Rejoice the God is in your midst

Luke goes messing this week up again. The first three readings talk about rejoicing that God is in the midst of his people. Emanuel is come.

Zephaniah 3:17 The LORD, your God, is in your midst, a warrior who gives victory; he will rejoice over you with gladness, he will renew you in his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.

Isaiah 12:6 Shout aloud and sing for joy, O royal Zion, for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.

Philippains 4:4-5 Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice, Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near.

Then we have the end of the world stuff from John the Baptist. "You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" Yet when you look at what he teaches, "Bear fruits worthy of repentance." It sounds just like Jesus when he is proclaiming that the Kingdom is at hand. Yeah, but where is the grace?

In entering the kingdom silly. Some have said that John the Baptist represents the last of the graceless age. That Jesus offered a new age of grace and wrath is no more. I don't think so, Jesus offered an enterance to the Kingdom of God to the real rule and presence - an eternal kind of life now as Willard puts it. In that God has never changed. He has always wanted people to trust him and enter into his life. The acts John describes are the same kind of living out the eternal kind of life that Jesus shows. And all this talk of the judgement to come gets people talking. A great expectation arose.
Could John be the one? No, he says, there is one coming after me who will baptise into a new kingdom with fire. We get the purifying theme coming back from last week's old testament reading.
It souldn't surprise us that the coming of God in the Flesh would have such strong statements. God is a consuming fire. Let us not let the meekness of the babe allow us to forget.