John 1:26 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

Navigator

John 1:26

Comments

There are two baptisms. John preached a baptism of repentance and taught that people must repent from their sin. Now if people really repented and believed what John was saying, that Messiah is coming, they would know to trust in him for salvation, and they would receive the second baptism, even before Christ formally began his ministry. But the trouble was that many of the people who listened to John repented in a very shallow way and for the wrong reason, and so they were never converted. The second baptism is the baptism of the Holy Ghost. It is conversion. It happens when the Holy Ghost fills your life and changes you, and you are baptised, filled as it were, with new life, and spiritual life, and spiritual understanding. You are also baptised with fire. You come under conviction of sin, and your sins are burned up. You truly repent, and cast yourself in dependence upon Christ who died in our place, who bore away our sin on Calvary.The baptism of John was only a symbol, a sign that they had supposedly repented, and the trouble was that so many of those people had not truly repented. You can tell this so easily because as Christ began to minister, apart from the wonder and spectacle and benefit of his healing miracles, they rejected him.

Application

The symbol is not necessarily the reality, which is the work of the Spirit of God in conversion. The person who is not really saved ultimately finds the strictness and the separation from the world irksome and odious and unpleasant. Baptism today is a picture of a changed life. The old life is buried as it were in the water, and we rise to newness of life. What a wonderful sign – if you mean it, if it is really is a sign of your conversion. But without conversion, for some even today, it is an empty symbol. Consider a time of awakening and revival. It is very moving and very powerful, and many people come under conviction of sin and repent and turn to Christ. But some get swept into the church by the flood. They think they are converted but they are not. It was a shallow repentance. They wanted something for themselves, and then they became a nuisance to the church, and often become the source of pain and difficulty.

Questions

When John the apostle quotes John the Baptist here – ‘I baptize with water’ – he assumes that we are familiar with the rest of John the Baptist’s words in the other gospels. This is why the Greek in John 1:26 puts the emphasis on the ‘I’ and the ‘water’ without completing the contrast. We have to fill in the rest from Matthew 3.11 – but ‘he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire.’

Outline

Purpose

Introduction

John 1:26 Commentary and Bible Study