What is Baptism - a short summary?

As we read the Bible we note that God loves role-plays. Passover is a wonderful example – year after year, the children of Israel play out what happened at Passover; the whole wilderness journey is expressed in the play at the feast of Sukkoth. In other cases, people have played out a role in their life – take Hosea for example, who demonstrated the sinfulness of Israel in a real-life role-play.

Baptism also has been instituted to remind us of many deep and important values, but in essence it is a symbol with two sides. For the one being baptised it is an announcement to those around her, that she is indeed a child of God: a new creation, the old having been done away, replaced by a new life, in obedience to Christ, and of course, aided by the Spirit of God. On the other hand, it demonstrates that salvation arises from the death, burial and resurrection of Christ in whom a child of Christ rests.

So what is Baptism?

The Apostle Paul in the letter to the church in Ephesus says there is one Baptism – as there is only one God and Father of all. It was also the Apostle Paul that sets out the doctrine of Baptism when writing to the Romans: He says in chapter 6:

Do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.

So baptism is of the individual, done once. Baptism is done unto the significance of the death of Jesus Christ. Baptism does not confer salvation – indeed it cannot save. Also it does not, nor cannot, confer membership of the church.

Overall baptism highlights three elements of the doctrine of Salvation.

1. It emphasizes death – this the Apostle Paul draws out – it actually highlights two deaths - the death of Jesus Christ who saves us, and the death of our old nature; requiring being born again.
2. Baptism emphasis burial – someone who is rightly dead is buried – it is the closure of any death, and in this we understand the reality of the death. I believe that immersion into a body of water is the true symbolism needed here for both death and burial. At this point we are buried with Christ by baptism. Christ also was buried.
3. However, as Christ rose again to this earth on the third day, and to heaven on the fiftieth day, so there is the element of being raised from the dead in Baptism. Hence Baptism is a figure of the resurrection of Christ: and taking the words of the Apostle Paul writing to the church at Colossi – you were … buried with Him in baptism, in which you also were raised with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead. This part is by the action of God – no one dead can rise on his own accord.

Therefore we note there is no effort on the part of the one being baptized – it is the effort of the baptizer that creates the symbol, which underscores that being saved is an act of faith upon God, not upon one's own goodness, for we all have none (see Ephesians 2).

And what is one Baptised unto: As Jesus said to Nicodemus – only by being born again can one enter the kingdom of heaven – baptism symbolizes that the old is buried, and we are to walk from that day forth in the "newness of life". Again, the Apostle Paul:

Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.