My grandpa on my mom's side was literally a drill sergeant. Not metaphorically, not like that guy was tough on us kids. No, literally, he was a drill sergeant. He taught Jan Michael Vincent, the guy who was in Airwolf, how to shoot. That's kind of my family's claim to fame, right there. So just take a minute, reflect on that. If you feel more impressed by me now, I totally understand. And so understandably, my grandpa had a little bit of trouble turning off the drill sergeant thing with us grandkids, but he was awesome. I love him. I loved him. I miss him. He was great, but he was the toughest grandparent on all of us by a wide margin. Whenever he came to our house, he had jobs for us to do and made us clean out the garage. And at times, he would just give me work, I think, to break me down as a human and mess with my brain in the same way he probably did with recruits. And so I remember one time he's like, uh telling me to clean the bathroom. Maybe your bathroom's a mess here at your house. And I was like, okay. So I went and wiped some stuff or something. I was like, that seems clean enough. He came in, he's like, nope, none of this is right. And he showed me how to clean the whole thing. And he did it and got down and scrubbed stuff, cleaned the toilet and everything very vigorously. And then he got done and he was like, now you do it. I remember thinking, but it's totally clean now. There's literally no reason to clean this bathroom. It's perfect. Yet he stood there and watched me clean an already clean bathroom for 30 minutes, critiquing every move. Now you might be saying, that is a mean, horrible grandpa. Why would he do that? But the reality is, I'm wicked good at cleaning a bathroom now, and it made my family's life better. And looking back on it, I really respect him and appreciate him for doing it. But the question, why clean a clean thing, baffled me, and it echoed in my brain again and again the whole time I cleaned the clean thing. That question very much applies to Jesus getting baptized. If baptism cleans us up and makes us right with God, then why are we cleaning a clean thing by baptizing Jesus? I think he's already clean. I'm 97.5% sure that Jesus was already going to heaven before he got baptized, and that baptism did nothing to affect his standing with God. I think God super liked him before he got baptized, and I don't think he had anything to repent for, which makes the whole thing weird. And maybe when we get to Matthew chapter 3 and the odd little dance that happens between John the Baptist and Jesus when they're hanging out as adults here, maybe we understand it best or understand John's confusion best by starting with that. It doesn't make any sense. I'm not a clean thing, you clean me. So I need to be baptized by you, says John the Baptist. And do you come to me? But Jesus then goes on to insist, saying, Let it be so now. It's proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness. Well, if I'm John, I'm like, okay, literally every other human who has signed up to be baptized through this little thing I'm doing came because I said, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near. You repent because you're screwing something up. I mean, to repent is to be headed in a direction and then realize that doesn't make any sense. I I can't be doing this. I gotta soften on this point, I gotta quit thinking this way and start thinking this way, and you do an about face and you go in the opposite direction. You repent of one trajectory by embracing a different, usually the opposite trajectory. Well, Jesus doesn't have anything to repent for. He hasn't done anything wrong. And in fact, he's done everything right and is about to do everything right henceforth. Now, there are a few people on some of the corners of Christianity, some of the fringes who are like, nope, Jesus was not sinless as a child or a young adult, but it was only after his baptism when the Spirit descends upon him that he becomes clean and sinless. I don't know. I don't have time to break all of that down, but that that is not a center-cut Christianity view. And there's no real good reason to make that case biblically, so I'm not exactly sure where they're coming from, other than it solves some other theological problem. And that does happen when you're dealing with theology. There's a lot of swallowed the spider to catch the fly, and then oh now I got a spider inside my theology. Uh, what eat spiders? Birds. I'm gonna swallow a theology bird to eat my theology spider. That should be fine. I learned all the lessons I needed to here. Oh, dang it, birds are incredibly unpleasant in my theology stomach. This analogy is gonna work. Stick with me. I'm gonna eat a theology cat to solve that. So you can get to some really weird stuff as you try to solve problems that are heaped upon other problems, and I think this is maybe one of those things. So just for the sake of our discussion, I'm gonna go with the historical orthodox position that Jesus is sinless, period. Full stop, that Jesus is not touched by original sin. Some people don't even think that's a thing, but but that Jesus is completely clean and right from the get-go all the way to the very end, and that this, of course, is what positions him to be the flawless once and for all ultimate sacrifice, as we talked about last time around, the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world. So Jesus is not getting baptized because he needs to repent of something. Jesus is not getting baptized because he wants to become a Christian. Jesus is not getting baptized to be initiated into the church so that his association with the church can translate into his association by proxy through the mediating power of the church to a relationship with God. None of those later associations with baptism or various different denominational theological evolutions of baptism apply here. None of that could have been in view. So why are we doing it? Well, Jesus gives us a pretty good hint when he says, Let it be so now. It is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness. Okay, two words there that we see an awful lot in Matthew, fulfill and righteousness. And they're both coming into play. Well, these two words are actually more intertwined than you would figure. I mean, on the surface, it sounds like what we're hearing here is fulfill. Okay, that means something gets predicted by an Ostrodomist type in the past. Sometime later that thing comes to pass, and everybody's like, Whoa, how'd you know that? And it's amazing, this means something. Righteousness is usually going to sound to us like not doing naughty things, behaving very, very well, like a goofus and gallant from Highlights Magazine kind of thing, be the one that does the good stuff. But righteousness has this connotation in Matthew of right standing, of right thought, right behavior, rightness in general as a sense of the state of being. So we've already seen that Jesus is both the fulfillment and the rightness of the story of the Old Testament, what we'd call the Old Testament, that he's the completion of all of these arcs of prediction and incomplete themes lobbed forward into history, all converging in Jesus. This is our butt, bada-da-da-da. Jesus theme that's developing throughout. And I think that's exactly what Jesus is talking about when he says, to fulfill all righteousness. Everything is culminating in him, all of these predictions, all of these themes, all of this hope, but also his role in relationship to the law. He is going to make it very clear in what a lot of people would say is the key verse of the book of Matthew, Matthew 5.17, that he did not come to abolish the law and the prophets, but to fulfill them. He's not washing his hands of everything that happened in the Old Testament and all of history and saying, well, you know, my father and I and the Spirit, we gave this a shot. It didn't really work out so well, but we're gonna try this different thing. So we're gonna wash our hands of that. Let's do Salvation and Redemptive Plan 2.0. No, this was always the plan. It's the fulfillment, the completion, the finalization of the plan. And so Jesus is in keeping with the law. His behavior is in keeping with the law. He's not a lawbreaker or a law rejector. He is a law completer. So what's being said implicitly here and explicitly later is that Jesus understands the point of the law. He gets what all of the stories and all of the rules and all of the ceremonies and all the sacrifices of the Old Testament were actually supposed to be because they were his idea and he authored all of that stuff sovereignly as the deity who's behind all of it. But now he's here to complete that and round out the arcs. Bump bump. And in doing so, if he rejects the law, well, then the whole beauty and like poetry at rhymes symmetry of bump but-dun dun dun dun goes away. And it actually reduces his credibility, as well as if he were to just abolish the law and make a whole new thing. It undermines the reality that God's character has been played out over the course of history. There's nothing wrong with God's character. God's character is interacting with history exactly the way it should, and God's character is continuing to interact with history exactly the way it should in Jesus. And if this seems super abrupt, I'm sorry it is. This is actually future me interrupting past me. Got into the edit on this, was like, I don't want to cut enough stuff to make this one episode. So we're just gonna neatly snip it right there. And tomorrow I'm picking up, like, I mean, immediately where we left off with the second half of this thought and breakdown. Again, this week of the podcast is sponsored by Dwell Audio Bible app. This is a great idea for something to give away as a gift. I mean, you're just giving people Bible in a new, fresh, accessible way. I'm really enjoying it. I'm hearing from a lot of you that you are as well. They're doing a gigantic discount for people who listen to this podcast. You can just get that most easily by clicking on the link down in the show notes below. It's 50% off a lifetime subscription, which I think is rad. Okay, picking up abruptly where we left off tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. We'll catch you soon.