GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
LUKE 1:80
80 The child grew up and became strong spiritually. He lived in the wilderness until the day he appeared publicly to Israel.
Why would John have lived “in the wilderness” and not with his parents as he grew up? The answer is very probably that his parents didn’t live long after his birth. Even if they had lived another ten years, that would mean a ten-year-old boy on his own. Wasn’t there any other family to take him in? Of course—verse 58 tells us that this was so. But we must allow this verse to tell us the correct detail about the place of his upbringing: He lived in the wilderness. There are at least five possible ways of understanding this that do not contradict anything in Scripture.
1. His parents (or one of them after the other died) took him to live “in the wilderness” sometime after his birth. This seems unlikely, since they had family and friends in their Judean village when he was born.
2. John went out alone to live by himself as a hermit. This view is a popular one, but it is less likely to be correct if his parents died when he was a child, since a child would have been taken in by a relative.
3. John went to live with a relative who was already a kind of recluse or nomad in the wilderness. There is much to commend this idea. John would have been seen as an outsider, and there would be little or no reason to mention the cousin or whomever it was who raised him.
4. John went to live in a small village in the wilderness—a place like the village of Emmatha (with its hot springs) near Gadara on the east bank of the upper Jordan, or one of the villages of Perea lower down that same east bank, like Amathus (on the Jabbok), Zia (near the border of the Decapolis), or Beth Haram across from Jericho (Joshua 13:27). Galileans and people of Jerusalem would have seen any of these villages as being “in the wilderness” and not given them much further thought.
5. John went to live with a group of hermits, in one of the settlements around the rim of the Dead Sea. The Essenes would have been one such group, but also the scribal group that so carefully copied the Old Testament Scriptures and hid them in the caves of Qumran (some of them may have been Essenes, but probably not all). There may have been Zealot groups as well (Luke 6:15). However, John’s theology does not correspond to any of these semi-monastic groups. He is entirely a Christian, and in keeping with the faith of typical Jews (like his parents) who were waiting for the arrival of the Messiah, Christ.
Although I suspect that the third or fourth of these proposals is the correct one, we can’t say for certain. What we can say is that John grew spiritually, and so he had a connection with the only thing that strengthens faith: the word of God. So he did not become the kind of hermit who shuns the Bible in favor of his own ideas or his own flawed human reason. He embraced the Scriptures, he knew them, he understood them, and he applied them. In this way he is an ideal example for us and the way that we grow in our faith. However old you are—ten, or a hundred and ten—you are not finished learning about the Bible. Read it. Meditate on what it says. Listen to it as a servant and not as a sceptic, and remember that through it, you have the word from God himself to you, for your heart, for your soul, and for your eternal good.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Archives by Wisconsin Lutheran Chapel: http://www.wlchapel.org/worship/daily-devotion/
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota