<p>3:14 <i>And soldiers also asked him, saying: And we, what must we do? And he said to them: Do not intimidate anyone or accuse falsely, and be content with your wages</i>-</p><p>The nature of how demanding John was is reflected in his response to the soldiers and publicans. He didn&rsquo;t tell them to quit their jobs, but to live with integrity within those jobs. He told the soldiers to be content with their wages- implying he expected them to not throw in their job. And seeing there were no Roman Legions in Judaea at his time Josephus,&nbsp;<i>Antiquities</i>&nbsp;18.5.1, these were likely Jewish soldiers. He didn&rsquo;t tell them to quit their jobs, but to live with integrity within those jobs. He told the soldiers to be content with their wages- implying he expected them to not throw in their job. This is juxtaposed with the command for them to do no violence. But not grumbling about wages was as fundamental an issue for John as not doing physical violence to people. To have as Paul put it &ldquo;Godliness with contentment&rdquo; another of his allusions to John&rsquo;s preaching? is as important as not doing violence. And yet our tendency is to think that moaning about our wages is a perfectly normal and acceptable thing to do, whereas violence is of an altogether different order. It&rsquo;s like Paul hitting the Corinthians for their divisiveness, when if we&rsquo;d been writing to them we would likely have focused upon their immorality and false doctrine. John would have been far less demanding had he simply told the publicans and soldiers to quit their jobs. By asking them to continue, and yet to live out their lives within those jobs with Godly principles, He was being far more demanding.</p><p>John places complaining about wages a common human fault in juxtaposition with doing violence to others (Lk. 3:14)- to show that in his serious call to a devout and holy life, there are no such things as little sins. Ez. 16:49,50 defines the sins of Sodom as including &ldquo;pride, fullness of bread, and abundance of idleness, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor&hellip; they were haughty, and committed abomination&rdquo;. The abomination of their sexual perversion is placed last in the list, as if to emphasize that all the other sins were just as much sin. Likewise Paul writes to the Corinthians about their failures, but he doesn&rsquo;t start where I would have started- with their drunkenness at the memorial meeting. Instead he starts off with their disunity. Those things which we may consider as lesser sins, the Bible continually lists together with those things we have been conditioned into thinking are the greater sins. Clearest of all is the way Paul lists schism and hatred in his lists of sins that will exclude from the Kingdom. The Anglo-Saxon worldview has taught that sexual sin is so infinitely far worse than a bit of argument within a church. But is this really right&hellip;?</p>