Jesus, the Spirit Baptizer

Creation according to John

Last week, we looked at the opening prologue to the gospel of John and we saw this very cosmic view of Jesus Christ as the Word who is the creator of life, there at the beginning even before time and space. And we can clearly see that this first chapter of John was meant to parallel the first chapter of Genesis. In fact, they begin with the exact same three words “In the beginning...” which is probably the most recognizable start to any book in the English language. But that is not the only similarity because right after that John talks about the fact that the life that Jesus lived in perfect obedience to the Word of God was meant to be the light to all men. As you many know, the first thing that God created in the physical universe was light because without light, there is no way to create or sustain life. In the same, way the light of Jesus Christ was meant to create and sustain new spiritual life. And in both and , we can further see this parallel because both chapters of the Bible chronicle the activity of God in the first week, both in the old creation and the first seven days of the new creation. And we read about the first day of the new creation beginning at :19.

John 1:19–34 ESV

And this is the testimony of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?” He confessed, and did not deny, but confessed, “I am not the Christ.” And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” He said, “I am not.” “Are you the Prophet?” And he answered, “No.” So they said to him, “Who are you? We need to give an answer to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” He said, “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’ as the prophet Isaiah said.” (Now they had been sent from the Pharisees.) They asked him, “Then why are you baptizing, if you are neither the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?” John answered them, “I baptize with water, but among you stands one you do not know, even he who comes after me, the strap of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie.” These things took place in Bethany across the Jordan, where John was baptizing. The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks before me, because he was before me.’ I myself did not know him, but for this purpose I came baptizing with water, that he might be revealed to Israel.” And John bore witness: “I saw the Spirit descend from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but he who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, this is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ And I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God.”

John 1:19-

Day one begins with the testimony of John the Baptist. Day 2 is when John recognizes Jesus as the Lamb of God. Day 3 is when Jesus calls Andrew and Peter. Day 4 is when Jesus calls Phillip and Nathanael. Days 5, 6, and 7 lead to Jesus first miracle at the wedding of Cana. The first 4 days of Jesus’ ministry of re-creation are marked by the statement, “the next day” found in verse 29, 35, and 43, then chapter 2 concludes this first week with the phrase “on the third day there was wedding at Cana”. Whether John intended to or not, the Holy Spirit inspired him to mark out the first seven days of Jesus’ ministry, from the witness of John the Baptist to his very first miracle, because these events would lay down the foundation for God’s work of renewing life.

And in the passage that we read this morning, we see the first two essential steps to the renewal of our lives:

John 2:1 ESV

On the third day there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there.

1. Beholding Jesus Christ as the Lamb of God

2. Receiving Jesus’ baptism of the Holy Spirit

Jesus the Lamb of God

Knowing that there is this parallel to adds far more significance to the beginning chapters of John. In fact, the entire narrative of the first three chapters is about Jesus renewing the work of creation beginning with the renewal of human life. (Hence the name of our series, Christ Our Life) Jesus came to reverse the effects of sin as the first step in redeeming and renewing the most important part of God’s creation, you and I. As I shared last week, humans are the crown jewel of God’s creative work largely because we are the only beings that have been made in the very image of God. This is why there is such a large gap between us and our next closest relative, the chimpanzee. And this quantum leap in evolution cannot be explained scientifically because the answer doesn’t lie just in our genetic code. Any biologists that tells you that monkeys and humans are not that different beyond our genes is delusional. We went from grunting and howling to creatures that have harnessed the power of atoms, explored the vast reaches of space, and control the fate of the planet that we live. We have become god like in our dominion of this earth. And that is exactly where the problem lies. We have been given the potential for great good but also the capacity for unthinkable evil.

I think we can safely say that all of the problems in creation began with the fall of man and it continues today because of human sin so it makes sense that the solution to restoring this broken world is dealing with the issue of our sin. And this is exactly what Jesus came to do. John the Baptist declares Jesus to be the Lamb of God who has come to take away the sin of the world. If you are not familiar with the system of offerings described in the Bible, oftentimes animals, like a newborn lamb, were sacrificed as a way to atone for their sin but it was understood that this was a temporary agreement until God could permanently deal with the problem of man’s sin. As the last of the OT prophets, John the Baptist believed that Jesus was God’s answer for sin, that he would permanently take away the sin of the entire world.

John 1:29 ESV

The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!

Those of us who have been in the church awhile can easily take this statement for granted. This is an astonishing claim especially if you think about all of the evil, all of the violence, and all of the pain and suffering that is in our world. And to believe that one man will take all of this away requires a step of faith. Every little thing that we do makes some sort of impact on the world. I’ve shared before that my daughter after a hard day at school asked me why Adam and Eve had to sin and ruin our lives. It’s so easy to read the story of original sin and put all the blame on the indiscretion of two people but I think there is an adult way to understand the story of the Fall and that is simply, every sin that is committed, big or small, has greater impact than we realize. The Bible is the classic example of the Butterfly Effect made famous by Edward Lorenz who was a meteorologist who asked the question “Can the flap of a butterfly wing cause a hurricane somewhere in another part of the world?” And more than just being a mere philosophical question, the answer to this question is rooted in science and not surprisingly, it has been shown that what seems to be insignificant events can have catastrophic consequences. So it is altogether plausible that what appears to be a small matter of eating a piece of forbidden fruit has led to all this trouble that we see. And I don’t want you to feel bad but you and I have no idea how much our sin has impacted the world that we live.

People are so caught up in the unfairness of eternal death and hell being the consequence of sins that we don’t stop to think about the unpredictable cascade of events that were a result of minor things we’ve done. It is like the story of the teenager who started the Eagle Creek fire because he was playing with fireworks which happen to be against the law in that part of the country. In the end, the fire burned nearly 50,000 acres, destroyed 400 homes, and caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. The judge fined the teenager $36 million for essentially lighting some fireworks. Fair or unfair, that was the cost of that young man’s indiscretion. Now, I’m sure that you and I have done far worse than lighting a bottle rocket against the law and just because we don’t know the ultimate consequences of our sin, doesn’t mean that God can’t hold us accountable for it.

Let me bring this home a little bit closer. For a period of year or so, I was really into online poker for real money and I knew this was against the moral code that I had agreed to as a pastor. But even when the warnings came from my bank that these gambling sites were being sourced by offshore banking entities that may have links with terrorists, I continued to play even though I felt pretty guilty. I had a picture of Jesus in my office at the time and I would take it down whenever I would start gambling. Eventually, I stopped but when ISIS began its reign of terror, I couldn’t help but wonder “Is some of my money tied into funding those weapons that they are using?” Our sins are far more serious than we could imagine and more damaging than we would even dare to admit. This is why we so desperately need a Savior, one that can take away our sins along with the sins of the world. One day, because of what Jesus has done, we will live in a world without sin and the dawn of that day begins right here with our own redemption from sin.

Admittedly, it is hard to imagine how the death of one man in history could change the destiny of the world forever but this seemingly insignificant event has led to immeasurable good. Jesus’ death on the cross is the permanent solution to sin and His resurrection is the proof that the ultimate consequence of sin, which is death, has been overcome! Jesus is the Son of God who was slain as the Lamb of God and raised to newness of life so that those who believe in his message would enjoy the renewal of life, now and forever. Hence the main theme of the gospel of John, which is given to us at the end of the book.

Jesus’ death on the cross is the permanent solution to sin and His resurrection is the proof that the ultimate consequence of sin, which is death, has been overcome! Jesus is the Son of God who was slain as the Lamb of God but raised to newness of life so that those who believe in his message would enjoy

Hence the main theme of the gospel of John, which is given to us at the end of the book.

Hence the main theme of the gospel of John, which is given to us at the end of the book.

John 20:31 ESV

but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

Jesus came to do more than simply help us with our problem of sin, he came to give us a new kind of life, a divine life, a life that that has been given to us from above. If we stopped at the first point, we would have what Dallas Willard calls the gospel of sin management, which primarily focuses on the forgiveness of sin and getting into heaven after you die. These are obviously important things but they are not the entirety of the Good News. Though it may not be our intention, the messaging of Western Christianity is that you can live whatever way you want, sin as much as you want, because you’ll be forgiven as long as you believe in Jesus Christ, and then you can go to heaven. Anything that conflicts with this is legalism. This sounds great on paper but it is not the full Gospel because it largely leaves our present life unchanged. And that has been the effect in our churches, the levels of immorality along with the emotional and psychological issues that come with sin remains a rampant problem. Our lives sadly or no less abundant than anyone else’s. Willard describes the reason for this discrepancy very powerfully:

What must be emphasized in all of this is the difference between trusting Christ, the real person Jesus, with all that that naturally involves, versus trusting some arrangement for sin-remissions set up through him-trusting only his role as guilt remover. To trust the real person Jesus is to have confidence in him in every dimension of our real life, to believe that he is right about and adequate to everything…It is left unexplained how it is possible that one can rely on Christ for the next life without doing so for this one.”

(You would think that the heavenly life that Jesus came to give us would look very different. The old renaissance scholar Thomas Linacre was given a copy of the gospels after his studies in Latin. At that point in church history, only the priests were allowed to read the Bible. So for the first time, Linacre was given the Holy Scriptures that we have and what he said after reading it for the first time lives in infamy, he returned to the priest who had given him the Bible and said, “Either these are not the gospels or we are not Christians.” He was thoroughly perplexed.

Technically speaking, if all God wanted to do was help us manage sin and the guilt and shame that we feel because of it, the message and the baptism of John the Baptist would have been sufficient. At that time, the rite of baptism was something that was already being practiced in Judaism but it was mainly used on Gentile converts to Judaism. In the eyes of Jews, all Gentiles were defiled and unclean so they had to go through this ceremony of water baptism in order to be declared clean enough to worship and come before God.

But the thing that alarmed the religious leaders was the fact that John was baptizing Jewish people including many of their leaders. It was one thing to baptize unclean Gentiles, it was another thing to baptize God’s chosen people. But there were some who believed that according to certain prophecies from the Old Testament, the nation of Israel was supposed to wait in anticipation for a Messiah that would cleanse them from their sin. We see this in books like Zechariah:

1. Beholding Jesus Christ as the Lamb of God

Zechariah 12:10 ESV

“And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and pleas for mercy, so that, when they look on me, on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn.

Zechariah 12:10

Zechariah 13:1 ESV

“On that day there shall be a fountain opened for the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, to cleanse them from sin and uncleanness.

2. Receiving Jesus’ baptism of the Holy Spirit

However, the religious leaders believed that this would only happen through either the Messiah, or the return of Elijah or Moses. But because of what John the Baptist was doing, the religious leaders began to inquire if he was the Christ, the promised Messiah. When he denied this, they asked him if he was Elijah? When he again denied this, they asked then are you Moses, the Prophet? And left with no other options, they asked him “Who are you then? If you are not the Christ, not Elijah and not Moses, what right do you have to baptize the Jewish people?” John’s answer to that question is both incredibly humble and powerful at the same time. He says, “I am merely the voice, fleeting and temporary, crying out in the wilderness, sent to prepare the way for the Living Word.” I can help you manage your sin by baptizing you with water but there is someone who will come after me that will do something far greater by baptizing you with the Holy Spirit.

It is one thing to have a baptism of repentance, it is another thing completely to be baptized in streams of living water. And the only one that can you to those waters that produce life from deep with is the living Christ, raised on the third day, who now sits at the right hand of His Father. You can see why John the Baptist who was the greatest ever born by natural means would say of Him, in comparison I am nothing but a voice unworthy even to stoop down to tie his sandals. It is this Jesus that beckons us to come and to baptized in His Spirit so that we might have His life in us.