Again, while we have here a clear prediction of the Spirit as bestowed by Christ, we find no hint of His work as the sacrifice for sin, through whom the guilt which no repentance and no outward baptism could touch was taken away.  The Gospel of John gives us later utterances of the Baptist’s, by which we learn that he advanced beyond the point at which he stood here.  ’Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world,’ was his message after Christ’s baptism.  It is the last, highest voice of prophecy.  The proclamation of a kingdom of heaven, of a king mighty and righteous, whose coming kindled a fire of judgment, and a blessed fire of purifying, into one or other of which all men must be plunged, contained elements of terror, as well as of hope.  It needed completion by that later word.

When John stretched out his forefinger, and with awe-struck voice bade his hearers look at Jesus coming to him, prophecy had done its work.  The promise had been gradually concentrated on the nation, the tribe, the house, and now it falls on the person.  The dove narrows its circling flight till it lights on His head.  The goal has been reached, too, in the clear declaration of Messiah’s work.  He is King, Giver of the Spirit, Judge, but He is before all else the Sacrifice for the world’s sins.  Therefore he to whom it was given to utter that great saying was a prophet, and more than a prophet; and when he had spoken it, there was nothing more for him to do but to decrease.  He was like the breeze before sunrise, which springs up, as crying ‘The dawn! the dawn!’ and dies away.

THE BAPTISM IN FIRE

     ’He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire.’—­MATT.
     iii. 11

There is no more pathetic figure in Scripture than that of the forerunner of our Lord.  Lonely and ascetic, charged to light against all the social order of which he was a part, seeing many of his disciples leave him for another master; then changing the free wilderness for a prison cell, and tortured by morbid doubts; finally murdered as the victim of a profligate woman’s hate and a profligate man’s perverse sense of honour:  he had indeed to bear ‘the burden of the Lord.’  But perhaps most pathetic of all is the combination in his character of gaunt strength and absolute humility.  How he confronts these people whom he had to rebuke, and yet how, in a moment, the flashing eye sinks in lowest self-abasement before ‘Him that cometh after me’!  How true, amidst many temptations, he was to his own description of himself:  ’I am a voice’—­nothing more.  His sinewy arm was ever pointed to the ’Lamb of God.’  It is given to very few to know so clearly their limits, and to still fewer—­and these, men who keep very near God—­to abide so contentedly within them, and to acquiesce so thankfully in the brightening glories of One whom self-importance and ambition would prompt to take for a rival and an enemy.