Sermon: The Baptism of John

John the Baptist as the Forerunner and the Meaning of His Baptism

I don't mean by the fact that there have been Baptists who have argued, well, John was a Baptist so obviously we're right. That's generally not the best argumentation to use. But even in serious materials written on this subject, it does seem to me that especially amongst the Reformed, there is somewhat of a unwillingness to struggle with one reality and that is in historical Reformed theology, the immediate antecedent to their understanding of baptism today is circumcision under the old system.

And so they look at circumcision, they go circumcision is fulfilled in the New Covenant by baptism and circumcision was given to infants, it was a sign of the covenant and therefore the continuity argument is that that continues on into the New Testament as well.

But to do that, you have to skip over one troubling reality and that is you have this man named John and he is an interesting person, isn't he? And I don't just mean from the fact that we can look at his history, we can look at what little the New Testament tells us about him, his, his being born was supernatural.

I mean, his father is, received supernatural revelation in the temple concerning what his name was to be and what his function was to be, that's pretty unusual. And when Jesus addressed him, remember there are times he's, he's talking with Jews, when you went out to see John the Baptist in the wilderness, what did you expect to see?

Who was he? What was his function? And they didn't want to answer the question because they had rejected his message of repentance. Even when the scribes and Pharisees came, as we're going to see here in a moment, he rejected them because he was giving a baptism of repentance and they were unwilling to repent.

And as Jesus talked about John, he, he presents him as the last of the old, as the transitionary character preparing the way for the Messiah, and that's how John presents himself. And yet he practiced baptism.

And there really isn't any question, we will see as we read Matthew chapter 3, we will see that the form of the baptism is obvious. It was not sprinkling. And the subjects of the baptism is obvious. They were people who could repent of their sins.

They were people who could understand the message of repentance. And so that becomes the immediate predecessor to the act of baptism after the resurrection of Jesus and the proclamation of the gospel.

That's sort of important. You'd actually have to come up with an apologetic to say, well, yeah, okay, that's what John was doing, but we need to do something completely different than what John was doing.

That's generally not part of the conversation. It needs to be. So let's look at Matthew chapter 3 and see what it has to say. Now in those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the wilderness of Judea, Judea saying repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

For this is the one referred to by Isaiah the prophet saying, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, make ready the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Now John himself had a garment of camel's hair and a leather belt about his waist and his food was locusts and wild honey.

Then Jerusalem was going out to him and all Judea and all the district around the Jordan and they're being baptized by him in the Jordan River as they confess their sins. But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, you brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?

Therefore bring forth fruit in keeping with repentance and do not suppose that you can say to yourselves, we have Abraham for our father, for I say to you that God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.

And the ax is already laid at the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown in the fire. As for me, I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I and I am not fit to remove his sandals.

He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire and his winnowing fork is in his hand and he will thoroughly clear his threshing floor and he will gather his wheat into the barn but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.

The Baptism of Jesus and the Trinity Revealed

Now let's just stop there for a moment because I want to go ahead and read about the baptism of Jesus, too, because it's very important to add to this. Let's just make sure we note a few of the important aspects of what we see here, okay?

So John the Baptist, we already had his story given beforehand, you get Luke gives us information and remember Elizabeth and the baby leaping in his womb, we don't have time to go through all of that today.

John has entered into his ministry, he comes and he's preaching in the wilderness of.

Judea.

This is a time where prophecy has ended, even the Jews recognize the next thing on the prophetic calendar is the Messiah. And so there's lots of speculation, there's already been many false prophets who have come claiming to be the Messiah.

And of course there's difficult times under the Roman occupation at this time. And so here he comes and he has a message, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. So there's an eschatological element, the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

It's not something that's thousands of years down the road, it is at hand now. And so you need to repent, you need to be made right with God. And he does not limit to whom he gives this message because we know from elsewhere in the Gospels what ended up leading to his demise.

He gave that message of repentance even to the most powerful men. Powerful men who had engaged in sin in their lives and had the ability because of their power to have him executed and eventually they did.

He did not hold back from calling even the most powerful political figures to repentance in light of what God's law says is true and honest and just. So he is the one referred to in Isaiah chapter 40, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, make ready the way of Yahweh, make his paths straight.

And so there is this proclamation. And it's so easy for us to say, well Yahweh in the sense of, yes Yahweh is sending his Messiah and so on and so forth. But given the fact that the New Testament writers are going to identify Jesus with that divine name over and over again, we dare not just simply gloss over it.

There is a proclamation that the covenant God of Israel was in some sense coming. And he did come in a way that was far greater than anyone could begin to imagine. And so here is the beginning of unfolding of prophetic fulfillment here in the forerunner of Jesus in John.

Now John is not trying to get in with the Jewish leaders. He wears a garment of camel's hair. You do realize they didn't have deodorant back then, right? Can you imagine what John out there, now John did get in the water a lot.

I suppose that did help some. But I really doubt that John was, I bet you John was a nodiferous fellow. Especially with that leather belt about his waist and eating locusts and wild honey. Now I don't know about you, I'm starving before I'm eating a locust.

I'm going down, just go ahead and bury me. I ain't going there. I know the elites today want to start feeding us solely on crickets and locusts and grasshoppers and insects and stuff like that. That's what Bill Gates wants for you.

But his food voluntarily was locusts and wild honey. I can do the wild honey part. That's, I've got a sweet tooth, that's good stuff, but not with locusts in it. So he is not seeking to fit in. He is, however, walking very much in the pattern of the Old Testament prophets.

You think of an Elijah and Elisha here, don't you? And so he is preaching repentance, Jerusalem is going out to him and all Judea and all the district around the Jordan River and they're being baptized by him in the Jordan River as they confess their sins.

So there really isn't any basis for arguing that this is immersion in the waters of the.

Jordan River.

He does not have a bunch of pots set up on the shore and he's dipping his hands in and going ding, ding, ding, ding on people as they go by. They're going down into the river, we're going to see this in Jesus' baptism.

That's why he has to be there. He has to be in a river where there is sufficient water to bring about immersion. This has never really been an argument in the history of the church and it doesn't need to be an argument today.

This was the normative mechanism of baptism. But please notice it is a baptism of confession of sin. As they confess their sins. This wasn't just simply I am associating myself with a particular people or a particular movement.

There is a recognition of sin on the part of the individuals who go down into the water and are baptized by John. This is also clearly seen in what happens after this because the Pharisees and Sadducees come and John is not exactly overly politically sensitive in his response to them.

You brood of vipers who warned you to flee from the wrath to come. Now everything that John says is eschatological judgment language. If we haven't spent enough time in Matthew chapter 24, hopefully you see the connection between Matthew chapter 3 and if you don't, Jeff may go back and do it again just to make sure that you get it.

Okay, don't make him do that.

All right?

All of the wrath to come has a fulfillment in what we are going to see later in the gospel of Matthew. But please notice what he says to them. Bring forth fruit in keeping with repentance. Bring forth fruit.

This isn't an infant baptism. This is exactly the same thing you would expect. When we look at the commands of Paul in regards to partaking of the Lord's Supper, examination of oneself. These are actions of individuals who can hear the truth of God and act in response to it.

That is what John is saying to them. And do not suppose you can say to yourselves, we have Abraham for our father, for I say to you that God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Evidently, there were people who were trusting in their covenant relationship and having received the covenant sign of circumcision.

And John says, hey, God can raise up children to Abraham from rocks, dude. God is concerned about the heart. God is concerned about what's going on in here. The ax is already laid at the root of the trees.

This is judgment language. Judgment is already coming. Every tree, therefore, does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. As for me, I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, and I am not fit to remove his sandals.

He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. He will baptize you. He will immerse you with the Holy Spirit and fire, and his winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will thoroughly clear his threshing floor, and he will gather his wheat into the barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.

That is all judgment language. That is judgment language. This isn't meek and mild Jesus holding the little lamb in his arms. This is the one who is going to separate the wheat and the chaff, and there is unquenchable fire reserved for those who are not his wheat, his people.

He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire. This is part of the message of John the Baptizer. So in the midst of this, Jesus arrived from Galilee at the Jordan coming to John to be baptized by him.

Now think about that. You can see why John, you know, we could go over to the Gospel of John, and we know that when John comes, when Jesus comes to John in the Gospel of John, he has already said this is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

He knows who Jesus is. He's known since he was a baby in the womb, in one sense. So John tried to prevent him saying, I have need to be baptized by you, and do you come.

To me?

So John recognizes who Jesus is. And John, understanding the prerequisite of his baptism, which is repentance from sin, John says, I'm the one that needs to repent of sin in light of who you are. But Jesus answering said to him, permit it at this time, for in this way it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.

Now some people would like to say, well, this means Jesus was admitting his sin. There's nothing about Jesus admitting sin. But there is something about Jesus identifying with those who repent of their sins.

There is something about Jesus identifying with those people there in Israel who were recognizing the appropriateness of what it means to be righteous, and the message of John the baptizer. And so he says, permit it at this time.

He doesn't say, oh no, I have sins to be forgiven as well.

No.

Permit it at this time, for in this way it is fitting, it is proper for us to fulfill all righteousness. And then he permitted him. And after being baptized, Jesus went up immediately from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove and coming upon him.

And behold, a voice out of the heavens saying, this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. Now obviously, we could do more than one sermon simply upon looking at how each of the Gospels records this event.

We could, and the Puritans would, do months worth of sermons, and not really in an appropriate.

Way.

This is one of the most important texts in the New Testament. It is one of the most important revelations of the nature of God, of God's purposes. But what I want us to see briefly for now is not only the clear differentiation of Father, Son, and Spirit that is inherent here, and this is the same Gospel, where at the end of the Gospel, how are we to be baptized?

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Here is the Father speaking from heaven. The Son is the one being baptized. The Holy Spirit descends as a dove. And so here you have one of the most important texts in all of Scripture, and certainly in the understanding of Christian people down through the centuries, in regards to the nature of baptism that also reveals the nature of our triune God.

And so you have a voice coming out of the heavens saying, this is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Here you have the divine announcement, certainly something that John was already aware of, but now is more greatly confirmed in his understanding of.

But now to those that are there, you have this announcement from heaven of the identity of the one that John says is going to bear the sins of the world. This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.

This is not the divine part of Jesus speaking to the human part of Jesus. This is a misunderstanding. A lot of people struggle with the doctrine of the Trinity. Instead, you clearly have only one covenant God of Israel, but here you have the Father speaking to the Son, and the Spirit descending as a dove out of the heavens.

The baptism of Jesus was clearly a baptism of immersion. It says right there, Jesus went up immediately from the water. It does not say he had a few drops on his head. He had gone down into the water, he comes up out of the water, and as he comes up out of the water, the heavens are opened, and you have this incredible event taking place, demonstrating who he truly is, and giving divine authority to his proclamation and to his ministry.

And this is seen publicly. But may I say something just in passing? Do you remember that brief little comment later on in the Gospels, where John sends some of his disciples after he's been put in prison?

His numbers have done this. Jesus' numbers have done this. And now he's in prison, and he knows that his life could end any day. And in that context, he sends some of his disciples to Jesus, and he asks the question, are you the one we should be looking for?

Or should we look for someone else? And we might say, oh, poor John. How could he have forgotten what he heard at Jesus' baptism? How could you have this happen? You must remember, Jesus' response is to point to passages of Scripture that the Jews had not emphasized as being identification markers of the Messiah.

Many of the Jews expected a Messiah who would be a military conqueror. And when Jesus sends the men back, he does so by pointing them to fulfillment Scriptures that show a different aspect of the Messiah's ministry, to confirm John in his continued faith.

But the thing to remember is, it can be difficult to be alone in prison. It can be difficult to face your own mortality. And John, even someone as special, as chosen by God as John, could need encouragement.

If he could need encouragement, so do we. So do we. Now, as far as baptism is concerned, what we have here is the forerunner of Jesus calling people to repentance from their sins and baptizing them by immersion upon their profession of repentance of sin.

And this is the one who is preparing the way for the Messiah. All right? So far we have, therefore, further evidence. I'm going to remind you very briefly, we've looked at the meaning of the word. It's been a few months since we did so, but we've looked at the meaning of the word and we've established the fact that the normative meaning of the term is to immerse something into something else.

And any meanings of sprinkling or anything like that are extensions, not the normal core meaning of the word. And so as we look at John's baptism, we see what we will be doing in a few weeks. Luke just mentioned we have a baptism service coming up.

Right now, there's no water back there, but there will be then. And if it's as hot then as it is now, we won't have to worry about anyone shivering this time around because there's no such thing as cold water coming out of the ground during this time of the year in Phoenix.

But we have to put enough of it in there to immerse. Secondly, we see that in John's situation, he is not indiscriminately giving this particular action to anyone based simply upon their parents, their genealogy.

There is no evidence of infant immersion in the Jordan. There is nothing here about joining a covenant community. There is something very much about repentance of sin. There is a recognition, bring forth fruit of repentance.

There is a message that precedes and then gives meaning to the action, just as there is in the supper and just as there is in Christian baptism. It is not, come and be baptized and I hope someday you will repent.

No, that is not what John is doing. Pretty straightforward. Are we done? No, not quite yet. Because one thing that is frequently missing, and like I said, we could spend a tremendous amount of time looking at the parallels and some of the Old Testament fulfillments, but the one thing that I almost never hear anyone talking about is this.

When you think of John's baptism, do you think about the fact that in one place in Scripture we are told that it wasn't just John that was doing baptism? Turn with me to Gospel of John chapter 4. Gospel of John chapter 4.

Now, when you think of the Gospel of John, you think of chapter 4, the first thing that crosses your mind is, okay, chapter 3 was Nicodemus, born again. Chapter 5 is going to be the relationship of the Father and the Son.

Oh, chapter 4 is the woman at the well, Samaria. Oh, yes, okay. That's true. But there's something that very often doesn't get looked at. John chapter 4 verse 1. When therefore the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John.

Did you catch that?

Making and baptizing more disciples than John. Now, lest there be some confusion here, there's a parenthesis, a parenthetical statement. Although Jesus himself was not baptizing, but his disciples were.

He left Judea and departed again into Galilee, and he had to pass through Samaria, so he came to the city of Samaria called Sychar, etc., etc. And so normally what happens is we read this. This is sort of just a background statement, and it gets swallowed up as part of the geographical, this is why Jesus decided to go do what he was going to do at the time he did it, and we really don't give thought to it.

And maybe we do catch and think about, Huh, I wonder what it must have been like to be John. You're the forerunner. You're sent to do this. But you're sent to point your disciples to somebody other than yourself.

And so how many times was it that people came to John and said, Well, what about, should we all just go to Jesus? Should we all just become disciples of Jesus? We're really not sure. And in the back of our minds we remember, yeah, over in the book of Acts, far, far away in Ephesus, Paul encounters decades later disciples of John.

I mean, he had a big ministry. But a lot of those people had traveled, maybe on pilgrimage to Jerusalem or something like that, heard the message of John. They're baptized. He gives them some instruction.

Years later, they're still being faithful someplace else. Isn't that amazing? But we sort of just put that off. But I want us to think about something. Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John.

Although Jesus himself was not baptizing, but his disciples were. Now, it's interesting. I remember very clearly this was back before the Internet. Some of you are going, Stories from ancient church history from Uncle Jimmy, yay.

But we used to have something called bulletin board systems, BBS, where I was very much involved in what was called the Mormon Echo, the Mormon Echo. And this is where you could have conversations between Christians and Mormons.

You would write something, and you'd send it off in these mail packets, and they'd promulgate between different computers around the world. And then they'd write responses, and it would eventually come back to you.

And sometimes it could come back to you the same day. Sometimes it might be two or three days later. It depended on how the routing was done and everything else. And it was done on, literally, when I first started on the Mormon Echo, I had a 1 ,200-baud modem, lightning fast.

Some of you are going, I have no idea what that means. Remember dial-up? Dial-up was fast in comparison to 1 ,200-baud modems, I can assure you. But I got into a conversation with a really intelligent, well-read Mormon.

And one of the arguments he made was based on this text. Because in the King James Version, it says something along the lines of, although Jesus himself was not baptizing, but his disciples. It doesn't have the word were.

And he was making the argument that Jesus was actually baptizing, and he baptized the disciples. And he was making a connection to the priesthood argument and all the rest of these things. It was order of priesthood and all the rest of this stuff.

And I remember pointing out to him that in the original language, his disciples in Greek are in the nominative form. If his disciples were the ones being baptized, they'd be in the accusative form. So his interpretation, based upon the ambiguity of the King James English, was impossible in light of the original language.

And the thing I liked about this guy, I think he's passed on since then, unfortunately. But the thing I liked about him is he actually went to a BYU professor and said, I can't check what this Christian guy is saying out.

Is he right? And the professor looked at him and said, yep, he's right. And here was a Mormon that was willing to come out publicly and say, I've made this argument. I was wrong. Doesn't mean that you're right about everything else about Mormonism, but I was wrong.

That was, I don't know, that was back when, I guess that was the beginning of social media. But, I don't know, things were just different back then. And people were actually willing to admit the truth when they saw it.

Jesus was not doing the baptizing. But his disciples were. What did that look like? I've not seen anywhere in the New Testament where we have an example of the disciples doing baptisms and what prompted people to be baptized by the disciples of Jesus.

But if they're making and baptizing more disciples than John, there can be no question as to the substance of what was being preached and what people would understand they were doing when they were being baptized.

In other words, what we see here is the disciples are immersing people in water in the same way that John was immersing people in water, and he was doing it for repentance. And he was doing it, what we would call, for adults.

Doesn't mean that there weren't 13-year-old boys. I mean, you know what a bar mitzvah is, right? Bar mitzvah, son of the commandment. Thirteen years of age, you're considered basically to be an adult, to be responsible for keeping the Torah.

And so there may have been younger people who repented of their sins. But there was no one going down to that water with a baby and sprinkling water on the head of that baby. That's not what John was doing.

And so that means that's not what the disciples of Jesus were doing either. They are immersing people for repentance. And they're doing it with such regularity and for such a period of time that they are gaining more disciples and baptizing more disciples than John the Baptist, who had so many disciples that decades later Paul runs into him in Ephesus.

So there isn't a whole lot of emphasis put upon it in the New Testament, but the reality is this wasn't just something they did for a couple days for the fun of it and then went off to do something else.

The Continuity Argument, Calvin, and Paedo-Baptist Objections

Why am I emphasizing this? Well, let's think about it together. When we have our discussions with our dear Pado-Baptist brethren, the argument is almost always, well, you go from circumcision to baptism.

And therefore you define this in light of the parameters of this. So since circumcision was done to these people in this context, then even though the normative experience in the New Testament text, in the book of Acts, is of adult baptism by immersion in water upon profession of faith, the argument is, but that's only at the beginning the normative view is going to change.

After the time of the apostles, once you get the church going, once you get generations going, then it's going to go back to the old way of it being primarily a covenantal progression type thing, a continuity of covenant relationship.

That's the argument. Heard that argument made this week? Pretty much heard that argument made every week, come to think of it. And if you wanted to, on Facebook, you could hear it pretty much every hour.

If you really, really wanted to do that, you could never sleep again and still run into it in that way. But here, doesn't it seem rather obvious to all of us that if the question is, what kind of baptism did the apostles of Jesus teach after the resurrection of Christ?

What did they practice? Some might say, well, those initial experiences on Pentecost are unusual. The church has not yet been fully established. There is going to be a period of miracles and stuff like that.

And that's true. I'll admit that. That's true. But shouldn't the first question across our mind be, well, what was the last thing that the apostles did in regards to baptism that we know of in Scripture?

And the answer to that is almost never, oh, they were baptizing people upon their confession of their sins. And they were doing it regularly during the ministry of Jesus. Because all of a sudden, what you have to say is, yeah, that's what they were doing, but they stopped doing that.

Or if they continued doing that, they knew that that was not going to be how it was going to be in just a few generations down the road in the church. In almost any other situation, if we didn't have, let's just be honest, if we didn't have all the traditional energy and emotion that is attached to this subject, we'd stand back and we'd go, you know, it seems really significant that when we look at the baptism of John and we look at the baptism being performed by the disciples of Jesus, these are the immediate predecessors.

And here in the Gospel of Matthew, where you have this baptism going on in Matthew 3, here in the Gospel of John, you have this baptism going on in John chapter 4, Jesus is going to send out the disciples and say, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

What is the natural conclusion that you would draw from that? What we would say is that, well, absent any compelling argumentation and examples that could be given to us from some other source, the normative way of thought would be there's going to be consistency.

There's going to be consistency. If the text, if Matthew has used baptizing in one part of his Gospel, then he gets to the end and he doesn't tell us, oh, by the way, this is something different, we're going to do it differently, we're going to have different people that are this object, he doesn't do that.

He's built up an understanding and he just continues on. That would normally be how we do things, but this is why we as Baptists can read our Pado-Baptist brethren and learn so much and have so much deep fellowship and so much agreement.

But I have said since my seminary days that when I first read, unlike Brother Jeff who keeps saying, I'm not going to read Calvin, I keep saying, read Calvin for crying out loud. When I first read the Institutes of the Christian Religion, my commentary was that the ink smudged.

It wasn't because I bought a cheap edition of the Institutes. It's because it seemed so new, it seemed so up to date. I mean, the man could write in a way that remains relevant centuries after he's dead.

I can't do that. That's an incredible skill. And so I read Book 1, oh, wow, so challenging. Book 2, oh, yes. Book 3, ah. Then you get to Book 4. And yeah, there's still lots of good stuff in Book 4, but then it's sort of like clank.

It's like something changes. And what changes is where Calvin presents his doctrine of baptism. And I won't go back over it right now, but you can go back and you can listen to the presentation I made in my debate with Greg Strawbridge, Dr. Strawbridge, a number of years ago in Florida.

But I made the argument that Calvin presented a new understanding of baptism that no one before him had ever held. That does not mean that there were not people who did not hold elements of it, but as Calvin enunciated and defended it, it was a new belief.

It was not what the early church taught. It was not how the early church viewed infant baptism. It was a theological novum, and it was derived from the context in which he lived. In other words, there was a traditional content and an emotional connection to a practice that now had become universal in the church for over a thousand years.

And we cannot dismiss that. And I simply say to my Paedo-Baptist brethren, how do you know that when you come to these texts, you are not allowing that emotional connection that you have to cause you to not see that this should be John's baptism, its methodology, who it's aimed to, the disciples of Jesus doing the same thing, and then the examples we're going to see in the book of Acts, they are consistent all the way through.

Shouldn't that override any analogy that you might try to come up with from another perspective? On any other subject, if it was in the atonement, if it was about the resurrection, if it was about other subjects in biblical theology, we would be agreed on that, but we're not here.

I'll never forget, I was sitting right over there, in this room, in this church, in 1995. I did a debate on baptism in 1995, and our table was over here, and the Paedo-Baptists were over there. And at one point in the closing statements, a well-known Paedo-Baptist scholar, some of you may have read some of his books, it was a part of that debate, very clearly demonstrated exactly what I'm talking about right now, because in frustration at being pressed about the New Testament examples, he presented a, but what am I supposed to do with my children?