Obedience and Identity in Christ

Luke 3:21 – 38

 

Have you ever yelled at the screen while watching a movie? You’ll see the characters do something that doesn’t make any sense and you just start yelling at them to go the other way or to make a different decision, as if they could even hear you. I’m especially guilty of this while watching football, but unlike a football game, the end of a movie is already written with every decision in the story leading right to its climax.

 

The same is true for books. Some of the best written books leave us with a dozen new questions and no new answers as we work our way through the story to its climax and then all the pieces start to fall together. Really, you get the most out of a book if you actively engage with it, rather than passively read over it. The same is true, especially true, about the Bible. When reading the Bible, you will learn much more from it if you stop and ask it questions rather than just read it passively.

 

One of the greatest problems in Bible reading, especially with listening to audio Bibles, is that our eyes move over the words and when we get to the end of the column, we don’t know what we’ve read. We read a passage, a chapter, or a whole book of the Bible and we don’t sense any growth in our mind or our spirit because our reading was purely mechanical, it was just checking a box.

 

When we find ourselves in that place, where reading Scripture feels like going through the motions, when it feels like there is no discovery, no life, no breakthroughs to new insight, we have to remind ourselves to pause and ask the Bible, and its true author, questions.

 

Training yourself to ask questions of Scripture is one of the best ways to breathe life into your Bible reading. Our passage from today is one of those that causes us to ask questions about it in order to really learn from it. I know I did. Let’s read God’s Word together: Luke 3:21 – 38.

 

I’ve always been curious by nature, so I was most certainly that kid who always had to ask why. My father-in-law was my little league coach, and he still remarks about how I would ask why about everything. Why do we throw the ball here? Why is home called home? And his favorite, “Why do we have to run to first? Couldn’t we just run to third and back?”

Naturally that has carried over to adulthood, “why do we have to pay this bill?” Why does my tritip cost so much now? (I know why, and it’s ridiculous). Why does my knee, my hip, my back, and my neck hurt? (I also know the answer to that). Why is insurance so expensive?

 

But being curious and inquisitive, when nurtured and aimed properly is truly a gift from God. Wanting to know why has fueled my desire to learn for many years, and when I directed that at the Bible, man God just went to work on my heart and my mind. The best why questions to ask are about what we read in God’s Word.

 

The beauty of expository, or expositional, preaching is that when I commit to preaching through a whole book, that means preaching through the whole book and not just the passages I like. It forces me to engage with the whole text of Scripture, including the challenging, confusing, or the seemingly boring parts, like the genealogy I just read, and ask why is this here and what is God saying through this? This passage is one of those.

 

The baptism of Jesus, which is what we begin with today, only takes up two verses here in Luke. That’s a little odd, considering how detailed Luke is about other things. The guy who was inspired to list seven different rulers to mark the beginning of John’s and Jesus’ ministry’s only writes one sentence, two verses, about the most important baptism of John’ ministry. We should definitely ask why.

 

Our passage says that when all the people were baptized, and then Jesus came to be baptized. The use of the word all doesn’t mean that every person that John was to be baptized was baptized before Jesus came to be baptized. We know from the other Gospel’s that John continued baptizing even after he baptized Jesus.

 

The significance of all is a climactic one. Jesus came to be baptized at the climax, the peak of John’s ministry, “when all the people were baptized,” and as such Jesus was not just one of the crowd. His coming to be baptized had special significance, but what is that significance?

 

One of the best ways to get the answers to our questions here, is to look at how Luke’s account differs from the other accounts in Scripture about it. While Luke writes the least about Jesus’ baptism, it is Matthew who gives us the most detail about it. Read Matthew 3:13 – 15.

In Matthew we see that John is reluctant to baptize Jesus. I mean, who wouldn’t be? But Jesus’ response to John both answers our question about significance and yet begs another question at the same time. Jesus tells John to baptize Him because it “fulfills all righteousness.” And so, John consents and baptizes Jesus.

 

John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance, and we know that Jesus was sinless. He, of all people, had nothing to repent of. So why get dunked in the river Jordan like all the sinners who came to confess their sins, repent, and be baptized?

 

Right there is the answer to the question. Jesus could have gone to Jerusalem to begin His ministry. It would have made sense for Him to go where the religious rulers were, the most educated religious men of His time spent their days in Jerusalem, at the temple, debating and discussing theology. Instead, Jesus Christ begins His ministry in the river, getting baptized like sinners were.

 

The apostle Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 5:21, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” God made Jesus the sinless one to be sin, so that we could become the sinless ones in the eyes of God, justification by faith.

 

The purpose of God the Son taking on human flesh was so that He could do what no other human could do, live a perfect sinless life, to be the perfect unblemished sacrifice for all our sins. In taking on flesh, Christ identified with mankind, and in submitting Himself to a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, He identified Himself with sinful man, and by taking on the sin of man He gave man His own righteousness.

 

So when Jesus tells John that it is fitting for them to fulfill all righteousness, Jesus is saying that this is precisely what the Father wants Him to do. This fulfills all righteousness because Jesus was being obedient to God’s plan for the salvation of humanity. Thank God Jesus was obedient, because we could never be that obedient on our own. But by faith, we are saved by Christ’s obedience.

 

Now, that’s a lot to have been summarized the way Luke wrote it in his Gospel. That’s because the emphasis in Luke hits differently than the emphasis in Matthew because the intended audience is different. Matthew wanted to show the Messiah’s righteousness, Luke His Sonship.

Jesus’ prayer life is most shown in Luke. Before most of His major decisions or directions in His ministry, Jesus is shown praying. Before Jesus chose His twelve apostles, He prayed. Before He asked Peter who he believed Jesus was, He prayed. Before His transfiguration, Jesus prayed, when the apostles asked Jesus how to pray, He was praying, and in the garden of Gethsemane before His crucifixion, Jesus prayed.

 

Jesus’ life during His ministry was full of prayer, He always sought connection and communion with the Father, and here immediately after His baptism He does the same. Let that be an example for you. And when He did, the miraculous happened. We get a look at the Holy Trinity, our Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

 

To this point in the Gospel of Luke God had been speaking through His angels. Here, heaven opened up, and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form, like a dove, and God spoke from heaven in His own voice, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”

 

The angel Gabriel had told Mary that the child she bore was the Son of God, the Son of the Most High. Jesus Himself knew He was the Son of God when He was twelve and stayed back in the temple and said He was in His Father’s house. Now it is God’s own voice confirming that Jesus is the Son of God, and in Him God is well pleased.

 

Now, we get a seemingly oddly placed genealogy here. How many of us get to a genealogy in the Bible and we just groan internally? Some genealogies are quite long, and the names, the names can be nearly impossible to pronounce correctly. It’s like a tongue twister exercise! But genealogies, have a purpose.

 

Matthew began his Gospel with Jesus genealogy, and both he and Mark go from Jesus’ baptism to His temptation in the wilderness. But Luke inserts this here in between those two events. So this genealogy serves two purposes, we just have to ask what they might be.

 

First, genealogies serve to show us that the Bible is talking about a real person here. While many of the names in the genealogy of Jesus are people we know nothing about, some we do. Zerubbabel, the son of Shealtiel was governor of Judah during the restoration of the temple and wall in Ezra and Haggai. We know king David and his son Nathan to be real people as well, and Abraham, Issac, and Jacob are real people too.

Here is where Luke is his typical specific self. He is the only one to mention Jesus’ age when He was beginning His ministry. He narrows it down as best as he can when he says that Jesus about thirty years old. Jesus is just as much a real person as the handful of famous people in His earthly genealogy.

 

The second purpose in this specific genealogy is found when looking at how it differs from the one in Matthew. One main difference is found in the names between David and Jesus. Thirty-eight names are different there, the most significant being the name of Jesus’ grandfather.

 

Scholars have gone round and round on this one, and still don’t know for certain, but the most common thought is that Heli is Mary’s father because of the parenthetical statement that Jesus was “supposed” to be Joseph’s son, making this genealogy Jesus’ physical earthly lineage, whereas in Matthew it’s His legal lineage through Joseph.

 

But while these differences are cause for much scholarly debate, the biggest and most important difference in the two genealogies of Jesus come after Abraham. That’s because Matthew began at Abraham and worked his way down to Jesus to show His Jewishness and Messiahship. But Luke begins with Jesus and works his way up the family line beyond Abraham all the way to Adam, and ultimately God Himself.

 

You see, the point of this genealogy is a further emphasis on the universality of Jesus as Savior of not just the Jews, but the whole world. While every believer is a child of God, born again by the Spirit and adopted into Sonship by faith in Jesus, everyone of us is a physical descendant of Adam, both in flesh and in sin.

 

This passage is showing us that Jesus is also physically descended from Adam like all mankind, though not cursed by original sin. And it’s that last distinctive in the genealogy, the son of God, that links it to Jesus’ baptism, where God proclaimed Jesus as His beloved Son, His beloved and obedient Son.

 

Adam and Jesus have something in common that the rest of us don’t, they weren’t created in the normal way. God created Adam from dust and breathed life into his nostrils, and Jesus, though born of a woman, was not conceived by man, but by God. And in that connection, we have the first Adam, and the second Adam, which is Jesus.

Luke was a gentile convert who spent a lot of his time with the apostle to the Gentiles, Paul. Paul writes about this relationship between Adam and Jesus in both Romans and Galatians. Let’s take a look at those passages, beginning with Romans 5:12 – 21. The first Adam disobeyed God in the garden of Eden and brought condemnation and death upon all mankind, but in Jesus we have the free gift of grace and eternal life.

 

But it doesn’t end there. Paul writes in Galatians 4:4 – 7, “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.”

 

It's no accident that Luke makes this connection between Adam, sinful man, and Jesus. Adam, was a son of God given rest in the garden, rule over creation, and an intimate relationship with God. But he messed up, he royally messed up and brought the curse of sin into the world. We are sons of Adam by birth. We are born into an inheritance of death.

 

But Jesus, the son of God, who brings rest, who rules over all the earth, through whom you can have an intimate relationship with God, perfectly fulfilled what it means to be human. He perfectly fulfills what it means to be the son of God. He accurately represented and is the image of God and He spread His glory over the earth. He inherits the kingdom.

 

God the Son, descended from heaven and took on flesh, the same flesh as sinful man. He then submitted to a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, like sinful man. Jesus, fully God and fully man, became who He came to save by becoming what He came to save man from, sin.

 

Jesus accomplished what the first man couldn’t, and what no man thereafter can, a life of perfect obedience, a sinless life. Jesus accomplished that, and then sacrificed Himself on the cross to die for your sins, so that by faith you may have eternal life. That’s the message of the gospel, and that message is for everyone to hear, and by God’s grace to receive and believe.

 

 

As a believer in Christ, you must root your identity in Jesus in order to live a purpose-filled life of faithfulness and obedience to God.

 

By faith in Christ, you have a place in this genealogy through adoption into sonship by the work of Jesus. By faith in Christ, you have been redeemed from death in Adam to life in Christ. You have been born again into God’s family as beloved sons and daughters, gaining a new identity and purpose as children of the one true King.

 

By faith in Christ you are baptized by the Holy Spirit and refined by fire. Just as Jesus identified with you when he began His public ministry by being baptized, so you entered the waters of baptism by faith in obedience to Christ to publicly demonstrate that by faith in Christ you have been raised with Him to live a new life.

 

In this new life, root your identity in Christ, not in other people, careers, or things. By faith who you are is in Christ, and no longer in Adam. Sin’s curse no longer has a hold over you. You can confidently live this life knowing you are a child of God, chosen by Him before the foundation of the world, and destined for eternity with God.

 

Seek your purpose in Christ and let God’s Word lead you. God’s story didn’t begin with you, but it certainly includes you. God has a purpose for you, a plan for your life, that He prepared for you before He created you. That purpose is only found through Christ, and revealed through the study of God’s Word.

 

This new life is characterized by obedience that comes before preference. Throughout His ministry, beginning with His baptism, Jesus demonstrated what it meant to live a life of obedience to God over living a life obeying his own preferences and desires. Through in faith in Christ, not only is His obedience credited to you, but the Holy Spirit empowers you to live obediently. Not perfectly, but obediently.

 

Want to know how to live obediently? Read your Bible. Want to know what your purpose is and how to live it out? Read your Bible. Want to know what your identity in Christ means? Read your Bible. Ask it questions as you read it, ask God those questions in your quiet time, and ask your Bible study leader, your pastor, or a more mature Christian in your life those questions.

 

God made you and God is all you need and He has revealed Himself through His Word. He created you for a relationship with Him and all He asks for in return is obedience to His Word. Read it, listen to it, hear it preached, hear it taught, study it, and meditate on it. You will hear His voice.

 

Let’s pray.