Tom Mount – July 28, 2024

 

What the Father says about Jesus: Luke 3:21-22

21 When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized too. And as he was praying, heaven was opened 22 and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”

  • “When all the people were being baptized” – John likely baptized thousands
  • “Jesus was baptized too” – Why was Jesus baptized?
  • “as he was praying” – Of the four Gospel writers, Luke especially emphasizes Jesus’ prayer life (cf.5:16; 6:12; 9:18,28; 11:1; 22:32,41,44; 23:34,46).
  • “the Holy Spirit descended on him” – This was Jesus’ formal anointing, making Yeshua ben Joseph (“Jesus son of Joseph”) Yeshua HaMashiach (“Jesus the Christ”).
  • “A voice came from heaven” – Note the holy Trinity in this text: Son, Spirit, Father.
  • “You are my Son” – Ps 2:7-8; John 3:16 “uniquely begotten Son”
  • “[You are] my beloved” – John 5:20: “The Father loves the Son…”
  • “with you I am well pleased” (or “in whom I delight”) – Isa 42:1-3.
  • Was it important for Jesus to hear these things? (Luke 4:1-13 and Luke 4:14-30).

What God says about those who are “in Christ”

  1. You are my “son” or daughter.
  • This wasn’t always the case (Eph 2:2-3): were children of disobedience and wrath.
  • What had to happen? We needed a new nature. Christians are a new creation (2 Cor 5:17), born of God’s Spirit (John 3:3-8), products of God’s DNA (1 John 3:9).
  • Salvation is not just about going to heaven but being made recreated in God’s image
  • When the Father says of you, “You are my daughter, you are my son”, he means: “I have fathered you in a radically new way. I haven’t merely created you; I’ve recreated you by putting my own DNA within you to transform your spiritual genome from a sinner into a holy one; an unrighteous one into a righteous one; a child of disobedience into a loved, holy child of God.”
  • When we accept that, we no longer are tempted to define our identity in terms of race, color, gender or any other comparatively trivial attribute.
  • God does this for us the moment we place our believing trust in Jesus Christ.
  • You’re a child of God, a brother or sister of Jesus Christ. As the church fathers and mothers used to say: “What the Son of God is by nature, he has made us by grace.”
  1. You are my “beloved.”
  • “beloved” is agapetos, “loved one, esteemed, dear, favorite, cherished one”
  • 1 Jn 3:1 – God has lavished his love on us. Result: we are the ”beloved” of God.
  • A closely associated OT term is cegullah: “treasured possession, inheritance, jewel, one’s share of the spoils.” Deuteronomy 7:6-8a.
  • Just before his arrest and death, Jesus prayed to the Father and asked: “that the world may know that you (Father) have loved them even as you loved me” (John 17:23b).
  1. With you I am “well pleased”
  • God finds genuine delight in his people (Psalm 16:3; Zep 3:17; Eph 1:5,9).
  • This fact underscores the perfect freedom of God’s redeeming actions. God was under no coercion to make us his children and envelop us within the life of the holy Trinity.
  • But what about all my sin? What about the fact I keep messing up? (Eph 1:4: “he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the earth”.)
  • Our sins don’t define us. What defines us are the facts that the Creator of the cosmos loves us and delights in us as we trust in him. As a wise monk once commented: “I am a sinner yes, but before I was a sinner I was loved.”
  • God said through the prophet Jeremiah: “I have loved you with an everlasting love” (Jer 31:3). He loved you before you were ever created and sinned. He loved you when you were lost in your darkness and sin and didn’t love him. He loves you now as you struggle to overcome the temptation to sin. And he will go on loving you forever.
  • But doesn’t God get irritated and angry with me when I blow it? (Ps 103:13-14).

Take away

Some of us need to repent of our harsh thoughts of God. In a broken world, bad things will happen. But in the midst of these things, remember: He created you, he loves you and he offers to recreate you and give you an eternity of joy, peace in his presence. Draw close to the Father through Jesus. Spend time with him this week reading his Word, talking to him—not out of some sense of religious obligation—but in humility and honesty and a genuine yearning to know him better and to root your identity not in your job, own moral goodness or anything else than the unchanging reality that, in Christ, you are his child, his beloved, in whom he finds immeasurable delight.