Our Lord, however, had a much higher thought and loftier end in the question he put to these men than that of merely saving his life by the facts involved in the question.

When a minister, either diplomatic or religious, on foreign soil, is asked for his authority, it is absolutely necessary for him to produce satisfactory credentials of his investment with the office and the honor he may claim.  Our Lord’s credentials must be clear and satisfactory, beyond those of any other minister, because no others ever have been or can be subjected to such a rigid scrutiny and to such scathing tests as those were which he bore.  They must present a more imposing front than that of the power to work miracles.  Others had wrought miracles before.  Moses had made the bottom of the Red Sea dry ground; and with a single stroke of his rod had cleft a mighty rock to the gushing forth of a flood of water from it.  Elijah had raised the widow’s dead son, and had kept her cruse of oil and her barrel of meal replenished; so that the famine came not nigh her door.  The walls of Jericho had fallen under the sound of Joshua’s band of rams’-horn trumpeters; and, in fact, miracles had, in one way or another, been connected with almost all the events recorded in the Jewish Scriptures.  On the evidence of these facts the scribes and Pharisees said to him in scorn:  “Art thou greater than our fathers, which are dead? and Moses, and the prophets, which are dead?”

You may now perceive how necessary it was for our Lord to have some higher claim to authority, in the eyes of these unbelieving Jews, than they were willing to see in his power to work miracles.  This higher testimony to his authority was given by his Father, signed and sealed by the Holy Spirit, in the presence of witnesses, as Jesus came up out of the water when he was baptized.  It was on the bank of the Jordan that “the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove, and coming upon him; and lo, a voice out of the heavens, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”  To this fact all four of the evangelists bear testimony, in nearly the same words.

Peter, in an address recorded in the first chapter of the Acts, indirectly affirms that many witnessed our Lord’s baptism and the attendant manifestations from heaven.  To his mind it was an essential part of the qualifications of a candidate for the apostleship, that he had been a witness of our Lord’s baptism, as well as of his resurrection.  And why not?  The proofs of his Sonship, of his Messiahship, of his union or oneness with the Father, of the Father’s love for him, and of the acceptableness of the Son’s work and obedience, were as clear and undeniable in the first as in the last.