Luke 3:3 Commentary and Bible Study

What words these are, and they are words which paint for us a marvellous picture of the whole way of salvation. Now the context of these words is the preaching of John seeking to bring people to repent of their sins, and seek forgiveness. It is described as a fulfilment of the prophecy of Isaiah, the voice of one crying in the wilderness. That is John the Baptist. What is he doing? He is calling people to prepare the way of the Lord to repent under these terms because ‘every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low’. The commission to John the Baptist was to preach people to repentance. Repentance seems to us to be our act. Although the Spirit draws us to it, we would never repent, but for God working in our hearts. We are so stubborn, we are so proud, we are so determined in our sin. God moves, and then at last we come to the point where we repent. But then there is an act which is entirely God's act, the remission of sins. It's an old-fashioned word and it means simply this: God acts and God freely forgives us. He determines not to demand the due debt that we owe him because of our sin. Here we are in great debt to God. We have stolen away our lives, we have stolen our time for ourselves, we have taken our faculties and our capacities, and seized them as though they were ours by right, and done what we liked in this world and sinned away our days, and we deserve to die, we deserve to forfeit all blessing and happiness eternally and to be judged by God, we have a lasting leap. But when we repent, almighty God decides not to exact the due penalty. So there is the remission of sin, the free forgiveness. That was the message that John the Baptist was preaching. The emphasis of the preaching of John the Baptist was that of repentance, and he was preaching to individuals. He wasn't calling the nation as a whole to repentance. He wasn't saying that they should bring in by legislation an age of greater righteousness and worship. No, he was preaching to individual men and women, and as they came out of the towns and into the wilderness places to hear him, so he preached personally to individuals. There was a tendency among the Jews of that time to hide under the idea that God dealt in a special way with their whole nation. They had the temple, the priesthood. There was a great tendency for the people to say, because I'm a member of this nation and we are a privileged nation, then obviously I can take it for granted that I am in God's favour. John the Baptist comes almost saying, it wouldn't make any difference if we did reform the entire land, purge out the ungodly priests, make sure that our synagogues were run only by people who themselves knew the Lord and loved him. That wouldn't help the ordinary man.