Baptized into the Sins of His People

In His baptism, Jesus was symbolically drenched in the sins of others so that He might carry them from the River Jordan to the cross of Calvary. Today Sinclair Ferguson considers the event that began Christ’s public ministry.

This week on Things Unseen, we’re thinking about some of the big moments in the life of our Lord Jesus. We’ve thought about some of them earlier on in the year. For example, when we were talking about baptism, I think I mentioned the importance of Jesus’ own baptism. And today, I want to think a bit more about His actual experience on that day.

It was a very big moment. In fact, it was so important to Him that when He looked forward to His passion, He described it as a baptism: “I have a baptism to be baptized with,” He said, “and I feel hemmed in until it happens” (Luke 12:50).

John the Baptist said something intriguing, even enigmatic, about his ministry of baptizing. He said the reason for it was so that the Messiah would be revealed, as indeed He was when the Spirit came on the Lord Jesus in the form of a dove, and He was identified as the Servant King by the voice of God. And so when Jesus appeared in the crowds, waiting to be baptized, there was something about Him that gripped John. We know he didn’t want to baptize Him. He said it should be the other way round; he wasn’t worthy to untie Jesus’ sandal.

But after the event, John the Baptist began to see what had happened. The dove and the voice had identified Jesus as the Lamb of God. Yes, He was spotless; He didn’t need to be baptized. But He was the spotless Lamb of God who had come to take away the sin of the world. And so it was, as Jesus had said to him, fitting that they should fulfill all righteousness (Matt. 3:15). It was fitting with respect to God’s purpose that the sinless One should become the sin bearer, that He should be baptized as though He were a sinner Himself, indeed, as though He were the sinner.

And two things made this a big moment in Jesus’ life. One, of course, was what happened. To this point, He’d lived a private life. We know almost nothing about Him between the ages of twelve and thirty, except what we can put together from the things He later said and the character He displayed. After all, His holy character didn’t just drop from heaven the moment He was baptized. But clearly at His baptism, Jesus sensed He was being set apart, newly equipped, reassured by His Father for the next stage.

In the book of Genesis, Joseph had begun his work as mediator and physical savior of the ancient Near East at the age of thirty. In the Mosaic administration, priests entered fully into their ministry when they were thirty years old. So in a similar way, this was our Lord’s moment of ordination for His public ministry as Savior. The words that God spoke made that clear. And after reading Isaiah 61 in the synagogue at Nazareth, Jesus made it clear that He understood that. The Spirit of the Lord had come upon Him to anoint Him, to equip Him for this new public stage of ministry.

But for that very reason, this event also marked a new stage of commitment on the part of the Lord Jesus. He was stepping into a new phase. The One who did not need to be baptized was voluntarily submitting to John’s baptism. The One who had no sins to repent of, no sin to carry back into God’s presence and ask for forgiveness, that One was coming to be symbolically drenched in the sins of others in order that He might carry them from the river Jordan to the cross of Calvary.

Yes, from one point of view, John was right to sense the incongruity of the situation. He was doing to Jesus what Jesus didn’t need for Himself. But it began to dawn on him what Jesus already understood. He’d come to do what we need.

And so, by whatever mode John the Baptizer actually baptized, he used the very water of Jordan into which he had symbolically washed the sins of the people. And that water that was now symbolically polluted, full of sin, now drenched the head of the one person who didn’t need the baptism. Jesus could easily have used the words of 2 Corinthians 5:21 to describe His experience, I think: “I am being symbolically made sin, so that in Me, sinners might be made the righteousness of God.”

No wonder then that our Lord’s water baptism was a big moment in His life. He was coming as the spotless Lamb of God who would take away the sin of the world. He was being baptized into the sins of the people, so that they could be baptized into His righteousness. Here, the gospel was being set forward in the form of a drama. No wonder He later said, “I have a baptism to be baptized with, and I’m hemmed in until it happens.”

So, His baptism was a big moment for Him. It expressed His absolute commitment to love us to death, literally—His death. And that’s why that big moment in Jesus’ life is a big moment for our lives too.