Welcome back to Seamus Bopri. I'm Joe Heschmire. And if Jesus is sinless, why does he get baptized by

John the Baptist and the Jordan? After all, John was out there preaching a baptism of repentance for

the forgiveness of sins. And Jesus had no sins for which he needed to repent. So on the surface, it's baffling.

Even John the Baptist is shocked to see Jesus coming forward to be baptized, saying, I need to be baptized by you. And do you come to me? So what's going on here? At the outset, I should say there are actually multiple good answers to this question. But that doesn't mean that all of the answers preachers sometimes give are good ones. So we're going to start by taking a look at some of the worse answers. And then we're going to take a look at the good ones. Before we do that, I want to thank a bunch of

the good ones who support me over at Shamelessjo.com. Your direct support helps keep this channel going.

We couldn't do it without you. So okay, one poor answer comes from Dr. Jonathan Pennington

of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He says that

when John the Baptist proclaims our need to repent for the kingdom of God is at hand, this is a call

to reorient our values, habits, loves, thinking, and behavior as disciples. So far, so good. But then he

applies that need to Jesus himself, arguing that even Jesus has to repent, not in the sense of

turning from sin, but in the sense of dedicating himself to follow God's will fully on earth.

But Jesus isn't in need of repentance. Jesus is God, and even as man, he perfectly fulfills God's

will, as we see in things like the finding in the temple nearly two decades earlier.

When John's out there in the desert proclaiming the need to repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand, Matthew's clear

that this is a message to prepare the way of the Lord, not a message that the Lord needs to repent.

Or take Sinclair Ferguson's argument, that the baptism of Jesus is about him being baptized into our sin.

You see what John is doing? He is baptizing Jesus with the very water into which those

sins have been symbolically washed. And there's a profound gospel message in this picture,

isn't there? And it's profoundly theological too.

It's a picture of the gospel,

sinners washing away their sins into the water,

but then Jesus himself being baptized with that sin-polluted water.

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