Luke 3

Luke introduced John the Baptist's ministry by stating that God went to him in the wilderness. God had been preparing John for this ministry his whole life, and then went to him to get it started.

John was in the wilderness - I once heard that it's hard for the devil to find you in the wilderness. Perhaps God was protecting John - not just physically, but spiritually - by keeping him in the wilderness. And when he started ministering to others he did not address them with soft words meant to appeal to their selfish desires - the way many churches today do. He called the crowds a "brood of vipers," which would have certainly reminded the people of the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

John told people straight up to produce fruit and repent, and not to try to comfort themselves in their traditions. And what was the response he got from the crowd? The people who should have been most offended by his message came to him asking questions and seeking guidance. The truth can be hard to say, and hard to hear, but it is the desire of our hearts to live by it.

Then he baptised Jesus, and then Luke gives us a genealogy of Jesus that is quite different from the one that Matthew gave us.

I did quite a bit of digging into Jesus's Genealogies, and you can find my writeup on it here Jesus Genealogies.

Genealogies in the Bible can be quite interesting if you investigate them deeper. Some highlights about the genealogy in Luke include:

You will notice that this genealogy does not agree with Matthew's. They diverge after David. Matthew's genealogy goes through the line of David's son Solomon, and Luke's goes through the line of David's son Nathan. The reason for this can be found in Jeremiah 22:30. God pronounced a curse on the line of kings that had been ruling Judah, that they would not have any offspring sitting on the throne ever again. But God still fulfilled His promise to David through one of his other sons.

And Joseph, Mary's husband, is called the "son of" Heli - not saying that Joseph was "begotten of" Heli like Matthew's genealogy words things. This term for "son of" could include adopted sons. And Mary's father would have adopted Joseph when he married Mary if Mary did not have any brothers to receive his inheritance. This was the tradition that was bourne out of the law given to Moses when he was dividing up the land in Numbers 27:1-11 and Numbers 36:1-12. In this we can see that both Joseph and Mary were descendents of David, and Jesus is the fulfilment of God's promise to David that he would always have a son on the throne.