The Life of All Lives - Our Saviour Jesus - 5
The Baptism of Christ
This is our fifth study in the life of Christ, and today our attention focuses on His baptism, which occurred when Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee to John the Baptist, who was baptising in the river Jordan.
Matthew, Mark and Luke each give us a description of the event, while John identifies to its significance for John the Baptist personally. Apart from the death of Christ, and the events immediately surrounding it, this is the only one of these major events in His life that each of the four writers refer to. That in itself is perhaps a testament to its importance.
Matthew is the only writer who tells us of John’s reticence when approached for baptism by Jesus. “I need to be baptised by you, and do you come to me?” John asked. Jesus replied in words that we shall think about later: “Let it be so now; it is proper for us to do this to fulfil all righteousness.”
Mark’s account is the briefest of them all, and he emphasises the fact that the baptism of Jesus was followed ‘at once’ by the temptation.
Luke’s account is similar to Mark’s, but he prefaces his version with the statement that “When all the people were being baptised, Jesus was baptised too.” Again, we shall think later about the significance of that seemingly small detail.
Now to you and I today, the fact that Jesus was baptised at all may present a problem. In our minds, baptism is closely related to conversion. It is understood – quite correctly – as a public witness to the fact that, as Paul put it in Romans chapter 6, we ‘died to sin’ and, being united to Christ in both His death and His resurrection, ‘we too may live a new life.’ And here lies our difficulty: why should the perfect Son of God do something like this? To make matters worse, the explanation that Jesus gave to John is not easy to grasp.
One thing we must be clear about is that Jesus’ baptism was entirely different to Christian baptism. For a start, Jesus received the baptism of John, and this was something different to that which is practised by the Christian church. John’s baptism was preparatory – it was practised in the context of urging people to repentance in readiness for the coming Messiah, of whom John was the forerunner.
More importantly, Jesus’ relationship to God is fundamentally different to ours. He was not baptised to mark his repentance since he never had anything to repent of.
So, to investigate the reason why Jesus was baptised, we return to what he said to John. John was conscious of the moral superiority of Jesus and protested that if anything, he needed to be baptised by Jesus. However, as we have seen, Jesus gently insisted with the words, “Let it be so now; it is proper for us to do this to fulfil all righteousness.”
What exactly did He mean by this? Now we can’t be absolutely dogmatic about it, but let’s take the word ‘fulfil’ as a starting point. Matthew uses the word often. He is keen to point out whenever he can that Jesus fulfilled many of the prophecies contained in what we know as the Old Testament. One of the prophets he was particularly given to alluding to was Isaiah, where we find the ‘Servant Songs’.
In what sense was Jesus fulfilling ‘all righteousness’? Well, in Isaiah chapter 53:11, in words that are looking forward to the Suffering Servant who was to come, we read: “by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities.”
The point is this: Jesus could have stood where John was, separate from the crowd and calling on the masses to repent, from his standpoint of moral and spiritual superiority. But he didn’t. Instead, he stood with the people. He stood alongside them, in solidarity with them, and was baptised too. He was identifying himself with them. Isaiah makes the very same point later in chapter 53 when he says that Jesus “was numbered with the transgressors.” We tend to see this as an allusion to the thieves who were crucified with Jesus, but perhaps we should not limit the reference in such a way.
Do you remember the point that Luke brought out – that Jesus was baptised ‘when all the people were being baptised’? Maybe you are beginning to see the importance of that seemingly small detail. One of the great emphases in Luke is the universal scope of the gospel. Jesus’ baptism was not held in private, still less in secret. It was not undertaken before a specially invited audience. He publicly and openly stood with whoever was present – he stood with the crowds that flocked out into the desert to hear the preaching of John – he stood with the sinners of all shades; he stood with the brazenly immoral and the religiously self-righteous, with every traitor, crook and conman who made his way to the Jordan – he stood alongside sinful humanity and identified himself with them.
As we have said, John spells out the significance of the baptism of Jesus for John the Baptist personally. In John chapter 1:32 we read: “Then John gave this testimony: “I saw the Spirit come down from heaven as a dove and remain on him. I would not have known him, except that the one who sent me to baptise with water told me, ‘The man on whom you see the Spirit come down and remain is he who will baptise with the Holy Spirit.’ I have seen and I testify that this is the Son of God.”
Now remember that John was related to Jesus, and had been born 6 months earlier. When John said ‘I would not have known him’ it is unlikely that he meant that he had never seen him before and had no idea that this was his relative. It is quite likely that on a human level he knew Jesus very well indeed – well enough to have already realised, as Matthew tells us, that Jesus was morally superior to him.
John was saying that he did not recognise Jesus as the Son of God until it was supernaturally revealed to him at his baptism. And this leads us to our last point: human insight alone will never lead anyone to recognise Jesus for who he really is. Even John the Baptist could not spot it until God revealed it to him. When Peter later confessed that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God, Jesus told him: “this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven.” May He by His Spirit reveal it to you today.