By: Curtis Baker
With Easter fast approaching, much of the Christian world this week is focused on the last week of Jesus’ life, leading up to the climactic moment of his resurrection from the dead. It would not be too large a statement to say that the resurrection is the very foundation of the Christian faith. Without it, Jesus would have simply been another prophet with a moral message. But with it, he is the very Son of God who has now been tasked by the Father to reign over the whole cosmos as the world’s one true Lord. Everyone is faced with a choice because of Jesus’ resurrection. Either one accepts his Lordship, and strives to bring their life in accord with that reality…or they reject his Lordship, and continue to live their life as if their will is the most important thing in the universe. Paul is clear in Romans chapter 6 that one of these states of life is congruent with slavery, while the other is a resurrected and new kind life.
As we saw last week as we began to study Romans chapter 6, Paul sees baptism as the entrance point into this new and resurrected life. Of course, baptism, the act of immersing a person in water, has no value in and of itself, but when it is done as an act of obedience, expressing one’s confidence that Jesus is the Son of God who has died for their sins, Paul teaches us that it moves us from one kind of life to another. The old kind of life is a life that is bound in slavery to sin and the fear of death. The new life is of the sort that one’s sins are not held against them, and Jesus, who is Lord, will guide a person into a life where not only our sins are forgiven, but they actually are uprooted from our habits. How can this be so? Once again it comes back to death and resurrection.
Paul tells us in Romans 6:4-5 that baptism is a kind of death. To be more specific, it is actually a participation in the death that Christ died on our behalf. One does not physically die, of course, when they are immersed in water, but Paul tells us something happens through God’s actions that is unperceivable on the surface of our life. When we are immersed in water, it is as if we are dying and being buried in a grave just as Jesus was. However, one is not brought under the water simply to stay there. Just as Christ broke the bonds of death, and rose from the grave, so also are we brought up from our watery grave into a newness of life that is granted to us as a gift from God.
Two things are taking place when we are obedient to Christ in baptism. First, through our participation in his death, we are promised that we will one day share in his literal resurrection from the dead. Just as Christ physically died and was raised to have a new and glorified body, so too will we die physically and then be raised from the dead to take on a new and glorified body. That new body will not have all the weaknesses or struggles of the current body. It will be the glorified body God always intended for us, fitting us to live in our new heavenly dwelling. That body will never die!
But secondly, not all benefits of our baptism are pushed off to the future. There is a kind of death and resurrection that takes place in our present lives. The death that we experience now is a dying to our life which was caught in slavery to sin. Our new and resurrected life is the life of grace that God shares with us, where we are forgiven of our sins and empowered by the Spirit to literally put away our sin. When you take these two things together, you see how the resurrection is the very basis of our current and future life in God.
So as we move toward Easter this week, I hope that you will take a few moments to reflect on these things. Are you a Christian who has already put your faith in God and been baptized into Christ? Rejoice in the resurrected life you have been granted, both now and in the future! Have you never put on your Lord in baptism? What are you waiting for? Enter the watery grave before death calls you to your real one.
(Don’t forget to join me for A Message From the Heart radio program Sunday evening at 8:00pm on KJAK 92.7FM, or streaming live at www.kjak.com) (curtisbaker@hotmail.com)
Write to: P.O. Box 157, Slaton, TX 79364
