THE WORD OF GOD CAME
Luke 3:2-4 nkj
2 during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the wilderness. 3 And he went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 4 As it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet,
“The voice of one crying in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.
One of the ways to get more out of reading your Bible is to look for what stands out to you while reading your chapter. It’s not that every time you read, something jumps off the page. But as you are reading, you may see a phrase or a verse that catches your attention. It is similar to finding a thread and pulling it. As you pay closer attention to what is standing out, you’ll see more.
This is how today’s devotional developed. The phrase “the word of God came to John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness” stood out to me. It appears that John was in the wilderness before he started preaching to Israel. Maybe John simply was drawn to the wilderness. He was a different breed. He ate locusts and wild honey. He wore camel-hair tunics with a leather belt. My imagination paints John as a man with wild hair living alone in the desert.
Maybe John went to the desert as a result of reading the verses in Isaiah 40:3-5. John referred to the scriptures when the Pharisees came to him in the first chapter of the gospel of John. They asked John who he was, and he denied being the Christ, Elijah, or the Prophet. John said about himself what Isaiah said: that he was the voice of one crying in the wilderness. So John found himself in the scriptures.
We don’t know how long John was in the desert before the word of God came to him. We know he was just a few months older than Jesus. And he began preaching to Israel before Jesus began to preach, but the timing was close. What did John do in the wilderness? My guess is that he prayed and sought God and read His word. And the word of God came to John.
We also don’t know how the word of God came to John, but we know that the word John received ushered in his ministry. John’s ministry was to preach and proclaim a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. When the word of God came to John, he began to challenge a nation that professed to love and serve God. We know John did not preach until the word of God came to him, but when it did, John’s ministry impacted the entire nation. John was to prepare the way for Jesus. And he was the first one to realize who Jesus was and what He came to do. But nothing happened until the word of God came to John.
APPLICATION
The principle of the word of God coming to John still applies to us today. We need to hear words from God to enable us to handle the challenges we face. We need the word of God to come to us before launching out in new directions.
Sometimes, the word of God will come as we read the scriptures. Sometimes, we may hear a part of a message in a sermon that comes to us. Sometimes it comes through other people.
We needed more room after we started the church. We were meeting in a roller rink that we had reworked to hold 300 people. We were talking about the challenge after church one day when a lady spoke up and gave us the exact answer we needed. She was not the one I expected the word of God to come from, but it was an accurate word, and it worked amazingly well.
If the word of God can come to John in the wilderness, then the word of God can come to us today.