Matthew 11 tells of John sending disciples to Jesus. The question is nothing less than amazing and dismaying;
Are you He who was to come or are we to look for another?
After all that John was prepared for and all the signs he saw attesting the evidence that Jesus is the Messiah yet in spite of all this John spectacularly missed it!!!
I know in this series I have stressed the importance of the wilderness and the preparation but it does mean we can still miss the Lord in how we continue a tuned to what God was doing in Jesus. We can miss it still…we can lose sight of what God is doing because our part in it has changed.
A forerunner is that until the runner comes to the fore…pun intended.
It is important that He increases and I diminish.
John became offended because he did not handle the diminishing. It seems that the years of preparation were equal to months of ministry. In the blink of the eye it was all over. The lines for baptism diminished because Jesus was now baptising. The crowds were forgetting John in the spectacular miracles that flowed from Jesus.
Whilst John fasted and ate little Jesus feasted
The sacrifice of John and the hard preparation he went through is not reflected in Jesus. He sat with all and feasted. He was followed by the multitude. John had none of this, seemed so hard and so much sacrifice to what he understood was necessary.
We readily speak about the need for sacrifice and preparation but it is not a guarantee we won’t make mistakes and miss it. We can as some do, judge moves of God by the former sacrifices and methods that other generations were led into.
When the Asbury revival broke out in a University chapel many got the standard ruler of theology and testing manifestations and even declared it to be false. I prayed and sought God. I was surprised because God showed me it was of Him. Also He showed me something was coming. Where the move of God’s presence was taking place there would come a rise of anti semitic and hate movements. And violence. Revival sometimes precedes situations that provoke judgment.
I cannot judge the way God moved and speaks to other spiritual generations. I must discern the origins and align the theology.
We can become offended at Jesus if we become so rigid and religious if we expect our experience be a yard stick for new generations. The offence becomes so strong that we become blind and bitter. In that way we forget that God met with us powerfully.
Then we begin to look elsewhere and believe that a political figure is the answer. Our energies become immersed in human initiatives that become a platform for the flesh.
John became this way and came into the cross hairs of Herod. In the end he is imprisoned and loses his head…figuratively and literally. I am convinced that God never intended this end. He desired John to be a powerful witness of Christ. He was too fixated on what he did not expect and how he diminished.
John was the greatest in the Old Covenant, in virtue of his task but he was the least in the New because he had to be diminished to access, and what He could not deal with became not the door that it was intended but an exit and exclusion from the very Covenant he was preparing for.
I believe that in virtue of Ephesians 4, in the words of Paul , Jesus when He descended to Hades preached to John and the old saints and from there he understood…my musing.
May we learn this lesson. Our walk is not a pattern to be imposed on contemporaries but we must focus on Christ. Our bitterness and offence can obscure our perception of Jesus. To our eternal loss. Discern and pray lest we don’t fall into this temptation.
Maranatha!!!
Leave a Reply