Matthew 3: Prepare the Way for the Savior

There is no wrong way to start reading God’s Word. All you have to do is start. All you have to do is dive in and get going.

John the Baptist Prepares the Way

Starting off, as Matthew kicks off the chapter, he does something really strange and really interesting. He starts talking about someone, but it’s not Jesus.

We are now three chapters into the Gospel of Matthew, and Jesus hasn’t even shown up as an adult yet until halfway through chapter 3. The first two chapters focus first on Joseph and Mary and then on John the Baptist, and that seems really strange.

But Matthew is doing something important.

He laser-focuses on this man, John the Baptist, here at the beginning of Matthew chapter 3 for a very important reason. It is because, just like in Matthew 1 and Matthew 2, John the Baptist is another example of the way that the Lord always keeps His promises.

John the Baptist is another example of the way that the Lord is absolutely in control of the course of history.

John the Baptist is a fulfillment of prophecy.

Isaiah 40 tells us that there is someone coming who is going to prepare the way for that Savior that God promised us. Isaiah 40 prophesies that someone is going to come before the Messiah. Someone is going to come ahead of the Messiah. Someone’s going to come who is not the Messiah, who is not the Savior, but who is going to spend his life preparing the hearts of the people to meet and receive and embrace and be redeemed and restored by that coming Savior.

Isaiah 40 says:

“The voice of one who calls out,
‘Prepare the way of Yahweh in the wilderness!
Make a level highway in the desert for our God.’”
—Isaiah 40:3 (WEB)

And in Matthew chapter 3, he bends over backwards to show that John the Baptist is that voice crying out in the wilderness to prepare the way for this Savior, Jesus. He is making the path straight for Jesus to make His entry.

And so John the Baptist is out in the wilderness. He has a wilderness ministry.

John the Baptist is not part of the established religious leadership in Jerusalem. He is not part of the official religious leadership in Israel.

Like we saw in Matthew chapter 2, the religious leadership in Israel during the time of Jesus had completely lost their love for the Lord. They had lost their passion for the Lord. They had stopped serving the Lord, and instead, they only served themselves.

They were in it for the power it provided them. They were in it for the prestige that it gave them. They were in it because they wanted to be important and influential people in the culture. They were in it because it made them rich. They were in it because they were passionate about their own power and glory and name and recognition and wealth and prestige and so forth.

These were—I don’t even know how to put it exactly. I don’t know who to compare them to right now exactly—but the religious leadership in Israel had stopped being genuine servants and shepherds for the Lord.

Hungry for the Truth

And because that was true, whenever someone really wanted to know the truth and really wanted to know the Lord and really wanted to grow in the Lord and serve the Lord faithfully and be part of the Lord’s mission and work in the world, they had to go somewhere else.

They weren’t going to find true spiritual leadership in the synagogue or the temple. They had to go to the wilderness.

They had to find this weird guy named John who ate locusts and wild honey, which is gross but edible. You—you can do it. You go to some places, and they literally have, like, candy-covered grasshoppers.

I’ve never tried it, but you know what? Honestly, shrimp is literally just sea grasshoppers, right? A shrimp is just a sea locust. So if you eat shrimp, there is really no reason for you not to eat locusts.

It’s gross, but hey, shrimp has been normalized in our culture. Locusts, grasshoppers, have not.

But hey, John the Baptist, he ate locusts and wild honey. He wore super weird, super simple clothes. If you saw him and met him, you might think he was crazy or unhinged or a tinfoil hat or whatever.

And yet John wasn’t crazy.

He was the only one actually seeking and preaching and teaching the truth about God.

And so people were rushing out to the wilderness to go listen to this weirdo who ate bugs and wore, like, camel-skin garments because they truly wanted to grow in the Lord and learn the truth and be part of God’s good work in the world.

So that tells us something really important.

The people of Israel were starting to get a heart for the truth.

Even though the religious leadership had completely disintegrated, the people themselves were hungry for the Lord. They were desperate for a work of God in their day. They were desperate to know the truth about the true God and worship Him faithfully and serve Him faithfully.

I pray that that same thing will happen here and now in our day and time and culture.

Do you have a heart for the truth?

Are you desperate to know the truth, no matter how difficult or strange or counterintuitive it is?

Are you willing to desperately seek the truth even if it leads you away from what you used to believe, even if it leads you away from what your family taught you and raised you to believe, even if it leads you away from what your traditions used to hold, even if it leads you away from what your culture says is good and right and normal?

Are you desperate for the truth to the point that you will search for it relentlessly, no matter what it costs?

If so, then you can understand the mindset of the people who were going out to hear and learn and be discipled by John the Baptist in the wilderness.

A Brood of Vipers

So John the Baptist is out there. He is carrying out his wilderness ministry.

And about that time, who shows up?

Those exact same religious leaders who ignored the birth of the Savior in Matthew chapter 2, who will one day help the Romans crucify the Savior, but who right now are coming out to the wilderness so that they can heckle John, give John a hard time, and try to stop John from preaching and teaching the truth because it challenges their power in the culture.

So these Pharisees and Sadducees, they come out to where John is preaching, and the sense that Matthew gives is not that they are out there to learn.

They are out there to try to sabotage John.

They are out there to try to stop John from preaching the truth. They want John the Baptist to sit down and shut up so that they can have a monopoly on spiritual leadership.

But these guys are not spiritual leaders.

These guys are frauds.

They have lost their love for the Lord, and they have started to serve themselves and their wallets instead of Yahweh.

And so John calls them exactly what they are.

He calls them a brood of vipers.

Generally speaking, you should not insult people. You should not call them names. Generally speaking, you shouldn’t make bad assumptions about people’s intentions.

There’s a lot of people out there who do things that you don’t like but who are not bad people, right?

There’s a lot of preachers and teachers that I disagree with, but I don’t think they’re bad.

There’s a lot of preachers and teachers that I think are wrong about some of the things that they teach and so on and so forth, but that doesn’t mean that they’re false teachers. That doesn’t mean that they’re frauds. It just means that we disagree about how to interpret things.

That is not what’s happening between John the Baptist and these religious leaders.

John the Baptist is calling out these frauds for what they are. He calls them a brood of vipers, and then he tells them something that absolutely rocks their world.

He tells them, “The wrath of God is coming for you.”

Children of Abraham

Why does he say that?

The obvious answer is because, again, these religious leaders in Israel have lost their love for the Lord. They have stopped serving the Lord. They are serving themselves. They are in this for power and wealth and prestige. They’re in this to control people and so on and so forth.

They are not serving God.

They are serving themselves.

That’s the obvious answer, but there’s actually more to it than that.

To understand why John says all these things, you have to understand that in the first century in Israel, the Pharisees and Sadducees believed a very specific and very dangerous piece of false teaching.

They believed that they had God’s favor because they were ethnically Jewish. They believed that they had God’s blessing because they were ethnically Jewish. They believed that they had God’s love because they were Jewish.

They believed that God loves Jews and God hates everybody else.

They believed that God loves Israelites and that God hates all the other nations and all the other races and all the other ethnicities and all the other people groups.

They believed that God loves everyone who is physically, biologically descended from Abraham.

Abraham is the first Israelite. From Genesis 12, God says, “I’m going to make your descendants into a great nation called Israel, and your descendants, that great nation Israel, is going to bless all the nations of the world.”

The Pharisees and Sadducees, these religious leaders in Israel in the first century, they have fallen so far from what God actually said to Abraham.

God told Abraham He was going to work through his descendants to bring about the Savior so that all the peoples of the world could be blessed and redeemed and restored.

But the Pharisees and Sadducees took that, distorted it, and they turned it into good old-fashioned prejudice and favoritism.

They believed that if you were ethnically descended from Abraham, that you were saved and loved and redeemed and favored and protected and blessed by God.

But they believed that if you were a Gentile, if you were any other race or ethnicity, God despised you and that God was going to destroy you.

That’s what the Pharisees and Sadducees believed.

And because that is true, they would sin and disobey the Lord and rebel against the Lord and live in ways that dishonored the Lord without worrying a thing in the world about it because they believed, “God can’t punish me because I’m part of the favored race and favored nation.”

That’s what the Pharisees and Sadducees believed.

So this would be exactly the same as if you saw somebody out there, like, you know, cheating on his wife with 17 prostitutes in one night, stealing from the cash register of the local country store when the owner was in the back, punching a disabled kid in the nose just because he could, and then you went up and said, “Hey, dude, you need to stop doing that. You are sinning, and you’re being a jerk. Like, the Lord is watching you right now, man.”

And he said, “Uh, no, don’t worry. I’m white. God can’t punish white people.”

That’s insane, right?

That is exactly the way that the Pharisees and Sadducees saw their relationship with God.

They believed they could do anything they wanted. They could live any way they wanted. They could sin any way they wanted. They could rebel against the Lord. They could disobey His commands. They could bring shame to His name.

But that God would favor them and bless them and forgive them, not because of anything else, but because they were Jewish.

That is how the religious leaders in Israel saw God.

Faith, Not Bloodline

But John the Baptist arrives in the wilderness. He stands on his platform. He clears his throat. He looks straight at the Pharisees and Sadducees and says, “None of that is true.”

He says, “You are headed for condemnation.”

He says, “God’s wrath is coming on you because of your sin and rebellion and faithlessness.”

And they say, “Hey, we’re children of Abraham. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

They say, “We are safe because we are children of Abraham. We are saved because we’re children of Abraham.”

They say, “We are never going to be punished because we are children of Abraham.”

And John says, “No, you are not.”

He says, “If you want to be a child of Abraham, there is only one way to do that. You need to repent and put your faith in the God of Abraham.”

Now, we are going to talk about this more in the coming months, especially once we get to the book of Romans and once we get to the book of Galatians and once we get to the book of Hebrews.

Keep those in your mind.

We are going to talk a lot more about all of this.

But here’s what we need to understand.

John the Baptist is telling these Pharisees and Sadducees the only way to be a child of Abraham is to put your faith in the God of Abraham.

You need to repent and start following Abraham’s God. You need to believe in Abraham’s God. You need to submit to Abraham’s God. You need to place your faith in Abraham’s God in a way that drives you to throw yourself on His mercy, submit to Him as your Lord, and repent of your sins.

In other words, he says your bloodline doesn’t make you a child of Abraham.

Your faith makes you a child of Abraham.

This is really important.

He says your ethnicity, your race, your biology, your blood relation to Abraham does not make you part of God’s people.

Your faith makes you part of God’s people.

And he says to these Pharisees and Sadducees, “You are faithless, so you are not Abraham’s children.”

The Same Is True for Us

And that same exact thing is true for all of us today.

If you want to belong to the Lord, it is not about what ethnicity you were born into. It does not matter if you were ethnically Jewish or ethnically whatever else. It does not matter what your race is. It does not matter what your ethnicity is. It does not matter what your background is. It does not matter what your culture is. It doesn’t matter what your past is.

There is absolutely nothing in the world that has any effect whatsoever on your relationship with God except your faith.

If you want to belong to the Lord, place your faith in the Lord.

Follow after the Lord.

Throw yourself on His mercy.

Say, “Lord, I want You to save me.”

Say, “Lord, I want You to make me Your child. I want You to make me Your son or Your daughter. I want You to make me a citizen of Your kingdom. I want You to make me Your servant. I want You to be my Lord and my Savior.”

That’s faith.

Place your faith in the God of Abraham, and you will be saved and redeemed and restored and accepted and embraced by God for all of eternity, by the God of Abraham along with Abraham.

But these Pharisees and Sadducees had no faith.

They were faithless, and they were rebellious.

They lived for themselves. Their religious leadership positions had nothing to do with honoring and worshiping and serving the Lord. It was all about gaining power and prestige.

And so John says, “You need to repent and place your faith in Abraham’s God.”

Baptism, Faith, and Repentance

So John the Baptist sets up shop in the wilderness, and he spends his life leading people to repentance to prepare them for the coming of the Savior.

And as a symbol of that repentance and faith, John the Baptist starts doing something called baptizing.

He’s out there in the wilderness. He is right next to a body of water, and people come out to him, and he will baptize them in that body of water, the Jordan.

And when he baptizes them, it represents two things.

It represents faith and repentance.

When people went to John the Baptist to be baptized, they were saying, “I repent of my rebellion against the Lord.”

They say, “I repent of all the ways that I have rebelled against the Lord and disobeyed the Lord and ignored the Lord and run from the Lord in the past. I am repenting. I am leaving that behind. I am turning around 180 degrees, and I am going to serve the Lord and worship the Lord from here on out.”

You are saying to the Lord, “I want to belong to You.”

And you are saying, “I believe the Lord. I submit to Him as my King, and I follow Him as my Lord, and I trust Him as my Savior.”

That is what you are saying when you go out to the wilderness to be baptized by John the Baptist.

And the funny thing is, both Jews and Gentiles were going to the wilderness to John the Baptist to be baptized together.

Why?

Because he’s saying whether you are Jewish or Gentile, whether you are Israelite or you are from one of the other surrounding Gentile pagan nations, there is one way to be part of God’s people and family and kingdom, and that is through faith and repentance.

And so the Jews and the Gentiles file out to the wilderness together.

They go into the water, and they come back up as a symbol and a metaphor and a way of declaring, “We are giving ourselves to the Lord, and we are waiting for the Savior that He promised.”

The Savior Arrives

So as John the Baptist is out preaching and teaching and baptizing in the wilderness, every single person who is there is there because they are preparing themselves for this coming Messiah that God promised.

They are preparing themselves to meet this coming Messiah.

They say, “We know the Messiah is coming. We know this Savior is coming, and we are preparing our hearts for this Messiah. We are preparing ourselves to meet this Messiah and receive this Messiah and embrace this Messiah and follow this Messiah.”

They say, “We are coming here so that when the Savior comes, we can start following Him as His disciples and His servants and His people.”

And as these truth seekers out in the wilderness gather around John the Baptist to be baptized and taught and trained, what happens?

That Savior they’ve been waiting for shows up.

That Savior they’ve been waiting for gets in line to be baptized, and He makes His way up to John the Baptist.

And John sees Him, and he recognizes Him.

We’re going to learn later down the line in Luke that John the Baptist and Jesus are cousins. I don’t know when John the Baptist realized that Jesus was the Messiah, but at some point he did.

And John sees Jesus, and he says, “Jesus, You are the Savior we’ve been waiting for. You don’t need me to baptize You. You don’t have any sin to repent of. You don’t need me to baptize You. You don’t need to be saved. You don’t need to be redeemed. You don’t need to be restored. You are the One who’s going to save. You are the One who’s going to redeem. You are the One who’s going to restore. You don’t need to become part of God’s people. You are the God of the people. You need to baptize me, if anything.”

But Jesus says, “No, no, no, no. Go ahead and do it.”

He says, “This must be to fulfill all righteousness.”

And so John goes ahead and baptizes Him.

Why Was Jesus Baptized?

Now, why would Jesus go to be baptized when He has no sin that needs to be repented of and He is the God that we place our faith in?

I’m not 100% sure, but here’s what I think.

I think it’s because Jesus is showing us how to be human.

All throughout His life, remember, Jesus took on human flesh. He took on human nature. He became a real human.

Jesus is not God pretending to be a human.

Jesus is God become human.

God comes down from heaven and lives out a human life in Jesus Christ so that He can be our perfect sacrifice and our perfect substitute.

And as humans, we need to repent and place our faith in the Lord. And we symbolize that repentance and faith through baptism.

And so Jesus is going through the motions of this symbol and metaphor for faith and repentance.

He is showing us, “You need to repent and have faith, and baptism is a picture of that.”

“This Is My Beloved Son”

But when Jesus comes out of the water, one last really interesting thing happens.

He comes up out of the water, and suddenly we hear the voice of God coming from heaven, and it says, “This is My beloved Son. I take delight in Him.”

Once again, God is announcing to everyone there, “This is the Savior you’ve been waiting for. This is the Savior you’ve been looking for.”

All throughout the Old Testament, all throughout the Psalms, all throughout the prophets, again and again and again, God says this about the coming Savior.

He says, “The coming Savior will be My beloved Son, in whom I take delight.”

And now, as Jesus comes out of the waters of the Jordan, the voice of God booms down from heaven, and He says to all the people gathered together seeking the truth at John the Baptist’s feet, He says, “This man that John just baptized, this is that beloved Son you’ve been waiting for. This is that man that I take delight in that you’ve been waiting for. This is the Savior I promised.”

And then out of the heavens, the Holy Spirit apparently visibly descends, and He descends onto Jesus.

And everyone looking on sees God the Father announce, “This is the Savior,” and then God the Spirit descend and rest on His shoulders.

Once again, the Old Testament prophets said the coming Savior will be a man on whom God’s Spirit rests.

It says, “My Spirit will descend on the Savior, and the Savior will go from one place to another, bringing My presence and My power and My glory and My love and My healing.”

And so they just heard from the mouth of God, “This is the Savior you’ve been waiting for. Listen to Him. Follow Him. Believe in Him.”

And then they saw with their eyes the Spirit God promised descending and resting on His shoulders.

They say, “God’s Spirit dwells in Him, just like God promised.”

Follow Jesus

God is calling every man, woman, and child gathered at the Jordan around John the Baptist to stop following John himself because his work is done and to start following Jesus.

And that is the same calling that God has on you and me today.

We are called to follow Jesus.

We are called to become disciples of Jesus.

These disciples in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, they were the disciples of Jesus in the year 33. You and I are called to be the disciples of Jesus in the year 2025.

And when we open up God’s Word together to read it and study it and meditate on it and learn it and obey it, it is like we are sitting at the feet of this Jesus that God promised for centuries beforehand and then rested His Spirit on and told us to follow.

And so as we continue reading Matthew, we are learning from this long-promised Savior.

We are becoming His students and His disciples.

What you are doing right now, as you read Matthew 3 and then try to understand it and apply it, is you are being a disciple of Jesus.

What we are doing as we read God’s Word is we are not just fulfilling some obligation. We are not just fulfilling some daily task. We are fulfilling our role as the disciples of Jesus who sit at His feet and learn from Him.

And so keep at it. Keep reading. Keep learning. Keep studying.

If you miss a day, don’t freak out. You can catch back up later.

What challenges you? What confuses you? What do you need more explanation on? What are you struggling with here in Matthew chapter 3?