John 1:19-34: Baptism

Video Teaching
Verse-by-Verse Commentary
Full Transcript

Video Teaching

Verse-by-Verse Commentary

19 Now this was John’s testimony when the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem sent priests and Levites to ask him who he was. 20 He did not fail to confess, but confessed freely, “I am not the Messiah.”

The narrative shifts back chronologically from the opening eighteen verses (which served as an overview of the Book of John) to the beginning of Jesus’s public ministry.
What is happening to John in this verse is a public interrogation, not a respectful inquiry. Their goal was to discredit John. If he denied having authority, people might stop following him. If he claimed authority, they could report him to the Romans as a troublemaker.

21 They asked him, “Then who are you? Are you Elijah?”

He said, “I am not.”

“Are you the Prophet?”

He answered, “No.”

The authoritative figures that are being addressed here are all in Scripture. The second coming of Elijah is in Malachi 4:5, the coming of the prophet is in Deuteronomy 18:15, and prophecies about the coming messiah are found throughout the Old Testament (especially Isaiah).

22 Finally they said, “Who are you? Give us an answer to take back to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?”

The Pharisees’ may be villains in these passages, but they were also people with real, legitimate concerns.
1. The Roman-Jewish historian Josephus recorded four individuals in the first century who claimed to be the Messiah, raised armies, and fought the Romans, all of whom understood the Messiah as a military figure.
2. A later false messiah, Simon Ben Kosiba, led a rebellion in the early second century that resulted in the Romans destroying Israel, renaming it Syria Palestine, and scattering the Jewish people. Israel did not reappear on maps until after World War II.
3. The Pharisees were justifiably worried that a false messiah would bring destruction, but while trying to prevent this, they tragically overlooked the true Messiah.

23 John replied in the words of Isaiah the prophet, “I am the voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way for the Lord.’”

John seems surprisingly comfortable given the circumstances! He knew he wasn’t “the one.” He was just there to point to the person who was.
1. How often do we carry the burden of having to be “the one” rather than pointing to the person who genuinely is?
He identifies himself using Isaiah’s words: “I am the voice of one calling in the wilderness: ‘Make straight the way for the Lord.’” (Isa 40:3)
1. Untying sandals was considered such a lowly task that even rabbis were forbidden from asking their disciples to do it (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Ketubot 96a) John’s statement signifies his profound sense of unworthiness compared to the greatness of Jesus.

24 Now the Pharisees who had been sent 25 questioned him, “Why then do you baptize if you are not the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?”

26 “I baptize with water,” John replied, “but among you stands one you do not know. 27 He is the one who comes after me, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.”

The practice of baptism existed before John, rooted in Old Testament purification rituals, such as priests washing in a basin before approaching the altar in the tabernacle and later bathing in the temple.
John brought this practice to the people, applying the principle of purification to prepare for God’s approach in the form of Jesus.
John’s baptism was a symbolic act. He explicitly states, “I baptize with water,” indicating it was just water and held no special divine power. It was a good thing to do, encouraging people to recognize their sinfulness and need for God’s purification.

28 This all happened at Bethany on the other side of the Jordan, where John was baptizing.

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

The title “Lamb of God” connects Jesus to a rich scriptural history of lambs being sacrificed so that others might live: the ram that died in Isaac’s place, the Passover lamb whose blood protected the Israelites, and the lambs sacrificed for forgiveness in the temple.
John identifies Jesus as “the” ultimate Lamb who will provide the final sacrifice.
The use of the singular “sin” (not “sins”) is significant. Sins are the symptoms (wrong actions), but “sin” is the underlying disease or “rot in our soul” that began with Adam and Eve. Jesus came to eliminate the root cause, not just the symptoms.

30 This is the one I meant when I said, ‘A man who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’ 31 I myself did not know him, but the reason I came baptizing with water was that he might be revealed to Israel.”

Why would the sinless Jesus need to be baptized? Common reasons for baptism (joining the church, receiving the Holy Spirit, washing away sin) do not apply to Him. Surely Jesus could have revealed himself to John the Baptist in other ways. Why was this way fitting?
1. John’s baptism was purely symbolic, which means a lot of the answers (the bestowal of the Holy Spirit, joining the Body of Christ, etc.) don’t apply here. It really is a matter of symbols: why would a sinless person symbolically ask for purification?
2. The 18th-century monk Nikodemos of Athos speaks to this in his prayers: “Jesus, being God, had no need for purification, but he suffered purification for me,” (Prayers to Our Lord Jesus Christ).
3. Jesus gained nothing from baptism; it was an act of humility. His glory is repeatedly revealed through such humble acts: the infinite God being born in a small human body, in a manger; and ultimately dying a humiliating death on a cross.

32 Then John gave this testimony: “I saw the Spirit come down from heaven as a dove and remain on him. 33 And I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water told me, ‘The man on whom you see the Spirit come down and remain is the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.’

What was once a purely symbolic, natural act became more than natural, now carrying the power of the Holy Spirit to bestow grace, unite a person with the body of Christ, and wash away sin.
Note that there is no reason to expect two baptisms. Some traditions insist that you need one “water baptism” and one “baptism of the Spirit” (generally identified by strong feelings in the believer), but Ephesians 4 is explicit that there is only one baptism. Jesus has transformed baptism, not added a second baptism.

34 I have seen and I testify that this is God’s Chosen One.

Matthew 11:11”Truly I tell you, among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist; yet whoever is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”
1. John was the greatest of “those born of women,” or those born by purely natural means.
2. Through baptism, believers are made part of the “Kingdom of Heaven” and are greater than John the Baptist
Just as Jesus transformed water and a human body into something more than natural, He transforms believers into more than natural people by giving them the Holy Spirit.

Full Transcript

So, for those of you who thought last week was a little too abstract, good news: John gets concrete pretty quickly. Here in verse 19 onwards, we are going to see a comparison between two men, John, the Baptist and Jesus, and the different types of baptism that each of them offers : John’s baptism of repentance and Jesus’s baptism of the Holy Spirit. Now, often when you see comparisons between two things, one is good and one is bad. Right? There’s the good, the and the evil. The big and the small. The smart and the stupid. One is generally implied to be superior and one is implied to be inferior. This is not strictly the case, it’s a little different. Here you see something that’s good and something that’s better. It’s got John the Baptist, the best this world has to offer, and Jesus, who is better. And, there’s a verse from Scripture that I think really helps explain the entirety of what we’re looking at today. Matthew 11:11: “Truly I tell you, Among those born of women, there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist. Yet whoever is least in the kingdom of heaven. Is greater than he.” So just keep that in the back of your mind. Think on that as we move forward and let’s dig in.

So beginning at verse 19,

19 Now this was John’s testimony when the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem sent priests and Levites to ask him who he was. 20 He did not fail to confess, but confessed freely, “I am not the Messiah.”

21 They asked him, “Then who are you? Are you Elijah?”

He said, “I am not.”

“Are you the Prophet?”

He answered, “No.”

22 Finally they said, “Who are you? Give us an answer to take back to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?”

23 John replied in the words of Isaiah the prophet, “I am the voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way for the Lord.’”

Let’s just start with that. That’s a good chunk. So first off, You can see at the beginning of verse nineteen. Now this was John’s testimony when. We’re seeing that this is just a little indication that this doesn’t happen chronologically after what we had last week. Those first eighteen verses are essentially a summary of everything that happens in the book of John and a little before and a little afterwards. So we saw before Jesus was incarnate, and then we saw John the Baptist, and he was proclaiming the coming of Jesus. And then we saw Jesus come and he was not received; he was rejected. And yet, he created a pathway to salvation. We saw all of this right there in the first eighteen verses. But now that we’re on to verse nineteen, we’re going back. We’re going back, and we’re getting a little more in detail in what was presented in the first eighteen verses as an overview.

So, this is what happened when John, the Baptist was confronted by priests and Levites from Jerusalem, and, If you didn’t know any better, you’d think these priests thought pretty highly of him. Look at all the things they ask him : “Are you the Messiah? Are you the second coming of Elijah? Are you the prophet?” All three figures from Scripture: the Messiah since Genesis itself, this prophecy about a coming prophet from Deuteronomy, even the second coming of Elijah foretold in Malachi, all three big deals. And they’re asking John, are you this big deal? Are you that big deal? And each time, no.

If you didn’t know any better, you might think they’re a little impressed with John. They are not. This is a public interrogation. They have cornered John the Baptist while he is doing his baptizing in front of a group of people. And what they’re trying to do is ask him if he is any of these great figures from Scripture. These would give him authority, and in their minds, this is a win-win. On one hand, he says he’s not and he has no authority. That’s great ; maybe people won’t follow him anymore and now he can’t cause any trouble. Big win! But on the other hand, maybe he says he is those figures. That’s a win too; then they can go right back. To the people in charge and the Romans, and tell them, “Hey, the guy we were wondering is he a troublemaker? Yup, troublemaker. He needs to be taken care of. ”

I think it’s really easy to see these priests, Levites, and Pharisees as purely villainous figures. We see them harassing John the Baptist. We see them harassing Jesus. It’s easy to just say, “Uh oh.” To be fair, in this story they are villains, but I think it can be helpful to understand why they’re doing what they’re doing. Because they’re not one-dimensional, you know. They had reasons for doing what they’re doing. The historian Josephus, a Roman historian specifically about Jewish people, tells us that in the first century alone, there were four different people who all claimed to be the Messiah and raised up an army in Israel and tried to fight the Romans. Four different people, all of them understood the Messiah to be a military figure—someone who would raise an army and kick out the Romans and restore Israel to its earthly glory as a phenomenal kingdom. Four times! That’s one every twenty five years. There were a lot of people claiming to be the messiah. And Josephus only tells us that there were four who managed to put together an army to challenge the Romans. He doesn’t tell us how many people might have tried and never quite made it far enough to be historically noteworthy.

Ultimately, it was a false messiah that would cause problems for Israel in the end. It’s a man named Simon Ben Kosiba, who was another person who claimed to be the messiah in the early second century. And again, he put together an army and again he fought the Romans. And it didn’t, well, it went better than for a lot of others, but the Romans eventually put down this rebellion. And when they did, they were done. No more. No more of this. “How many times have we had to put down an insurrection in Israel? We’re done with it. I want that place ruined! I want it wiped off the face of the map! No more Israel. That is now Syria Palestine. No more kings of Israel. I want those people scattered to the four corners of the earth.” It was a false messiah who ultimately removed Israel from the map for over a thousand years. You don’t see Israel again on maps until after World War II, so there’s fair reason for people to be worried. They’re worried that a false messiah will cause problems, and they’re not wrong. Rather than seeing them as villainous, I guess I tend to see them as more tragic figures. All, this time trying to protect people from a false messiah, and in the end, they end up overlooking the real one in the process. But in any case, that’s why they’re doing what they’re doing. That’s why they’re interrogating John the Baptist: Is this guy going to cause trouble? Are people going to get hurt because of what he’s saying?

You see the three different questions they asked, and John doesn’t seem particularly bothered by the questions. It says that he freely confessed that he was not the Messiah. So John’s not sweating bullets; he’s okay, he’s comfortable. Why? Because he knows he’s not the big deal that they’re worried about. He doesn’t even claim to be a big deal; he knows he’s just the guy who’s pointing people to the guy that matters, and there is a certain freedom that comes along with that.

I wish all of us were as comfortable doing that sort of thing as John the Baptist; as free and easy pointing people to Jesus, rather than trying to point people to ourselves. That becomes very easy. All too often we try to prove to people that we are big shots, that we are the ones who can answer the questions, that we are the ones who get things done, that we are the people that they should be looking towards. When you get too used to that there’s a certain kind of anxiety that accompanies that because at the end of the day, we will never be the answer to every problem that people have. We are so limited; we just can’t do it all. Naturally, there will be anxiety. What if they know that I am not the big deal that I claim to be? But if you point people to Jesus—if like John the Baptist, You point them to the one who is—the one who can take care of all of their problems—the anxiety is gone. You can freely confess, “I am not a big deal, but I know the one who is.” And John answers them with that exact answer in the end. They ask, “Are you this scriptural figure? Are you this scriptural figure?” He says, “I know the one that is,” he quotes from Scripture, the book of Isaiah. He says, “I am the voice calling in the wilderness: make straight the way for the Lord.” That’s the passage he chooses to identify himself.

Now at this point, The Pharisees are annoyed. He seems to be claiming some sort of authority, and yet he will not admit it. And so they throw a curve ball at him. They say, “

“Why then do you baptize if you are not the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?”

“Why are you out here baptizing if you’re not a big shot?”

John the baptism did not invent baptism, by the way. Baptism had been around before John the Baptist. You’ll notice that the Bible never says, “and there was a guy named John who came up with this thing called baptism, and it was good.” Never says that. It just assumes that you probably know what baptism is. You can see the roots of baptism as early as Exodus. When the Israelites are in the tabernacle before they approach the altar, a priest is supposed to take a large basin of water and wash their hands and wash their feet to show, “I recognize that I am sinful. God, please forgive me and purify me as I approach you at your altar.” Then when the temple is built, the practice gets a little more elaborate. The basin of water gets even bigger, and rather than just washing your hands and your feet, you bathe in the water. A priest would bathe before they approach the altar for the same reason: I know I am about to go towards God’s altar; I recognize I am sinful ; God, please purify me as I approach Your altar. What John has done is he has taken this practice of baptism, and he’s taken it to the people. Because they might not be approaching the altar, but here’s the thing: you might not be approaching God in that sense, but God is approaching us. Jesus is coming; you will want to be purified. Get baptized, repent of your sin, ask God to be made pure so when you see Him face to face, you’ll be ready. And it’s purely symbolic, right? That’s what John is doing. It’s a good thing; John is doing something that is unambiguously good.

It can’t be particularly prideful to tell people, “Hey, recognize that you are sinful and that you need to be made pure by God.” That’s it. And, yet the Pharisees are claiming that this humble practice that he is involved in is evidence of his pride. And we see that. We see that all over the world to this day. People, who are humbly trying to follow their God and others who use their humility as evidence of their pride. For example, if someone hears, “Oh yeah, I try to be in church every Sunday.” Ooh. Someone thinks they’re a pretty good person. Oh yeah, you don’t want any more drinks? Oh, you’re too good for us. Someone’s a good person. Watch out for them. Oh I can’t make it to the bachelor party this weekend. I’m not actually comfortable with the things that you guys are going to do. Oh, okay. Okay, we got a saint over here. All too often, when people are trying to humbly do what God asked of them, others see that as evidence of pride. Totally untrue, but nonetheless a sad truth.

How does John the Baptist handle it? He handles it by again reiterating I am not a big deal. I am not special. I just know someone who is. He responds, “I baptize with water.” Again, he’s saying, “Look, this baptism thing. I don’t have any divine special power. It’s just water on the head. That’s all I’m doing. It’s not such a big deal. I don’t claim to be special.

But among you stands one who you do not know. He is the one who comes after me, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.”

Now, how many of you remember when George Bush was in the Middle East and got a shoe chucked at him? He was giving a speech, and someone in the crowd did not think very highly of him and so they threw a shoe at his head. It’s a chuckle-worthy YouTube clip. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth your time. But why did they do that? Because in the Middle East, that’s a sign that you don’t think too highly of someone. The foot is the grossest, dirtiest part of the body in popular imagination there, so to associate someone or something with a foot, you are saying that’s what I think of you. And here John is saying Jesus is so incredible. This guy I am preparing the way for, he’s so amazing. I am not even fit to touch the grossest, dirtiest part of his body. I can’t do the lowest of the low for him. Untying the sandal was considered so inglorious that he’s saying he’s not even worthy of that.

When a rabbi was teaching a disciple, it was important to give them tasks so they could show that they were listening to their rabbi and that they were devout. And yet it was literally written, “But don’t have them untie your sandals. That’s too low. You can’t have them do that. Gotta let the guys have some dignity.” John is saying he is not even worthy of doing that. It’s not that he’s so great, it’s that he’s not even great enough to do that.

So we’ve seen John the Baptist—the greatest man, according to Jesus, who ever walked this earth—the greatest man of the natural world there could possibly be. And we saw his baptism, often known as the baptism of repentance, a purely symbolic act to indicate God, “I am impure please make me pure.” Now, as we move towards this second half, we’re going to see the one who he’s being compared to. We’ve seen the best now let’s see better than the best. We’re going to look at Jesus. Verse 29:

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

There’s so much in what he says right there when he sees Jesus. “Look! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” That’s the first thing he says. And notice what he doesn’t say: “Look! A great philosopher who can teach us things about the world beyond.” He doesn’t say that. He doesn’t say, “Look, a great teacher that can teach us how to act well in the world.” He doesn’t say, “Look, a self help guru that can teach us how to be better people.” No. He says, “Look! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

“The Lamb of God.” What does he mean by that? Well there’s lots of lambs in Scripture. We see lambs come up time and time again. For example, as early as Genesis, we have Isaac. Abraham was told to sacrifice his son Isaac. So he takes Isaac to the altar and right before he sacrifices him, there is a lamb: a lamb that dies in Isaac’s stead. And then we have Passover. In the book of Exodus, the angel of death comes to Egypt to kill all of the firstborn. How do the Israelites make sure that their firstborns are safe? They kill a lamb and they put the blood of the lamb on their doorways so that the angel passes over their house. And at the temple, when they have done something wrong, when they wanted to be forgiven by God, what did they do? They sacrificed a lamb. Even the book of Isaiah talks about a lamb who will be sacrificed. So much lamb imagery: lambs that die so that others might live.

John says, not just “Here is a lamb.” He says here is the lamb. This is the ultimate lamb. This is the one who has come to finish, and he says, this lamb will take away the sin of the world. He doesn’t say sins. He uses the singular, not the plural. Often we think about sins, plural, instead of sin, and that’s fine. You know, sins are the wrong things we do. Those are not good. But at the same time, it’s kind of like a symptom. Sins are a symptom of sin. Sin in the singular is more than just the wrong things we do. It’s like a disease. It’s like a blight in our hearts. It’s like rot in our soul. That is sin. And that’s why in Genesis, when Adam and Eve commit sins, the problem is not just that they have done individual wrong things. The problem is that they have caught this disease. This rot has taken root in them! Sin is the problem—not just the individual sins they have committed, but the greater sin that is now nested within them. Jesus has come as the Lamb to eliminate the sin, not just the sins. He’s not just going to get rid of the symptom; he’s going to get rid of the cause itself. “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

As we get towards this last section, this answers one of the questions that I had for the longest time. I always wondered. Why did Jesus get baptized? What did he get out of it? I wondered that for years. Why would Jesus need to get baptized? It doesn’t make any sense by a lot of metrics. When we talk about baptism, we think there’s a lot of ways of explaining it and they’re all true. For example, baptism is when we individually join the church which is the body of Christ. Baptism is when the Holy Spirit is bestowed on us. Baptism is the washing away of our sins. Baptism is a promise that we make to God to stay loyal. It’s all of these, and yet do any of those make sense for Jesus? Why would Jesus need to join the body of Christ when He. Himself is Christ? That doesn’t make any sense. Why would Jesus, part of the Trinity which is Father, Son and Holy Spirit always in communion with one another, need to have the Holy Spirit bestowed on him when he’s already in constant communion with it? Why would Jesus, a man that has no sin, need to be purified of sin? That doesn’t make any sense. And, why would he need to make a promise to God when he himself is God? All of the ways we describe baptism make no sense for Jesus. So why did Jesus get baptized?

Well, in this passage from John, first off, we see that a lot of those questions can be eliminated right off the bat because this is John’s baptism. He says it himself: it’s just symbolic. It’s just water. There is no divine power behind it. You’ve got to wait for Jesus to that to happen. So the only thing symbolically that’s happening here is Jesus is asking His Father, through baptism, to be purified of His sins. That’s a lot of our questions eliminated right off the bat, but we still have one: why would a sinless person need to ask to be purified from their sins? It doesn’t make sense. I wondered that for ages, and it wasn’t until I ran across the writings of a devotional author called Nikodemos of Athos. Nikodemos of Athos was a monk in 18th century Greece well known for his devotional writings. Among the many treasures he has left to the world, one of them is an acrostic series of prayers. It just takes you through the whole alphabet, and it’s got a different prayer for every letter of the alphabet. As you go through the alphabet, you go through the life of Christ thanking him for each and everything he did. They’re really lovely prayers. I was reading through them one day, and I got to the part about Jesus’ baptism. He had written “Jesus, being God, had no need for purification but he suffered purification for me.” I had never heard someone say that word “suffered” before, and yet it’s helped me start to make sense of it.

What did Jesus get out of baptism? What did He stand to gain? Nothing. If anything, It’s inglorious for someone who is perfect to have to ask for purification from sins that He didn’t commit. It’s a little absurd, but He did it to be revealed to John the Baptist. He is revealed through his humility, and that’s something that happens throughout Scripture. We can jump back over to that other passage we were looking at this morning in Philippians. Philippians 2:5: “In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus, who being in very nature, God did not consider equality with God, something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by being obedient to death, even death on a cross.”

Jesus is repeatedly found through acts of humility. He is glorious, and he absolutely could have just descended from the sky with glorious beams shooting off of him, a giant crown and a scepter or something. And yet he did not. Repeatedly we see him reveal his glory in his humility. God, the infinite God is born into the smallness of a human body? Unthinkable! God, the infinite God is born—not just born, but born in a manger. These are circumstances, which for the average person would be incredibly undignified. And yet this is how God reveals Himself. The pure asks for purification. Why? Unthinkable, undignified, And ultimately, Jesus dies on a cross, not just a death, but the most humiliating and painful death you could think of. All of this Jesus goes through so His glory is known through his humility. Here we see Jesus reveals himself, not by trying to prove he’s some kind of big shot. A real big shot doesn’t need to prove anything to anybody. They are a big shot simply by nature of what they are. God is glorious not because he needs to impress anybody, but because he can help anybody do anything just by nature of who He is.

We see here it says verse 30.

The greatness of God is revealed in this humble moment in which the pure asks to be purified. And we see here that the second form of baptism, baptism by the Holy Spirit, is what Jesus will offer—something different, something better than what John has offered. What John offered was good, but Jesus offers something that is greater than good.

Now, some people get confused here. They think there’s actually two forms of baptism. They think you need to get baptized by water, and that’s like the baptism of John the Baptist, and then there’s a second bonus baptism that comes afterwards. That’s your baptism by the Holy Spirit. That is usually indicated, in their thinking, by a fierce feeling that you’re very close to God, and when you feel that that’s your second baptism, the baptism by the Holy Spirit. This appears nowhere in Scripture. Pentecostals often make this claim, but in the early church’s writings, you can find no one who thinks that there’s a second baptism that is indicated by strong feelings. Not only that, but in Scripture it says that there aren’t two baptisms. In Ephesians 4 it says that there is not two, but one baptism.

Jesus did not offer this baptism by the Holy Spirit by some kind of different means. He didn’t come up with this new thing that people need after their first baptism. He took baptism in the same way that John the Baptist was doing it: water on the head, something that was purely symbolic, and he gave it divine power. No longer was it just a symbolic gesture. It had the power of the Holy Spirit behind it. That’s where we start to see all of those other meanings we were talking about earlier. Now, through the waters of baptism, the Spirit can be bestowed. Now, through the waters of baptism, a person can be united with the body of Christ. Now, there is so much more dimension because with John alone, we only have the natural—the best of the natural world—a great man who does great symbolic acts only through the power of man. With Jesus we have someone who is greater than just a human. He’s better than the best the natural world can offer, and His baptism—still water on the head—now carries infinitely more power, because the divine has transformed it from something merely natural into something more than natural, something that carries the power of the divine.

Think back to that Scripture we started with, Matthew 11:11: “Truly I tell you, among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist. Yet whoever is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” He says, “among those born of women.” What Jesus is saying is, among those who have purely been born by natural means there’s no one better than John the Baptist. He is the greatest the natural world alone can produce. And yet, in the kingdom of heaven, there is better.”

You were made a part of the Kingdom of Heaven through the waters of baptism. You are no longer just natural. Just as Jesus took the waters of baptism, just water, and transformed it into something greater than the natural world has. In the same way He took a human body and made it greater than just a human body; He gave it the divine power of the Word. In that same way, Jesus took you, and now you are more than just a natural person. You were made a part of the Kingdom of Heaven through the waters of baptism. You are no longer just natural. Just as Jesus took the waters of baptism (just water) and transformed it into something greater than the natural world has, in the same way He took a human body and made it greater than just a human body; He gave it the divine power of the Word. In that same way, Jesus took you, and you are more than just a natural person.You have the power of the Holy Spirit inside of you. You have been blessed with the power of the Holy Spirit. You, according to Scripture—the words of Jesus Himself—are greater than the greatest that the natural world has to offer.

I don’t know what you faced this week. I don’t know what you’re going to face in the coming weeks. I don’t know the challenges. I don’t know the frustrations. I don’t know the hurt. I don’t know what this world has for you. But we saw this morning John handle the incredible distress of being interrogated by some of the most powerful people in his region, and he stood up to that. If the greatest the natural world had to offer was a man so great, I wonder, what can God do through you, who is greater than him, who has the power of the Holy Spirit behind you? What will God do through you? Amen.

Video Teaching

Verse-by-Verse Commentary

Full Transcript

Share this: