The Old Testament ends with a promise.

The last book of the Bible is of the prophet Malachi, who lives almost four hundred years before the New Testament opens. As the Old Testament ends, the Jews have returned from their exile in Babylon. They have returned to the Promised Land, and the temple has been rebuilt. But all is not as it should be. God’s people are still under the rule of a foreign empire and will remain under foreign domination for centuries. They do not have their independence or a Jewish king to rule over them.

The book of Malachi ends with a promise that ‘a day is coming’ when things shall be made right and the promises of God will be fulfilled. And then we hear this promise: that when “the great and terrible day of the Lords comes,” God will send the prophet Elijah to inaugurate these events. The return of Elijah will be the sign that God is acting to fulfill God’s promises and that the time of fulfillment is at hand.

And then there are four hundred years of silence as the people wait.

They wait for deliverance; they wait for their hopes to be fulfilled; they wait for a Davidic king (messiah).

The New Testament opens four centuries later, around the year 24 C.E. with the story of the coming of John the Baptist in the wilderness outside of Jerusalem. Specifically, he appears on the far side of the Jordan River, just north of the Dead Sea and at the exact place the Israelites crossed into the promised land nearly 1200 years later under Joshua.

The oldest Gospel, Mark, opens the narrative with these words, “John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And the people from the whole of the Judean countryside and the people of Jerusalem were going out to him. Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey.”

Being clothed in “camel’s hair with a leather belt” may sound bizarre to us, but it would have made sense to the Jews living in the first century. It would have been electrifying and full of symbolic meaning. The ‘hairy mantle’ is clothing of a prophet, the first one in Israel in over 400 years. Matthew’s gospel specifically tells us that the people understood John to be a prophet. The gospels and the Jewish historian Josephus make it clear that with the appearance of John a prophet has arisen in Israel for the first time in over 400 years. This is why the crowds were drawn to him.

After centuries of waiting, God had sent a prophet, and not just any prophet.

John’s description as wearing “a cloak of camel’s hair” and with “a leather belt around his waist” would have brought to mind one specific prophet. The description of John the Baptist in the gospels are exactly the words used to describe Elijah found in 2 Kings 1:8 and Zechariah 13:4. The one Malachi promised would return and inaugurate ‘the great and terrible day of the Lord’.

The message is clear. With the appearance of John in the wilderness, the time of waiting is over. God is finally acting to fulfill God’s promises to Israel. Elijah has returned in the form of John the Baptist. The ‘great and terrible day of the Lord’ is at hand. God’s deliverance is at hand.

Even John’s baptism is highly symbolic. John is baptizing at ‘Bethany beyond the Jordan’. He is baptizing people as the cross the Jordan and enter the Promised Land at the exact place where Joshua and the children of Israel had done over a thousand years earlier. John’s baptism is a reenactment of that event.

As he preaches, John announces “the one who is more powerful than I is coming after me. I baptize you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” In the next scene Jesus appears and is baptized by John. According to John’s gospel, Jesus then spends time with John until John is arrested. With the arrest of John, Jesus returns to Galilee and begins his ministry.

John the Baptist is the hinge between the Old Testament and the New, between the story of Israel and the story of Jesus and our faith.

With the coming of John, the story of the fulfillment of God’s promises begins. And that is where the story of our faith begins.

Photo via The Bible television series on the History Channel