Make the Desert to Live Again Bible
Similar many prophets in the Old Attestation, John the Baptist not only preached his God-given bulletin merely illustrated it through his striking and arguably bizarre behavior. Living in a desert wilderness and surviving on insects would accept been as unusual then as it is today, and that was precisely the betoken! Rugged isolation from the globe and eating locusts and honey was a vivid flick of his message. This final and greatest of the prophets presented his whole life every bit a parable, a symbolic picture of repentance and organized religion. He literally departed from his wicked generation.
The prophets as living parables
John's life of eating locusts in the wilderness of the Judean desert falls into an established biblical blueprint. Prophets were not simply traveling preachers who predicted the time to come. They delivered their messages through actions also as words. The Lord allowable not only what they were to say, simply also what they were to do to deliver His warnings and promises to the people. Note, for example, the instructions God gave to Isaiah:
"In the year that the commander came to Ashdod, when Sargon the king of Assyria sent him and he fought against Ashdod and captured it, at that time the Lord spoke through Isaiah the son of Amoz, saying, 'Go and loosen the sackcloth from your hips and have your shoes off your feet.' And he did and so, going naked and barefoot. And the Lord said, 'Fifty-fifty equally My servant Isaiah has gone naked and barefoot three years as a sign and token against Arab republic of egypt and Cush, so the king of Assyria will lead away the captives of Arab republic of egypt and the exiles of Cush, young and old, naked and barefoot with buttocks uncovered, to the shame of Egypt" (Isaiah 20:i-4).
Isaiah had to carry out his prophetic ministry building stark naked for 3 whole years to brand his point. To illustrate the shame God would bring on Egypt, Isaiah bore that shame himself. He pictured the prediction in his ain body. He not just proclaimed information technology. He lived it. This is not unique to Isaiah. The prophet Ezekiel in one case publicly acted out a siege on a brick with the word "Jerusalem" written on it to prophesy the coming judgment on the city (Ezekiel 4:1-3). He then had to lay on his side for over a year as a further display (Ezekiel 4:four-8). Later on, he had to publicly cook his food over a pile of excrement, (Ezekiel iv:12-15).
Further examples could be multiplied, but these establish the signal. When John was sent to spend his whole life autonomously from all the cities of men, living in the scorching sands of the wilderness and eating locusts and wild honey, he was doing what prophets often practice; he was strikingly picturing his message.
Eating locusts in the wilderness: A call to repentance
John's peculiar fashion of life is well established in the gospels. He was called as a prophet and filled with the Spirit even before he was born (Luke i:15-17), and we are told that his wilderness dwelling began at a very early on age:
"And the child continued to grow and to become strong in spirit, and he lived in the desert until the twenty-four hours of his public advent to State of israel," (Luke i:eighty).
And, of course, the well-nigh famous clarification of this wilderness life is the foods he ate, repeated in multiple gospels:
"Now John wore clothing of camel'south hair with a leather belt effectually his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey" (Matthew three:4, see also Marker 1:vi).
Again, this was the sort of thing God had His prophets do. Indeed, John's desert dwelling, coarse clothes, and harsh diet of eating locusts were, at least in function, what signaled to the people that he was a prophet!
"As these men were going away, Jesus began to speak to the crowds about John, 'What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the current of air? But what did you go out to meet? A human being dressed in soft habiliment? Those who wear soft article of clothing are in kings' palaces! But what did yous go out to see? A prophet? Yeah, I tell you, and one who is more than a prophet'" (Matthew 11:vii-9).
For John to come up in comfort and luxury would take been unfitting of his mission and bulletin, as one early on Christian writer noted:
"For how possibly could he have worn a purple robe, who turned away from the pomp of cities," 1
John'south message was an urgent call to repentance in grooming for the immediate coming of the Lord:
"John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins," (Marker 1:iv).
"Now in those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the wilderness of Judea, saying, 'Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.' For this is the 1 referred to by Isaiah the prophet when he said, 'The voice of one crying in the wilderness, "Make ready the way of the Lord, Make His paths straight!"'" (Matthew 3:one-3).
John'south wilderness life, including his pattern of eating what he could find in the desert rather than what he could farm or fetch in the town marketplace, was a picture show of repentance, a literal separation from the defiled generation of his day. That imagery would not have been alien to Jews of that time. Retreating to a barren identify and surviving on wild forage (like eating locusts) had a cultural meaning at the time. In the non-biblical Jewish literature from the time betwixt the Old and New Testaments, we read of the cultural hero Judas Maccabeus, the human who led in throwing off the oppressive tyranny of the Greek empire:
"Simply Judas Maccabeus, with nearly nine others, got away to the wilderness, and kept himself and his companions live in the mountains as wild animals do; they continued to live on what grew wild, so that they might not share in the defilement" (2 Maccabees v:27).
Thus, John's life in the Judean desert, foraging on locusts and wild honey, was an indictment of the people as defiled and corrupt and a call on them to apologize and seek cleansing and forgiveness from the Lord, whose coming was near. It was an outward moving-picture show of the inner reality to which John called his people; a living parable of repentance and faith. We are not here called to physically go out our homes, pitch a tent on some isolated dune and swallow what bugs we can find. Our turning from sin, however, ought to be quite like that. Our faith ought to be that level of trust. And just equally John pointed not to himself but to Jesus who would come up after him, the object of our faith ought to be in Christ lonely.
Source: https://carm.org/other-questions/why-did-john-the-baptist-live-in-the-desert-and-eat-locusts/
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