Is the declaration “You are my Son…” an allusion to Psalm 2:7 or Isaiah 42:1?

We believe that the voice from heaven does have Psalm 2:7 as point of departure, but not Isaiah 42:1, for the following reasons.

1. The word Son is dominant. The rest is a further definition of that word. Jesus is the Son and he is beloved. In Greek that usually means that the certain person is the only son or daughter. Jesus is the Son, the unique, the only One. The words with you I am well pleased are apparently not central; they are missing in John. Nor is it necessary to attribute a strong contrasting effect to the end of the utterance, as if in the words “with you I am well pleased” Jesus were being compared with someone else about whom one might suppose, unjustifiably, that God had pleasure in him. Matthew uses a simple relative pronoun (with whom I am well pleased) and the words with you must be regarded as a continuation of the earlier words (You are my beloved Son). By these words (with you I am well pleased) the voice from heaven emphasizes that the silence about all the previous persons who were baptized was telling: they confessed their sins and did not earn God’s pleasure. But as Son of God, Jesus, who was guiltless, immediately came up out of the water, and God declares that he has pleasure in this own Son. He is the only Son and he is the only One in Israel in whom God can have pleasure. There is insufficient ground to find an intended reference to Isaiah 42:1 in the conclusion of the heavenly voice’s utterance. Of course, this does not eliminate the possibility that the choice of words here may have been influenced by the scriptural background. However, biblical word usage is not the same as an explicit text reference.

2. The word Son is an acknowledgement of what Jesus is. This is apparent from the addendum to Mark 1:1 (Jesus Christ, the Son of God). Immediately after the baptism (in the wilderness of the temptations), Satan also used the designation Son of God as a title and characteristic of Jesus (Matthew 4:3, Matthew 4:6). The heavenly voice does not say that in God’s eyes Jesus is like a son, or that God calls him his son, but it says that Jesus is God’s Son.

3. The word Son is referential. Now John the Baptist did not at all give the impression that he saw himself as the Son of God, and therefore the heavenly voice cannot be explained as a choice of Jesus over the Baptist (You and not John are God’s Son¹). Since John preached about the coming of someone with divine authority (Mark 1:7–8), we can regard the heavenly utterance as connecting to that preaching. John says, “He comes.” God says to Jesus, “You are.” But now the voice does not use a term that John had used. It does not say, You are the mightier one. That word identified the relationship between John and the One who was coming. But now God himself speaks and the relationship between God and the One who comes is that of Father and Son. That is why the voice identifies the Son as the mightier One who was coming and who is Jesus now. This new word, in combination with the high expectations about the coming of the Lord himself (the appearance of the Angel of Yahweh) reminds us of a homogeneous, unique declaration in the Old Testament. Psalm 2:7 speaks about someone who can declare that God spoke to him, You are my Son. The difference in word order does not prevent us from seeing a close connection between the two expressions. In Psalm 2:7 the addressee conveys what God said to him (The Lord said to me, 'You are my Son'). But in Mark 1:11 we read the same thing in the direct address by God to Jesus and God spoke to him at the moment that he united himself with the people in the baptism. In this situation the word order is changed because it is not an actual quotation, although in substance it is an identical statement (And a voice came…You are my beloved Son).

   When the voice from heaven identifies Jesus as God’s Son, God thereby signifies that the invisible reality of the prophecy in Psalm 2:1–12 has now become flesh and blood in Jesus, who came from Nazareth and sided with God’s people.²