With five children presenting for Believer's Baptism today, we remember that the Lord Jesus commanded it.
John the Baptist's baptism is prototypical of the ordinance: it was a baptism "unto" repentence. What we find, in considering the ordinance, is that it is a public declaration of identity with or union with a cause, an ideal, a leader, or a savior. Usually, the method of identification is some special event that binds the person unto that which he espouses.
Baptism is never the CAUSE of that union, but rather the public manifestation of a union that already exists. Baptism always followed after faith unto salvation in the New Testament. Cornelius and the Ethiopian Eunuch are two clear examples of this truth.
Submersion and uplifting from water is particularly suited as a public sign of union with Christ in His death and resurrection. For the Gospel is that Christ died in the place of sinners, taking upon Himself the death we should have borne for our sins. Further, His resurrection is for us a total victory over sin and hell and the grave.
Thus, we are united by faith in Jesus, dying with Him and rising again with Him legally. That union is what Baptism symbolizes.
The image of death by water is found all through the Scriptures. Even Jesus described the horror of judgment by comparing it to drowning.
In Psalm 69, we find that our Lord Jesus' death for us was compared to death by flood. As He owned our sins as His own, and was judged in our place, it was as if deep waters overwhelmed Him!
Thus, submersion is a beautiful physical picture of union with our Lord Jesus in the death He died to save us. We are also raised up with Christ to eternal life!
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John Pittman Hey was born in 1961 in Jackson, Mississippi, to Godly parents who from the beginning raised him in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. With child-like faith he came to Christ on his fourth birthday at his mother's knee. He received his education at church...