JOHN067 - Baptism Software Update Needed. Install Now?

John 1:29-34

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast, and I would like to start today by saying I do not consider myself to be a jowly man. I don't think you hear jowls when I talk. I think when people have jowls, I've got a little bit more of this routine going on. Like if you got real, if you're really jowly, I think you can sort of hear it when people talk. Look, I'm not saying that I'm in as good a shape as I would like to be in. I'm playing tennis and working out and stuff and trying. I could be in better condition than I am, but I'm not jowly. Good heavens. Or at least I thought I wasn't. I test drove a Tesla today. This is all gonna come together here in just a second. I'm not gonna buy the Tesla. I've just been curious. We don't really have those in Rapid City, South Dakota, where I live. But I saw there was one, it's right there at a dealership. It was used, so I was like, maybe they let me drive it. I want to find out. So I went and drove the Tesla and the guy's like, it's fast. Really? Fast, you say? It's like, yeah, take it over here to this fairgrounds parking lot. So I was like, okay. And dude's like, just give it a go. I was like, all right. So I mashed that thing to the floor. And Teslas, you know, they have CVT, control variable transmission, a lot of the electric cars do. So it doesn't shift. You don't get it's just smooth, even acceleration that you you don't notice because it's not herky jerky. So I mashed that thing. I'm not even kidding. I think we were at 65 miles an hour in like four seconds. It was insane. And in that moment, remember when I was talking about jowls earlier? I could feel my jowls. I do have them because they must back in the seat as I accelerated. It was insane. So then I stopped the car, sort of collected myself, and the dude's like, Yeah, right? Am I right? And I'm like, Yeah, you are right. It was so fast. I jowled. I was like, okay, well, now I want it to drive itself. How do I do that? And he's like, Yeah, I don't, I think it needs a software update. What? So I started messing around with the menu. You know, Teslas are just basically a driving computer. And I I found it, and sure enough, I like, you you drive me. What are the settings? And I said, Well, you got to download a firmware, a software update, and it's gonna take 55 minutes. I thought, well, that's a little much for a test drive, so I won't do it. But how crazy is that? One, the car is so fast that it will expose your secret jowls. Two, that it's so fancy that it'll do software, firmware updates. You get these on your phone, right? Sometimes you'll wake up in the morning if you have a smartphone. If you don't, I applaud you. I think you're living life the right way. But if you're one of us idiots who still has a smartphone, you wake up in the morning and sometimes they'll be like, your phone successfully got a software update. And you're like, okay. And sometimes you look at what the software update is and it's nothing. You can't tell what happened at all. Not a big update. Other times, you open your phone and nothing's where you left it. It's like you got a whole new architecture built into your phone and you got to relearn stuff and things look different. I just wonder how big is the update on the Tesla? One time you get in your car and it's just confusing, the buttons aren't where they were anymore. I have no idea. What I do know is that in the same way that some things get the big fancy firmware update, and it represents a pretty meaningful redesign to the underlying architecture of the thing. So in the New Testament, we get a massive firmware update in terms of what baptism is and the relationship between God and humanity between the time that we're looking at in John chapter one with the baptism of John the Baptist and what baptism means in the context of Jesus just a few years later. There were two competing understandings of what baptism were about that were still in play, even when the Gospels got written a little bit later on. And what do you know? As we read through the New Testament, we discover that some people didn't get the firmware update. They were still going on the old baptism software, firmware, even after Jesus had done all his stuff, died, and been resurrected and ascended back into heaven. And so there's sort of an onboarding process, there's an updating process that continues throughout the New Testament. And we get some hints about that in the way Mark describes the same scene that we've been looking at in John chapter one for the last couple of weeks or whatever. Here's how it goes. Mark, by the way, is informed by Peter. You know, Mark and Paul had a falling out in the middle of the first missionary journey. Mark got homesick or quit or whatever, and Paul was not really impressed. So Paul didn't take Mark with him on future missionary journeys. And but they, I mean, they worked it out. Paul is in the room with Mark, and they're on good terms in, you know, when Paul's writing the letter of Philemon later on. But it looks like Mark instead paled around with Peter after his falling out with Paul on the first missionary journey. And tradition and reason, you know, literary analysis tell us that Mark's gospel is really built from the remembrances and sermons of Peter. And it's pretty efficient. It has a workman's, working man's pace to it. Still, like John 1, the passage we've been looking at for quite a while here, Mark one opens with stuff about John the Baptist. The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ to the Son of God. It is written in Isaiah the prophet, I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way, a voice of one calling in the desert, prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him. And so John came baptizing in the desert region and preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Okay, that right there is your old firmware when it comes to baptism. This is a baptism like we talked about yesterday, that is for the repentance and forgiveness of sins. It looks like Jews back in the day were starting to do this. This really wasn't an old testament practice, but ritual washing, particularly the Essenes, the people who lived out by the Dead Sea during this time. It looks like they did a type of self-washing to demonstrate a repentance of sins. This was a like a repeated practice. But here it's a one-time thing. John is doing this. These people are not becoming followers of God when they get baptized. It looks like they already are, and they're repenting of sins. I mean, maybe some of them. This was brand new in their first exposure, but it looks like the majority of people here are repenting of neglecting the things of God, and they are confessing and asking God for forgiveness, and that's what the whole baptism thing is about. That is baptism firmware 1.0. And then the, you know, John keeps alluding to this future baptism that is coming in Christ, and that's going to be your firmware update. That's going to be your 2.0. The whole Judean countryside, verse 5, and all the people of Jerusalem went out to John the Baptist, confessing their sins. They were baptized by him in the Jordan River. John wore clothing made of camel's hair with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. And this was his message. After me will come one more powerful than I, the thongs of whose sandals I'm not worthy to stoop down and untie. I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit. And there's your 2.0 version, right? These are very different things. The baptism 1.0 is repentance and forgiveness of sins, public proclamation of I've been walking in the wrong direction, and I'm going to do an about face. These baptisms would have been pretty much exclusively Jewish. I don't know, maybe some Gentiles sneaked in there or something. And I mean, it wouldn't be crazy. The Gentiles are in view in the Old Testament. John seems very aware of the Old Testament. He's quoting stuff from the Old Testament. He understands his role in light of the Old Testament. So maybe John was that forward-looking, but overwhelmingly. This is going to be Jewish people getting baptized. Whereas this baptism that comes later on, the baptism that John's pointing to in Christ is a baptism with the Holy Spirit. Now, this is the baptism that closely accompanies salvation. Clearly, the New Testament teaches from beginning to end there is a baptism of John, and there is a baptism of Jesus, and the baptism of John points to the greater baptism, which is the baptism of Jesus. It is not that these two baptisms are in competition. The one is the fulfillment and the completion and the end game of the earlier one. Verse 9 of Mark 1, at that time Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. As Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the spirit descending on him like a dove, and a voice came from heaven. Well, then moving forward, among some people, we see the baptism software update happen very quickly. They get it. In fact, the first version of the software they receive is 2.0, the baptism of the Holy Spirit, the one that John pointed to, not the one that John did. But a whole bunch of people were disciples of John, and they didn't meet Jesus when Jesus was doing his public ministry. And they, you know, these disciples of John, they probably scattered when John got arrested and then executed in a grisly manner by the Herod family. And one of these people who had baptism 1.0, the baptism of John, is this fellow named Apollos. And in Acts chapter 19, we meet him. He's got quite the reputation. He's come up from Alexandria in Egypt. He's made his way to Ephesus. And it says in chapter 18 of Acts, he was a learned man with a thorough knowledge of the scriptures. He'd been instructed in the way of the Lord, and he spoke with great fervor and taught about Jesus accurately, though he knew only the baptism of John. He began to speak boldly in the synagogue, and when Priscilla and Aquila, these are their couple, their leaders of the early church, when they heard him, they invited him to their home and explained to him the way of God more adequately. And then a couple verses later, right at the beginning of Acts 19, while Apollos was at Corinth, Paul took the road through the interior and arrived at Ephesus. There he found some disciples and asked them, Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed? I mean, to use our parlance today, did you get baptism 2.0? Do you have the update? They answered, No, we've not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit. So Paul asked, Well, then what baptism did you receive? John's baptism, they replied, the beta version, the 1.0 version. Paul said, John's baptism was a baptism of repentance. He told the people to believe in the one coming after him, that is, in Jesus. On hearing this, they were baptized into the name of the Lord Jesus. When Paul placed his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came upon them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied, and there were about twelve men in all. I think that's a really important little arc for us to track down in the New Testament story, and it's a forgotten one. These disciples of John the Baptist scattered, they weren't all there for the Jesus stuff, but apparently John did such a good job of prepping them that people like Apollos could go and be really effective on the beta version. But now that the gospel is circulating and there's been a bunch of clarification about how this is for everyone and how the Gentiles are receiving the Holy Spirit, we see kind of a cleaning up that's referenced to in Acts where those last remaining people who were still operating without the update get the update, and immediately there's miraculous confirmation involved to say, yeah, this is the baptism that John the Baptist anticipated, that his baptism was meant to point to, the baptism that is only delivered by Jesus, the baptism that is coupled with salvation and the ultimate forgiveness of sins by the work of Christ on the cross, and the baptism that comes with the presence of the Holy Spirit. And Christians believe for good reason that to this day, whether there is miraculous manifestation or not, that to be in Christ is to receive the Holy Spirit. Isn't it cute how every day I'm like, I think we'll just run through all the other accounts about John the Baptist and Jesus' baptism. And then every day we get like one or one and a half done. I don't know. I just like the Bible, guys. I like I like talking about it and I like not rushing that much. Should I skip Luke tomorrow? Do you feel like we've kind of got it? Oh, what is that? I hear a bunch of you booing and being like, no, don't rush. We want more Bible. Okay, well, I guess we'll do it then. You win this round, people who want more Bible. Tomorrow we'll cover Luke's, and then finally we're gonna move forward in John chapter one. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. We'll do this again soon.