Luke 3

Today’s Passage: Luke 3

After two chapters of angels and songs and a temple courtyard, Luke suddenly reads like a government record. He names an emperor, a governor, three tetrarchs, and two high priests, and only when the whole world has been pinned down by name and by year does he let the sentence arrive at its verb: the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. That is the opening move of this chapter, and everything else follows from it. John goes through the whole region of the Jordan preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, and Luke reaches for Isaiah to explain him, quoting the prophecy further than any other Gospel does so that it can end on the line he cares most about: all humanity will see God’s salvation. Then we hear John preach, and he is not gentle. He calls the crowds a brood of vipers, refuses to let anyone rest on Abraham as a family credential, and lays an axe at the root of the trees. But when the people ask him what repentance actually looks like, the answers Luke alone records are almost startlingly plain, and every one of them is about clothing, food, money, and power over other people. Then John points past himself to One whose sandal straps he is not worthy to untie, and is shut up in Herod’s prison for telling the truth to a king. And there, at the Jordan, the One he pointed to is baptized with everyone else, and while He is praying the heavens open. The chapter closes by walking His family line backward, past Abraham, past Noah, to Adam, and to God.

As you read, hold this: God set His salvation down inside real history, sent a voice to level the road for it, and then traced His Son’s line all the way back to Adam, because this Savior is for the whole human race.

Luke 3:1–6 (BSB)

¹ In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, while Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, ² during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. ³ He went into all the region around the Jordan, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, ⁴ as it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet: “A voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for Him. ⁵ Every valley shall be filled in, and every mountain and hill made low. The crooked ways shall be made straight, and the rough ways smooth. ⁶ And all humanity will see God’s salvation.’”

Take the long sentence slowly, because Luke built it on purpose. He piles up six rulers, an emperor and a governor and three tetrarchs and a doubled high priesthood, and the whole weight of it hangs unfinished until the second verse comes down like a hammer: “the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.” Every one of those men had an address, a treasury, a garrison or a temple. God passed them all. He went out past the last village and spoke to the son of an old country priest standing in a dry riverbed. And notice that Luke is doing two things at once. He is telling you that this is not myth. You could have gone and checked; the men are datable, the offices are real, the year can be counted. Our faith is not a set of beautiful ideas floating free of the world. It happened, under Tiberius, while Pilate was in the governor’s chair. But Luke is also telling you where God’s power actually runs, and it is not through the palaces. Sit with that for a moment. If you have ever felt that the important things happen somewhere you are not, in rooms you will never be invited into, read verse two again. The word of God came to the wilderness.

And it came in the old prophetic form. “The word of the LORD came to” is exactly how Israel’s prophets are introduced, and every reader of the Scriptures would have caught it instantly, because the phrase had gone silent for four centuries.

"The word of the LORD came to me, saying: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I set you apart and appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”" Jeremiah 1:4–5 (BSB)

So John stands in that line, and what he preaches is a baptism of repentance (μετάνοια) metanoia, pronounced met-AN-oy-ah. Strong's G3341, repentance, a changed mind that turns the life. Metanoia is built from two ordinary words, one meaning “after” or “change” and one meaning “mind,” and at its root it names a change of mind. But do not shrink it down to a mood. In the Greek Old Testament and in the mouths of the prophets it carries the freight of the Hebrew idea of turning, of a man walking one direction and then walking the other. It is not first of all feeling sorry, though sorrow is often in it. Judas felt terrible and hanged himself. It is not first of all a resolution to try harder either. Metanoia is a mind so changed about God, about sin, and about oneself that the feet follow. That is precisely why John will not accept the word without the evidence in the very next paragraph: produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And notice the enormous mercy in this. God does not open the road to His salvation only for people who have never gone wrong. The entrance He builds is a turning, which means it is an entrance made specifically for people who have gone wrong, and it is standing open this morning to anyone willing to walk through it and say so. for the forgiveness of sins. He is not offering a ceremony that cleanses by itself. He is calling a whole nation to turn, and giving them water as the public sign that they have. People walked down into the Jordan in daylight, in front of neighbors who knew exactly what they had been, and came up dripping, having admitted before God and everyone that they needed forgiving. That is a costly thing to do, and thousands did it.

Then Luke reaches for Isaiah, and here you should notice something. All four Gospels quote the voice in the wilderness. Only Luke keeps quoting until the sentence reaches the horizon. Isaiah had spoken to a people in exile, promising a road home across the desert, and in the ancient world when a king traveled his servants went ahead to fill the hollows and cut down the ridges and straighten the track so that nothing would delay him. Every valley filled in. Every mountain and hill made low. The crooked ways straightened, the rough ways smoothed. Here is the picture of what repentance does: it is roadwork. The low places in a life are lifted and the proud high places are brought down, and what was twisted is set straight, all so that the King can come through without obstruction. And then Luke lets the quotation run one line further than Matthew and Mark do, to the words he has been aiming at from the first page of his book: “And all humanity will see God’s salvation (σωτήριον) sōtērion, pronounced so-TAY-ree-on. Strong's G4992, salvation, God's saving act made visible. Sōtērion is the neuter form of the word family we usually meet as sōtēria, salvation, and sōtēr, savior. It is best heard not as an abstract state but as the saving thing God does, His deliverance made visible. Luke loves this word group as no other Gospel writer does. The angel announced a Sōtēr born in the city of David; Mary sang that her spirit rejoiced in God her Savior; old Simeon took the infant in his arms in the temple and said that his eyes had seen God’s sōtērion, using this very word, and then said it was prepared in the sight of all peoples, a light of revelation to the Gentiles. Now John’s mission is described with the same word, and later Paul will say it once more at the very last verse of Acts, that this salvation of God has been sent to the Gentiles and they will listen. So the word stitches Luke’s two books together end to end. And notice what the sentence promises: that all humanity will see it. God did not intend His deliverance to stay a rumor among specialists. He meant it to be shown, in public, to everyone. .” Not Judea only. Not the temple crowd only. All humanity. Hold on to that line, because in about thirty verses Luke is going to prove it with a family tree.

Luke 3:7–14 (BSB)

⁷ Then John said to the crowds coming out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? ⁸ Produce fruit, then, in keeping with repentance. And do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. ⁹ The axe lies ready at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.” ¹⁰ The crowds asked him, “What then should we do?” ¹¹ John replied, “Whoever has two tunics should share with him who has none, and whoever has food should do the same.” ¹² Even tax collectors came to be baptized. “Teacher,” they asked, “what should we do?” ¹³ “Collect no more than you are authorized,” he answered. ¹⁴ Then some soldiers asked him, “And what should we do?” “Do not take money by force or false accusation,” he said. “Be content with your wages.”

No preacher would open that way today, and John opens that way to people who had walked miles to hear him. “You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?” The image is of a field being burned off at harvest and the snakes pouring out of the stubble ahead of the flames, running not because they have changed but because they can feel the heat. John is asking a searching question of a crowd that had come out for a religious experience: are you here because you have turned, or only because you are frightened? And then he takes away the one thing every person in that crowd would have reached for. “Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’” They had a covenant, a lineage, a history with God going back two thousand years, and it was all perfectly true, and John says it will not save one of them. God can raise up children for Abraham out of the stones lying at their feet in the riverbed. Then the axe, already laid at the root, and the tree judged by one thing only, whether it produced good fruit (καρπός) karpos, pronounced kar-POSS. Strong's G2590, fruit, what a tree or vine produces. Karpos is the ordinary word for what a tree or a vine actually produces, and in Scripture it is the standing test of what a thing really is. Israel had heard it before, most memorably in Isaiah’s song of a vineyard that got everything a vineyard could want and yielded sour grapes. The Lord Jesus will use the word constantly: a tree is known by its fruit, and no good tree bears bad fruit. Paul will list the fruit of the Spirit, singular, one ripening cluster grown by God in a life. Now watch how carefully John frames it. He does not say “produce fruit and God will accept you,” as though the fruit were the payment. He says produce fruit in keeping with repentance, fruit that matches the turn you claim to have made, fruit that fits. The fruit is never the root. It is the evidence that a root is there. That is a mercy for anyone whose heart is quick to accuse them, because it means you are not asked to manufacture a harvest in order to be loved. You are asked to turn to God, and then to let the turning show. And it is a warning to anyone resting on a religious pedigree, a family name, a church membership, a remembered decision. The axe is not interested in the label nailed to the trunk. . Do not soften that. Judgment is real, and John says so without flinching. But hear where he is standing when he says it. He is standing waist-deep in the water, with his arms open, telling people how to escape.

And then comes the part of this chapter that belongs to Luke alone, and it is worth slowing down for. Three times a question comes back at John out of the crowd, and it is the best question in the chapter: “What then should we do?” These are people who have heard the warning and believed it, and they want to know what turning actually looks like on a Tuesday. Notice that John does not send them into the wilderness to live like him. He does not prescribe a fast, a pilgrimage, a course of study, or a religious feeling. Every single answer he gives is about ordinary property and ordinary power, and about the neighbor standing next to you. To the crowds: whoever has two tunics should share with him who has none, and whoever has food should do the same. Not a tenth of your estate and not a heroic renunciation. Two coats, one neighbor without any. That is the whole instruction. It is so plain that we hurry past it, and John clearly meant it to be impossible to hurry past.

"If anyone with earthly possessions sees his brother in need, but withholds his compassion from him, how can the love of God abide in him?" 1 John 3:17 (BSB)

Then the tax collectors, and this is the point where a modern reader should sit up. These men were despised, and not unfairly; they had contracted to collect for the occupying power and lived off the margin they could extract. John does not tell them to quit. He tells them to collect no more than they are authorized. And the soldiers, armed men among their own people, are not told to lay down their weapons. They are told not to take money by force or by false accusation, and to be content (ἀρκέω) arkeō, pronounced ar-KEH-oh. Strong's G714, to be sufficient, to be enough. Arkeō means to be enough, to suffice, and in the middle voice, as John uses it here, to be satisfied with what one has. It is not a soft word about mood. It is a hard word about sufficiency: this is enough, therefore I will stop reaching. The soldiers’ opsōnia, their wages, were originally the ration money paid to a man in service, never generous and often late, which is exactly why extortion on the roads was so common. John does not promise them a raise. He tells them the pay is enough. And the same root runs through some of the most steadying promises in the New Testament. Paul asked three times for a thorn to be taken away and was told, “My grace is sufficient for you,” the same word standing in the middle of it. The writer to the Hebrews joins contentment directly to a promise, telling believers to be free from the love of money and satisfied with what they have, because God has said He will never leave them. That is the ground under this. Contentment is not pretending you have plenty. It is knowing who holds you, and therefore being able to keep your hands off what belongs to someone else. with their wages. Do you see what he has done? He has taken three groups whose whole lives ran on money and leverage over other people, and instead of removing them from their positions, he has told them to stand in those positions honestly. Repentance did not require them to find a holier job. It required them to stop robbing people in the job they had. That is a searching word for anyone who has ever imagined that real obedience would be easier somewhere else, in some other role, under some other circumstances. God’s first claim is usually not on your circumstances. It is on your integrity inside them.

Luke 3:15–22 (BSB)

¹⁵ The people were waiting expectantly and were all wondering in their hearts if John could be the Christ. ¹⁶ John answered all of them: “I baptize you with water, but One more powerful than I will come, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. ¹⁷ His winnowing fork is in His hand to clear His threshing floor and to gather the wheat into His barn; but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” ¹⁸ With these and many other exhortations, John proclaimed the good news to the people. ¹⁹ But when he rebuked Herod the tetrarch regarding his brother’s wife Herodias and all the evils he had done, ²⁰ Herod added this to them all: He locked John up in prison. ²¹ When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized too. And as He was praying, heaven was opened, ²² and the Holy Spirit descended on Him in a bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are My beloved Son; in You I am well pleased.”

The crowds had begun to do the arithmetic. Four hundred silent years, and now a prophet who preaches like Elijah and baptizes like the day of the LORD is coming, and the whole country is going out to him. Was this the Christ? Luke says they were wondering it in their hearts, which is a lovely detail, the kind of thing people turn over privately before anyone says it out loud. And John kills the idea the moment it surfaces. He does not enjoy the speculation for a season. He says he baptizes with water, which is a symbol, and that One is coming whose sandal straps he is not worthy to untie, which is the errand of the lowest slave in a household. Consider what it costs a man at the height of his influence to say that. The greatest thing John ever did was point away from himself, and every servant of God since has had the same job. Then he names what the Coming One will do, and it is not water but the Holy Spirit and fire, and he sets it beside a picture every villager knew: a man on a threshing floor with a winnowing fork, tossing the beaten grain into the evening wind so that the wheat falls back onto the stone and the light chaff blows off to be burned. Gathered in, or burned up. There is no third pile. Luke says John kept preaching in this vein, and then adds a phrase we should not miss: with these and many other exhortations, he “proclaimed the good news to the people.” Vipers, axes, fire, and Luke calls it good news, because it is. A warning shouted from the bank is good news to a man in the water.

And it got him arrested. Luke tells it briefly and out of strict order, closing the account of John before he opens the account of Jesus, and he does not soften it. John rebuked Herod Antipas over Herodias, his brother’s wife, and over all the other evils he had done. Antipas had put away his own wife and taken his brother’s, and John told a tetrarch to his face that it was wrong. The result was prison, and eventually far worse. That sentence sits in this chapter like a stone. The forerunner did his work faithfully and was locked in a cell for it, and Luke lets you feel that faithfulness and comfort are not the same thing. Herod, for his part, “added this to them all,” which is Luke’s dry way of saying that silencing the man who names your sin does not remove the sin. It only adds to the list.

And then, quietly, in a single sentence, the thing the whole chapter has been preparing for. “When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized too.” He does not arrive in state. He comes down into the water in the middle of the queue, among the crowds and the tax collectors and the soldiers, the only sinless man in the river standing exactly where sinners stand. He needed no repentance and had no sins to confess, and He went in anyway, taking His place with the people He came to save. That is the shape of everything He will do, all the way to a cross between two criminals. Then Luke adds four words that no one else records, and they are one of his signatures: and as He was praying. Luke will do this again and again. At His baptism, before choosing the Twelve, before Peter’s confession, on the mount of transfiguration, in Gethsemane, on the cross. Whenever heaven is about to open in this Gospel, you will usually find the Lord Jesus on His knees first. And heaven does open. The Spirit descends on Him in bodily form like a dove, and the Father’s voice comes down: “You are My beloved Son; in You I am well pleased.” Here is the whole Trinity at the Jordan in one moment, the Son in the water, the Spirit descending, the Father speaking, and the words are spoken before a single sermon has been preached or a single miracle done. The Father’s delight in the Son rests on who He is. Glory be to God for a scene like that.

Luke 3:23–38 (BSB)

²³ Jesus Himself was about thirty years old when He began His ministry. He was regarded as the son of Joseph, the son of Heli, ²⁴ the son of Matthat, the son of Levi, the son of Melchi, the son of Jannai, the son of Joseph, ²⁵ the son of Mattathias, the son of Amos, the son of Nahum, the son of Esli, the son of Naggai, ²⁶ the son of Maath, the son of Mattathias, the son of Semein, the son of Josech, the son of Joda, ²⁷ the son of Joanan, the son of Rhesa, the son of Zerubbabel, the son of Shealtiel, the son of Neri, ²⁸ the son of Melchi, the son of Addi, the son of Cosam, the son of Elmadam, the son of Er, ²⁹ the son of Joshua, the son of Eliezer, the son of Jorim, the son of Matthat, the son of Levi, ³⁰ the son of Simeon, the son of Judah, the son of Joseph, the son of Jonam, the son of Eliakim, ³¹ the son of Melea, the son of Menna, the son of Mattatha, the son of Nathan, the son of David, ³² the son of Jesse, the son of Obed, the son of Boaz, the son of Sala, the son of Nahshon, ³³ the son of Amminadab, the son of Admin, the son of Arni, the son of Hezron, the son of Perez, the son of Judah, ³⁴ the son of Jacob, the son of Isaac, the son of Abraham, the son of Terah, the son of Nahor, ³⁵ the son of Serug, the son of Reu, the son of Peleg, the son of Eber, the son of Shelah, ³⁶ the son of Cainan, the son of Arphaxad, the son of Shem, the son of Noah, the son of Lamech, ³⁷ the son of Methuselah, the son of Enoch, the son of Jared, the son of Mahalalel, the son of Cainan, ³⁸ the son of Enosh, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God.

Do not try to walk this list name by name. Most of these men are otherwise unknown to us, and Luke did not include them so that we could study each one. He included them for the direction they run and the place they stop, and those two things preach. Matthew opens his Gospel with a genealogy that runs forward, from Abraham down to Christ, and it is exactly the right way to introduce Israel’s Messiah to a Jewish reader: here is the son of David, the son of Abraham, the promise arriving on schedule. Luke does it the other way. He does not put his list at the beginning; he waits until the Father has just said “You are My beloved Son,” and then he starts at Jesus and walks backward, generation by generation, out through David, out through Abraham, past Noah, past Enoch, all the way to Adam. And he does not stop even there. The last three words of the chapter are “the son of God.” So the list begins with the Father’s voice naming His Son and ends with the word God, and everything between them is the human race.

That is the point, and it is enormous. Matthew’s line makes Jesus the heir of a covenant people. Luke’s line makes Him the answer to a whole species. He is not only the Messiah of Israel, though He is certainly that, and Luke has already sung it through Mary and Zechariah and Simeon. He is the second Adam, the new head of humanity, and this is precisely what you would expect from a Gentile physician writing for a Gentile reader named Theophilus. Remember what Luke did just twenty verses earlier, keeping Isaiah’s prophecy running until it reached “all humanity will see God’s salvation.” Here is the same claim written as a family tree. If the line goes back to Adam, then there is no one on earth outside it. Every reader of this Gospel, whatever nation or century or language, finds his own ancestry in that list somewhere before the end, and therefore finds that this Savior belongs to him. Sit with that if you have ever felt like an outsider to the things of God. Luke traced the line back to the first man on purpose, so that the door could not be shut in front of you.

Now the honest difficulty, because a reader who compares Matthew 1 with Luke 3 will find that the two lists do not agree, and it is better to face that squarely than to be startled by it later. Matthew names Joseph’s father as Jacob; Luke names him as Heli. Between David and Joseph the two lines diverge almost completely, Matthew running through Solomon and the royal house of Judah, Luke running through David’s son Nathan, and the number of generations differs as well. Faithful Christians have offered several explanations and they are worth knowing. Some hold that Luke is giving Mary’s line, with Heli as her father and Joseph reckoned his son by marriage, which would fit Luke’s evident interest in Mary and would explain the careful phrase “He was regarded as the son of Joseph.” Others hold that both lists are Joseph’s, with Matthew tracing the legal or royal succession, the line of the throne, and Luke tracing the actual biological descent. Others appeal to levirate marriage, the ancient provision by which a man raised up children to a dead brother, so that a single man could genuinely have two fathers, one by law and one by nature. Any of these could be right. None of them can be proved from the text we have, and this study will not pretend otherwise or manufacture a verdict. What we can say is that both writers were working from records that mattered enormously to the people who kept them, that neither one was careless, that they agree exactly where the promises hang, on David and on Abraham, and that the ancient world reckoned descent by more paths than our modern birth certificates allow. Where Scripture leaves a question open, we may leave it open too, and hold what it says plainly with both hands.