Separate to Elevate: Luke 3:2

John the Baptist could have served in the temple. He was the son of a priest, and by birthright that door was open to him. Instead he lived in the desert, and that's where the word of God found him. Today we slow down on one phrase in verse two and ask what the wilderness actually was, why John chose it over the temple, and why God so often separates people before He uses them. Join me on an immersive Bible Study Experience. Learn more at ⁠BibleStudyLive.org⁠ Have a question about the series or a prayer request? Leave me a voicemail: ⁠SpeakPipe⁠ Why was John in the wilderness? Luke told us back in chapter one, verse eighty, that the child grew and became strong in spirit, and he lived in the deserts until the day of his public appearance to Israel. So the wilderness is essentially where John grew up. The practical reason may be simple. Zechariah and Elizabeth were both advanced in years when he was born, so it's reasonable to think they died while he was still young. Scripture doesn't say, but something moved him out of the village and into the desert early. There's also the calling. Gabriel said he would drink no wine or liquor and would be filled with the Holy Spirit from his mother's womb, which sounds a great deal like the Nazirite vow from Numbers 6. Normally a person chose that vow. John was set apart from conception, the way Samson and Samuel were. That word anointing means set apart. Someone with that kind of calling was never going to live an ordinary village life. Mark fills in the picture. John was clothed with camel's hair, wore a leather belt around his waist, and ate locusts and wild honey. Locusts were permitted food under the law, so he was eating what God provided in the desert. The clothing is not an accident either. Elijah is described in 2 Kings as a hairy man with a leather belt around his waist, and Gabriel said John would come in the spirit and power of Elijah. John was dressing the part. He didn't have to. It was a physical way of showing people who he was and what he had come to do. Why does it matter that he chose this? Because he had another option. John was the son of Zechariah, a priest. By birth he had the right to serve in the temple. He could have spent those years in the temple courts waiting for Jesus to begin His ministry, and it would have been far more comfortable. The temple was the center of Israel's worship, the place where God's presence dwelt with His people, the most sacred address in the entire nation. John went the opposite direction. What was that wilderness actually like? When we hear desert we picture sand dunes. This was not that. This was rocky hills, deep ravines, scrub brush, and almost no water. The area sits in the shadow of the mountains of Judea, so storms drop their rain on the Jerusalem side and very little makes it over. Jericho gets only a few inches a year. In spring a thin grass comes up and shepherds bring flocks through, but the rest of the year it is dry and very hot, especially as you drop toward the Dead Sea, which sits about 1,400 feet below sea level, the lowest place on dry land anywhere on earth. The Hebrew word for this region is midbar, and it doesn't mean dead. It means uncultivated. Open country where you might drive flocks at certain times of year, but land nobody could farm and nobody owned. This is the land David knew. He shepherded here as a boy and hid here from Saul. When he wrote in Psalm 63 about seeking God in a dry and weary land where there is no water, he wasn't only being poetic. He was describing what he could see. How did people at that time think about the wilderness? They held two feelings about it at once. First, it was dangerous, physically and spiritually. No water, extreme heat, wild animals, even rumors of lions, and bandits. The road from Jerusalem down to Jericho ran through here, which is the road in the story of the Good Samaritan. People understood that story because they knew that road. Beyond the physical, they believed evil was out there. On the Day of Atonement they drove a goat carrying the sins of Israel out into the wilderness, which we read in Leviticus. Isaiah 34 describes ruined desert places haunted by wild creatures. Jesus Himself later says an unclean spirit passes through waterless places. Keep that in mind, because in Luke 4 Jesus goes into this same wilderness for forty days. Second, and at the same time, it was holy ground. Many would have remembered the wilderness as the place where God courted Israel. In Jeremiah 2, God says He remembers the devotion of her youth, the love of her betrothals, her following after Him in the wilderness. It was almost their honeymoon, the time before they had anything, when they simply followed Him. This is where Israel became a people. They came out of Egypt and spent forty years in the desert. They received the law at Sinai. They ate manna. They learned to depend on God for water. This was the place where they had nothing but Him.