Devotional 147: The Institution of Baptism: A Sacrament of the New Testament

The Confession Read

Baptism is a sacrament of the new testament, ordained by Jesus Christ, not only for the solemn admission of the party baptized into the visible church; but also, to be unto him a sign and seal of the covenant of grace, of his ingrafting into Christ, of regeneration, of remission of sins, and of his giving up unto God, through Jesus Christ, to walk in newness of life. Which sacrament is, by Christ's own appointment, to be continued in his church until the end of the world.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 28, Section 1

Introduction

On a mountain in Galilee, the risen Christ drew His eleven disciples together and spoke the last recorded words of His earthly ministry, words that would set the whole course of the church until the end of time. All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. With those words the ascended Lord gave to His church an ordinance and a gift: the washing of water by which a sinner is solemnly received into the visible fellowship of God's people and sealed as His own. We have spent these last studies walking through the doctrine of the sacraments in general, learning what a sacrament is, how the sign and the thing signified are joined, whence their efficacy comes, and how the sacraments of the old covenant agreed in substance with those of the new. Now we descend from the general to the particular, from the doctrine of the sacraments to the first of the two sacraments themselves. We turn to baptism. And we begin with a sentence that is easy to read and hard to exhaust. The Westminster divines tell us that baptism is not one thing but two, and each of the two answers a question every human soul must sooner or later put to itself. The first question is this: who is admitted into the visible household of God upon earth? The answer is the party baptized, for baptism is the solemn admission of a soul into the visible church. The second question is deeper still: what does this washing pledge to the one who receives it? The answer is a flood of grace, for baptism is a sign and seal of the covenant of grace, of ingrafting into Christ, of regeneration, of remission of sins, and of a life given up to God in newness. The door of the church and the seal of the covenant: these are the two great things baptism is, and it would be hard to overstate how much comfort and how much obligation they carry. Let us take them in order, beginning where we always must begin, at the word of God.

Scripture Foundation

Every word of this section rests upon a single, majestic sentence uttered by our Lord after His resurrection, and we do well to fix our eyes upon it first. In Matthew 28:18-20 the risen Christ declares: "All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen." Three things in this passage deserve the closest attention, for the confession takes its stand upon all three. The first is the authority. The word rendered "power" is exousia, and it means rightful authority, not brute force, the authority of a King who may lawfully command. Before Christ speaks a word about baptism, He announces that all authority in heaven and earth has been given to Him; the command to baptize flows from the throne, not from the counsel of men. This is why our confession says baptism was "ordained by Jesus Christ." The church did not invent this ordinance, and no church may alter it, for it bears the signature of the risen King. The second thing is the name. To be baptized "in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost" is to be placed under the ownership and protection of the triune God, marked with His own name as His property. The third thing is the promise. "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." The word rendered "world" is not kosmos, the created order, but sunteleia tou aionos, the consummation of the age; and the force of it is precisely what our confession declares, that this ordinance is to be continued in the church until the very end of time. The King who commands baptism pledges His own abiding presence to the church that administers it, until the age is consummated and the sign gives way to sight. Baptism, then, is not a temporary expedient or a ceremony for one generation only; it is the standing ordinance of the risen Christ for all nations, in all ages, until He comes again. But to what does baptism admit a man? Turn now to 1 Corinthians 12:13, where Paul unfolds the churchward side of the ordinance: "For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit." Mark what the apostle says, and what he does not say. He does not say that baptism unites us invisibly to Christ only; he says it baptizes us "into one body," the one visible communion of believers upon earth. Jew and Gentile, bond and free, men who could never have sat at one table are, by this single washing, received into one fellowship. Here is the solemn admission of which the confession speaks. Baptism is the door through which a soul passes out of the world's wide field and into the visible church of God, and by it a visible difference is set between those who bear Christ's name and those who do not. This is not the whole of baptism, as we shall see, but it is where baptism begins, and the eye of faith should rest there first. When the water fell upon you, or when it was poured upon the brow of the child carried in your arms, a name was added to the visible roll of God's church on earth, and a soul was solemnly received into the company of those who call upon the Lord. Yet baptism is far more than admission to a society, and the next text carries us into the very heart of the matter. In Galatians 3:27 Paul writes: "For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ." The verb is endusasthe, to put on, to clothe oneself with a garment, and the image is as tender as any in Scripture. To be baptized into Christ is to be drawn into a union with Him so close and so real that the apostle can speak of it as a man putting on a garment, so that what covers the wearer is no longer his own ragged righteousness but the righteousness and the very life of Christ. This is what the confession means by "ingrafting into Christ." A branch cut from the vine and grafted into a living stock is no longer what it was; it is now one with the stock, and the life that flows through it is the stock's life, not its own. So the baptized soul is received, as it were, into Christ, and from that union all its hope and all its fruit are drawn. Baptism seals this union, and sets it visibly before the church and before the world. And this union, once forged, is nothing less than a death and a resurrection. Hear the apostle once more in Romans 6:3-4: "Know ye 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." Here is the phrase our confession echoes almost word for word, "newness of life," and here is the whole power of the ordinance laid open. Baptism is a kind of funeral and a kind of birthday in one. The old man is buried with Christ in the water, and the new man rises to walk with Christ in the power of His resurrection. This is regeneration, the washing of the new birth, the passing from death to life, of which the confession speaks; and this is the engagement, the giving up of oneself to God to walk in newness of life, that stands at the close of the sentence. And lest we think the remission of sins is left out of the account, hear Peter's word on the day of Pentecost in Acts 2:38: "Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins." The word is aphesis, release, the loosing of a prisoner, the canceling of a debt; and it tells us that the water of baptism holds before the believer's eyes the very pardon that Christ's blood has purchased. Ingrafting, regeneration, remission, newness of life: these are not four separate blessings but four sides of the one great salvation, and baptism sets them all before us in a single visible act.

What the Divines Meant

The sentence we are studying is one of the most carefully weighed in the whole Confession, for in it the divines were answering several of the deepest errors of their age together, and they meant to leave no room for any of them. Consider first the phrase with which they begin: baptism is "a sacrament of the new testament." The point of that word "new" would not have been lost on the divines or their first readers. In the previous chapter they had established that the sacraments of the old testament agreed in substance with those of the new: circumcision and the passover pointed to the same Christ, sealed the same covenant of grace, and conveyed the same salvation as baptism and the supper. But now, having laid that foundation, they mark the difference with a single word. Baptism belongs to the new testament, to the age of fulfillment, to the covenant sealed by the blood of Christ rather than the blood of bulls and goats. The old sacraments looked forward to a sacrifice yet to be offered; baptism looks back upon a sacrifice already accomplished. And because the covenant is new, its initiating sacrament is no longer the painful cutting of circumcision but a washing with water, a gentler and fuller sign, suited to the whole world of nations to whom the gospel now goes. Next mark that baptism was "ordained by Jesus Christ." The divines are here asserting the divine, and not merely human, origin of the ordinance, and this assertion was a weapon drawn against two very different enemies. On the one side stood Rome, which had multiplied sacraments to seven and claimed authority to add to, or alter, the worship of God as it saw fit. Against all this the divines set the simple fact that baptism comes from Christ's own mouth, on the mountain in Galilee, and that no church on earth may add a single sacrament to the two He gave, nor take one away. On the other side stood the enthusiasts and the Socinians, who treated the sacraments as bare memorials of man's own devising, useful perhaps, but carrying no divine warrant and no divine grace. To them the divines reply that this is not a human ceremony at all; it is an ordinance of the living Christ, and to despise it is to despise its Author. Baptism stands or falls with the authority of Christ Himself. Then comes the heart of the sentence, and here the divines are at their most precise: baptism is "not only for the solemn admission of the party baptized into the visible church; but also, to be unto him a sign and seal of the covenant of grace." Observe the double "not only, but also," for it is the hinge upon which the whole section turns, and it was carefully chosen. The divines are refusing to be pressed into either of two opposite corners. Against those who saw in baptism nothing but a bare badge of church membership, a public profession and nothing more, they insist that it is a sign and seal of the covenant of grace, charged with spiritual meaning and divine efficacy. Against Rome, which taught that baptism works grace of itself, washing away sin by the mere performance of the act, they insist that it is a sign and a seal, not the grace itself. A sign points to something beyond itself; a seal ratifies and confirms something already given. Neither a sign nor a seal creates the thing it signifies; both presuppose it, and hold it forth. So baptism neither confers grace by its own power, nor is it an empty ceremony; it is the God-appointed sign and the God-affixed seal of a covenant grace that is real, and that comes by faith. And see what that covenant grace includes, for the divines name four things, and each repays our wonder. Baptism is a sign and seal "of his ingrafting into Christ, of regeneration, of remission of sins, and of his giving up unto God, through Jesus Christ, to walk in newness of life." Here is the whole of salvation in four strokes. The first, ingrafting into Christ, is the root: the soul's union with the risen Savior, out of which every other blessing grows. The second, regeneration, is the new birth, the inward washing of the Spirit that answers to the outward washing of the water. The third, remission of sins, is the pardon, the clearing of guilt, the blotting out of the record. The fourth, giving up unto God to walk in newness of life, is the engagement, the consecration, the vowed life of obedience that flows from all the rest. There is a beautiful turn in the grammar: the first three are things God does for us, but the last is a thing we do for God. Baptism looks both ways, as every seal must: it declares what God promises to the believer, and it binds the believer to what he vows to God. It is, at once, a gift received and a life pledged. Finally, the sentence closes with a word of perpetuity: this sacrament is "to be continued in his church until the end of the world." The divines are answering a doubt that had troubled some tender souls, whether the sacraments, like the ceremonial law of Moses, might be temporary, to be laid aside as the church grew to maturity. Not so, they answer. Baptism is not a tutor for the church's childhood but a standing ordinance for her whole pilgrimage. Until the end of the world, the church will be baptizing, and until the end of the world, the risen Christ will be with His church as she does it. The ordinance continues because the covenant continues, and because He who commanded it has promised to be with His people to the very consummation of the age.

Theological Depth

We descend now from the wording of the sentence to the truths beneath it, and here the divines of the church have left us a rich inheritance. Calvin, whose Institutes we have had occasion to consult from the first, opens his treatment of baptism with a definition that might almost have been the seed from which our confession grew. Baptism, he writes, is the sign of our initiation, by which we are received into the society of the church, that being ingrafted into Christ we may be accounted among the children of God. Listen to those two clauses, for they are the very two clauses of our confession in Calvin's own words: the sign of initiation into the church, and the ingrafting into Christ by which we become the children of God. Calvin would not allow these two to be torn apart. Against those who made baptism a mere ticket of church membership, he insisted that the outward reception is nothing apart from the inward ingrafting; and against those who made it a bare inward experience with no outward form, he insisted that Christ has joined the sign to the thing, and we may not put asunder what He has joined. For Calvin, baptism is the visible door through which the soul enters the church and Christ together, and the one entrance cannot be had without the other. His is the mind that stands behind every word of this section. Watson, with his unfailing gift for making doctrine sweet, takes up the image of the seal and presses it home upon the heart. In his Body of Divinity he reminds us that a seal serves a double purpose: it ratifies a deed, and it marks out property. A king's seal upon a charter confirms it as genuine, so that the trembling subject may rest his claim upon it without fear; and a seal upon goods marks them as the owner's own, so that no man may lawfully take them. So baptism, says Watson, is God's seal: it ratifies the covenant of grace to the believer, that he may plead it as his own, and it marks him out as the property of God, that the world may know to whom he belongs. Watson would have the baptized believer read his baptism as a man reads a sealed charter, and say, Here is God's own hand, pledging to me ingrafting into Christ and remission of sins; let me rest my soul upon it. This is the pastoral warmth of the doctrine, and it has dried many a tear. A. A. Hodge, in his commentary on the Confession, supplies the precision that holds the whole together. He observes that the section makes two affirmations and no more: first, that baptism is the rite of initiation into the visible church; second, that it is a sign and seal of the covenant of grace, embracing the four great benefits the sentence names. These two, Hodge insists, are not to be confounded, nor yet separated. They are not to be confounded, because a man may be solemnly admitted to the visible church who is never truly ingrafted into Christ, and the confession, in a later section, will say so plainly; and they are not to be separated, because Christ has appointed the sign as the ordinary seal of the grace, and it is presumption, not faith, that would have the grace while despising the sign. Hodge helps us see that baptism, rightly understood, is neither a magical washing that saves by itself, nor a bare ceremony that means nothing, but a divine appointment in which the visible and the invisible, the church and Christ, meet in holy union. Robert Shaw, whose Exposition has guided us through the sacraments, draws out the double aspect of the seal with his characteristic clarity. Baptism, he observes, is a seal on God's part and an engagement on ours. On God's part, it seals to the believer all the promises of the covenant: that he shall be ingrafted into Christ, washed from his sins, and renewed to walk in newness of life. On man's part, it is a solemn engagement to be the Lord's, to renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil, and to live henceforth as one who has been buried and raised with Christ. The sign, says Shaw, looks Godward and manward together, and it is this very doubleness that makes baptism so searching a thing. It is a comfort and a bond in one, and woe to the man who takes the comfort while despising the bond. To these we may add a voice nearer our own day. John Murray, who taught at Westminster Seminary in the last century and wrote a small book on baptism that has become a touchstone, pressed the church to recover the central phrase the confession echoes: baptism "into Christ." Murray argued that too many had reduced baptism to an outward rite of obedience and too many had elevated it to an automatic conveyer of grace, and that both had missed the beating heart of the ordinance, which is union with Christ. To be baptized, Murray insists, is to be baptized into Christ: into His death, into His burial, into His resurrection, so that the whole meaning of the sign is the believer's union with the Savior. Everything else in the confession's list, ingrafting and regeneration and remission and newness of life, is but the unfolding of that one great thing. This is the deep water at the center of the ordinance, and Murray's recovery of it has proved a gift to the whole Reformed church. Turretin, whose precision we have leaned upon through this whole study, sets the ordinance in its covenant frame and guards it against two ancient errors together. Baptism, he argues, is the sacrament of initiation into the covenant of grace, the seal by which God confirms to the believer his ingrafting into Christ and his right to all the benefits of the covenant. Against the Anabaptist reduction of the sign to a bare profession, Turretin insists that baptism is a true seal, charged by the Spirit with confirming grace; and against the Romanist error that the sign works grace by the bare performance, he insists that baptism does not regenerate by the mere act, but seals a regeneration that the Spirit works and faith receives. The middle path he cuts is exactly the path of our confession: the sign is not empty, and the sign is not everything; it is the God-appointed seal of a grace that is real, and it becomes effectual to the believer through the work of the Spirit and the word of institution. When we set these voices side by side, a single melody sounds through them all. Baptism is Christ's own ordinance, the seal of His covenant, the sign of union with Him, and the pledge of a new life. It is not the grace itself, and it is not a bare sign; it is the God-appointed seal of a grace that is real, received by faith, and lived out in newness of life. Let the doctrine stand, and let us now ask what it must do in the hearts of those who profess it.

Puritan Application

Let us bring the doctrine down from the head to the heart, where alone it can do us good, and let us search ourselves by it. First, let your baptism be a perpetual remembrance of your covenant with God. There is a reason the divines call baptism a seal, and a reason the Spirit, through the apostles, so often bids the church recall the washing she has received. A seal is not a thing to be performed and then forgotten, like a receipt filed away in a drawer. It is a thing to be remembered, and remembered often, for it binds the one who bears it. Go back in your mind to the day the water fell upon you, or to the day you stood and watched it fall upon your child, and hear again the threefold name spoken over that washing. God was then pledging Himself to you, and you, or those who held you, were pledging you to God. Is the vow still honored? Is the life you now live a life that answers to that seal? Let not your baptism be a buried memory, but a living bond, remembered daily, pleaded in prayer, and answered in obedience. Second, make your calling and election sure, for the sign is not the thing it signifies. This is a hard word, but it is a necessary one, and the divines themselves will press it upon us again before this chapter is done. Baptism does not save any man by itself; a seal on a title-deed is worthless unless the estate is truly yours. There were those in Israel who bore the sign of circumcision and yet were not Israel, and there will be those in the visible church who bear the sign of baptism and yet are strangers to the grace it sets forth. Let this make you search your own heart. Do you know the ingrafting into Christ of which the water speaks? Have you the regeneration, the new birth, the remission of sins, the walk in newness of life that the sign seals to the believer? Do not rest in the outward washing; rest in the inward grace, and make sure that the thing signified is yours, lest the sign that should be your comfort become a witness against you. Third, walk in newness of life, for that is the very end of your baptism. The confession does not stop at ingrafting and regeneration and remission; it presses on to the life that follows, the giving up of oneself to God to walk in newness of life. Baptism is a death and a resurrection, and a resurrection is not an idle thing. The man who has been buried with Christ is a man who has done with sin, and the man who has been raised with Christ is a man who lives unto God. Let this be the test of your baptism every day. Is there a mortifying of the old man, a putting to death of the deeds of the body? Is there a walking in the Spirit, a bearing of fruit unto holiness? The water that fell upon you was a promise, and it was a summons. It calls you, this day and every day, to rise and walk with Christ in the power of His resurrection. Fourth, prize the visible church into which your baptism admitted you. Some today are impatient with institutions and suspicious of visible forms; some think lightly of the church precisely because they think highly of private devotion. But the confession will have none of it. Baptism is the solemn admission of a soul into the visible church, and the church into which it admits you is the body of Christ upon earth, the household of God, the pillar and ground of the truth. Do not despise what Christ has established. Love the fellowship of the saints; bear with their weaknesses; sit under the preaching of the word; join in the prayers of the congregation; and count it no small thing that your name is written in the visible roll of God's people. The man who would have Christ for his head must not despise the body through which that head is served. Fifth, live in the hope that the ordinance itself proclaims, for it is to continue until the end of the world, and He who gave it has promised to be with His church to the last. This is a word for the weary and the discouraged, for those who fear that the church will fail, that the gospel will be snuffed out, that the darkness will prove too strong. Let such a one look to his baptism. As often as the water falls upon a brow, the risen Christ is keeping His word; as often as a name is added to the visible church, the promise stands, Lo, I am with you alway. The ordinance will continue until the consummation, because He who ordained it will never leave His church nor forsake her. Therefore let your baptism be to you a seal of the past and a hope for the future, a standing pledge that He who has begun a good work will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ. And when at last the sign gives way to sight and the water to the living fountain, you shall know, even as you are known, the fullness of that covenant of which your baptism was but the visible seal.

Prayer

O Lord our God, who didst ordain baptism by the mouth of Thy risen Son, and who hast appointed it to be continued in Thy church until the end of the world, we bless Thee for this holy ordinance, and we bless Thee for the grace it seals. We thank Thee that in the water of baptism Thou hast set before our eyes our ingrafting into Christ, our washing from sin, our new birth by the Spirit, and our calling to walk in newness of life. We thank Thee that by this sign Thou hast solemnly received us into the visible fellowship of Thy people, and that Thou hast sealed to us the covenant of grace, ratified in the blood of the Lamb. We confess, O Lord, that we have too often forgotten our baptism, too often borne the seal without honoring the bond, too often rested in the outward washing while the heart remained cold. Forgive us, we pray, and renew in us the grace which the sign sets forth. Grant that we may daily die unto sin and live unto righteousness, that we may walk as those who have been buried with Christ and raised with Him. Make us faithful members of the visible church, loving the fellowship of Thy saints and esteeming the means of grace. And do Thou, who hast promised to be with Thy church alway, even unto the end of the world, keep us by Thy Spirit until that day when the sign shall be done away and we shall see Thy face. We ask it all in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, who was baptized in the Jordan that He might fulfill all righteousness, and who ever liveth to make intercession for us. Amen.