Speaker 1: 0:06

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Pure Faith Podcast, a podcast where we discuss all things Bible. This is Mitchell. I'm Michelle. I did it backwards this time. You did I noticed we still have the same clothes on.

Speaker 2: 0:17

We do.

Speaker 1: 0:19

Oh no, so this is the final, well, not the final. This is the third of Mitchell's sermons that he gave at church at Living Waters Ministries here in our hometown. And, Mitchell, why don't you give us a background of this third one that you did?

Speaker 2: 0:32

So this is the second part of my two-part baptism that I was doing, and this one is this one will actually go into the actual baptism of Jesus and it focuses more on the same thing everybody focuses on when they talk about the baptism of Jesus why was Jesus baptized? So we go into that and I break that down into multiple questions that we then go through. As far as you know, obviously, the fact that Jesus was sinless, yes.

Speaker 2: 1:07

And then we go into some of the other stuff along those same lines. So this one I don't think was as exciting as last week's. My personal opinion.

Speaker 1: 1:17

I might agree with it, but it was still a great message and we did learn a lot from it.

Speaker 2: 1:22

So it isn't.

Speaker 1: 1:24

It's the important one as far as not all of your sermons can be exciting. Well, oh shoot, no, it was. It was very informational as well, and um, we hope that you enjoyed it as much as what we did um here at living waters and um, when mitchell gave gave the message to us.

Speaker 2: 1:43

So and here's the video. So, as I've already mentioned this week, when we talk about baptism again I know it's a big shock because I literally just said it, but first I'm going to go ahead and recap what we talked about a little bit last week and last week was. The big thing to take away from last week is we don't know where Jesus was baptized. It could have been anywhere, and that's kind of what we discussed different locations that Jesus could have possibly been baptized, anywhere, from Almagdus, which is just north of the Dead Sea, up to Jordanic, which is just south of the Sea of Galilee. And then the third possible location was north of the Sea of Galilee, in the region of Bethany, or possibly Baphonia, which would have been in the Old Testament, that would have been the region of Bashan. So we talked about those three locations. Again, we don't know where it actually was, but in the same sense, the few things that we do know for sure Is that Jesus was baptized in the Jordan River. He was baptized by John the Baptist and it most likely occurred in Bethany, across the Jordan. So those are the few things that we do know. So this week we're going to Go a little bit deeper into the actual baptism, a few reasons why Jesus was baptized, and we're going to start with that same Matthew that we read in Matthew 3, 13-17. This is the same verse that we read at the beginning of last week, so we're going to stay there. I will be talking a little bit about everything else that we read last week, so from John, but I'm not going to be reading it and we're not going to be looking in too many details, I'll just keep mentioning it in passing. So Matthew 3, 13 through 17,. This reads Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan, to John, to be baptized with him. John would have repented him saying I may be baptized by you if you come to me. But Jesus answered him Let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness. Then he consented and when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water. No-transcript.

Speaker 2: 4:26

Well, this week we're going to do mainstream. Why was Jesus baptized? This is the most common question you'll see asked everywhere If you look up the baptism of Jesus. Everybody talks about why was Jesus baptized and there's a lot of different reasons people have out there. And there's a lot of different reasons people have out there. I'm going to highlight a few, but the most obvious one is right in the text. It literally says it was fitting to fulfill all righteousness, so that Jesus was baptized to fulfill righteousness, okay. So what does that mean? So the definition that I always use for righteousness whenever it comes to the Bible is doing what is right in the eyes of God. So for John to baptize Jesus, it was right in the eyes of God for that to happen.

Speaker 2: 5:24

Well, this kind of leads into some of the more intricate reasons as far as why Jesus was baptized. Because, yes, okay, it was right in the eyes of God, but why was it right? So we're going to talk about a few of them, and I'll give you all three and then I'll go into detail about them. So the first one was the act of baptism was actually the act that started Jesus's public ministry. So that's the first one. The second one is it gave God the opportunity to allow the Holy Spirit to descend on Jesus like a dove and for God to proclaim this is my son, with whom I am well pleased. It's making that public pronouncement of who Jesus was. And then, third, it was a way for Jesus to associate himself with the sinners, because if Jesus was going to ultimately go to the cross to take all of sin upon himself, he first needed to associate himself with that sin. And so we're going to talk about all three of these, and the first one is the beginning of Jesus' ministry.

Speaker 2: 6:41

So something probably all of us know is that Jesus was roughly 30 years old when he was baptized, when he started his ministry. This is pretty common knowledge. Now there is argument over what year it may have actually been, but everybody agrees Jesus was about 30 years old. And the thing is we don't know much else about Jesus before this point, like his history from when he was born to his time of 30. Yes, we have his birth story and we have stories about when he was younger, but it's not necessarily about his life. They're about movements. You know, moving to Egypt because King Herod was going to kill all the kids two years and younger. So Joseph takes Mary and Jesus and goes to Egypt and then going back to Egypt because King Herod was going to kill the kids two years and younger. So Joseph takes Mary and Jesus and goes to Egypt and then coming back from Egypt, but they don't give us any details about his life, the only really detail we get about Jesus' life prior to this is in Luke 2, 41-52.

Speaker 2: 7:41

And this is the story of when Jesus was 12 years old and his family went to Jerusalem for the Passover. And his family left Jerusalem after Passover but Jesus wasn't with them, and so they actually traveled a whole day. Jesus wasn't with them. They get stopped that night, try to find Jesus. He's not there. So they have that Kevin moment from Home, alone. They're like, oh, we forgot Jesus. So they have to travel a whole day back to Jerusalem and then they spend a day finding Jesus. And that's where in Scripture, in this passage, it actually says that it took them three days to find Jesus. Well, they travel away. They travel back third day. They find Jesus. Where did they find Jesus?

Speaker 2: 8:27

In the temple, he was in his father's house. Well, what was he doing there? He was. It literally says he was talking and asking questions to the teachers. Who were the teachers? It was the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Sanhedrin. He was talking to these elites, members of the council, and he was asking them questions and talking to them. Well, it literally says that they were amazed at his understanding and his knowledge. So we know that at 12 years old, jesus was discussing with others scrolls, scriptures, the Torah. He was talking about this.

Speaker 2: 9:20

It would be very naive of us to think that, okay, after this maybe he didn't talk about it anymore. No, this was the Son of God. No, this was the Son of God. He knew he was the Son of God. He, and actually even in verse 52, so Luke 2, 52, it says Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man. So if it just said God, okay, maybe he was just learning on his own, you know, doing learning in his inner room, door locked. God can see what's happening there, but man can't. But no, this says and man. So this implies that he was going out, he was teaching, talking, maybe preaching. So that leaves the question okay, so maybe if he was doing all this stuff, what's the difference between that and his baptism, kicking off the beginning of his public ministry, when he was probably already publicly talking about scriptures and Torah?

Speaker 2: 10:24

Anyways, the difference is in the old tradition, in the old law, you had to be 30 years old in order to become a rabbi, a teacher, and at that point, that is when you can have disciples, you can have students, and in those days. Remember, this is a very oral tradition. So your students, they would follow you. They would literally just like we see the disciples following Jesus. That's the way it was for all kinds of rabbis. They would have disciples that would follow them and learn everything that this rabbi or teacher had to teach or to teach them, and they would soak it all in and they would memorize all this stuff and then eventually they themselves could become a rabbi and then pass that information on to the next generation. So it's a constant way of keeping that oral tradition accurate and true, and there's actually evidence that the oral tradition was very accurate throughout many years. So that was the difference between becoming a public minister or public rabbi as opposed to what he was doing before.

Speaker 2: 11:41

Because, like we talked about last week, we talked about, yes, this Matthew that I read today plus the John what was that about? Jesus was baptized. He immediately went up to the wilderness for 40 days to suffer the temptations of the devil. It comes back to where John the Baptist was. John sees Jesus as behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Okay, well, the next day he says basically the same thing. And Andrew and John, who would become the apostle, start following Jesus. Well, then, the day after that, nathaniel and Philip start following Jesus. So here we are.

Speaker 2: 12:30

Okay, jesus went out to the Lord for 40 days, he's back for a couple of days and he's got four guys following him. This is what it means, that he started his public ministry. But this is him being a rabbi. That's what it was about. And then he eventually got the 12. And I'll say at one point he probably had thousands of disciples and that's why he made the 12 apostles, which was a step above, because he had a lot of people that would follow Jesus to learn from him and they could have been considered disciples, but it was the apostles that were the 12 original disciples. Okay, let's see. Have you caught up with my notes?

Speaker 2: 13:16

So the next is the Holy Spirit descending and God proclaiming. So how awesome would it be if you're getting started public ministry, you get baptized and all of a sudden, everybody sees heavens open up and the Holy spirit come down and a voice from heaven saying behold, this is my son. I'm well pleased, and that'd be an awesome way to start a ministry, right? So that's kind of what what's happening here, and we talked, like last week, extensively about the location of Jesus being baptized. The truth is, it doesn't matter where Jesus was baptized at all, because no matter where it was, the same thing still happened. The spirit came down and God proclaimed that happened anywhere and no matter where it happened, the evil heard it.

Speaker 2: 14:17

So the devil, his evil minions, the demons, they heard this proclamation. Whether it was up north, in bashan, at the gates of hades, or down south at Al-Maktus, right north of the Dead Sea, anywhere in between, it doesn't matter, they still heard it. And as soon as they heard it I'm going to speculate here a little bit that's when they started planning to kill Jesus, like, oh, this is the son of God, he must die. Now, obviously, the devil, the demons, they can't physically do that on their own, but they can work through humans, and we see that happen through Caiaphas, through the Sanhedrin, through the Pharisees. The evil got in them and decided I mean, even with Judas Iscariot, evil got within them and was like okay, yes, he must die. They manipulated humans to make sure that happened. Now, granted, they probably didn't realize what they were actually doing, because if they would have known that, they never would have killed Jesus. That's a whole different story that we won't go down today. We won't have enough time for that.

Speaker 1: 15:43

Good.

Speaker 2: 15:46

Good, we won't so. And then the third one is the association with sinners. And this one, jesus himself, was sinless. We know this. I mean again, this is more mainstream common knowledge stuff. So it doesn't really make sense that for somebody who was sinless to be baptized with John's baptism, that was for the repentance of sins. There's no point in having sins forgiven if there's no sins to begin with. So it's obvious that the repentance of sins was no reason, or was not the reason Jesus was baptized.

Speaker 2: 16:30

However, something that we can do, that they could do at the time of Jesus' baptism, was to see the big picture. We see all of Jesus' life. We've seen everything that happened. We know how it ends. We know that Jesus eventually goes to the cross and that he takes on all of man's sins and was a once and last atoning sacrifice for all of our sins and then eventually took that place in the order of Melchizedek and was the high priest and split between us and God. He is our mediator. So we can see that now.

Speaker 2: 17:10

But then they didn't know that Mostly they didn't even realize Jesus was Messiah. So you have to kind of look at this in both ways. So in that point of view, us knowing what we know, then we kind of have to ask ourselves the question okay, well, jesus is being baptized in order to associate himself with the sinners, in order to prepare himself, because in order to take on all that sin, he had to prepare himself, I mean, and it didn't all happen at once, but the start of that preparation was baptism. Well, okay, so he got baptized, he associated himself with the sinners. So does that mean, when he went to the cross, that those that were not baptized in John's baptism, like they, were not saved? Well, no, well, yes and no.

Speaker 1: 18:16

But Close that rabbit hole.

Speaker 2: 18:23

Well, I need to scurry it for a little bit. Anyways, I want to take this question and turn it back on itself. So that question implies that we are bringing mankind up to Jesus' level. But no, that's not what it's about. It's about Jesus coming down to our level. So it's just the way of looking at it. So so Hold on. So, yes, it's not about the people that was being baptized, it's about the act of baptism itself. And what is baptism? What does baptism represent? The death, burial and resurrection. Okay, typically, the way we look at it today, it represents the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus on the cross. This is before Jesus was on the cross. Guess what? It still means the same thing. Baptism has been around a lot longer than Jesus and it has always, always meant death burial resurrection.

Speaker 2: 19:42

So let's go back to the flood. The flood was a baptism. It represented the death and burial of evil. During the flood, what does Scripture say? The world is full of evil, that there is only one righteous man in the world, noah and his family. So what does Jesus do? Noah builds an ark. Flood Kills everything. There's a baptism, there's a death and burial of the evil and the. A death and burial of the evil and the resurrection is the beginning of a new life, a new path for humankind. We can do the same thing with when Moses split the Red Sea. Same thing there was a death and burial of the life of slavery, of persecution from the Egyptians. They're walking through the Red Sea through that baptism and they're being reborn as a new nation, free of that slavery. Now, granted, they screwed things up pretty quick, so they had to go through 40 years in the wilderness, but then there was another baptism when they crossed the Jordan to go conquer Jericho. Again, there was a death and burial of their evil ways and now they were being reborn into a new life, the life in the promised land of Canaan.

Speaker 2: 21:18

There's been a lot of baptisms throughout history. It's just a lot of times in today's society, we just focus on the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus, which, yes, we should that is very important but realize there's a lot more history to that baptism, that idea of baptism, than just Jesus. So, with that said, there's something else we need to think about, especially when it comes to Jesus. Yes, he was baptized, and that was the beginning of his ministry, but then he was baptized again at his death. The beginning of Jesus' public ministry, there was a public baptism. At the end of his public ministry, there was a public baptism. First one was a baptism through water, the second one was a baptism through death, baptism through death. So again, each one represented a death and burial of a way of life and ushering in a new way of life. And both of them it's. You know, before Jesus, a lot of it was about the law, about structure, about all this other stuff.

Speaker 2: 22:43

Well, whenever Jesus went to his first baptism, what was Jesus' ministry about? It's about disrupting the common beliefs. Basically, it seems like his whole goal was to make the Pharisees mad Because ultimately they killed him. But he was constantly Going against the Pharisees. And again, there's so many different Scenarios we can talk through About the Pharisees. They do one thing. And Jesus says no, you're wrong. That's not what it means. This is how it should be done. That's what his whole ministry was about. Ultimately, it led to his death. What happens in his death? He dies on the cross, death, burial, resurrection. We kind of all know what that means, what that stands for, that's leaving the law behind and being reborn into a covenant of grace. So we probably don't need to talk too much about that.

Speaker 2: 23:42

But then the question becomes okay, well, what does all of this mean for us today? And to put it simply, jesus his first act in public ministry was to be baptized. When we accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, one of the first things we should do is be baptized. And there's a lot of people out there that think oh, you know, my life's a mess, I got a lot of sin, I did a lot of things wrong, I'm going to get my life straightened out and then I'll be baptized. No, that's not the right way to look at it. You should get baptized and then let Jesus help you work through all that other stuff. The most important thing is to be baptized. So don't wait to be baptized. Be baptized now and then something else. That kind of I don't know kind of weighs heavy on my heart.

Speaker 2: 24:44

For most of you that know, when I was, I came from the Catholic Church. In the Catholic Church, we believed in sprinkling babies for baptism. Well, first things first. The word baptism literally means submersion. It means being dunked under the water, and that is what a true baptism is. I'm not saying there's not cases where sprinkling can be used, but typically full submersion baptism is the proper way of being baptized.

Speaker 2: 25:19

Then, as far as being an infant, I mean, I give mom and dad credit. Yes, it was the right thing to do, especially in the Catholic belief, but that wasn't my decision. I did not choose God at that point. I did not choose to be baptized. That was the decision my parents made for me. So that was their decision, not mine. So actually, when I was, it was after the 2019 deployment, I think that's when I decided I really wanted to start doing Bible studies and stuff like that and I was going to start a family Bible study, and so I started a family Bible study. Very first thing I taught on was baptism, and at the end of that lesson it ended with me being baptized, and I had Paige and Michelle baptize me.

Speaker 2: 26:22

In a hot tub and I had Michelle there because, one, I didn't think Paige would be able to pull me up, but two, I didn't know if she would. We're still pretty early on in our marriage, so it may have been a way to get out of it pretty easy. So may have been a way to get out of it pretty easy. So I had Michelle's assurance to make sure I came back out of the water.

Speaker 1: 26:42

But in all, fairness, I don't think either one was really how it had to work.

Speaker 2: 26:47

Well, that's again. That's why I made sure I had two.

Speaker 1: 26:52

I'm not going to say it later. I'm going to say it later.

Speaker 2: 26:56

I was submerged it was all good, we're bringing it back. So, yeah, even though I was baptized as an infant, I felt a strong need to be baptized as an adult. I wanted it to be my decision, saying I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, that I wanted to make that public pronouncement, and so that's what I did. And I felt like before I started teaching, before I started doing Bible studies and stuff like that, I needed to do that, and so I just took it upon myself to give a lesson on that. That ended with me being baptized. But yeah, so it's kind of the same thing as in okay, well, I was baptized as an infant. If you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, and the only time you were baptized was as a young child and it wasn't your decision, make that decision and be baptized again here in a couple weeks and make that decision for yourself is what I'm trying to get at. I'm probably over time, I have no idea, but yeah, so all right, we'll end it there. Anybody have any questions?

Speaker 1: 28:20

Well, we really hope you enjoyed that sermon.

Speaker 2: 28:23

Stop it.

Speaker 1: 28:26

Oh, that was a great sermon there, Mitchell. Thanks for giving us that message.

Speaker 2: 28:31

It was full of words.

Speaker 1: 28:34

It was full of words, but informational words. So we thank you for joining us and we will see you again next time.

Speaker 2: 28:42

Have a blessed day everybody Bloopers.