One Baptism

Romans chapter 6, and I invite you to turn there with me. Having laid out the nature of justification in chapter 5, Paul anticipates the question “Well, if that’s true, then can we then just rely upon God’s grace and do as we choose?” And he in chapter 6 tackles that.

“What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

“For if we have been united with him in a death like [this], we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.”[1]

Amen.

We’re going to use as a prayer before our study the collect for the fourth Sunday after Easter. It’s a little out of sequence, but from the Book of Common Prayer we make this our prayer:

O Almighty God, who alone can order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men: grant to your people that they may love what you command and desire what you promise, that so, among the many changes of the world, our hearts may be surely fixed where true joys are to be found, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

Well, we have been locked in Ephesians 4:5 for some time. It was never my intention, but here we are. We’ve slowed almost to a standstill there at Ephesians 4:4: “There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call—one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.” And in this present study, we are considering just these two words, “one baptism.” “One baptism.”

The English Puritan John Owen, who lived in the early part of the seventeenth century—he was born in 1616—wrote that in a sense, there are only two basic issues with which the minister of the gospel has to deal.[2] It’s an interesting thought. Indeed, it would be an exercise to say, “If there are only two issues, what do you think those issues are?” Of course, he is answering his own question. He says the two basic issues that the gospel minister has to tackle are what he refers to as, number one, the evangelistic challenge. The evangelistic challenge—namely, persuading those who are under the dominion of sin that that is the truth about them. All right? So in other words, explaining what the Bible says about who and what we are outside of Christ—that our great dilemma is that we are alienated from God, we are separated from him, and this is our settled state by nature. So, that’s the evangelistic challenge. It’s the work of the Holy Spirit to convict, but it is the challenge of the gospel minister to explain to his listeners that by nature we are under the dominion of sin, that that is the truth about us.

Secondly, the pastoral challenge. The pastoral challenge: persuading those who are no longer under sin’s dominion that this is who they really are. All right? And it is with this second element that we are concerned at the moment as we work our way through this particular section. Because we have seen that this challenge is a challenge that Paul takes up in his pastoral ministry as he writes to those who have been on the receiving end of his evangelistic ministry. He has had the privilege in many cases of preaching to them, explaining their position outside of Christ, and seeing them turn to Christ in repentance and faith. And then he pastors them by seeking to persuade them that they’re no longer under sin’s dominion. They need to know who they are, and this is exactly who they are.

Now, Paul has been doing this all the way from the beginning of this letter. And he’s been saying to the folks in Ephesus, “It is of vital importance that you understand that you are in Christ.” “In Christ.” This is Paul’s great phraseology. He refers to himself in this way: “I knew a man in Christ,”[3] referring to himself, when you have that section in 2 Corinthians where he talks about his thorn in the flesh and so on. And he doesn’t refer to people, interestingly, as Christians. In fact, he never does! He refers to them as those who are “in Christ.” They were formerly not “in Christ.” Now they are “in Christ”—which is actually really, really helpful. Because if you think about it, all sorts of people will say that they are Christians: “I’m a Christian because I’m not Jewish,” or “I’m a Christian because I’m not Muslim,” or whatever reason, “I’m a Christian.” And so we have to wade our way through that and say, “Well, what is it that the Bible says? What is the nature of genuine Christian faith?” And Paul helps with this as much as anybody does, because he’s saying again and again that the essence of being a Christian is in being united to Christ by faith.

So, for example, in 1:13, referring to this, he says, “In him”—that is, in Christ—“you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit.”[4] And in that opening section of his letter, which we referred to as a great symphony of praise, he has been praising God for the wonder of his goodness in the lives of those to whom he wrote, because he realizes that they have been “blessed,” once again, “in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.”[5] “This,” he says, “is what is true of you. This is who you are. This is your birthright in Jesus. And you need to know who you are.”

Somebody—we were talking the other day, and somebody said that they’d been in a store, and they were waiting in a long line to go through the purchase process, and somebody who’s been relatively prominent in the world of television just came right to the front of the line. And someone said, “Excuse me?” And the person said, “No, I’m just going to go ahead.” And the person said, “Excuse me?” And the person said, “Do you know who I am?” And the person said, “Yes. And the end of the line is back there.” Okay?

Well, what I want to say to you this morning is, if you’re a believer, do you know who you are? Do you know who you are? You see, the problem with that individual was narcissism. It was a self-image problem. And when narcissism and self-interest is represented in a Christian community, then it divides, because people have forgotten or they don’t know who they are— previously thought that their identity was in their intellectual achievement, or their identity was in their financial acumen, or their identity was in their ethnicity, or whatever else it was. But now they discovered, “No, that’s not it. These things are not irrelevant, but the most significant thing about me is that I am a woman in Christ. I have been placed into Christ. I have been united with Christ. I am no longer what I once was.” That is exactly what Paul is doing here as he underscores these things for these folks.

You say to me this morning, “Well, I don’t feel like it.” Martyn Lloyd-Jones responds, “Whether you feel like it or not, if you are in Christ, this is the truth concerning you.” Do you feel American this morning? Well, whether you feel American or not, the majority of you are American. You are! It’s who you are. It’s your identity, at least in terms of culture and nationality.

Now, why are we going to tackle this in this way? Well, because the reality of who we are in Christ is a shared reality. Because the same grace that has united us with Christ, brought us into union with Christ, has brought us into communion with one another. And that picture of our engagement with one another, of our unity in the Lord Jesus Christ, is the focus of Paul at the beginning of chapter 4. He wants to make sure that those to whom he writes are now, as he says, “eager to maintain [this] unity,”[6] with all humility and with gentleness and with forbearance to one another.[7] Because, he says, this is the kind of unity that is found in the physical body—that the physical body is an organic and a vital unity. My little finger is part not only of my hand but part of my entire body. This finger actually emerged from a single cell, along with the rest of me. It’s a strange thing. It’s a wonderful thing, actually—the creative power of God. But the little finger is not allowed to say, “I don’t like thumbs, so I don’t want to be part of the thing. I don’t really consider myself part of it, you know.” Well, guess what? You are part of it. See? And the same is true of us in Christ. That actually has something to say, again, about our gathering together and so on. But I think you’ve had more than enough on that for this morning.

But notice that this is part and parcel of the foundation of unity “in Christ.” There is “one Lord.” There is “one Spirit.” There is “one body.” There is “one hope.” There is “one faith”—both a faith that we proclaim and a faith that we embrace, objectively and subjectively, as we saw last time. And there is “one baptism.” And that baptism is an indication, again, of who we are “in Christ.”

The same grace that has united us with Christ, brought us into union with Christ, has brought us into communion with one another.

So, let’s just try and do this: let me try and say something about how we need to be clear concerning what Paul is saying here when he says “one baptism.” Because when you read this, it may strike you immediately as ironic that he would include baptism as a basis for unity. Because historically, baptism has proved to be an occasion of disagreement, even amongst people who are good friends with one another and embrace the same truths concerning the gospel. Right? Because people disagree with one another about who should be baptized, when they should be baptized, how they should be baptized. Do you dunk them? Do you sprinkle them? What do you do with them? When do you do…? And people have set up entire denominations concerning this as a basis of disagreement. So what an irony that Paul says, “Here is one of the expressions of your unity in the gospel, and that is that there is one baptism.”

Well, I think it’s also safe to say that the initial readers of Ephesians, when they had this letter read out to them, none of them would have been caught up in these divisive debates. Right? There’s no reason… I mean, maybe they were, but I do not think they were—that they would have understood exactly what was happening when a person was baptized. They had once been going in one direction. They’d encountered Jesus, as had Paul on the Damascus Road. They had understood what it means to submit to his lordship, and their profession of faith was then galvanized, if you like, and exemplified in their baptism. So they would not have been sitting around, saying, “Well, I wonder what he means by ‘one baptism,’” in the way that we’re tempted to do. And so it may be that he is simply referring to the fact that they have not only believed the same truths, submitted to the same Lord, but that they have displayed the same sign—namely, in their baptism. Or perhaps we could say that he’s acknowledging that they have received the same sign, that they have been marked in the same way.

Turn for a moment to 1 Corinthians 12, and let’s see if we can’t think this out. First Corinthians 12. Paul again is addressing the issue of the body. It’s a favorite metaphor for him. He’s been talking about the “one body,” and in verse [12] he tells us that Christ is the head of the body, and he’s addressing the way in which they were incorporated into the body, how they became members of the body. And he points that out here in verse 13. He says, “For in one Spirit we were all baptized.” Notice that is passive; it is not active. This was something that was done to us; it was not something that was done by us, first of all. “We were all baptized into one body—[whether we were] Jews or Greeks, slaves or free,” and so on. We “were made to drink of [the] one Spirit.”

I think it’s two ways of saying the same thing. What? That when they were converted—when they were, if you like, included in Christ—they became members of Christ’s living body, so that, as we’ve noticed in Ephesians 1:13, when they “heard the word of truth,” which is “the gospel of [their] salvation,” when they believed it, they “were sealed [by] the … Holy Spirit”; that the mysterious, mystical work of the Holy Spirit is not simply that their sins were forgiven (which they were), but the amazing thing is that their entire life was transformed; that they were removed from one domain and placed in another domain; and that the work of the Holy Spirit in doing this is described here as baptism. They were baptized into Christ.

And I take it—although not all agree with me (and not all agree with me in many things)—but I take it that it is not, in this instance, the external observance of water baptism to which Paul refers in Ephesians 4:5: that there is “one baptism.” I’m taking it that when he refers to that one baptism, he is referring to baptism à la 1 Corinthians 12:13, in that we have been brought by a spiritual transformation into a relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. That which has happened, if you like, privately, mysteriously, personally, unobservably, but really, is then exemplified in the physicality of water baptism. And that physicality of water baptism has, throughout the ages, taken on various forms in various places. And if we choose, we can argue all day and all night about that. But what we do know is that the nature of the one baptism, however it is exemplified, is a shared reality described here in 1 Corinthians 12 and elsewhere.

Turn, if you would, to Romans chapter 6, and let’s try and advance the thought. In Romans chapter 6, from which we’ve read, he begins, “Here are some people. Apparently, they want to know, ‘Can we continue in sin so that grace may abound? If all of our sins have been forgiven—past, present, and future—if we can never advance our cause before God from where we are in Christ, then surely there’s a legitimate possibility that we could just actually go out and sin like crazy then and prove how forgiving God actually is.’” Now, what is Paul’s answer to that? “God forbid!” he says. “By no means!” Common parlance, he might say, “You’ve got to be crazy! Are you serious?” “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means!”

And then he asks the question: “How can we who died to sin still live in it?” If we’ve been removed from the realm of sin, the dominion of sin, in Christ, how can we then still live in the realm from which we have been removed? It’s a contradiction! You can’t be both “in Christ” and “in Adam”[8] simultaneously. By nature, we are in Adam, as children of Adam, sharing in all of the fallenness and the sin and our isolation from God. By grace, we are placed in Christ, into a whole new domain of life and forgiveness and fellowship and joy. And so Paul says, “Are you actually asking the question? How can somebody who has died to sin still live in it? You can’t live in two houses at the one time. You were born and brought up in this one. You have been moved to this one. The thing that you need to know,” he says, “is that you are now in Christ. The essence of your Christian experience is your union with Christ. You are united with Christ.” This is the fact, you see.

And again, someone says, “Well, I don’t feel it.” Well, it doesn’t matter right now whether you feel it. “We have been,” look, he says… And he uses the same picture: “Don’t you know (of course, you do) that all of us who’ve been baptized into Christ were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him in baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” A radical transformation has taken place. And again notice that the verb is in the passive not in the active. It’s not something we do ourselves, because it doesn’t primarily signify something that we ourselves have done.

One of the dangers, you see, in our baptismal services, which I enjoy more than… More than… I just really enjoy! The danger is that people come and listen to it and think it’s about us; it’s about the person who’s being baptized; that it is something that points into us. But in actual fact, baptism does not exist to point into us. Baptism, like the Lord’s Supper, exists to point away from us, to Jesus. That is why—and don’t misunderstand this statement, please—that is why, in many senses, baptism has a clearer expression when somebody does not give testimony to their own personal coming to faith in Jesus. I’m not suggesting that they shouldn’t. We love it that they do. But it then raises the question: “Well, is this a story about you?”

But you see, when we simply address the questions to the individual—they make no personal statement—“Do you believe in God the Father?” “I do.” “Do you believe in his Son who loved you and gave himself for you?” “I do.” “Do you believe in the Holy Spirit who sanctifies you?” “I do.” “Upon your profession of repentance towards God and of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ…” What faith in the Lord Jesus Christ? The faith, the one faith, that he is the only Savior, that he justifies me, that he saves the ungodly, that he died for sinners, that I have been raised with him to a new life. That Jesus. That faith. “On the basis of your profession of faith, we now baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit.”

Paul, when he writes at the beginning of 1 Corinthians, he says, “I’m thankful that I didn’t baptize any of you. Were you baptized in this guy’s name or that guy’s name or this fellow’s name? No, you weren’t! There was only one name in which you were baptized, and that is the name of the Lord Jesus Christ himself. You’ve been given a new name.”[9] And in the same way that my name is Begg—and yours may be Jones or McKinnon or whatever else it is—when someone says your name, it identifies you. If someone says, “Alistair Begg,” there shouldn’t be fifteen people get up here and run out—might run away, but not run and answer to the name. It’s my name. It’s my name. And I have been baptized into the name of Jesus! I’m no longer just Alistair Begg, full stop. I am Alistair Begg, “in Christ.” That’s my identity—not my ethnicity, not my intelligence, not my stature or my absence of stature. And it isn’t yours either, if you’re in Jesus.

And some of you are wrestling all the time with your self-image, and “who I am,” and “where I am,” and “how I fit,” and the next thing. Loved ones, here is the pastoral challenge: that those who are in Christ may know who they really are. Do you know, this morning, who you are?

You see, baptism doesn’t symbolize so much what we have done as it symbolizes what has been done for us. What has been done for us. When people come and they see the baptism and say, “Well, what in the world happened to her? What is that about?”—well, it’s about who Jesus is. That’s why, if somebody is prepared to ask the question, “Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?” Paul is saying, “It’s obvious that they don’t understand what it means to be in Christ.” Or, if you like, they don’t understand the nature of baptism. They don’t understand that they have been united to Christ, that they have died to sin.

What does that mean? It means that I’m no longer under its dominion. I’m no longer under its dominion. Previously, I was a slave to sin. That’s Ephesians chapter 2. I was enslaved to sin. It wasn’t a choice. I thought wrongly about God. There was no part of my life that was not impregnated with the reality of my rebellion against God, my disinterest in him. That was just my state. But it’s not my state any longer. Why? Because I? Because he! Because he. Because of who he is. He died; I died with him. He was raised; I was raised with him. He will live forever; I will live forever. It is ontologically impossible for me not to live forever. Why? Because I am in Christ. Oh, it’s so good!

Baptism doesn’t symbolize so much what we have done as it symbolizes what has been done for us.

Now we’re stuck in Romans chapter 6. I’m sorry. We must stop. We must stop. Let me just say a further word concerning, then, how this clarifies our identity in Christ. I’ll give you just the CliffsNotes.

What is Paul actually saying here? Well, if you look down at verse 6, he says—we’re still in Romans 6—“[For] we know that our old self”—“our old self,” or “our old man.”[10] “Self” is good, because it means who we were in Adam. “We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin.” Okay? Now, just take that for what it says.

Paul’s argument in Romans chapter 5 is the wonder of what has happened: in Christ, we have been set free from all of the bondage that was ours where death reigned in Adam.[11] You’ll need to look at this for yourself. For example, 5:19: “For as by the one man’s disobedience”— namely, Adam—“the many were made sinners”—our state before God—“so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.” We were by nature under the dominion of sin and death, but now, by grace, we are in the domain of Christ and the domain of life.

Again, if you go back to Ephesians 2, where Paul is reminding these folks of what they were: “You were dead in your trespasses. You lived in this way. You were by nature children of wrath. You were like the rest of mankind.”[12] Somebody says, “No, I wasn’t. No, I wasn’t! I was a really nice person. I mean, I can see how some of these Ephesians must have been like that, but I wasn’t like that.” Now we’re back at the challenge number one. What was the first challenge? The evangelistic challenge: to convince those who are outside of Christ that the real dilemma is that they’re under the dominion of sin. That’s what we do. He says to them, “You know now that that’s what you were: really nice, well-respecting Chagrin Valley people who hadn’t a clue that the real predicament was that they were dead in their trespasses and in their sins—that there was nothing that they could do to put themselves before God in an acceptable fashion.” Until they understood that, there is no need of a Savior. Jesus Christ, then, is just somebody you add to your program—a little thing that you add to your life, a little spiritual experience. That is not Christianity! That is not what Paul is talking about. Paul is talking about this immense reality: “You once were this, but you are no longer this.”

When we studied it, we used the Jimmy Owens songs, didn’t we? We didn’t sing them, but:

Keep looking down, [you]’re seated in the heavenlies;
God’s mighty power has raised us over all!
Keep looking down, above all principalities,
For we have died and risen with the Lord![13]

Sinclair Ferguson, in a section on this, says if you want to think of it this way, we have been transferred from Adamland to Christland. We have been moved from the Adam family—not the Addams family—the Adam family to the Christ family.[14]

So, what are we saying? We’re saying, “I’m no longer the person I once was.” Why? Because I have been baptized into union with Christ. This is something that he has done. This is a mystery. In Christ, I am someone who is delivered from the domain of sin and transferred into the kingdom of God.

And the final word is this: that it is out of that identity that our activity flows. He says all of this so that “[you] might walk in newness of life.” And then, at the end of chapter 6, he has a run of imperatives. You can find them on your own. He says, “And so I want you to make sure that you’re doing this and you’re doing this and you’re doing this.” Well, you see, unless the imperatives are grounded in the indicatives, then the imperatives just sound so burdensome—and they are! “How am I going to do this? I would need to be a new person to do this!” In Christ, you are a new person. “I don’t feel like it.” Don’t worry about that at the moment. This is your name. Live up to your name! Are you really going to say, “Shall I continue in sin so that I may prove what a wonderful Savior Jesus is?” God forbid! That’s incongruous! You are somebody totally new. Now live in the light of your newness.

I’ll never forget in Hamilton years ago, we had a lady—and I’ve told this story fifty times over thirty-three years, but I love it so much, I tell it again—but we had a lady come. She was a high-ranking medic in the nursing world. She’d come to take over a significant responsibility in Scotland. She was English. I think she came from Lancashire. She had a Lancashire accent. And she told me on one occasion—she used to call me, “Pah-ster,” “Pah-ster”—she said, “I had a phone call,” she said, “from one of my friends in Manchester. Some of the girls were coming up to Glasgow, and they called me up to say, ‘Let’s go out on the town.’” Now, she had become a Christian. And she said, “As I was a little diffident in my response, my friend said to me on the phone, ‘Come on now, Miriam. You don’t sound like the old Miriam to me.’” And she said, “That’s because I’m not the old Miriam. I’m not the old Miriam. I am Miriam in Christ. And it is my identity which is the impetus for my activity.”

You see, loved ones, if you get this the wrong way round, then the story of the gospel is completely reversed. It is no gospel at all—that is, that by my activity I may then create my identity. No! It is out of my identity that my activity emerges.

“Oh,” you say, “this is not easy.” No, it’s not easy. But you need to get up in the morning—I need to get up in the morning and say to myself—look in the mirror, if you can stand it, and say, “You know what? I’m no longer enslaved to sin.” Why? “Because I’m in Christ.” “Yeah, but I had a horrible day yesterday. I shouted at somebody. I was disobedient. I had poor thoughts, bad thoughts, ugly thoughts, dirty thoughts.” But I’m no longer enslaved to sin. I don’t live under its dominion. I don’t have to. I still deal with its temptations. I’m still involved in “a continual and irreconcilable war.”[15] But I am a man in Christ. And it is because of this, because of this new identity, that I may then proceed to this activity.

And loved ones, here—and with this I stop—the principal means whereby God, by his Spirit, achieves this move, if you like, from justification, where we are the beneficiaries of the imputed righteousness of Christ by faith, to sanctification, where, by our obedience and following, we work out our own salvation—the primary means that God the Holy Spirit uses to achieve this is the Word of God. The Word of God. And it is our spiritual map, food, guide. That is why I said what I said to you about the preaching of the Word of God—not to secure our pastoral team’s longevity but because I love you—and in the way that my mother loved me and said, “Hey, quit pushing that stuff to the side of the plate. Eat that stuff! I want you to grow up to be a strong boy.”

“I don’t like that.”

“I don’t care if you like it. Eat it! You may grow to like it.”

“What if I don’t?”

“Eat it!”

You say, “That doesn’t sound very nice.” Listen: it is by the truth of God’s Word, brought home by the Holy Spirit, that you and I and we will grow and flourish. It is the absence of the impact of the truth of God’s Word in our lives, individually and communally, that will lead to stagnation and eventual sterility. A church that will not commit itself to the teaching and preaching of the Bible, both done and received, is destined to live forever in the nursery—in the sense that the writer to the Hebrews says, “I couldn’t address you as mature people. I couldn’t give you solid food. I had to just keep giving you the same stuff all over and over again.” Why? “Because your spiritual stomach has shrunk.”[16]

It is by the truth of God’s Word, brought home by the Holy Spirit, that we will grow and flourish.

May God make sure that that doesn’t happen to us. And the way to deal with it is each of us, one person at a time, going back to the Bible and saying, “This is who I am. And therefore, this is how I will live.”

Father, thank you that we could study this for a long time and to our benefit. We pray that you will, by the Holy Spirit, enable both the evangelistic and the pastoral challenge to be at work as we draw our service to a close, showing all of us that by nature, the problem is that we’re under the dominion of sin; showing all of us that Christ came to redeem us from the curse of the law; showing those of us in Christ that all that is in Christ, by him and for us, is ours, and that this is who we really are—that “in Christ alone our hope is found.”[17] For we pray in his name. Amen.

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[1] Romans 6:1–11 (ESV).

[2] John Owen, A Treatise of the Dominion of Sin and Grace (1688), chap. 2.

[3] 2 Corinthians 12:2 (KJV).

[4] Ephesians 1:13 (ESV).

[5] Ephesians 1:3 (ESV).

[6] Ephesians 4:3 (ESV).

[7] See Ephesians 4:2.

[8] 1 Corinthians 15:22 (ESV).

[9] 1 Corinthians 1:14–17 (paraphrased).

[10] Romans 6:6 (KJV).

[11] See Romans 5:12–21.

[12] Ephesians 2:1–3 (paraphrased).

[13] Jimmy Owens and Carol Owens, “Children of the Kingdom” (1974).

[14] Sinclair B. Ferguson, Let’s Study Ephesians (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2005), 64.

[15] The Westminster Confession of Faith 13.2.

[16] Hebrews 5:12–14 (paraphrased).

[17] Keith Getty and Stuart Townend, “In Christ Alone” (2006).