He comes in furious judgment.
In Isaiah 30 verse 27, "Behold the name of the Lord comes from a remote place, burning is His anger, dense is His smoke. His lips are filled with indignation, His tongue is like a consuming fire, His breath is like an overflowing torrent." Very, very graphic prophecies. Amos chapter 5, very strong prophecy along the same line. Let me read you Zephaniah 1:14, "Near is the great day of the Lord, near coming very quickly, listen, the day of the Lord, a day of wrath is that day, a day of trouble, distress, a day of destruction and desolation, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness." He goes on to describe it down to verse 18 on..."The day of the Lord's wrath all the earth will be devoured in the fire of His jealousy. He will make a complete end, indeed a terrifying one, of all the inhabitants of the earth."
Those are just a few of many, many passages in the Old Testament, particularly in the prophets, that speak of judgment when Messiah comes, when God comes. All the prophets preached judgment. John preached judgment. Any true preacher preaches judgment. And when you give a witness for Christ to another individual, you have to talk about the wrath to come. The wrath to come is speaking of final, eternal judgment. Jesus made that a theme of His preaching. He preached more on hell than He did on heaven. He preached more on hell than anybody ever preached on hell. Why? Because He didn't like sinners, because He wanted to damn sinners? No, because He wanted to warn sinners. And one of the things that you must preach when you preach for a true repentance is the seriousness, the eternality and the suffering of eternal hell.
John preached the wrath to come. Obviously the indication here in Luke chapter 3 is that these people were coming to him to flee the wrath to come which meant that he was pointing out to them those passages in the Old Testament that indicate when Messiah comes wrath will come with Him. And it is essential in true repentance to understand the wrath to come, to recognize that reality. There is a hell and it is forever and it is a forever alienation from God and a forever conscious punishment, conscious torment. That's what makes forgiveness urgent. That's what makes forgiveness good news. And that is a strong motivation and any faithful preacher preaches the wrath to come.
John uses very graphic terms and he speaks very harsh words because he is so profoundly concerned about the wrath to come. And the Jews understood it. Why else would these Jews come flocking out there? They knew when Messiah came that there would be blessing but they also knew there would be fiery judgment, that was very clear from Malachi. There would be a terrible day of burning. There would be terrible wrath. They knew that. They wanted to make sure they got the blessings and not the wrath.
Notice how straightforward John is. He says to them, "You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" You sons of poisonous snakes...boy, that is not a seeker-friendly approach. What is he saying here? This is not how to win friends and influence people. This is not how to schmooze people into the Kingdom here. What in the world is he saying?
First of all, I think he's calling them children of Satan. Jesus did that in John 8:44, He said to the Jewish leaders, "You're of your father, the devil," didn't He? He says, "You're of your father, the devil." Jesus said to the Pharisees, Jewish leaders, Matthew 12:34, Matthew 23 I think it's verse 33, both places, "You brood of vipers," same phrase exactly. Jesus said it twice to the Jewish leaders...you sons of snakes. I think he's really identifying them with their father. The devil appeared in the Garden in Genesis 3 in what form? A serpent. And according to the scriptures he is a serpent, as clearly indicated in Revelation chapter 12. So he's really telling them...you belong to Satan, you snakes. You are running from the fire but not interested in any change of your nature. You're still snakes, you're just scrambling in front of the fire. Shallow repenters are offsprings of that snake, Satan.
Matthew 3:7 when Matthew writes about the preaching of John, says when John said this to Pharisees and Sadducees. Luke says he said it to everybody. So particularly to the Pharisees and Sadducees who were the most vicious, poisonous and deadly of all the snakes, of all the children of Satan because they wore the name of God, as it were, on the outside but were satanic on the inside, thus their hypocrisy was more devastating. He says you're the worst of it, the rest of you also belong to the same nature, same satanic nature. Beyond just the Pharisees and the Sadducees, all those people had the very nature of Satan, they were the children of Satan. And he's pointing out their superficiality, he says, your repentance is superficial because your true nature is vicious, your true nature is of the serpent, your true nature is poisonous, your true nature is hostile, your true nature is deadly...particularly those Pharisees and Sadducees...paraded themselves as if they represented God and they were just biting the people and filling them with poison.
This was a pattern for John, he therefore began saying to the multitudes "who were going." The imperfect tense and the present tense verbs mean this is something that went on a lot, this is not one-time dialogue, sometimes it was the Pharisees and Sadducees, sometimes it was the crowd, and sometimes it was both...this is a recurring pattern in John's preaching. He is saying to them...it doesn't do you any good to scramble around like snakes in front of a brush fire if you don't change your nature. Who told you you could escape the wrath by just coming down here and getting baptized?
They have fires because the land is very dry and brush fires like they are in California, are very dangerous and deadly, and what happened obviously in a brush fire is the snakes who live in that area when the fire come begin to scramble to stay ahead of the fire and that's what John sees. Here comes all the Pharisees and the scribes scrambling down the mountain side and backside of Jerusalem into the Judean wilderness, scrambling, as it were, ahead of the fires of Messiah, scrambling to escape the wrath of God by whatever they need to do to escape the wrath of God. But never interested in any change of their wretched nature. So he warns them. There's more to repentance than scrambling to avoid the fires of divine wrath. That you must do, that you must understand but there's more to it than that.
This brings us to the third point. True repenters reflect on personal sin, they recognize divine wrath, but also they reject religious ritual. The Jews were used to a ritual approach to religion. They were used to believing that you could somehow make yourself right with God by your formal prayers, by your alms-giving, by whatever religious ceremony you went through on the Sabbath, or whatever sacrifice you offered. They were believers in the fact that you could actually make yourself right with God through these various rituals. One of the interesting things about Judaism is it rejects total depravity. Jewish commentators think the sin of Adam affected only Adam and that's why they believe we can make ourselves righteous because no fallenness really passes to us from Adam. And so they believe that they could be good before God and that by religious ritual achieve God's pleasure and favor. So they came down to go through another ritual. So John is saying to them...Huh, who told you to come down here and try to escape the wrath of God by being baptized? Do you think that's enough? Verse 8 he says, "You better bring forth fruit in keeping with repentance. Isn't going to do you any good just to be baptized. That's not what God is looking for. Do you think you can scramble like scrambling snakes in front of a fire and all you want to do is head for the water? And you get down here and you slither into the Jordan River and it's all well and good?"
There's no right, there's no ceremony, there's no ritual, there's no baptism that can save anybody. There's no salvation in baptism then and there's none in it now. When Jesus preached His great sermon on salvation in Matthew 5 to 7, He destroyed all their hope in ritual. He attacked their prayers and said it's nothing but vain repetition. He attacked their alms giving and said it's nothing but parading your self-righteous pride. He attacked their sacrifices. He attacked their Sabbath observances. He attacked their oaths. He attacked their vows. He attacked their misinterpretation of the Law of God. He attacked everything they were ceremonially and ritualistically hanging on to. And in a sense He said to them, "All of that stuff is what Paul said in Philippians 3, it's manure apart from repentance."
The churches are full of people going through the motions. People who were baptized as babies, people who were baptized as young people, people baptized as adults, people who go to the church and go through whatever ordinances their churches call for them to go through, whether it's confirmation or whether they go and the priest tells them to say so many Hail Marys and they go through their beads and they go through whatever patterns of penancing they go through, etc., etc., etc., light so many candles, or whatever, pray so many prayers, in the end it has absolutely nothing to do with anything. You cannot flee the wrath to come by scrambling and diving in the water. Verse 8 says you have to bring forth fruit that demonstrate repentance.
Paul in Philippians 3, said, "I'm from Israel, the tribe of Benjamin, the Hebrew of the Hebrews...that means he was kosher, traditional, kept the law, zealous for the law, blameless before the law, ceremonially down to the gnat's eyebrow, just like any good Pharisee." And he said, "I took a look at it when I saw Christ and it was all dung."
John is not telling them they don't need to escape. He's telling them they need to escape. But not like scrambling snakes just headed for the water, that won't do it. A snake in the water is just a snake in the water. What they needed was a change of nature. It's impossible for any sinner to escape judgment by any or all external rituals. True repentance then honestly reflects on personal sin...the depth and height and length and breadth of it. Honestly recognizes divine wrath and totally rejects all religious ritual as a means of forgiveness. Now baptism is an outward sign of something in the heart, but John knew well it could be an outward sign of nothing in the heart as it was in many cases in his ministry...sad to say.
Number four, repenters not only reflect on personal sin, recognize divine wrath and reject religious ritual, but they renounce family ancestry. Look at verse 8 again. "Do not...he says...do not, I warn you, do not begin to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham for our father.'" Now what was this? We don't have anything to fear from the wrath to come, we are the children of Abraham. And after all, salvation is genetic, it just gets passed down, we're Jewish, we have Abraham for our father. They were basing their eternal hope on their genes. They were the people of the promised blessing. They were the people to whom God had made great unilateral, irrevocable, unconditional, eternal promises both to Abraham and to David. They were the people who were promised the land and blessing and a kingdom. They had been promised redemption, according to Galatians 3, that was in the Abrahamic Covenant. They were also promised a Redeemer in the Abrahamic Covenant with the seed who was not many seeds but THE seed, Messiah. They were counting on that descent.
In John chapter 8 they enter into a discussion with Jesus, the Jewish leaders again, and those who are religious leaders, the theologians, and they say to Jesus, "We are Abraham's offspring." And Jesus says to them, "I know you're Abraham's offspring...verse 37...yet you seek to kill Me because My word has no place in you." In verse 39, "If you're Abraham's children, do the deeds of Abraham." You are the children of Abraham, but look, Abraham didn't kill God. He didn't try to kill God. That's what you're trying to do. You're doing the deeds of your father, he says, and your father is the devil.
Not all Israel is Israel. And he is not a Jew that is one outwardly but one inwardly, Romans 2. That's no defense against God's judgment. That is no defense against God's judgment. They knew the prophets. Ezekiel 18, they knew what Ezekiel 18 says that everybody is going to be basically judged on his own life. Verse 21, "If the wicked man turns from his sins which he has committed and observes My statutes, practices justice, righteousness, he shall surely live and shall not die. All his transgressions which he has committed will not be remembered against him because of his righteousness which he has practiced, he will live. Do I have any pleasure in the death of the wicked, declares the Lord God? Rather than that he should turn from his ways and live." God says...Look, it's up to you. Ezekiel says you have to choose to live or die. He will live if he obeys.
Same thing down in verse 30, "Repent, turn away from your transgressions so that iniquity may not become a stumbling block to you. Cast away your transgressions which you've committed," and so forth. Why do you want to die?...he says. "Why do you want to die, O house of Israel?" Being in the house of Israel doesn't protect you from eternal death. Repentance, faith in God does.
Later on in Luke's gospel, chapter 13. Jesus makes an interesting statement. Luke 13:16, just a brief statement, "And this woman," this is more of this dialogue Jesus has with the people who don't understand, he's teaching here in this synagogue on a Sabbath, trying to help them to understand individual faith. Verse 16, He says, "This woman, a daughter of Abraham as she is." Yeah, she's a daughter of Abraham, "But Satan has bound her for 18 long years." Wow, she is a daughter of Abraham and Satan bound her. Later in verse 28, "There's going to be weeping and gnashing of teeth when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the Kingdom of God and yourselves being cast out." You may be Jewish, and He's very clear about this, but you may be shut out of the Kingdom. That doesn't protect you. The fact that you may have been raised in a Christian family doesn't make you a Christian. The fact that you may have been baptized as an infant doesn't secure your salvation. By the way, you remember the rich man that died and went to hell? He says, "Father Abraham, have mercy on me," he was Jewish. What's he doing there? Boy, Jesus made it pretty clear. Heritage doesn't save you.
Zaccheus was a Jew, chapter 19 of Luke. He needed salvation. Jesus went to his house, he was saved.
John says then in very sarcastic words, again at the end of verse 8, "Don't you begin to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham for our father, for I say to you that God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.'" That's no big deal. God can make children of Abraham out of the rocks. You think you're special? God can make as many children of Abraham as He wants out of the dirt.
That is a very demeaning statement. You snakes...you nobodies that God can make out of a bunch of dirt. In fact, if you go back to Isaiah 51 verses 1 and 2, God says, "Remember the rock from which you were hewn," almost as if to say, you know, you were...God just sort of cut you out of a rock to begin with and God can make more of you if He chooses out of the rocks lying around here on the ground. That's nothing special.
You have to come to the place if you want to truly repent where you don't base your relationship to God on anything ancestral. It doesn't matter what your father believes, your mother believes...their salvation doesn't pass to you. I don't think there are people who understand that. There's a whole world of Greek orthodox people, a whole world of Russian orthodox people who believe that salvation is generationally passed down. There are people in the Reform Movement, people in the sacerdotal, sacramental church, Roman Catholicism, who believe somehow that rites which they engaged in as infants passed salvation down from the parents to them. Actually at infant baptism the parents' faith is counted for the salvation of the infant.
Abraham's true children, according to the Scripture, are those who follow the faith of Abraham. It's not genetic. You're Abraham's child if you follow the faith of Abraham. I wish we had time to look at Romans 2, Romans 4, Romans 9, Galatians 3 to see that. What you did get from Abraham, by the way, is sin nature and judgment.
True repentance calls for honest reflection on personal sin. It calls for a recognition of divine wrath. It calls for a rejection of any religious ritual as a means of salvation and the renouncing of any ancestral hope. And even all of that won't save you cause there's two more. True repenters also, number five and we'll just mention these, do them next week, must be spiritually transformed. There must be the revelation of a spiritual transformation. And the sixth one, the heart of it all, they mustreceive the true Messiah.
There's no more important thing than giving a clear message of the gospel and that means a clear understanding of repentance. John is a wonderful model. You say, "Yeah, but he was so harsh." Yeah, but the issue is so serious. You can do it with love, you should do it with tenderness, there should be a tear in the voice and a tear in the eye, but at the same time you cannot hold back. People have to come to grips with personal sin, the depth and height and length and breadth of it. They have to recognize the reality of divine wrath to motivate them to seek forgiveness and escape. But they must reject any external religious ritual and renounce any ancestral kind of genetic hope or any kind of ceremonial hope passed down from their parents.
True Repentance: God's Highway to the Heart, Part 2
Luke 3:8-14
Jesus in Matthew 11:11 said that of those that are born of women was John...greater than Abraham and Moses and David and Solomon and Isaiah and Jeremiah and Daniel and Ezekiel and anybody and everybody else. There was much about John the Baptist to emulate. He was filled with the Holy Spirit from his mother's womb which meant that his life functioned under divine direction and power. He was a man who lived a simple and frugal and almost self-denying life. He spent his entire ministry pointing toward Jesus Christ. All of those are admirable qualities. And if one were to pick a hero, somebody to pattern their life after, John the Baptist would be the best choice of those people who preceded Jesus Christ.
And I think not only in those personal areas, but in the fact that John is a notable model for the preacher. I'm not talking about his wardrobe, I don't think God expects us to wear camel skin. I'm not talking about his diet, I don't think we need to eat locusts and wild honey. And I'm not talking about his location, I don't think we have to go out in the desert and expect everybody to come to us. But I am talking about his message because what marked John was that he was a preacher of repentance and he was a preacher of Jesus Christ.
Those were the two features in his ministry. He called on people to turn from their sin and embrace the Messiah, the essence of all true gospel preaching. John was a preacher of repentance. Matthew tells us in his third chapter that John came and said, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." And Jesus came and said, "Repent." Luke 5 records for us Jesus said He didn't come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance. Repentance is the issue. In the thirteenth chapter of Luke and the third verse and the fifth verse, Jesus said if you don't repent you'll perish.
Repentance so often ignored today, so often overlooked and minimalized is at the very heart of any biblical gospel ministry. And John was a preacher of salvation. He was preaching that people could have the forgiveness of sin and New Covenant salvation, as we've already learned. And the essence of that preaching is two-fold...you preach repentance from sin and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. That's precisely what Acts 20 says the Apostles preached. That is New Covenant preaching, preaching to sinners telling them they can be forgiven if they repent and if they embrace the true Christ, the true Messiah.
That is God's promise not just for Israel. John was directed to preach to Israel but that is God's promise to all sinners of all times. Salvation, forgiveness of sin, eternal life is given to those who repent of sin and acknowledge Jesus Christ as the only Savior.
The prophet John's ministry was not unlike the ministry of prophets before him. All the prophets before him talked about sin and they talked about righteousness and they talked about forgiveness. And they saw God as a Savior and a forgiver and for those who didn't receive His salvation and forgiveness, God then is a judge and an executioner. John just stands at the pinnacle of that with the most concise and defined message and because he was living at the time the Messiah came he can point most directly of all the prophets to the Messiah.
When John began his preaching in the wilderness, about six months before Jesus appeared to begin his public ministry, the hope for the Messiah was very high. The Jews were weary, to put it mildly, of Roman oppression and prior to that Greek oppression, the oppression of the Medo-Persians and even the captivity of the Babylonians. They were ready for their own king and they were ready for the fulfillment of everything that had been promised to Abraham and David and they hadn't seen that fulfillment. They were ready for the Savior to come, the Redeemer, the One who would bring New Covenant salvation, New Covenant forgiveness and usher them in to the fulfillment of all Abrahamic and Davidic promise. They were looking for a monarch who would come and conquer nations, and they got a Lamb who came to conquer sin first. John was a model for this.
He did talk about the Kingdom, but he also talked about repentance. He did talk about the King, but he also talked about the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world because before they could ever have the Kingdom and the fulfillment of Abrahamic and Davidic promise, they had to come through New Covenant salvation by way of repentance and faith in the Savior and the Redeemer, the Messiah. Luke wants us to understand John's message because it is a message for all the ages. And so he gives us a sample of John's preaching, starting in verse 7:17.
As we go through this passage, we really do see the essence of gospel preaching. This, for me, is the model of how we are to preach. John is a great example. We are greatly indebted to Luke for giving us such a clear sample of John's great preaching, and in so doing providing for us the powerful and clear pattern for everybody who proclaims the good news of forgiveness.
As we go through this section, we see the nature of true repentance. Because the main note that John sounded was the note of repentance, because he came calling people to repent, he was very clear as to what that involved. This is absolutely critical today because there is a tendency to downplay repentance, to shrink repentance down to a minimal level. We face a tremendous amount of false repentance, a tremendous amount of shallow repentance, a tremendous amount of non-saving, superficial repentance.
There was nothing superficial about John's message. John preached what you would call hard, confrontive, harsh truth because he understood the urgency of repentance and salvation. He was very direct. He paid no attention to his culture, in fact he lived his 30 years apart from the culture the whole time in the wilderness. He was not subject to the nuances of the political culture of the Romans, nor was he subject to the nuances of the religious culture of the Jews. He lived apart from all of that. He was culturally ignorant, culturally indifferent. He was not interested in what the society thought or what they wanted to hear, he was only interested in the message that came from God to them. And so, John's message is very direct, very straightforward, very unembellished hard truth.
Even so, most of the people apparently who came out and responded to John's preaching and repented and were baptized (and there were a lot of them because the Bible says all Judea and Jerusalem were going out to him) involved the multitudes in general. They involved the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the religious leaders. They involved the tax collectors, the outcasts of society. They involved the soldiers which would be Jewish soldiers most likely, those who were attached to Herod Antipas up at Perea and other Jewish soldiers who functioned as policemen in Jerusalem. All of these various elements of society all going out to be baptized to get ready for Messiah, making some kind of act of repentance, some kind of confession and yet when you get to the end of it all and Jesus has lived and died and gone back to heaven, there are only 120 disciples gathered in an upper room. We can only conclude then that if there were only 120 who were really devoted to Jesus Christ, that most of this was superficial.
Now if even direct preaching by this man, this great gifted preacher, the greatest of all prophets up to his time, resulted in some large extent of superficiality, what in the world can we expect today with the kind of preaching most people hear? We need to go back and look at John. Matthew says John came preaching repentance, and he did. And Jesus came preaching repentance, and the apostles throughout the book of Acts were preaching repentance. And I need to remind you how serious it is to preach a message without a call to true repentance because apart from true repentance there is no salvation. It's not enough to say to someone, "You need to accept Jesus as your personal Savior." I know what people mean when they say that and it's well intentioned, I don't question that. But such words, frankly, are really inadequate to instruct a sinner in the way of salvation. You need to accept Jesus as your personal Savior as if you were sitting in the seat of sovereignty and you were going to give Jesus the privilege of being accepted by you.
You hear people say, "Well, you need to make a decision for Christ," as if the salvation decision was yours and not His. Those kinds of statements subtly change the focus of the gospel, and they change it subtly away from repentance. What the sinner needs to do is not accept Jesus Christ or make a decision for Christ, but to repent and cry out and ask Jesus Christ to accept him in spite of his sin. He asks Christ if He would make a decision to forgive him. It's not your decision for Christ, it's His decision for you that matters.
It's not about you accepting Christ, it's about you asking Christ to accept you, right? That's the issue. It's at His discretion. We don't call sinners to repent enough today. We're not asking Him to take moral action. We have this superficial thing about accepting Jesus. There's a real moral issue. There's a grappling with a condition that is endemic, systemic, profound called sin. It isn't that Jesus is standing hat in hand waiting for sinners to render a verdict on Him. It's that He is ready to render a verdict on sinners. They are at the disposal of His sovereignty. But He promises for those who truly repent that He will provide forgiveness. So the gospel is a call to repentance and faith in Jesus Christ, and that is the essence of what John preached. And that is the essence of what all true preachers preach. And those who don't preach that don't preach truly. We preach repentance. That's what I said. In Luke 13:3-5 Jesus said, "If you don't repent, you'll perish.
At the very end of Luke's gospel in the great commission, Jesus says, "Repentance for forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in His name to all nations." That's what we do. We preach that God forgives sinners who repent and believe in the name of Jesus Christ.
John was aware of shallow conversion. He was aware that the Jewish people were very good at superficial religion and so the tone of his preaching was urgent and the tone of his preaching was even harsh as he spoke hard truth calling sinners to true penitence.
A true repenter is to be known by six characteristics. Number one, I already covered the first four, we're just going to review...number one, true repenters reflect on personal sin. Secondly, true repenters reflect on personal sin, secondly, reviewing, true repenters recognize divine wrath. Third, true repenters reject religious ritual. Fourth, John also says you have to renounce family ancestry
Fifth, true repenters reveal spiritual transformation. True repenters reveal spiritual transformation. "Therefore bring forth fruits in keeping with repentance." John says if the repentance is real it will show up in your conduct, behavior and attitudes.
When the Apostle Paul was giving his testimony to Agrippa, the king, in Acts 26:19, he said to Agrippa, "Consequently, King Agrippa I didn't prove disobedient to the heavenly vision, I kept declaring both to those of Damascus first, also at Jerusalem, throughout the region of Judea, even to the Gentiles that they should repent and turn to God performing deeds appropriate to repentance."
Is your repentance real? Then let's see it manifest in your life. If this repentance is real, it is the work of God. If it's real repentance, it's the kind of repentance that Paul wrote to Timothy about that God is granting, that God is working and it means it's consistent with regeneration. Repentance doesn't occur in a vacuum, it occurs in the environment of regeneration so that the Spirit of God is regenerating and the repentance then is reflective of that new life and it shows up in new attitudes and new conduct.
This is not unfamiliar to the Jewish people. They knew that whenever there was a call to repentance, there was a call to a new approach to life. In Isaiah 1, where this statement of depravity, your whole head is sick, the whole heart is faint, from the sole of the foot to the head there's nothing sound in it. You're depraved from top to bottom, Isaiah says in verses 5 and 6. Then in verse 16 he says, "Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean. Remove the evil of your deeds from My sight. Cease to do evil. Learn to do good. Seek justice. Reprove the ruthless. Defend the orphans and plead for the widow."
You want to repent? Then let's see the work of God in that repentance in your life. Though your sins are scarlet, they'll be white as snow; though they were red like crimson, they'll be like wool. If God is changing you and God is cleansing you, then we're going to see it in the way you treat orphans, the way you treat widows and the way you treat God's Law.
The familiar call to repentance in 2 Chronicles 7:14 is, "My people who are called by My name humble themselves and they pray and they seek My face and they turn from their wicked ways. Then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin." It's when there's a turning. It's when there's a rejection of sin and there's a pursuit of righteousness that there is evidence of the real working of God. Ezekiel 33:1　says, "When the wicked turns from his wickedness and practices justice and righteousness, he will live."
When God is doing the work, when God the Father is drawing and when God is doing the work of conversion, transformation, new birth, regeneration, the repentance is going to show up in changed life. So true repenters reveal spiritual transformation.
Compare Ezekiel 36 where the work of God is going on in New Covenant fashion, where the New Covenant is at work in the life of a person. It says in verse 25, "I will sprinkle clean water on you, you'll be clean, I'll cleanse you from all your filthiness, from all your idols. I'll give you a new heart, put a new spirit within you, move the heart of stone from your flesh, give you a heart of flesh. I'll put My Spirit within you...listen to this...and cause you to walk in My statutes and you will be careful to observe My ordinances."
When God is doing the work, there's a spiritual transformation. And now go down to verse 9 and here's another warning. "Also, the ax, by the way, is laid at the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that doesn't bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire." So John says, and I just want to remind you that God is ready to do the judgment. He's already walked out to the orchard, He's already surveyed the trees and He's laid the ax down against one of the trees, He's ready to do the judgment. And if He looks at your tree and there aren't any elements of fruit on the tree, then the ax is going to be laid at the root of the tree and the tree then, having been chopped down, is going to be thrown into the fire and the fire is eternal judgment. The same eternal judgment, the same fire that Malachi warned them about in the last book of the Old Testament when he said He's like a refiner's fire, He's going to come in fiery judgment, the Messiah is. So they knew that with the Messiah's coming was blessing but also was fiery, fiery judgment because the prophets had made it abundantly clear that that was so.
John reminds them to repent a real true repentance manifested in fruit, which is attitudes and actions that are righteous, that manifest the love of God and obedience to His Word. And he's simply saying...If I don't see that, then I don't see the fruit of true repentance. It's not enough for you to scramble down here and get through the water and think that your Abrahamic ancestry and your ritual and your remorse about your sin is enough, there has to be indication of a hatred of sin and a love of righteousness that shows up in a changed behavior, which indicates regeneration. And if it's not there, if the fruits not there, the ax is going to be struck at the root of the tree. This is not collective Israel because it says "every tree that doesn't bear good fruit," it's talking about individuals here, any sinner and every sinner is in view. And if there's not the right fruit, that sinner is going to be destroyed, if there's not the evidence of spiritual transformation, regeneration.
If enough individuals reject, then you have a national situation. And that's what happened. There were many individuals whose repentance was shallow and the ax was laid at the root of the tree, believe me, in those individuals lives. In 70 A.D. the Romans came in there and murdered, literally massacred a million, one-hundred thousand Jews and the ax fell in judgment and those people were cast into eternal hell. There were so many of them that it constituted a nation literally going into temporary exile, as it were, out of existence temporarily. We're living in a day when we're watching God bringing them back, reconstituting them a nation in 1948 and getting them ready for the great salvation yet to come in the millennial Kingdom that will fulfill His promises to David. And at that time they will believe, they will look on Him whom they've pierced, they will mourn for Him and then a fountain of cleansing will be opened and they will be spiritually transformed and they will become the witness nation that God always wanted them to be and their witness all through the Tribulation and their witness all through the Kingdom so that on the robe of every Jew will be hanging ten Gentiles saying..."Take me to see the King of Kings." But at the time that John was preaching, they rejected. The time of Jesus preaching, they rejected. So many individuals rejected that it constituted a national rejection. But every tree that doesn't bear good fruit will be cut down.
The Messiah will not only judge Israel this way, but He'll judge all men this way. Zephaniah 1, "The great day of the Lord is near, very near, coming very quickly, it's a day of wrath, a day of trouble, distress, destruction desolation, darkness, gloom, clouds, thick darkness." And at the end it says, "He will make a complete end on the day of the Lord's wrath, all the earth will be devoured. He will make a complete end, a terrifying one of all the inhabitants of the earth." It isn't just Jewish people that will feel the wrath of God, anyone who rejects the Messiah will be subject to that final terrifying judgment. He says in chapter 3 of Zephaniah verse 8, "He will pour out His indignation and burning anger on the whole earth."
John preaches a very strong message of judgment on individuals. But if enough individuals reject, it becomes a national issue, as in the case of Israel. And if enough individuals reject, it becomes a world issue, as in the case of today as the world is largely made up of sinners who refuse to repent.
The evidence of repentance then is righteous deeds. That's why Romans 2:5 to 8 says God is going to judge finally on our deeds because the deeds aren't the way we earn our salvation, they're the demonstration that we have been saved by grace. You have been saved unto good works, Ephesians 2:10 says.
The crowd is getting the seriousness of the message, right? And apparently they've worked their way through the list, that they have done some reflecting on their own sin...so much that they're willing to submit themselves to a baptism that confesses their no better than Gentiles, and that was very hard for proud Jews to swallow. And they went so far as to recognize divine wrath and to scramble to escape it because it was all over the prophets of the Old Testament. They also had to reject the ritual as a saving ritual and they had to reject their ancestry from Abraham as any kind of protection from judgment. In fact, it only exacerbated the judgment if they rejected their Messiah because they had received more revelation, they were more accountable to be more greatly punished.
They're told they have to have a life that demonstrates this true repentance. That creates some questions, go to verse 10, this is just a brief dialogue. "And the multitudes were questioning him saying, 'Then what shall we do?'" So the crowd said...You want the fruits of repentance, we don't want the ax to fall, we don't want to be thrown into hell, so what do we do? What does God want to see?
"And he would answer and say," the form of those words there in the original indicates that this was a constant thing with him. It's not that he once answered and said...it's he would answer anytime this came up and it came up all the time because he preached like this all the time. And he would answer and say to them..."Let the man who has two tunics," tunic, the word there refers to an undergarment and you only wore one of those so if you had two you had a spare one. It was the undergarment you wore over your skin and then you wore your outer garment on top of that. "So if somebody has two of those then share with the person who doesn't have any and whoever has food, do the same."
This is a pretty menial kind of thing, it's pretty trivial. Is this the kind of fruit of righteousness? Sure because the first great commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. But the second great commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself. The Jews knew that very well. They knew Leviticus 19:18 because Leviticus 19:18 says you shall love your neighbor as yourself, that was reiterated all through the Old Testament. They knew they were to love and sacrifice for their neighbors. They would show their love for God by how they loved their neighbors. They would show a transformed heart by being unselfish and generous with their neighbors. And that follows all the way through the whole New Testament where we're told we fulfill the whole law of God when we love God and love our neighbors. So he's saying just what Jesus said when He said to His disciples in John 13, "All men will know that you're My disciples if you have love for one another." How do you show that love? You wash each other's feet. You share a garment with each other. You provide food for each other. In fact, in 1 John 3 he says if you see your brother has need and you don't meet it, how does the love of God dwell in you? And if the love of God doesn't dwell in you, then we might assume that you're not God's children.
This is more profound than it appears, perhaps, on the surface because there was a general selfishness, there always is, in unregenerate minds. There would be the evidence of regeneration in selflessness and in the consuming love of one another where you look not on your own things but on the things of others, as Paul said in Philippians 2. So if you have two chiton, two of those linen undergarments and somebody has none, then you give him yours. And if you have more food than you need, then you give that other person what food you have. They understood the environment of loving your neighbor as yourself. Isaiah 58:7-8, Ezekiel 18:7-9, Micah 6:8 and elsewhere called them to this kind of demonstration of sacrificial love.
Even James writes that pure religion and undefiled is to take care of widows and orphans. That for some people doesn't seem like a very lofty view of religion but that's it at the heart. Such works are the expression of a true heart repentance and a real conversion and a real work of regeneration. They are not the means of salvation, as the rabbis wrongly teach, but they are the effect of that salvation.
Another group came and Luke uses them to illustrate the point in verse 12, some tax gatherers. They were the most hated people in the country because they were Jews who were collecting taxes for Romans. Usually wealthy Romans would buy a tax franchise for a certain area of Palestine. They would hire traitor Jews, really, who would then go collect taxes from their countrymen and they were exorbitant, there was tremendous abuse, there was extortion. All the worst possible things as well as representing a Gentile idolatrous government and taking for them money from God's people Israel, that was the traitor of all traitors. That's why the worst that could be said about somebody was you would treat him like a tax collector, a total outcast.
Here come the tax collectors. Now they want to know what to do. They've got a lot on their plate, they must have felt some guilt so they said, "What do we do? This is pretty open, you know," they were vilified, scorned and hated by the people. They were the abusers of the people. The publicans, the chief collectors, as I said, were Romans but under them were these Jews who got rich at the expense of their countrymen and made a life of robbing people. Virtually they were considered virtually unclean and regarded as alienated from God. They were associated with drunkards and prostitutes. They went around collecting poll taxes, land taxes, sales taxes, anything they could come up with. John must have made them feel guilty and if they wanted to repent and get ready for Messiah, what were these Jews going to do?
He says in verse 13, "Collect no more than what you've been ordered to." Now the law had been written and apparently the law was a reasonable law developed by the Roman senate and then put upon the people, but it never was adhered to. These tax collectors extorted...the story of Zaccheus will come into play in chapter 19 when we get there, in another millennium. But until that time you can read it for yourself. He just says to them...don't take anymore than the law requires. That's a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree move for the tax collectors. Just take what you're supposed to take, that's all, don't take anymore. Love is one manifestation of a transformed life. Another one is honesty or justice. That's a beautiful picture, fairness and justice, a characteristic of God.
There's a third group here, soldiers. And in my Bible...in my study Bible I put the note that they were probably Roman soldiers, I think I was wrong. As I've studied it again, it's debatable in some ways, but I really kind of...I'm going to change that in the next edition. I'm going to change it to the fact that I think they were Jewish soldiers who were really assigned to Herod Antipas and stationed in Perea, that's the best way to historically track them back. There's really no compelling reason why Romans would show up here to get ready for the Messiah, and maybe some of the soldiers that functioned in Jerusalem in a sort of a police faction. But these soldiers, most likely Jewish soldiers, came and were questioning the same way. And this would have been probably a repeated scenario...what about us? What do we do? What are the fruit of...what's the fruit of repentance for us? What are you looking for? What is God looking for?
He says to them, "Do not take money from anyone by force or accuse anyone falsely and be content with your wages." Those are the three major pit falls for people in authority, people who carry the sword, people who carry weapons, police, soldiers. Those are the three most obvious ways that they can pervert their authority.
The first one, "Do not take money from anyone by force." The Greek verb literally means "to shake down." Don't shake down people. How do you shake down somebody? By intimidation, by threat, you shake them down by force. And soldiers did that. They robbed people. That was the pattern for them. They would rob people. They had authority. They had power. They had weapons and they would shake down people and take whatever they wanted.
Now the second thing he says to the soldiers is, "Don't accuse anyone falsely." People in positions of police have tremendous authority and tremendous ability to twist and pervert evidence in order to convict people who are innocent and perhaps in some cases to blackmail those people for money, if they want to be set free. Fining people on false charges, extorting them by fraud.
The third thing he says, "Be content with your wages." It's the discontent over your wages that turns policemen to criminals. So these are the issues that they deal with with people in positions of authority like soldiers and police. He's simply saying...Hey, honesty, integrity, justice, fairness, love, let it be that that's manifest out of your life. This is contrary to how unforgiven, untransformed, unregenerate people act.
Really it all shows love. It all shows justice, honesty, contentment. Those are righteous virtues that evidence a changed life. And so, John is saying...Look, are you a true repenter? Have you reflected on your personal sin? Recognized the wrath to come? Rejected ritual? Renounced ancestry as a protection from divine judgment? And is there a revelation of transformation into your attitudes and your actions are so different?
Now up to this point we have a clear compelling understanding of true repentance. This is the real deal. The genuine repenter does a real honest inventory of the reality of his personal transgression. He understands that no religious ritual and no heritage can bring about escape or protection from divine judgment. That he must have a heart transformation that results in a righteous life that manifests love and justice and honesty and those virtues that are characteristic of God Himself. And all that is good.
There's one other thing missing, the sixth and final element in a true gospel preacher's arsenal is this...he must receive the true Messiah...he must receive the true Messiah. All the rest is insufficient without the true Messiah so that you repent but you also put your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ because Acts 4:12 says, "There is not salvation in any other name."
True Repentance: God's Highway to the Heart, Part 3
Luke 3:15-17
In the preaching of John there is really one great point that he is making and it is the point of true repentance. John preached repentance and that's what we have been preaching to you as we have been learning about John. (Acts 17:30) Matthew 9:13 says that Jesus Christ came to call sinners to repentance. Second Peter 3:9, "God is not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance." Luke 15:7 and 10 indicates that there is joy in heaven over one sinner brought to repentance. And in Luke 24:47, the Great Commission Jesus gave is that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in His name to all peoples.
Our message is repentance. It is a hard, harsh message. It confronts sin. It unmasks hypocrisy. It denies superficiality. You cannot preach the true gospel apart from repentance. John came preaching repentance, the Bible says. Jesus came preaching repentance. The Apostles preached repentance. Christ commands repentance. He does it at least three times in just Revelation 2 and 3. God saves through repentance. In fact, in Acts 11:18 it calls repentance, "Repentance unto life." There is no spiritual life, there is no eternal life without repentance. In Acts 5:31 it is said Christ is exalted as a Savior to give repentance and the forgiveness of sins.
And yet you do not hear repentance being preached today. The message is that God will forgive all the sins of the sinner who truly repents. That is the good news that we must preach. John preached repentance and he was concerned about false repentance, shallowness and superficiality. He preached strongly and sometimes even harshly and very confrontively because it was necessary to repel the shallow repentance if possible. Even with all of John's hard preaching it became clear that there were many shallow repenters who came out to see him and to hear him and even to be baptized. Even when you preach the truth and you preach it as it should be preached, there will be shallow conversions, there will be shallow repentance. How much more of that there will be when there is no repentance at all being preached and there is no confrontation of sin at all.
The sixth and final characteristic of true repenters is that they receive the true Messiah. And now we turn from the five things that are looking at sin and the means of salvation and we turn to the One who alone can save, Jesus Christ. And let's look at verse 15.
"Now while the people were in a state of expectation and all were wondering in their hearts about John as to whether he might be the Christ, John answered and said to them all, 'As for me, I baptize you with water. But one is coming who is mightier than I and I am not fit to untie the thong of His sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. And His winnowing fork is in His hand to thoroughly clear His threshing floor and to gather the wheat into His barn. But He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.'"
Again you see the harshness of John, you see the hard truth that John preaches and maybe you don't see anything else. But what you really have here is a very significant attestation to the fact that the coming One, the Messiah, the Christ is in fact God. This is a great statement on John's part that Messiah is God. And that is plenty of reason why John is not the Christ because the Christ can do things that John cannot do. John can baptize with water. But John cannot baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire. That is supernatural. And that terminology comes from the Old Testament and has deep meaning in the minds of the Jewish hearers.
Modern evangelicalism thinks that if you have to believe in Christ to be saved, that's too narrow. But it's not. Acts 4:12, "Neither is there salvation in any other name than the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth," as in that context. No matter what kind of repentance a person makes, there will be no salvation unless there is trust in the person and work of Jesus Christ. So that's the capstone on John's preaching. He preaches repentance, but he then turns them toward Messiah.
Look at verse 15. "While the people were in a state of expectation." There was just general expectation that went on all the time because, I mean, they've been waiting for the Messiah for centuries, waiting for the promises of God to Moses about the prophet who would come...the promises of God way back in the Garden, the one who would be the seed of the woman, who would bruise the serpent's head...they've been waiting for a long time for the promise that God made to Abraham to be fulfilled in the seed who would be the Redeemer. The promise to David in the King who would come and establish His Kingdom all throughout the earth. So there was a sort of expectation just built in the fabric of their religion. But that's not what it's really addressing here. There was a level of expectation that had been heightened by the ministry of John. John came as the herald. He came saying he was the fulfillment of Isaiah chapter 40, he was the voice crying in the wilderness. And everybody was going out to hear him, all Jerusalem and Judea, and they were literally having their expectation heightened because John was preaching.
According to Matthew 11:3 and Luke 7:18-20, Messiah is called the expected one. Messiah and expectation in some ways was synonymous. They were waiting for, if you will, the coming one, that's another way to translate it, and I think in the NAS in those two verses, Matthew 11:3 and I think it's Luke 7:20, He is called the expected one. So they were eagerly waiting the expected one.
It was very natural, for them to wonder as it says in verse 15, in their hearts about John as to whether he might be the Messiah who is synonymous with the coming one, or the expected one. By the way, in verse 16 Messiah is referred to as the coming one, but one is coming, or literally the coming one, the expected one.
Was John the expected one? John never claimed that. In verse 16 he says he is mightier than I, the one who is coming, the coming one, the expected one is mightier than I and I am not fit to untie the thong of His sandals. We are on two different levels. I am not even worthy to climb up and be the lowest slave imaginable rendering the humblest duty in His behalf. We are in two different worlds, He is so superior to me.
The gospel of John says it in unmistakable terms, "There came a man sent from God whose name was John. He came for a witness that he might bear witness of the light...who is Christ...that all might believe through him. He was not the light but came that he might bear witness of the light." He was not the Messiah. He knew it. Everybody knew it, really. Luke 20:6 says, "All men perceived that John was a prophet." What does a prophet do? A prophet preaches sin, repentance, forgiveness, judgment, salvation. John perfectly fulfilled the mission of a prophet. And, of course, of all the prophets who had ever lived he was the greatest, Matthew 11:11 says of all the people who had lived he was the greatest up until his time. His message of repentance and forgiveness and judgment and salvation and blessing and Kingdom, both sides, made everybody know that he was a prophet. And all men, Luke 20:6, perceived that John was a prophet.
But it was natural to wonder at the beginning whether or not he might in fact be more than a prophet. But he wasn't more than a prophet and he knew it. That's why in John 3:30-31, John the Baptist, the prophet said, "Jesus must increase and I must decrease." I'm not even worthy to untie His sandals. That was the worst, that was the lowliest of the lowest of the low duties. In fact it was said by some that it was such a dirty thing to do that it should only be done by a Gentile. I'm not even worthy to do that. I can't even climb up to do the dirtiest job in His behalf, that's how separated we are.
John answered and said to them in verse 16, "As for me, I baptize you with water." I can just dunk you here in the Jordan, that's all I can do. "But the coming One, the expected One who is mightier than I." He is in another category all together. "When He comes, and by the way, I'm not fit to untie the thong of His sandal, He will baptize you not with water, but with the Holy Spirit and fire." This is a completely different paradigm, now we're in to the supernatural. John says I can dunk you in the water of the Jordan River, what I cannot do is immerse you into the Holy Spirit, nor can I immerse you into eternal judgment, that belongs to the divine category, right? So what he's saying here is I am a man, He's not. They associated the Holy Spirit and the giving of the Holy Spirit with God. Why? Ezekiel 36, God says, "Under New Covenant terms I bring you New Covenant forgiveness and wash away your sins, I'll put My Spirit in you." They associated that with the work of Almighty God. They also associated the fiery judgment of final retribution with Almighty God.
What John is saying is with me you're dealing with a man who is a prophet. With Him you're dealing with God who dispenses the Holy Spirit to those who repent and eternal judgment to those who don't. That is a completely different category. John, who is miles ahead of philosophers as a prophet who spoke the truth of God had limitations. He could preach the truth and he could baptize in water, but that's where it ended.
Jesus is the One John's pointing to. The coming One, the Messiah who by the way is even referred to as the coming One in Isaiah 40. You remember back when we read the opening ten verses, some of which is quoted in verse 4, 5 and 6 that I pointed it out to you that God is called the coming One. That when Messiah comes it will be God who is coming. So the coming One, borrowed from Isaiah 40, God when He comes in the form of the Messiah is mightier than I. Yes, He's a mightier preacher of righteousness than I. He's a mightier preacher of repentance than I. But more than that, He's so far beyond me that I'm not even worthy to do the humblest task in His behalf. He's so far beyond me that it's inconceivable because He will immerse you in the Holy Spirit, or He will immerse you in fire. And I don't have the power to do that.
John is saying I can't save you, nor can I damn you. I can't give you the Holy Spirit, nor can I bring you to eternal punishment. That's way beyond me. We have now catapulted out of the human realm and we're into the realm of God. So the Messiah is coming is none other than God. And He will do what no prophet, no man even the greatest man who ever lived up until his time could even begin to think to do. For anybody to imagine they could dispense the Holy Spirit or eternal judgment would be to have arrived at a level of lunacy and blasphemy beyond which one cannot go. Nobody can do that but God. He is the asserting the deity of Jesus Christ. You're dealing with the coming One who is none other than God as promised in Isaiah 40.
True Repentance: God's Highway to the Heart, Part 4
Luke 3:15-17
John, this great prophet, known as John the Baptist because of his baptizing ministry, he is the forerunner of Messiah. He is the herald who announces the Messiah is coming. He has two responsibilities, to prepare the people for Messiah's arrival and to identify the Messiah to the people.
Where there is true repentance there is also a reception of the true Messiah, that's number six, a reception of the true Messiah. You know, you could go through all of that repentance and fall short if you didn't embrace the true Messiah. Acts 4:12, "Neither is there salvation in any other name. There is no other name given among men whereby we must be saved." Heaven has given no other name. John 1:12 says, "As many as received Him, He gave the right to be called children of God." Acts 16:11, I think it is, it says, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved."
I went back this week again just to check in my mind was I right, that article in "Christianity Today," where there was a statement on salvation made. And the person who wrote the statement, an excellent statement, was asked by the editors of the magazine, "Don't you think you're being too narrow when you say that in order for someone to be saved they have to have an intellectual knowledge of Jesus Christ?" I thought, "Maybe I missed that." But that's what it said. The idea that somehow you could be saved apart from the knowledge of Jesus Christ is heresy. It's a sad lie. John says in verses 15 to 17, there's one coming, He's mightier than I, He's the one you've got to look to. Don't look to me, verse 15, "The people were in a state of expectation, they were wondering in their hearts about John as to whether he might be the Christ." Remember, he never claimed that. His followers never claimed that. They never claimed that he was the Messiah, he never claimed that he was the Messiah.
That's indicated in Acts 19. It tells us Paul was passing through the upper country and he came to Ephesus and he found some disciples. Interesting, he's in Gentile area, he finds some disciples and he says to them, "Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?" They said to him, "No, we have not even heard whether the Holy Spirit has come." They had heard of the Holy Spirit, all Jews knew of the Holy Spirit, of course. But they hadn't heard whether the Holy Spirit had come in the way that had been promised. And he said to them, Paul did, "Well then in what baptism were you baptized?" And they said, "Oh, into John's baptism." These were disciples of John from way back who had never yet heard about the Messiah. They had been baptized down there in the Jordan River at the time that John was doing his baptism. Wandered back off into the Gentile world but never knew about the Messiah. And he said then, "John baptized with the baptism of repentance," Paul said, "telling the people to believe in Him who was coming after him, that is in Jesus." Just point that out to you because I want you to know that's exactly what John said. He never told anybody to believe in him as Messiah. Paul says he told people to believe in the One that was coming after him, even Jesus.
That's the way it was from the beginning. When Gabriel told Zacharias, the father of John, when he was going to have a son, he said his son would announce the coming of Messiah. That's what John knew from the very time the angel gave the message, and that's always what he knew and that's always what he preached. He was not that light, John 1 says, but was sent to bear witness of that light. He knew that. He makes that very clear because he knows that question is in people's minds. In verse 16 he answered and said to them all, that's a very important phrase because the Greek language there indicates a formal introduction to official teaching. Here was an official doctrinal statement, "As for me, I baptize you with water but one is coming who is mightier than I and I am not fit to untie the thong of His sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire." John says don't get us confused, folks, we are worlds apart...we are worlds apart. I can baptize you with water, that's all I can do. I can take you down here into the Jordan River and I can dunk you, and that is not very special, anybody could do that, you could do that, I could do that, anybody could do that. That is not a supernatural act. That is not some kind of act of great power. That is just a plain old human act. You can take somebody in water and baptize them. John says I can do that.
But literally in the Greek with a definite article, "The coming One," and again I say that is a technical title for Messiah, "The coming One...the coming One," that's how the Jews knew Him as the coming One, "who is mightier than I." In the eleventh chapter of Luke and verses 21 and 22 He is called the stronger One, the coming One, the stronger One, the Messiah. "I'm not even fit to untie the thong of His sandals." The task of taking somebody's sandals off and washing their feet was so low on the service ladder that you couldn't get lower than having to do that job and it was a job usually assigned to a Gentile because it was beneath the dignity of a Jew to do it. John says I'm not even fit to climb up to the point where I could tie...untie His sandals, I don't even belong with Him. I'm not even near Him. I'm not even fit to go up and do the lowliest, most despised duty. We're so far apart. We are in two different worlds. We are so far apart.
The reason we're so far apart is clear. "I baptize with water," end of verse 16, "He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire." That is a great statement filled with tremendous profound truth. John says...Look, I can immerse you in this Jordan River, I can do that, anybody can do that...what I can't do is immerse you in the Holy Spirit or immerse you in fire. I can do a human thing but I can't do a divine thing.
What he's saying here is the One who is coming, the coming One, the stronger One, the mightier One, the One I'm not even worthy to untie His sandals, that One will do things that only God can do...only God can immerse you in the Holy Spirit. Only God can immerse you in fire. John is pointing out the deity of the Messiah. John is saying...I don't have the power to save you and I don't have the power to damn you. I don't have the power to immerse you in the Holy Spirit. And I don't have the power to immerse you in hell. That's not my power.
The Jews understood this. You notice there's not a big explanation about this because the Jews knew that when Messiah came He was going to be a dividing line. They knew that because the prophets said that over and over in the Old Testament. The coming of the Messiah was a two-edged sword, believe me. When the Messiah came there would be blessing. And when the Messiah came there would be salvation. And when the Messiah came there would be the Kingdom. But when the Messiah came there would be judgment and there would be death and there would be burning.
The Jews knew about the New Covenant. And I'll just give you the quick little summary. When God was giving covenants to Israel, He gave them promises in those covenants. The ones that are important for us to know are the promises He gave to Abraham. They understood that God promised to Abraham that He would bless this people if they were faithful. If they would be His witness nation. It wasn't that He wanted only to bless them, He wanted to bless the whole world through them. But if they would be faithful He would bless them. And all that blessing is laid out to Abraham and to Isaac and Jacob. And then He made promises to David that He would bless them with a Kingdom that would stretch over the whole earth. And they wanted those blessings. The Jewish people wanted those blessings.
God gave them another covenant called the Sinaitic Covenant, the one made on Mount Sinai, or the Mosaic Covenant made with Moses. That was the covenant of law. In order for you to be blessed you've got to keep the law. Well they couldn't keep the law and so all the law did was damn them and cut off the promises of Abraham and the promises of David from them. So here they were caught in that situation. God made promises, they couldn't attain to those promises because they couldn't attain to the standard of holiness God required which was perfection and they were crushed under the Mosaic Law, they were crushed under the inability to keep God's law. So God had to introduce another covenant, that other covenant was called the New Covenant. It was the covenant they needed, it was the covenant of forgiveness. And when you read New Covenant passages, whether you're reading Ezekiel 36:25-27, or whether you're reading Jeremiah 31:31-34 you find in the New Covenant, God says I'm going to give you a New Covenant and in there is the forgiveness of sins. God's going to forgive your sins. If you'll come to Him and ask and repent, He'll forgive your sins and He'll make a New Covenant and once you come through the New Covenant, then you can have the promises to Abraham and you can have the promises to David fulfilled.
So they knew the New Covenant. They knew it because the prophets wrote about it. But they also knew this that in the New Covenant was the giving of the Holy Spirit. You see, in the New Covenant it says in Ezekiel 36:25 that God's going to put His Spirit within you. And they knew that when a person was really converted, when a person was genuinely forgiven, even in Old Testament times, God's Holy Spirit took up residence in that person. They knew that. Did you think that only people in the church age received the Holy Spirit? Not so. Why do you think I read this morning in Psalm 51:11, David said, "Don't take Your Holy Spirit from me." He had sinned so greatly that he was fearful that he had gone too far and God would reject him. Don't take Your Holy Spirit from me.
They understood the role of the Holy Spirit. They understood the Holy Spirit's role in creation. They understood the Holy Spirit's role in the life of a believer to take up residence. That God in the New Covenant would plant His Spirit. The New Covenant wasn't ratified officially until Jesus died, but was in place and operative through all of redemptive history. God forgave those people who repented and asked Him to forgive them on the basis of what Christ would do because in the mind of God it was already done because God lives in one eternal present and that's why God calls Jesus the Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world. So they were all people who were ever saved were saved by the New Covenant terms. And in the New Covenant, according to Ezekiel 36, God's Spirit is planted in believers. So they were knowing that when the Messiah comes, He's going to come, He's going to bring the blessing of the New Covenant and He's going to bring the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not only going to be planted in us, but the prophet Joel said when the Messiah comes and sets up His Kingdom, the Holy Spirit is going to do some amazing things. There's going to be a mighty explosion of the work of the Holy Spirit. So they associated the coming of Messiah with the Holy Spirit. Isaiah 37:14, "I'll put My Spirit within you and then you will come to life."
They understood that. When the Messiah comes the Holy Spirit is going to come and He's going to pour out the Holy Spirit. Joel says He's going to pour out His Holy Spirit. They also knew that the Messiah would have the Holy Spirit in a unique way on Him. Isaiah 11 associates the Messiah with the seven-fold Holy Spirit. Isaiah 42:1 associates the Messiah with the Holy Spirit. Isaiah 61:1 associates the Holy Spirit with the Messiah. So when the Messiah comes He's going to come with the attendant power of the Holy Spirit, He's going to bring the Holy Spirit and He's going to grant the Holy Spirit to those who believe. He's going to pour out His Spirit, Joel 2:28-29, in fact He's going to pour out His Spirit beyond Israel on all flesh.
They associated the coming of the Messiah with salvation and salvation in New Covenant terminology meant the granting of the Holy Spirit. So John says...Look, when He comes He's going to come and immerse you in the Holy Spirit. They would understand that. Oh, New Covenant blessing, this means that the Messiah is going to come, bring the Holy Spirit. He's going to give us that New Covenant salvation. And we're going to be immersed into the Holy Spirit. They understood that. And that's why on the day of Pentecost when Peter stood up to preach, Acts 2:38, he said, "Repent, repent, receive the forgiveness of sins and you shall also receive the Holy Spirit." You see, nobody is converted, nobody is saved, nobody is forgiven, nobody is transformed by some human act. When a sinner is truly repentant and comes to God in a broken and contrite spirit and asks for forgiveness and God forgives and transforms, it is the working of the Holy Spirit. So in the Old Testament, the New Testament alike it was the Holy Spirit that brought about that wonderful work of regeneration.
You say, "What's the difference now and then?" The only difference is in some degree, there's some quantitative work of the Holy Spirit in the church that is in some sense different or some qualitative work of the Spirit that is in some sense different than it was in the Old Testament, but it's the same Holy Spirit. He has been with you, Jesus said, all along in the future in the time after the church He shall be in you. I don't know the details of that that means, it's a new dimension of the Holy Spirit which we enjoy. They were not at all without the Holy Spirit since He is essential in the New Covenant, I'll plant My Spirit within you.
What John is offering them is this, the Messiah is way beyond me because He dispenses the Holy Spirit. I can't do that. I can't do that. No man can do that. Secondly, He's greater than me because He's going to bring fire.
Now if the Jews heard the word "fire" in connection with Messiah, they had plenty of Old Testament scriptures to pop into their minds. Many, many times in the Old Testament "fire" is associated with judgment. And I'm not going to take the time this morning to give you all those scriptures. But, for example, and there are many, many of them, Isaiah 29:6, "From the Lord of hosts you will be punished with thunder and earthquake and loud noise, with whirlwind and tempest and the flame of a consuming fire." That's just one of many, that's Isaiah 29:6. You can see it in Isaiah 31:9, Ezekiel 38:22, Amos 7:4, Zephaniah 1:18, Zephaniah 3:8, Daniel 7:10, God's final judgment is associated with fire.
Malachi 3:1 is a prophecy about John...I'm going to send My messenger, he'll clear the way before Me...God says I'm coming, again this indicates that the Messiah was in fact God incarnate. I'm going to come and I'm going to send My messenger to clear the way...that was what John did, he was the voice of one crying in the wilderness, clearing the way for the coming of Messiah. I'm going to send John before Me and then the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to His temple. And the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming. So, He's coming, He's coming, the coming One, that's where they got that term for Messiah, the coming One, but before the coming One is going to be the messenger who announces His coming, so that's John. And when He comes, verse 2, who can endure the day of His coming? Who can stand when He appears? For He is like a refiner's fire. When He comes He's going to come to bring the Holy Spirit. But He's also going to come to bring fire.
Go over to chapter 4 verse 1, "Behold the day is coming, it's that same day when He comes burning like a furnace and all the arrogant and every evil doer will be chaff and the day that is coming will set them ablaze," says the Lord of hosts, "so that it will leave them neither root nor branch." So when the Messiah comes, the coming One arrives, it's going to be a day like a furnace that's going to consume everything. "But...verse 2...for those who fear My name, the Sun of Righteousness will rise with healing in His beams. You're not going to be burned, you're going to go forth and skip about like calves from the stall and you're going to tread down the wicked and they're going to be ashes unto the souls of your feet on the day which I am preparing, says the Lord of hosts." Boy, what a frightening thing.
When the Messiah comes there's going to be a forerunner, according to Malachi 3. Then the Messiah is going to come and He's going to come in fiery blazing judgment that's going to consume the ungodly and turn them into ashes. And He's going to save those who belong to Him and that's all John is saying. When the Messiah comes, He's going to do the supernatural work, He's going to immerse some with the Holy Spirit, He's going to immerse the rest in fire. Fire is in Luke's gospel frequently a metaphor for judgment. For example, in Luke 9:54, His disciples James and John come to Jesus and said, "Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?" Well at that point Jesus rebuked them for saying that but they understood that associated with Messiah was the consuming fire of judgment on those who dishonored God. In Luke 12:49 Jesus said, "I have come to cast fire upon the earth." "And how I wish it were all ready kindled."
In Luke17:29 we're reminded that fire went out from God, fell on Sodom and Gomorrah and destroyed everybody.
Luke touches on the fire of judgment in his gospel. Obviously Revelation 19:11 describes fire when Christ comes. But maybe the strongest word comes from 2 Thessalonians 1:7 when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels in flaming fire, dealing out retribution to those who do not know God and those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus.
When Messiah comes He comes to separate. John had a work of separation. His baptism separated, but it only separated visually, or superficially. There were the baptized and the non-baptized. But when Messiah comes, His separation is at a supernatural level. He will separate those who are immersed in the Holy Spirit, who received promises made to Abraham and David, who receive all the blessings of salvation, who receive the Holy Spirit and eternal life. And on the other hand, those who are going to be burned eternally in everlasting hell. Messiah is a divider.
The principle given at the end of verse 16 is illustrated in verse 17 by just a simple and graphic illustration that is reminiscent of the language of Malachi 4 that I just read you. Verse 17, here John and his preaching illustrated the principle of baptism with the Holy Spirit and with fire. It's like a winnowing process. "And His winnowing fork is in His hand to thoroughly clear His threshing floor, and to gather the wheat into His barn so He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire."
This separation the Messiah is going to do can be illustrated by an agrarian illustration very familiar to the Jewish people because grain was grown in all the lowlands of Israel, and is still in many places there today. When all the grain was gathered, it was brought into a flat, hard floor and there were winnowing shovels, really, a winnowing shovel, a large, flat shovel that was thrust under a pile of this grain and then thrown in the air. And the breeze would then blow the lighter chaff, or straw, away from the grain and the grain being heavy would fall straight down. So it depended upon the way the wind was blowing. At the end of that process when the entire floor had been picked up and thrown into the air, all the grain would be piled in the middle and the chaff would be lying on the perimeter...therefore the separation was complete. And when the separation was done, the wheat would be taken to the barn, and the chaff would be burned with fire.
This is not a new illustration. Psalm 1 verse 4. "The wicked are like the chaff which the wind drives away." Jeremiah 15 verses 5 to 7, exactly the same illustration. The ungodly again are like chaff. So here you have the picture. When Messiah comes everybody will be dealt with.
In verse 17. You see that verb "to thoroughly clear" - "to thoroughly clear," that's very interesting in the Greek. That is a verb diakathairo, that's what we call a hopox legamana(???) in the Greek which means it's the only time in the New Testament this word is used. It's a very unusual word, this being its only usage. What it means is no traces are left, nothing is left, everything is dealt with. The separation is complete. That is to say nobody is left out. The separation will take place completely. You either fall in the pile of grain, or the pile of chaff. You are either barned with the grain which means you go into the glories of heaven, or burned with the chaff which means you go into the terrors of hell.
This is strong preaching. I wish you'd all pray that God would raise up more preachers like John. You don't want to be without love or without compassion, but you need to preach the truth with boldness, courage and conviction because the sinners need to know what they're dealing with. Everybody will be dealt with, thoroughly that threshing floor will be cleared, everyone will be done with. And there are only two piles, the barn and the burnt.
Would you notice an interesting word in verse 17? Unquenchable...with the word unquenchable you move from the analogy to the reality. The fact is that the fire that burned the chaff eventually went out. When all the chaff was consumed and there was nothing left to fuel it, the fire went out. But the fire that John is talking about and the fire that Messiah brings is a fire that never goes out. That introduces to us for the first time eternal hell. Oh, I mean the first time in Luke, not the first time, cause even the Old Testament talks about it. Job chapter 20 verse 26, you can read for yourself Isaiah 34 verses 8 to 10, talks about God's judgment and a fire that never goes out. Isaiah 66 and verse 24, the last statement in Isaiah, "Those who have transgressed against Me, their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched." And Jesus quotes that in the New Testament...the unquenchable fire. Isaiah talked about...the Jews knew...Messiah would judge with an eternal fire. Hell is an eternal time of punishment, really an eternal and timeless experience of punishment. Jesus picked up this message. Jesus said more about hell than He did about heaven. The Apostles preached it in the epistles. The book of Revelation speaks of it.
So John called people to true repentance and he called them to turn and acknowledge the true Messiah. And the one who was greater than John, so much greater because all John could do was a human, physical ceremony, but the Messiah could immerse people in the Holy Spirit...on the other hand, he would immerse them in eternal fire. You have to acknowledge Him as God, therefore. This is a statement about the deity of Christ. This is a monumental statement of the deity of Christ. Jesus is going to do what only God can do, save people and damn people, glorify people and punish people. This is the standard, beloved, for all gospel preaching. It's a call to repentance and an acknowledgement that Jesus is the great divider who either saves or damns.
Repentance means you come to an honest understanding of your own personal sin. You recognize divine wrath. You reject ritual and ancestry. You demonstrate transformation in the fruit of true repentance. And you receive the true Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ.
It does weigh heavily on my heart that there are so many people who call themselves Christians today who have no understanding of this and they're engaged in a false repentance, shallow, non-saving repentance. Let me give you a final warning about that regarding false repentance. False repentance is grounded in selfishness, rather than the honor of God, because it has nothing to do with the honor of God, and only has to do with the regret that a person has because of the consequence of sin. It's not built on the fear of hell, or the fear of dishonoring God.
False repentance also leaves the feelings unchanged. The love of sin is not subdued and the passion for holiness is not initiated. False repentance leads men to hypocritical concealment. Once you've falsely repented, now you've got to keep it up. And so you just lay on one more level of hypocrisy after another to keep up the deception. That leads eventually to self-deception and to a deadly false security where you begin to believe the lie you're living that you wanted originally others to believe and now you've come to believe it, and that is that you really are God's when in fact you're not. And that hardens your heart. Each time shallow sorrow washes over the emotions of the heart, and doesn't truly break that heart, the fountains of feeling are more and more dried up. And then the conscience seared and then you're irretrievable.
John understood this. We need to understand this and call people as we would call you today to a true repentance.
