Matthew 3:13–17:

“Then Jesus came from Galilee to John to be baptized by him in the Jordan River. But John tried to prevent Him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by You, and yet You come to me?’ So Jesus replied to him, ‘Let it happen now, for it is right for us to fulfill all righteousness.’ Then John yielded to Him. After Jesus was baptized, just as He was coming up out of the water, the heavens opened and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on Him. And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is My one dear Son; in Him I take great delight.’”

One of the doctrines we cannot trifle with is the doctrine of the identity of Jesus Christ, and you have it not just in one place like this—where a voice came from heaven, God the Father saying, “This is My own dear Son”—but we have it everywhere in Scripture. We have it in many places about the identity of Christ, and it is like a tapestry.

Look at the design. You have a massive canvas and an artist is painting something. He paints a stroke here. There is something already in the mind of the artist. There is an ending point. There is something he wants you to see. But it takes a while for that artist, who already has the picture in his mind. It is going to take a while, depending on how massive the project is. One stroke here, one painting there, another stroke in another place.

What some people want is for every stroke to be “Jesus is God, Jesus is God, Jesus is God.” No. What we have is God as a divine artist painting a tapestry. One stroke here, another stroke there. By the time you step back and look at the whole project, you see it: “Wow, this is massive. This is a Person that has just been painted,” even though it took a while; word here, a statement there.

What John wrote in John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word…” What Paul wrote in his letters, the dots, the massive work, the difference in Jesus—the fact that He receives worship, how He says, “Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9), how He says, “Come to Me,” how He puts Himself in the place of God many times.

It just seems inevitable that we come to the conclusion that Jesus Christ is God, who does not have a beginning, even though He became incarnate.

You have a challenge when you have a religion that comes with the conclusion that there is nothing like the Trinity, because it “doesn’t make sense” to them. Then they want to impose that on Scripture. They want to force the Scriptures to match that. What they do is take all the beautiful tapestry, all the beautiful angles of that massive project—God communicating things about His Son through different means, through different writers of the New Testament, even from the Old Testament, and Jesus Christ Himself coming down as the way, the truth, and the life, making all those claims about Himself—and they want to smooth it over.

So what you end up with is not the sharp picture from an artist, but a blurry shape that you cannot really make anything out of.

The voice came from heaven. But has that voice come to your heart, to show you “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6)?

God bless you. See you later.