Transcript
All right, Matthew chapter three. Matthew chapter three. We have been looking at Matthew and in the opening lines of Matthew, he wants you to know Jesus in five ways. He's introducing Jesus as Jesus. That's his first name that's given to him by Joseph. The angel tells him to name him Jesus. So that's his name. We also see that he's the Messiah, Christ, that's the same word. Christ is Latin Messiah. It's the anointed one. And this is what Israel was anticipating and waiting for. The Messiah would come. And then we see in chapter one that he's the son of David, and so he has royal blood, he has a right to the throne, and we see that he is the son of Abraham. We go all the way back to Genesis 12, and God is creating and forming a nation through Abraham saying through you, I'm going to bring a blessing upon the world.
It's through your sons and daughters. There's going to come this blessing that is part of Jesus's lineage. And the last thing that we saw is that he is going to be called Emmanuel, which means God is with us. And so Matthew in these opening chapters is really trying to drive home that this is who Jesus is for you and I. This is who Jesus is. Now, chapter one, we had the genealogy, and then we jumped into Mary's second and third trimester. And we look at this scene where Joseph is in this difficult place of deciding, what do I do with this woman I'm betrothed to who's ended up pregnant and God sends an angel in a dream to Joseph telling him to marry her. We then see in chapter two that Jesus is born and the wise men come to see him. It causes a political issue to arise.
And Herod ends up killing the babies two years old and younger. The wise men return a different way to their home country, and Joseph again is directed by God through a dream to go and take his family to Egypt. They then return to Nazareth where Jesus grows up. And then last week we saw John's baptism and we saw that John had this specific job of preparing the way for the Messiah. He was called upon by God. He was prophesied that God would send one before the anointed one, the Messiah, who would prepare the way. And he did that by preaching and by baptizing we saw that he had very strong words for who?
The Pharisees and the Sadducees, right? Yeah. Both of them got called a brood of vipers, fruitless trees that were about to be cut down and burned. And then right at the end of the text we were looking at last week, John shifts gears and he says, there is this one who is coming, Jesus the Messiah. And he says of Jesus that he's more powerful than I am. I'm not worthy to untie his sandals. He's going to baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. And then he uses this picture of the winnowing shovel that sorts out the grain from the chaff, and he says He's coming with his winnowing shovel to clear the floor of humanity. He's going to gather the wheat to himself and the chaff will be burned. We talked about how there's this black and white nature about Jesus and his kingdom, that you're either wheat or you're chaff, and Jesus has come to find and call the wheat to himself.
He's inviting us to be a part of this kingdom work. So John, imagine John is baptizing. It says in the other gospels that all of Israel comes out to John. He's about 31 years old. He's got his own disciples. There's a whole troop of people doing these baptisms in the Jordan River there right in the heart of Israel, and it's a spiritual movement where the nation is just getting dunked under the water as a symbol of I repent. It's a statement that I turn away from the past. I'm basically turning my back to who I have been and my personal rebellion against God, and I'm now orienting my life towards God. They didn't know all that God wanted to do. It was just this moment of reorientation, God, I'm ready to do it. And then they're listening to John saying, there's somebody coming. There's somebody coming that has been prophesied about, and the nation of Israel is ready.
And that brings us to verse 13 through 17, a little bit shorter section this morning. Let me read it for us. It says, then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan to be baptized by him, but John tried to stop him saying, I need to be baptized by you, and yet you come to me. Jesus answered him. Allow it for now because this is the way for us to fulfill all righteousness. Then John allowed him to be baptized. When Jesus was baptized, he went immediately from the water. The heavens suddenly opened for him. He saw the spirit of God descending like a dove coming down on him. And a voice from heaven said, this is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased. Let's pray for a moment. Lord, we ask that you would just teach us from your word and that you would speak right into our lives.
We give you this time, you know our story just where we are at spiritually and whether we feel close to you or far from you. And God, we trust that you have a plan that you designed us for a good plan, but some of the stuff in our life is still broken up, and we're asking God that you would work in our lives this morning. We give you permission to change the ways that we think about things. We give you permission to work in the midst of our emotions, to tenderize our hearts and give us soft hearts. Lord, we are willing for you to work. We're willing to let you work in our lives, and we invite you to do that. Now, you pray this in Jesus' name, amen. Amen. Such a fascinating story. Look at this. Jesus comes from Galilee, and a lot of ministry is going to happen in this.
The Galilee is this region where there's a big giant lake and Jesus will be up there a lot, but he comes from that area where Nazareth happened to be to John at the Jordan to be baptized by him. But John tried to stop him saying, I need to be baptized by you. And yet you come the dilemma, there is a dilemma. It is twofold. All of a sudden we're reading the Bible, we're cruising down through the genealogies, which was a little bit of a windy part of the road. And then we get to John and oh, the Wiseman. That was fun. And then we get to, Jesus comes to get baptized, and it's like we hit a speed bump and he's like, what's going on here? And John is like, stopping Jesus, which it's not a good idea to try to stop Jesus. I mean, it's not because he made the whole world.
And so trying to stop Jesus from what he wants to do is really simply not a good idea. That's our first application this morning. Don't stop Jesus this week. But John tries to stop Jesus from getting baptized. And the second dilemma that we have here is we're wondering why is the sinless son of God needing to be baptized? Now, if you were here last week, we saw that this baptism was really, it's a baptism of repentance, and John was not sugarcoating things. When you start calling people a bruta vipers, you're not really trying to make friends, right, or influence people. That's strong language. And the idea for John, I mean, you get this window through even just that short little message there that John is scaring people into baptism almost. He's freaking them out about their sinful condition. I mean, this is hell, fire and brimstone, and the whole idea of getting in the water is that you are now making a public declaration that I have been a bad person and now I'm ready to turn towards God and I'm ready for a new spiritual work. And so we understand that, and yet Jesus tries to get down there into the water. Why did John try to stop Jesus from being baptized?
Why did he try to stop him? There's this word where we use, it's called, it's the word appropriate. And for John, it seemed completely inappropriate for Jesus to get into the water and to be baptized. Now it's anybody's guess. Why did John find this inappropriate? Did John already know that Jesus was the Messiah? Well, if you go and you look at the parallel passage in John, it doesn't seem like John knows yet that Jesus is the Messiah or it hasn't been confirmed. So it could be that John just knows that Jesus is righteous in general, and John's opinion is that Jesus is not a person in need of repentance, that he doesn't need to get down there in the water and to repent. But the second possibility is that who is John? John is this related cousin of Jesus, and he was the one when he was still in his mother's womb leaped up when Mary came into the room.
And so it's possible that his mother, Elizabeth told him, Hey, this is who Mary is. This is who Jesus is. There may have been a lure that existed around Jesus. And so while John May not have fully had it confirmed, and he was absolutely sure that Jesus was the Messiah, he knew his calling, and it seems as if he had a sense, a pretty strong sense about who Jesus was. But this baptism, it was a baptism of all about repentance. Now, if you're just kind of loosely familiar with Christianity, you know that we talk about this thing that's a baptism, right? And we say that, listen, if you've decided to follow Jesus, as soon as you make this decision where you're ready to repent and turn your life, orient your life back towards God, and to believe in Jesus, the next step is to be baptized.
But this baptism of John is not the believer's baptism. What? Yeah. No. Look it, I'm going to show you this here. Paul had this super interesting encounter in Acts 13, and he's preaching to a Jewish audience. Now, Paul was a missionary. He goes out on his first missionary journey to Cyprus and then over to what we call Turkey, and he's oftentimes preaching to Jewish people first, and this is one of the sermons. This is just a snippet out of the middle of one of Paul's sermons. He says, then they ask for a king. He's talking, he's giving them Jewish history, and God gave them Saul, the son of Kish. Saul was the first king in Israel. He was a man of the tribe of Benjamin for 40 years. After removing him, he raised a David as their king and testified about him. This is what he testified.
I have found David, the son of Jesse, to be a man after my own heart who will carry out all my will. So we've got Saul and David, and then let's fast forward to in Jewish history from this man's descendants as he promised God brought to Israel the savior Jesus. Okay? So we jumped from David to Jesus. Then verse 24, before his coming, before Jesus is coming to public attention, John had previously proclaimed a baptism of what rep repentance he had proclaimed a baptism of repentance to all the people of Israel. Now, as John was completing his mission, he said, who do you think I am? I am not the one, but the one is coming after me, and I am not worthy to untie the sandals on his feet. So I put this in front of you because I want you to see that John the Baptist baptism was a baptism that fit within Jewish history.
It was the act of a prophet calling these people to be ready for their Messiah. It's not like God dumped Israel and got a new girlfriend. No, this is a continuing relationship that John played the strategic spiritual work of calling the nation to repent. The baptism, though that comes as a follower of Jesus, that Jesus talks about in Matthew 28, that baptism is a baptism of I'm ready to follow Jesus. I want to just show you one other time when this comes up. Another really, really interesting story out of Acts 19. Now again, Paul's a missionary and he is traveling around southwestern Turkey near Ephesus. While Apollos was in Corinth, Paul traveled through the interior regions and came to Ephesus. He found some disciples, okay, so you see this term disciples, this is not the 12 apostles. He finds some disciples and he asks them this question.
Now look at the question. Isn't this interesting? He says, did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed? Isn't that an interesting question? Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed in Jesus? Their answer, no, we haven't even heard that there is a Holy Spirit. You see, at this time, the unfolding work of God in history is that the message of Jesus, his kingdom, and the promise of the Holy Spirit, it's like rippling across Asia, minor into Turkey, into, and that's why these missionaries are talking about Jesus, but there's people who they're kind of standing. They crossed the spiritual stream of Israel. These guys crossed the stream, and all they heard about was John's baptism because look it into what then were you baptized? He asked them, oh, we got baptized into John's baptism. They replied, Paul said, John baptized with the baptism of repentance, telling the people that they should believe in the one who had come after him, that is in Jesus.
Oh, okay. Do you get it? You see that when they heard this, they were baptized into the name of the Lord Jesus. So they needed to get baptized again because they had only been baptized into, they were only caught up with the work of John, but they needed to be baptized into the name of Jesus. Isn't this fascinating what's on here? And it's tied in with the Holy Spirit, right? There's some really interesting theology that kind of can come from this. But when Paul had laid his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them and they began to speak in tongues and to prophesy. Wow, crazy. But I put that in front of you because I want you to see that there was this specific kind of baptism that John was doing. It had a specific meaning, and it meant you're repenting of your sins.
But again, back over in Matthew, why is Jesus coming to get baptized? Do you feel the tension there? Jesus steps on the scene as the Messiah and all these dirty sinners are getting baptized, and Jesus is like, yeah, I'm here to get baptized too. And John freaks like breaks him. It breaks a bit of his understanding. John tries to stop Jesus from being baptized and says, the roles ought to be reversed. You should be baptizing me. But then it says in verse 14, John tried to stop him. I need to be baptized by you, and yet you come to me. It's interesting. There are, and I want you to see this because we're going to go through, we're traveling through Matthew, and there are many times, many occasions in the ministry of Jesus where the good guys object to what Jesus is doing. Now, we're familiar with the Pharisees playing the role of the villain and really trying to come after, why are you eating on the Sabbath day, right? Or would you dare heal this person on the Sabbath day? Well, how could you violate the sa, oh, he eats with sinners in tax? There's plenty of objections that we get from the religious leaders, but I want you to see that there are also occasions when the good guys object to what Jesus is doing.
For example, Peter Rebukes Jesus, when he hears about the cross, this is Mark 8 31. Then he began to teach them that it was necessary for the son of man to suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and scribes be killed and rise. After three days, he spoke openly about this. Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, but turning around and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and he said, get behind me, Satan. You're not thinking about God's concerns, but human concerns. There's the occasion of the disciples prohibiting the children from coming to Jesus. Do you remember that? These children are gathering around and they look at them and they're saying, this is the picture. This is one depiction of Jesus having the children come to him and the disciples go, no, no, no, no, no. Let's get the kids out of here.
They're in the way. This is a distraction. And Jesus says, no, let the little children come to me. Another example is that the disciples object to his anointing at Bethany. This is when a prostitute comes and brings an alabaster jar and anoints Jesus's feet. There's another occasion where she's crying and she's drying his feet with her hair, and the disciples go, man, if he knew who was letting him touch him, he would not let that happen. This can't be right. And again, the good guys are objecting to something that Jesus is doing. The disciples were concerned about Jesus speaking with a Samaritan woman in John chapter four, the disciples were reluctant to go back to Judea after the death of Lazarus anticipating the resurrection. They were kind of reluctant. Well, if he's going, we'll go to, we might as well just die with him, right?
They just don't want to do it. The disciples, there was confusion over eating Jesus's flesh and drinking his blood out of John 6 52. Jesus is using this metaphor of like, you have to take me in. You have to assimilate me just like a meal that is, and they're, we don't like that. Even some left him when they heard that analogy because they're like, oh, that's too gross. We are out of here. There's a story of Philip and Andrew feeding the 5,000 and they want to send the crowds away. And Jesus says, well, you feed them.
It is all throughout the story of Jesus. The good guys struggle and run into these speed bumps where it's just like, nah, I don't know how I feel about that. And here's the thing that you and I need to understand. We're followers of Jesus. And the essence of following, the essence of following is that you are willing to be led, that you're willing to be led. And it's important to see that even the people that were closest to Jesus, they didn't get it all the time. They didn't understand. And so there can be this misconception as a Christian where you're going along and you think, okay, I like this guy. Jesus. I want to be a follower of him. But then the pieces in your life, you just expect you have a set of expectations. My life should work out this way, and yet it's going this way.
And some people decide at that point, well, this following Jesus thing, this is too rough. I want to just kind of go back to doing life my own way. In fact, Jesus told a parable like that about a little plant that grew up and it was choked out by the caress of this world or by the thorns that were there, or by the sun beating down on it. The plant didn't survive. And it was a metaphor of this idea that the gospel message can take root in our life, and then life happens and it's like, oh, forget this. I'm off the bandwagon. I'm not going to follow Jesus any longer.
John says, I can't do this. We can't do the whole baptism thing. How does Jesus respond? Jesus answers and he says, allow it for now because this is the way for us to fulfill all righteousness. Then John allowed him to be baptized. So Jesus says, allow it. Allow it to take place, and I would encourage you to allow God to do the work that He wants to do. You and I have to submit to the process that God puts us through. We may not pick different things to happen in our life. It may be sickness. It may be an employment issue. It may be just the sorts. You may wish, man, I wish I was more beautiful, or I wish I was more skinny, or I wish I lived in this place, or I wish I had a different family or a different spouse. Whatever it is.
You may wish that the story was different, but this idea here, you need to allow it for now is the essence of a disciple of Jesus. You've got to entrust yourself again to the Lord and allow him to do his work. So he says, we need to allow it because this is the way for all righteousness to be fulfilled. What does this mean? I want to give you five ways in which the righteousness of God is fulfilled through the baptism of Jesus. The first is that it fulfills. It could be a fulfillment of the law. Okay? Jesus life, mission and ministry are deeply rooted in fulfilling the Jewish law and the prophets. Jesus had to tell the disciples, look, I didn't come here to just blow it all up. I didn't come to destroy the law, but I came to fulfill the law. His baptism could be seen as a way of honoring the Jewish purification rights and religious traditions, thus fulfilling all righteousness in that context.
Another way in which this fulfills all is that it's a solidarity with humanity. By being baptized, Jesus identifies with sinners, although he himself is sinless, this act of humility and solidarity can be seen as fulfilling all righteousness because it embodies God's merciful and incarnation involvement with humanity. Let me just show you Philippians two, seven through eight in this vein. Instead, he emptied himself. Jesus emptied himself by assuming the form of a servant taking on the likeness of humanity. And when he had come as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even to the death on a cross. So there is, as we went through the book of Hebrews, what we saw over and over again was that Jesus obediently took on humanity, took on the form of humanity, and you think, well, couldn't he have accomplished the resurrection and the redemptive purposes of God?
Without that, I don't know, but God saw it fit to take Jesus and say, Jesus, you as my son are going to play the full human role. You are going to humble yourself to the point of death, but obedient to the point of death. The third way in which this fulfills all righteousness is the initiation of Jesus' ministry. The baptism marks the formal initiation of Jesus's public ministry. This fulfills all righteousness in the sense that it sets in motion the divine plan of salvation. In the early church, there was a problem. Judas had been an apostle of Jesus. He was one of the 12, but you'll recall that Judas betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver. Do you remember that part of the story? Then Judas feels convicted. He goes back, he tries to return the money. The religious leaders say, we don't want the money back.
We don't want the money back. He throws it down on the ground and Judas goes and commits suicide kills himself because of this, just the mistake that he had made. Peter, after Jesus goes up to heaven, stands up amongst the 120 Christians, followers of Jesus that are there. He says the number of people who he speaks to them, and the number was about 120. Then going down to verse 21, he says, therefore, from among the men who have accompanied us during this whole time, the Lord Jesus went in and out among us from the baptism of John until the day he was taken up from us, from among these, it's necessary that one become a witness with of his resurrection. Do you see? In order to find a qualified apostle, a qualified apostle, they need somebody who's been around from the baptism of John all the way up through the ascension.
So this moment, again, this third point is the initiation of Jesus's ministry. There's a sense of this is the beginning. This is where this ministry begins, and anybody that wasn't around from this very beginning doesn't even meet the criteria of being a 12th apostle. The fourth way in which this fulfills all righteousness is its modeling repentance and baptism. Jesus sets an example for his followers. If Jesus submitted to baptism, how much more should his followers do? So in this way, he fulfills the righteous requirements set for humanity and becomes a model of obedient faith. We saw this in Hebrews, Hebrews five, eight. It says, although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered. Obedience learning. Obedience didn't mean that he needed to abandon disobedience, but he proved out the idea of obedience by doing this baptism by doing only the things that the father told him to do.
So he's modeling repentance and baptism for his followers. And then the fifth way is that there's this prophetic fulfillment. John the Baptist is the last of the Old Testament prophets. By allowing John to baptize him, Jesus affirms John's ministry and bridges the old and the New Testament fulfilling the prophetic tradition. So it's fitting, it's prophetically fitting. It's a moment that sits well in the Jewishness of Jesus, but there is this sense of like, man, it's just out of place. This, as I was thinking this morning about this scene, this is a picture of Hudson and Hudson spent a few years doing karate, and Hudson was very good at doing karate, and they would have a tournament every year, and as his dad, I would go and watch and there was usually three or four different areas where they would compete. And it was nice. There's a bunch of kids there getting to compete at different ages, and Hudson would win in each category, and there was a sense when he would come away carrying his trophies like this, and I'm walking him back to the car, it was like, I kind of feel proud, but I also kind of feel a little embarrassed.
And there is this moment with John and Jesus there where you're like, I don't know what to do with this. I don't know. I don't know what to do with this moment, but yes. Well, I'm going to put that next thought in my conclusion. Give me a second here to wrap up what happens because this is the part. So what we just covered is not in Luke, it's not in John's gospel, and it's not in Mark. Only. Matthew tells us about this little thing that comes up between John the Baptist and Jesus, where John's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on. This is not how it should be, right? But then this is where the story picks up. John Matthew three 16, when Jesus was baptized, he went up immediately from the water. The heaven suddenly opened for him. He saw the spirit of God descending like a dove coming down on him, and a voice from heaven said, this is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased. It's this beautiful moment that's like, it's a beautiful moment, and it's kind of like we've been talking about where the overheads over they wrap, they overlap.
There's this sense of mirroring that's going on because this like the heavens being rent open and God's speaking from heaven. This is what we can anticipate in the future. This was this moment here, but there's another second coming of Christ where God's going to speak from heaven. Heaven's going to completely invade what we know as real, and it's going to be just totally mind blowing, and it happens here for just a little glimpse. And this is what happens through the first all throughout. Jesus's first coming is these little moments where just heaven just breaks on the scene and it's like, whoa, where's the voice coming from? And you see this, the spirit of God is in the form of a dove coming down. Now, here's the thing. We have in our scene here, the spirit of God. We have God talking. We have Jesus. Do we have a better scripture that affirms the Trinity? It's passages like this that really force us to hold to a Trinitarian theology. In other words, we believe that God is one made up of three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And we see that here in our text. Alright, let's make some application from
This text to our life. There is sometimes Christians who are stuck and maybe they've been baptized, but they're stuck in the baptism of repentance. And I don't want to be mean, but they're kind of a downer and they've kind of conflated or confused the idea of that God can't endorse rejoicing or happiness. But true spirituality is expressed through mourning over your sin. And I've got to be always in this state of repentance and confession. And if I'm happy, it's inappropriate and they're stuck on a john's repentance moment. And yet Jesus shows up and there's this moment where the Father just is not tripping out on the whole repentance thing. It's like it's Jesus's moment. And I just want to encourage you with this text to embrace and allow God to bring you to the moment where Jesus shows up, where Jesus comes on the scene and is ready to take you from that place of mourning over your sin to the place of victory, to that place of victory, where it's like, yes, now is the kingdom moment.
Don't feel guilty when Jesus shows up. Don't feel like it's like, oh, I got to stay in the place of repentance and dourness and sadness, and I can't embrace the moment of Jesus coming on the scene. Let God have his moment in your life. This is an account of Jesus's life for his disciples. Those who choose to follow Jesus. Even the good guys, even the good guys don't always understand what it looks like for all righteousness to be fulfilled. But at the end of the day, we need to allow God's work to occur. Some of you, I know the challenges that you're facing and you're scared or you're disappointed and there are very real threats to your future and where you're at with your finances and all of those things. And I want to encourage you from this text to be a follower of Jesus and to let the moment that's appointed come in whatever way it comes.
There was a point for John and he did his thing, but then there's this point where Jesus shows up and it's like, wow, that's shocking. And it does have a little bit of a speed bump, but the right thing to do is like, okay, God, I'm going to let Jesus's agenda be carried out in my life. Amen. Lord, we do. We want to give you permission to work in our life and there's the normal course of events and there's the ways that things should be, and there's the safe way of doing our spirituality. And then you show up. And it may not be how we would have written the story, and yet you deserve to be the one that writes the story. You deserve to be the one that has the final say in our life. And so, Lord, we give you this week and we give you permission to work in our life, whether it's something that we would say, oh, that's bad news.
Or we would say, wow, that's really good. Lord, we give you permission to work in our life and to win. We believe that you have already accomplished the victorious work of the cross and the resurrection and that you've adopted us into your family and that you're leading us in triumph. And sometimes it doesn't look like that. But Lord, we choose this morning to trust that you are going to bring about the victory in our life. Help us God, to be patient and to occupy our place in the unfolding work of your kingdom in the world. Lord, we submit and surrender to you afresh. Lemme pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.