The Fruit of Repentance

Matthew 3:8-9

Bear fruit in keeping with repentance.
And do not presume to say to yourselves,
"We have Abraham as our father,"
for I tell you, God is able from these stones
to raise up children for Abraham.

...............

It is fitting that the forerunner of the Messiah would be an iconoclast. For hundreds of years, the people of Israel had lived without a prophet, without an authoritative word from God. The Temple had been destroyed and the locus of Jewish religion had shifted to the home, to the community, and to the local rabbis. Rabbinical orders like the Pharisees and Sadducees had developed, along with a rabbinic tradition of wisdom sayings and interpretations (midrash) of the Torah. Significantly, the people of Israel had become comfortable in their culture and traditions, believing that God's favor upon them as an ethnic group was secure and unchanging (a complacency not really warranted by the warnings of the Old Testament, however).

Into this cultural complacency came the iconoclast, John the Baptist. Even his diet and clothing were against the grain. People were flocking to him from all over Judea and Jerusalem because he was calling everyone to a changed life, a new start, and also alluding to some mysterious figure who was one the way. Some speculated whether John himself was the Messiah spoken of in the Hebrew Scriptures, the specially anointed king who would lead the ethnic people of Israel to a restored Davidic kingdom. Boy, were they wrong.

Not only was John not the Messiah, but he was pissed off (at least concerning the Jewish leaders). His mind was so fixed on the coming of Christ and preparing people's hearts for what was about to take place, that he had little time for the "brood of vipers," the Pharisees, who thought that their ethnicity was tantamount to a cosmic "get out of jail free" card. Nobody likes a freeloader, especially one with an inflated sense of entitlement. These guys fit that description to a "T." John warned them that God had no partiality for ethnic origin, saying that he could make children of Abraham out of the stones (Paul will later argue in Romans and elsewhere that those who have faith in Christ are the true "children of Abraham"). No, what truly mattered to God was a changed life, a life that was radically transformed by repentance and faith.

As a closing illustration, the Apostle Paul gave a stirring example of what it meant to have no regard for one's race or cultural background with reference to salvation and acceptance before a holy God. A former Pharisee himself, he made a laundry list of his heritage and accomplishments, and then stated this, in Philippians 3:7-9:

But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which come through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith...