A Bible History of Baptism

by Samuel J. Baird

It will be the triumph involved in all this revelation of glory and blessedness in contrast with the spectacle of Satan and his followers and work, exposed before all intelligences, in shame and everlasting contempt;—his achievements seen in discord and darkness, in sin and suffering and sorrow, in lamentation and woe, in the loss to him and to his of all the divine perfections in which they were created, and in distortion, deformity and discord, possessing and pervading them all; his confident wisdom and power turned to imbecile folly, and his conspiracies and wiles made the occasions and means of fulfilling God’s plan which he opposed, and crowning the Son of man with glory.

The true dignity and significance of the rite of baptism can only then be adequately realized when we appreciate this comprehensive extent and grandeur of the baptizing office of Christ, signified by it. In the fulfillment of that office he now orders all things; and its exercise must be continuous to the end. The Great Baptizer must breathe the Spirit of life into all that mighty multitude, out of every generation and race, whom the Father has given Him. He must send fire upon the earth, and divide between his people and his enemies, and vindicate the Father’s sovereignty and grace in all his dealings with the wicked. He must, at last, by the quickening virtue of the baptism of His Spirit, raise up his saints,—their bodies glorious as his own glorious body, and their souls perfect in holiness,—and place them on the throne of judgment with himself; judge and cast the wicked out of his kingdom; confirm the holy angels in rectitude and blessedness, and cast Satan,—thwarted, defeated and bound in chains of darkness,—into the gulf of fire,—him and his angels and followers. He must purge the earth and heavens with fire, from the defilement which Satan and sin have wrought, and out of them create and adorn the new heavens and the new earth, the abode of righteousness, the home of the holy and the blessed,—where the many sons shall dwell with God and the Lamb. He must make all things new.

Then may the triumphant Son of man proclaim his work accomplished, and his office ended. Then may he,—not now from the cross, but from the throne,—cry, “It is finished!” “The former things are passed away, and behold I have made all things new.” Sin and the curse are abolished;—tears, and death, and sorrow, and crying, and pain are no more; and in life and immortality the earth-born sons of God possess the glory.

“It is done!” The floor is purged; the garner filled; and the chaff burned. The baptism is accomplished. Then shall the Son, his commission fulfilled, deliver up the kingdom to God even the Father, and shall himself also be subject to Him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all. (1 Cor. xv, 24, 28.)

Section LXXIV.—Argument from the Real to Ritual Baptism.

Thus is Jesus revealed in characters of unspeakable grandeur, as the true and only Baptizer,—his the real baptism, of which all others are mere shadows. His baptizing office is the very end of his exaltation, the peculiar and distinguishing characteristic of his throne and scepter. As the cross of Christ is the symbol of the whole doctrine of his humiliation, sorrow and death, so his baptizing scepter represents the whole doctrine of his exaltation his kingdom and glory. And, as the sacrament of the supper shows forth his abasement and atonement for sin; so, that of baptism proclaims the glory and power of his exaltation, and the riches of salvation and grace which he sheds on his people from on high. The ritual ordinance therefore if true to its office, must be true to the similitude of the real baptism,—must represent and proclaim those very things which are realized in the office and work of the great Baptizer. But what has the real baptism to do with the humiliation of Christ, in any of its aspects? And, especially, what has it to do with the burial of his dead body? With the throne of his power, the prerogatives of his scepter, the grace, the grandeur and the glory of his achievements to the end, its relations are intimate and from them inseparable. But with humiliation and shame, with death and the grave, it holds no relations but those of boundless distance and infinite contrast.

Here then, at the culminating point in the history of baptism and the plan of God’s grace, as identified with it, the divergence of the immersion theory from the statements, conceptions and principles of the Scriptures on the subject interposes between them a widening and deepening gulf, broad, profound and impassable. Whilst the Scriptural rite points exultingly upward to Christ’s high throne, and calls us to lift up our heads and admire and adore the height of his majesty and the grace and grandeur of his baptizing work,—the immersion theory constrains its votaries, with bowed heads and stooping forms, to grope among the graves, in the vain endeavor to trace some fanciful resemblance between the rite which they espouse and the form and manner of the burial of the dead,—a burial, too, which, as thus imagined, the crucified One never received!

The doctrine of the real baptism is thus utterly incongruous to that of immersion. Equally irreconcilable with that form are all the phenomena and expressions used in connection with the administering of Christ’s baptism. The sound from heaven as of an outbreathed mighty breath poured down, and filling all the place, was the only phenomenon of Pentecost indicative of form or mode. And its mode was affusion, or outpouring, and descent from above. The language in which the transaction is everywhere described and referred to is equally specific and invariable. It was a shedding down—a pouring down—a falling upon—a filling of the disciples;—a style of expression used, not on the occasion, only, but in every subsequent allusion to the subject. So, the prophecy[prophecy] cited by Peter is an express definition of this as the mode. “I will pour out of my Spirit.” But, more than this, it identifies the outpouring of Pentecost with all those Old Testament prophecies, in which the gift of the Spirit is spoken of in terms of pouring and sprinkling. All these, again, as we have formerly seen, are intimately associated with the baptisms of the Levitical system. Those baptisms represented in ritual form the things which the prophets set forth in analogous figures. If Christian baptism departs from the Old Testament mode, it to the same degree departs from the form in which the grace of Pentecost is uniformly predicted, represented, described, and referred to.

The attempt is made to evade the force of these facts by the assertion that the “sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind,” “filled all the place where they were sitting;” and that the disciples were immersed in it. But (1.) the immersion thus imagined is, an inversion of the Baptist theory. The result of an admitted affusion, it is an application of the element to the person, and by a sustained analogy, on Baptist principles, would require that the grave should have been brought and put about the body of Jesus, and that, in water baptism, the element should be poured over the subject, until he is covered, although drowning would be the inevitable result. (2.) There is, in fact, no analogy, except in the jingle of words, between an immersion in water, which is immediately and inevitably fatal to life, and an immersion in the vital air, which is the very breath of life, the withdrawal of which is fatal. (3.) If Christian baptism sustains any real relation at all to the baptism of the Holy Spirit, which Christ administers—as it assuredly does—it is that of type to antitype—of a similitude to the reality. Both the form and the meaning of the rite must be derived from the nature of the reality, of which it is the symbol. If then the immersion of the disciples in the wind or breath of Pentecost is the antitype symbolized in the outward form of baptism, the ordinance means, not the burial of Christ’s dead body, but the imparting of his Spirit of life to his people. Thus the Baptist theory of the form and meaning of the ordinance is exploded, since the two ideas can not stand together. They are mutually destructive and the incongruity is fatal to the whole scheme, which can not stand without an immersion on Pentecost; and can not endure the crucial test of the only immersion which they can pretend to discover there.

The alternative is inexorable. If that which Christ dispenses is the normal, the antitype, baptism, then by it the ritual baptisms of both economies are to be interpreted; and their signification is to be found, not in the sepulchre, but on the throne—in the Spirit thence poured out, and the life and salvation thence dispensed;—and the form of the ordinance must needs correspond to its meaning. If, on the other hand, immersion in water is the normal baptism, and the burial of the body of Jesus, its meaning, then the baptism of Pentecost with all its phenomena and doctrine is to be struck from the record, as no baptism at all. If that which Christ dispenses is baptism, immersion is not.