Matt.3:5 – Then Jerusalem was going out to him, and all Judea and all the district around the Jordan; and they were being baptized by him in the Jordan River, as they confessed their sins.
John the Baptist, the last of the Old Testament prophets, was also the greatest of all the prophets. Apparently the Lord had saved the best for last, John had a unprecedented revelation of the purpose of the Messiah. He said He was the Lamb of God to purify us from our sin and then he proclaimed the unthinkable. He described the heavenly ministry of Jesus as a ministry of baptism, He would immerse us into God. I recently read some interesting comments from Barclay about water baptism and the Spirit by Barclay, check out these thoughts.
word for spirit is ruach, and ruach, like pneuma in Greek, means not only spirit; it also means breath. Breath is life; and therefore the promise of the Spirit is the promise of life.…When the Spirit of God enters us, the tired, lackluster, weary defeatedness of life is gone, and a surge of new life enters us. (2) This word ruach not only means breath; it also means wind. … Wind means power. The gale of wind sweeps the ship before it and uproots the tree. The wind has an irresistible power. The Spirit of God is the Spirit of power. … We are enabled to do the undoable, to face the unfaceable and to bear the unbearable… (3) The Spirit of God is connected with the work of creation. It was the Spirit of God who moved upon the face of the waters and made the chaos into a cosmos, turned disorder into order, and made a world out of the uncreated mists…. When the Spirit of God enters into us, the disorder of human nature becomes the order of God… (4) The Spirit enables people to recognize God’s truth when they see it. When the Spirit enters our hearts, our eyes are opened. The prejudices which blinded us are taken away. The self-will which darkened us is removed. The Spirit enables us to see.
So this is what John came to proclaim and Jesus came to accomplish, He came to give us full immersion into God Himself. Being immersed or baptized in the Spirit is pictured by our water baptism. We are buried in His death and we are raised into the life of God.
He breathes His life into us and we come alive. He fills us with supernatural power to live a supernatural life, He recreates our disordered lives and brings the order of God into our world, and He fills us with a Spirit of revelation that so we can see God and His plan at work in our world. So yeah, water baptism is more than being dipped into water, we are being immersed into God.
Amen!!!Thank you Jesus!!
As we have been immersed, with eyes able to see what once we could not, our challenge becomes purposely ignoring every distraction so that our focus of thought, sight and purpose is to experience His presence. Our awareness no longer satisfied with superficial, but finding what had been hidden, that which glorifies God and reveals once unknown, unrecognized attributes of our God who wants us to know Him. It’s like finding your love connection in your teens or early twenties, everything else suddenly takes a backseat with zero disappointments.