de
world beyond Nazareth.

The lambs went quietly to the Temple when they were taken there to be
offered to the God of Israel. Jesus must be obedient like a Lamb of
God.

4. Jesus Goes to Work

[Illustration]

When Jesus was thirty years old, people began to talk about the great
man who had come to Palestine.

"This man is so great," they said, "that he may be the Messiah."

But it was not Jesus they were talking about. It was his cousin, John.

John was a preacher. He was afraid of no one, and as a result everyone
was a bit afraid of him. John was a rough, strong man. Next to his
skin he wore leather, and over that he wore a cloak of camel's hair.
Honey and locusts were his food.

Every day John preached down by the river Jordan. The people flocked
out from Jerusalem and from all the countryside round about to hear
him preach. It was a wild and dreary place to come to, but when John
preached everybody wanted to be there.

This was how he preached:

"Give up your sins, and begin a new life at once, for God is coming to
rule over men! I am a voice crying in the wilderness. I tell
you--prepare for the Lord!"

And when the people heard him, they were afraid. Many of them cried
out, "We have sinned!" and came forward out of the crowd. John led
them down the bank into the river and baptized them as a sign that
they wanted to be cleansed of their sins and begin a new life. Thus
John came to be known as "John the Baptist."

But when John thought that a man was not in earnest, then he refused
to baptize him. Some of the Pharisees and the Sadducees came to be
baptized, and John would have nothing to do with them. They might be
great men in Jerusalem, but John called them "snakes in the grass." He
told them:

"I've seen the snakes out here in the wilderness, wriggling for dear
life to get out of the way when the grass catches fire. That's what
you remind me of. You're scared. You think that something terrible is
going to happen, and so you're pretending to be good people so that it
won't go so hard with you. You will have to show me that you want to
be something different from what you are! And don't think that you
amount to anything just because you are Jews. God could make as good
Jews as you are out of these stones."

That is how John the Baptist talked to some of the great men of
Jerusalem. It made people think more than ever that he might be the
Messiah. Who except the Messiah would dare to talk t