John the Baptist & the Path of Repentance

Far from merely assigning to [John] a temporal and now accomplished task…[the church] recognized him to be the one who will be forever preparing the way for Christ and who, so to speak, stands guard at the frontier of the aeons [our lives].

The way to Christ and into the kingdom of God did not merely at one time—in a moment of past history—lead through John the Baptist, but it leads once and for all only along that path of repentance shown by him. Faith in Jesus Christ is only there where the believer, for himself and within himself, lets the shift of the aeons [realms of living] take…