Now this was John’s testimony when the Jews of Jerusalem sent priests and Levites to ask him who he was. He did not fail to confess, but confessed freely, “I am not the Christ.”
They asked him, “Then who are you? Are you Elijah?”
He said, “I am not.”
“Are you the Prophet?”
He answered, “No.”
Finally they said, “Who are you? Give us an answer to take back to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?”
John replied in the words of Isaiah the prophet, “I am the voice of one calling in the desert, ‘Make straight the way for the Lord.'”
Now some Pharisees who had been sent questioned him, “Why then do you baptize if you are not the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?”
“I baptize with water,” John replied, “but among you stands one you do not know. He is the one who comes after me, the thongs of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.”
This all happened at Bethany on the other side of the Jordan, where John was baptizing.
John 1:19-28 (NIV)
John the Baptizer came for a purpose; a purpose that God had chosen for him from before the world began. John was to be the herald for the Messiah, the one who would prepare the way for Him and announce His arrival to anyone within earshot. The one who would be, in the more complete words of Isaiah, “A voice of one calling: ‘In the desert prepare the way for the Lord; make straight in the wilderness a highway for our God. Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain. And the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all mankind together will see it. For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.’” (Isaiah 40:3-5 NIV)
You see, John knew something that many, if not most, of the people around him had kind of lost track of in the hustle and bustle of everyday life: God was coming to visit His people! He had promised to come to them, and He was going to keep His promise. And He knew that the visit was going to happen any day now. These were amazing times, and they were going to get even more amazing! And John’s job was to get everything ready. Not just to spruce up the sidewalks, and repaint the buildings and make sure that the garbage was picked up along the motorcade route. His job was to make ready a PEOPLE prepared for the coming of the Lord Himself.
The way that He did this was to proclaim the age-old standards that God had given to His people 1500 years before out of a cloud of fire on a mountaintop; to help the people see that they had fallen short of that standard; and help them to repent and turn back to the God that they had defied and neglected for so long. Now, none of this was politically correct. None of it could be done in a way that was really non-offensive. When you show people that they are headed entirely the wrong way, you are likely to ruffle some feathers (at least among those who figure that they have their act together!).
John’s was not a highly desirable job. It wasn’t a cushy job. And it definitely wasn’t a job that had a lot of upward mobility built into it.
When the priests and Levites came to John to find out if, perhaps, he was the long-awaited Messiah, John didn’t hesitate a bit: “I am not the Christ.” That wasn’t the job God had called Him to and created him for. When they pressed further, asking if maybe he was Elijah come back to earth (Elijah had been taken to heaven in a whirlwind and was supposed to reappear before the coming of the Messiah), John’s answer was even more concise: “I am not.” When they asked if he was the Prophet that was foretold by Moses, the one who was to be a powerful new leader of the people (Deuteronomy 18:15), he gave them just a single word: “No.”
You see, John never wanted to be anyone other than who God had called him to be. He had no aspirations, no plans beyond the singular calling for which God had made him. He was content to find his place in history as the one who would prepare the way; a God-called roadie, who would never appear on the stage, but who had to be there in advance to make sure that everything was up and ready to go when the main attraction showed up. And he did it well. He did it with all of his heart. And when Jesus, the star of the show, made His appearance, everything was ready for Him.