Matt 3 RITES OF ASCENSION 1/13/13 Introduction: Open your Bibles to Matt. 3. More than a quarter century after Jesus was born this new King stood in the wings waiting for his cue to begin his reign. He waited, not at the gate of Jerusalem but at the ragged edge of the wilderness, a place fit for neither man nor beast. And the King s herald who announces him is not wearing royal red coat, or a holding a royal decree on parchment. No trumpets or Hear ye! Hear ye! [Read Matt 3] The wilderness is almost a character here. When Jews came out to that wilderness place a journey of 20-30 miles for most it stirred a deep national memory from some 1500 years earlier, when Israel spent 40 years in the wilderness as the price of their faithlessness. God had delivered them from slavery in Egypt but they refused to trust that he would bring them safely into the land he d promised them. So a whole generation died there, waiting for faith to be born. The wilderness still all those years later carried that dusty, dry taste of faithlessness and death. The Jordan River was the gateway to the Promised Land. At the end of the 40 years, Israel came to the Jordan at flood stage and God parted the waters so they could pass through on dry ground, just as he had parted the Red Sea when Israel was freed from Egypt. It had been a national baptism passing through waters of death in the care of God, and coming out on the other side to the God-blessed life. John the Baptist, Jesus cousin, seemed to wear the wilderness as work clothes. He was a mysterious magnet to the heavy, iron hearts of people who had forgotten what to do with their sin. And standing there in the River Jordan, he was an unlikely physician, using confession and a bath to part the waters, and to prepare a people to finally meet their God in the flesh. John the Baptist was the one prophet other prophets promised. A voice of one calling in the wilderness. And the heart of his message was, Repent! And since sin still hangs heavy upon us John still shouts through the wilderness dust to us. 1
I. REPENTANCE IS THE ONLY WAY TO PREPARE YOURSELF TO MEET GOD S KING (3:1-12) A. When John said, the kingdom of heaven has come near, there is literally a world of meaning in that phrase. Jesus himself uses exactly the same phrase when he begins to preach. God reigns over all the universe, of course, but there is a realm, a society, a civilization over which God reigns without sin s rebellion or mortality s stain, where all is right and light, beautiful and timeless. And that kingdom was about to begin slowly eclipsing this world s deadly darkness. At the leading edge of that light was Jesus Christ, the pioneer of our faith. B. But here s the thing. God s kingdom is lethal to sinners. They d be like terrorists trying to get through security. People who live by doing what we please, by being our own masters, are rebels of the worst sort in God s kingdom. The only way sinners can meet this coming King and his kingdom safely is by repenting of their sin. As someone said, by repenting we come to the King who is coming to us. It was a strange and holy time in Israel. God drew people all those miles out to that seemingly godforsaken place to meet God and then, of all the truly distasteful things to do, to verbalize their sorrow-wrapped sins and be baptized, a public bath for in God s grace. Confessing sins means that we name what has stained us, hurt others, and offended the holy God. You know you re confessing sins rightly when you feel something terrible in you dying. And when you feel death leaving you. It isn t just humbling; it is humiliating. And it hurts. If God is not there, if our confession is not also a prayer, then we stand there broken and helpless. But when confession is made to Almighty God to lay hold of his mercy an astonishing thing happens. I ve baptized many people, of course, and when people come up out of the water there 2
is always this grateful gasp for air. When we confess our sins in prayer, God whooshes down that highway you ve built like the wind like a breath of fresh, holy air right into your lungs. You come up out of that death gasping great gulps of life, of immortality. You are a new creation. When these people were baptized in the Jordan River there was also a kind of national déjà vu Israel was once again stepping out of the Jordan River into the blessed life God had promised them, just as they had under Joshua centuries before. A new people were being born of water and the Spirit. The kingdom of heaven was near indeed! Repentance was their national Saturday night bath to get ready for the Day of the Lord. C. But there is a terrible danger there on that wilderness river bank. V.7 Those religious leaders came out feigning an interest in the spiritual life of their people but they were snakes in clergy-wear. God s wrath awaits spiritual vipers who are not repentant themselves. Unrepentant spiritual leaders pastors, elders, professors are snakes in the grass; hiding their deadly poison under their tongues. The measure of anyone who professes faith in God is in v.8, Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. Repentance produces something in our lives and in the lives of spiritual leaders that we just simply can t produce in any other way. Fruit that others can see and taste. According to Luke 3:10-14 people wanted to know just what Jesus meant People who repent before God become by nature generous, just, and content. Religion doesn t really produce those things in the heart. Only repentance does, and everyone there on that riverbank knew that those leaders never showed such fruit. The choice, as John put it so vividly, was to be fruit or firewood. One or the other. It is stark and harsh, but that is what it says. We re reluctant to speak much of hell, lest we be seen as heavy-handed or manipulative, but Jesus warns us all here of God s coming 3
wrath, of final judgment, and of fire an everlasting death. Do not think this is an empty threat, or that hell is only for hitlers. Jesus said, wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. D. Now in vv.11-12 John opens the window more. Jesus did not baptize during his ministry on earth, but he does baptize and not with water. Vv.11-12 Be prepared to be baptized by Jesus. Jesus will baptize everyone sooner or later. One baptism, two outcomes. Those who come to Jesus just as people came to John the Baptist, repentant confessing sins and lowly in spirit will be bathed in the Holy Spirit and filled with the Holy Spirit as with a new breath of life. But being plunged into the Holy Spirit is only safe and life-giving if your heart is lowly if you have condemned to death that old nature within you. Otherwise, a holy bath is incendiary. It is hell. Now is a season of grace the year of the Lord s favor when we can repent and be recreated as immortals through the Holy Spirit. But the day is certainly coming when all those living and dead who have not bowed to Christ in repentance will be baptized by holy fire, burning away from the kingdom of God anyone who tries to come in on their own terms. SUMMARY: Sooner or later, we will all be baptized by Jesus. He has already come, bringing the light of God s heavenly kingdom across the darkness of this world. Prepare a road for him to come to you in the wilderness by repenting of your sin. Be baptized in Jesus, in the bath and breath of the Holy Spirit. Be baptized in water, if you have not been, to make public your death and life. Illus.: I always remember the time I was preparing to baptize Mary. Hold me under a little extra long, she told me, so I remember that I have died. Now in the story Jesus makes the journey from Galilee to the John s baptizing place. If you knew nothing more, and I asked, 4
What do you think happens when Jesus gets there? you might well say, I suppose Jesus took over the baptizing. That s what John expected, too. Vv.13-15... Recently I learned the expression, rites of ascension. In ancient lore, these were painful rituals or feats of strength of magic to be performed before a king could be crowned. Remember how the boy Arthur pulled the sword from the stone and Merlin then knew he was to be the king? Jesus is going to go through two rites of ascension in quick succession his baptism and his temptation, both of them in the wilderness. The obvious question to John and to us is, why would Jesus need to be baptized? He was the only one ever born who did not need to repent of anything. Remember that baptism here is a symbol. Jesus baptism was a vivid, visual promise. II. JESUS CONDESCENDED TO THE BAPTISM WE COULD NEVER BEAR (3:13-17) A. Baptism, for those who came to John, was a symbol of death and life, personally and nationally. For Jesus, his baptism was a symbol of his literal and complete death and burial, and his trust in God that God would raise him back to a new, literal immortality. What s more, this was the very reason he was born, the son of Abraham and King David and the Son of God. The very way this Messiah this King from God would usher in the kingdom of heaven to this world was through this baptism of deep death and utterly new life. Listen to what Jesus said in Lk 12:49-50, I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled. There it is the baptism Jesus would inaugurate, the fire of the Spirit that either gives everlasting life, or everlasting death. Then Jesus continued, But I have a baptism to undergo, and what constraint I am under until it is completed. Everything in the kingdom of heaven waited till Jesus baptism of death, burial, and life was finished. Then all heaven broke loose! B. Look again at v.15, it is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness. What does that mean? Righteousness is the absolute necessity for citizenship in the kingdom of 5
heaven. Not niceness, or pretty-good-ness, or spirituality, but a heart-deep, honest-to-god righteousness. Holiness. And righteousness is the very thing we utterly lack and can never achieve. Jesus, by being baptized in death and resurrection met every demand of righteousness. He himself was fully righteous because he obeyed God the Father in every detail, even dying on the cross at his command. Then Jesus full righteousness is offered, in all its completeness, to us. So that we can be reckoned fully righteous even by the holy God. And that means we can come freely through the low, low entrance into the glory of God s kingdom. He fulfilled all righteousness. C. Then one more astonishing thing happened: vv.16-17 Here is the family union of the Triune God--God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit--drawn together for us to see and hear in their eternal, mutual mission of love and redemption to us sinners. Here the God-man, Christ Jesus, sees the Holy Spirit descend upon him, dovelike, to carry him forward into his wilderness invasion. And his Father speaks aloud to Jesus in that moment heavy with divine humility and redeeming death, and we hear God s pleasure and even gratitude: This this dying, redeeming, trusting, loving Man is my true-born Son, and I am thoroughly satisfied with him, because he does what no one else could do. He will fulfill all righteousness. Conclusion So, first, if Jesus has never come to you, repent so that he might. Confess your sins to God, and perhaps to someone else, and then step by faith into the bath of God s grace, and come up breathing the Spirit the Breath of God. If you have never been baptized in water, it is time, because this is how God wants us to show and feel something of what has happened in our hearts the dying and washing and breathing immorality. 6
If you are a believer, come to know repentance as a gift. Rowland Hill, an English preacher of 200 years ago, wrote, If I may be permitted to drop one tear, as I enter the portals of the city of my God, it will be at taking an eternal leave of that beloved and profitable companion, repentance. [D. Larsen, Company of the Preachers, p.400] Soon, in the beatitudes, Jesus will open to our eyes both the dimensions of repentance, and the happy privileges of our citizenship in the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 7