The Truth About John the Baptist
Matthew 11:7-15
When we began our study of Matthew’s gospel, I told you that Matthew’s purpose was clear. Matthew wrote to show Jesus is the promised Messiah-King. Matthew has shown this in Jesus’ royal lineage, His virgin birth, His fulfillment of scripture, His forerunner, His coronation at His baptism, His victory over the devil, His kingdom preaching, His authoritative teaching, His unparalleled miracles, and His power over sickness, evil spirits, nature, sin, and death.
One preacher put it this way: “Matthew has been jumping up and down, waving his arms, and shooting off flare guns declaring that Jesus is the King.”[1] The response to Jesus was mostly positive so far, although there have been incidents of opposition and rejection already. Still, multitudes were following Jesus as disciples. From these, Jesus had chosen twelve and sent them out with His authority to declare the kingdom of God.
But in Matthew 11, something had just happened that, I believe, left the people who saw it in a bit of shock. John the Baptist, the mighty prophet, had expressed disappointment and doubt about Jesus. God had made it clear to John at Jesus’ baptism that He was the Messiah, the Christ. But Jesus was not proving to be the kind of Messiah John expected Him to be. John had been expecting Jesus to bring judgment on Israel’s enemies and rule on the throne of King David. Instead, Jesus was going about teaching and healing people and John was wasting away in prison for standing against immoral rulers. Was Jesus the Messiah that John had been proclaiming Him to be, or was John mistaken and should he look for someone else?
Jesus assured John that He was the Messiah because He was doing the work of the Messiah in fulfillment of scripture. He told John’s disciples to go and tell him what they see and hear: “The blind see and the lame walk; the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear; the dead are raised up and the poor have the gospel preached to them. And blessed is he who is not offended because of Me.” (Matt. 11:5-6).
If John had some doubts about Jesus, Jesus had no doubts about John! The crowd must have overheard the question John’s disciples put to Jesus and our Lord’s response. As John’s disciples depart to report back to John what Jesus said and did, Jesus uses this occasion to address the crowd concerning John the Baptist. And what I want you to understand in this passage is that as Jesus speaks about John, He is revealing Himself as the king and the nature of His kingdom. Matthew records Jesus’ tribute to John the Baptist because it shows the majesty of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
So first, we see that Jesus testified of John as[2] …
1. The herald of the King (Matt. 11:7-10)
Matthew 11:7 says, “As they departed, Jesus began to say to the multitudes concerning John: “What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind?””
Jesus asks the listening crowd a series of questions about their expectations of John the Baptist and what they went out into the wilderness to see. Back in Matthew 3, we were told that “John the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness of Judea …” (Matt. 3:1) and “… Jerusalem, all Judea, and all the region around the Jordan went out to him” (Matt. 3:5). John didn’t travel from city to city preaching his message. He preached in the wilderness. Yet, the people made a great effort to go out to him.
So, Jesus asks “Why”? When went out all that way to the wilderness to hear John, what were they expecting to see? “A reed shaken by the wind?” A swaying reed pictures someone who is timid or fearful or swayed by pressure. If that’s what they went out to see, that’s certainly not what they got because John was no wimpy little reed that got blown around. He wasn’t simply preaching what people wanted him to say. He wasn’t an ear-tickling, people-pleasing preacher. John was a man of godly conviction and courage. He said things like this:
“Brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Therefore bear fruits worthy of repentance, and do not think 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” (Matt. 3:7-10).
J. Vernon McGee commented that John was no ‘reed shaking in the wind’! He was a mighty wind, shaking the reeds! There was no preacher like John! He did not bend to the crowds or try to gain the favor of the elites. He called people to repent and bring forth fruit in keeping with repentance. He rebuked the Scribes and Pharisees for their religious hypocrisy and called on them to repent as well. He even spoke against King Herod’s immorality. In fact, Matthew 14 tells us that is why he was in prison.
Next, in Matthew 11:8, Jesus asks, “But what did you go out to see? A man clothed in soft garments?” and He answers, “Indeed, those who wear soft clothing are in kings’ houses.” Matthew tells us that “John himself was in clothed in camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist; and his food was locusts and wild honey” (Matthew 3:4). John lived the rugged life of a prophet who had a word from God burning within him. He dressed as a prophet from God would dress (Zech. 13:4), and there was no pretense about him. He didn’t dine at a fancy table and didn’t live in a fancy house. He lived as an out-of-this-world kind of man with a not-from-this-world kind of message, and the only thing that mattered to him was to proclaim it! Anyone who went out to hear a nice, pretty-faced pulpiteer in a shiny, sequined chapel—some sissy sermonizer in a silk suit—certainly didn’t find that with John. John did not compromise with wealth or power. He was no prosperity preacher telling people how to get rich like him. John the Baptist willingly sacrificed and denied himself in order to set himself apart, both physically and symbolically, from the corrupt religious and political system of his day.
And so, in Matthew 11:9, Jesus goes on to ask, “But what did you go out to see? A prophet?” Which, of course, was the right answer. But there was more. Jesus says, “A prophet? Yes, I say to you, and more than a prophet.” John was a prophet in every sense of the word. He was more than a prophet because he not only spoke a message from God, as all true prophets did; he not only prophesied the coming of the Messiah, as many other prophets did; but he was himself the fulfillment of prophecy. He was a “prophesied prophet!” His role as a prophet was unique because God promised his ministry in the Scriptures nearly five hundred years before it began!
In Matthew 11:10, Jesus quoted from the last prophet of the Old Testament, Malachi, and said, “For this is he of whom it was written: ‘Behold, I send My messenger before Your face, who will prepare Your way before You!’” To get the full impact of this quote from Malachi, we need to go back and look at the context of Malachi 3. Translated from the Hebrew, Malachi 3:1 reads, “”Behold, I send My messenger, And he will prepare the way before Me. And the Lord, whom you seek, Will suddenly come to His temple, Even the Messenger of the covenant, In whom you delight. Behold, He is coming,” Says the LORD of hosts.”
I want you to notice some things here that inform the New Testament use of the passage.[3] First, Jesus changed the pronoun from “Me” to “You.” The speaker in Malachi is the Lord, Yahweh, God Himself. God is sending the messenger before Himself because according to Malachi 3:5, He will come in judgment. The great event was the coming of Yahweh, and the announcement of it would be through His messenger. By changing the pronoun in His use of the verse, Jesus makes the prophecy about Himself. He affirms that if John the Baptist was the messenger preparing the way for the Lord Yahweh, then He, Jesus, is the Lord Yahweh, the God of Israel who was coming into the world.
The second thing to observe is that, in Malachi, the “Messenger of the covenant”—the one that the messenger, John, announced, Jesus the Lord—will come to “His temple.” Here too we have a subtle indication of the deity of Christ. All through the Old Testament the temple is called “the house of Yahweh” (the house of the LORD). Malachi prophesied that “the Messenger of the covenant” would come to “His temple”—He is the Yahweh, the LORD God.
John was a prophesied prophet, who proclaimed a message unlike any other message, in an outstandingly unique way. He was a man set apart by God to point to another Man, and declare that Man to be the Lord who “… will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire” and who is “… the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). John lived like a man gripped by his own message.
So Jesus upholds John as the herald of the king. Second, we see that Jesus testified about …
2. The greatness of the Kingdom (Matt. 11:11-15)
Notice how Jesus begins and ends this section. “Assuredly, I say to you . . .” (Matt. 11:11), and He ends with the words, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear!” (Matt. 11:15). These, then, are words of great importance which can only be heard and understood by God’s grace. (Matthew 13:10-17). We should give careful attention to them and humbly seek before God to understand them.
In Matthew 11:11 Jesus says, “Assuredly, I say to you, among those born of women there has not risen one greater than John the Baptist…” Jesus says that out of all people who had been born, none were greater than John. He stood out head and shoulders above the rest of humanity. John was the last and greatest of all the prophets of the Old Testament era. Matthew 11:13 says, “For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John.” All other prophets before John prophesied about Jesus long before He came. They spoke of the glories of the kingdom from afar. But God gave John the great privilege of being the ‘prophesied prophet’ who pointed bodily prepared the way before Him who is greater.
John said of Jesus, “After me comes a Man who is preferred before me, for He was before Me” (John 1:30). He said, “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). No other prophet was so great a prophet as John! And his greatness was in the privilege he had of pointing immediately to the only one who was greater: the Lord Jesus Christ! He was the herald of the King!
But all that Jesus tells us about John’s greatness was simply to make an even more remarkable point. Jesus says, “. . . among those born of women there has not risen one greater than John the Baptist; but he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he” (Matt. 11:11). John was a great prophet, but being a disciple of John was not to be the goal. Entering the kingdom is the goal. Men didn’t just need to go out and listen to John, they needed to enter the kingdom, to believe in the One Who is the King and Messiah.
The “kingdom of heaven” is God’s kingdom which John proclaimed when he announced, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matt 3:2). It is the rule of God over men and women through His King Jesus Christ; the kingdom which commenced when the Son of God came into this world as a Man to die for men, and that will finally be consummated at His return to this earth to reign as King of kings and Lord of lords with those He has redeemed. It’s a kingdom that we enter into by faith in the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross and that we experience today through fellowship with Him and obedience to His commands. It’s the kingdom we will one day enjoy fully in heavenly glory. And Jesus is letting us know that, as great a man as John the Baptist was in the program of God, he was just the herald of a kingdom to come. The man or woman who is “least” in the kingdom of heaven is greater than even John!
John was great because he could point unambiguously to Jesus as the Messiah. But now that the kingdom has been inaugurated in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, the least in the kingdom has a greater witness than John. The most humble New Covenant Christian has greater knowledge and greater opportunity than even John the Baptist had. What a privilege is ours today! What a wonderful blessing it is to be a citizen of the kingdom of heaven through Jesus Christ! What an honor it is to be a witness of Christ!
In Matthew 11:12, Jesus says, “And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force.” What does Jesus mean by that?
There are two main ways to interpret this verse. And it depends on how you look at the Greek verb that is here translated “suffers violence” (biazeõ). It’s a rare word in the New Testament, used only here and in the parallel passage in Luke 16:16. The form of the verb can either be understood to be in the passive voice or the middle voice. The New King James Version translates it “the kingdom of heaven suffers violence” which is the passive voice—that is, it’s describing something that is being done to the kingdom of heaven from outside.
If this is the correct way to interpret these words, then this might mean that the kingdom of heaven is being violently attacked in an effort to keep it from spreading—and, of course, that is true. Jesus speaks these words in Matthew 11 in the context of opposition and rejection. John is suffering in prison for preaching the gospel. The Lord Jesus said that whenever the “seed” of the gospel is sown in someone’s heart, the devil often comes and “snatches away what was sown” (Matthew 13:19), using the same word for “take it by force”. Jesus once rebuked the scribes and Pharisees, saying, “For you shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither go in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in” (Matt. 23:13). Understood this way, when Jesus says, that “the violent take” this kingdom “by force“, it could be a way of expressing how it suffers attack from its enemies or from those who would seize ahold of it for their own evil ends. As the kingdom is preached, the attacks on it by violent men increase. This explains why John is in prison and wondering about Jesus.
A second way of interpreting this verse, though, interprets that verb in ‘the middle voice’, meaning an action that the subject of the verb performs on itself. This is the interpretation taken by the New International Version (1984) which reads, “the kingdom of heaven has been forcefully advancing, and forceful men lay hold of it.” It would be very much like what Jesus said, in a different context, in Luke 16:16; “The law and the prophets were until John. Since that time the kingdom of God has been preached, and everyone is pressing into it.” There, in the place of the kingdom “suffering violence” or “forcefully advancing”, the kingdom of God is preached. That would make this a call for people who hear the gospel preached to be aggressive in seizing ahold of the kingdom. The prophets and the law had preached until John; and during that time, the time of urgency had not arrived. But now, the “end of the ages” has arrived; and the kingdom must be eagerly sought and eagerly seized upon. A man or woman of God must be earnest, zealous, and eager. He or she must deny themselves, set all worldly pursuits into second place, and aggressively “seize the kingdom”.
Either way, doesn’t change the point of the whole passage which is to be among those who enter the kingdom. The kingdom has been offered to the Jewish people and their King is presenting Himself to them. And yet, many are not entering the kingdom. Jesus said, “For all the Prophets and the Law prophesied until John” (Matt. 11:13). But now, the kingdom has arrived. There was no longer need for prophecy about His coming. Now there was a need for a decision. Now the kingdom was here, and they must choose whether or not they would enter. The Jews were enamored with John and were certain he was a prophet, but were they doing what John said?
In Acts 19:4, Paul preached to the disciples of John the Baptist saying, “John indeed baptized with a baptism of repentance, saying to the people that they should believe on Him who would come after him, that is, on Christ Jesus.”
Jesus is saying that if they understood who John is, then it would be obvious who He is. That is why Jesus says about John what He does next, “And if you are willing to accept it, he is the Elijah who was to come” (Matt. 11:14).
Jesus was not saying that John was “Elijah reincarnated” although that’s what some thought. Elijah, you might remember, was a prophet who was taken up into heaven in a fiery chariot (2 Kings 2:11). John was Elijah-like in many ways.[4] John dressed like Elijah (Matt. 3:4; 2 Kings 1:8). Both John and Elijah spent time living in remote places, eating food that was different from typical folks. Both John and Elijah were, in a sense, “inferior” to their successors. John made it clear that Jesus was far greater than he (Matt. 3:11). Elisha had a two-fold portion of Elijah’s spirit (2 Kings 2:7-14). Elijah was more a man of violence; Elisha was more a man of peace. Elijah had his doubts and had the false perception that “he alone was left” (1 Kings 19:10, 14). Elijah hoped to bring about a national revival, but it didn’t work. It was through others, whom he was to designate, that God would bring about significant changes in the nation (1 Kings 19:11-18). John truly came “in the spirit and power of Elijah” (Luke 1:17) as Gabriel had announced to his father Zachariah.
Probably because John was so much like Elijah, people came to him and asked, “Are you Elijah?“; but John answered, “I am not” (John 1:21). Yet, though John was not literally “Elijah”, Jesus says that John was the fulfillment of the last great prophecy of the Old Testament. In Malachi 4:5-6, it says,
“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet
Before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD.
And he will turn
The hearts of the fathers to the children,
And the hearts of the children to their fathers,
Lest I come and strike the earth with a curse” (Mal. 4:5-6).
The promise was kept, and “Elijah” came in the person of John. The “end of the ages” had come upon them. But the people to whom this promised “Elijah” came rejected the kingdom offer that was being made. Jesus will later say in Matthew 17:12, “Indeed, Elijah is coming first and will restore all things. But I say to you that Elijah has come already, and they did not know him but did to him whatever they wished” (Matthew 17:11-12). Matthew then comments, “Then the disciples understood that He spoke to them of John the Baptist” (Matt. 17:13).
The point is, if that promise was kept—if John is the fulfillment of the coming of Elijah—then who does that make Jesus? He is the Lord Yahweh who promised to come. The question is, Are you willing to accept it? Are you willing to accept that Jesus is King? Are you willing to accept that He is the only Savior? Are you willing to accept that His truth is truth? Will you repent and believe in Him? Will you take up your cross and follow Him? Will you confess Him before men? Are you willing to accept Jesus as Lord? That is the decision we are each faced with. “He who has ears to hear, let him hear!”
That is the truth about John the Baptist. He was a great man, you could follow no better. But if you haven’t trusted in the One John pointed to, then he is nothing more than the prophet you have yet to obey.
Don’t just recognize who John is, do what He said. In John 3:36 he said, “He who believes in the Son has everlasting life; and he who does not believe the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him.” Will you accept it?
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[1] Rory Mosley, Accepting The Truth About John The Baptist (Matthew 11:7-15), https://fbcspur.org/accepting-truth-john-baptist-matthew-117-15/.
[2] Greg Allen, Seizing the Kingdom, https://www.bethanybible.org/archive/2006/031906.htm#f1. I adapted the first part of Allen’s outline and drew from some of his points in this sermon.
[3] Allen P. Ross, The Question Of John The Baptist (Matthew 11:1-19), https://bible.org/seriespage/15-question-john-baptist-matthew-111-19. Ross was helpful in the information that follows.
[4] Bob Deffinbaugh, Jesus, John the Baptist, and the Jews (Matthew 11:1-30), https://bible.org/seriespage/22-jesus-john-baptist-and-jews-matthew-111-30#P63_23625
