Underwater Jesus

Luke 3:21-22

“Christ of the Abyss” is the original of several bronze statues of Jesus placed underwater. This one is in the Italian Riviera. It is a favorite spot for divers among the coral. It must be cleaned often.

In our text, Jesus did go underwater. He, of course, needed no cleansing. It is now thirty years after His birth [v. 23] and it is time to be launched into His ministry and the launch has as its most notable feature, a voice out of heaven affirming that He is the Son of the Most High God with whom the Father is well pleased. He chooses to be baptized and goes underwater. He can walk on top of water, but instead He goes under it.

It is the summer of the year 26 A.D. and probably felt like any other year in life. And He looked like everyone else. He came from obscurity in the hole in the wall town of Nazareth, off the beaten path, and nothing would have stood out about Him. He didn't have a halo around His head and He didn't wear some special heavenly garb.  There was no light emanating from Him.  But when Jesus was baptized, all heaven broke loose because this was not just another baptism. This was a singular event to launch the ministry of the Messiah, the Son of God, the Savior of the world. He had for 30 years been undercover and now He goes underwater.

Thirty years of perfect, sinless growth and maturing are over with. Thirty years in which Jesus has increased in wisdom and stature and favor with God and man, as chapter 1 verse 52 says.  All the preparation is past and now He is ready to begin His ministry.  So He leaves Nazareth and takes the sixty to seventy-mile hike down from Nazareth to Judea and out to the Jordan River where John is.

The word Trinity is not in the Bible, but here we have the Trinity.  We have the Son being baptized.  We have the Holy Spirit descending.  And we have the Father speaking out of heaven.  All three are present simultaneously.  And a good way to look at the text is to see it from the differing viewpoints of the three persons of the Trinity.  Let's begin with the Son. 

Jesus evidently stood in line with others until it was His turn. The Gospel of John says that John the Baptist didn’t recognize Jesus at first. Though they may have met as children, they have lived far apart for decades now. So Jesus identifies Himself. John immediately knows who He is…You are the Messiah! You're the Son of the Most High God. You're not alienated from God. You're the sinless one. You're the holy child as the angel said. You have no sin. You don't need this baptism.

His protest is a reasonable one.  John may be saying, I need to protect You from somebody drawing the wrong conclusion here.  If I baptize You, somebody may assume that You are testifying to being a sinful person.  This can't happen.  John says, look, what needs to happen is You need to baptize me, since I'm baptizing everybody else and can't baptize myself, but I'm a sinner, why don't You just dunk me? That's a better plan. 

Here’s the first thing Jesus says since He was twelve that's recorded in Scripture.  Eighteen years of silence are now broken.  And what He says is really amazing. 

Matthew 3:15

¹⁵ And Jesus answering said unto him, Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness. Then he suffered him.

What is Jesus saying here?  He's saying He has to do this. He has to do it to fulfill all righteousness.  What does that mean? 

God sent John to baptize people in water.  That's what God asked of righteous people.  So, Jesus wanted it done to Him because He needed to fulfill all righteousness.  Whatever God required, Jesus did, because Jesus would live a life of perfect righteousness.  There would be no sins of commission, He would never do what He shouldn't have done, and there would be no sins of omission, He would never fail to do what righteous people did.

Did Jesus go to the Passover?  Many times.  Did He take of the Passover meal?  Many times.  But did He really need to participate in a meal that commemorated God's deliverance of His people from Egypt and that looked forward to the payment for sin by the final Lamb that would come?  Did Jesus have to partake of a Passover meal as a testimony to His need to be delivered from sin?  No, but righteous people kept the Passover because God instituted it.

Remember a conversation between Peter and some people from the Israeli IRS, the tax people.  The tax people came and asked, “Simon does your master pay taxes?” And Peter said, "Yeah, He does, He pays the tax."  And then Jesus said to him, "Peter, who pays the tax?  Does the king's son pay the tax or do strangers pay the tax?"  Peter said, "Hah, that's easy, strangers, the king's son never pays taxes.  It's not how the system works.  If you're the king's son he doesn't get taxed.  It's all the strangers that get taxed."

"Nevertheless,” Jesus said, “you go down and throw your little hook in the lake, pull out a fish, you reach in his mouth, you'll find a coin there. That's enough to pay both of ours.  Go pay the tax."  Jesus was saying this: I don't need to pay the tax, I'm the King's Son, but I'm paying it because that's what God requires of righteous people.  You render to Caesar what is Caesar's, you render to God what is God's."  Now in Jesus' life, if God said this is what I want righteous people to do, Jesus did it.  And it's not a confession that He was a sinner, it's only an acknowledgement that whatever God established as righteous conduct, Jesus did it.

I'm sure that Jesus ate the Passover meal.  He participated as a family member in the sacrifices that were made by the father for the family.  Jesus was a part of all of those things that God had ordained for righteous people to do, and that's why He did what He did. Was it to be a good example for us? Sure. Was it an act of humility? Absolutely. But it’s deeper than that.

Jesus needed to live a perfect life, so that perfect life could be credited to your account.  That’s the doctrine of imputation and justification. On the cross, 2 Corinthians 5:21, God made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us.  God treated Jesus as if He had committed all your sins, right?  In other words, God punished Jesus for your sin and my sin, for all the sins of all who would ever believe.  God treated Jesus as if He lived your life, as if He lived my life.  Then turns around and that same verse says, "That we might be made the righteousness of God in Him."

Jesus needed to live a perfect life so that perfect life could be credited to your account.  He couldn't just come down on Friday, die, rise on Sunday and go back.  There would have been no righteous life.  There would have been no righteous childhood, no righteous teen-age years, no righteous adulthood.  That perfect life is what is credited to our account.  when God looks at my name in the book it will say "Jerry Shirley," and under it, "Lived a perfect life."

"Really?"  Yes, that's right.  What happened to Jerry’s sin?  It was placed on Jesus Christ who was treated by God as if He had committed it all.  So, on the cross God treats Jesus as if He lived my sinful life, and then turns right around and treats me as if I lived His righteous life. 

Philippians 3:9

⁹ And be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith:

And, according to the words of Isaiah, the best good you can come up with is filthy rags, so God clothes you in the righteousness of Christ.

So why did He have to be baptized?  To fulfill all righteousness, to do what God required to be done so that perfectly righteous life would satisfy God and then be credited to our account.  That is a lost truth in the church today.  We all understand that Jesus died on the cross to bear our sins, but very few people understand that God then exchanged for our sins the perfect life of Christ. 

So, John caves in and says, OK, I understand, and baptizes Jesus.  And no one gets the wrong idea that He’s a sinner because at the very time that Jesus is coming up out of the water, the Holy Spirit comes down, and out of heaven comes the voice of Father God, "This is My beloved Son in whom I am well pleased," which is the way by which God announces the absolute holy perfection of the one who has just been baptized.  John doesn't have to protect the reputation of Jesus.  He will be fine on His own and in the care of His Father.

Here’s something fascinating: Luke mentions that He was praying.  The Messiah in the midst of this baptism is in perfect, holy conversation with God.  There is no breach in that relationship.  There is no separation.  From eternity to eternity, through time in the middle when Jesus was incarnate, there never was a break in communication with the Father except for that moment on the cross when Jesus said, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" when God turned His back as He was executing Jesus for all our sins.  But apart from that moment, no alienation existed. 

Jesus prays constantly, without ceasing. To whom? To the Father. How did He close His prayer after saying thank you for this food?  In MY name, Amen?

We see Jesus praying before He chooses the twelve and praying at the feeding of the 5,000 and praying when He was about to ask His disciples a very important question in Luke 9, and praying on the mountain where He was transfigured, praying just before that tender invitation in Matthew 11, "Come unto Me, all you who are weary," praying before He taught the disciples how to pray, praying at Lazarus' tomb, praying when He started the Lord's Supper, praying, of course, in Gethsemane, praying on the cross, praying after the resurrection.

v. 21 says heaven was opened.  Now things begin to become transcendent. 

Coming up out of the water, Matthew puts it, heaven was opened.  John baptized by immersion. That's what baptized means, to immerse or to dip.  Heaven opened up to let heaven come down and to let heaven be heard.

In Ezekiel 1:1, Ezekiel was by the river Chebar among the exiles, heaven was opened: “I saw visions of God.”  Jesus in John 1:51 talked about the heaven being opened up and angels of God ascending and descending.  Acts 7, Stephen at his execution saw heaven open and there he saw his Lord.  Revelation 19 talks about heaven being opened, verse 11, out of heaven comes the Lord Jesus Christ riding on a white horse, coming to conquer.

Isaiah 64:1

¹ Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down…

Well, that happened at the baptism.  The heavens were rent.  Heaven was opened and down comes the Holy Spirit and out comes the voice of God.  This is critical because this is divine confirmation.  This is the other two members of the Trinity confirming the messiahship of Jesus, descending on the right man, the right person.  This is the launch pad of the ministry of Jesus.

And this is personal to me, because on September 7, 1977, Heaven came down and glory filled my soul!