His Baptism and Our Vocation
His Baptism and Our Vocation
His Baptism
The Anticipations of John (John i. 26–34)
The Attitude of Jesus Himself (Mark i. 9–11)
The Acceptations of Jesus for Himself (Luke iii. 21–23)
The Appointment of Jesus in Himself (Matthew iii. 13–15)
Our Vocation
The Anticipations of God (Hebrew ii. 9–10)
The Attitude of the Saint Himself (1 Corinthians i. 26–29)
The Acceptations of the Saint for Himself (Acts xx. 24)
The Appointment of the Saint in Himself (Philippians iii. 10)
The age of thirty represents the perfection of physical, mental, and spiritual powers. Jesus Christ was thirty years of age when He was baptised; all His powers were fully matured. For thirty years our Lord had done nothing in public, then at the preaching of John the Baptist He emerged and was baptised with the baptism of John, which is a baptism of repentance from sin. Our Lord’s baptism is not an illustration of the Christian rite of baptism, nor of the baptism of the Holy Ghost. At His baptism our Lord accepted His vocation, which was to bear away the sin of the world. We have no corresponding experience to that. Jesus Christ did not come to do anything less than to bear away the sin of the world, that is His vocation as Son of Man. By His bearing away the sin of the world, the way is opened up for every human being to get to God as if there had been no sin. The revelation in the Bible is not that Jesus Christ was punished for our sins; but that He took on Him the sin of the human race and put it away—an infinitely profounder revelation (see 2 Corinthians v. 21; Hebrews ix. 26). All through the Bible it is revealed that our Lord bore the sin of the world by identification, and not by sympathy . He deliberately took upon His own shoulders, and bore in His own person, the whole massed sin of the human race. Our Lord knew what He had come to do, and His baptism is the first public manifestation of His identification with sin with a conscious understanding of what He was doing. At His baptism He visibly and distinctly and historically took upon Him His vocation.
The Anticipations of John. “John answered them, saying, I baptise with water: but there standeth one among you, whom ye know not; He it is, who coming after me is preferred before me, whose shoe’s latchet I am not worthy to unloose.... And John bare record, saying, I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode upon Him. And I knew Him not: but He that sent me to baptize with water, the same said unto me, Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending, and remaining on Him, the same is He which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost. And I saw, and bare record that this is the Son of God” (John i. 26–34). The anticipations of John, which were built upon the Old Testament, begin to be fulfilled in our Lord’s baptism (Matthew iii. 10–12). Jesus Christ is the true Baptiser; He baptises with the Holy Ghost. He is the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world, my sin (1 John ii. 1). He is the One Who can make me like Himself; the baptism of John could not do that.
The Anticipations of God. “But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angel for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honour; that He by the grace of God should taste death for every man. For it became Him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings” (Hebrews ii. 9–10). God’s anticipations work in us because our Lord accepted His vocation. God anticipates that He is going to bring sons and daughters, not ‘saved souls,’ to glory. A saved soul is simply one who has partaken of the mighty efficacy of Redemption. A son or daughter of God is one who has not only partaken of Redemption, but has become of value to God in this order of things.
We must ever make a practical distinction in our minds between the revelation of Redemption and the conscious experience of salvation. Redemption is absolutely finished and complete, but its reference to individual men is a question of their individual action. The whole human race is condemned to salvation by the Cross of our Lord. God nowhere holds a man responsible for having the heredity of sin; the condemnation begins when a man sees and understands that God can deliver him from the heredity of sin and he refuses to let Him do it; at that moment he begins to get the seal of damnation. John iii. 19 is the final word of condemnation—“This is the judgment,” i.e., the critical moment, “that the light is come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light; for their works were evil.”
Is God realising His anticipations in our lives? Is the Son of God reaching His maturity in us? The formation of the Son of God in us and our putting on of the new man must go together. We are brooded over by the Holy Ghost (Luke i. 35), and that which is formed in us is the Holy Son of God (Galatians i. 15–16). His life is formed in our human nature and it develops quietly in the unrecorded years. We live our ordinary life as human beings, remembering that our natural life, although delivered from sin, is continually in danger of misunderstanding the Son of God, just as Mary misunderstood her own Son.
In a hundred and one ways we can prefer that the sword should go through the Son of God in us rather than through our natural life, and that our natural impressions should have the ascendency rather than the Son of God. The putting on of the new man means that we must not allow our natural life to dictate to the Son of God, but see to it that we give Him ample chance to dominate every bit of us. He has delivered us from sin, now we must see that He dominates our natural life also, until the life of Jesus is manifested in our mortal flesh.
This is the meaning of bringing a son or daughter to glory, and it is also the meaning of the efficacy of our Lord’s baptism and the acceptance of His vocation being worked out in individual lives. Our Lord’s vocation, which He accepted at His baptism, was His identification with sin. Our vocation is to fulfil the anticipations of God and to become His sons and daughters. The majority of us so harp on the ordinary evangelical line that we thank God for saving us and then leave the thing alone. We cannot grow into holiness, but we must grow in it. Are we accepting our vocation and determining to let the Son of God manifest Himself in our mortal flesh? If we are, it will mean that our human nature must be perfectly obedient to the Son of God and that we must bring all our imagination and fancies and thoughts into captivity to the obedience of Christ.
The Attitude of Jesus Himself. “And it came to pass in those days, that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized of John in Jordan. And straightway coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon Him: And there came a voice from heaven, saying, Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Mark i. 9–11). The baptism of our Lord was an extraordinary spiritual experience to Himself. “And there came a voice from heaven, saying, Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”We have no experience like that; it stands unique. There is only one beloved Son of God; we are sons of God through His Redemption. John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance from sin, and that was the baptism with which Jesus was baptised. He was baptised into sin, made to be sin, and that is why His Father was well pleased with Him. When our Lord took on Him His vocation as sin-bearer the Holy Ghost descended, and the voice of the Father came. The Holy Ghost descended on Him as a dove; He comes to us as fire. The descent of the Holy Ghost and the voice of the Father were to our Lord the seal on His accepted vocation.
The Cross of Jesus Christ and His baptism express the same thing. Our Lord was not a martyr; He was not merely a good man; He was God Incarnate. He came down to the lowest reach of creation in order to bring back the whole human race to God, and in order to do this He must take upon Him, as representative Man, the whole massed sin of the race. That is why He is called “the Lamb of God.” It was in this connection also that God said, “Thou art my beloved Son.” “Though He were a Son, yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered.” The Son of God alone can redeem, and because He was the Son of God, He became Man that He might bring man back to God.
We so continually run down the revelations of the New Testament to the level of our own experience. That is wrong; we must let God lift up our experience to the standard of His word.
The Attitude of The Saint Himself. “For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called: but God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; and base things of the world and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: that no flesh should glory in His presence” (1 Corinthians i. 26–29). This is our calling as saints, and it is the only line on which the Holy Spirit will witness to us. He will never witness to our wits, or to our intelligence, or to our physical perfections, or to our insight or genius, or to anything at all that is natural to us; He will only witness to that which has been produced in us by His Redemption. Are we watching our experience, or are we estimating the witness of the Holy Ghost? The Holy Ghost witnesses only to the Son of God, and not according to our fleshly estimates of things (2 Corinthians v. 16), and if we try and estimate Jesus Christ according to the flesh, we shall find there is no reality in it.
Spiritually, God always builds upon the weakest link, never on the strong link. The empires of the world were all founded on strong men, consequently they broke, because no chain is stronger than its weakest link. God Almighty became Incarnate as a helpless Babe in Bethlehem, and Jesus Christ begins His life in us by a new birth. Do we realise that our human nature has to become the birthplace of the Son of God, or have we only realised the miracle of God’s changing grace? ‘Bring up this child for me.’ How is the life of the Son of God growing in our bodily life? Are we putting on the new man in keeping with the Son of God born in us? How is the Son of God progressing in the affections of our heart and the imaginations of our mind? Have we crushed Him? The historic Son of God was put to death because the wits and wisdom of this world could not agree with Him, but blasphemed Him and crucified Him, and the same thing may happen in any individual life. Watch the barriers God puts into your life. The natural life says, ‘I ought to be this and that.’ But God has told you you cannot. Woe be to you if you hanker for a second after the thing about which God has said ‘No’ to you. If you do, you will put to death the life of God in you. Are you willing to accept the barrier from Him? It may be a barrier with regard to personal ambition for His service. This must be our attitude to ourselves—fellowship with the things that are despised, the things that look ostensibly weak to the wise things of the world. They are not weak to God because they are based on His Redemption. When we accept our vocation of sons and daughters of God, we become identified with the Son of God, Who was Himself despised and rejected of men.
The Acceptations of Jesus for Himself. “Now when all the people were baptized, it came to pass, that Jesus ago being baptized, and praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon Him, and a voice came from heaven, which said, Thou art My beloved Son; in Thee I am well pleased. And Jesus Himself began to be about thirty years of age, being (as was supposed) the son of Joseph, which was the son of Heli” (Luke iii. 21–23). We read that Jesus was in communion with His Father at the time of His baptism, “Jesus also being baptized, and praying.” Our Lord accepted His vocation in the centre of His spirit, consequently the temptations when they came made no appeal to Him although they were based on amazingly wise strategy. Satan could not get near Him. The vocation our Lord had accepted was that of sin-bearer, not of dominating world-lord. Satan’s aim was to get Him to fulfil His vocation on another line, “There is no need to die for sin, You can fulfil Your vocation by a ‘short cut’ and evade the cross.” Our Lord came here for one purpose only-to bear away the sin of the world in His own Person on the Cross. He came to redeem men, not to set them a wonderful example.
The Acceptations of the Saint for Himself. “But none of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy, and the ministry, which I have received of the Lord Jesus, to testify the gospel of the grace of God” (Acts xx. 24). “None of these things move me,” says Paul. What things? The things that were to smash Paul’s heart, crumple up his body, and extinguish all his earthly ambitions. Have we accepted that kind of vocation, or are we only concerned that we get deep conscious communion with God? The acceptation of the saint for himself is that he is concerned about nothing at all saving this one thing, “that I might finish my course with joy”, not happiness. Joy is the result of the perfect fulfilment of what a man is created for. Happiness depends on things that happen, and may sometimes be an insult. It is continually necessary to revert to what the New Testament asks us to accept about ourselves. Have we received this ministry from Jesus, “As Thou hast sent Me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world?” How did the Father send Him? “For I came down from heaven, not to do Mine own will, but the will of Him that sent Me.” The first obedience of Jesus was to the will of His Father, not to the needs of men. Then our first accepted vocation is not to help men, but to obey God, and when we accept that vocation we enter into relationship with the despised and the neglected. It is always easy to neglect a man or woman who deliberately accepts the aim of his life from the Lord Jesus. Many of us are imitators of other people; we do Christian work because someone has asked us to do it. We must receive our ministry, which is to testify the gospel of the grace of God, from Jesus Christ Himself, not from other Christians. Paul determined to relate everything to Jesus Christ and Him crucified (1 Corinthians ii. 2). ‘You may do what you like with my external circumstances, but you shall not deflect me by making me consider myself, I have only one end—to fulfil the ministry I have received of the Lord Jesus.’ Just as our Lord accepted His vocation and Satan could not turn Him from it, so we as sons of God through His Redemption have to accept our vocation and to fulfil the ministry we receive from Him. All the onslaught of Satan gathered round the Son of God to prevent Him from fulfilling His vocation, and Jesus says the same thing will happen to us. We must beware of affections, of imaginations, of successes, of practical work, of organisations—of everything and everyone that would deflect us for one second from Jesus Christ’s purpose in our life. It will mean going “without the camp”, the camp that wants to dictate over the head of Jesus Christ, “bearing His reproach.”
The Appointment of Jesus in Himself. “Then cometh Jesus from Galilee to Jordan unto John, to be baptised of him. But John forbad Him, saying, I have need to be baptised of Thee, and comest Thou to me? And Jesus answering said unto him, Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness” (Matthew iii. 13–15). John knew Who Jesus Christ was, viz., the One Who was to baptise with the Holy Ghost and fire, and yet that One comes to him to be baptised with the baptism of repentance. No wonder John was amazed, and he refused to baptise Jesus until Jesus said, “Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.” John as the forerunner of the Messiah had no business to introduce his own conceptions as to what was fitting for the Messiah; John had to obey just as the Messiah did. The vocation of our Lord was His identification with sin; He became absolutely and entirely identified with sin, and His baptism is the sign before the whole world of the acceptation of His vocation ‘This is what I am here for.’ It was not a baptism into power and dominion, but a baptism into identification with sin. The disposition of sin, i.e., my claim to my right to myself, entered into the human race by one man (Romans v. 12), and the Holy Spirit entered into the human race by another Man, so that “where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” Jesus Christ by His death bore away the sin of the world, and by our identification with His death we can be delivered from the heredity of sin and can receive a new heredity, the unsullied holiness of Jesus Christ. We receive this new heredity not by imitation, but by identification, by giving up our right to ourselves to Jesus Christ (Galatians ii. 20).
The Appointment of the Saint in Himself. “That I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His death” (Philippians iii. 10). It is one thing to recognise what God is doing with us, but another thing to deliberately accept it as His appointment. We can never accept the appointment of Jesus Christ and bear away the sin of the world, that was His work; but He does ask us to accept our cross. What is my cross? The manifestation of the fact that I have given up my right to myself to Him for ever. Self-interest, self-sympathy, self-pity—anything and everything that does not arise from a determination to accept my life entirely from Him will lead to a dissipation of my life. How many of us have dispassionately and clearly looked at Philippians iii. 10? Paul is not speaking poetically but expressing plain, blunt, simple, spiritual, heroic fact. “That I may know Him”; not what He can do, nor what I can proclaim that He has done for me, but “that I may know Him , and the power of His resurrection”; that I continually receive my life from Him by deliberate appointment on my own part; “and the fellowship of His sufferings”; that I enter determinedly into His relationship with things, which means going contrary to my natural intuitions, “being made conformable unto His death.” It is appalling how few are willing to efface their natural nobility. Fasting from food is an easy business, but fasting in its true nature means to fast from everything that is good until the appointments of God in my soul are accepted. For instance, there are times when a preacher if he is eloquent or poetical must fast from his own conceptions of things until he has accepted the appointment of God for his life. The One Who is being hit hardest in this war is Jesus Christ, and those of us who should have been fasting in fellowship with His sufferings have been out on the ‘noble natural’ line, and the sword that was thrust at Him we have not turned aside but have lashed into Him, and been applauded for doing it. “Being made conformable unto His death;” that I may be identified with the things in which He has interests; “if by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead”; that I may have a resurrection like His, not merely the resurrection of a saved soul, but of one who has proved himself a son of God by the redemption of our Lord.
Many of us are not living in the domain in which Christianity can alone be lived—the domain of deliberate identification with Jesus Christ. It takes time, and it ought to take time, and the time is not mis-spent for the soul who will wait before God and accept His appointment for his individual life.