We are tracing a theme in the Bible that we're calling the firstborn.

It's a theme about who God chooses to rule the world on His behalf.

It's a theme about power and how power should be used.

Today we arrive in the New Testament and we talk about how Jesus is the ultimate power in the universe,

the first born of all creation.

This title gets specifically applied to Jesus by Paul later in the New Testament,

but the gospel authors make the same point in a different way by calling Jesus the Son of God.

In the first time that title is used of Jesus publicly is in the story of His baptism.

The story is about the commissioning of the Son as the Son of God to begin ruling over creation as God's image and Son.

And that's what's being announced here.

Not a new identity that a human is somehow like adopted into but didn't have before.

Baptism is an anointing ceremony of the true king.

This king is born of a woman but also has a cosmic identity that makes him the true ruler of the cosmos.

These two ways that Jesus is the Son of God, one is through his human lineage.

It goes through Joseph, Mary, and Lixbacked Adam.

And that's crucial for him coming as a human to do for humans what no human seems to be able to do.

But the baptism is revealing this other aspect of his identity that in appearing among us as the Son of Adam,

that one is at the same time the eternal Son of the Father.

If Jesus is the ultimate power, how will he use it?

After his baptism, he goes into the wilderness where Satan tempts him to do what other firstborns have done before him.

Seize power by their own means.

But Jesus will succeed where others have failed by the very act of surrendering his life.

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