The Voice

Hey everyone.

I have started my study of the Gospel of John and in the first chapter I have found a new hero,  He is John the Baptist, and I will tell you some of his story today.  Now John is preaching and teaching in the wilderness and big crowds are coming to him.  In John 1:19 the leaders of the Jews in Jerusalem send some men out to question him.  They want to know who he is and why is doing what he is doing.  These are legitimate questions, I suppose.  The people have been looking for The Messiah, and John tells them right up front that he is not The Messiah.  So they continue to question him, "Are you Elijah?"  (v.21) He denies being Elijah and also denies being the The Prophet.  These men wonder, if John is not any of those things, then who exactly is he?  John's response to the question, "Who are you?" is "I am the voice of one calling in the wilderness."

There is a lot here that is interesting.  First, why would they ask him if he was Elijah?  Elijah had lived generations before, and if you remember had been carried off to heaven in a chariot of fire.  (2 Kings 2:11)  Were they expecting him to return?  In a way, they were.  The last passage of the Old Testament talks about Elijah returning before the "great and dreadful day of the Lord."  (Mal. 4:5-6)  Interestingly it says that when Elijah comes he will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents.  (This comes up later.)  So not only are they expecting the Messiah to come, they are also expecting Elijah to come.  So it seems a very legitimate question to ask John, "Are you Elijah?"  I will show you that according to scripture he was.  So then the question becomes, why did he say he wasn't Elijah?

OK. Time for some good old-fashioned Bible study.  In Luke 1:5-24 the angel Gabriel appears to Zechariah and tells him that he is going to have a son.  He tells him in v. 17 that this son (John) would "go before the Lord in the spirit of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the parents to their children."  It is clear that the angel Gabriel is saying that John is going to be this Elijah that Malachi has prophesied about.  Zechariah, being a priest, should have clearly understood what Gabriel was saying about his coming son. 

Need more witnesses.  Jesus says in Matthew 11:13 that John the Baptist was Elijah.  He says it again in Matthew 17:11-13.  When Elijah (the OT one) appeared along with Moses at the Mount of Transfiguration, the disciples mention this idea that Elijah had to come first.  Jesus tells them that Elijah had already come, but that they did not recognize him. The disciples understood at this point that Jesus was referring to John the Baptist.

This brings us back to our question.  Why did John say that he was not Elijah, when clearly he was.  All we can do is speculate, but I will give it a shot.  Of course, it is possible that John was this Elijah, but did not know it.  It's possible, but I think that there is more to his denial than just not-knowing.  It think that the answer is found in his response toe their question, "Well then, who are you?"  He responded, "I am the voice of one calling in the wilderness, 'Make straight the way for the Lord."  John recognized that he wasn't doing all this to call attention to himself.  It was his job to point people to Jesus, not himself.  So when asked who he was, he referred to a passage in Isaiah 40:3 and basically "Me?  I am just a voice."  John demonstrates both here and in other places an incredible humility.  With John, it is never about John, it is about Jesus.  Later in John 1, when Jesus appears, John points him out to two of his followers, Andrew and John, who become two of the apostles.  Again, John is not thinking of himself, but is pointing people to Jesus.  So I think was his humility that led John to say that he wasn't Elijah.  He just to continue his work preparing the way for the Lord and pointing other people toward him.  Which is, by the way, what we are to be doing as well.  We can learn a lot from John.

Tom