Prep for Ministry – Jesus’ Baptism

Jesus is the son you and I have failed to be.

Sometimes people think that when you go to seminary, you learn all of the stuff that’s in the Bible and nothing could be further from the truth on that. There is no way everything can be covered in just a few years. And one of the aspects of theology that I have always had questions about but never really understood because I didn’t study it in seminary, didn’t have really an opportunity in seminary to study, was Jesus’ baptism. Does anybody else find it weird that Jesus got baptized? Does this seem strange to anybody else? It’s odd if you compare it to the reason why Christians get baptized. Christians get baptized as a way of demonstrating the spiritual transformation that has taken place in our hearts because of our faith in Jesus. The water serves as a symbol in two different ways. It’s a symbol of being washed clean from our sins. So the water is a washing mechanism, but then it’s also a symbol of joining Christ in his death, his burial and his resurrection to new life. It’s the outward sign that we have entered into a new relationship with Jesus. Basically, you are saying Jesus has washed me white as we just sang, right? Jesus has washed away my sins. His death is my death and his life is my life. By the way, if you are a follower of Jesus but you’ve never been baptized, that’s a step of obedience that you need to take. And I would be very happy to talk with you about baptism and what that would look like and what that means and how we might go about that. So please come talk to me or to talk to one of the pastors or the elders here. Let us know that you would like to be baptized.

But when we when you think of baptism as a symbol of our union with Jesus, it kind of boggles your mind why Jesus would be baptized. If that’s the symbol it is for us, why would Jesus go through baptism? He’s not being baptized for repentance like the rest of the people being baptized by John the Baptist in the in the river. He’s not doing that. He’s not being baptized to show the spiritual washing away of his sins. He doesn’t have any sins. That’s one of the most important points of the gospel. He didn’t come for his own sins. He came for our sins. And he certainly isn’t being baptized to show his union with the death burial and resurrection of himself that has not happened yet. Okay? That’s not even that didn’t even make logical sense. So why then is Jesus baptized by John in the Jordan River? And what does it mean for our understanding of Jesus? That’s our aim this morning.

We’re going to look deeply at these questions, but I can summarize where we’re heading by saying that Jesus’ baptism has to do with his identity and his mission. Jesus is the son that you and I have failed to be. That’s it. Jesus is the son that you and I have failed to be. As I mentioned the past few weeks, one of the most important points of Jesus early ministry is that he succeeds precisely where we fail. And today we’ll see why that is. His identity as the Son of God makes him the son that you and I could never be on our own. We could never be the child of God that Jesus is for the Father. And by the way, that’s a that’s a good thing. It’s very good news that Jesus is the son that you and I have failed to be. If your view of God is that his pleasure in you is based on your performance, you might think that having Jesus succeed where you fail is bad news because it means that you haven’t measured up. But when you understand that the good news isn’t about your performance, but it’s about Jesus’ perfection on your behalf and your relationship with him, well then his perfect Sonship becomes a reason for you to celebrate. So we’re going to celebrate Jesus baptism today.

You can open your Bibles, if you would, to Luke Chapter 3. We’re going to begin in verse 21 today. I’m going to start by reading our passage, but I’m not going to read the entire passage this morning because most of what we’re going to see in our passage this morning is a genealogy. And you do not need to listen to me stumble through a list of English versions of Greek versions of Hebrew names. Okay. No one needs that today. So after we read this, I want to concentrate on two big questions. What is the significance of Jesus’ baptism and who is Jesus? And then I want to talk about how the answers to these questions should impact us. Our entire understanding of who God is and who we are is shaped by the revelation that Jesus has for us in Luke here this morning. So let’s read this passage now. ‘When all the people were baptized and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heavens were opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove; and a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved son, with you, I am well pleased”. Jesus, when he began his ministry was about 30 years of age, being the Son (as was supposed) of Joseph, the son of Heli’, and then skipping down to the to the end of the passage, … “the son of Enos, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the Son of God.”

So let’s begin by asking the question, what is the significance of Jesus’ baptism? Another way to ask that question be What did Jesus’ baptism accomplish? I want you to picture this group of people who have come out to the river. John is baptizing the river. They’ve come out from the surrounding villages to the Jordan because they hear about this strange guy who was out there calling people to repent and to prepare themselves for the salvation that’s coming. And among them, one day in the crowd of people that are out there at some point in John’s ministry, Jesus is there. He’s in the crowd. Now, the other gospels give us details about what took place, how John identifies Jesus. He in fact, he even argues with him at one point, even argues with him. He says, I don’t want, I can’t baptize you. I should be baptized by you. I can’t be the one that baptizes you. And then Jesus insists to John that he needs to be baptized to fulfill all righteousness. According to Matthew, that’s the phrase to fulfill all righteousness, which is kind of a vague phrase. But what it tells us is that there’s some type of fulfillment that needs to happen. And John knows this. According to the Gospel of John, John the Baptist knew in advance that eventually he was going to baptize someone that he would fully recognize. And when the Spirit, God’s Holy Spirit descends on this man like a dove, then he’ll know that this is the one who has come to baptize people not with water, but with the Holy Spirit.

Luke doesn’t give us any of those details. He doesn’t give it. He just says Jesus was baptized. It’s because he wants to put all of his attention simply on what it means for Jesus to fulfill all righteousness. What does that mean after Jesus was baptized, he starts to pray. The heavens are opened up, and it says The Holy Spirit fell on him in bodily form, meaning the people around him could see this happen. And it says this body moved like a dove. Now some people make a big deal out of the dove. They’re trying to figure out what does the dove mean? They’re trying to what’s the symbolism of the dove? But you have to understand, this is a metaphor. It didn’t look like a dove. Whatever came down simply floated. And the best way to describe it was kind of like a dove might float down. Okay, so there’s no dove in the story. The point was, the people standing around could see that Jesus had received an anointing from heaven. That heaven came down to Christ. Jesus is praying. He’s speaking to his father, and the Father responds by giving him a heavenly anointing of the Holy Spirit. This is what all the kings of ancient Israel received from one of the prophets of their day. Whatever King was, they would receive this anointing from the Prophet of the Lord in that day, you might know about King David. The Prophet Samuel went to Jesse’s house to find David and to anoint him King over Israel. Here Jesus is with the final Old Testament prophet. I know it’s weird because we’re in the New Testament, but John the Baptist serves as a kind of last Old Testament or Old Covenant prophet. And John the Baptist gives this anointing to Jesus, but he doesn’t get this royal stamp of approval specifically from John. It doesn’t come from John’s hand. John is there, but it doesn’t come from him. Jesus doesn’t get it even from any guy at all, like the human kings that came before him. This time, God’s chosen ruler gets an anointing straight from God himself. This is the purpose of Jesus baptism. It’s a heavenly endorsement that Jesus is the Messiah. He’s the savior servant king that Israel has been waiting for. See, anyone can claim to be the Messiah. Anybody can claim. In fact, many did in that day. There were lots of people that stepped up and said, I’m the Messiah. Only one man has ever received public, documented, historically reliable accounts from four historians that testify to the fact that God himself physically anointed his Messiah. When we get a new president, there’s an inauguration, right? We have this big ceremony, and that marks the beginning of this person being president and the start of that president’s administration. This is similar to that, but it’s not quite the same because Jesus has always been the Messiah. We know that because of the Virgin conception, the proclamation of the angels and the testimony of the prophets in the temple. So what’s happening here is not that Jesus is becoming the Christ becoming God’s Messiah. It’s that His administration is beginning, or the way we would put that His mission is beginning. He’s starting his ministry. Think of the baptism of Jesus as the ceremony that sets up the father’s public revelation of who Jesus is and His endorsement of who Jesus is, both of His life and His ministry.

Which then leads us to our second question. If that’s what it accomplishes, if that’s what this whole thing is about, this public proclamation of God’s endorsement of Jesus as His Messiah, well, then we have to ask, who is this Jesus? Who is he? I’ve been using the word Messiah, but the word Messiah just means anointed one. So does the word Christ, by the way, when we say Jesus Christ, we’re talking about Jesus, the one that God anointed. That’s what Jesus Christ means. So while it means Jesus is set apart for a special purpose by God’s anointing, the word itself actually doesn’t explain what Jesus is anointed to do. What is his job? And so we have to ask, who is this, this Jesus? Let’s look again at the father’s words. This pronouncement is the whole point of the baptism, so it’s worth breaking down. He says, You are my beloved son. With you, I am well pleased. You are my beloved son. With you, I am well pleased. That’s two statements.

One identifies Jesus’ status. The other is the Father’s personal feelings concerning Jesus. First of all, Jesus is the Father’s beloved son. This title comes from Psalm 2, which we read and heard earlier. It also comes from Isaiah chapter 42, verse 1. Psalm 2:7 says, I will tell the of the decree. The Lord said to me, You are my son. Today, I have begotten you. This is King David writing about himself. The Lord calls him his son because he serves as the King of God’s people who will lead them to stand in righteousness before the Lord. And the end of the Psalm calls the nations to come and to kiss the son, which sounds weird to us, I know. But what it really means is that they need to come under the leadership of God’s Son. That was a way of referring to the King, and all the nations need to come, and come under the reign of God’s son. Isaiah 42:1 says, “Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations.” So here’s the Lord’s chosen servant, both upheld by the Lord and delighting the Lord’s soul, which means that he causes the Lord to be very, very happy because the service of this servant is perfectly in line with God’s justice. This servant doesn’t deviate in any way from what is true and right and good. He is always serving God. And the reason for that is it’s the result of the spirit resting on this servant. Does all of this sound familiar? All of this is packed into what the father says about Jesus. This is my beloved son. The heavens open up. The Father sends the spirit down to rest on the son. So what we have there, by the way, is the Holy Trinity all together, the Father sending the spirit on to the Son, and there in that single moment, Jesus is announced as the servant king who will finally bring delight to the Lord. Do you remember the kings of the Old Testament? Some of you had a chance to study the Old Testament and looked at him.

Do you remember the kings of the Old Testament? They were a mixed bag, to put it mildly, weren’t they? That’s quite a group of guys there. These were men who sat in a position of being anointed Son of God. That was their position. They were set apart as leaders who would lead the people toward a deep and obedient relationship with the Lord. Most of them actively, purposefully did the opposite of that. They did the opposite. Most of them did what people do with power today. They used it for their own advantage, and they did whatever felt good to them at the time. It wasn’t their job, but that’s what they did with their power. They turned from God to serve themselves. They used the people to their advantage, to fulfill their own greed; they desired, they wanted to be powerful. And they used the people to do that. And they fulfilled their own greedy, lustful desires, not caring at all about fulfilling their calling as God’s son, as God’s king. Now, some of them weren’t so bad. Some of them even called for repentance and reformation. They to get rid of the results of the guy before them. They said, Oh, we can’t be going in this direction anymore. We’re going to call for a public repentance. And they repented and they turned and they got rid of some things, not all the things, unfortunately, but they tried to bring about some reform, but none of them were perfect. Even King David, the one who’s mentioned in Scripture, is the man after God’s own heart. He was a murderer and an adulterer and a man so filled with pride that it almost cost him the lives of his people.

Some of them, like David, repented during the reign. They recognized that they had failed to be the sons that they were called to be. But here’s the question. What’s Jesus going to be? Will Jesus be different than all the sons that came before him? Will he actually do what he’s supposed to do? Because everybody else failed. Will he be like King Ahaz? Do you know King Ahaz? He didn’t stand out. Maybe if you’re an Old Testament reader, you’d read about him, but King Ahaz, you can read about him in Second Kings 16 if you want to. He was a king in Judah for 16 years. He was such a despicable ruler, so caught up in idolatry of his heart that he sacrificed his own son in worship to a false god. And when the northern kingdom of Israel came and they besieged Judah and they besieged Jerusalem, he didn’t reach out to the Lord for help. He didn’t even cry out to the Lord when his kingdom was falling apart. Instead, he reached out to Assyria. And he said these words. So Ahaz sent messengers to Tiglath-pileser King of Assyria saying, I am your servant and your son come up and rescue me from the hand of the king of Syria and from the hand of the King of Israel who are attacking me. I am your servant and your son. Don’t miss that language. I’m your servant and your son, Tiglath-pileser King of Assyria. His heart was so hardened against the Lord that he exchanged his servanthood and his sonship. And do you know what Tiglath-pileser did to him? Well, he came to Ahab’s rescue. He defeated Israel. And then he enslaved Ahaz. And Assyria pillaged Judah. Justice in all ways does, by the way. That’s what sin always does. It weakens you. It does not strengthen you. It robs you and pillages you, even though there feels like a promise that things will get better if you go your own way. It never helps. Is this the kind of son that’s the servant Jesus is going to be? Is this who he’s going to be or will he be like David or Solomon? You know, pretty good, flawed in some significant ways, but a good leader on the whole. Or will he be something entirely new? Will he be something greater than the fallen, sinful, broken leaders who have come before him? Will Jesus be something different than the fallen, sinful, broken people that you and I are? Because make no mistake, that’s the kind of leader we would be to. We would fail. Will Jesus fail? Will he be like us or will he be something new? God is pleased with Jesus right now. We just heard him say it. Will he always be pleased with him? Technically speaking, we don’t know, from this passage, whether he will fail. This passage doesn’t answer that question. This passage actually sets us up for an answer to that question that’s going to come in the next story that we’re going to look at over the course of the next two weeks.

But there’s an indication of the kind of son that we should expect. And believe it or not, it’s actually in that long genealogy that I didn’t read the entirety of this morning. Do you see that phrase? If you look at your scriptures, you can see it. You see that phrase there where it says ‘the son of’ and it keeps saying, the son of the son of the son of. That’s actually a pretty weird way to write a genealogy because it goes backwards. Most genealogies start in the history in the past and they move forward. That’s actually how Matthew writes his genealogy of Jesus. That’s how they appear in the Old Testament. But right after recording the Lord’s words that Jesus is the son in whom He is well pleased, Luke then goes back through the history of Israel to trace this Sonship. He wants to show us the roots of this Sonship. Now, I don’t know who all the people are in the list there. A lot of them are only mentioned in that list in the Bible. But what is absolutely clear is what Luke is doing with his list. He’s doing two things. He’s showing us that Jesus is absolutely in the line of David and Abraham, so he’s the fulfillment of the promises to both David and to Abraham. But secondly, he goes beyond Abraham, all the way back to Adam. All the way back to Adam. And that’s important. See, the nation of Israel began with Abraham when Abraham’s son, Jacob, was renamed Israel, and then his 12 sons became the 12 tribes. That’s an important part of the Messiah’s identity. But Jesus’ Sonship doesn’t end with him just being the king of Israel. He’s the son of God in the way that Adam was the son of God. He’s not just the ultimate David come to fulfill the role of sinful David that he couldn’t fulfill. He’s the ultimate Adam who has come to fulfill the role that fallen, sinful, broken Adam couldn’t fulfill. And let me tell you, it’s one thing to undo bad leadership. It is quite another thing to undo bad humanity. We’re not just talking about the redemption of a nation. We’re talking about the redemption of all creation. All creation. Jesus has come to be the new Adam. The perfect son. The fulfillment of the promise that one day through the generations of the people that would come from Adam and Eve, one of those sons would rise up and would finally crush the serpent once and for all. That sin would be destroyed in God’s anointed one. He’s going to succeed as the son where the first son failed. And this time, God’s pleasure is not going to end.

Now, every person I know, every person I know, believes in the existence of God, wants God to be pleased with them. I don’t know a single person who believes in the existence of God, who does not want God to be pleased with him. You can have atheists, of course, I have some friends who are atheists. Or you can, you can believe in an impersonal higher power. You can be a deist or some sort of thing like that, who think that there’s no God of justice who is more or less pleased with us. By the way, they are the tiniest minority of people in the world. If you if you think like that, if you’re in the line of there is no God or there is no God that cares or there’s no God that cares about anything that happens in this world, you are on the very small island of people who have ever existed in the history of humanity. And that should tell you something about that view. Most people think that there’s a God or gods that are pleased or not pleased with them. And the question these people have to ask is a pretty natural question. If God can be pleased, is he pleased with me? If he can be pleased, how does he feel about me? The church I had the honor of planting in Detroit was a church called Doxa Church and Doxa Church was surrounded by temples and mosques of other religions. Our neighbors to the south of us had a giant Hindu temple, so my church was across the street from a giant Hindu temple, and the people there would go and they would bring offerings to the gods in the hope of pleasing them so that they could get blessings and so that their lives could go well. We had some Muslim friends just down the road who prayed five times a day to fulfill that pillar of Islam and the other pillars of Islam so that Allah would show them mercy. And be pleased with them.

So what about Bible reading, Bible believing Christians? Are we involved in a similar kind of project to please the Lord? My answer actually might surprise you. My answer is yes. We are absolutely committed to pleasing God. The Bible tells us that this is what his people are going to do. That internal inclination that you have to make sure that God’s good pleasure is on you and that you are pleasing to him, is hardwired into your soul. And it’s there for a reason. But here’s where the religions of the world take a left when the gospel goes right. Our inclination will be to impress God with our goodness. That’s what our heart will tell us. Try to please God with your goodness. It’ll be to try to win his pleasure. Like with how great we’re doing. God, see me? See? See how good I am, how great I’m doing. However, the long history of the human race and the short history of your personal experience will tell you that you’ve not done anything really that will please God, or at least certainly not enough. In our disobedience, we have failed to please God, and in our arrogance we have thought that God would accept some of some of our good works to make up for the ways we’ve displeased God. You know, it is a profoundly arrogant attitude to tell God ‘here, take this token of my good works to make up for the ways that you’re displeased with me. And now you have to be happy with me.’ Isn’t that arrogant? It’s terribly arrogant. We don’t set the price for sin. We don’t tell the creator what he must receive from us or how he should feel about us. What we need to do is stop our homemade forgiveness projects and our God pleasing strategies that are tailor made to our preferences and we need to find out what actually pleases God. And here it is, his son. His son. The father is pleased with his son. The son with the spirit resting on him, will go on to achieve perfect obedience before the Father. In every place that you and I fail, Jesus will overcome and he will maintain perfect obedience. And he will remain in God’s good pleasure. So let me tell you, friends, if deep in your heart this morning there is a desire, a driving desire to please God, to receive his forgiveness, to have his good pleasure fall on you, then what you need is the son. You need to be covered by the son. The payment required to restore our status to the pleasure of God was paid by Jesus when He took the cross and shed His blood. He took our sins and He gave us his status. And what is his status? The beloved son. The Bible describes the relationship Christians have with God as being a son or a daughter of our Heavenly Father. See, when we trust in Christ, we don’t have just forgiveness and then an acquaintance with the Lord. We are adopted into His family. The great theologian J.I. Packer once wrote: You sum up the whole of the New Testament teaching in a single phrase if you speak of it as a revelation of the fatherhood of the Holy Creator. In the same way you sum up the whole of New Testament religion, if you describe it as the knowledge of God as one’s Holy Father’. In other words, when Jesus came, he revealed that the creator of the universe is His father. And He shows us that through faith in Christ, He becomes our father too. Everyone wants God to be pleased with them. Everybody wants God to be pleased with them. But only Christianity offers a relationship in which God’s pleasure with his children never ends. Let’s pray.