Monthly Archives: March 2023

THE BAPTISM OF JESUS

Bible Study, ,

THE BAPTISM OF JESUS

Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptised by John. But John tried to deter Him saying, “I need to be baptised by you, and do you come to me?” Jesus replied, “Let it be so now; it is proper for us to do this to fulfil all righteousness.” Then John consented. Matthew 3:13-15

Jesus made a cryptic statement when John refused to baptise Him: “Let it be so now; it is proper for us to do this to fulfil all righteousness.” Why did Matthew record this exchange between John the Baptist and Jesus?

Firstly, Matthew reveals that John knew exactly who Jesus was. John’s task was to go ahead of the Messiah and prepare the way for His coming. Unlike the citizens of Nazareth and even the religious leaders, John was not fooled by Jesus’ natural birth or humble upbringing. He took his rightful place before Jesus and wanted to defer to Him at this point.

Secondly, we need to unravel the meaning of His statement – fulfil all righteousness. In what ways did His baptism fulfil all righteousness? Righteousness is acting in oneness with the nature and will of God.

Baptism was an act of immersion in water – “The water of the mikveh is designed to ritually cleanse a person from deeds of the past. The convert is considered by Jewish law to be like a newborn child. By spiritually cleansing the convert, the mikveh water prepares him or her to confront God, life, and people with a fresh spirit and new eyes–it washes away the past, leaving only the future…

There is a second layer of meaning to mikveh. It marks the beginning of the ascent to an elevated religious state. This function of mikveh goes beyond the basic purpose of purification. Anthropologists refer to this threshold of higher social status as “liminality.” The person at this moment of transition is a “liminal” or “threshold” person. The liminal state is common to virtually all persons and societies, ancient and modern, and it marks a move to an altered status or to a life transition. Entering adulthood from adolescence, for example, requires a tunnel of time, a rite of passage, a liminal state that acknowledges by symbolic acts the stark changes taking place in one’s self-identity, behavior, and attitude…” http://www.myjewishlearning.com/life/Life_Events/Conversion/Conversion_Process/Mikveh.shtml

Baptism was Jesus’ initiation into His elevated role as a rabbi with authority – s’mikeh.

Baptism symbolised His identification with the human race He came to save. He chose to be completely human and not to function in any way as God so that He could qualify to be man’s substitute as a sin offering.

Baptism was His initiation into the priesthood and a new order – the order of Melchizedek. He became our never-dying high priest, able to sympathise with us in our weaknesses because He is one of us (Hebrews 4:16).

All these factors fulfilled God’s righteousness, Jesus doing the right thing to qualify as our perfect Saviour.

SUPERNATURAL HARVEST

Christian Life, ,

SUPERNATURAL HARVEST

Do you not say, “Four months more and then the harvest”? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest. John 4:35.

Imagine the disciples’ surprise, when they arrived back from the village of Sychar where they had gone to buy lunch, to find Jesus deep in conversation with a Samaritan woman. They were reticent to question Him. Instead, they urged Him to eat, but His mind was still mulling over the encounter He had just had with the woman and the stunning outcome it had produced. His response was almost as though He were talking to Himself. “Doing God’s will is more satisfying than just eating lunch,” He murmured.

In the meantime, the women abandoned her water jar in her haste to tell the villagers of her life-changing encounter with a Jewish rabbi who said He was the Messiah. Gone was her guilt, her shame, and her embarrassment in the presence of the other villagers. She sought them out, instead, to announce her discovery and to invite them to share her joy.

To His disciples Jesus proceeded to explain a spiritual principle that needs to be taken out of the context of a missionary appeal that we often put it into, and placed where it belongs – in the ordinary, everyday encounters that we have with people who, like the Samaritan woman, are thirsty for “living water” but are drinking at the wrong fountain. By offering her water that would forever quench her thirst, Jesus sowed a seed which, unlike natural seed, which takes time to mature into a harvest, had the power to produce new life within minutes.

In that one short encounter, a lonely, guilt-ridden woman was transformed into a new creation, forgiven, cleansed, and filled with joy, her thirst quenched and satisfied by a new love that would enable her to become a woman of dignity and beauty and a worshipper of the true God because she was fully accepted and loved by God.

Ephraim, the Syrian, in the 4th century, said, “Jesus came to the fountain as a hunter. He threw in the grain before one pigeon that He might catch the whole flock. At the beginning of the conversation, He did not make Himself known to her, but first she caught sight of a thirsty man, then a Jew, then a rabbi, then afterwards a prophet, last of all, the Messiah. She tried to get the better of the thirsty man, she showed her dislike for the Jew, she heckled the rabbi, she was swept off her feet by the prophet, she adored the Christ.”

How this should encourage us, who want to follow and imitate Jesus, to believe that the word of God, sown into the soil of the human heart, has the power to awaken desire and to produce a harvest of new life, not in “four months” but the moment that soul believes that Jesus is the Christ, Son of the living God.

MAKING OTHERS BIG

Christian Life, ,

MAKING OTHERS BIG

“Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.” Philippians 2:3,4.

What an unusual quality for believers to have in a world of arrogant pride and self-interest. According to Jesus, true greatness is to be found in humble service – making others big at our own expense. This is not the world’s way of achieving greatness. In the world, “greatness” is most often arrived at, either by climbing on other people’s heads, or by self-aggrandisement at the expense of others.

There is, in the Trinity, a beautiful picture of the perfect unity and harmony between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Each Person in the Trinity focussed on making the other two Persons big. As I read through John’s Gospel, for example, I am struck by Jesus’ passion to exalt His Father and the Holy Spirit. During an altercation with the religious leaders who accused Him of being demon-possessed (how they reached that conclusion one does not know), He vehemently defended His relationship with the Father.

“I am not possessed by a demon,” said Jesus, “but I honour my Father…” John 8:49.

Over and over again, He declared His submission to the Father and exalted both the Father and the Holy Spirit above Himself. And yet, when He was speaking of the Holy Spirit’s ministry to His disciples in the Upper Room, He assured them that the Spirit would exalt Him and teach them about Him. “He will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you.” John 16:14.

The Father, too, has elevated the name of Jesus above all other names and given Him the highest position heaven can afford. “Therefore, God exalted Him to the highest place and gave Him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” Philippians 2:9-11.

We not only have examples of the way the three Persons of the Trinity made each other big, but we also have the example of the human Jesus in the way He acknowledged people and treated them all, no matter whether they were good or bad, big, or small, with respect and dignity and made them big by accepting and acknowledging each person equally.

Since Jesus calls us to follow Him, and since God’s kingdom, alone, is eternal, and functions in the opposite way to the world, we, as followers of Jesus, can only find our true selves and true greatness in doing what He did. Even when He dealt with obvious “sinners” like the Samaritan woman, or the woman taken in adultery, no accusing word passed His lips, but love and acceptance that set them free.

INTRO-SPECTION OR “OUT”-SPECTION?

Christian Life, ,

INTRO-SPECTION OR “OUT”-SPECTION?

“Therefore, my brothers, be all the more eager to make your calling and election sure…” 2 Peter 1:10.

“Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves.” 2 Corinthians 13:5.

Introspection is something we are often urged from the pulpit to do. From a “western” way of interpreting the Beatitudes, for example, Jesus is seen as encouraging His disciples to keep looking inside, to be aware of how spiritually bankrupt we are, to mourn over our sinfulness and to hunger and thirst for righteousness as though it were a quality we don’t have and is just out of reach.

The verses I have quoted above, however, are not a call to introspection, but a reminder to be sure that we are “in the faith” and faithfully following our calling and election. 1 Corinthians 11:28 calls on those who participate in the Lord’s supper to examine themselves, not morbidly introspectively but to ensure that their attitude to fellow believers is right, recognising and acknowledging the “body of the Lord”, the church, lest they suffer the consequences of mistreating one another which was sickness and death.

As I read through the Old Testament, I often find the writer’s invitation to God to examine his heart. “Search me, O God and know my heart: test me and know my anxious thoughts…” David prayed in Psalm 139:23. God does not want us to spend our lives bewailing our sin and our human frailty. His desire is that we should experience His peace and joy as a witness to the miracle of His life that He has given us.

According to the Hebrew way of interpreting God’s word, the Beatitudes were Jesus’ reminder that true happiness comes from carrying out God’s desire for us to make other people’s lives better. His law, recorded in different places in the Old Testament, centred on worshipping God as their source and being merciful and generous to their fellow Hebrews and to the strangers who lived among them because God had been merciful and generous to them when they were slaves in a foreign land. God’s law was not intended to make them good but to set them free from greed and selfishness so that they could show the surrounding nations what God is like.

In the Sermon on the Mount, which many people claim to be their standard for living, even those who have never believed in Him, Jesus gives us a vivid picture of the character of kingdom citizens and the way they should live as members of the kingdom of God. None of the things He talks about are possible outside of the grace of His Spirit, empowering people to live in a way completely opposite to the ways of the kingdom of darkness.

The problem with introspection is that it focuses on the problem and sucks us into misery and despair. Rather, we change, not by looking within, but by looking at Jesus and doing what He did – loving and serving others.

GUILTY AS CHARGED

Apologetics, ,

GUILTY AS CHARGED

Again the high priest asked Him, “Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?”  “I am,” Jesus said. Mark 14:61b,62a

“Are you the king of the Jews? asked Pilate. “It is as you say,” Jesus replied. Mark 15:2.

There was a deep irony in Jesus’ trial. The religious leaders had both a reason and a motive for wanting to kill Him. For years they had hounded Him for healing people on the Sabbath. This was the worst form of sacrilege for them because the Sabbath was the sign of the Mosaic covenant (Exodus 31:14-17). To break the Sabbath was to cut oneself off from the blessings and privileges of the covenant. Jesus responded by claiming the right both to heal and to forgive sins on the Sabbath because He was the Son of God.

This enraged them even further because He was adding to His guilt of Sabbath-breaking, the sin of blasphemy, which was punishable by death, because He claimed to be equal with God. They thought they had a watertight case against Him. This may have been legitimate if the evidence did not point to the truth that He was the Son of God. Nicodemus, a Pharisee, was honest enough to recognise that He was special.

Their motive for wanting to kill Jesus was envy, according to Pilate (Mark 15:9, 10). Envy has a deeper connotation than coveting what someone else is or has. By His compassionate and merciful treatment of the people whom they despised because they thought they were better, Jesus had shown the religious leaders up for what they were, selfish, greedy hypocrites and they hated him for that. He challenged their idea of God by revealing the Father in His words and works and they wanted to silence Him.

As Jewish leaders, they could legitimately charge Him with blasphemy, but they could not execute Him. Only the Roman government could do that. The Sanhedrin tried Him for blasphemy, and He was found guilty on His own admission. The only problem was that He was found guilty because of their prejudice, not because they had examined the evidence. In fact, Jesus was guilty of the claim He had made, not of blasphemy, according to their interpretation, but of being the Son of God.

To pass the death sentence, Rome had to find Him guilty of treason – claiming kingship in opposition to Caesar. And so, He was sent to Pilate for his verdict. Once again Jesus himself admitted to His claim to be king of the Jews but not, as the Sanhedrin accused Him, to oust Caesar but king of the Kingdom of God. Not even Pilate bought into their lie, but he gave in to their demands to save his own skin.

Was Jesus guilty as charged? No. He was not guilty of blasphemy or treason according to the indictment of the Sanhedrin but, yes, He was guilty of the claims He had made. He is Son of God and He is king of the Jews!