BAPTISM

BAPTISM

I do not comply with your request to write a paper, for it would be making more of baptism than the Lord has made of it. Your question is, why are children of one believing parent holy now, and how can the unbelieving one be sanctified? Was it the death of Christ that effected this change since Ezra’s time? And secondly, in what way did the death of Christ give Him a claim on every man? Admitting this universal claim, must the believing head of his house cause all his to pass through baptism unto Christ as that which expresses His death, and that man in the flesh has now no status before God? The death of Christ (see Colossians 2) has freed us from four things: the body of the flesh, circumcision practically known in ^[p. 440] the land after Jordan. Baptism is burial, the dead buried morally. This is the sea out of Egypt, and the river into the land, and practically precedes circumcision. The other two are the handwriting, what God required of man, and the powers of evil.

His death has freed us from everything which could hinder us from walking according to “the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him” (Colossians 3: 10). Christ has all the rights now, and every believer bears His name, not only in his heart, but openly submits to it in baptism, and consents that all his should bear the same mark, and in yielding to this he places them in the sphere where the Holy Spirit maintains Christ’s rights, and therefore in the place of privilege for his children, already in the place of promise. This is a partial outline of what I see in Scripture.