BAPTISM—A BURIAL – Charles Spurgeon
Baptism—A Burial
“Know you not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into His death? Therefore we are buried with Him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.” Romans 6:3, 4.
I shall not enter into controversy over this text, although over it, some have raised the question of infant Baptism or Believers’ Baptism, immersion or sprinkling. If any persons can give a consistent and instructive interpretation of the text, other than by assuming Believers’ immersion to be Christian Baptism, I should like to see them do it. I myself am quite incapable of performing such a feat, or even of imagining how it can be done! I am content to take the view that Baptism signifies the burial of Believers in water in the name of the Lord, and I shall so interpret the text. If any disagree, it may at least interest them to know what we understand to be the meaning of the baptismal rite—and I trust that they may think none the less of the spiritual sense because they differ as to the external sign. After all, the visible emblem is not the most prominent matter in the text. May God the Holy Spirit help us to reach its inner teaching.
I do not understand Paul to say that if improper persons, such as unbelievers, hypocrites, and deceivers, are baptized, they are baptized into our Lord’s death. He says, “so many of us,” putting himself with the rest of the children of God. He intends such as are entitled to Baptism and come to it with their hearts in a right state. Of them, he says, “Know you not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into His death?” He does not even intend to say that those who were rightly baptized have, all of them, entered into the fullness of its spiritual meaning, for if they had, there would have been no need of the question, “Know you not?” It would seem that some had been baptized who did not clearly know the meaning of their own baptism. They had faith and a glimmer of knowledge sufficient to make them right recipients of Baptism, but they were not well instructed in the teaching of Baptism. Perhaps they saw in it only a washing and had never discerned the burial.
I will go further and say that I question if any of us yet know the fullness of the meaning of either of the ordinances which Christ has instituted. As yet we are, with regard to spiritual things, like children playing on the beach while the ocean rolls before us. At best we wade up to our ankles like our little ones on the seashore. A few among us are learning to swim, but we only swim where the bottom is almost within reach. Who among us has yet come to lose sight of shore and to swim in the Atlantic of Divine Love where fathomless Truths of God roll underneath and the infinite is all around? Oh, may God daily teach us more and more of what we already know in part—and may the Truth which we have as yet but dimly perceived, come to us in a brighter and clearer manner till we see all things in clear sunlight! This can only be as our own character becomes more clear and pure, for we see according to what we are and as is the eye, such is that which it sees. Only the pure in heart can see a pure and holy God! We shall be like Jesus when we shall see Him as He is—and certainly, we shall never see Him as He is till we are like He is!
In heavenly things, we see as much as we have within ourselves. He who has eaten Christ’s flesh and blood spiritually is the man who can see this in the sacred Supper. And he who has been baptized into Christ sees Christ in Baptism. To him that has shall be given and he shall have abundantly! Baptism sets forth the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ and our participation therein. Its teaching is two-fold. First, think of our representative union with Christ, so that when He died and was buried, it was on our behalf and we were thus buried with Him. This will give you the teaching of Baptism so far as it sets forth a creed. We declare in Baptism that we believe in the death of Jesus and desire to partake in all the merit of it.
But there is a second equally important matter and that is our realized union with Christ which is set forth in Baptism, not so much as a doctrine of our creed as a matter of our experience. There is a manner of dying, or being buried, of rising and of living in Christ which must be displayed in each one of us if we are, indeed, members of the body of Christ.
I. Our Representative Union with Christ
First, then, I want you to think of OUR REPRESENTATIVE UNION WITH CHRIST as it is set forth in Baptism as a Truth of God to be believed. Our Lord Jesus is the Substitute for His people and when He died, it was on their behalf and in their place. The great doctrine of our justification lies in this—that Christ took our sins, stood in our place, and, as our Surety, suffered, bled, and died—thus presenting on our behalf a sacrifice for sin. We are to regard Him, not as a private person, but as our Representative. We are buried with Him in Baptism unto death to show that we accept Him as being dead and buried for us.
Baptism as a burial with Christ signifies, first, acceptance of the death and burial of Christ as being for us. Let us do that, at this very moment, with all our hearts. What other hope have we? When our Divine Lord came down from the heights of Glory and took upon Himself our manhood, He became one with you and with me! And being found in fashion as a Man, it pleased the Father to lay sin upon Him, even your sins and mine. Do you not accept that Truth of God and agree that the Lord Jesus should be the bearer of your guilt and stand for you in the sight of God? “Amen! Amen!” say all of you!
He went up to the Cross loaded with all this guilt and there He suffered in our place as we ought to have suffered! It pleased the Father, instead of bruising us, to bruise Him. He put Him to grief, making His soul an offering for sin! Do we not gladly accept Jesus as our Substitute?
O Beloved, whether you have been baptized in water or not, I put this question to you, “Do you accept the Lord Jesus as your Surety and Substitute?” For if you do not, you shall bear your own guilt and carry your own sorrow—and stand in your own place beneath the glance of the angry justice of God! Many of us at this moment are saying in our inmost hearts—
“My soul looks back to see
The burdens You did bear,
When hanging on the cursed tree,
And hopes her guilt was there.”
Now, by being buried with Christ in Baptism, we set our seal to the fact that the death of Christ was on our behalf and that we were in Him, died in Him and, in token of our belief, we consent to the watery grave and yield ourselves to be buried according to His command. This is a matter of fundamental faith—Christ dead and buried for us—in other words, Substitution, Suretyship, vicarious Sacrifice. His death is the hinge of our confidence—we are not baptized into His example, or His life, but into His death. We hereby confess that all our salvation lies in the death of Jesus, which death we accept as having been incurred on our account.
But this is not all. If I am to be buried, it should not be so much because I accept the substitutionary death of another for me as because I am dead, myself! Baptism is an acknowledgment of our own death in Christ. Why should a living man be buried? Why should he even be buried because another died on his behalf? My burial with Christ means not only that He died for me, but that I died in Him, so that my death with Him needs a burial with Him. Jesus died for us because He is one with us.
The Lord Jesus Christ did not take His people’s sins by an arbitrary choice of God! But it was most natural and fit and proper that He should take His people’s sins, since they are His people and He is their federal Head. It behooved Christ to suffer for this reason—that He was the Covenant Representative of His people. He is the Head of the body, the Church, and if the members sinned, it was meet that the Head, though the Head had not sinned, should bear the consequence of the acts of the body. As there is a natural relationship between Adam and those that are in Adam, so is there between the second Adam and those that are in Him.
I accept what the first Adam did as my sin. Some of you may quarrel with it and with the whole Covenant dispensation, if you please, but as God has pleased to set it up and I feel the effect of it, I see no use in my opposing it! As I accept the sin of father Adam and feel that I accept the death and sinned in him, even so, with intense delight, I accept the atoning Sacrifice of my second Adam and rejoice that in Him I have died and risen again!
I lived, I died, I kept the Law, I satisfied justice in my Covenant Head! Let me be buried in Baptism that I may show to all around that I believe I was one with my Lord in His death and burial for sin! Look at this, O child of God, and do not be afraid of it! These are grand Truths of God and they are sure and comforting. You are getting among Atlantic billows, now, but be not afraid. Realize the sanctifying effect of this Truth.
Suppose that a man had been condemned to die on account of a great crime. Suppose, further, that he has actually died for that crime and now, by some wonderful work of God, after having died, he has been made to live again! He comes among men again, as alive from the dead! And what ought to be the state of his mind with regard to his offense? Will he commit that crime again? A crime for which he has died? I say emphatically, God forbid! Rather would he say, “I have tasted the bitterness of this sin and I am miraculously lifted up out of the death which it brought upon me and made to live again. Now I will hate the thing that slew me and abhor it with all my soul.”
He who has received the wages of sin would learn to avoid it for the future.
But you reply, “We never died, so we were never made to suffer the due reward of our sins.” Granted. But that which Christ did for you comes to the same thing—and the Lord looks upon it as the same thing! You are so one with Jesus that you must regard His death as your death, His sufferings as the chastisement of your peace! You have died in the death of Jesus and now, by strange, mysterious Grace, you are brought up, again, from the pit of corruption unto newness of life! Can you, will you, go into sin again? You have seen what God thinks of sin—you perceive that He utterly loathes it—for when it was laid on His dear Son, He did not spare Him, but put Him to grief and smote Him to death! Can you, after that, turn back to the accursed thing which God hates? Surely the effect of the great grief of the Savior upon your spirit must be sanctifying!
II. A Realized Union with Christ
This doctrine is not the conclusion of the whole matter. The text describes us as buried with a view to rising. “Therefore we are buried with Him by baptism unto death”—for what objective?—“that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.” Be buried in Christ! What for? That you may be dead forever? No, but that now, getting where Christ is, you may go where Christ goes! Behold Him, then—He goes, first, into the sepulcher. But next, out of the sepulcher—for when the third morning came He rose! If you are one with Christ at all, you must be one with Him all through—you must be one with Him in His death and one with Him in His burial—then you shall come to be one with Him in His Resurrection!
Am I a dead man now? No, blessed be His name, it is written, “Because I live you shall live also.” True, I am dead in one sense, “For you are dead”—but yet not dead in another, “For your life is hid with Christ in God.” And is he, now, absolutely dead who has a hidden life? No, since I am one with Christ, I am what Christ is! As He is a living Christ, I am a living spirit! What a glorious thing it is to have arisen from the dead because Christ has given us life!
Our old legal life has been taken from us by the sentence of the Law and the Law views us as dead—but now we have received a new life, a life out of death, resurrection—life in Christ Jesus! The life of the Christian is the life of Christ! Ours is not the life of the first creation, but of the new creation from among the dead. Now we live in newness of life, quickened unto holiness, righteousness, and joy by the Spirit of God. The life of the flesh is a hindrance to us. Our energy is in His Spirit. In the highest and best sense, our life is spiritual and heavenly.
This is also a doctrine which is to be held most firmly. I want you to see the force of this, for I am aiming at practical results this morning. If God has given to you and to me an entirely new life in Christ, how can that new life spend itself after the fashion of the old life? Shall the spiritual live as the carnal? How can you, that were the servants of sin, but have been made free by precious blood, go back to your old slavery?
When you were in the old Adam life, you lived in sin and loved it. But now you have been dead and buried and have come forth into newness of life—can it be that you can go back to the beggarly elements from which the Lord has brought you? If you live in sin, you will be false to your profession, for you profess to be alive unto God!
If you walk in lust, you will tread under foot the blessed doctrines of the Word of God, for these lead to holiness and purity! You would make Christianity to be a byword and a proverb, if, after all, you, who were quickened from your spiritual death, should exhibit a conduct no better than the life of ordinary men and little superior to what your former life used to be!
As many of you as have been baptized have said to the world—“We are dead to the world and we have come forth into a new life. Our fleshly desires are, from now on, to be viewed as dead, for we now live after a fresh order of things. The Holy Spirit has worked in us a new nature and though we are in the world, we are not of it, but are new-made men, created anew in Christ Jesus.”
This is the doctrine which we avow to all mankind, that Christ died and rose again, and that His people died and rose again in Him. Out of this doctrine grows death unto sin and life unto God—and we wish, by every action and every movement of our lives, to teach it to all who see us.
So far, the doctrine—is it not a precious one, indeed? Oh, if you are, indeed, one with Christ, shall the world find you polluting yourselves? Shall the members of a generous, gracious Head be covetous and grasping? Shall the members of a glorious, pure and perfect Head be defiled with the lusts of the flesh and the follies of a vain life?
If Believers are, indeed, so identified with Christ that they are His fullness, should they not be holiness, itself? If we live by virtue of our union with His body, how can we live as other Gentiles do? How is it that so many professors exhibit a mere worldly life, living for business and for pleasure, but not for God, in God, or with God? They sprinkle a little religion on a worldly life and so hope to Christianize it. But it will not do!
I am bound to live as Christ would have lived under my circumstances. In my private chamber or in my public pulpit I am bound to be what Christ would have been in the same case. I am bound to prove to men that union to Christ is no fiction, or fanatical sentiment, but that we are swayed by the same principles and actuated by the same motives! Baptism is thus an embodied creed and you may read it in these words—“Buried with Him in baptism, wherein also you are risen with Him through the faith of the operation of God, who has raised Him from the dead.”
II. A Realized Union with Christ
But, secondly, A REALIZED UNION WITH CHRIST is also set forth in Baptism and this is rather a matter of experience than of doctrine.
First, there is, as a matter of actual experience in the true Believer, death. “Know you not that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into His death?” It must be contrary to all law to bury those who are yet alive. Until they are dead, men can have no right to be buried. Very well, then, the Christian is dead—dead, first, to the dominion of sin. Whenever sin called him before, he answered, “Here I am, for you did call me.” Sin ruled his members and if sin said, “Do this,” he did it, like the soldiers obedient to their centurion, for sin ruled over all the parts of his nature and exercised, over him, a supreme tyranny.
Grace has changed all this. When we are converted, we become dead to the dominion of sin! If sin calls us, now, we refuse to come, for we are dead. If sin commands us, we will not obey, for we are dead to its authority. Sin comes to us now—oh, that it did not—and it finds in us the old corruption which is crucified, but not yet dead. But it has no dominion over our true life. Blessed be God, sin cannot reign over us, though it may assail us and work us harm! “Sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under Law, but under Grace.”
We sin, but not with allowance. With what grief we look back upon our transgressions! How earnestly do we endeavor to avoid them! Sin tries to maintain its usurped power over us, but we do not acknowledge it as our sovereign. Evil enters us, now, as an interloper and a stranger—and works sad havoc—but it does not abide in us upon the throne. It is an alien and despised. It is no more honored and delighted in. We are dead to the reigning power of sin.
The Believer, if spiritually buried with Christ, is dead to the desire of any such power. “What?” you ask, “do not godly men have sinful desires?” Alas, they do. The old nature that is in them lusts towards sin, but the true man, the real ego, desires to be purged of every speck or trace of evil! The law in the members would gladly urge us to sin, but the life in the heart constrains us to holiness. I can honestly say, for myself, that the deepest desire of my soul is to live a perfect life. If I could have my own best desire, I would never sin again.
And though, alas, I do consent to sin so that I become responsible when I transgress, yet my innermost self loathes iniquity. Sin is my bondage, not my pleasure. It is my misery, not my delight—at the thought of it, I cry out, “O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me?”
In our heart of hearts, our spirit cleaves steadfastly to that which is good, true, and heavenly, so that the real man delights in the Law of God and follows hard after goodness. The main current and true bent of our soul’s wish and will is not towards sin. The Apostle taught us no mere fancy when he said, “For he that is dead is freed from sin.”