December 20

Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me. - Malachi 3:1.

WE know that John the Baptist is here intended. The language is metaphorical, and the allusion is to kings and princes, who are preceded by heralds and harbingers, to make ready for their approach. When an eastern monarch travels, a forerunner gives notice of his coming, and the pioneers are employed to remove every obstruction to his advance.

If we can depend upon their own history, some of them on these occasions effected extraordinary things. We read of their having filled up chasms and levelled eminences, and opened passages where otherwise the places would have been impassable. When Isaiah would illustrate great things by very little ones, he said, “The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked places shall be made straight, and the rough places plain, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.” In other words, John was to “make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” And accordingly he aroused their attention, he removed their prejudices, he awakened their consciences, he announced the nearness of Messiah’s approach, proclaimed the nature of his reign, convinced them of sin, and showed them that they stood in need of a much greater salvation than deliverance from the Roman yoke.

His mission originated not with himself, neither was he employed by any governing power. “The word of the Lord,” it is said, “came to him.” “There was a man sent from God whose name was John.” And here we are called upon to behold him as the Lord’s messenger. When thirty years old he obeyed the heavenly vision. We may easily imagine the scenery. Behold him in raiment of camel’s hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins, sitting under the shade of a rock or of a tree, eating his frugal repast of “locusts and wild honey;” and when he saw any person passing by, he arose, and approaching them, exclaimed, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

These soon expressed this to others, and those to more, and “then went out to him Jerusalem, and all Judea, and all the region round about Jordan, and were baptized of him in Jordan, confessing their sins.” But when the sun arises, the morning star is concealed. We may look at the forerunner while he is alone, but when we have heard the exclamation, “The king! the king!” every eye will be naturally and unavoidably turned away from him.

And John would acquiesce in this; he did acquiesce in this; he said to those who came to inform him that he whom he had baptized, and to whom he had borne witness when he said, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world,” “The same baptizeth, and all men come unto him”-I am glad of it, says the messenger; “ye yourselves bear me witness that I said I am not the Christ, but that I am sent before him. He that hath the bride is the bridegroom, but the friend of the bridegroom which standeth and heareth him rejoiceth greatly because of the bridegroom’s voice: this my joy therefore is fulfilled. He must increase, but I must decrease.”