John the Baptist

135:3.1Along the val­ley of this lit­tle brook John built no less than a dozen stone shel­ters and night cor­rals, con­sist­ing of piled-up stones, wherein he could watch over and safe­guard his herds of sheep and goats. John’s life as a shep­herd af­forded him a great deal of time for thought. He talked much with Ezda, an or­phan lad of Beth-zur, whom he had in a way adopted, and who cared for the herds when he made trips to He­bron to see his mother and to sell sheep, as well as when he went down to En­gedi for Sab­bath ser­vices. John and the lad lived very sim­ply, sub­sist­ing on mut­ton, goat’s milk, wild honey, and the ed­i­ble lo­custs of that re­gion. This, their reg­u­lar diet, was sup­ple­mented by pro­vi­sions brought from He­bron and En­gedi from time to time.

135:3.2Eliz­a­beth kept John posted about Pales­tinian and world af­fairs, and his con­vic­tion grew deeper and deeper that the time was fast ap­proach­ing when the old or­der was to end; that he was to be­come the her­ald of the ap­proach of a new age, “the king­dom of heaven.” This rugged shep­herd was very par­tial to the writ­ings of the Prophet Daniel. He read a thou­sand times Daniel’s de­scrip­tion of the great im­age, which Zach­a­rias had told him rep­re­sented the his­tory of the great king­doms of the world, be­gin­ning with Baby­lon, then Per­sia, Greece, and fi­nally Rome. John per­ceived that al­ready was Rome com­posed of such poly­glot peo­ples and races that it could never be­come a strongly ce­mented and firmly con­sol­i­dated em­pire. He be­lieved that Rome was even then di­vided, as Syria, Egypt, Pales­tine, and other prov­inces; and then he fur­ther read “in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a king­dom which shall never be de­stroyed. And this king­dom shall not be left to other peo­ple but shall break in pieces and con­sume all these king­doms, and it shall stand for­ever.” “And there was given him do­min­ion and glory and a king­dom that all peo­ples, na­tions, and lan­guages should serve him. His do­min­ion is an ev­er­last­ing do­min­ion, which shall not pass away, and his king­dom never shall be de­stroyed.” “And the king­dom and do­min­ion and the great­ness of the king­dom un­der the whole heaven shall be given to the peo­ple of the saints of the Most High, whose king­dom is an ev­er­last­ing king­dom, and all do­min­ions shall serve and obey him.”

135:3.3John was never able com­pletely to rise above the con­fu­sion pro­duced by what he had heard from his par­ents con­cern­ing Je­sus and by these pas­sages which he read in the Scrip­tures. In Daniel he read: “I saw in the night vi­sions, and, be­hold, one like the Son of Man came with the clouds of heaven, and there was given him do­min­ion and glory and a king­dom.” But these words of the prophet did not har­mo­nize with what his par­ents had taught him. Nei­ther did his talk with Je­sus, at the time of his visit when he was eigh­teen years old, cor­re­spond with these state­ments of the Scrip­tures. Not­with­stand­ing this con­fu­sion, through­out all of his per­plex­ity his mother as­sured him that his dis­tant cousin, Je­sus of Naz­a­reth, was the true Mes­siah, that he had come to sit on the throne of David, and that he (John) was to be­come his ad­vance her­ald and chief sup­port.

135:3.4From all John heard of the vice and wicked­ness of Rome and the dis­so­lute­ness and moral bar­ren­ness of the em­pire, from what he knew of the evil do­ings of Herod An­tipas and the gov­er­nors of Judea, he was minded to be­lieve that the end of the age was im­pend­ing. It seemed to this rugged and no­ble child of na­ture that the world was ripe for the end of the age of man and the dawn of the new and di­vine age—the king­dom of heaven. The feel­ing grew in John’s heart that he was to be the last of the old proph­ets and the first of the new. And he fairly vi­brated with the mount­ing im­pulse to go forth and pro­claim to all men: “Re­pent! Get right with God! Get ready for the end; pre­pare your­selves for the ap­pear­ance of the new and eter­nal or­der of earth af­fairs, the king­dom of heaven.”