Gary Pollard
According to Romans 5-6 and Galatians, baptism frees us from the standard of the old law. Without grace, which we receive at baptism, our only hope for eternal life is perfectly keeping every single command. No one can do that. The law existed to show us how sinful we are, according to Romans, and we become aware of our own inadequacy compared to God’s standard. Baptism releases us from that standard. We become part of a new and far more lenient system. And no person who has genuinely been convicted by their own guilt would see that as license to sin. But it does mean that God’s forgiveness is abundant and powerful. This is yet another benefit of baptism.
In Colossians 2, baptism gives us access to the divine and to a perfect new body. John likely wrote I John at the end of the first or beginning of the second century, some decades after the church was established. Despite probably tens or hundreds of thousands of people who had divine insight through miraculous gifts, by John’s day the nature of this new body was still unknown (I John 3.1-3). That hasn’t changed. We can make inferences from how Jesus interacted with reality and with his disciples after his resurrection. There’re some interesting and compelling aspects to what Jesus could do with this new body, but that’s a study for another time. All we know is that baptism gives us access, through Christ, to a greatly expanded range of intellectual and physical motion after the death of this body.
Equality is something of a loaded term in this era. For most people, it’s an activism word. But scripture presents a divine equality that has nothing to do what race or sex or culture a person is: I Corinthians 12.12-13, A person has only one body, but many parts. Yes, there are many parts, but all those parts are still just one body. Christ is like that, too. Some of us are Jews and some of us are not; some of us are slaves and some of us are free. But we were all baptized to become one body through one spirit, and we all drink from the same spirit.
Activism has tried and repeatedly failed to “level the playing field” because humans are flawed. One extreme imposes draconian overreaction, the other extreme denies its value entirely. Only God offers true unity and equality. When we’re baptized, we join a body unified by the same power responsible for creating everything we see, and everything we can’t yet see.
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