Fulfilled: The Chosen King: Tear It Open with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaCurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

He's been masterfully telling these parallel stories, John the Baptist and Jesus, from the time of their birth announcement till they came, when they finally entered the scene as children, and now they are adults.

John has started his ministry, but Jesus is still in obscurity, raised in Nazareth, the nowhere of all nowes.

And now their streams will cross.

And as these stories come together, God does something beyond magnificent, beyond miraculous.

This is the beginning of Jesus starting his ministry.

It has now, after this moment, been put into motion, and what is put into motion in this moment cannot be stopped until the kingdom of God eventually comes to earth.

Luke tells this monumental moment in just two short verses.

We find it in Luke chapter 3, verses 21 and 22.

Luke 3:21

When all the people were baptized, Jesus also was baptized.

As he was praying, heaven opened, and the Holy Spirit descended on him in a physical appearance like a dove, and a voice came from heaven.

You are my beloved son.

With you, I am well pleased.

It seems like just a simple moment.

Jesus baptized by his cousin John the Baptizer, but it is so deep.

The deeper you dig into this tiny moment in the life of Jesus, the more you realize how infinitely deep it goes.

And so let's start at the most obvious.

In this moment, we have a fully rounded picture of how God operates.

We talk about how the God of creation is a triune God.

God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

At the end of Jesus' time on earth, right before he ascends back to heaven, he tells us that we are to go into all the world to preach the gospel, to make disciples and baptize them.

How?

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Right now, at Jesus' baptism, where we're at in Luke, what do we see?

We see Jesus, God the Son, corporeal, in body, in the water, being lowered down by his cousin, John the Baptizer.

We see heaven break open.

We see God the Father who affirms his son.

And we see the Holy Spirit.

All concurrently, the Holy Spirit comes down and rests upon Jesus.

We have the Trinity, the triune God of Scripture.

And this is a template for us.

Everything Jesus does is a template for us.

That really living our life for God looks like this.

We live in full surrender to Jesus, God the Son, in obedience to God the Father, through the power of God the Holy Spirit, all of the persons of the Godhead operating in our lives and bringing us to maximum power as we walk the earth.

But there's more.

You see, as Jesus comes out of the water, the Father says, You are my son, and with you I am well pleased.

Now, this might not mean much to us, but in Psalm chapter 2, we have the Psalm of Coronation.

Psalms 2 · chapter mention

What have we said all throughout the beginning of Luke's gospel?

That Jesus didn't just come to be Savior.

He didn't just come to be healer.

He didn't just come to be our friend.

That Jesus came first and foremost to establish his reign as king.

In Psalm chapter 2, verse 7, this is the Psalm of Kingly Coronation.

Psalms 2:7

And what does God say?

You are my son.

In the prophet Isaiah chapter 42, God says of the coming Messiah, the last and final chosen king, this is my chosen one, that you are my servant, that I am well pleased with you.

Isaiah 42 · chapter mention

All of the pieces are coming together that when Jesus goes in the water and John baptized him in that moment, it is inauguration, it is coronation, it isn't just saying that Jesus is starting his ministry, it is signaling to the world that the king has arrived.

And if all of that isn't like a full enough picture, there's more.

See, we can get lost in the theology and we can get lost in examining the Old Testament.

But what if we just stop and look almost more on the surface level?

What is happening is Jesus walks out of obscurity.

Now we know who Jesus will be, he's the most famous person in all of history.

We know about the miracles, we know about the healings, we know about the teaching, we know about him raising people from the dead and casting out demons.

But in this moment, in Luke chapter 3, none of that has taken place.

Luke 3 · chapter mention

In this moment, John is famous, Jesus is not.

Nobody knows Jesus.

No one is showing up to mountainsides to hear him proclaim truth.

Jesus hasn't really done anything to make his mark on the world, and yet the Father splits the sky and says, You are my son.

That is a statement of security.

With you, I am well pleased.

That is a statement of significance.

You see, we live in a world of identity crisis, and identity is the search for two things: significance and security.

What God says to Jesus as he comes out of the water is a statement of identity, and please don't miss this.

He speaks of his identity before all the works, before all of the crowds.

Our culture gets this backwards, and it's why we live in an identity crisis, because we think our identity comes from what we do, that we earn our identity, or that over time we stack up enough winds or enough power, enough money, or enough influence, and that becomes our identity.

But Jesus is modeling something for you that could change your life today.

That your identity is not found in what you do.

Your identity is found in who you are in Christ.

This one moment.

Luke tells it in just two verses.

We have the fullness of the triune God.

We have the coronation, inauguration of the last and final chosen king.

We have a statement of identity and a reality that could change our life if we would quit looking to what we're capable of for identity and look to our Father in heaven.

And yet, we're really just getting started.

You see, if you just slow down a little bit, look at the context of where we have been, it will beg a question of this passage.

We know that John's baptism was a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.

A baptism that signaled you had been transformed in your mind, heart, and soul, and that your sins were being forgiven by the Almighty God of the universe.

And so it just all begs the question: why would Jesus, who is God on earth, need a baptism of repentance?

He doesn't need transformation from the inside out.

Why would Jesus need a baptism for the forgiveness of sins?

But Jesus was doing a couple of things in this baptism.

One of them was looking backwards into Israel's history, and you have to come back next Sunday because where we go next in Luke makes this so abundantly clear.

But Jesus is also pointing forward to what he's ultimately going to accomplish while he's on the earth.

First, we look backwards, and what he's signaling is to one of the key moments in the history of Israel.

You might be familiar with the story.

There's an entire book in the Old Testament called The Exodus.

It's the story of Israel before it's even a nation.

They're just God's chosen people tracing back to Abraham, and they've been in captivity for 400 years in Egypt, just waiting on God to deliver them.

Finally, God calls Moses and Moses comes.

You might know the story.

He goes to the Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, demands that the people are set free.

But the people are a million strong, and they are free slave labor to build the Egyptian Empire.

The Pharaoh has no intention.

For them to be given their freedom seems like an impossible task.

Finally, after God shows up again and again and again and demonstrates his power and his might, his mercy and his justice, Pharaoh has no choice but to set the people free.

Finally, they are on their way to freedom, they are on their way to rest, they are on their way to the promised land.

And Pharaoh changes his mind.

About the time the Israelites come upon the Red Sea, an impassable body of water, Pharaoh sends all of the armies of Egypt after them, and soon they find themselves pinned down between the Red Sea and the Egyptian army.

They have nowhere to go.

All hope is lost.

Their choice is death or slavery, and there is nothing in between.

You may not know this, but there's all these moments throughout the scriptures leading up to the time of Jesus that are foreshadowing of what is to come.

And this moment, Moses is a foreshadow of Jesus.

God tells him to step out into the water and to spread his arms and his staff out over the water.

And in Exodus chapter 14, it says that the water was divided into.

Exodus 14 · chapter mention

Now we don't have to guess whether or not the New Testament authors were thinking about this moment when they wrote the story of the baptism of Jesus.

You see, during Jesus' time, the Old Testament they read was called the Septuagint.

It was a Greek version of the Old Testament.

And in that moment, when Moses stretches his arms and the waters are divided, it's a very unique, very specific Greek verb.

It's the Greek verb schizo.

This is a strong, punchy, even violent term.

It literally means the waters were torn apart one from another.

Now we get four Gospels in the New Testament.

Mark's is the earliest.

Here is how Mark describes the moment that Jesus comes out of the water in his baptism.

It says he looks up and the heavens are torn apart.

The same exact, very rare, unique Greek verb, schizo.

This is no mere coincidence.

Mark is signaling to the people that Jesus is the new and better Moses.

That at one point these Israelites that John the Baptist is preaching to, they were stuck in slavery to Egypt.

And the people who are standing in front of Jesus that day in Luke chapter 3, they are stuck enslaved to sin.

Luke 3 · chapter mention

And it's an impossible situation to be in.

You are stuck between slavery or death, and until Jesus, there was no in-between.

It's so interesting.

Moses walks into the water and the waters are divided.

Jesus walks into the water and the heavens are torn open.

Moses made a way for slaves to escape and to earn their freedom.

Jesus made a way for the entire world to escape our sin.

The heavens were torn open and the spirit came out.

Just like the waters were torn open and the slaves were set free.

It's all beginning to connect.

The first thing that the readers need to see in the story of Jesus' baptism is this seminal moment.

And we are not the Israelites.

We did not cross the Red Sea.

But there is a good chance that you have something in your life that feels like you cannot get past it.

That there is something between you and freedom, maybe, even if you're honest, that there is something between you and God.

And the question is, can you get past it?

Can it be torn open and make a way for you when there seems like there is no way?

At the moment that Jesus got baptized, no one really understood, just the full context of what was happening.

No one really understood who Jesus was.

We even see this with Matthew's gospel.

He gives us even more context.

He says that John begged Jesus, I can't baptize you.

Bro, you you should be baptizing me.

But Jesus stops him and says, this has to happen to fulfill all righteousness.

The baptism of Jesus does not just point backward to a moment in Israel's history.

It is pointing forward to the ultimate reason that Jesus came to earth.

You see, we've already seen God tear open the Red Sea, and now the heavens have been torn open, but there's one more barrier in the way between mankind and God.

See, why did Jesus get in the sinful water, the same water as sinners and tax collectors, soldiers and prostitutes?

It was a foreshadowing that this is what Jesus does.

He comes and he stands in our place.

He doesn't shout instructions from the riverbank, he gets into the water.

And of course, this is the foreshadowing that he would also take our place in the greatest reversal.

See, the wages of our sin is death, and not just physical death, but eternal separation from God.

And Jesus, he took that death for us.

You see, Moses, he stretched his arms out over the sea and made a way for the slaves to escape into freedom.

But Jesus, he spread his arms on a cross.

Remember, in the Old Testament, the waters were schizo, they were torn apart.

And when Jesus comes out of the water, Mark says that heaven is schizo, it's torn apart.

And there's one other time that Mark uses that verb.

It's in Mark chapter 15 where he says that Jesus hung his head and he breathed his last.

Mark 15 · chapter mention

And the veil, the part of the temple which kept people separate from the presence of God, the ta the veil was torn in half from top to bottom.

Whatever you think is keeping you apart from God, whatever your Red Sea is of doubt or sin or shame or insecurity or mistakes or broken relationships, whatever you think is keeping you from God, Jesus came and even just in his baptism demonstrated that he would tear apart.

He has made a way for you when there was no way.

So you don't have to be sandwiched between death and slavery to sin.

You can be set free.

And all it takes is putting your faith in the one who came to be your chosen king.

If you're at one of our venues, you're watching online, and you've never made that decision, I want to give you the opportunity to do that today.

To just simply take a moment and trust Jesus with your life.

Become convinced in your mind and convicted in your heart that He is God, that He did die for your sins, and He really did walk out of a grave.

And he will tear open a path for you to live in the fullness of life that God created for you to live.tv.

There you can learn how to take next steps.

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Man, I love you guys and I hope you have a great rest of your day.