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Matthew 3-4
(Click on Rob’s Lent Challenge in Sidebar to read other’s insights on reading.)
I’m reading Kierkegaard and John the Baptist on the same day. Coincendence?
He bluntly tells religious people - the way of God is repentance. You want clarity, peace, redemption, whatever else? Repent first. Get over yourself, get rid of the self-preservation that you have made a part of your religious culture and repent. Start letting God be God. Come down and let a badly dressed roughneck baptize you.
And Jesus does. No, I don’t think Jesus had sin to repent of…but obviously there was significance in the act of allowing John to baptize him that I fail to grasp. God opens up the heavens and proclaims that He is pleased with his Son for this act?
Then the desert. God does his best work in the desert.
Abraham.
Isaac.
Moses.
Joshua.
John.
Jesus.
The temptation in the desert was to accomplish God’s goal by a way other than God’s way - an easier way. Ouch for me. And the message coming out of the desert was remarkably similiar to the one going in - repent, the Kingdom is at hand.
Tags: Jesus, John the Baptist, Matthew 3 4
2 responses so far ↓
1 Mark // Mar 2, 2006 at 12:21 pm
Notice it says that “from then on” (v17) he preached…
He stayed on message through the sermon on the mount and throughout his ministry (for the kingdom of heaven is like…). Have we failed to grasp that message? Reconsider the direction of your life, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Is that our charge? What does it mean? No need to move on until we figure this one out. Is it near? How do we drop into it? Is it there that transformation takes place. It may be worth spending the next 38 days thinking about this one.
2 Wayne // Mar 2, 2006 at 12:30 pm
It’s fascinating to me in Luke where he sends out the 72 and instructs them to say to those they come in contact with (either those they healed or those that rejected them) that “the kingdom of God has come near to you.”
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