Imagine you had access to a time machine and could travel back in history to see any event as it was happening! What would you want to see first? What event in history is so incredible, inspiring, unique and important that it would be at the top of your priority list? My thoughts went immediately to the crucifixion of Jesus. To see God in human form surrender to the evil of this world in order to overcome it would be overwhelming!
I cannot imagine the wide range of emotion I would feel! Part of me would want to do anything I could to ease His burden. Part of me would want to hug Him and look into His eyes and tell Him how sorry I am for doing the things I did that put Him on that cross! I would want to shout praise and encouragement to God for enduring the mistreatment and death of His Son! I would want to try to persuade the religious leaders and Romans to realize what they were doing so it was not in vain for even one person! And then there would be this part of me that would be angry!
How could I not be angry? As I tried to soak up everything going on all around Jesus, it would get under my skin that there was a group of soldiers huddled at the foot of the cross trying to decide how to split up the belongings of Jesus (See John 19:23-25)! How could they become so calloused that they would wonder what they were going to get out of the crucifixion of the Son of God? Could they really be this self-absorbed? And then that would make me wonder how many times I had approached the cross of Jesus with my own agenda! How many times during the partaking of communion have I acknowledged that there was a man hanging on a cross (that is, after all, why we are gathered together), but I came with my own appetite to satiate and my own agenda to fulfill? How many times have I looked for what I would get out of it rather than stopping to appreciate what Jesus was doing for me?
Perhaps that is why John the Baptist, the one whose job it was to “make ready the path of the Lord”, talked the way he did when people started to come out to him to be baptized (Luke 3:7-9). Calling people a brood of vipers and questioning their motives for coming out to be baptized does not seem politically correct or religiously polite. Shouldn’t someone blow their whistle and call a foul? Shouldn’t we be concerned about offending people and running them off?
John was much more concerned with true repentance! It doesn’t matter that they are Abraham’s children (V. 8)—God can make more from the stones of the ground! It doesn’t even matter whether they were baptized if they don’t produce the good fruit they were created to bear (V. 9). How can they withhold from those in need (V. 11); exploit one another (V. 12-13); or resort to extortion and bearing false witness (V. 14) if they are truly of the Father? No wonder the axe was already “laid at the root of the trees”!
Should we be concerned about falling into the same traps? Are you here this morning wondering what you are going to get out of Bible class or the worship time? Perhaps it would be time better spent simply reflecting on what it is Jesus has done for us and marveling at the extent He would go to in order to make us right with the Father!
-Scott Jarvis
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