“Behold I and the children which God hath given me.” (Heb. 2:13)
The writer of Hebrews is quoting Isaiah 8 as a proof text to show that God always planned to become one of us. Isaiah 7-8 are all about Immanuel which means God-with-us, but wound through the prophecies of coming Immanuel, are the enacted prophecies of Isaiah who is having children and naming them crazy names indicating the coming judgment of God on Jerusalem.
When God has spoken the coming judgment, Isaiah responds by saying, “Behold I and the children whom the Lord hath given me are for signs and for wonders in Israel from the Lord of Hosts, which dwelleth in mount Zion.” (Is. 8:18)
Part of the point is that God is the Great and Good Father who does not let His rebellious children wander away forever. He comes in judgment. He comes to discipline His children as a faithful Father, but He ultimately sends His own Son to identify with them, to take up their failures and sin and to destroy the power of death. God became a child to save His rebel children. God can say: Here I am with my Son as a sign and wonder in Israel. Jesus is the great sign of God’s judgment and salvation.
But in Christ, we are called into that gospel, into that story. Jesus is the Captain of our Salvation, and so we follow Him into His glory. And so when God gives us children, we want to imitate Him. We want to imitate Isaiah. Our children are not ours. They are God’s, and so we bring them to Him. He is their Father, and He may do with them as He pleases. He may make them into whatever sign or wonder He likes.
But more specifically, we bring them to baptism to make them signs and wonders of the gospel of Jesus. We anoint them and name them with God’s name because He is not ashamed to call them His brothers because He was a child too. And our children are partakers of His flesh and blood because He has partaken of our flesh and blood so that through death, He might destroy Him who had the power of death.
This is why we baptize our children, and this is what Hendrick’s baptism means, Timothy and Anna. It means that Hendrick belongs to the Triune God, and He is now a sign and a wonder in Christ, proclaiming the judgment and mercy of God to us and to the world. Teach your son this as he grows up. Remind him that because Jesus has come for him, he has been claimed as a sign and a wonder of that grace.
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