Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We decided we to sing we never sing on Wednesday wednesday night singing Don't Say Never, never Say Never him number 148. Stand, ladies and gentlemen, there's within a Heart of Melody. And you can we'll just have the choir sing from where they are here tonight? And here we go. Heart of melo. That's a different song. In my heart there rings bell. Sing it. We'll make up words. In my heart there rings a melody rings a melody there rings a melody in my heart rings a melody today. Which song is that? It's a good one. Aren't you glad you're here tonight? Let's have a word of prayer. Heavenly Father, thank you for your presence here tonight for the melody in our heart even if we don't know the words or the name of that song. And we are grateful, dear Heavenly Father, and pray that you would bless our time of Bible study and joy and that it would be an encouragement to us all. In Jesus name, amen. Amen. You may be seeing I think the pianist is almost over. In my heart there rings a melody need to get the pianist on the right song? Yeah. Welcome, everybody. Glad you're here. Last week and this week, I wore a tie on Wednesday night. I haven't worn ties on Wednesday night for years and years and years unless it was a special occasion. But I found this chinaman who had a whole bunch of ties and I bought a bunch of cheap ones and they were just too good not to wear. So I keep wearing ties. And it reminds me of my first church. Because of my first church, this is back in the every preacher wore a tie all the time. And so I always had a tie on on Wednesday night and Monday morning and whatever it was. And so now I feel like I'm young again. Put a tie on, ladies and gentlemen. You'll feel young again. Keep it on very long and you'll choke. But anyway, glad everybody's here as we come into Mark, our third session of the Gospel of Mark. It's been a joy to go through these already. There's our supper tonight. I have a little supper picture, except I didn't get the food. I just got the table setting. For those of you online, we not only have wonderful supper, but we set the table nice with placemats and silverware and place. And now look at our cups that say couch. First Baptist Church available for 39 95 plus handling or something like that. Don't you online? Wisher, wish merger. That's the whole goal of showing those pictures every Wednesday night is to say I wish I could be a tough New Mexico like these good people to even Josh drove up from Albuquerque. It was worth it too, because you got a freak out, right? That's a $40 value. We're coming to Mark, chapter one tonight as we have journeyed through already at blazing speed and come to through the first eight verses, and Nathan tells me I should turn my mic on. So as we come through did they hear any of that? Oh, they heard a little bit of okay, I just wanted to make sure I didn't have to repeat myself. What I said is we're giving away $100,000 to all participants in blazing speed. We've made it through Mark chapters one, one through eight, and tonight we come down to nine through 13, and we look for got to have a pointer. We look tonight at the baptism of Jesus, and we're going to see a couple of things I think that are interesting and intriguing, and maybe we'll answer some questions, and maybe we'll make some questions along the way, and we will go with it. But he starts out saying, and it came to pass. Shall we stop right there? And it came to pass. Obviously, that is just a narrative set of words to help us realize, hey, kind of in this context, in this setting here's what happened. It came to pass. The context in the setting, of course, is that John the Baptist is baptizing in all of Judea, and Jerusalem is coming out to hear him, and he's baptizing people in the Jordan River, and he's dressed in camel hair and eating locusts and wild honey and all those things we talked about the last two weeks. And with that backdrop, it came to pass. This is maybe the only time, if memory serves me correctly, it's the only time in the Gospel of Mark we're going to see this kind of general phrase, and it came to pass because with that, we don't know. Did it come to pass like, really soon? Did it come to pass a month later, five months later, two years later? What are we talking about? It came to pass. It could be a long time. Like Luke. The famous words in Luke. It came about in those days that a decree went forth from Caesar Augustus. Okay, well, what are we talking? From when to where? So it came to pass actually, the reason I want to focus on that a little bit is to tell you a little bit about the nature of the Gospel of Mark. Mark writes a chronological history of the activity of Jesus, and he doesn't talk too much about the teaching of Jesus. It's more the activity of Jesus. He doesn't talk too much about the theology of what's happening. He just tells you what happened. So it's a little bit of the if you had to put a tagline on it and you wanted to be a little bit snarky, maybe your tagline would be just the facts, ma'am. Just the facts. So here's the gospel of Mark. It spills out the facts. It's kind of a newspaper account, I guess you would say, that takes place. And because of that and one of the very nice things about the Gospel of Mark is that he typically is pretty good about telling us when something happened. So this is kind of unusual right here at the beginning a little bit, but it's a little unusual. Much of what we're going to see in the Gospel of Mark is going to be he's going to say things like two days later or the next day, things like this that very much give us a timing from this thing to the next thing. And I would say that if it were not for the Gospel of Mark, we would have a really far more difficult time doing a chronology of the life of Jesus because Mark again just sort of lays it out in timeline fashion and here it is. And even with Mark it's a difficult thing to put it in a timeline on what Jesus did, when and exactly where. But Mark, it would be almost impossible to do without the Gospel of Mark. So Mark is our chronological study of what happened and what came to pass. But it came to pass in those days that's the days of John the Baptist, that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John and the Jordan. Now you notice it's almost you kind of want to say, well, that's sort of an understatement. There's a lot of stuff in there and not much in there that what do you mean he came from Nazareth? What do you mean he was baptized? What do you mean by well, John and the Jordan? He kind of laid that out in the previous verses one through eight. So he's got a little bit there. But we're going to have the baptism in 910 and eleven and he's really not going to tell much about it. In fact, one of the big questions we're going to ask when we get to the end of verse eleven is why was he baptized by John and the Jordan? And Mark's not really going to answer that question for us. So we are going to make stuff up. How's that sound or we'll at least speculate a little bit and hope our speculation is somewhat grounded in scripture. But neither Mark nor Matthew nor Luke or John, john also speaks of the baptism. None of them tell us why except for one little hint that we'll get to but here comes Jesus from Nazareth of Galilee. Now again, I think probably Mark is the first gospel written that would make Mark let's go ahead and call it. If we were going to argue about it, maybe there would be some decent arguments otherwise. But let's just go ahead and say Mark is the first thing ever written in the New Testament. It's the first gospel, let's put it before any of the epistles are written. That's probably not the case. Probably James actually was the first thing written chronologically. But it's certainly the first gospel, I think certainly the first gospel that is written. And so this is the first time we hear anything about Nazareth of Galilee. What's up with that? I thought if you read Luke, of course Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Or if you read Matthew, jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea and all the prophets said Bethlehem of Judea. And now here comes Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee. I suspect he just wants us to know that Jesus is from Nazareth in Galilee. I think it's kind of interesting that he has to point out where Nazareth is in Galilee. A lot of places you would not have to point that out, but Nazareth was such an inconsequential town that you have to point it out. Where is that? Nazareth of Galilee. But again, he doesn't say anything about it and he was baptized of John in the Jordan. Now again, other than what we already know in verses one through eight about what John was doing in the Jordan and Baptizing, which wasn't a whole lot, but we know there was a little and we've talked about some of that last couple of weeks. Other than that, there it is. Matter of fact, there it happens. And that is what we're going to see as we go through the Gospel of Mark is here's what happened. Just the facts, ma'am. There it is. And we'll take some other gospels and we'll do some speculation and all the kind of theological speculation how's that? And try to put some things together. You know, I didn't do any kind of counter study on it, but I suspect that the most common word in the Gospel of Mark is in verse nine. And that word is it's also in verse ten. It's also in verse eleven. And you got it. And we're going to find out that this is Mark. He says this and this and this and this and this and this and this and that's the way that Mark becomes a very, I'll say, fast paced Gospel. How's that for three weeks. And we made it to verse nine so far for the fast paced Gospel. Aren't you glad we're not on the slow one? So there it is. Matter of fact, Jesus came, was baptized by John in the Jordan River, kind of a matter of fact statement that is given right there. And verse ten straightway coming up out of the water he saw the heavens open and the spirit like a dove descending upon him. Let's talk about a couple of things. One is that I can remember in my younger days when I wore ties on Wednesday night that I used this verse to help prove baptism by immersion. Now I believe in baptism by immersion rather than by sprinkling or pouring or squirt guns or whatever it is, I believe in baptism by immersion. And so as a Baptist who believed in baptism by immersion, sometimes you're looking for a proof text. I want to prove this, prove that the lutherans are wrong, right? And it's supposed to be immersion. So I remember one time using this verse right here, straightway coming up out of the water. Well, have you ever seen a Catholic baptismal font? Yes, sure you have. The little holy water at the beginning, with apologies to the Catholics. It's kind of like a bird bath. You don't really get in it. There's no way to come up out of it. You would splash all the water out of it if you were in it. So here he's in the Jordan River, and I use this to say, see, there it is, a baptism by immersion. Now, that might be kind of a logical assumption you would make, but I want to argue against using this to argue for baptism by immersion. By the way, I still believe in baptism by immersion. That's the way it was. I think every baptism in the Bible was a baptism by immersion. But I think there are better ways to argue it. One of the things that I have learned, the older I get, is if you're going to argue, argue with a good argument. And sometimes if you set out on the wrong foot on an argument, you're not going to get very far, and you're not going to convince very many people. I think this would be the wrong place to argue baptism by immersion. Why? I think because even without digging any further into Greek, came up out of the water only tells us that he was in the water, right? Does it tell us that he was immersed in the water, or could he have been in the water just like all the pictures that all the classic artists did, where Jesus is standing in the water with John the Baptist, and what's John the Baptist doing pouring some water over his head? So you would still use the same English. He came up out of the water after he was sprinkled in there, after John poured some water on his head. So I think it's our I'll say Baptist assumption, but anybody who immerses it's our assumption that, okay, yeah, he was down in the water completely, and he came up out of the water. I think that was probably the case. I just think this is the wrong place to argue it. And if you're going to have an argument, you just will have a good argument, right? And you just will be right before you go in it into it. So he came up out of the water. Doesn't really tell us. There's another interesting thing, however, here. The word out of out of right there is kind of an unusual word that you wouldn't really expect. And I've got some notes on the outline, if you want to dig deeper into it, but it's the word APO instead of the word ek. Now, ek means to come out of the center of, if you will, to come out from the interior of and of course, the most common usage that we would have it in English would be like the sign back there that says exit eck out of. Get out of the heart of it. You're in it. Get out of it, exit. But this doesn't use the word eck. This uses the word APO. And APO is to be moving away from whether you are in it or not, you're moving away from it. For example, here I could say, hey, if you go out here and turn left, you are APO. Coming out of or moving away from is the word. You're moving away from Santa Fe. You're moving away from Santa Fe. If you go out here and turn left and that's true, right? You're moving away from Santa Fe. But we're not in Santa Fe, so I wouldn't say you, etch. You're exiting Santa Fe. No, you're exiting Taos if you go out here and turn left. But you're APO. You could be APO Santa Fe. Or if you keep going far enough, New Mexico. If you keep going far enough, the United States. If you keep going far enough, you start going south eventually. So APO is moving away from, okay, now what's the big deal there? Coming up away from the water again, all that really tells us grammatically is he was in the water. Now, you know that many times when I give an argument, scriptural argument, I'll say something about the ladies and gentlemen of the jury. And it's my job as the preacher to convince the ladies and gentlemen of the jury. And I just spent a long time saying I wouldn't use that to try to convince you for baptism by immersion, because the ladies and gentlemen of the jury are going to hear from the defense, and the defense attorney is going to say, ladies and gentlemen, it doesn't say he was at the scene of the crime. All we saw is a videotape showing him moving away from the scene of the crime, but he might not have been at the scene of the crime. You got it? How's that for trying to convince you of something that you didn't really need convinced of. You were good all the way through with it. But I point all that out as an illustration to say for the third time now, when you have a biblical argument, have a good one. There are better biblical arguments to give for a lot of things. I see this one of the big places I see this is in the pretribulational rapture. I believe in a pretribulational rapture. And I hear so many people argue for a pretribulational rapture from the wrong places, and I'm like, wow, I agree with you about the pretribulational rapture, but you're not helping the cause any. You're making it look like we only have a weak argument. Use the strong argument, not the weak argument. Later on, you could use this as icing on the cake if you wanted you could use this as a supplemental material for baptism by immersion. By the way, if I were to want to argue a baptism by immersion, I would start with the word baptizo, which it in and of itself means to dip, to immerse. But anyway, coming out of the water now, it uses the word straightway. There. Straightway means what? Means you made a straightway. Which honestly also doesn't help if you're trying to use this to build the argument for baptism by immersion, because I don't know the other way to come up out of the water from under the water, other than straightway. You zigzag your way out of the water, what do you do? But this does kind of fit in to say, he got himself out of the river, he took the most direct path out of the he didn't dillydally in the river, he came out. And I want to stop and talk about the word straightway just a little bit. And if you have a modern translation, it probably doesn't say straightway. It probably says something like immediately or quickly, right away. Maybe he came out of the water. I suspect most of them say immediately. And the truth is, it kind of means immediately. And so you might look at it and say, I suspect if you ask the average preacher, my King James says straightway and yours says immediately. Why say straightway? Because the King James is archaic language. That's why it says straightway. Well, straightway is archaic. We don't say straightway very often, do we? I don't. Do you? In Wisconsin? No. It's not a thing in modern language to say straightway. The reason I think that the King James used it, I suspect I don't know this for sure, I suspect that straightway was not the normal way to say quickly or immediately in 1611 either. I kind of think it was a little bit unusual to say straightway, but they use straightway. But the interesting thing is the underlying word is eutheos. I'm going to put the roots it is utithamae. Utithamae. It's in a different form there, but that's the words. Anyway, remember the Greek prefix EU spelled EU, and it means exactly, it means good, like we often say eulogy a good word, a eulogos. Euthanasia a good thanatos a good death, as euthanasia. All those EW words mean good if they're from Greek, and most of them are good. Tithamai is to place something or to direct something. So he's got a good placement of getting out of the water. That looks to me like straightway. It's the straightway, not the crooked way, not the bad way, it's the quickest way. Now, probably what that means is quick, immediate. So I think that the modern versions, they don't get it wrong when they say immediate, because straightway would be immediate. But here's what I think. One of the reasons I like and the reason I stop here and camp on this a little bit, other than the fact that I like to stop and camp on almost useless subjects that are kind of interesting, is that the King James translators. I think better than I'll go better than anyone on the face of the earth for the history of time. They did a more precise job of translating than anyone has ever done. I see this over and over again. What they tried to do is say, well, here we've got a compound word, utemai, so let's find a compound word in English that would mean good placement. That wouldn't mean anything if we said a good placement, but we could go a straight way and we have this word straightway. So let's use the word straightway. And then people in 2023 can use a dictionary to look up what straightway is if they can't figure it out. But my guess is you didn't even need a dictionary to figure all that out. So all that is a promotion for the King James Bible on sale today for 29 95. No straightway. So as directly as he could, he came up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened. That word's kind of interesting as well. I don't know how you picture the heavens opening. It would be difficult if I wanted to take a little time. I guess I should have put Trent on the research today, finding movies and television programs that depict this and see how did in cinema, how did they depict the heavens opened? I don't know how you do that, but the word here is kind of a violent word, not just like open the door. And my suspicion is, if we were to do the work and to see that on film, digitally, in video, we would find that it was kind of a nice, sweet thing. It's really a violent word. In fact, it's the same word that is used when the veil of the temple was rent into from top to bottom. It is the idea of ripping something open, of tearing something open, of bursting something open. So if I were the movie director and I saw this nice little unveiling of a scroll or something like this, I would say, wait a minute, that's got to be different than that. It's got to be more of a violent look of the heavens being ripped open. I don't know what that means in the heavens opened. It's plural heavens, which probably means, and I think this would bear out if we studied it, it means the stars, the sky, the clouds, the blue sky, the atmosphere was opened. It's not talking about the dwelling place of God, which would be a singular, but rather the blue sky gets ripped open. And whatever it is you see, if you rip the sky open. I don't know how that works. But that had to have been a very dramatic visual experience, right? That's one of the things that you would go home and say, honey, you'll never guess what happened today down by the riverside, that this was spectacular in whatever it means. And it's kind of interesting that none of the let's see again, this is Matthew, Mark, Luke, I think John also. None of them give much description beyond that the heavens were opened. And you kind of do want to say, well, could we go back and talk about that a little bit? What do you mean the heavens were opened? I don't know what the heavens were opened means. My guess is it was dramatic and not much you could describe other than the heavens were opened. There it is. So the heavens opened and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him. This is what we've got, the spirit. I think that the Spirit like a dove. It is the capital S here. That's a matter of interpretation, but I think you would be hard pressed to say this should be like a lowercase spirit, just like a heavenly spirit came upon him. I think you've got the third person of the Trinity here and that this would be a decent place, maybe not the best, but a decent place to argue the Trinity, because we're about to have the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. And we start here. Well, we've got the Son in the river straightway coming out of the water, and now we've got the Spirit like a dove descending upon him. Again, it doesn't say was a dove, but I suppose some likeness of a dove. I suspect, though this is hard to know which came first here. I suspect that a dove had some symbolism in that day in ancient Judaism and probably a religious symbolism of Israel, of God's presence of peace, the things that you would kind of think that a dove would represent. The problem is that none of that's written down. And so we might have that understanding of a dove now because of this scene, rather than from before, although you do have the dove in the Noah story here. But here comes the Spirit like a dove descending on him. And then with that, the last verse of the baptism, there came a voice from heaven saying Thou we'll stop right there. A voice from heaven saying Thou just from here, you might argue nobody saw nor heard this except Jesus. But when you read Matthew especially, and Luke on this, you find out the other people there, they saw it, they heard it as well. So there are bound to be many people there. So here's this voice from heaven saying, thou art my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. It's a little bit of echo from Psalm chapter two, verse seven. Thou art my son today I have begotten thee is the words in Psalm chapter two, which is a messianic Psalm. So here you got a couple of things. The heavens opened and the Spirit of God comes down upon him like a dove. I think if you were an astute Bible student in that day, and probably a lot of them were, I think that was a day in which Jewish people delighted in the study of the text and of the prophets. There was a great messianic fervor during that day. And so they looked at some of these things and they would have read from Isaiah and known the passage. I've got the reference in your outline, but there's the passage in Isaiah that says it's a prayer. It says to God a prayer to God, oh, that thou would rend the heavens. Oh, that's interesting. Rip open the heavens and come down. Well, when the heavens get ripped open, that's probably something they think, oh, we said that prayer last Sabbath at the Sabbath School. We sang the song, oh, that thou would rend open the heavens to houde. Is that the words of that song? There's the prayer to rend open the heavens, that you would come down. And here's this visual of the heavens being rent open and God coming down. That's got to be I think there's a ton of communication in there from God saying, this is the Messiah. But just in case you don't get it, here's a voice now from heaven. Thou art my beloved Son, right, in whom I am well pleased. And that kind of gives the stamp of approval from the Father in the voice, the Spirit in the dove and the Son right there. And you've got all three of them right there. It is a decent place to argue, the Trinity. And here is this testimony from God that, yeah, this is my Son, and I'm sending him to you. I have ripped open the heavens and come down. And to use the words of John or the words of the fourth Gospel, the word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory of the only begotten of the Father. So God's saying, okay, here I am. I am right with you, god in the flesh. The word become flesh. I'm here. The heavens have been ripped open. I'm here. So it's a lot of subtle fulfillment of prophecy, not as clear as like, even earlier in chapters in verses two and three of this chapter, where Mark just tells us, hey, these two prophecies were about John the Baptist here. It doesn't tell us Isaiah and psalm two and others are about Jesus the Messiah. But I think the only conclusion you would make is that these scenes taking place are prophetic fulfillment and describing who it is, you know, shall I give another advertisement for the King James version, thou art my beloved son. I think once again, I speculate a bit, but that's one of those little phrases that has made itself into the Western world, thou art my beloved Son, that you could probably get it started and people would finish it. Thou art my beloved son. I suspect. And this would take a little while to do it in actual study, but I suspect that little phrase, thou art my beloved son has come through in a lot of western literature, movies, things like that. Whether it's those words or a reference to those words or kind of a play on those words, thou art my beloved son. And the reason I say that it shows a little bit of the influence of the King James is because I never hear people saying, you are the son I love. No, thou art my beloved son. Thou art that's clearly archaic language, but that's the way American society at least has heard those words. I don't know. I suspect that if you were to go to some contemporary church next time you all are in one, you can check, especially if you find them preaching on the baptism of Jesus. I have a suspicion that they would read from a Bible that says, you are my son that I love. But then as they started preaching and referred to it, it would come out of their mouth as thou art my beloved son, that this is so ingrained within them. And I happen to think, as an educator, that the King James Bible has influenced our society in more ways than any other book ever written, and we ought to kind of recognize that and even capitalize on that a little bit. If somebody could ever go through the King James Bible and say, here's all the places that everybody in our society knows this, even if they never go to church at all, they know these words would be kind of an interesting thing. So there it is. Thou art my beloved son, in whom I'm well pleased. Now that's 910 and eleven. The question is, why was Jesus baptized? Again, Mark? As matter of fact, he was baptized in the Jordan River. He came out straightway, the heavens were rent open, spirit came like a dove, and the father said, thou art my beloved son, and whom I am well pleased. It certainly begs the question a lot of questions mark does that. He doesn't answer all the questions, he just puts it out there. But it begs the question, why? Why was he baptized? You could put some things together just from one through eight on the baptism, but you would come to the same conclusion that John did in the Gospel of Matthew when Jesus comes to be baptized. Remember, John says, wait, I need to be baptized by you. This is backwards. And Jesus says, well, you're going to baptize me anyway to fulfill all righteousness. So if you want a biblical answer, why was Jesus baptized? There's the answer to fulfill all righteousness. And how many of you are totally satisfied with that answer? You kind of say, I don't know what that means, to fulfill all righteousness. How does his baptism fulfill all righteousness? I think the bottom line and then I'll back off of it. The bottom line is we'll have to wait till we get to heaven and find out. We're never really going to know. Why was Jesus, the righteous son of God, going through an act that was and we already saw this in the earlier verses for the forgiveness of sins. He didn't need the forgiveness of sins. John told him, you don't need to be baptized. I need to be baptized by you. Why, Will? To fulfill all righteousness. Okay, I still don't get it. Why? I think there's an intriguing idea that I'll present to you. I can't prove it. Nobody ever could prove it. But remember that Zechariah and Elizabeth were descendants of Aaron, the original high priest. Remember that every high priest was supposed to be a descendant of Aaron. But remember that the high priest in this day was a fellow named Anis who was not a descendant of Aaron. He was a descendant of George Soros by the office. And so Anas had bought the priesthood from the Romans. Remember that we discussed the Essenes and that they were very Jewish and religious, but they wouldn't even go to the temple because they said, it's a fake priest up there. We're not going up to the fake priest. Remember that John the Baptist may have been an Essene or associated with the Essenes. He's certainly getting out there doing his baptism in Essene territory by Kumaran. All of these things kind of play into, here's a piece of circumstantial evidence. And another, and another, and another and another. After a while, you get so much circumstantial evidence you begin to say maybe there is something up to it here. So here's John the Baptist, the son of descendants of Aaron. Now, what if and this is a big what if what if John was the last descendant of Aaron? How many children did John the Baptist have? As far as we know, none. I don't think there's any reason to speculate that there would unless you're trying to write a novel or something. So John the Baptist doesn't have any kids. He's certainly a descendant of Aaron. It is scientifically possible that he could be the last of the ironic priesthood, and he's not even serving. So what if John the Baptist actually was supposed to be the high priest? And maybe this is part of his rebel status, if you will, and part of the reason why Herod wants him dead. And all those kind of things that go on that we discussed a little bit last week. Remember we gave that quote last week from Josephus? And Josephus, the Roman historian said the Jewish Roman historian said I paraphrase john the Baptist was so powerful that people would do whatever he said. And so Herod wanted him dead. Okay, that seems a little beyond what a guy in a camel hair cloth out in the wilderness can bring. Maybe John's got something in his resume that gives the king reason to worry. Again, all that speculation because maybe he's not the last descendant of Aaron, but what if he is? Now let's go ahead and pretend like he is the last descendant of Aaron. Then what happens to the priesthood after John dies? The Torah. The Hebrew Scriptures doesn't give us an option. There is no priesthood left. But the Book of Hebrew says that Jesus is a priest after the order of Melchizedek, not after the order of Aaron, but after the order of Melchizedek. Now, we'll get into Melchizedek on another day and some of the interesting things about that. But could it be that what John is doing is as the last priest anointing the new line of priests? This is what the priesthood would do for a king and it's also what would be done when Aaron and his sons were anointed. There was a ceremonial washing that took place back in the Book of Leviticus you can read about. So could this be the ceremonial cleansing, if you will, that was given to Jesus that established his priesthood? If that's the case, then it's no wonder that God the Father and God the Spirit show up for the ordination of Jesus as the priest. Also, if that's the case, that means that there is no more Jewish priesthood. Now, there already wasn't at that day in the New Testament, and there never has been a priest after Aaron since that time. Which means the Jewish people don't really, even if they have a temple, they don't have a priesthood. And so what do they ultimately need to do? Turn to the one who was anointed by their last priest and it was handed over to this priest, to Jesus as the priest after the order of Melchizedek, which ultimately is what the Jewish people will do now. It kind of begs the question when the Third Temple comes, let's say the Tribulation Temple, it's going to have some Jewish priests serving in it, are they going to be descendants of Aaron? My speculation is no, that they will be Jews, their last name might even be Cohen or Levy or something like this. But are they a descendant of Aaron? Is it the right kind of priesthood, to borrow from an ironic illustration? Can they throw their staff down and have it bud like Aaron's Rod did when it budded? When someone says, no, I'm the priest and I'm the priest, remember that story? And the almond buds were kept forever to show God's anointing of that priesthood. They were kept forever in the Ark of the Covenant. You win the prize. I don't really have a prize, but you win the prize. Last time you won a prize, it was the Mexican flag, didn't you? What'd you do with your Mexican flag anyway? That's all speculation and I know that sometimes when it comes to speculating like that, especially in an academic setting, if you were in the big box seminary and said, okay, here's my speculation about it. They would say, can't be proven, therefore, it's mere speculation. That is all, and there's that much truth to it. But the flip side is, are you just going to leave without asking any questions, without coming up with some solution yourself? So I gave a speculation that maybe you don't like. Well, give a better speculation, come up with something else on it. And typically, what I find in academia is they refuse to make theological speculations, and they just leave everything kind of open ended. There's never really an answer out there. I have more of an inquiring mind, right? An inquiring minds want to know. So I don't think there's anything wrong with digging into it and saying, hey, does the whole scenario work? And the answer on this is, yeah, it works. It's a decent theory. Is it? Right? I can't tell you, but I like my speculation better than your non speculation. I'd rather have something than nothing. And to go with that, so that's my reason why Jesus was baptized there. Now, I got two more verses here. It says, immediately, the spirit driveth him into the wilderness. There's something that is kind of unique here about this. So he's baptized, and now he goes into the wilderness, and the spirit driveth him into the wilderness. Now, I didn't mean to talk so much King James here tonight, but there's some peculiarities in all of this that we should discuss. Driveth. Let's start with the suffix E-T-H. That is what you would use for a third person. He driveth, thou drivest. So ETH is always he, she, or it doing it, the the driving, the talking, whatever. He you might sit there and say, he talketh and talketh and talketh. And I would say, what DOST thou talkest about? So you talkest, he talketh. Now you know. But that's not the interesting thing about this. That's incidental, the spirit driveth him let's drop the suffix and make it as we would use in modern English, drives, the spirit drives him into the wilderness. What is unusual about that? The way you would read that I almost in my own mind, in my mouth, change something, even saying it, because it sounds kind of weird to say, immediately, the spirit drives him into the wilderness. How would we say it? Using the word drive? Drove. Immediately, the spirit drove him into the wilderness. Okay, because we would make it past tense. Drive is present tense, right? Drove is past tense. You will drive home because you drove here. But this is the present tense. The spirit drives him into the wilderness. Every one of the modern translations makes it past tense. The spirit drove him into the wilderness. From our perspective, it's past tense, isn't it? The spirit drove him into the wilderness. And there really is no theological thing that rests and rises or falls on this, but there might be. It's a slippery slope once you get this started is my point. Even the new King James says the spirit drove him into the wilderness. Now, the Greek tense is in the present tense. So if we were to translate it into the present tense, we would have to say immediately, the spirit drives him into the wilderness. That's exactly what the King James did, is it? Kept the present tense, even though that doesn't make sense to us. Now, again, somebody might say, well, that's archaic language. No, it's really not archaic language. It's precise language. It's a precision of translation. What the King James translators did is say if we have that tense in English, the same tense in English that they had in Greek, then we'll use it even if it doesn't really make all that much sense to us, even if normally we wouldn't communicate that way. If we have it, we're going to use it, and we happen to have the present tense. So they didn't change it into the past tense for the comfort of our ear. They kept it where it is. Now, why is all that important? You say they're all this persnickety about getting the absolute best word, even if it's archaic. They get used the same tense, even if we would never use that tense, keeps it all that way. I think that makes it so that the student of English reading the word can basically figure out the Greek or the Hebrew without ever knowing Greek or Hebrew, you can immediately there say something's weird about that. Why is he doing that? Present tense driveth is in the present tense. Why is he doing that? And you can know the underlying greeks got to have present tense. That's what they did. And you deal with that in the King James enough and you recognize, yeah, I don't even have to go look it up. I know the Greek has the present tense, but you can't even tell that in any of the modern versions. You don't know unless you go into the Greek. Now, here, honestly, it doesn't matter if he drives him or he drove him, but what about places where it does matter, where the tense does matter, and there are some where it does matter, especially when it comes to the verb to save, being saved, he saved. There's some of this that really does matter. Now, what this is called is the historical present. It's like a play by play. If you're listening to golf on a Sunday afternoon, every now and then somebody tells me, I'm going to go home and watch golf. Yeah, I'm going to go home and watch the paint dry. But anyway do you watch golf, Frank? Okay. I don't even know how people stay awake through that. But he's walked up to the tea, he placed his golf ball on the tea, ladies and gentlemen. He's looking down the fairway. That play by play. Is this immediate. Here's what's happening. What we're going to find is that this is the way that Mark writes. He goes back there and describes it. This is what's happening. We're going to see it a lot in Mark. He uses this so called historical present a whole bunch of times. I think he probably does it for kind of a dramatic reason, because he wants to have this sort of urgency in the whole tone of his gospel and this and that and the immediacy of it. And he almost wants us to be there as if we're experiencing it right now. And so there it is, the spirit driveth him into the wilderness. And then a little commentary. He was there in the wilderness 40 days, tempted of Satan and with the wild beast, and the angels ministered to him. And I am out of time. So next week I'll have to pick up on the wild beasts, and the angels ministering unto him. End of 40 days. I think there's some interesting stuff there, but we will save that for next time because it's time for you to drive home. Sunday. We have potluck. I will send out a text right away so you can reply and say, I'm bringing T bones or whatever it is that you're going to bring. Josh, you still in town on Sunday? You don't know? Well, it's worth staying. We have the best food in town this Sunday. Okay. Yeah. Let's watch some golf afterwards. What a good idea. Can't wait. Let me lead us in a word of prayer. Heavenly Father, thanks for your watch. Care over us and the blessing that we have for those who joined us online as well. Thank you for the word of God and all the precision that we can enjoy in studying it on these Wednesday nights. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen. God bless you all. See you soon. Thank.