Mark 1:6
And John was clothed with camel’s hair, and with a girdle of a skin about his loins; and he did eat locusts and wild honey; And John was clothed with camel’s hair, and with a girdle of a skin about his loins; and he did eat locusts and wild honey;
Mark 1:6 belongs to the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ. It stands within John's wilderness work of baptizing and preaching the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins. It stands where all the land of Judea and those of Jerusalem came confessing sins and were baptized by him in the Jordan, and before his preaching of the mightier One to come after him. In the setting of Mark 1:5-8, already-received baptism is not to be rested upon as sufficient, and the Holy Ghost is needed just as much now.
John wore a coarse garment of camel's hair, a hair-cloth garment, fastened about him with a leather girdle or belt. He ate locusts and wild honey found and supplied in the wilderness. That food was plain and simple, described as purely vegetable food, and with it he drank water from the hills, the pure water of the wilderness.
His dress and food expressed the simplicity and self-denial of an ancient prophet. They were part of a life-long consecration to God, in which he made his birth dedication as a Nazarite his own, separated from ordinary comforts. His clothing and diet resembled those of Elijah, wearing coarse garments like Elijah. He lived in the wilderness away from the cities because no school on earth could have fitted him for his great appointed work. His study books were the Old Testament Scriptures, God, and the nature God had created, while the customs and practices of men were not to be his education and worldly engrossment was to have no part in forming his character.
That austere wilderness life was deliberate self-denial to control appetite, to avoid society's temptations, luxuries, and corrupting influences, and to prepare his physical, mental, and moral powers for his work of calling people to repentance and fitting him for preparing the way of the Lord. His coarse clothing and simple diet had no outward display to attract admiration. His dress rebuked the extravagance and display of his generation, especially the priests and the people. His plain diet rebuked indulgence of appetite and widespread gluttony. His disciplined, temperate life prepared him for his work as a reformer and shows the temperance expected of those who prepare people for Christ's coming.