Digenis.org

I was eagerly anticipating the scheduled return of Antithesis.com today. They’d announced that they would be starting up a new season of articles and resources today, begining with “Before a Watching World : Why Should They Give a Damn?”, an article which has apparently been in the works since late this past summer. If I remember correctly, it was supposed to be published on the net back in early August, but since then it has been postponed and postponed again. Today when I got back from church (and actually before I went as well), I checked to see if the article was up yet. It wasn’t. Instead, in it’s place there was an announcement stating that the new season would begin on October 28, 2002. Another delay.

Today Pastor Hobbs spoke on something which I hadn’t really though about before. In Matthew 3, we read of Jesus coming to John the Baptist to be baptized. John describes the baptism which he performs as a ‘baptism of repentence’, and promises that there would come one that would ‘baptize with the Holy Spirit and with Fire.’ So, John’s was a baptism of repentance, yet Jesus the spotless Lamb came to him to be baptized. . . Why was this necesary? If Jesus never sinned, then he would have nothing to repent of.

John himself realizes the apparent absurdity of it and says that it would be more fitting for Jesus to instead baptize him (John). So why was it he was baptized by John? The easy answer is that Christ says it must be done in order to ‘fufill all righteousness’ (v. 15), and also that the Father in Heaven gives his approval of the act directly after it happens. God ordained it to be.

But why? Inquisitive minds ask. . . I think that it has something to do with the whole concept of Jesus being the propitiation for our sins. Perhaps, just as his death was substitutionary, so was his baptism. This makes sense to me because the baptism of Jesus us commonly seen as the start of his redemptive ministry.