#4 Following Jesus In Baptism Series

#4 Following Jesus in Baptism

Series: Mark

Chuck Sligh

January 12, 2020

NOTE: A PowerPoint presentation is available for this sermon by request at chucksligh@hotmail.com. Please mention the title of the sermon and the Bible text to help me find the sermon in my archives.

TEXT: Mark 1:4-10 – “John did baptize in the wilderness, and preach the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins. 5 And there went out unto him all the land of Judaea, and they of Jerusalem, and were all baptized of him in the river of Jordan, confessing their sins. 6 And John was clothed with camel’s hair, and with a girdle of a skin about his loins; and he did eat locusts and wild honey; 7 And preached, saying, There cometh one mightier than I after me, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to stoop down and unloose. 8 I indeed have baptized you with water: but he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost.

9 And it came to pass in those days, that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized of John in Jordan. 10 And straightway coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him.”

INTRODUCTION

Last time we were in the book of Mark, we looked at the “Son motif” in Mark 1. This is how the Gospel writers used two terms that reached all the way back to the Old Testament and tells us some important facts about Jesus Christ.

• The first term is the “Son of Man.” – This term was used by the Gospel writers to remind us that the Messiah would be a man, a human.

• The second term is the “Son of God”, a term used by Mark in the very first verse of His gospel and again by God the Father in our text in verse 10 when He said approvingly, “You are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” – We saw that this is a term was to point to the deity of this man named Jesus Christ. God implanted the seed of Jesus into the womb of Mary, and at that point, God the Son became man. He was born on this earth as a human, so He was a son; but He was fully God as well, so He was the “Son of God.”

This led us into a natural segway into the doctrine of the incarnation—the fusion of God with man on this earth—quite appropriate right before Christmas, and what the incarnation meant to the world and to those of us who are saved. Today we want to look at this same passage of scripture, but we want to focus on the baptism of Jesus itself, not so much on the approval of God at his baptism.

Consider with me four things about baptism we see in this passage.

I. FIRST, BAPTISM DOES NOT SAVE.

Verse 4 is a little confusing until you dig a little deeper. In that verse, we read, “John…came baptizing in the wilderness, and preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”

At first reading, baptism “for the remission of sins” sure sounds like baptism was doing the saving, doesn’t it? But you have to be careful when translating prepositions like “of, for, by, etc.” from one language to the other. Many of you Germans have tried to understand Americans trying to translate word-for-word prepositions that are used in entirely different ways in German than in English, and the reverse is also true. Often, I’ll hear a German say something that befuddles me until I realize that where we might use the word like “by,” a German might use another preposition in that context and if they don’t know how “by” is used in English as opposed to how it is used in German, it can cause confusion.

This is no less true when translating from Greek to English. The Greek word translated “for” here is eis, which my Greek dictionaries and lexicons say can mean to, unto, for, in, on, toward, against and an assortment of other miscellaneous minor meanings. How do we know which one is right?

One way is to compare how the word is used here compared to the overall tenor of Scripture. The New Testament teaches in scores of places that a person is saved by faith in Jesus Christ, plus nothing and minus nothing. In none of these scriptures is baptism ever mentioned, a terrible omission is baptism is necessary to salvation.

Therefore, one must look a little more closely at the only two passages of Scripture that can conceivably be interpreted to be saying that baptism is necessary for salvation, one of which is Mark 1:4 to see if the Greek can give us some indication. [The other scriptures Acts 2:38] In order to explain the apparent ontradiction, I originally took a deep dive in the Greek word eis as it is used here. It would be just a bunch of mumbo jumbo and felt that it would be too tedious and technical. The short version is that eis here references or modifies the word “repentance,” not “baptism. This would mean that the phrase would more naturally have been understood to mean that John preached a baptism of repentance, the remission of sins being the consequence of the repentance, not the baptism.