I love it when God opens my eyes to something in Scripture I haven't seen before. That happened while I was reading a devotional about the life of Christ by John MacArthur.
When
John the Baptizer was baptizing in the wilderness, the idea was that
people were coming to repent of sins, desiring to change, in
preparation for the coming Kingdom of God. Some came without true
repentance, and John rebuked them in no uncertain terms. But here
comes One who had no sin,
asking to be baptized. John protested, understandably. But Jesus
insisted. He knew that repenting and desiring to change was not
enough to get us into God's Kingdom. We were born sinners, and we
needed to be “born again,” to have our sins taken away.
Jesus
had a plan to fulfill, His Father's plan. He (who knew no sin) was to
“be sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in
Him.” By being baptized, Christ was identifying
with us
and our sin. He knew at
the time of His baptism that just as He went down under and rose up
out of the water, He would die, be buried and rise out of the grave
for us.
Our sin
had come between us and God. Only removal of sin would bring us
together again. God came down to us as His Son Jesus to take our sins
away. That's how much He loves us. His baptism showed His willingness
to identify with us in His death, to be our substitute, to die for
us, to take the punishment for our sins.
When
we are baptized (by immersion) we, in turn, are identifying with Him
“who bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having
died to sin, might live for righteousness.” He
identified with us so that we could identify with Him
and be reconciled to God.
Repentance alone cannot get us into God's
kingdom, but paves the way for us to accept Him as our only Savior
from sin and death. Baptism is a wonderful opportunity to give
testimony of our faith in and obedience to the Father's plan for us,
even as Christ fully obeyed the Father's plan for Him. "Through
baptism we declare, “He died for me - I'll live for Him!”
