II. It is to be invested with the character of Christ.—“For as many as have been baptised into Christ have put on Christ” (ver. 27). For if Christ is Son of God, and thou hast put on Him, having the Son in thyself and being made like to Him, thou wast brought into one kindred and one form of being with Him (Chrysostom). To be baptised into Christ is not the mere mechanical observance of the rite of baptism; the rite is the recognition and public avowal of the exercise of faith in Christ. In the Pauline vocabulary baptised is synonymous with believing. Faith invests the soul with Christ, and joyfully appropriates the estate and endowments of the filial relationship. Baptism by its very form—the normal and most expressive form of primitive baptism, the descent into and rising from the symbolic waters—pictured the soul’s death with Christ, its burial and its resurrection in Him, its separation from the life of sin, and entrance upon the new career of a regenerated child of God (Rom. vi. 3–14).
III. Implies such a complete union with Christ as to abolish all secondary distinctions.—“For there is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (ver. 28). All distinctions of nationality, social status, and sex—necessary as they may be in the worldly life—disappear in the blending of human souls in the loftier relationship of sons of God. The Gospel is universal in its range and provisions and raises all who believe in Christ to a higher level than man could ever reach under the Mosaic regimen. To add circumcision to faith would be not to rise but to sink from the state of sons to that of serfs. Christ is the central bond of unity to the whole human race; faith in Him is the realisation by the individual of the honours and raptures of that unity.
IV. Is to be entitled to the inheritance of joint heirship with Christ.—“If ye be Christ’s, then are ye . . . heirs according to the promise” (ver. 29). In Christ the lineal descent from David becomes extinct. He died without posterity. But He lives and reigns over a vaster territory than David ever knew; and all who are of His spiritual seed, Jew or Gentile, share with Him the splendours of the inheritance provided by the Father. Here the soul reaches its supreme glory and joy. In Worcester Cathedral there is a slab with just one doleful word on it as a record of the dead buried beneath. That word is Miserrimus. No name, no date; nothing more of the dead than just this one word to say he who lay there was or is most miserable. Surely, he had missed the way home to the Father’s house and the Father’s love, else why this sad record? But in the Catacombs at Rome there is one stone recently found inscribed with the single word Felicissima. No name, no date again, but a word to express that the dead Christian sister was most happy. Most happy; why? Because she had found the Father’s house and love, and that peace which the storms of life, the persecutions of a hostile world, and the light afflictions of time could neither give nor take away.
Lessons.—1. Faith confers higher privileges than the law. 2. Faith in Christ admits the soul into sonship with God. 3. The sons of God share in the fulness of the Christly inheritance.
GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES.
Vers. 26–29. Baptism.
I. The doctrine of Rome.—Christ’s merits are instrumentally applied by baptism; original sin is removed by a change of nature; a new character is imparted to the soul; a germinal principle or seed of life is miraculously given; and all this in virtue, not of any condition in the recipient, nor of any condition except that of the due performance of the rite. The objections to this doctrine are: 1. It assures baptism to be not the testimony to a fact, but the fact itself. Baptism proclaims the child of God; the Romanist says it creates him. 2. It is materialism of the grossest kind. 3. It makes Christian life a struggle for something that is lost, instead of a progress to something that lies before.
II. The doctrine of modern Calvinism.—Baptism admits all into the visible Church, but into the invisible Church only a special few. The real benefit of baptism only belongs to the elect. With respect to others, to predicate of them regeneration in the highest sense is at best an ecclesiastical fiction, said in the judgment of charity. You are not God’s child until you become such consciously. On this we remark: 1. This judgment of charity ends at the baptismal font. 2. This view is identical with the Roman one in this respect—that it creates the fact instead of testifying to it. 3. Is pernicious in its results in the matter of education.
III. The doctrine of the Bible.—Man is God’s child, and the sin of the man consists in perpetually living as if it were false. To be a son of God is one thing; to know that you are and call Him Father is another. Baptism authoritatively reveals and pledges to the individual that which is true of the race. 1. This view prevents exclusiveness and spiritual pride. 2. Protests against the notion of our being separate units in the Divine life. 3. Sanctifies materialism.—F. W. Robertson.
Ver. 26. The Children of God.