Coming Out

"John appeared, baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.  And all the country of Judea and all Jerusalem were GOING OUT TO HIM and were being baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins." (Mark 1:4, 5)

The people of Israel were supposed to be God's covenant people.  They were the nation that God inhabited.  Jerusalem was the "city of God" and there was a temple in the city that was the very house of God.  Everything about that city within that nation was focused on that temporal dwelling place that had been built for the God that they continually sought. 

But before the time of Christ, God had been silent for 400 years.  People were starved for a word from God.  They wanted to know Him, and see Him move and work in ways that their fathers had experienced.  This desire to know God made them do the unthinkable.  They left the city, the temple, their traditions, and went out to the desert to see God work through one of the roughest figures that many had ever seen.  Have you ever considered what they were leaving behind in order to experience God?

They left behind the traditional places that God had lived.  The Jews believed that the temple in Jerusalem was the exclusive dwelling place of God.  It was the only place that one could go to be anywhere near His presence.  The rituals that were practiced by the priests and pharisees were rituals designed to bring about the presence of God. At one point these rituals had been valid - even commanded by God -  but by this time Israel had come to the point where they were simply going through the motions.  The ritual had become just that, ritual.  They had ceased to be about pleasing God and had become nothing more than a method for man to manipulate God.

I say these things, not to run down tradition, but to point out that sometimes tradition grows cold.  Those who went out into the desert were not leaving behind tradition simply to do something new.  Far too often we change just for the sake of change.  This was not the case.  These people were not leaving behind the commands of God.  They were simply tired of the ineffectiveness of man's interpretation of God's commands.  They wanted explanation, they wanted substance rather than formality and legalism.  These people wanted to experience the holiness of God.  They wanted to see Him work, they wanted to know Him.

This scripture has an interesting parallel in our day.  We go through the motions, and do what we've always done, and we don't experience God, we don't experience holiness, and we seldom experience anything more than those of the world experience.  We are generally pretty ignorant of the commands of God, why God gives them, and what we need to do with them.  We don't experience God because we've become very good at performing ritual and ignoring the substance.  I think this is probably a "form of Christianity that denies the power."  Scripture gives us the information that we need to experience God.  If we earnestly seek Him, He will be found.  The Bible gives us an abundance of proof that if we are seeking God, and not simply a free ticket to heaven, we will experience His presence in our lives.  We will see Him work among us, and within us, and around us.  The question is, how much dead ritual are you willing to give up to experience Him?  Are you willing to come out from among the cold, dead ritual that we practice to experience God through prayer, His Word, and His Holy Spirit?  It had taken the people of Jerusalem and Judea 400 years, but by the time John the Baptist came onto the scene they were finally willing.  Are we?