The Gospel of Matthew chapter 3, and we read at the thirteenth verse, let us hear God by His Spirit speaking to us through His Word. Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to John to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him saying, I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me? But Jesus answered him, let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness. Then he consented. And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him. And behold, a voice from heaven said, this is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased. Please be seated. Well, allow me for a brief moment to say what a pleasure and privilege it is to be back with you, two years to the day since I was last here. I do want to thank Peter and the elders for their willingness to have a Scot, although I'm delighted to see that Scottishness is beginning to take increasing root in the life of the congregation. I saw a tartan tie when I came in for Sunday school, and now I saw a brother with a kilt. I don't possess a kilt. I've never owned a kilt, but it's a pleasure to be with you this morning. Both this morning and, God willing, this evening, I want to reflect with you on this brief passage that we read together in Matthew's gospel. This morning, thinking about the baptism of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. and this evening thinking with you about his anointing. And we will see that our Savior experienced two baptisms, and this evening that he experienced two anointings. Two things this morning, perhaps, I would like to especially focus with you upon, the first quite briefly and the second a little more extensively. First of all, to notice with you the geography of Jesus' baptism, and then secondly, the significance and meaning of His baptism. First of all, then, the geography of Jesus' baptism. We're told that Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to John to be baptized by him. Now, any early reader of Matthew's gospel would immediately have paused as he or she heard those words or read them. The Jordan. The Jordan was a place of deep significance in the purposes of God for His people throughout redemptive history. And perhaps there are two significant moments when God manifested Himself in a new way to His people at the Jordan. perhaps most obviously, when the people of God finally came through their forty years of wanderings in the wilderness to the River Jordan, and the waters parted. And the people of God, led by the priests of God holding the ark of God, passed through the waters. And God's people were brought out of their wilderness wanderings into the land of promise. And at the very heart of that transition from wilderness to new land of promise was God's presence in the Ark of the Covenant held by the priests of God going before the people of God. And here we have our Lord Jesus Christ, the one of whom Moses spoke that God would raise up a prophet greater than he, the one on whom all the avenues and trajectories of Holy Scripture find their ultimate fulfillment and omega point. Here is the one in whom we meet with God. the one in whom God has come to tabernacle among us, as the Apostle John tells us. And it's in this significant moment of geography that the greater than Moses comes into public view. the one in whom God will meet with His people preeminently and exclusively. And we should see here in this geographical moment the purposes of God coming slowly but inexorably to their ultimate climactic fulfillment. But there's another moment by the Jordan that careful readers of the Word of God would immediately have remembered, and it was the occasion when the prophetic mantle passed from Elijah to Elisha. and it's by the River Jordan. And I've little doubt that we're intended to pause because all Scripture is given by inspiration of God. Every word, every jot, every tittle, every sentence, every paragraph, every inherent theological trajectory is intended to be pondered over. And here we find the ultimate prophet of God being mantled, as it were, by John, the last and the greatest of the old covenant prophets. Now, as we shall see, John is saying to Jesus, Lord, far be it from you to come to me. John is not fully grasping the onward flow of redemptive history that his time is about now to end. John is about actually to be arrested and beheaded. The age of the old covenant is disappearing. And here is the prophet of God, the one who himself is the Word of God. who comes to declare Himself. And here He is presenting Himself for baptism by John in the River Jordan. And we should always take note of the geography of Holy Scripture and seek to understand the landscape of God's Word. and see how in the midst of the messiness of life and in the midst of the geography of life, I'm often saying to my students, you need to understand geography often to make sense not only of the Bible, but of church history. Perhaps you'll come to this in your studies on the European Reformation, but geography has a profound and significant part to play in the sovereign providence and purposes of God in the forwarding of His saving purposes during those early decades of the 16th century. And so, just really by way of introduction, we should notice the geography of our Lord's baptism. Here is the greater than Moses. Here is the one in whom the presence of God will meet with His people. And here is God's final, ultimate Word to humanity. Here is His final prophet. And John, as it were, is mantling the Lord Jesus Christ with his prophetic office. If you understand anything about the history of redemption in the Bible, you will know that the history of redemption begins significantly with a sermon that God Himself preaches in Genesis chapter 3 in the wake of Adam's sin God Himself takes it upon Himself to preach the very first sermon. And in that sermon, He makes a promise. He says that He will raise up from the seed of woman one who will come to crush the head of the serpent. And the whole of the Bible is really an unfolding exposition of that first sermon of the living God. The whole Bible is an unfolding, unraveling, developing, profound exposition of this great promise of the One who will come from the woman and who will crush the head of the serpent. And as you read through the Scriptures, you find yourself caught up in the progressive momentum of this promise. you find in Abraham that this promise is going to extend to all the families of the earth. In you, Abraham, all the peoples of the earth will be blessed. And as you read through what we call the Old Testament Scriptures, you find the Lord Increasingly, sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes in less obvious ways, increasingly picturing for us, depicting for us, adumbrating for us who the seed of the woman would be. We discover that He would be Emmanuel, God with us. We discover later in Isaiah 9 that He would be the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the wonder of a counselor, the Prince of Peace. And there are moments throughout the Holy Scriptures where God punctuates time and space with particular moments when He forwards and advances the history of redemption. And then we come, as we've been thinking these past two or three weeks or so, to that great moment that John Owen, the great English Puritan, calls the rock on which the church of Jesus Christ rests, the moment when God unfathomably, unexpositionally, and unexegetically becomes man in the womb of the Virgin Mary. That moment when God punctuates time and space with the unfathomable and the glorious and the supernatural, and the history of redemption is forwarding its inexorable divinely ordained purpose from times eternal. And then it seems there are thirty years. of silence. God the Son becomes flesh in the virgin's womb. And just as there is a veil of decorousness placed by the Holy Spirit over the mystery of the incarnation, so there is almost a veil of silence placed over the next thirty or so years of the God-man's life. But actually, actually, it is only an apparent veil of silence. You remember how Luke tells us at the end of the second chapter of his gospel, that the God-man, the Messiah Savior, grew in favor with God and with man. And if we know the Old Testament, that would immediately send us back to the second and third servant songs of Isaiah, wouldn't they? You remember how in the third servant song, The servant of the Lord, the promised one who is to come, says, he made my mouth like a sharp sword. In the shadow of his hand, he hid me. He made me a polished arrow. In his quiver, he hid me away. During these apparent years of silence, the Lord is watching over and progressively—now notice the language—progressively sanctifying His servant's son, not from anything sinful to something perfect, but progressively sanctifying him in the sense that he becomes as perfectly sanctified as a one-year-old could be, a five-year-old could be, a ten-year-old could be, or a thirty-year-old could be. He grew in favor with God and with man. And how did he grow? Well, the Third Servant song tells us something absolutely stellar and profound. The Lord God has given me, says the Messiah's servant, the tongue of those who are taught, that I may know how to sustain with the word him who is weary. Morning by morning He wakens, He wakens my ear to hear as one who is taught, the Lord God has opened my ear and I was not rebellious. How did our Lord Jesus Christ grow in favor with God and with man? Naturally. Now that might seem a strange word to use. But you see, our Lord, because of the saving significance of His true humanity, was not excused the natural processes of human development. His intellectual development as well as His physical development and His spiritual development were nurtured not magically, not by a conduit of the divine pouring into the human. That would have divinized him and rendered him utterly unable to save us as one of us. But morning by morning, he awakens my ear to hear. Through the whole course of his life, he was not excused the maturative processes whereby we grow in favor with God and with man. I've often wondered about the way the Lord Jesus, in the great temptations that continued to inaugurate the public identity of His person and ministry, when Satan assails Him, how is the Lord, without a Bible in His back pocket, without some scrolls to look at, how is He able to pluck so perfectly from the book of Deuteronomy, once from chapter 8 and twice from chapter 6? How is He able to know this? because morning by morning he wakens my ear to hear as one who is taught. Now, whether our Lord knew by memory the whole Tanakh, the whole what we call the Old Testament, we don't know quite possibly. It wasn't unusual for rabbis to know the whole of what we call the Old Testament. A few months ago, I was on the phone with Sinclair Ferguson, and we were chatting, and he said, you know, Ian, I've just finished reading the biography of George Lawson. Now, George Lawson was a secession Presbyterian minister in the latter half of the 18th century. He has a very fine expositional commentary on the life of Joseph. And Sinclair said to me, he said, you know, Ian, he said something quite astonishing. One of his parishioners said to him, Mr. Lawson, if they take our Bibles away, what will we do? And George Lawson replied, I would be able to write the whole Bible from memory, but I'm not sure I would get the proverbs in the right order. And I was stunned by that. And the reason why was because earlier in the day, as I was walking around Inverness, I'd been saying to myself, Ian, how much of the letter to the Romans could you recite? And I was just thinking in my head, and I thought, well, hopefully easily a half, maybe more than a half, tiny wee bit in Greek. I was so humbled. He said, I think I could recite and write down the whole Bible. But maybe I wouldn't get the proverbs in the right order. Now, whether our Lord knew the whole Scriptures by memory, I tend to think He did. The point is that He had to learn them. He wasn't excused the hard discipline of learning. But we're here, and maybe you're thinking, I thought we were going to be hearing about the baptism of Jesus. The point I want to make is this. As the history of redemption now continues to unfold, what is the next punctuating moment that advances dramatically the history of redemption? Well, it is the baptism of the Lord Jesus Christ. The incarnation was not the end of the Savior's humiliation. That humiliation would gather an internal, decretal momentum, and it comes to a further point in the decretal momentum when He comes to be baptized by John in the Jordan. Thirty years of near but only near silence, and now He comes to fulfill all righteousness. There is a background to the baptism of Jesus, and it's Genesis 1 through 3. Here is the one promised by God in the first gospel sermon preached by God. Here is the one who has come to crush the serpent's head. Here is the one who has come to do what Adam failed to do in the garden. Here is the one who has come to fulfill all righteousness, and that you will notice as the Lord responds to John, when John says to him, I have need to be baptized by you, and you're coming to me? And Jesus says, let it be so for now. Thus shall all righteousness be fulfilled. Now the question is, what is the meaning of this baptism? John's baptism was a baptism of repentance, you'll notice, for the forgiveness of sins. But Jesus is without sin. He has no need to repent of sin. And this is what so perplexes John. He understands the crowds who are coming for baptism, confessing their sin, looking to God for a new beginning, understanding that covenant signs alone do not circumcise the heart. And John says, you're coming to me. for a baptism of repentance, for the forgiveness of sins. What's the meaning? What's the significance of this baptism? Well, very simply, the baptism of Jesus by John in the River Jordan is where the Lord publicly identifies Himself and publicly inaugurates Himself into the mission entrusted to Him in the covenant of redemption in eternity by His Father. It's as if the Son is saying, Father, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. I have come to do Your will, O God. It is written about me in the volume of the book. I've come to do Your will, and here I am. I am ready to stand where sinners stand. I'm ready publicly to identify with a world of lost humanity. I've come to be the representative head and the substitute for men and women in their lostness, in their defiledness before you, our heavenly Father. And I think we are to understand that here, not that Jesus is inaugurating His mission, because that inauguration was when the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit conspired in holy love and mercy to save a people to the praise of God in times eternal. But now we have the public unveiling, the public inaugurating of that mission. And it's all about the obedience of the Son. ready to stand where we stand. Can you imagine people looking on and saying, there's another sinner coming to be washed clean of sin? And he had no sin to be washed clean from. But the world looking on, what would they see? Just another sinner. Well, in a sense it was just another sinner, in the sense that he who knew no sin was becoming to be made sin for us so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. He is being baptized into his office as the priest who had come to make cleansing for sin. He's been baptized into His office as the prophet who is God's last and final Word to humanity, and He's come to be baptized into His office as the King summoning the whole creation to bow down before the Holy One clothed and veiled in flesh. This is what the baptism of our Lord is about, isn't it? He's coming to so identify with us as to become one with us. Our representative head, the one, the second Adam who to the fight and to the rescue has come. He's come to fulfill all righteousness. He's come to fulfill the law perfectly that we could never fulfill. And he's come to experience in himself the exactions of God's holy broken law that we could never pay. He's come to satisfy divine justice. And he stands, and it's as if the dirt and the filth that would wash off of the people began to wash over him. Behold your God." Who is like unto you, O God? Can you imagine evangelists standing by the river and saying to the people, Behold the Servant King? This is the Servant King standing in the water receiving a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, this is the servant king? Behold your king." God turns the values of the world upside down and inside out, and in weakness and in apparent, in apparent need of repentance. The Son of God stands where we stand. and says, Father, I've come to embrace what we covenanted in times eternal to accomplish, and though it cost me everything, I embrace it, heart and soul. But I said there were two baptisms that the Lord Jesus Christ experienced. And I'm sure some of you will already in your minds have been thinking ahead to Luke chapter 12, where Jesus says, I came to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled, I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how great is my distress until it is accomplished. There was a baptism in water by John in the Jordan, and there was a baptism in blood by God the Father on the cross. The water baptism, in a sense, prefigured and pointed forward towards a greater baptism. when the One who had not only become flesh, but who had become one with us to be one of us, that He might stand before God in place of us, would Himself be deluged by the wrath of God on Calvary's cross that our sins deserved. In His baptism in blood, Jesus is fulfilling publicly in His baptism on the cross the will of the Father to save a people to the praise of His glory. It wasn't enough that the Savior should be baptized by John in the Jordan. This is the public inauguration, if you like, into His office as the Servant's Son, the public inauguration, not the inauguration, but the public unveiling of it. But it wasn't enough that He should stand with us. We needed someone who would do for us what we could never do for ourselves. We needed someone who would pay in full the price we could never pay and who would render up the perfect obedience that we could never give. And that's why Paul writes in Philippians 2, himself he emptied, literally. And I actually like the King James Version. It's not so much a translation, but it's a profound theological understanding of the text. Himself he emptied, making himself of no reputation. Because he didn't stop being who he was. He didn't empty himself of all but love. He never ceased to be who he eternally was. He made himself of no reputation, taking, taking the form of a servant. It's addition by subtraction or subtraction by addition. He takes the form of a servant and that form veils and obscures the eternal Godhead that was natively his. And this is what our Lord Jesus Christ is committing Himself to in the waters of baptism. But actually, the one thing I want to leave with you this morning, and I know our time really is gone, I wonder if we, as much as the Bible would have us be, men and women and boys and girls who understand that our identity as Christian believers is forged and sealed in our baptism into Jesus Christ. I wonder if it's ever dawned on you that every conversion we read about and every household we read about that comes to faith, they're baptized. Baptism isn't a secondary adjunct. It belongs to the complex of conversion. There's no such thing in the New Testament as an unbaptized Christian. Now, don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying you can't be a Christian if you're not baptized. I'm saying in the New Testament there is no such thing as an unbaptized Christian, because in baptism we are being publicly inaugurated into the baptism of Jesus Christ in water and in blood. And that is why Paul can tell the church in Galatia that we have been baptized into Christ and therefore we're all one in Christ. Our water baptism is to be reflected in the transformative lives that the baptism in blood accomplishes for us. through repentance and faith. And that's why when the New Testament comes to describe what a Christian is, it tells us, yes, a Christian is someone who has believed into Jesus Christ, the Christ who was baptized in water and who was baptized in blood. But what does that mean? We're baptized into Christ. We're baptized into union with Christ. We receive the life of Christ. And what does that actually mean? Well, says Paul, it means this, Colossians 3.12, put on as the elect of God, love, gentleness, faithfulness, goodness, meekness. Those who have been baptized into Jesus Christ are to show in their lives their union with this Jesus Christ. That's why when people become members of a gospel church, the one thing we look for, isn't this the case? We look for a credible profession that has issued in a transformed life. We're not looking for perfection. We don't know the hearts of men and women, boys and girls. But we're looking to hear a credible profession that has become transformative of a new life. If anyone is in Christ, new creation. So here the Savior has come. As it is written of me in the volume of the book, here I am. Calvin thinks that in his baptism, Christ is sanctifying baptism for us. That may be the case. I rarely disagree with Calvin. I don't have the temerity. But he's not always right. But I think there is something there as well. He is sanctifying baptism. people come to John. You know what John is saying to them? Your covenant signs won't save you. Your circumcision according to the flesh won't save you. Your allegiance to Moses and the law won't save you. God is looking for a new heart, a circumcision of the heart. There's a repentance from sin that you need to understand and undertake. And it's as if the Lord Jesus Christ comes and says, and I'm going to stand with you in that water of filth and be the one who will accomplish for you the graces you need to have your hearts made clean before God. So, a simple question as we end, has your heart been circumcised? I'm not asking you, are you a paid up member of Covenant Presbyterian Church? I'm not asking you, Can you tell me the whole 107 questions and answers of the Shorter Catechism, though I'd love that you would? I'm not asking you, have you digested Reformed truth? I'm simply asking, has your heart been circumcised? Because you know, this is my last word, you know there can be an eternity of difference between knowing the doctrines of grace and knowing the grace of those doctrines. You understand the difference? I understood the doctrines of grace before I really, really in God's mercy knew anything about the grace of the doctrines. What a Savior, willing to come, stand among us. one with us, that He might do for us what we could never do for ourselves. Let us pray. Lord, we bless You for Your great Son, our Savior Jesus Christ. How can we begin to thank You for the one who left the realms of glory for us, who was born into this world for us, who learned the scriptures for us, who was baptized for us, who lived for us, who died for us, who rose for us, who ascended for us, who now presently intercedes for us, and who one day will come again for us. All praise and thanks to God we bless you, in our Savior Jesus Christ's name. Amen.