JOHN170 - Why John the Baptist Is Rightly on the Mount Rushmore of New Testament Mentions

0:06 Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And yesterday we were trying to guess who the top 20 most mentioned characters in the New Testament are. And I'm supposing you probably guessed a whole bunch of them. I would bet that there were a couple on the list that kind of surprised you.

0:21 But the one we're fixated on is the guy who's in the number four most mentioned position on the New Testament list, and that is John the Baptist. I was arguing, my suggestion is that maybe at first impression, that's surprising, maybe a little higher than you'd figure. But my argument that I'm making yesterday and then today is that when you look a little closer at the Bible and the history of the church, it kind of makes sense that John the Baptist comes up so much.

0:49 So yesterday we got through two of my three reasons that it makes sense. And today we will do the third, right after my close personal friend, Jeffrey Foote, plays some music. And finally, a third reason that I think John the Baptist is the fourth most mentioned character in the New Testament and why that makes sense, especially in the Gospel of John, is because he was so dang good at his job.

1:23 He was interesting, he was compelling. He assertively lived out what he claimed to believe. Remember, all these people came out into the desert to see him. They didn't get photographs or a video preview. They didn't watch a hundred videos on YouTube and then make a pilgrimage. They just heard the rumblings and the rumors of what this was and what he did.

1:46 It had the credibility of God behind it. Then so they went and they got baptized. And then they went back and told other people and they went out and got baptized. People traveled from probably as far away as Greece and Ephesus in modern-day Turkey to go and get baptized. John's disciples loved him. He was so good at his job that he had trouble getting his disciples to just get off me.

2:09 Stop grabbing, go to Jesus. Just let me go. Think about it. John the evangelist, as well as Andrew's, Simon Peter's brother. They're John the Baptist's disciples in the early going in John chapter one. And John the Baptist looks at Jesus and is like, hey guys, you two, that right there, look, that's the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

2:31 You should go to him. And then he has to say it to them again the next day. Guys, why are you still with me? paraphrases mine. That is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. John's disciples, when John died, they went and collected his body and they continued to teach and honor the ways that had been put in place by John the Baptist.

2:50 Years later, we see Apollos, a rock star of the early church in Acts chapter 18. He runs into the Apostle Paul and a couple other early Christian friends named Priscilla and Aquila. And Apollos is doing great things, but he only knows the baptism of John. He is a disciple of John who is teaching Christian things with half-knowledge.

3:13 The very next chapter in 19, Paul goes to Ephesus and there he finds 10, or I don't remember the exact number, 10 or 12 people, and they're all disciples of John the Baptist as well. And Paul's like, Well, you hear about the Jesus thing? And they're like, tell us more. He's like, Well, that's the whole deal with John.

3:28 He was pointing them to Jesus. And these disciples of John the Baptist and Ephesus are like, okay, well, we would want to follow Jesus then. And they get baptized and they follow Jesus. Even Josephus, the non-Christian Jewish historian from the first century A.D., in his Antiquities of the Jews, chapter 5, book 18, he writes about John the Baptist.

3:48 John the Baptist was a big enough deal to make it into the history book. He says now some of the Jews thought that the destruction of Herod's army came from God, and that very justly, as a punishment for what Herod did against John that was called the Baptist. Again, this is a secular historian, or a non-Christian historian, I should say.

4:06 For Herod slew him, who was a good man, and commanded the Jews to exercise virtue both as to righteousness toward one another and piety toward God, and so to come to baptism. That's Josephus. That's decades after the fact. Here's the point. John the Baptist cast a very long shadow because he was so effective, because God used him so effectively, and it was hard for some people to let go.

4:32 You know who was really sympathetic to having it be hard to let go of following John the Baptist? John the Evangelist, because he was one of those initial disciples who had such a tough time heeding John the Baptist's urging to go and follow Jesus. Obviously, John the Evangelist eventually did so and never looked back.

4:54 But at the end of his life, when John the Evangelist is looking at the landscape of the Christian church after several decades of growth, maybe 50 years, 60 years even after the crucifixion of Jesus, he looks at it and he realizes, I believe, that there's still a faction that is operating in support of John the Baptist.

5:18 There's still more people out there floating around, like Apollos or those 10 or 12 or whatever it was disciples in Acts 19 in Ephesus. And John the Evangelist is like, hey, you know, part of properly telling the story of Jesus is properly telling the story of John the Baptist and how John the Baptist voluntarily crossfaded out so that Jesus would crossfade in.

5:40 He must become greater, I must become less. For you and me reading this thing now, it's like, yeah, okay, I can kind of skim the John the Baptist parts here in John. Yeah, I know. John testified to Jesus and he was great and he was kind of weird and he fulfilled prophecy, but Jesus is a point. Let's get on to it.

5:59 But John the Evangelist is probably writing the Gospel of John that we're reading right now from Ephesus. He probably knew those 10 or 12 guys written about in Acts 19 who met Paul and went from being disciples of John the Baptist to being disciples of Jesus. And there were probably a lot more guys like that still hanging around in Ephesus and the larger Mediterranean world who John the Evangelist, now an old man, was still aware of.

6:28 Here's what I see happening in the first three chapters of John. One, John the Evangelist is trying to point us to Jesus, and in doing so, he's trying to double down on the work of John the Baptist. Jesus is the point. We testify to what we've actually seen. Jesus is God in the flesh. The default setting of our situation in the world is death.

6:50 But the snake is lifted up in the desert. There's life, there's light, it is Jesus. John the Baptist attested to this. I, John the Evangelist, attest to this. And when we read it through the lenses of a late first century original audience, and when we read it, bearing in mind that this gospel probably originated from Ephesus, a hotbed of John the Baptistism, well, it makes a lot of sense that John is going to want to emphasize so heavily this point that John the Baptist was not about John the Baptist.

7:24 That John the Baptist would not want his disciples to be following and memorializing John the Baptist. That John the Baptist would want his disciples to do the number one thing John the Baptist commanded them to do, which is to behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Behold Jesus, believe in him, and by believing have life in his name.

7:50 That's what John the Baptist wanted his followers to do. That was the whole point. I think John the Evangelist at the end of his life was like, man, this is a travesty. There should not be a cult of John the Baptist apart from Jesus. This shouldn't be a thing. And in the process of me explaining the Jesus thing, I'm gonna clarify this even further.

8:13 I really need to make sure that John the Baptist's legacy and his God-ordained purpose that he faithfully saw through to the very end. I, John the Evangelist, one of the last survivors from this age, one of the last eyewitnesses. Yeah, I need to make it really clear what John the Baptist was about and what he was doing.

8:34 So John the Baptist is the fourth most mentioned, probably, character in the New Testament, depending on how you count it. And at first, that might seem to you and me, uh, if you are a modern Christian or you were raised around it, it might seem kind of weird and kind of surprising. And I would argue that if it seems weird and surprising to you at all that John the Baptist would be the fourth most mentioned character in the New Testament, well then that means John the Baptist was very, very good at what he did.

9:04 He wanted to take attention off of himself and put it on Jesus. If he does slip our mind just a little bit, I can't imagine John the Baptist would be at all offended by that. He, that is Jesus, must become greater. I, that is John the Baptist, must become less. Cool. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast.

9:26 Let's do this again soon.