Luke 1:80

And the child grew

John’s secluded life

Not in sandy deserts like those of Arabia, but in the wild, waste region south of Jericho and the fords of Jordan to the shores of the Dead Sea.

This was known as Araboth or ha.Arabah. This region, especially where it approached the Ghor and the Dead Sea, was lonely and forbidding in its physical features, and would suit the stern spirit on which it also reacted. In 1 Samuel 23:19, it is called Jeshimon, or “the Horror.” John was by no means the only hermit. The political unsettlement, the shamelessness of crime, the sense of secular exhaustion, the widespread Messianic expectation, marked “ the fulness of time.” Banus the Pharisee also lived a life of ascetic hardness in the Arabah, and Josephus tells us that he lived with him for three years in his mountain cave on fruits and water. But there is not in the Gospels the faintest trace of any intercourse between John or our Lord and His disciples, with the Essenes. The great Italian painters follow a right conception when they paint even the boy John as emaciated with early asceticism. In 2Es 9:24, the seer is directed to go into a field where no house is, and to “taste no flesh, drink no wine, and eat only the flowers of the field,” as a preparation for “talking with the Most High.” (Archdeacon Farter.)

Satisfactions of solitude

Charles the Fifth, after a life spent in military exploits and the active and energetic prosecution of ambitious projects, resigned, as is well known, his crown, sated with its enjoyment. He left these words, as a testimony, behind him:--“I have tasted more satisfaction in my solitude in one day than in all the triumphs of my former reign. The sincere study, profession, and practice of the Christian religion have in them such joy as is seldom found in courts and grandeur.” (Baxendale’s Anecdotes.)

Solitude a good teacher

St. Bernard said, in writing to a pious friend, “If you are seeking less to satisfy a vain curiosity than to get true wisdom, you will sooner find it in deserts than in books. The silence of the rocks and the pathless forests will teach you better than the eloquence of the most gifted men.” (Fenelon.)

Solitude helps to mature thought

Whenever Michael Angelo, that “divine madman,” as Richardson once wrote on the back of one of his drawings, was meditating on some great design, he closed himself up from the world. “Why do you lead such a solitary life?” asked a friend. “Art,” replied the sublime artist, “is a jealous god; it requires the whole and entire man.” During his mighty labour in the Sistine Chapel he refused to have any communication with any person, even at his own house. (L D’Israeli.)

The youth of John the Baptist

I. INQUIRE INTO THE REASONS WHY THE YOUTH OF JOHN WAS SPENT IN OBSCURITY.

1. Purity of his mind shrank from a society so devoid of true religion

2. Privations fitted him for the self-denial with which he afterwards attracted the people.

3. Arrangements also well adapted to prevent any such intimacy with Christ in His youth, as might have excited suspicion of a collusion betwixt them.

4. In such retirement John enjoyed, undisturbed, that communion with the Deity so delightful to eminent piety like his.

II. CONSIDER THE INSTRUCTIONS WHICH THIS ACCOUNT OF JOHN’S YOUTH HOLDS OUT TO THOSE WHOSE VIEWS ARE POINTED TO THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY. Entire seclusion not required of them, but let them retire as often as they can, and prefer the calm of solitude to the bustle of dissipation.

III. CONSIDER THE LESSONS HELD FORTH BY THE YOUTH OF JOHN TO THE YOUNG IN GENERAL. The wisdom and advantage of frequent retirement.

1. What opportunities of improvement solitude will present to you.

2. From what temptations it will detach you.

3. To what solidity of character it will form you.

4. How it will prepare you for the seclusion of days of darkness. (Dr. Belfrage.)

The retirement of John was

I. A RENUNCIATION OF HIS PRIESTLY RIGHTS.

II. A BREAKING-OFF FROM THE THEN JUDAISM.

III. A UNIQUE REALIZATION OF THE TRUE NATURE OF GOD. He believed that there, in the desert, as really as in the Temple, was the “God of the Temple” to be found and worshipped.

IV. Observe that GOD THE HOLY SPIRIT MINISTERED TO HIM IN THE DESERTS. (A. B. Grosart, LL. D)

Every life has its desert period

Those grand solemn days when God calls us out of the world’s noises to commune in deep consultation with Him until the soul’s purposes are shaped, and the characters of our immortal spirits formed. These are the days of destiny, the birth-hours of all that is really great in us, times when we are truly born again, if we will be, or when we rush back and plunge into the troubled sea of unregenerate existence, never to find rest. If we look back down the long line of God’s heroic ones, each had his wilderness. Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, dwelt all their lives in the grand deserts of existence, and tabernacled with God. Moses, David, Daniel, Elijah, Jeremiah, yea, all God’s great ones, were caused to turn their backs on a world and face the truths of the living God, until those truths rose up to them to march in triumph, through the opposition of men and devils, to glorious victory. Now, as then, God calls us to the wilderness-school--calls us out to uncover the great purposes of truth before us, and sends us back to stand up for Him, regardless of all the surgings of sin, applause, fear, or death. Here, and here alone, is the safety of any Church, age, or man, in “the kingdom of God within,” trueness to the ideal of life realized, as the soul in its lone consecration stretches itself on the naked will of God, and feels the strong beatings of His eternal purposes of truth, justice, and love. (Bishop Penriek,)

Waxed strong in spirit

We need strong men--Elijah-like, John-the-Baptist-like men in these “perilous times,” and “spiritual” strength is incomparably the strongest, the most celestial, the most Christly of all strength. (A. B. Grosart, LL. D.)

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