Luke 3:1-8 Commentary

John the Baptist Prepares the Way
1 In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar—when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and Traconitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene— 2 during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. 3 He went into all the country around the Jordan, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 4 As it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet:
"A voice of one calling in the wilderness,
'Prepare the way for the Lord,
make straight paths for him.
5 Every valley shall be filled in,
every mountain and hill made low.
The crooked roads shall become straight,
the rough ways smooth.

6 And all people will see God's salvation.' " [a]

7 John said to the crowds coming out to be baptized by him, "You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? 8 Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not begin to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our father.' For I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham.


Dig Deeper
The first time I went off to college, I remember having to go into this class that seemed rather ridiculous at the time. It was basically a prep class to orient us and prepare us for what we were going to experience as college students. As I recall, however, the things that they told us were helpful but I cannot say that they were particularly cheerful or encouraging in most respects. We were told of all the mistakes that incoming freshmen make and how likely we were to be one of those people if we didn’t make some serious changes in our work habits and character that most of us had brought with us from high school. Look to your right and to your left, we were told. Statistics show that one of those two people that we had just looked at were not going to make it. We were about to enter a whole new world and if we didn’t prepare ourselves in our hearts and minds for what was coming, we would never be ready for it when it actually came at us full force. The time was coming and the choice was ours. We had been warned and prepared so we could not claim that we were going to be caught off guard by the challenges that college life was going to bring.

The Jew’s of Jesus’ time were, for the most part, expecting God’s promised Messiah to come soon. There were many different ideas floating about as to what this messiah would be like and what he would accomplish when he came but nearly all Jews could be listed as expectant for a messiah to come. Some argued that he would be political in nature, some thought that he would be a king, others believed that he would be a mighty warrior that would drive out all of Israel’s enemies, and still others thought that there might even be two or three messiahs to encompass all the seemingly different types of prophecies that were written in the Old Testament about the coming Messiah. What nearly everyone agreed upon, besides the fact that there would be a messiah of some type, was that he would have a forerunner that would alert people to the coming of the Messiah. This thought came from, among other passages, Malachi 3:1, in which God promised, "’I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come,’ says the LORD Almighty.” The clear point was that one would come who would prepare people for the coming of the Lord, but as Malachi 3 goes on to make clear and as we will see in the next passage of Luke, this message wasn’t all grins and giggles. It was a message of challenge calling people to get themselves ready for a challenge that they wouldn’t have imagined and certainly wouldn’t be ready to meet unless they began to humble themselves and see their need for preparation and change immediately.

Luke takes special care to give us some important political markers so that we can have a better idea of when and where to place John’s ministry in the gamut of world events, so we would do well to take a moment and consider the information that he has given us. The opening two verses echo the introductions of other Old Testament prophets including those that describe the prophet in historical context with powerful leaders. But Luke is not so much trying to give us a list of the most important people of the time or even the clue to precisely triangulate the chronological beginning of John’s ministry. Luke is giving a sketch to those who would have been familiar with these names of the swirling socio-political landscape out of which John steps. Tiberius had become Caesar following the death of Augustus, in AD 14, and was already being worshiped as a god in many parts of the Roman Empire despite his well-deserved reputation for ruthlessness. Rome was ruling Israel but had set up two of Herod the Great’s sons, Herod and Philip, as rulers of the northern part of Israel, while Rome directly ruled the southern portion through the other tetrarchs mentioned. Yet, Rome’s influence went beyond just military might and political leaders. It stretched all the way to the high-priesthood. Caiaphas was high priest from AD 18-36 and was the son-in-law of Annas, who had been high priest from AD 6-15, but Annas was an ever-present and formidable figure who still wielded much power. Both men were in the hands of the Romans and only had power because Rome had put them in that position.

Pious Jews were longing for something to happen, something that would be nothing short of God acting to save his people. They had returned from the disastrous exile in to Babylon many hundreds of years ago, but now they were being oppressed and ruled by pagans, they were, in a very real way, in a new exile in their own land. The promises of the prophets were clung to as they had promised that some day God himself would return and restore Israel. Perhaps, they hoped, it would be a new Exodus. Something on the scale of the first Exodus when God raised Moses up to lead his people through the waters of the Red Sea and into freedom. In a sense, the whole nation needed to be returned from this exile and into the presence of God, because they had turned away from God, said the prophet Malachi. But what was the answer? How could they be restored in their relationship to God? Malachi, speaking for God, said that all they had to do was to return to God, and he would return to them (Mal. 3:7).

The people could know that this time of return was coming when the forerunner would come and prepare the people of Israel for what God was going to do. The prophet Isaiah had foretold that this messenger would be the voice of one crying in the wilderness, calling people to return to God and to prepare themselves to be his people once again. Luke wants us to see that John was the one spoken of by the prophets. He was the one that symbolically would be connected to the Exodus by living and having his ministry in the wilderness. John was preparing people for the coming of God’s glory and restoration, or as Luke interprets it, “God’s salvation.” This messenger, says Isaiah, would not just be preparing the way for another of God’s messengers, but for God himself to return, “See, the Sovereign LORD comes with power, and his arm rules for him. See, his reward is with him, and his recompense accompanies him. He tends his flock like a shepherd: He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart; he gently leads those that have young” (Isa. 40:10-11).

It is certainly unlikely that John’s listeners, and probably not even John himself, would have fully understood the implications of John’s call. Somehow he would be preparing the way for God to return to Israel and for the Messiah to come, but no one could have foreseen that God would fulfill both of those expectations in the same person of Jesus. Even the call for repentance, forgiveness of sins, baptism, and salvation would not have been understood fully for the things that John’s ministry was pointing to. In the context of the Old Testament these all would have been viewed as pieces of national repentance or turning back to God as a people. Baptism was what non-Jews did when they wanted to convert to Judaism and so John’s call for them to be baptized would have been calling them to embrace the idea that they had drifted from being God’s people. But if they returned to God and became his people once again, they would receive salvation, which they would have understood in it’s Old Testament context of being restored to God as his people.

It is important for us to understand that John was not fully enacting any of this but pointing to the reality of these things that was to come. John was preparing people with a symbolic change of heart for the ideas that they were not automatically part of God’s family simply because they had been born Jewish. He was preparing them for the idea of the need to be baptized into a new family and reconciliation with God for the ultimate salvation from sin death. Luke will make clear later in his narrative in Acts that the symbolic baptism of John was not adequate in restoring one to God’s family; that could only be accomplished by the very real (and not symbolic act like John’s was) of being baptized into the life of Christ (see Acts 18:25-26; 19:1-5).

But John’s ministry was not to prepare people for other first-century messianic movements. If they were simply coming out in droves looking for the next promising movement to which they could attach their wagons to and hope that this one would finally end Roman rule and make way for the presence of God to return to Israel, then they could forget that notion. His was not a movement of going along to hedge your bets that you might be on the right side if this was the movement of the promised Messiah, but if not, then just go back home and wait for the next one. This was not about power, politics, or personal benefit at all. This was about seeing that not just Israel as a nation was exiled from God but that you as an individual were also exiled from God. It was about realizing that you were not part of God’s family simply because you were a Jew. Simply being a physical descendant of Abraham would not bring you back to God. It was going to take a true changing of ways, a true allegiance to whatever God was sending next in order to be part of the promised family. Those that could see their need to be reconciled back to God and somehow brought into his family would be able to produce the genuine fruit of repentance and keeping the Covenant between God and his people. But there would also be those who wouldn’t see their need. There would be those who would not accept the possibility that they were not part of God’s family and who were simply waiting for God to work according to their expectations and in a way that was a benefit to them. If that response sounds frighteningly like the response of many today or even your own response to God’s call to salvation and reconciliation then the rest of John’s message will be of particular importance. Remember, he was preparing people for Jesus that was to come and if they didn’t heed that call seriously, they would never make it. John’s message of needing a heart open to repentance in order to accept Jesus as Lord is just as true today as it was 2,00 years ago.


Devotional Thought
We can learn a very serious lesson from John’s warning to the Israelites. We cannot presume that just because we have been brought through the waters of baptism to become God’s people that this is a magic formula for salvation if we don’t show the genuine fruit of real repentance in our life. Spend some time to reflect and pray about the true fruit of ongoing repentance that you have seen in your life as a Christian.