Mark 1:6 Commentary and Bible Study

‘John was clothed with camel's hair, and with a girdle of a skin about his loins;’ – he seemed like Elijah – ‘and he did eat locusts and wild honey.’ Mark doesn't say that he only ate these things, but he lived out in the wilderness, and he lived very simply, and his life was a rebuke to the people. All they were doing was complaining about the Roman occupation which took away their independence and kept them from being prosperous and wealthy.Calem’s hair was cheap and coarse and it made something like sackcloth, and we could go back and read from Exodus 39 and the wonderful description of the finery with which Aaron the High Priest and his sons and successors were to be clothed, with beautiful linen and fine and wonderful embellishments. What John the Baptiser, the immerser, wore was the very opposite. Sackcloth! It was almost a rebuke to the priesthood. This one, who would draw the vast crowds and announce the Messiah was nothing like a priest. Actually, he was; he was the son of a priest, but he was out there in the desert, dressed like Elijah almost, like a prophet of old and that was a rebuke to the clergy of the time, to the way the Jewish church had become with all its hypocrisy and its spiritual vanity and emptiness.But there is an even great reason, I think, why he had to be clothed like this. He had come to announce the Son of God, who would be humiliated. The Creator of all worlds would enter into human flesh and be down-trodden and rejected of men, and the one who announced him was clothed so humbly, because he was to announce and herald the humblest person in the history of the world: Jesus Christ the mighty Son of God.