Mark 1:1-8--John the Baptist Prepares the Way

Mark 1:1-8
English Standard Version

John the Baptist Prepares the Way
1 The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

2 As it is written in Isaiah the prophet,

“Behold, I send my messenger before your face,
    who will prepare your way,
3 the voice of one crying in the wilderness:
    ‘Prepare the way of the Lord,
    make his paths straight,’”

​4 John appeared, baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 5 And all the country of Judea and all Jerusalem were going out to him and were being baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. 6 Now John was clothed with camel's hair and wore a leather belt around his waist and ate locusts and wild honey. 7 And he preached, saying, “After me comes he who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. 8 I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

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I want to take a small break from the Old Testament to look at the Gospel of Mark--the shortest of the four gospels.  It is action-packed and many scholars hypothesize that while John Mark penned this gospel account, it was actually the apostle Peter who was dictating it to him as John Mark was a companion of of Peter, Paul, and Barnabas.

This gospel jumps right in to the beginning of Jesus' ministry.  It doesn't start with a genealogy to establish his right to be the King of Kings like Matthew did, nor does it start with the proclamation of His birth like Luke did, nor does it go back to the very beginning like John 1:1 does to establish theologically that Jesus is the eternal Son of God.  No, Mark just starts off "In the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God."  His identity is not something that needs to be established, but is stated as fact.  Jesus is the Son of God.  Period.  This is the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ--to believe this point of His identity, of if He was not the Son of God, than nothing else that He said or did mattered.

Like several of the other gospel accounts we start the account of Jesus' ministry talking about John the Baptist (recall that Peter was a disciple of John the Baptist before Jesus called Him to come and follow Him).  Mark points to the gospel message preached by John the Baptist as a fulfillment of the prophecy in the book of Isaiah that there would be a harbinger to would come before the Messiah.  The harbinger would prepare the way and be a voice crying in the wilderness (John the Baptist ministered in the wilderness area near the Jordan River to the east of Jerusalem).  In fact, John the Baptist would use these very words from Isaiah whether he meant to or not, "Prepare the way of the Lord.  Make His paths straight."  This was like when the king was coming to town and there was an "advance team" that was coming before him to clear the road of obstacles and to tell everyone to get ready and look sharp because the king was coming.  That is the role of John the Baptist according to the Old Testament that Mark is pointing us to.

So then, what was this message that John was preaching that was to help prepare the way for Jesus' ministry? John preached that the people needed to repent of their sins and be baptized as a sign of their repentance.  Baptism is something new to us--we didn't ever see it in the Old Testament, but it seems to be something that the people understood quite clearly, and many people came to John to hear his message and be baptized.  The Greek word for "baptize" is to dip or submerge in dye so that cloth takes on a new color (a permanent change in identity).  It is important to note though that John's baptism is not what we today would call "believer's baptism," for this is not yet people associating themselves with the life, death, burial and resurrection of Jesus as their penal substitutionary atonement.  That hasn't happened yet.  No, they are just identifying themselves with their need for a Savior.  They confessed that they were Law-breakers, and that they were under the curse of the Law, and that they needed the New Covenant spoken of in the book of Jeremiah and the book of Ezekiel where God would take their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh.  He would put His Spirit within them and the Law would no longer be something external to them on the tablets that the LORD wrote for Moses, but it would be written on their hearts so that there would not even be a need for them to teach one another, for every man would know by the Spirit of God what it was they were to do, and they would desire to do it.  These are people desperate to see this fulfilled.  In today's terminology, they want to see revival.  Yet there are many among them that believed that the way this would come about was for the LORD to send a great military leader that would conquer and rid the world of all their enemies.  They didn't realize that the brokenness originated from inside each of them and that they needed to be made new.  This was the battle that John (and Jesus) had with the Pharisees in particular.

John came giving testimony that he was not the Messiah, but that one was coming whose was mightier than John and the strap of whose sandal John was not even worthy to untie.  That may not make a lot of sense to us today, but it was the job of the lowest slave in the house to remove the master's sandals and wash his feet, so John is saying that when the Messiah appears he wishes that he even had the right and privilege to be lowest slave in His house, but John says he is not even worthy of that.  Jesus is going to say of John that he is the greatest man born among women and because of John's humility, Jesus would highly exalt John to call him Jesus' "best man" at the wedding that will take place between Jesus and His Bride (what we call The Church).  John states an important difference for the people that John can only baptize them in water which gets them clean on the outside, but Jesus would come and baptize them with the Holy Spirit which would make them new on the inside.

The ministry of John will not take up many verses in the Gospel of Mark, but John played a significant role in preparing those that Jesus would call to follow Him--especially Peter, James, John and Andrew.  John also laid began to show the people that "salvation by works" message of the Pharisees was false and unable to really save them.  They needed a better answer that was consistent with the answer given by God in the Old Testament--penal substitutionary atonement.  But where would they find enough lambs, rams, bulls, and goats to cover all their transgressions, and even if their transgressions were covered, what about their inequities where they knowingly rebelled against God?  There are no regular sacrifices for other (other than perhaps the Day of Atonement).  Something better is needed to not just cover up sin, but to take away sin and so John's testimony of Jesus rings in our ears, "Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world."  How profound this message was--not just a sacrifice of one animal that would temporarily cover the sins of a person, family, or nation, but by the death of one men, all people in all places at all times could have their sins forgiven and taken away.  What "good news" (that is what gospel means) that is!  This is where The Gospel of Mark starts, and it is a wonderful place to begin.