Let's look a little at John the Baptist and consider the significance of what he was doing. We just take it for granted that he went around baptising people, but we don't really appreciate the significance of what he was doing. The Jews had a baptismal rite, but there were two key features of it. First, only priests were allowed to carry it out. Secondly, and most importantly, it was only for Gentiles who were converting to Judaism, to cleanse them of their Gentile uncleanness. So John was causing offence on two levels. He wasn't a priest, and he was saying that Jews needed to be baptised, they needed to be washed of their uncleanness. We see in all the gospels that a major problem the Jewish leaders had was that they would not admit that they needed to be cleansed of their sins. Yet the ordinary people did.
We can apply this to our generation. The elite who rule our society at all sorts of levels think they have no need of God. This does not mean that ordinary people will not respond.
Anyway, it was because of John's actions and his message that the Jewish leaders sent people to investigate who he was, did he have the right to do whatt he was doing?
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