Trevor Laurence
Quite often in the Old Testament, the prophets of Israel who speak the word of the Lord to the people’s ears also act out the substance of their message before the people’s eyes. They engage in a bit of prophetic theater, dramatically embodying the content of their communication. They preach God’s covenant call in word and put it on display in action.
Theatrical Prophets
Isaiah walks around naked and barefoot to dramatize the Lord’s affirmation that Egypt and Cush will be led away by Assyria as naked captives—and are therefore a sorry source of security for God’s people (Isa 20:1–6).1 And Ezekiel engages in an elaborate and prolonged symbolic performance of God’s imminent judgment in the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem (Ezek 4–5).
Jeremiah breaks a flask in front of the elders and priests as a sign that God will break Jerusalem for their breach of covenant, their slaughter of the innocent, their worship of false gods (Jer 19). And Ahijah tears a new garment in pieces to show that God will tear the kingdom from Solomon because of his idolatrous indulgence (1 Kgs 11:29–33).
Elijah engages in a fair bit of prophetic theatricality as well. At the very beginning and the very end of his ministry, Elijah departs into the wilderness east of the Jordan—which, like the land east of Eden, is the place of exile. In 1 Kgs 17:1–7, Elijah inaugurates his career by embodying the exile coming upon a nation that continues in the idolatrous ways of Ahab, exiting the land across the Jordan where he will be fed by unclean ravens just as Israel will be sustained by the unclean nations.2 In 2 Kg 2:1–12, his time on earth draws to a close as he journeys out of the land and crosses to the other side of the Jordan, retracing backward the path of Israel’s conquest, unwinding Israel’s entrance into the land of God’s presence, a sign to the people that they are in the wilderness already and must repentantly reenter the land under Elisha’s leadership and drive out all that is unholy among them.3
Outside the border of the land, Elijah passes the mantle to Elisha as Moses did to Joshua so that a new conquest may ensue: if Israel does not acknowledge her wilderness position and retake the land, God will expel a disobedient nation from the land into the wilderness. The climactic exile of 2 Kgs 17:1–23 only brings to fruition what Elijah’s bodily movements through symbolically-rich geography had already proclaimed was coming if Israel would not return to the Lord.
John in the Wilderness
John the Baptist, clad in camel’s hair and a leather belt that recalls the garb of Elijah (2 Kgs 1:8), preaches like Elijah a message of repentance and a warning of judgment and, like Elijah, sojourns in the wilderness to communicate in action the plight of God’s people.
Elijah unwound the conquest in his exilic journey out of the land to dramatically demonstrate to Israel her true condition and the future that awaited her continued impenitence. Long after the exile Elijah announced had come to fruition, John’s ministry in the wilderness outside of the land is a revelatory embodiment of Israel’s ongoing exile—despite the fact that she physically inhabits the land, her exile to the wilderness that began centuries prior never really ended—and it is simultaneously a prophetic enactment of the fate of a people whose exile will deepen unless they heed his call.
In the wilderness, John calls the people to confession and repentance, and Israel must go out to him—moving their bodies into the wilderness, acknowledging with their very flesh and bones their true location. Baptizing in the Jordan, John symbolically ushers this wilderness generation through the waters and back into the land, recapitulating Israel’s initial entry into Canaan through the Jordan.4 With this baptismal re-entry into the promised land, John prepares repentant Israelites for the new exodus that is coming in Jesus—the definitive exodus out of the wilderness of exile into the kingdom land—and so fulfills Isaiah’s announcement:5
A voice cries:
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord;
make straight in the desert a highway for our God. (Isa 40:3)
Like Moses giving way to Joshua, and like Elijah giving way to Elisha, John will give way to Jesus—a prophet in the wilderness receding out of view so that a deliverer may arise who will lead Israel on a cleansing conquest into the land.6 When Jesus goes through the waters of the Jordan and wages war against the serpent and his kingdom, he shows himself to be the true Joshua and the true Elisha who will lead Israel into the good land, restore God’s kingdom in the world, and bring his people into God’s rest. But John is a voice crying in the wilderness to prepare God’s new exodus way, and his baptism of repentance is the first step on the way the Lord has made out of the wilderness and into the kingdom that is dawning in Jesus’ ministry.
Prophetic Cuisine
John’s food, like his geography and his garb and his baptism, dramatically performs his message. The locusts and honey John puts into his mouth visually portray the words that come out of his mouth. His ingestion is proclamation. His oral consumption is oracular communication.
Locusts are in the Old Testament predominantly associated with God’s judgment. Egypt is struck with a plague of locusts (Exod 10:1–20). The Deuteronomic curses state that covenant-breaking will be met with exile to a foreign nation, and locusts will decimate Israel’s fruitfulness (Deut 28:36–38). Invading nations are pictured as locusts who lay waste the land (Judg 6:1–6). Swarming armies are as numerous as a locust swarm (Jer 51:14), and military campaigns devour like the locust (Nah 3:15–16). Joel warns of marching warriors who will desolate the garden vineyard of God—the covenant community—just as locusts swallowed up the fields of Judah (Joel 1–2). Locusts are judgment, and whether as insects or as soldiers, they have the capacity to turn a land of abundance into a wilderness. When a swarm of locusts comes upon the fields of Israel, it’s a proleptic picture of exile. When an army of locusts comes upon the field that is Israel,7 it’s the reality of exile.
Honey represents everything that the locust is not. God purposes in the exodus to rescue Israel from her captivity in Egypt and plant her in a land flowing with milk and honey (Exod 3:8), and Israel is to flourish in covenant obedience just as the land yields its bounties (Deut 6:3). Israel is to be a holy, fruitful garden in a fruitful land with her holy God. The land of honey is the land blessed with God’s presence, the abundant recovery of Eden, the temple-kingdom, the place on earth where God reigns over and dwells with his people in holiness, peace, and fullness.
John’s proclamation of repentance is at once a warning of judgment and an invitation to enter into God’s restored kingdom. “Prepare the way of the Lord” (Matt 3:3) announces that, as the Lord made a way through the sea in the first exodus, he is on his way to make a way through the wilderness in the second. God is coming to do a new thing, to make good on his promises, to undo the exile, to rebuild the ruins of a crumbled kingdom in Jesus, and John’s exhortation to repent “for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matt 3:2) is a call for the people to make themselves repentantly ready to receive the delivering king. To resist repentance, however, is to align with the serpent in opposition to God, to reveal oneself as a snake in a “brood of vipers” (Matt 3:7), and Jesus’ conquest that brings life and blessing for the repentant brings wrath for the impenitent, driving the serpent’s seed out of the land. Those unfruitful plants that continue to corrupt God’s garden with unholiness will be cleared away: “Bear fruit in keeping with repentance…Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire” (Matt 3:8, 10). Whether serpent or thorn, any unfit infiltrator in the place of God’s presence will be expelled.
As Ezekiel rations his food and eats barley cakes baked on dung to witness to Israel that she will eat with anxiety and partake of unclean bread when she is driven among the nations (Ezek 4:9–17), so John eats locusts and honey as a witness to what is coming in the coming of Jesus. John’s diet—evoking images of blessing and judgment, of God’s land and the loss of the land—clarifies what is at stake in his preaching.
With their response to John, the people can move from the wilderness through the Jordan to the true land of milk and honey, or they can remain in the desert of exile and experience the locust’s devastation. They can walk by faith into Canaan or be plagued like Egypt. They can embrace the kingdom to which the promised land pointed, or they can incur the judgment to which exile pointed, the judgment of the king who will sweep away every unholy corruption, serpentine intruder, and unfruitful twig from his royal garden-temple. John’s cuisine is a culinary “choose this day” (Josh 24:15), a dietary discourse that is prophetic proclamation: “See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil” (Deut 30:15).
Conquest and Cleansing
John announces of Jesus, “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (Matt 3:11–12). The blessing of God’s presence or the consuming judgment of fire; life with God in the place of his dwelling or removal from the land of his holy dominion; honey or locusts.
John’s reference to the threshing floor conjures associations with the temple: David purchased a threshing floor and said, “Here shall be the house of the Lord God” (1 Chron 22:1), a fitting abode among a garden-people who are to produce a harvest of righteousness. The threshing floor is a place of separation: when the threshed wheat is tossed into the air, the chaff blows away in the wind, and only the good grain remains. God’s temple is a threshing floor where he separates the wicked from the righteous in his human field. The wicked “are like chaff that the wind drives away” (Ps 1:4)—blown by the wind of God’s presence out of God’s presence, unable to stand in the judgment or dwell in the congregation of the righteous—and only those who are holy, those bountiful trees rooted in God’s covenant word, remain before the Lord.
Jesus “will clear his threshing floor” (Matt 3:12) and drive the wicked chaff from the place of God’s presence. Israel is called to be God’s verdant field, the holy people among whom God resides, and Jesus will cleanse God’s dwelling of all unholiness, clearing God’s house, his land, his garden-people of every unfruitful thing that is unrepentantly unfit for God’s presence—not least when he comes in judgment to make the world the temple where God abides with his holy, fruitful, redeemed people.
But before this happens at the end of history, it happens within it. Jesus goes into the land, driving out the kingdom of darkness in a ministry of conquest. Jesus enters the temple, sweeping away the chaff that has infested God’s threshing floor, cleansing God’s house of unholy corruption. Jesus declares that his rejectors will be rejected—they will be expelled from the vineyard they were tasked with stewarding—and the kingdom of God’s presence will be given to a people that produces fruit by faith in Jesus. Eventually, an army of Roman locusts destroys Jerusalem’s temple, clearing the old threshing floor in judgment.
Pentecost, however, is also a fulfillment of John’s message. On the day when Israel celebrated God’s faithfulness in the grain harvest (Lev 23:15–22), Jesus reaps a kingdom people and baptizes them in the Holy Spirit. Gathering an abundant harvest of wheat to God, Jesus builds a new and sacred garden-temple—a threshing floor cleared of every unholiness—and restores exiles into God’s holy presence. This people will be a fruitful field, the blessed and bountiful residence of God’s templing Spirit, made citizens of and witnesses to the heavenly honey land.
Trevor Laurence is the Executive Director of the Cateclesia Institute
Image: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness
- J. Alec Motyer, Isaiah, TOTC 18 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 142: “[Isaiah’s] intention was to mime the fate of those taken captive by Assyria and thus to expose the folly of trusting Egypt.”[↩]
- There is, to be sure, far more going on in Elijah’s movements than a picture of exile, but exilic performance is at least one dimension of the significance of Elijah’s season in the wilderness. See Peter J. Leithart, A House for My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2000), 171–2.[↩]
- See Dean B. Deppe, The Theological Intentions of Mark’s Literary Devices: Markan Intercalations, Frames, Allusionary Repetitions, Narrative Surprises, and Three Types of Mirroring (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2015), 364; Peter J. Leithart, 1 & 2 Kings, BTCB (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006), 172.[↩]
- Cf. Peter J. Leithart, The Gospel of Matthew Through New Eyes, Volume One: Jesus as Israel (Monroe, LA: Athanasius Press, 2017), 81.[↩]
- N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, vol. 2 of Christian Origins and the Question of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 160 observes that “anyone collecting people in the Jordan wilderness was symbolically saying: this is the new exodus.”[↩]
- So Alastair J. Roberts and Andrew Wilson, Echoes of Exodus: Tracing Themes of Redemption through Scripture (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018), 127; Deppe, The Theological Intentions of Mark’s Literary Devices, 364.[↩]
- cf. Exod 15:17; Ps 43:2; 80:8–9; Isa 5:1–7; Hos 14:5–8.[↩]