JOHN THE BAPTIST AND JESUS

The law/gospel distinction is found everywhere in the Bible. It is the single most important hermeneutical tool to help Bible students to interpret God’s holy word. In his Freedom of the Christian, no less a guide than Martin Luther found this law/gospel paradigm to be the basic way God communicates truth to us. He said “that the entire Scripture of God is divided into two parts: commands and promises’’ His close associate, Philip Melanchthon, said in Loci Communes, “All of Scripture is either Law or Gospel.” To those unfamiliar with these concepts this may sound like an oversimplification. A more careful consideration of the matter will soon vindicate this way of looking at God’s revelation to man. What the law/gospel principle says is that everything God speaks to man either flows from His holy character that demands man’s obedience or from His gracious character that freely promises man the very righteousness he so desperately needs. Or to say it another way, all Scripture is either what God demands (and rightfully so) or what God freely gives to sinners. Law and gospel cannot be mixed together; they are two complementary ideas that exist in separate universes. Law must always execute justice while gospel is non-justice, that is, it has nothing to do with right or wrong but with grace. One is driven by legal necessity, the other by uncompelled freedom. Together they comprise a comprehensive spectrum of how God deals with mankind. To say it clearly, either man is in debt to God, or man is favored by God. No other relationship is possible. If man is in debt, he owes that which he cannot pay. If favored, then man receives what he could not otherwise imagine. Paul said if something is of grace it is no longer of works, and vice verse. So, where law is the ruling principle, there is no gospel, and when all is gospel, there is no law. Everything in the Bible is either one or the other, law or gospel, merit or grace, working or not working.

The more a Christian sees that everything in Scripture is law or gospel, the more he is likely to find this comparison in strange places. This article will endeavor to show that the law/gospel distinction is clearly seen in the ministries of two men, John the Baptist and Jesus. John, as you might suspect, represents the law; Jesus, the gospel. We turn now to the Scriptures to prove our point.

We begin with John. He was an old covenant prophet who saw his ministry as a preparation to the gospel ministry of Jesus. He was the voice crying in the wilderness as prophesied in Isaiah 40. His ministry was to prepare hearts for the reception of Messiah. His ministry focused on the human condition and he stirred up the masses through law to reveal their need of a Savior. HIs ministry did not intend to save anyone but to prepare everyone. That is not to diminish John’s ministry. The law that John preached is holy, just and `good, and not one jot or tittle of it will ever go away. The law is the outflow of God’s character. But it is preparatory by nature, never salvific; penultimate not ultimate. We find John baptizing many as they confessed their sins (Mark 1:5). And when they asked him how to do better he gave the seekers more law. When several groups came to him wondering what they must do to get right with God, he answered them in this way,

“Therefore bear fruits worthy of repentance, and do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I say to you that God is able to raise up children to Abraham from these stones. And even now the ax is laid to the root of the trees. Therefore every tree which does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. So the people asked him, saying, ‘What shall we do then?’ He answered and said to them, ‘He who has two tunics, let him give to him who has none; and he who has food, let him do likewise.’ Then tax collectors also came to be baptized, and said to him, ‘Teacher, what shall we do?’ And he said to them, ‘Collect no more than what is appointed for you.’ Likewise the soldiers asked him, saying, ‘And what shall we do?’ So he said to them, ‘Do not intimidate anyone or accuse falsely, and be content with your wages’” (Luke 3:8-14).

John was answering the crowds in an Old Testament context. To be right with God is to keep His commandments and commandment keeping is the old covenant key to bearing fruit. So he instructs each particular group to repent with respect to the sins to which they are most vulnerable in their stations in life. What John did not do - could not do - was urge those groups to believe in the death, burial and resurrection of the Messiah. His message was rooted in Old Testament Law. They must shape up and stop sinning. We find another legal aspect of John’s ministry in his dealings with Herod. The king is involved in an illicit relationship with another man’s wife and John comes up boldly and says, “It is not lawful for you to have her.” Those are the words of an Old Covenant prophet. He seeks reform, not salvation. And, of course, as with the other prophets, he is ignored, and eventually persecuted. The law makes Herod worse, not better. Once again we see in living color that law cannot save anyone, and, in fact, only increases sin. That is its function as Paul says, “Moreover the law entered that the offense might abound” (Rom 5:20).

While John’s ministry was preparatory to grace, Jesus’s ministry was that of fulfillment. Note how Mark describes the ministry of Jesus; “Now after John was put in prison, Jesus came to Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand, repent, and believe the gospel” (Mark 1:14-15). What was Jesus saying? John had come to prepare hearts to receive the good news by showing men their utter sinfulness. But the law can only go so far. John’s work is now done and he must exit the scene. Paul speaks similarly about the law in Galatians 3:19, “What purpose then does the law serve? It was added because of transgressions, till the Seed should come to whom the promise was made.” The law took center stage in God’s redemptive purposes until gospel came. And once Jesus comes, John and the law retreat into the shadows. So we see that the ministry of John was the ministry of law that lasted for a specific purpose and the ministry of Christ was the ministry of grace that would go on forever. In this age, both law and gospel work together to save sinners, but they serve wholly different purposes.

Another difference between the two ministries was that John’s ministry was to restore while Jesus’ ministry was to renew (Rev 21:5). What is the difference? Jesus told His followers that John came “to restore all things” (Mt 17:11). What did Jesus mean? The word for restore, apokathistano (ἀποκαθιστάνω) is found eight times in the New Testament and it means to reestablish or to return to a former state. The word is used when the disciples asked Jesus in Acts 1:6 if He was going to restore the kingdom to Israel. They were asking Jesus if He was going to bring Israel back to her former glory. This is the very crux of repentance. It brings sinners back home after going down the wrong path. As an Old Testament prophet John’s mission was to show the people their sins and to bring them back to obedience to Torah. This was the mission of all the prophets. Their message was not a gospel to be received but a law to be obeyed. Jesus, on the other hand, had a much loftier ministry. He came to renew all things; that is He came to tear down the old and from the rubble resurrect something completely new. We see the end of His ministry at the end of the Bible when He destroys the old creation and rebuilds a new creation from the bottom up. “I make all things new,” says the Lamb. Resurrection, not restoration, is what Jesus came to do. And in order to resurrect something it must first be torn down, dismantled, killed. A skilled artisan might take an old antique chair, sand it and varnish it, and restore it to its original beauty. But it is still the same old chair. That’s what John’s ministry did for Israel. The ministry of Jesus, however, burns up the old chair and from the ashes creates a brand new chair that is made of new material that neither “moth nor rust can corrupt.”

Another difference between the two ministries was this: John characterized his ministry by asceticism while Jesus defined His by freedom. I trust you recall the tiff between the disciples of John and Jesus chronicled in Matthew 9:14-17. John’s men couldn’t understand why Jesus allowed his disciples to enjoy life, to eat and drink and go to parties, while they had to neglect their body. Behind this complaint was the voice of the law which always says that discipline is the goal of life. This reminds us that living by law always leads to a view of life that punishes the flesh. It prioritizes the beating the body and neglecting the bodily appetites in order to achieve a higher spirituality. It prefers the harsh desert over the halls of gaiety. It is a life that focuses on God the Lawgiver and defines life as obeying His lofty standards. Such was the Rich, Young Ruler, the monastic movement, the Medieval church and some strands of modern Fundamentalism. But Jesus defined His ministry not by a preoccupation with law, but by a preoccupation with Him, God the Father, and the great salvation they wrought for sinners. The great joy of God is when a sinner repents and turns to the gospel. Jesus desires that man see God as the giver of good gifts. He yearns for us to revel in a relationship with the Father not of strict obedience but of sonship. For many Jews and for us today, this is a radical message. The reason is simple; we humans are born with a proclivity to equate our worth with doing something. But Jesus comes along and wishes us to see the worth of our lives is commensurate with our relationship with God and with others. This changes our perspective as Christians. It beckons us to move away from thinking of God as a angry Judge who lives in light unapproachable to thinking of Him as a Father whose arms are ever open for intimacy. But, alas, even today many, many Christians live under the shadow of John’s ministry. They are preoccupied with their lives and how they are doing rather than focusing on the beauty of a loving Savior. They become like the disciples of John, arguing about moral minutiae, judging others for what they consider to be slack lives, and holding up their noses as God’s chosen few. But when one understand the freedom that Jesus gives, sinners come alive, and the noise of the clanking shackles of moral perfectionism is drowned out by the joyful music of dancing. Pietism turns to praise.

Another distinction between the two ministries is the difference between John’s ministry of water and Jesus’ ministry of the Spirit. The distinction is outlined in John 1:33 and Matthew 3:11-12. Both texts occur at Jesus’ baptism. The text in John says, “I did not know Him, but He who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘Upon whom you see the Spirit descending, and remaining on Him, this is He who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’” In Matthew 3:11-12 John adds, “I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance, but He who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” In both texts the comparison is between water and Spirit or water with fire. Now what is water? Water in the Bible it is closely connected with the idea of cleansing. If we are dirty, we need water to clean us up. The water doesn’t change anything in us, it merely changes the externals. It doesn’t make us a new person, it only takes away the dirt and reveals the person we were before we got dirty. What of Spirit and fire? We know that they Holy Spirit did not come to lightly change mankind but to radically alter man’s very being by the application of the blood of Christ. By the Spirit man is not improved, he is born again. And what of fire? It is often used in conjunction with the ministry of the Holy Spirit for it carries with it the idea of extensive change. Fire devours its victim and destroys all remnants of it. It is a radical force of nature. Think of volcanoes and raging forest fires and the ruins of Pompeii. Jesus came to inaugurate the ministry of the Spirit. It is a ministry that never leaves us the way we were. Jesus doen’t clean up the sinful man, he remakes the man into His own image of righteousness and holiness. Jesus comes to forge a new humanity that will one day live in a new creation; just as Paul said, “If any man be in Christ he is a new creation, old things have passed away, behold all things become new.” There is an irony here. The ministry that purports to maintain life is a ministry that ultimately kills, while the ministry that promises to kill gives life. The ministry of Jesus is a ministry of life and “not of the letter for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”

I trust that the reader will begin to see that the principle of law and gospel are found everywhere in Holy Writ. The ministries of John and the Baptist and Jesus are one important place where this hermeneutical is pictured. The ministry of John the Baptist was extremely important. The frequent reference to him in the New Testament bears this out. His ministry left to itself would only condemn. At the same time his ministry would precede and point to a greater ministry that would do something the law couldn’t do, save sinners. But in God’s infinite wisdom, the very law that condemned sinners would become integral to the ministry of salvation. That is, in His infinite wisdom God would expand the role of the law in the New Covenant. More than simply condemn sinners it would be used to drive men to seek the one remedy it couldn’t provide, the cross of Jesus Christ. When John began his ministry, the Jewish world only saw law as something to keep. But unlike any prophet before him, John not only condemned the world, but he pointed sinners to the One who could free them from this condemning power. Thus, he was the greatest of all the prophets for His message was to look to “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” As with the ministry of John, the ministry of law is vitally important. It works cooperatively with the gospel to save sinners. The roles between the two are different, much as the roles of John and Jesus were different. But they work together to fulfill God’s redemptive scheme. Neither are expendable. We need John, we need Jesus. We need the law, and we desperately need grace. And now that Jesus has come we don’t dismiss John and never think of the law again, but as we consider our lives daily and see how frequently we disobey the law, we are reminded to turn once again to Jesus where we find full and free forgiveness. And as a added bonus, when we look away from law to Jesus we will eventually come to the place where obedience to the law will become a blessed reality as we dwell with our Savior in the eternal state as new creations. Amen.