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In a
Nutshell We should not forget how God Himself honoured the
work of John the Baptist by bringing the work of His son to its fulfilment in
the Ascension of the Resurrected Son of Man to the right hand of the Father
in Heaven. |
The New Testament story is chock-a-block with dreams and visions. There is a report of an angel visitations to Joseph right in the first chapter of Matthew. Appearances of angels in dreams to Joseph and the wise men saved the life of the baby Jesus when Herod's militia was sent to do a gruesome work in Bethlehem. In Egypt Joseph had a dream that that blood-thirsty butcher had left to meet his maker.
Dreams and visions were part of the preparation John the Baptist received from God before he appeared in the wilderness of Judea. They helped him to know what his own work was to be - they helped him to see that his second-cousin, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of his mother's cousin Mary, was indeed "the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world." This is what John's followers heard him say:
I baptize you with water; but One mightier than I is coming, the thong of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. His winnowing fork is in His hand, to clear His threshing floor, and to gather the wheat into His granary; but the chaff he will quench with unquenchable fire."
John made many disciples. Many were baptised by him and came to believe in the Person John told them about. This person, sure enough, was Jesus, and He also came to John to be baptized. But then Herod had John executed. Before he died John instructed some of his disciples to go and join themselves to Jesus. Others were spread far and wide.
Before he left His disciples, to return to His Father in heaven, Jesus instructed His disciples about how they were to wait for God's Spirit. He reminded them how they were still indebted to what John the Baptist had taught them. John had not only taught them about the Coming of the Lamb of God; he helped them prepare for the Holy Spirit; he warned them to get ready for God's judgment.
It was in terms of a multiplier effect. John had preached in the wilderness of the Jordan Valley. All of Galilee and Judea had gone out to him. When at Pentecost the Spirit of God descended in flaming tongues of fire, the dispersed Jews who had come to Jerusalem for the festival were part of the ongoing miracle. The Spirit enabled them to hear the good news about Jesus Christ, the Resurrected Crucified Messiah, in their own local languages. When Peter, prodded by God's Spirit ended up preaching the good news under the roof of the Roman Centurion in Caesarea, the Jews who had come with him heard Cornelius and his family give glory to God in a language they could understand.
Some years after that - maybe it was 15 or 20 years - Paul met up with some Christian believers who had been taught by one of the disciples of John the Baptist, a Jew from the northern Egyptian town of Alexandria, named Apollos. And when Paul learned they had been baptised in John's way, with water, with repentance, he urged them to be baptised afresh in Jesus' named, in order to give the sign that the Holy Spirit had come and this indeed joined them to the One Church that was then thriving as it ever has, by the blessing of Almighty God. And that is what happened and that is how Paul was confirmed by the Holy Spirit as an apostle of Jesus, an apostle who God had sent, like Peter at Caesarea, to pour out His Spirit.