Introduction
You’re in the wilderness of Judea, around the year 28. You’ve come down to the river Jordan to see this hellfire and brimstone preacher, the one dressed in camel’s hair who eats locusts and honey. He’s calling the religious leaders vipers (a sentiment you happen to agree with), and saying that even Jews need to repent of their sinful filthiness - almost like they were the same as Gentiles. You’re not so sure about that part. You’re intrigued by his boldness. His message of One who is going to come, who even this wilderness holy man won’t be worthy to stand before, touches on a nerve: you know your nation needs - you know you need - a powerful and majestic Savior like that.
But imagine your surprise when, one day, John seems to think this guy has come: John turns in the water, looks up on the bank, and exclaims: “behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks before me, because he was before me’” (John 1:29-30). But there on the bank stands not a mighty general, or a stately prince, but a Galilean. A carpenter, by the looks of him. And he’s coming to get baptized; which, if he’s taking away sin, doesn’t make sense.
John, it seems, agrees with you. As the Galilean comes down to the water, John protests, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” (Mathew 3:15). The Galilean answers him, “Let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” You wonder: what are these guys talking about?
And then your confusion is transformed into shock and perhaps even mild panic when, just moment later, as John lowers this man into the water and then brings him back up, the heavens open up, a form like a dove descends upon the now baptized Galilean, and a loud voice thunders “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11). What on earth is happening?
I imagine this whole scene would have been disorienting for anyone present there when Jesus came to John for baptism. I obviously wasn’t there, and there are still elements of it which have perplexed me my entire Christian life. Mark’s narrative of the events at the baptism, and the following wilderness temptation, though uncharacteristically sparse, reveal some connections which help make sense of the scene in the history of Israel, and have eternal impact for us today.
9 In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. 10 And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. 11 And a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”
12 The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. 13 And he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. And he was with the wild animals, and the angels were ministering to him.
Though we were told in Mark 1:1 that this gospel is about Jesus Christ, the Son of God, his actual presence was only hinted at as we looked primarily at the person of John the baptist in verses 2-8. But in verse nine we meet Jesus himself. We meet him, as we discussed last week, as an adult. No birth narrative, no discussion of eternity past - here Jesus is introduced to us, coming from his hometown of Nazareth down to see his cousin John at the Jordan river.
Mark records this event in extremely matter of fact terms that can be almost deceiving in their simplicity. Matthew records John’s objections and Jesus’ response, in Matthew 3:15, “Let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” What does that mean? Why did Jesus need to be baptized? We discussed last week how John’s baptism was one of repentance, that it was meant to indicate an agreement with God that the individual in question was a sinner in need of cleansing and forgiveness. Jesus didn’t have any sins to repent of, he had no need of cleansing. So why go through the ritual?
One simple answer is that he was setting in place the pattern for all of his believers to follow. In Matthew 28:18-20 Jesus gives his disciples a commission to go into all the world and make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything Jesus commanded. Baptism, public identification with Jesus, is the first step of discipleship, and he sets the pattern here for his disciples to follow.
But I think if we just jump forward to example, we’re missing a key piece of the significance of Jesus’ action. His baptism is meant to fulfill something. And that something has to do with the Exodus.
Identifying with Israel
Most of us are familiar with the Exodus story recorded in the Old Testament book of - that’s right - Exodus. Joseph had brought his family into the safety of Egypt during a period of famine, but then 400 years go by and while the family has grown exponentially from 70 people to numbering in the millions, the Pharaohs in whose land they dwell progressively forget about Joseph and how important he was for the Egyptian people. And forgetting the ancient kindness, the Pharaoh we read of in Exodus 1 decides to “deal shrewdly” with the people of Israel, by which he means ruthlessly putting them into bondage and extracting forced labor from them.
Through a long story which I won’t detail here, God raises up a man named Moses to lead the people out of Egypt, out of slavery, and into the land God had promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But after Pharaoh had allowed the people to leave he changed his mind, and pursued them with his army, and they were backed up to the Red Sea, with apparently no escape.
But then God worked a marvelous deliverance, by bringing them through the Red Sea on dry ground, splitting the waters of the sea in two so that they could pass over. End of the story, happily ever after, right? Well, not quite.
God had brought them out to worship him, and he led them to a mountain where he called Moses up and gave him the 10 commandments. While Moses was on the mountain, the people (after just being brought through the Red Sea!!) cry out for Moses’ brother Aaron to make them a visible God to worship, and so Aaron has the golden calf made. And this sets the tone for the beginning of the wilderness period: God delivers the people, and shortly thereafter, they break faith and quit trusting. This happens again at the edge of the promised land, when the people are supposed to go in, the cower in fear because of the giants in the land. And so God curses them to forty years in the wilderness, until the generation who were adults in Egypt and at the beginning of the wandering have all died.
Finally, in the end, after Moses and the entire generation have died, Joshua leads the people across the Jordan River and into the Promised Land.
So, what in our text makes me think Mark is intending to call all of this to mind? Three factors: The language of Son, the wilderness temptation, and the rending of the heavens.
Son Language
The most obvious way in which Jesus is connected to Israel in our passage is in the language of Sonship. Verse 1 tells us that this is “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” And as Jesus comes up out of the water, he looks up and sees the skies splitting, the Spirit descending and the Father speaks: “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” We take this language for granted - of course Jesus is the Son of God! But that language, with all that we mean by it, would not have been assumed for the people of Israel.
In the Old Testament, the term “sons of God” (in the plural) often referred to angels (see Job 1:6). It can also refer to individual Israelites (eg, Deuteronomy 14:1), or in the singular form, it could refer to the Davidic king (2 Samuel 7:14).
That latter usage seems to be picking up on another way the singular son of God is used in the OT, though. That is to refer to the people of Israel as a whole as God’s son. To go back to the Exodus story, we see this in Exodus 4:22-23,
22 Then you shall say to Pharaoh, ‘Thus says the LORD, Israel is my firstborn son, 23 and I say to you, “Let my son go that he may serve me.” If you refuse to let him go, behold, I will kill your firstborn son.’ ”
This language is picked up in Jeremiah 31:9, where God says: “I am a father to Israel, and Ephraim is my firstborn.”
And finally in Hosea 11:1, “When Israel was a child, I loved him,
and out of Egypt I called my son.”
The Hosea passage is of particular significance, because Matthew picks it up in Matthew 2:15, and applies it directly to Jesus (referring to Mary and Joseph returning with the child Jesus from Egypt; Matthew says this is fulfilled in Jesus even though Hosea is clearly referring backwards to the Exodus). Mark’s original readers would likely have been familiar with the OT language of Israel being God’s Son; now that language is being used for Jesus. This matters because it should set our expectations to see patterns in the OT life of Israel as finding their fulfillment, their point, their ultimate meaning, in Jesus. Israel, God’s son, was brought up out of Egypt, through the waters of the sea, and into the wilderness. Likewise, Jesus was brought up from the waters of baptism, and into the wilderness.
Into the Wild
I mentioned last week just how prominent this language of wilderness is in Mark 1. John came in the wilderness (v4). Jesus is driven by the Spirit into the wilderness (v12). And he was in the wilderness 40 days (v13), being tempted by Satan. But while the people of Israel repeatedly failed in the face of temptation and testing, choosing to complain, not trusting the Lord for his provision, and telling Moses they were better off as slaves, Jesus’ time in the wilderness was different. You may be familiar with the three temptations presented in Matthew 4 and Luke 4, but those seem to simply be the conclusion of a much longer period of being tempted. But Jesus withstands the temptation, he holds fast under trial. His time in the wilderness is part of why the author of Hebrews can say he was “in every respect tempted as we are, yet without sin.” Mark wants us to see the wilderness period as analogous to that of Israel - but rather than flavored by failure, Jesus’ wilderness testing is flavored by faithfulness.
Heavens Rent
The third clue we have that Mark wants us to read the events of Jesus’ baptism and temptation as embodying the exodus is found in v10: “And when he came out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove.” That language of being “torn open” is 1) strange. What in the world does it look like for the sky to split? It must have been a sight to behold. It also 2) is not original. Almost all commentators see a connection between the heavens being torn open in Mark, and the prayer for mercy we find in Isaiah 64. In Isaiah 63 the prophet is praying in the voice of the nation, 63:13, “you, O LORD, are our Father, our Redeemer from of old is your name.” And then Isaiah speaks of how the people had essentially become dispossessed, they were no longer looking like God’s people, and chapter 64:6 points out that this has been intertwined with their uncleanness, their corruption by sin: “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.” And “polluted garment” is a rather polite translation.
In the middle of this prayer is a request: Isaiah 64:1, “Oh that you would rend the heavens and come down”! And that’s precisely what happens in Mark 1. But God doesn’t descend upon the people writ large. Rather, the heavens are rent, and the Spirit descends like a dove on the representative king, who, like the Son of David (because he is the Son of David) in 2 Samuel 7, symbolically represents the whole nation. The coming of Jesus, and his being visibly given the Spirit by the Father, is the beginning of the answer to Isaiah’s prayer. He is the servant of the Lord spoken of in Isaiah 42:2, “I will put my Spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations.” He is the one who will lead the new exodus: the exodus from the slavery of sin, justification for those who have faith in him.
The Exodus of Jesus Promises Salvation from Sin
If you’re sitting here wondering what the upshot of all of this “identification” language is, these callbacks to the Exodus narrative and the wilderness years, it’s this: in identifying with the plight and history of Israel, Jesus is also identifying with my plight and yours. You and I are born in a bondage much worse than the temporary bondage of ancient Israel. They were slaves to Pharoah, driven hard by his cruel whips. But more than that, they were slaves to sin, naturally following and driven by the lusts of their flesh. This is a slavery in which we share, and which will ultimately lead us to hellacious separation from God forever in the lake of fire.
In being baptized in the Jordan, reenacting both the crossing of the Red Sea out of Egypt and the crossing of that same Jordan River into the Promised Land, Jesus is presenting himself as the one who will bring true deliverance. He is both the Greater Moses and the Greater Joshua. And he didn’t cross on dry ground. He was submerged in the waters of God’s judgment, dying the death and bearing the wrath which was deserved by God’s enemies: you and me. When you come to Jesus, he gives you that death as a gift, and he also gives resurrection life on the other side of it. A life where our identity shifts from being God’s enemies to ourselves being his sons and daughters (John 1:12). This new life as a son of God is a life driven not by lust and sin, but a life driven by the Spirit (v12). Which leads us to our final point.
The Exodus of Jesus Promises Strength to Face Temptation
Look at what the apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 10:1-4:
For I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, 2 and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, 3 and all ate the same spiritual food, 4 and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ.
Here Paul reminds his readers of the account of the Exodus. They were under the cloud, and passed through the sea, and he then calls this baptism in verse two. They were baptized into Moses. He then says they ate spiritual food: manna. If you don’t remember the deal with manna, Exodus 16 tells us of the Israelites complaining that God has brought them out into the desert to starve them. And instead of striking them down for their griping, he provides miraculous food for them. They would wake in the morning and find this “fine, flake-like thing, fine as frost on the ground” (Exodus 16:14). They weren’t quite sure what it was, so they called it manna - which means, “what is it?”
The Lord gave them this supernatural food, spiritual food, to sustain them through their desert years. He also provided for them with supernatural water in the form of the Rock which poured forth. We see this rock show up two times in the wilderness.
In Exodus 17 the people are again quarreling and fighting, this time because there is no water to drink. After Moses takes this complaint to the Lord, and the Lord commands Moses to strike the Rock; and it pours forth water. Later, in Numbers 20, the people are facing a similar situation; no water. And this time God tells Moses to speak to the Rock and it will pour forth water. Moses, in either his frustration or pride, or some combination of the two, decides not to heed the voice of the Lord. He again strikes the Rock. However, while we might expect that God would withhold his blessing from disobedient Moses, God still provides for the people: the Rock pours forth water. Moses does face consequences, but the people are provided for.
And lest this all seem like a simple history lesson, Paul says that the Rock, the one who poured forth water to satisfy the needs of the nation, was Christ himself. He is the fountain of living water, the one who gives the Spirit (Mark 1:8, cf John 7:37-39). In John 6 Jesus calls himself the bread of life:
John 6:32-35
‘Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” They said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.”
Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.”
And as we walk through the wilderness of this life, still not yet in the Promised Land of Revelation 21-22, facing many dangers toils and snares, he gives the living water of the Spirit. He offers himself as the true bread of heaven to sustain us. While angels came and ministered to Jesus in his wilderness trial, he promises to himself keep us and present us before the presence of his glory with great joy (Jude 24). Jesus leads us out of bondage to sin, and provides us by his word and Spirit with all that we need to walk in obedience and blessing through this life. The passage we read in 1 Corinthians continues:
1 Corinthians 10:5-6, 11-13: Nevertheless, with most of them God was not pleased, for they were overthrown in the wilderness.
Now these things took place as examples for us, that we might not desire evil as they did…Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come. Therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall. No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.
When you are tempted - tempted to lust by a halftime show, tempted to greed by an expertly designed commercial, or one of the thousand garden variety temptations we face every day - remember: if you are in Christ, he purchased your freedom from bondage. You don’t have to give into that temptation. You have the authority and ability, because of the Holy Spirit within you, to say no to sin. That might mean redirecting your thoughts. It might mean turning off the TV. It might mean a lot of different things in different situations, but the principle to remember is this: Jesus died for your sin, and he calls you to die to your sin. The Israelites give us a negative example. But Jesus, after being brought through the waters of baptism, went into the wilderness and resisted the temptation of Satan perfectly. So when you are faced with temptation: remember Jesus, and draw your strength from him. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you (James 4:7).
The guy standing on the bank of the Jordan River that day may not have understood all of this. But Mark wants you to understand that Jesus’ gift of forgiveness for sin and freedom from sin can transform your life right now; and it’s only possible because Jesus identified with sinful Israel and sinful us in baptism, and then, driven by the Spirit, resisted temptation both in our place and as our example.
