Matthew 3

Today’s Passage: Matthew 3

After the star and the flight into Egypt, Matthew’s account says nothing for thirty years, and when it opens again the child is a man grown and there is a stranger shouting in the desert. That is how this chapter begins. John the Baptist appears in the wilderness of Judea with one message, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near,” and Matthew tells us at once that this rough figure by the river is the man Isaiah had promised centuries before, the voice preparing a road for the Lord. Everything about John says older: the camel’s hair, the leather belt, the food scavenged from the desert floor. Israel had not heard a prophet’s voice in four hundred years, and now one has come, and the whole country pours out to hear him. They wade into the Jordan confessing their sins. Then the religious leadership arrives, and John turns on them with the sharpest words in the chapter, refusing to let anyone shelter behind a family tree while the axe is already lying at the root of the trees. He tells them outright that he is not the point. Someone stronger is coming behind him, so far above him that John does not count himself fit to carry the man’s sandals, and this One will baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire, and will separate wheat from chaff on His threshing floor. Then, without warning, that very One walks down out of Galilee and asks to be baptized. The chapter that began with a warning ends with an open heaven, a descending dove, and the voice of the Father over His Son.

As you read, hold this: The King begins His public work by stepping down into a sinners’ river, and heaven opens over Him to say that this is the beloved Son.

Matthew 3:1–4 (BSB)

¹ In those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the wilderness of Judea ² and saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.” ³ This is he who was spoken of through the prophet Isaiah: “A voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for Him.’” ⁴ John wore a garment of camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist. His food was locusts and wild honey.

God does not begin in the temple courts, where the incense was burning and the priests were on duty, nor in a school of the Law, nor in Herod’s palace. He begins in the empty country, through a man with no office and no address, and the whole nation has to walk out of its cities to hear him. That is a mercy and a rebuke at the same time. John has exactly one word for them: Repent (μετανοέω) metanoeō, pronounced met-an-oh-EH-oh. Strong's G3340, to repent, to change the mind and turn. Metanoeō is built from two common pieces, meta, meaning after or a change, and noeō, to perceive or to think. Put together they mean to change your mind, but in the mouths of the prophets and of John it never stays a private mental event. Behind the Greek stands the Hebrew shuv, to turn, to come back the way you went out, the word for a runaway returning home. That is why John can demand fruit in the very next breath without changing the subject: a turn that leaves the feet pointing in the old direction was never a turn at all. Repentance is a change of mind about God, about sin, and about yourself, deep enough that the life turns and follows it. Feeling badly about yourself falls short of that, as a proud man can prove at length without ever moving, and regret handed to God as payment falls shorter still. Nor is it something a man works up in his own strength; Scripture speaks of God granting repentance, and every soul that has ever turned has been drawn. Hear it, then, as the gift it is. The call to repent is not God’s rejection of you. It is God opening the door and saying, come back. , for the kingdom of heaven is near. There is no comfort in it, no easing in, no long preface. The King is at the door, therefore turn around. Matthew says “kingdom of heaven” where the other Gospels usually say “kingdom of God,” and it is very likely a reverent Jewish habit of speech, saying heaven rather than pronouncing the name of God carelessly. The meaning is the same and it is enormous: God is about to make His reign visible among men, and He is doing it in Person.

Matthew reaches for Isaiah to explain who this man is, and it is worth setting the two texts side by side. Isaiah wrote to a people facing exile, promising that a road would be built through the desert for God Himself to come home to His people:

"A voice of one calling: “Prepare the way for the LORD in the wilderness; make a straight highway for our God in the desert." Isaiah 40:3 (BSB)

The punctuation of the two texts runs differently. In Isaiah the road is built in the wilderness; in Matthew’s rendering the voice cries in the wilderness, and John is standing in a desert either way, so both come true at once. In Isaiah the highway is being cleared for the LORD, the covenant name of God, and no Jewish reader could have missed that. Matthew quotes the line, then points at Jesus of Nazareth walking down to the river, and lets the reader draw the conclusion. Ancient kings traveled this way, with road crews going ahead to level the ground for the royal procession. John is the road crew, and the King coming down the leveled road is God Himself.

Then Matthew describes his clothes. Camel’s hair and a leather belt around the waist is a costume with a history, and the history is why he mentions it:

"“He was a hairy man,” they answered, “with a leather belt around his waist.” “It was Elijah the Tishbite,” said the king." 2 Kings 1:8 (BSB)

Word for word, the leather belt around the waist. Malachi had closed the Old Testament by promising Elijah before the great Day of the LORD, and here comes a prophet dressed as Elijah, eating what the desert gives him, standing where Elijah stood. Later Jesus will say outright that John is the Elijah who was to come. So the wardrobe is a sermon. It says the long silence is over, the promised forerunner is here, and the Day is close.

Matthew 3:5–6 (BSB)

⁵ People went out to him from Jerusalem and all Judea and the whole region around the Jordan. ⁶ Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River.

They came from the capital, from all Judea, from the whole Jordan region, streaming out of the towns and down into that hot valley to hear one man say one thing. There is something in the human heart that knows when it is being told the truth, and the truth John told was not flattering. What the crowds did when they arrived was humbling work: they confessed their sins, out loud, in front of one another, and then they were baptized (βαπτίζω) baptizō, pronounced bap-TID-zoh. Strong's G907, to baptize, to dip or immerse. Baptizō is not a religious word by origin. In everyday Greek it meant to dip, to plunge, to sink, and it could be used of a ship going under or of cloth being dipped in dye. That last picture is the useful one, because a cloth pulled out of the dye vat does not come out the color it went in. Immersion changes what is immersed. John’s washing was, as he says himself, a baptism “with water for repentance,” an outward act confessing an inward turn, and it saved nobody by itself; the water was a sign, not a scrubbing. The word grows within three verses, where John uses it of Someone who will baptize with the Holy Spirit, and there the picture goes as deep as a picture can go. To be plunged into the Spirit of God, saturated, soaked through, changed like cloth in dye, is what the greater One came to do, and it is what has happened to every believer since. The Jordan water dried on their skin within the hour, and the baptism John pointed forward to has never dried off anyone it fell on. in the river. That was hard for anyone, and it was doubly hard for people raised to believe that being in Abraham’s family put them on the right side of the ledger already. Every man and woman who waded in was saying with their body what their mouth had just said: I am not clean. I need to be washed. Count me among those who have to start over. Nobody organized this. No committee planned a revival in the desert; God moved on a nation and the nation came down to the water.

Matthew 3:7–10 (BSB)

⁷ But when John saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his place of baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? ⁸ Produce fruit, then, in keeping with repentance. ⁹ And do not presume 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. ¹⁰ 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.

Then the tone hardens, and we must let it. John looks up and sees the respectable men arriving, the men of the Law and the men of the temple, and he calls them a brood of vipers. It is a desert image and a vivid one, the little snakes that come pouring out of the scrub ahead of a grass fire, running from the flames without any thought of changing. Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? He is not congratulating them for coming. He is asking whether they have come for anything more than fire insurance. Then he tells them exactly what he is looking for: “Produce fruit, then, in keeping with repentance.” Fruit that matches. A turned life shows itself the way a tree shows what it is in season, by what hangs on the branches, and John will not accept the word without the fruit.

Here he takes away the one thing they were counting on. “Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’” That was the deepest security these men had, the descent, the covenant, the bloodline running back to the friend of God. John does not deny that the promises were given to Abraham’s children. He denies that the bloodline can stand in for a heart. Then he says a startling thing, gesturing, we may suppose, at the stones lying all around that riverbed: out of these God can raise up children for Abraham. The God who made a nation out of one childless old couple is not short of options. He does not need any of us, which is precisely why it is such grace that He wants us. Then the axe. Not being sharpened, not being fetched from the shed, but already lying at the root, the blade resting against the trunk while the last decision is made. Every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. That is a real and terrible word about a real judgment, and John neither softens it nor gloats over it, and neither should we.

Take care with this passage, because it is the easiest paragraph in the chapter to misuse. The temptation is to read “brood of vipers” and immediately think of somebody else, some other church, some other party, some other kind of religious person entirely. Do not do it. This warning was aimed at the most orthodox, most respectable, most Bible-knowing men in the country, which means the heart it exposes is the heart that thinks it has already passed the test. It goes after anyone who has a religious inheritance to lean on, an upbringing, a membership, a baptismal certificate, a long habit of attendance, and who has let that stand in the place of a turned life without ever once saying so out loud. The axe question is not whether you were born into the right family. It is whether there is fruit on the tree. That question is put to every reader of this page, and to the one writing it.

Matthew 3:11–12 (BSB)

¹¹ I baptize you with water for repentance, but after me will come One more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. ¹² His winnowing fork is in His hand to clear His threshing floor and to gather His wheat into the barn; but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”

At the height of his influence, with the whole nation at his feet, John spends his breath telling them he is not worth watching. Weigh what he says. Carrying a man’s sandals was slave work, the lowest task in the house, given to the least servant, and John says he is not fit even for that. This is a great man, and greatness in the kingdom always looks like this, a finger pointing away from itself. He draws the contrast in one line: I baptize with water, He will baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire. Water is the outside of a man. The Spirit goes to the inside, where nothing John can do reaches. Fire in Scripture both purifies and consumes, and both senses are live here, for the same coming of Christ that refines His people is the coming that ends the matter for those who will not have Him.

Then the harvest picture, and it would have been familiar to every listener. The threshing floor was a flat, hard, open place, usually on a rise where the wind ran. The cut grain was beaten or trodden to break the kernel free from its husk, and then a man took a broad wooden fork and threw the whole mass up into the evening breeze. The heavy grain fell back to the floor. The light, worthless chaff (ἄχυρον) achyron, pronounced AH-khoo-ron. Strong's G892, chaff, the husk blown away at winnowing. Achyron is simply the farmer’s word for the husk and broken straw left over after threshing, the part of the harvest that has no weight. That weightlessness is the whole point. Chaff is not evil, it is empty; the wind takes it because there is nothing in it to hold it down. The Psalms open with the same picture, saying that the wicked are like chaff driven off by the wind, and the prophets return to it again and again. It is a sobering image precisely because chaff and wheat grow on the same stalk, come off the same field, and lie in the same heap until the fork lifts them into the air. What separates them is substance rather than appearance, and the wind is what reveals it. Hold this soberly and without any relish, because John does. He is not enjoying this. He is a man who loves his people, standing in a river, telling them that a real division is coming and that it will be made by the very One they are waiting for. Hold it hopefully as well, because there is a way to stop being chaff: the whole chapter is a summons to turn, and no one who comes to Christ is ever sorted out of His hand. blew off to the edge, where it was swept up and burned. The picture assumes that the wheat and the chaff came in from the field mixed together, looking like one heap, and that only the winnowing separated them. It is not John who does this sorting, and it is not us. The fork is in His hand. What He does with the wheat is gather it into the barn, which is the language of a farmer bringing his own crop home, safe, out of the weather at last. Do not let the fire in this verse frighten you past the barn, because the same hand that burns the chaff carries the wheat inside.

Matthew 3:13–15 (BSB)

¹³ At that time Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptized by John. ¹⁴ But John tried to prevent Him, saying, “I need to be baptized by You, and do You come to me?” ¹⁵ “Let it be so now,” Jesus replied. “It is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness in this way.” Then John permitted Him.

Then He comes. Matthew tells it in one sentence, almost in passing, the way you would mention a man walking down a road. Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan. He has waited thirty years in an obscure town, and now He walks seventy miles south and takes His place in the line of sinners at a preacher’s baptism. John sees Him and stops. Everything in him revolts at it. “I need to be baptized by You, and do You come to me?” That is exactly right, and John is the first man in the Gospel to say it out loud. The whole shape of things is upside down. The one who needs washing is holding the water, and the one who needs nothing is waiting His turn.

Why would the sinless One submit to a baptism of repentance? He had nothing to confess. This is a real question and it deserves a careful answer rather than a shrug. Jesus gives the answer Himself: “It is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness in this way.” He is not repenting. He is taking His place. From His first public act He steps in among the guilty and stands where they stand, joining Himself to the people He came to save, and the water closes over Him as if He were one of them. That is not a detour from His mission. That is His mission in miniature, the whole thirty-three years compressed into one afternoon in a river. He will do it again in the wilderness, and in Gethsemane, and finally on a cross between two criminals, standing in the sinner’s place until the sinner’s place is empty. Isaiah had written it down centuries earlier in one unforgettable phrase:

"Therefore I will allot Him a portion with the great, and He will divide the spoils with the strong, because He has poured out His life unto death, and He was numbered with the transgressors. Yet He bore the sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors." Isaiah 53:12 (BSB)

Numbered with the transgressors. Here at the Jordan is where the numbering begins, in public, with the transgressors themselves standing on the bank dripping. There is a second thing in that little word “us.” He does not say it is fitting for Me. He gathers John into it, so that even the forerunner’s obedience, in a moment when it looked backwards and felt wrong, was part of the righteousness being fulfilled. So John permitted Him. Praise God for a Savior who would rather be counted with us than remain uncounted and clean.

Matthew 3:16–17 (BSB)

¹⁶ As soon as Jesus was baptized, He went up out of the water. Suddenly the heavens were opened, and He saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and resting on Him. ¹⁷ And a voice from heaven said, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased!”

There is not a scene like this anywhere else in the Gospel. A man comes up out of a muddy river, water still running off Him and His feet still in the shallows, and the sky tears open above His head. The Spirit of God comes down, gently, in the likeness of a dove, and rests on Him. Not a flash and gone. Settled. Abiding. Out of the opened heaven comes a voice, and it is the voice of the Father speaking about His Son to everyone standing on the bank.

The Son is in the water. The Spirit is descending upon Him. The Father is speaking over Him. One God, and here in one moment of history He shows Himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, all three present and distinct, and no one of them mistakable for another. Christians have argued about how to put the doctrine into careful sentences, and the careful sentences matter, but this is where the doctrine lives, on a riverbank, under an open sky, in the sound of a voice, rather than in a puzzle assembled out of scattered proof texts. Whatever else you take from this chapter, take that, and take your time over it, because this is our God and here He has let Himself be seen.

Every word the voice speaks carries an echo. “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased (εὐδοκέω) eudokeō, pronounced yoo-dok-EH-oh. Strong's G2106, to be well pleased, to take delight in. Eudokeō is a warm word, and much warmer than “approve.” It is built from eu, well or good, and a root meaning to think or to be of an opinion, and it carries the sense of taking pleasure in something, being glad about it, finding one’s delight settled there. It is used of God’s good pleasure in choosing, in giving the kingdom to a little flock, in being pleased that all His fullness should dwell in His Son. So the voice at the Jordan is not an examiner passing a candidate. It is a Father saying, of this Son, here is My joy. The verb sits in a tense that reads as a settled thing, not a mood of the moment, and it is spoken over One who has as yet preached no sermon and healed no one. The New Testament carries it further still, saying that those who are in Christ are accepted in the Beloved, and that the Father who delights in the Son is not grudging toward those the Son has bought. If you have come to Christ, you do not stand before God hoping to earn a sentence like that one; you stand inside the Son over whom it was already spoken. .” My Son is the language of the second Psalm about God’s anointed King. My beloved is the phrase spoken over Isaac on the way up the mountain, the only son, the one loved. In whom I am well pleased comes straight out of Isaiah’s song about the Servant on whom God puts His Spirit. King, beloved Son, and suffering Servant, all declared over one Man in one sentence, and the Spirit coming down at exactly the moment Isaiah said He would. The Father says it before a single sermon, before the first miracle, before one disciple has been called. The Son has done nothing publicly yet, and the Father is already delighted in Him. The approval comes first, and the ministry flows out of it, never the other way around.