John the Baptist death

Can you pretend with me, for a moment, that you and I are snuggled up in those chairs together? I’ve just handed you a steaming mug of your favorite beverage, and you’re settling in because I have a wild story to tell you. John the Baptist death

Truth be told, I’ve wrestled with writing this, wondering whether or not it’s something to be shared with you or one of those tender things to keep to myself. But after yesterday’s news events, the light falls on it all a little bit differently. So, I write. Because these words have to go somewhere, and they might as well be to you. John the Baptist death

For context, two years ago, in the fall of 2023, I preached a message at a women’s conference about John the Baptist and the breakthrough moment when he baptized Jesus.

You can watch my message in full length over in the Dig Your Well Community (free until August 2026), but what you need to know about that is that I preached the message from a place of spiritual vitality.

That’s important to know because your current life circumstance always affects the way that you read Scripture. It affects the details you take notice of, the words your spirit pulls toward, the lens through which you see God moving in the details. John the Baptist death

>I preached that message on a high—a tiny inkling, I suppose, of the spiritual high that John the Baptist experienced that day that he baptized Jesus. Because it wasn’t just the fact that he saw the Holy Spirit come down like a dove with his own two eyes that day and settle upon Jesus (and remain there).

It was also the culmination of a promise God gave to him when He first instructed John to baptize.

When he did, God told him that he would see the Spirit descending (and remaining) on one person. That man would be one who would baptize with the Holy Spirit (John 1:32). John the Baptist death

So, John baptized. Some scholars estimated he was baptizing for upwards of 2-1/2 years before that moment with Jesus in the river, likely baptizing thousands of people. He was at the height of his ministry. And then, Matthew 3:13-17 happened. I can’t even begin to imagine what that did for his faith that was, literally, sight.

It’s an entire mic-drop moment of the holy ripple effect that one person’s choice to have some crazy faith to do some crazy things in obedience to the voice of God speaking in his life will have for generations. John the Baptist death

I circled back around to John’s story about three months ago—this time, in a much different spiritual posture. John the Baptist death

To be clear, my faith was (and always has been) stalwart. But I spent the first half of this year inside a kind of lament I never thought I would experience again.

I was lamenting, first, for the fact that I was lamenting again and lamenting that I’ve already lamented enough in my life. Lamenting that nothing has turned out the way that I expected it would. Lamenting that I experienced this wild encounter with God, and then things took a sharp turn in a direction I didn’t anticipate. John the Baptist death

Everything, it seemed, had gone in a direction I didn’t anticipate. John the Baptist death

So, when I saw another woman recounting John questioning Jesus very shortly after the baptism happened, I didn’t believe it was true. I ran straight to my Bible, turned to John’s parsed-out story in the gospels to see it for myself. She wasn’t wrong. I was gobsmacked when I saw it sitting right there on the page. John the Baptist death

I knew John’s story. But I had never known, noticed, or seen Matthew 11:3. Yes, John baptized Jesus and the Holy Spirit descended like a dove. And then, immediately, Jesus goes off to the desert (John 1:12). And, sometime shortly after, John goes off to prison (Matthew 4:12). John the Baptist death

There, from his prison cell, is where John questions Jesus. John the Baptist death

“Are You the Coming One?” he asks in Matthew 11:3, “or do we look for another

I can feel John’s pain, that twisted up tightness inside of his chest, because none of this makes sense. None of this turned out the way he thought it would. He was being obedient. He was walking in his calling, operating in his gifting.

People were getting baptized, so many lives were being changed. And then, it all stops. He’s in prison. And he’s suddenly questioning all of it.

“Are you really Him? Is this really it? Or was I duped?”

To be clear, it wasn’t John’s questioning that had me gobsmacked. It was Jesus’ response.

“Go and tell John the things which you hear and see,” Jesus said, and then He quoted Isaiah 61:1. “The blind see and the lame walk; the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear; the dead are raised up and the poor have the gospel preached to them. And blessed is he who is not offended because of Me.”

That was it. That was Jesus’ entire answer.

The thing that got me was that John knew Scripture. Jesus knew that John would know that the verse He quoted began with “the Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me.” And he would know that it also ended with one wild promise in light of where John sat, “and the opening of the prison to those who are bound.”

Remember, I am in a state of lament, so I saw this part of John’s story through lamenting eyes. And, man, did I wrestle through it with God, trying to make sense of what felt like a cruel joke.

You deliberately pointed to that verse to answer his question, I prayed. But You had no intention of doing that part of it. And, four chapters later, he is dead. What a cruel thing to do.

I wrestled with it for days. I dug into the verses, looked at the linguistics, followed the cross-references, trying desperately to make sense of something that didn’t seem to fit God’s character. I had to understand why something that was going so well suddenly ended so badly, and why Jesus would say something like that to John.

It wasn’t until just this week, three months later, with the fog of lament finally lifting, that I revisited it all. As I did, God interrupted my writing words and flipped my perspective completely upside down. What I didn’t realize then was that you and I have 20/20 hindsight. We know how it ended for John.

But John didn’t know that’s how it would end for him.

Jesus’ words? They weren’t a kind of cruelty. They were a kind of mercy.

John was questioning everything, and Jesus answered it all in the most subtle way possible, saying everything He needed to say without saying it out loud. Jesus pointed to that verse as proof of His deity.

“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me.” You saw it, John. You watched it happen. (I can see him sitting back in his cell, whispering the words to himself as the visceral memory of the Holy Spirit literally descending upon Him that day at the river runs through his mind.)

“The blind see and the lame walk.” And the prison doors open, John probably whispered, finishing the thought, his questions more than answered. His faith more than quickened. His hope more than restored.

It lets me assume that John didn’t die with a deflated faith. He died full of the Holy Spirit that he saw descend on to Jesus, reading between the lines of what Jesus spoke to him and his faith-eyes pointing straight to the hope that He could open the prison doors.

It’s no different than knowing that God could heal cancer, if He wanted. He could open wombs if He wanted. But sometimes, knowing that He will choose not to is just too devastating to bear. Knowing that death is looming? It’s just too much.

Jesus didn’t promise John that He would open the prison. But He reminded him that He could.

And, for John? That was enough.