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Why was Jesus baptized? Seems contradictory, given what Christians are taught about baptism. But Joe explains why all baptisms would be meaningless WIHTOUT Jesus first being baptized.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. And if Jesus is sinless, why does he get baptized by John the Baptist and the Jordan? After all, John was out there preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins and Jesus had no sins for which he needed to repent. So on the surface, it’s baffling. Even John the Baptist is shocked to see Jesus coming forward to be baptized, saying, “I need to be baptized by you. And do you come to me? So what’s going on here? At the outset, I should say there are actually multiple good answers to this question, but that doesn’t mean that all of the answers preachers sometimes give are good ones. So we’re going to start by taking a look at some of the worst answers, and then we’re going to take a look at the good ones. Before we do that, I want to thank a bunch of the good ones who support me over at shamelessjo.com.
Your direct support helps keep this channel going. We couldn’t do it without you. So okay. One poor answer comes from Dr. Jonathan Pennington of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He says that when John the Baptist proclaims our need to repent for the kingdom of God is at hand, that this is a call to reorient our values, habits, loves, thinking, and behavior as disciples. So far, so good. But then he applies that need to Jesus himself, arguing that even Jesus has to repent, not in the sense of turning from sin, but in the sense of dedicating himself to follow God’s will fully on earth. But Jesus isn’t in need of repentance. Jesus is God and even as man, he perfectly fulfills God’s will, as we see in things like the finding in the temple nearly two decades earlier. When John’s out there in the desert proclaiming the need to repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand, Matthew’s clear that this is a message to prepare the way of the Lord, not a message that the Lord needs to repent.
Or take Sinclair Ferguson’s argument that the baptism of Jesus is about him being baptized into our sin.
CLIP:
You see what John is doing? He is baptizing Jesus with the very water into which those sins have been symbolically washed. And there’s a profound gospel message in this picture, isn’t there? And it’s profoundly theological too. It’s a picture of the gospel. Sinners washing away their sins into the water, but then Jesus himself being baptized with that sin polluted water. It’s as though the sins that have washed off these sinners have now washed over the person of the Lord Jesus. A staggering reverse of position is taking place here. What the reformers used to call the wonderful exchange. Jesus is being baptized into our sin so that we might be baptized into his righteousness. Sin-filled water pours over him. Cleansing grace flows over us.
Joe:
Now, Ferguson rightly sees that Jesus’s baptism in the Jordan is a prefigurement of his crucifixion. Jesus himself even refers to it as a sort of baptism in Luke 12. And we who are baptized, we’re baptized into Christ’s death, as St. Paul says in Romans chapter six. So far, so good. But Ferguson has a view of the cross called penal substitutionary atonement. And in this view, God treats the innocent Christ as guilty so that he can set the guilty sinners free. And so Ferguson is left arguing that Christ is being baptized into sin in some way. And to be sure, Christ does allow himself to be associated with sinners, but there is no hint anywhere in scripture that sin is being imputed to Christ in his baptism. There’s no anticipation of the Father pouring out divine wrath upon Jesus here. On the contrary, the heavens open up.
The Holy Spirit descends upon him like a dove and the Father declares, “This is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased.” Or to take a third example, here’s the explanation that RC Sproul gives for why Jesus was baptized.
CLIP:
Why? Because it is necessary for me to fulfill all righteousness. I don’t think there’s any more important text in all of the New Testament that defines the work of Jesus than this one. That Jesus was sent to fulfill all righteousness. And what that meant to the Jew was to obey every Jaw and tittle of the law because now Jesus is not acting in his baptism for himself, but for his people. And if his people are required to keep the 10 commandments, he keeps the 10 commandments. If his people are now required to submit to this baptismal ritual, he submits to it in their behalf because the redemption that is brought by Christ is not restricted to his death on the cross.
Joe:
Once again, this gets things half right. Jesus is baptized to fulfill all righteousness. That is absolutely correct. That is in fact the answer that Jesus gives. In sproll is right to see this as an expression of Jesus’ radical obedience to his father. He’s even right in seeing that this perfect obedience involves the keeping of the Mosaic law perfectly. But here’s the thing, Jews were not required by the Mosaic law or anything else to get baptized. So the mistake that Sproul is making is a common one. He’s turning baptism from a sacrament into a mere ordinance. Treating baptism as a work of the law as if Christ came to fulfill the Mosaic law only to give us a new legal code. I’m going to return to that point at the end, but I don’t want to just critique the views that I think are inaccurate. What does Jesus get baptized for?
What are the good reasons? As I’ve said, there are numerous good answers. And so even the inaccurate answers that we’ve seen so far are getting things half right. The problem is that they’re missing this bigger picture. For starters, Jesus is, as I said, submitting himself entirely to the Father’s will. That is certainly what it means to say that he’s fulfilling all righteousness, but he’s also inaugurating his public ministry. And also his baptism is in anticipation of his death. And also he’s allowing himself to be numbered amongst us sinners on his behalf he’s going to die. And also he’s being revealed as the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. And also he’s being revealed as the son of God in whom the Father is well pleased and also he’s prefiguring our own baptism. But there’s one reason that the early Christians return to over and over again, and that’s this, that he is baptized to sanctify the waters of baptism.
That is, Jesus isn’t just prefiguring Christian baptism, he’s making Christian baptism possible. Saint Maximist of Turin, who spread Christianity throughout Northern Italy in the 300s, put it like this. Someone might ask, why would a holy man desire baptism? Listen to the answer. Christ is baptized not to be made holy by the water, but to make the water holy, and by his cleansing to purify the waters which he touched. For the consecration of Christ involves a more significant consecration of the water. For when the savior is washed, all water for our baptism is made clean, purified at its source for the dispensing of baptismal grace to the people of future ages. Christ is the first to be baptized then so that Christians will follow after him with confidence. Jesus tells us that if we want to enter the kingdom of God, we need to be born again by water in the Holy Spirit.
And the early Christians recognized in that a clear reference to Christian baptism. John has the waters of the Jordan and in the baptism of Jesus, we see them united with the Holy Spirit who descends upon Jesus like a dove. This is crucial for understanding Christian baptism. Protestants and Catholics alike typically agree. John’s baptism is just a symbolic one. John has water, but he has no pretense about it being anything more than just a symbol. But in Acts 19, those who received this symbolic baptism of John have to be rebaptized with Christian baptism in order to receive the Holy Spirit. And Christians from the 100s, people like origin, point to this as clear biblical evidence that Christian baptism actually does something. John’s baptism is inferior precisely because in Christian baptism, we are being born again spiritually through the bestilling of the Holy Spirit. Now this union of water in the spirit is prefigured all over the Bible, going all the way back to Genesis one in which the spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters at the beginning of our first life biologically.
But I want to look at just one of the ways that baptism was foreshadowed. In Exodus, the Israelites passed through the Red Sea led by the pillar of cloud, but it is the Lord who is in the pillar of fire and of cloud. So it makes sense that St. Paul would see this later as a foreshadowing of baptism. The Israelites are being baptized into Moses by water, the sea and the spirit, the cloud. But as Maximus points out, it’s fitting then for the Lord to go first in this baptism in the Red Sea, the cloud goes in front. And similarly, it’s fitting that Jesus should go first in Christian baptism. So that’s what we find happening here. When the pillar of cloud went before the Israelites and Exodus, it wasn’t because God was trying to get out of there, he needed to flee Egypt. No, it’s because he was leading his people into the promised land.
And when Jesus goes before us in baptism, it’s not because he needs to repent or that he needs to be covered in sin, it’s so that he can lead us to the promised land. So that’s why Jesus is baptized, not because he needed it, but because we need it. Now you might balk. Ephesians two tells us we’re saved by faith and not by works. Jesus’ baptism must just be a symbol, just like our baptism is just a symbol. Baptism can’t save us. Our faith does. Trust in and baptism is trusting in a work. Well, if you click here, I explain in this video why that’s a misunderstanding of baptism and why I agree with St. Peter when he says that baptism now saves us. For shameless popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.