“Time to get your hopes up!”

What did you have for breakfast this morning? Toast? Cereal? Fruit? Eggs? How about a meal high in protein and energy, like…some locusts and wild honey? You would all like to try some locusts and wild honey, wouldn’t you?

Well, have I got good news for you! Locusts and wild honey were not just foods from a past era. They’re still available today, so you haven’t missed out! All you have to do is go to holylocust.com. Products include locust protein shakes, locust bars and whole locusts in convenient packs. There’s even a Holy Locust T-shirt—not that John the Baptist wore that. Matthew tells us that John wore clothes made of camel’s hair and a leather belt around his waist.

These garments that John wore, like Elijah before him, were the customary clothes of a prophet. Their appearance identified them as God’s spokesmen who brought a legitimate message from heaven. Imagine if there was a bloke down on the street corner here, wearing a camel’s hair garment, eating locusts, calling out: “Repent for the Kingdom of heaven is near!” What a sight! We’d probably think they’d lost the plot. How would we know whether their message was truly from God or not?

God didn’t want there to be any such misunderstanding about the identity of John or the certainty of his message. That’s why God revealed this through the Prophet Isaiah hundreds of years before. John’s role was to prepare the way for the Lord. When the people saw and heard John, they would know the Saviour was coming soon. This Saviour was promised right after Adam and Eve’s rebellion against God in the Garden of Eden. Since that time until Isaiah’s day, Israel had become a flock of lost sheep, wandering from God’s word and following their own will. They had been led astray by the very leaders who were supposed to shepherd God’s people in his ways. God had brought judgement upon them and exiled them in a foreign land.

Yet God was still merciful. Over thousands of years, all through the Old Testament came God’s promises through his prophets, like the one we heard today: a righteous shoot from the stump of Jesse, who would delight in the fear of the Lord and upon whom the Spirit of the Lord would rest” (Isaiah 11:1-3). All that the people had was God’s promise in an otherwise hopeless situation. When God brought them back to their own land, they were still waiting, still hoping, for so long. They poured out their hearts in prayer and worship: “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope” (Psalm 130:5).

Imagine then, the flickering spark of hope in the hearts of God’s people flare up as they recognise John to be the one promised in Isaiah: “The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord.” Like kids counting down to Christmas day, the dreaming, the imagining, the hoping, the expectation was palpable. The arrival of the One they longed for since the Garden of Eden was nearly here.

So John the Baptist cries out: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is near.” He was in the water through which God’s people of old entered the Promised Land. He was calling them out of the land, to enter it again as God’s people renewed through confession of sin and baptism; a repentance that was not to be just sorrow and regret over past failures, but the beginning of new lives in which they fear, love and trust God above anything else.

Those words: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is near” are words for God’s people today, too. How do you hear those words?

We typically hear them as Law—that we should amend our lives because God is coming soon to bring his judgment. That word ‘repent’ is jarring, penetrating the fortress of pride we humans erect around our hearts, because the call to repent means a total change of heart and mind; changed intentions, a complete turning around. Repentance is often explained as leaving our sin behind and turning to back to God. But can we really do that? Can we really leave our sin behind us and turn back to God? If we could do that, would we even need a Saviour? In theory, we would be able to save ourselves.

This is, in effect, what the Pharisees and Sadducees thought. The Pharisees developed their own rules—610 of them—which they thought would help them keep God’s commandments in every life situation. But these rules and traditions only obscured God’s will. They trusted in their own ceremonial traditions, they trusted in their good works, they trusted in their religious performance, instead of trusting in God. They believed their moral superiority pleased God and made them his favoured people.

The Sadducees said that only the Torah (the first five books of the bible) was divinely authoritative for establishing law. So they rejected the Pharisees’ traditions and rules—but went to the other extreme, undervaluing the rest of Scripture. Believing that only one part was divinely authoritative led them to deny the afterlife, the resurrection of the dead, and the existence of angels and spirits, which are not explicitly mentioned in the first five books. So in their opposite extremes, both the Pharisees and the Sadducees obscured God’s word and enthroned their limited human reason above it. That’s why they got such a hard rap from John the Baptist.

But others came to John, from Jerusalem and Judea and the whole region of the Jordan. Those who, burdened by shame and guilt, knew their failings and unworthiness all too well. They knew they were spiritually and morally bankrupt before God and that their only hope was in his mercy and grace. They were those who heard God’s call to repent through John the Baptist, like those the Pharisees frowned upon—the tax collectors and sinners, whom Jesus welcomed and ate with (Luke 15).

For the people like these who had humble hearts; broken and contrite hearts, who placed their hope in God’s promise of the coming Saviour, John’s words: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near!” were not harsh, burdensome law, but sweet, joyful good news. A Kingdom is where it’s King is present, ruling with power and authority. ‘The kingdom of heaven is near’ was the promise that God’s Kingdom would arrive soon with the birth of Jesus—but also meant that the Kingdom of Heaven was close by; at hand, reigning with grace in the Person of Christ.

So John’s words are an invitation for all to turn to God for him to do what no amount of human effort and striving can do. It is not to turn away from sin, then turn back to God. It is to turn to the reign of God with their sins so that God can take them away. It is to turn to him with their unrighteousness so that they can be clothed with the righteousness of Christ. It is to turn to him with their poor and broken spirits to receive from him the Holy Spirit who makes holy. It is to turn to him with their shame and be covered over with Jesus. It is to turn to him with broken hearts to be bound up, for a bruised reed he will not break (Isaiah 42:3). It is to turn to him with their lack of self-worth, to receive identity, dignity and worth in Jesus.

In the challenges of being church in this time, it seems there are these same three outlooks today. First, there are so many who, like the Pharisees, seem to have a legalistic heart, who establish rules to live by rather than God’s word, obscuring God’s word by human principles, like the Pharisees of old. Those who seem to care only for right ritual performance and have no room in their soul for how the Spirit of God might be working, casting stones in their heart against those they deem to be unrighteous. They trust in Luther alone or Calvin alone or Wesley alone or Augustine alone but not Christ alone. They put on love and kindness with their Sunday best, then hang them back in the wardrobe two hours later. They see the church as their local building, rather than the people who are saved by the precious blood of Jesus, loved to death by him.

The second outlook is of those who seem confident to serve as God’s counsellor. Even though every word of Scripture is flawless (Proverbs 30:5), people decide which parts of the bible they will listen to and agree with. People say of what God has ordained: “That can’t be right!” Even though God’s word is living and active (Hebrews 4:12), eternal and fixed firmly in the heavens (Psalm 119:89), people say that God’s word is outdated; bound to the culture and time of when it was first written, and not relevant for us today. Like the Sadducees of old, people today pick and choose what is authoritative, cutting away the Old Testament from the New, then apostolic teaching away from the Gospels. The words of Peter, or Paul are just Peter or Paul—certainly not the Lord Christ speaking to us. Like the Sadducees of old with their five books, some today say that we just need four—Jesus’ words to us in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—as long as they fit with what’s permissible in today’s society.

The third way is God’s way—the way of hope. Not a wish or dream, like “I hope my team wins” or “I hope we have good weather next week.” Advent hope—Christian hope—is certainty. It is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see (Hebrews 11:1). It is the certainty that, although we are all born sinful and unclean and desperately in need of God’s grace and mercy, we too have it in the promised Saviour whom God has sent, the Lord Jesus Christ. It is expecting that one day he will come again with his winnowing fork to finally judge the world and set all things right, with fire and the Holy Spirit to bring judgment upon those who oppose him, but purifying and refining those who love him. He will bring final deliverance for his faithful people from this dying world, from our bodies of death, and from Satan and hell.

This is the hope, Paul says in Romans 8, through which you are saved. This hope involves waiting. “[For] hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.” (Romans 8:24-25).

Like the people of old, we too are waiting for the Saviour to come. Waiting is hard in a decaying world, and in bodies in bondage to death. War and strife, terror and darkness are all around. People are treated like possessions that when broken are thrown away. Selfishness, greed, and destruction know no bounds. Cities and homes are treated like piles of toy blocks to be kicked over. The church in conflict, doing its best to destroy itself.

But in the midst of all of this we have reason to get our hopes up: the Kingdom of Heaven is near. For God’s Kingdom is wherever Jesus is, present and working through his word, which will not return to him empty but will achieve everything he desires it to. As Jesus speaks he himself builds his church that goes beyond institutional borders which not even the gates of hell will overcome; the true church built on the foundation of the prophets and apostles with Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone (Ephesians 2:20).

While we wait in the wilderness of this world before crossing the Jordan to our promised heavenly homeland, everyone who would be a Christian in our day must encounter the message of John the Baptist. For the Good News is that the Kingdom of Heaven is near, even here, reigning right now. Like the people of old, may we hear the call for us to come to the water’s edge with empty hands and humble hearts, while we wait for our Lord and Saviour to return. May we not have doubt and confusion in our life and work in the world and the church, but the certainty God wants us to have and gives to us as he speaks to us through this word. For as Paul says in our reading today: “Everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide, we might have hope.” (Romans 15:4). And in the words of the Apostle Peter:

“We have the prophetic message as something completely reliable, and you will do well to pay attention to it, as to a light shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation of things. For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” (2 Peter 1:19-21).

Dear brothers and sisters, fellow redeemed saints by the precious blood of Christ, as you wait expectantly for his return, listen to him speaking through his word as the only sure guide for life. As you do, may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit (Romans 15:13) until our Saviour returns. Amen.

Questions for reflection:

• Can you think back to times in your life when all you had was the promise requiring blind trust? What happened? How was God at work?

 

• What are the things in this life you hope for? Can you be sure of them? How is hope for eternal things different from our everyday hopes?

 

• What understanding of repentance have you had in the past? How is the true understanding of repentance good news?

 

• As we reflect on the worldviews of the Pharisees and Sadducees, do you notice any similar traits in your own thoughts and actions? Do you tend to think and feel that God’s favour for you is based on how well or not you perform? Do you tend to impress your own opinion on God’s word?

 

• What are some things in your own life is God calling you to repent of?

 

• The Kingdom of Heaven is near. What picture of God’s Kingdom do you have? What different meanings can the word ‘near’ have?

 

• How does the reality of God’s gracious rule being close to us through his word give you hope, peace and joy as we live with trouble in a troubled world?

 

• The Psalmist wrote: “I wait for the Lord; my soul waits and in his word I put my hope.” What do you ultimately put your hope in? How can daily devotion in God’s word give us hope as we wait for Jesus’ return?

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