BAPTISM OF
JESUS
13Then Jesus
came from Galilee to the Jordan to John, to be baptized by him.
14John would
have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come
to me?”
15But Jesus
answered him, “Let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill
all righteousness.”
Then he
consented.
16And 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; 17and behold, a voice from heaven said,
“THIS IS MY
BELOVED SON, WITH WHOM I AM WELL PLEASED.”
MATTHEW
3:13-17
COMMENTARY
When the time
came for Lord Jesus to start his public ministry, He came all the way from
Nazareth in the Norwest part of Israel to the eastern part of the Jordan river
near Jerusalem, in Judea, near Bethania (John 1:28; Matthew 3:13) to be
baptized by John.
John, his
relative, knowing well who He was, refused at first to baptize Him, asking
instead for Jesus to baptize him (Matthew 3:14) but our Lord, also knowing very
well who He was and what He was doing, said to John that he should ‘Let it
be so’.
Jesus went to
John to acknowledge him as a prophet and to give validity to his ministry.
What would have
happened if John’s ministry was to announce the coming of the Messiah and the
Messiah Himself would have ignored it?
By giving validity
to John’s ministry, Jesus approved all the warnings and announcements that the
Baptist made about Him. And also, He redeemed all those who had taken John’s baptism
of repentance, because all those sinners who tainted the clean waters of the
Jordan with their sins, were now being made clean again by the perfect holiness
of Jesus when He descended into the waters, without having to do so for the
forgiveness of any sins.
With his
holiness and intention, Jesus clean all those who had taken baptism by John.
BUT this was not
everything.
When Jesus came
up from the waters, suddenly the heavens opened up and God spoke to Him with a
loud voice:
“This is my
beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased”
While the Holy
Spirit descended on Him in the shape of a dove.
This is the
first time the Holy Trinity manifests Himself fully, being the second time
during the transfiguration (Matthew 17:5) of Jesus.
On this occasion,
LORD GOD YHWH, the eternal and all-powerful God of Abraham, recognized as such
by all Israel; had manifested his own approval of the ministry of Jesus. Now
the man Jesus of Nazareth was given God’s approval to preach and announce
repentance and conversion, but not only that, He was announced to be ‘SON OF
GOD’.
At this stage,
this could mean just an approval of the Messianic claim of Jesus the man; but
we know now God was also proclaiming Him, divine, of equal nature to Himself.
But the man
Jesus of Nazareth, that in his human nature took the baptism of John, being
divine Himself, nevertheless, God the Father anointed Jesus with the descend of
the Holy Spirit.
The human Jesus
of Nazareth was ready to his public ministry, with God’s approval and the anointing
of the Spirit.
In this reading
the author leaves two essential teachings:
1 – JESUS DID
NOT LEARN his ministry from JOHN.
He came to John
knowing better than the Baptist himself who He was and commanded John to baptize
Him.
This rejects the
heretical modern theory that says that the man Jesus learned his mission slowly
from the Essenes and John the Baptist, or some other Hindu or Egyptian gurus.
The Son of God, did not need any human teacher in matters of religion and the
realization of his own mission, since He knew it from birth (Luke 2:49).
2 – The FATHER YHWH,
JESUS and the HOLY SPIRIT, are three independent divine entities, and not one
entity manifesting Himself in three different modes at different times.
This simultaneous
manifestation of the Father from Heaven, the Son in the flesh, and the Spirit
coming down on the Son separately from them, it is a proof of this. We are
aware of them three, and we can only relate to the Trinity through these three
forms.
But only by
realizing that the divinity can not be multiple and can only be one in essence,
we also know that is this invisible and unnamed God, whom Genesis calls Elohim
- אֱלֹהִ֔ים (Genesis 1:26),
is the God manifested as Father, Son and Spirit at the same time.
This debunks the heresy of modalism and Arianism,
either who deny the reality of this triple manifestation, or deny the divinity
of Christ.
From this day onwards, Jesus of Nazareth started this
public ministry as the anointed Messiah, anointed not by man, but by God
Himself.
Omar Flores.
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