BURIED WITH HIM BY BAPTISM

A message I heard as a boy nearly sixty years ago at the Belfast Easter Conference was on Romans chapter 6 and the headings were; ‘know ye, v. 3; reckon ye, v. 11; yield ye, v. 13’. These three phrases are the secret to enjoying and living this chapter. It is a chapter of sin, mentioned eighteen times, and of death, recorded seven times, and summed up in verse 23, ‘the wages of sin is death’; followed by the glorious statement, ‘the gift of God is eternal life’, which reveals God’s fulsome grace.

The grace of God, as described in chapter 5, prompts the sug­gestion in verse 1that to deliberately lead a sinful life would serve to emphasize God’s grace. Paul rejects this out of hand and proceeds to explain why it cannot be so. It is because we, as believers, are dead to sin. The aorist tense suggests that this hap­pened at a specific point in time, i.e. at Calvary when Christ died. Death speaks of separation, so we are now separate from or dead to sin as the controlling feature of our lives. Verse 3 reminds us we were at that time baptized into His death. This past spiritual reality is now expressed in water baptism which is a requirement for every believer though, of course, not a condition for salva­tion; it is a matter of obedience. Three days after His burial the Lord was raised from the dead, a necessity demanded by God’s glory and achieved by His power. He appeared in His resurrec­tion body and fellowshipped with the disciples. Baptism, by immersion, reflects this truth.

In baptism, the believer is buried beneath the water. He dis­appears (momentarily!) from sight … he dies. Then he comes up from the water … he is raised from the dead! This ‘burial and resurrection’ is a perfect demonstration of what happened spiritually when he trusted Christ. It is, however, more than that. It is an expression of the fact that the believer understands he has died to sin; it no longer controls him; he will not continue in it. The old life, now dead and buried, is replaced by a new man and a new life which encourages him to walk in the ways of the Lord - dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God, v. 11. Hence­forth, we must yield ourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, v. 13, denying sin the opportunity to reign.