Baptism symbolizes the previous entrance of the believer into the communion of Christ's death and resurrection,—or, in other words, regeneration through union with Christ.
A. Expansion of this statement as to the symbolism of baptism.
Baptism, more particularly, is a symbol:
(a) Of the death and resurrection of Christ.
Rom. 6:3—“Or are ye ignorant that all we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” cf. Mat 3:13—“Then cometh Jesus from Galilee to the Jordan unto John, to be baptized of him”; Mark 10:38—“Are ye able to drink the cup that I drink? or to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?”; Luke 12:50—“But I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!” Col. 2:12—“buried with him in baptism, wherein ye were also raised with him through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead.” For the meaning of these passages, see note on the baptism of Jesus, under B. (a), pages [942], [943].
Denney, in Expositor's Greek Testament, on Rom. 6:3-5—“The argumentative requirements of the passage ... demand the idea of an actual union to, or incorporation in Christ.... We were buried with him [in the act of immersion] through that baptism into his death.... If the baptism, which is a similitude of Christ's death, has had a reality answering to its obvious import, so that we have really died in it as Christ died, then we shall have a corresponding experience of resurrection. Baptism, inasmuch as one emerges from the water after being immersed, is a similitude of resurrection as well as of death.”
(b) Of the purpose of that death and resurrection,—namely, to atone for sin, and to deliver sinners from its penalty and power.
Rom. 6:4—“We were buried therefore with him through baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we also might walk in newness of life”; cf. 7, 10, 11—“for he that hath died is justified from sin.... For the death that he died, he died unto sin once: but the life that he liveth, he liveth unto God. Even so reckon ye also yourselves to be dead unto sin, but alive unto God in Christ Jesus”; 2 Cor. 5:14—“we thus judge, that one died for all, therefore all died.” Baptism is therefore a confession of evangelical faith both as to sin, and as to the deity and atonement of Christ. No one is properly a Baptist who does not acknowledge these truths which baptism signifies.
T. W. Chambers, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1890:113-118, objects that this view of the symbolism of baptism is based on two texts, Rom. 6:4 and Col. 2:12, which are illustrative and not explanatory, while the great majority of passages make baptism only an act of purification. Yet Dr. Chambers concedes: “It is to be admitted that nearly all modern critical expositors (Meyer, Godet, Alford, Conybeare, Lightfoot, Beet) consider that there is a reference here [in Rom. 6:4] to the act of baptism, which, as the Bishop of Durham says, ‘is the grave of the old man and the birth of the new—an image of the believer's participation both in the death and in the resurrection of Christ.... As he sinks beneath the baptismal waters, the believer buries there all his corrupt affections and past sins; as he emerges thence, he rises regenerate, quickened to new hopes and a new life.’ ”