Matthew 3:1

Matthew 3:1. In those days. Nearly thirty years after the events mentioned in the last chapter (comp. Luke 3:23). Of that long period of private discipline and preparation in Nazareth, only one incident is preserved in the Gospels (Luke 42 - 52). The Apocryphal histories ‘of the Infancy' are as foolish as false. This silence of Scripture suggests lessons of obedience and reverence to parents, of patience and perseverance in the long processes of education for our life-work.

Cometh. makes his appearance as a public personage; probably at the Levitical age of thirty years, as in the case of our Lord (Luke 23). This chapter is then the history of six months.

John, Hebrew: Johanan (the Lord graciously gave) allied to the Phenician name Hannibal (German, Gottlieb). On the remarkable circumstances attending his birth and naming, see Luke 1. He was related to the holy family, through his mother (Luke 1:36).

The Baptist, well known as such. This title is transferred from the Greek. Mark (Mark 6:14; Mark 6:24) twice calls him ‘the Baptizer' (‘he who baptized'). Baptism was a prominent and, as far as previous usage was concerned, a distinctive rite in his ministry.

Preaching. Proclaiming, or publishing, as a herald does; so throughout the New Testament. Not so much the act of formal religious instruction, as the announcing of facts, the heralding of a person. Preaching should still be thus distinguished from lecturing, catechising, etc. John was emphatically a herald (comp. Matthew 3:2-3), and in the truest sense a prophet

In the wilderness, i.e. a region ‘not regularly cultivated and inhabited, but used for pasturage, being generally without wood, and deficient in water, but not entirely destitute of vegetation.' This wilderness was a rocky tract in the eastern part of Judea, toward the Dead Sea. This appearance in the wilderness was not only a fulfilment of prophecy, but characteristic of the mission of John: whom men should go out to see (Matthew 11:7-9), and symbolical of the isolation of the Jews under the old covenant.