[Machine transcription]
And behold a voice from heaven said, this is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased.
You may be seated.
In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Dear baptized, we should, as we hear the account of the baptism of Jesus, I think we should
sort of furrow our brows and scratch our heads to try to figure out what exactly is going
on here.
At least that’s what John the Baptist did.
And Jesus, He was thirty years old, the gospel of Luke tells us.
He comes down to the Jordan River, and there was His cousin, John the Baptist, who was
preaching wearing camel clothes and eating locusts and thundering the gospel and baptizing
people for repentance and for the forgiveness of their sins.
And Jesus comes in the crowd, and He comes up to John to be baptized, and John says,
I’m paraphrasing, what are you doing here?
You don’t need this.
I’m forgiving sins.
You’ve never sinned in your whole life.
In fact, John says, I shouldn’t baptize you, you Jesus should baptize me.
That makes more sense.
But Jesus answers, and He gives us in this answer a little riddle that we want to unravel.
Bible, Jesus says this, “‘Let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill
all righteousness.'”
Now what’s going on here?
Two points, two things that I want us to notice this morning in the text.
Number one, Jesus’ baptism is when He becomes the Messiah.
It’s the moment that He becomes the Christ.
Now, to understand this, we need to go back and pick up from the Scriptures this important
distinction between the person and the office.
We don’tâ¦
I don’tâ¦
We sometimes think about this, but I don’t think that this is in our minds as much as
it is in the minds of the prophets and the apostles.
Our Christian mind, this should be one of the ways that it’s marked and set apart,
is that we are always noticing this distinction between the person and the office, and also
for ourselves.
I mean, just, so I was born Brian Wulfmuller, but I entered into the office of husband on
June 5th, 1999.
I wasn’t a husband before that, and I was a husband afterwards.
Or I was just kind of normal Brian Wulfmuller until June 25th, I think, June 25th, 2005,
and I became Pastor Wulfmuller.
I wasn’t a pastor before that, and that day I became one.
I entered into the office.
So I had my name, my person, all along, but I was given an office, a calling, a vocation.
Now all of us it’s the same thing, we’ve entered into various different callings, and
we’ve even left some various different callings, we’ve moved in and out of them, the person
has remained the same, but the office is either given or taken away.
Now some, some offices we’re born with.
We have them at the very moment, in fact the moment they were conceived we have these offices.
You were a son or a daughter to your parents from the moment of your conception.
You were a citizen, from the moment of your birth you were a citizen of whatever country you were born into.
Now these offices could change, you could be adopted into a different family,
you could immigrate from one country or to another
there, and as the offices change, we notice that the person stays the same even if the
office change.
Now in the Old Testament, there were three chief offices that were established by God.
They were the prophet, and the priest, and the king.
And the way you entered into that office was by being anointed.
Well not for the prophets.
The prophets were the anointers, and the priests and the kings were the anointed ones.
They would be put in office by the prophets, and the prophets would come and they would
actually take oil, either in a bowl or in a wineskin oil thing, and they would pour
the oil over the head of the man who was to become king, or who was to become priest.
And when the oil was poured over their heads, they entered into the office.
Now this helps with this kind of funny Psalm 133, I don’t know if you’ve ever been reading
along through the psalms and you come to Psalm 133, it’s a short little psalm, and it starts
out wonderfully.
It says, “‘Behold, how good and beautiful it is when brothers dwell together in unity.'”
You go, oh, that’s a nice psalm.
And then it gives a picture.
It says, it’s like the dew dripping off of Mount Hermon, and you say, oh, I can understand
that.
A kind of mountain with the snow and the river, it’s beautiful.
And then it says, it’s like the oil dripping off the beard of Aaron.
And you say, how in the world is⦠that sounds disgusting.
How is the oil dripping off of some guy’s beard supposed to be beautiful?
But this is the point.
That oil was the anointing oil that put Aaron into the office of high priest.
That oil dripping off of his beard, dripping onto his robes, that meant that he could stand
between the people and God and pray to God for the people and bless the people in God’s
name.
The Hebrew word for the one who is anointed is the word Messiah.
That’s what that word means.
So that the priests, when they were anointed into the office of being priests, could rightly
be called messiahs, or the king, whenever he was anointed in the office, could be called
a messiah, even while they were waiting for the messiah to come.
And the Greek word translated Messiah is the word Christ, Christos, anointed one.
The promises of the Old Testament set the people of God in the Old Testament to wait
for the chief one Messiah, for the chief one Christ who was coming to deliver and redeem
His people, and in fact to redeem and deliver the entire world.
And He would then be anointed for the office.
He would be Messiah Christ.
He would be put into place, and He would be anointed according to the prophets, not by
oil, but rather by the Holy Spirit.
We had that at least one of those promises was in the Old Testament lesson from Isaiah
42, where God the Father says, “‘Behold My servant whom I uphold, My chosen one in whom
My soul delights, I have put My Spirit upon him, and he will bring forth justice to the
nations, so that Jesus, we should understand the baptism of Jesus as His anointing.
Rather than covering His head with oil to put Him into the office, He is covered with
water and by the Holy Spirit.
And when the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus in the form of a dove and rests upon Him,
He is now set apart for the office and work of being the Savior, the Redeemer, the Christ.
Jesus went into the water of the Jordan River as Jesus of Nazareth, and He came out of the
water of the Jordan River as Jesus the Christ, the Messiah, the Lamb of God who would take
away the sin of the world.
Now, a couple of notes on this, just so we don’t get it wrong.
Number one, we want to know that Jesus, according to His person, was always God.
I mean, from the moment of His conception in Mary’s womb, He was the God-man, God incarnate
and in our flesh.
There’s an ancient heresy called adoptionism that teaches that Jesus became God when He
was baptized, or when the Holy Spirit came upon Jesus, He then became divine.
No, it’s not true.
He was divine beginning to end, but something did change in the baptism of Jesus.
He now begins His public ministry in the office of the Savior, and His unique work of salvation
begins here in the Jordan River, the work that would end on the cross.
So we know that Jesus is baptized into His work of redemption.
And that gets us to the second point that I want us to consider today, and that is this,
that our baptism gives us the gifts that Jesus won for us through His work, through His life
and through His death and through His resurrection.
And for this I want to give you a picture.
Now maybe I want to confess something to you, that this text, the baptism of Jesus, was
It’s the first Bible passage that was ever assigned to me to write a sermon on at my
very first preaching class at the seminary, and I probably worked on that sermon for a
hundred hours.
And I came up with a picture of how to explain the baptism of Jesus then, twenty years ago,
and I haven’t been able to think of a better one since.
So I’m going to give you this.
It’s an old picture, but it’s the best that I can come up with.
I want you to imagine this, okay?
I want you to imagine that you’re standing there by the Jordan River.
The river is coming down, and it’s coming down between two hills.
And on one side, on one side of the Jordan River, on the hill, is a flock of sheep, and
the sheep in this flock are absolutely filthy.
I mean, they are the ugliest, stinkiest, meanest, smelliest sheep you’ve ever seen, covered
in blackness and tar, etc., etc.
And one after another, John the Baptist is taking these sheep, and he’s dipping them
in the river, and he’s pulling them out, and they come out simply pristine, perfect, white.
There’s not a single spot on them.
They smell like cotton candy.
Their teeth are straight.
I mean, everything is perfect about these.
And he puts them down on the other side of the river, and one at a time he’s dipping
these sheep, and he’s pulling them out, dipping the sheep, pulling them out, and as
he’s doing this baptism work, there comes to the edge of the Jordan River one sheep
without a single spot on them.
In the midst of all of these filthy, nasty sheep, there’s one sheep that’s so perfect
and clean and wonderful that he’s gleaming, he can hardly look at him, he’s so white.
And John looks at this sheep and he says, you don’t need a bath.
Look at you.
You should baptize me.
You don’t need this cleansing that I’m giving out here.
And the sheep says, well, let’s do this now to fill up all righteousness.
So, John the Baptist takes this sheep and dips it in the water, and watch, as he dips
this sheep in the water, all the filth and all the nastiness from all the other sheep
that’s in the river like an oil spill, all of that goes onto him, all of it.
And John takes this sheep out of the water and puts it on the other side and
points to him and says, behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the
world. You see it? That in his baptism the Lord Jesus begins the work of carrying
your sin and my sin, of bearing your sin and my sin, of absorbing into Himself, of even
as St. Paul preaches in 2 Corinthians 5, that He who knew no sin, God made sin for us that
we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
And the work of carrying our sins begins there in the Jordan and ends all the way on the
cross, where Jesus finally suffers the price, suffers what we deserve for our sins.
It’s quite wonderful, isn’t it, that we have in the window there the baptism of Jesus
and right above it the crucifixion, binding these two things together so that in His work,
in His baptism, in His living, in His dying, in His suffering, Jesus is taking our sins
upon Himself. And this makes our baptism a lavish washing away of sin. There’s a
prayer. I think it was written by Martin Luther in his baptismal book, and he
says this, in your baptism in the Jordan River, you sanctified and cleansed all
water, making them suitable for holy baptism. So that the sin that is washed
off in your baptism is washed on to Jesus. Now what this means, dear saints,
and this is quite phenomenal, but what this means is that the same words that
God the Father speaks about His Son Jesus in His baptism are also spoken to
you. The Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus from heaven like a dove
God, and then they hear a voice from heaven that says, this is my beloved Son with whom
I am well pleased.
I want you to hear that.
God, the Father, is well pleased with you.
Now I know you’re a sinner, and I know you’re sinned against, I know you’re covered in shame,
I know you have trouble.
I imagine that all of us feel a bit, like when we get to church, like we’ve been walking
barefoot down a dirt road in the rain, you know, we’re just dirty.
We live in this world that’s filled with sin.
It’s constantly infecting us, and we don’t help that much, and yet the Lord brings us
in here and He washes us.
He takes us up and with His Word He cleanses us.
Our baptism has this enduring effect that everything that we have done wrong has been
cast away, sent away, suffered for by Jesus so that God can say to us, He is baptized,
you are my beloved son, you are my beloved daughter, I am well pleased with you.
Those who have been baptized have put on Christ.
You are wrapped up by your baptism into His perfection.
And by this gift of your baptism, God is happy with you.
He’s pleased with you.
And He delights in you.
Now I know you don’t feel like it all the time.
At least, you tell me you don’t feel like it all the time.
You feel like God’s mad at you. You feel like God’s angry with you.
you feel like God’s forgotten you, but listen to what the voice from heaven
says. Behold my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. You by your baptism are made
partakers of this, the love of God. May God grant us His Holy Spirit so that we
would know this love and this kindness now and always. Amen. And the peace of
God which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds through Christ
Jesus our Lord. Amen.
