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Matthew Chapter 3

(Overcomer Wu)

3:1

The question about John the Baptist coming in the spirit of Elijah or even being Elijah himself, as some surmised, introduces a few important truth. At every orthodox Passover ceremony even today a cup is reserved at the table for Elijah. Also at the Jewish rite of circumcision of orthodox Jewish baby boys a chair is placed for Elijah. The anticipation is that, if Elijah would ever come and sit in the chair or drink from the cup, the Messiah’s arrival would be imminent. That belief is based on Malachi 4:5-6, in which the prophet predicts, “Behold, I am going to send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord. And he will restore the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers.”

Yet, as he himself testified, John the Baptist was not the literal, resurrected Elijah most Jews of his day were expecting, or that many Jews of our own day expect. But he was indeed the Elijah that the prophet Malachi predicted would come. Luke 1:17 confirms that when it says that John “will go as a forerunner before Him in the spirit and power of Elijah.”

That the Elijah who was commonly expected by the Jews was not the Elijah of God’s plan was stated plainly by Jesus Himself after John the Baptist had been imprisoned and killed. ‘“Elijah is coming and will restore all things; but I say to you, that Elijah already came, and they did not recognize him, but did to him whatever they wished.’… Then the disciples understood that He had spoken to them about John the Baptist” (Matt. 17:11-13).

Because the Jews rejected John the Baptist as the true Elijah who was to come, they prevented the complete fulfillment of the prophecy as God had originally given it through Malachi. “If you care to accept it,” Jesus explained about John, “he himself is Elijah, who was to come” (Matt. 11:14). But John not only was not accepted, he was ridiculed, imprisoned, and beheaded. Because he was not received by the great body of God’s chosen people, he was not able to be the Elijah and there is therefore an Elijah yet to come. Some interpreters believe he will be one of the two witnesses of Revelation 11, but we cannot be certain. In any case, John the Baptist was rejected as the coming Elijah. And just as the herald was rejected, so was the King he heralded. John was beheaded, and Jesus was crucified. Israel therefore was set aside, and the kingdom was postponed.

John’s primary place of ministry; like his primary place of training, was in the wilderness of Judea. By the world’s standards and procedures, the coming of a king, or of a great person of any sort, is proclaimed and prepared for with great expense, pomp, and fanfare. Even the announcer dresses in the best suits, stays in the best hotels, contacts only the best people, and makes preparations for the monarch to visit only the best places. But that was not God’s plan for the heralding of His Son. John the Baptist was born of obscure parents, dressed strangely even for his day, and carried on his ministry mostly in out-of-the-way and unattractive places.

All of that, however, was not incidental or circumstantial. It was symbolic of John’s ministry to call the people away from the corrupt and dead religious system of their day—away from ritualism, worldliness, hypocrisy, and superficiality. John called them away from Jerusalem and Jericho, away from the cities into the “wilderness”—where most people would not bother to go if they were not serious seekers. John brought them away, where they were freer to listen, think, and ponder, without the distractions and the misleading leaders they were so accustomed to following. In such a seemingly desolate place, they could begin to see the greatness of this man of God and the even greater greatness of the One whose coming he announced.

3:2 His Message

“Repent”—Ìåôáíïåéôå. This was the matter of the preaching. The verb ìåôáíïåù is either compounded of ìåôá, after or change, and íïåéí to understand or the exercise of the mind, which signifies that, after hearing such preaching, the sinner is led to understand, that
the way he has walked in was the way of misery, death, and rebellion against God's kingdom. Or it could mean a change of mind from our own thoughts and valuation to that of God's thoughts and valuation of us. Hence, repentance is followed by "confession", the word in Greek is homolog åù, which means to speak in common; that is, to speak in common with God's pronouncement about us. God says that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God (Rom3:23), we confess the same that we are indeed sinners and have fallen short and even brought shame to the glory of God. Thus, it is doubtful that one has truly repented if he/she has not had a change of mind or opinion about himself/herself to align with God's thoughts and pronouncement on us.

The Repentance preached by John the baptist which leads to baptism in the Jordan river is significant, because as we recall the children of Israel crossing the river Jordan, the priests were asked to take 12 stones from the shore and leave them in the middle of the riverbed and in exchanged they were instructed by the Lord to take out 12 stones from the riverbed to the other side of the river. The 12 stones represented the 12 tribes of Israel. And the leaving of the 12 stones that were gathered originally from the shore and left in the riverbed to be covered up by the river water afterwards signifies that the old man of God's children needed to be buried there and rise up in resurrection represented by the 12 stones taken from the riverbed. Thus, the baptism of John is not just a a washing of the hands, feet and body, but a baptism of death and burial of our old man. This is how the ministry of John the baptist prepared the way of the Lord – by burying our old man that formerly sits on the throne of our hearts in order to make room for the Lord to come in to be the King to rule and reign in our hearts.

Furthermore, the word may be derived from ìåôá after or change, and áíïéá, madness, which intimates that the whole life of a sinner is no other than a continued course of madness and folly:
and if to live in a constant opposition to all the dictates of true wisdom; to wage war with his own best interests in time and eternity; to provoke and insult the living God; and, by habitual sin, to prepare himself only for a state of misery, is characterized by every sinner. It was from this notion of the word, that the Latins termed repentance resipiscentia, a growing wise again, from re and sapere; or, according to Tertullian, Resipiscentia, quasi receptio mentis ad se, restoring the mind to itself: Contra Marcion, lib. ii. Repentance, then, implies that a measure of Divine wisdom and thought is communicated to the sinner, and that he thereby becomes wise to salvation (2 Tim 3:15). That his mind, purposes, opinions, and inclinations, are changed; and that, in consequence, there is a total change in his conduct. Hence, a true penitent has that sorrow that he has sinned against God and deemed himself to be unfitted for the kingdom of the heavens, whereby he forsakes sin, not only because it has been ruinous to his own soul, but because it has been offensive to God.

The motive John gave for repentance was: the kingdom of heaven is at hand (3:2b). The people should repent and be converted because the King was coming Repentance is an admission of our offenses we commit against the King. At the very least He deserves this much and our full submission under His kingship. The unrepentant and unconverted cannot give the heavenly King the glory He deserves, do not belong to the heavenly King, and are unfit for His heavenly kingdom.

After four hundred years, the people of Israel again heard God’s prophetic word. Malachi’s prophecy was followed by four centuries of silence, with no new or direct word from the Lord. Now; when His word came to Israel again, proclaiming the coming of the King, it was not the expected word of joy and comfort and celebration but a message of warning and rebuke. The kingdom of heaven is at hand, waiting to be ushered in, but Israel was not ready for it.

Despite many similar warnings by the prophets, many of the people and most of the leaders were not prepared for John’s message. What he said was shocking; it was unexpected and unacceptable. It was inconceivable to them that, as God’s people, they had anything to do to inherit God’s kingdom but simply wait for and accept it. The Messiah was their Messiah, the King was their King, the Savior was their Savior, the promise was their promise. Every Jew was destined for the kingdom, and every Gentile was excluded, except for a token handful of proselytes. That was the common Jewish thinking of the day, which John totally shattered.

But John’s message was God’s message, and he would not compromise it or clutter it with the popular misconceptions and delusions of his own day and his own people. He had no word but God’s word, and he proclaimed no kingdom but God’s kingdom and no preparation but God’s preparation. That preparation was repentance. God’s standard would not change, even if every Jew were excluded and every Gentile saved. God knew that some Jews would be saved, but none apart from personal repentance and conversion.

Matthew uses the phrase “kingdom of heaven” thirty-two times, and is the only gospel writer who uses it at all.

3:3 His Mission

The mission of John the Baptist had long before been described by Isaiah the prophet (see Isa. 40:3-4). Here Matthew again emphasizes fulfilled prophecy in the coming of Jesus Christ as divine King (cf. 1:22; 2:5, 15, 17). But as herald of the great King, John did not clear the roads and highways of obstacles, but sought to clear men’s hearts of the obstacles that kept them from the King. “The way of the Lord” is the way of repentance, of turning from sin to righteousness, of turning moral and spiritual paths that are crooked into ones that are straight, ones that are fit for the King. “Let every valley be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low;” Isaiah continues, “and let the rough ground become a plain, and the rugged terrain a broad valley; then the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all flesh will see it together” (Isa. 40:4-5). The call of John’s voice that was “crying in the wilderness” of Judea was the shouting of urgency commanding people to repent, to confess sin and the need of a Savior. “His paths” (tribous) are well known, as the Greek term implies, because they are clearly revealed in Scripture.

3:3-10.

John’s message was a fulfillment of the prophecy in Isaiah 40:3 with reflections of Malachi 3:1. All four Gospels relate John the Baptist to Isaiah’s words (Mark 1:2-3; Luke 3:4-6; John 1:23). Isaiah 40:3, however, refers to “highway construction workers” who were called on to clear the way in the desert for the return of the Lord as His people, the exiles, returned to Judah from the Babylonian Captivity in 537 b.c. In similar fashion, John the Baptist was in the desert preparing the way for the Lord and His kingdom by calling on people to return to Him.

John was thus a voice of one calling in the desert to prepare a remnant to receive the Messiah. His preaching “in the Desert of Judea” (Matt 3:1) suggests that he came to separate people from the religious systems of the day. He dressed similarly to Elijah (clothes… of camel’s hair and… a leather belt; cf. 2 Kings 1:8; Zech 13:4). And he ate locusts and wild honey. Locusts were eaten by the poor (Lev 11:21). Like Elijah he was a rough outdoorsman with a forthright message.

Large numbers of people… from Jerusalem and all Judea went to hear John the Baptist. Some accepted his message and confessed their sins, submitting to water baptism, the identifying sign of John’s ministry. John’s baptism was not the same as Christian baptism, for it was a religious rite signifying confession of sin and commitment to a holy life in anticipation of the coming Messiah.

However, not all believed. The Pharisees and Sadducees, who came to see what he was doing, rejected his appeal. Their feelings were summed up in John’s words to them (Matt 3:7-10). They believed that they, as physical sons of Abraham, were automatically qualified for Messiah’s kingdom. John completely repudiated Pharisaic Judaism and said that God, if necessary, could raise up… stones to become His children. God could take outsiders, Gentiles, if necessary to find individuals to follow Him. Judaism was in danger of being removed. Unless there was productive “fruit in keeping with repentance” (v. 8), God would remove the tree.

3:7

The was “Pharisees” is derived from a Hebrew word meaning separate. After the ministry of the post-exilic prophets ceased, godly men called Chasidim (saints) arose who sought to keep alive reverence for the law among the descendants of the Jews who returned from the Babylonian captivity. It was a group that had the best of intention and was championing the right cause; however, this movement degenerated into the Pharisaism of our Lord’s day—a letter-strictness which overlaid the law with traditional interpretations held to have been communicated by Jehovah God to Moses as oral explanations of equal authority with the law itself (cp. Mat 15:2-3; Mark 7:8-13; Gal 1:14).

The Pharisees were strictly a sect. A member was a chaber (i.e. “united,” Jud 20:11) and was obligated to remain true to the principles of Pharisaism. They were moral, zealous, and self-denying, but self-righteous (Luk 18:9) and destitute of the sense of sin and need (Luke 7:39). They were the foremost persecutors of Jesus Christ and the objects of His unsparing denunciation, e.g. Mat 23:1-36; Luk 11:42-44.

The Sadducees were a Jewish sect that denied the existence of angels or other spirits, and all miracles, especially the resurrection of the body. They were the religious rationalists of the time (Mk 12:18-23; Act 23:8), and were strongly entrenched in the Sanhedrin and priesthood (Acts 4:1-2; 5:17). The Sadducees are identified with no affirmative doctrine, but were mere deniers of the supernatural.

Recognition of personal sin is the important first step. But by itself it is useless, even dangerous, because it tends to make a person think that mere recognition is all that is necessary. A hardened pharaoh admitted his sin (Exo 9:27), a double-minded Balaam admitted his (Num 22:34), a greedy Achan acknowledged his (Josh 7:20), and an insincere Saul confessed his (1 Sam 15:24). The rich young ruler who asked Jesus how to have eternal life went away sorrowful but not repentant (Luke 18:23). Even Judas, despairing over his betrayal of Jesus, said to the chief priests and elders, “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood” (Matt 27:4). All of those men recognized their sin, yet none of them repented. They were experiencing what Paul called “the sorrow of the world” that “produces death” instead of the “godly sorrow” that “produces a repentance” (2 Cor 7:10-11).

3:8

The marks of a truly repentant heart are “fruit in keeping with repentance,” or as Paul described them to King Agrippa, “deeds appropriate to repentance” (Acts 26:20). In his parallel account Luke mentions several examples of the kind of fruit John was talking about. To the general multitude he said, “Let the man who has two tunics share with him who has none; and let him who has food do likewise” (Luke 3:11). To the tax-gatherers he said, “Collect no more than what you have been ordered to” (v. 13), and to some soldiers he said, “Do not take money from anyone by force, or accuse anyone falsely, and be content with your wages” (v. 14).

As James points out, “Faith, if it has no works, is dead” (James 2:17). John says in his first epistle, “The one who practices righteousness is righteous, just as He is righteous” (1 John 3:7); and that “if someone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen” (4:20). Our actions toward our fellow men are indicators of our true attitude toward God.

True repentance will include a deep feeling of wrongdoing and of sin against God. David begins his great penitential psalm by crying out, “Be gracious to me, O God, according to Thy lovingkindness; according to the greatness of Thy compassion blot out my transgressions” (Psa 51:1). He not only clearly saw his sin but deeply felt his need to be rid of it. In another psalm he declared, “When I kept silent about my sin, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long” (Psa 32:3).

The sorrow of true repentance is like David’s; it is sorrow for offense against a holy God, not simply regret over the personal consequences of our sin. Sorrow over being found out or over suffering hardship or discipline because of our sin is not godly sorrow; and has nothing to do with repentance. That sort of sorrow is but selfish regret, concern for self rather than for God. It merely adds to the original sin.

Even acknowledgement of sin and feeling of offense against God do not complete repentance. If it is genuine, it will result in a changed life that bears “fruit in keeping with repentance.” David, after confessing and expressing great remorse for his sin against God, determined that, with God’s help, he would forsake his sin and turn to righteousness. “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me,… Then I will teach transgressors Thy ways, and sinners will be converted to Thee” (Psa 51:10, 13). Fruit is always seen in Scripture as manifested behavior (cf. Matt 7:20).

3:11

The Lord Jesus came to baptize us with the "Spirit and fire." To be baptized with the Spirit is to be receive the Spirit of life (Jn 20:22) and to be baptized through the Spirit into one Body, the Church (1 Cor 12:13). Whereas to be baptized with "fire" here is not the so-called fire of the Holy Spirit, but rather we should properly interpret it according to the context here of "fire" which has a consistent meaning of the fire of the lake of fire (Rev 20:15) as seen in vv.10 &12. Also, the conjunction used here is "and" separating the Holy Spirit and fire. This suggests that the Holy Spirit and fire are 2 different types of baptism. Or else the conjunction used would be "or" which would mean that the two objects separated by this conjunction are one and the same.

3:15

Why the Lord, who needed no repentance, should insist upon receiving a rite which signified confession (v. 6) and repentance (v. 11) is nowhere directly explained. Some suggested that it was just to demonstrate that his status as a man, like any man, needed to repent and be brought back to God. More importantly, the Jessus' baptism was a sign that: (1) He was now to enter into His mediatorial office as Prophet, Priest, and King and, as the Aaronic high priest publicly entered His office in a special ceremony (Exo 29:4-7), so our Lord’s baptism signifies His entrance into His ministry; (2) our Lord’s baptism was the means for His introduction as Messiah to His people (John 1:31-34); (3) by thus taking His place with sinners, He was illustrating the doctrine of identification (cp. Isa 53:12; 2 Cor 5:21); and (4) He was prophetically looking forward to His own death and resurrection, which alone could “fulfill all righteousness.” See Mat 20:22, where Christ speaks of His death as His baptism.

Another view: Jesus’ response to John was that it was fitting for Him to take part in John’s baptism at this time in order “to fulfill all righteousness.” What did Jesus mean? The Law included no requirements about baptism, so Jesus could not have had in view anything pertaining to Levitical righteousness. But John’s message was a message of repentance, and those experiencing it were looking forward to a coming Messiah who would be righteous and who would bring in righteousness. If Messiah were to provide righteousness for sinners, He must be identified with sinners. It was therefore in the will of God for Him to be baptized by John in order to be identified (the real meaning of the word “baptized”) with sinners.

3:16-17.

It is significant that the baptism of Jesus received the approval and authentication by God the Father and was sealed by the Holy Spirit. As Jesus came up out of the water… the Spirit of God came down on Him in the form of a dove. As One went up, the Other came down. A voice from heaven—the voice of God the Father—said, “This is My Son, whom I love; with Him I am well pleased” (cf. Eph 1:6; Col 1:13). God repeated these words about Christ on the Mount of Transfiguration (Matt 17:5). All three Person of the Godhead were present at this event: the Father who spoke of His Son, the Son who was being baptized, and the Spirit who descended on the Son as a dove. This is one of the passages that show beyond the shadow of a doubt that God the Father, Son, and Spirit coexisting from eternity past to eternity future, unlike the heresy of modalism that teaches God the Father ceases to exists when He became God the Son and later became God the Spirit. This baptism with the full confirmation by the members of the Godhead verified for John and all the attending witnesses that Jesus is indeed the Son of God (Jn 1:32-34). It was also a fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy that the Spirit would rest on the Messiah (Isa 11:2). The descent of the Holy Spirit empowered the Son, the Messiah, for His ministry in the kingdom of the heavens.