John may have had harsh features.. or at least that's my mental image of John.. despite what he looked like.. he was a man who knew nothing but COMPLETE joy in Christ. He knew Jesus intimately.. not just because they were cousins.. but because the Holy Spirit lived inside of him and he lived aggressively and passionately to serve the Lord and His will.
I think John the Baptist is a picture of what God is raising up in the church today. God is preparing us for the toughest of battles in the great war against the kingdom of darkness. In order to have victory in this battle.. God is conditioning His people to aggressively seek Him... with radical wholehearted commitment. Some will catch on, and grow in spiritual maturity... some won't.
Several things jumped out at me while studying this passage. God loves us... more than anything; a capacity we can't possibly understand. I have a very limited comprehension of that kind of love as a parent... I love my children more than anything according to my understanding of love. Take my four year old, Caleb, for instance...I don't think I could love him more than I already do.. or at least its difficult to imagine, but that doesn't mean I'm ready to let him drive my car, or ride his bike down the street by himself.
He's just not mature enough to handle that sort of responsibility. And I think living in Gods kingdom... unified with Him, while we're here temporarily on Earth.... is exactly like the picture I just described with Caleb.
As humans... we are limited by our level of maturity, as believers.. we have the opportunity to grow in unity with the Lord and the Holy Spirit helps us achieve this.
There are elements of Heaven that only the hungry find, only the love sick find, only the spiritually mature find... but one can't receive those gifts passively. One has to aggressively pursue them, like John the Baptist did.
Matthew 5: 6-7 .. the Beatitudes... as they're known.... talks about this very level of spiritual maturity... "blessed are the poor in spirit.. blessed are those who mourn, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness"... all of these things require positioning ones heart to receive the gifts God wants and has planned to give...even before the world began.
Being united with the Lord means loving the truth without an agenda. It means radical intolerant living while the world around us falls for a delusion of open minded, non-committal ideas about "religion". It means pressing into His word and guarding it closely.
I know I have a long way to go before I get there, but I'm excited to see the end result!
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