2020.04.03 Hopewell @Home ▫ Luke 3:21–38

Read Luke 3:21–38

Questions from the Scripture text: Who else was baptized when all the people were baptized (Luke 3:21)? What did Jesus do, when He was baptized? And what opened? Who descended in Luke 3:22? In what kind of form? What came from heaven? What did the voice say? At what age does Luke 3:23 say that Jesus began His public ministry? Whose son was He considered to be? Through which of David’s sons did Jesus come (Luke 3:31)? To what man does this genealogy trace back (Luke 3:38a)? To whom does it ultimately trace back (verse 38b)? How does this connect to Luke 3:22? 

We were created to be in the image of God. Adam was, in that way, something of a “son” of God (cf. Luke 3:38).  But God already had a Son. An eternal Son. Whom He loves. With Whom He is the same in substance, and equal in power and glory, and of course with Whom He is eternally well-pleased.

Gloriously, at Jesus’s baptism, heaven opened (Luke 3:21). Heaven opened. And the Holy Spirit took a physical form and descended (Luke 3:22). And God spoke from heaven something marvelous. The man that was standing, head dripping, in the river with the baptizer is one of Them: Persons of the Godhead. He is the Second person of the Trinity.

So, what is He doing here, now, as true a Man as He has been God from all eternity? Why has He been born of a woman whose husband would cause Him to be considered the son of Joseph (and Zerubbabel of Luke 3:27, and David of Luke 3:31, and Judah of Luke 3:33, and the patriarchs of Luke 3:34)? What is He doing being baptized to identify with a people who need repentance when He is sinless? Why has God added to Him a dependent human nature in which He must pray (Luke 3:21) and is only thirty years old (Luke 3:23)? In which He is, for some purposes, considered as if He descended from Adam (Luke 3:38)?

He is representing us so that when we receive His baptism (the Spirit, who works faith in us, when the Lord pours Him out upon us), we will be identified with Him, and in Him, God will declare the same about us: that in Christ, believers are just as loved and pleasing to God!

What did Jesus’s baptism say about His identifying with believers? What does ours say about the benefits that believers receive in Him?  

Suggested songs: ARP8 “Lord, Our Lord” or TPH302 “A Shoot will Spring from Jesse’s Stump”