First, as a brief introduction, let me explain my basic intention for this blog. My intention over the coming weeks, months, years, would normally be to take a piece of the sermon from Sunday and either to look at it from a different perspective or to look at it in more depth. I hope this would allow me to better explain some of those things that fall on the cutting room floor, as it were, that don't make it into the sermon for one reason or another.

Second, as always, I would hope to look at these things with the intention of professing the Gospel and/or glorifying God.

So, today I want to look at the scene of Jesus getting baptized by John the Baptist. In our sermon last Sunday we saw that Jesus was relating himself to us as sinners by being baptized for repentance when He had nothing to repent from. In other gospels we read that Jesus explained that He was baptized in order to "fulfill all righteousness". Which we understand to mean that He is fulfilling what we had to do not what He needed to do. When Jesus publicly announced this part of His ministry on earth, the reaction from Heaven was significant. We looked at how the Spirit descending on Him like a dove represented God's acceptance and approval of Jesus as the representative for mankind. And what a response it was.

So, what I wanted to go deeper into today is the humanity of Jesus and how our perspective effects our understanding of what that meant.

To begin, our perspective. Being finite beings our perspective is hindered by many things. Our experience weighs heavily on our perspective. Being unable to live outside of time and our inability to be more than one place at one time greatly effects how we view the world. Anything that we do not directly experience has to come to us second hand in one way or another. Whether by the documentation of someone from history or by the recounting by someone that may or may not have experienced the event being described. Which leads to the second issue with our perspective, in that it is effected by our sin. There is a reason why scripture is as perfectly preserved in all the details that it is. Because God has preserved it. So many other writings of man that have been translated or rewritten have changed so much since they were written, it is scarcely the same record. Even the eyewitness accounts of people in situations is dramatically different and changing. The direct experience of our lives dictates greatly how we view the world. And one of the greatest, if not the greatest, influences in our lives that shapes our perspectives is "ME".

Because of our limited perspective, one of the things that we need to do is to grow and to learn to view things from God's perspective through the sanctifying of the Spirit. His perspective is true. His perspective is right. His perspective is complete.

So, what does this have to do with the baptism of Jesus? Being human, our seeing the glory of God in His deity is not a comparably difficult thing for a Christian to do. His deity is something we cannot attain to. It is the opposite of who we are. It is contradictory to our state of being. It is different from anything we have ever experienced. Even as we exit this life and our sinful flesh is stripped away we still will not be God. He is something wholly different than we could ever be. And we can understand that to a certain point even while here on Earth. But do you hear the biased perspective creeping into that statement. Is it a true and good statement to say that God is glorified in His deity? Of course. Is it a true and good statement to say that Jesus is glorified in His deity? Of course. That's not my point.

My point is that, if we are not careful, we can view the glory of Christ in His humanity as something less than His glory in His deity.

When Jesus went down to the river to be baptized by John, He was doing something amazing that can slip past us if we're not careful. He was proclaiming His ministry to be carried out as a representative of man. If we look at this from our perspective, being human might seem like less of an achievement because after all, we're all human. But, like I said earlier, if we look at this from God's perspective, how amazing was it that Jesus chose to live, minister and represent us as a man? From God's perspective, becoming man and furthermore to pay the penalty for sinful man is something completely different from who He is. It is the opposite of who He is. It is contradictory to His state of being. It is the reverse of His experience. The ministry of Jesus being born, living, fulfilling our righteousness and dying a human death is glorifying to God and to Jesus. I think this is made obvious by the voice of God from Heaven saying "You are my beloved son. With you I am well pleased".

There are 2 times in scripture we hear this phrasing from Heaven. And I think it's a good place to finish. We hear, when Jesus took on the mantle as a representative for man, "This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased". We hear Him again, "This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased" when His deity was shown to Peter, James and John as He was transfigured on the mount in front of them.

From God's perspective, the humanity of Jesus was just as glorifying as the deity of Jesus. How amazing is it that our God who was described in the last chapters of Job or our God who was described in Isaiah 6 would choose to wrap himself in something so foreign and so limited as flesh and time? From God's perspective, that kind of love is glorious and it is what we will worship Jesus for in eternity(Worthy is the Lamb who was slain). In the coming days, I pray that the spirit would teach us and expand our perspective to see things from God's perspective and not our own.