Mark 1:4 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters | Metropolitan Tabernacle

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Mark 1:4

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‘In the wilderness’ – an arid, dry area between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. He is described by Christ as in effect the last of the prophets. He preached repentance for the remission of sins, which means releasing of sins, the doing away with sins on repentance. That is possible because the Messiah is coming and he is going to take away sin. He almost seems to say, ‘The Lamb I have been talking about, the person who is represented in the sacrifice of our Jewish ritual, there he is. All that the ceremonial law taught us to do was prophetic, but now he is come and he will take away the sin of the world.’ So when we read that he was preaching baptism, for repentance and the remission of sin, I think we can clothe that word with a realisation that he was talking about the Messiah who would come. Whether he knew exactly how Christ was going to do it is not certain, but he knew he would take away sin. What was baptism? Well, baptism was what they did to proselytes. If a Gentile wanted to – as much as he could – become a Jew, they would baptise him. Baptism among the Jews was for proselytes, indicating they had converted and totally changed their religion. Can you imagine the impact when John said to all the Jews, ‘You must be baptised’? There was coming an era of total change. He didn't know the full story himself, but he knew that Christ would bring change. This was the end of the ceremonial law. John was the first Christian minister. At first surprisingly, even the Sadducees and the Pharisees went to him for baptism. Why? Did they sincerely want change? Oh no, they were going to cling on to their office, to their control of all the Jewish platforms. They went to be baptised, probably, to stay in the favour of the people, because John at the time was the flavour of the month; he was everything to the people. They thought he was marvellous, this Elijah-like Old Testament prophet, with his mighty and very severe, judgmental preaching. He warned of the wrath to come and it did come in A.D. 70 with the destruction of their city and their land, and he urged people to repent in preparation for the coming of the Messiah.When John cried, ‘Repent ye’ (Matthew 3:2), the word ‘Repent’, as many of the old writers insisted, should actually be translated, ‘Convert ye’, be converted; he preached the gospel of conversion. Just as the early Methodist preachers preached the new birth to a church going society which did not know God personally, so John the Baptist came to these Old Testament educated Jewish people, believing in a works salvation, and he preached, ‘Be converted’, not just ‘Repent’; be radically changed.

Application

The way they went out to John, it was almost like the revivals that we read about in history. In our land in 1739, the Methodist Awakening began among other places in London on the Kennington Common on a foggy November morning, when George Whitefield first stepped out there to preach and the crowds came from nowhere, just impelled amazingly by the power of the Spirit of God. We read of so many occasions, when God has visited the land in revival and suddenly the churches have filled up and people have been overcome by a sense of need to hear this message. We pray very much for such things again. It must have been something rather like that that drove the people into the wilderness, into the desert waste, to hear John the Baptist preach. His vehemence was considerable and many of them were genuinely convicted of their sin.

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Mark 1:4 Commentary and Bible Study