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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 9

Import of Water in Baptism

page 6

Import of Water in Baptism.

Baptism is a question that has provoked much discussion, and that on various aspects of it. Much of the writing is learned, vigorous, and candid; having no appearance of a conscious, or thinly hid partiality,—but not a little of its literature manifests contrary characteristics. The subject is one of importance; more so than many genuine christians even, attribute to it. The inquiries into its import have been mainly occupied with—who are its proper subjects? and in what form should it be administered? These questions naturally suggest each other—and, perhaps, they are no nearer being settled than ever. The writer of this paper believes that there is still a more internal aspect of the subject, than that generally taken, or taken at all, as far as known to him; and the following statements are an instalment of that view. Like most if not all permanent ordinances of the church, baptism has an historical origin, and the principles embodied therein, a progressive development. This origin and development pertain to its internal contents, and the first question is—How came water to have a place in the ritual of the church? and with what import has it its place there? The subjoined statements are an attempt to answer these questions historically. The two passages of Scripture on which the reasonings are based, seem to warrant such an answer. And if the answer appear unsatisfactory, it might be replied—it cannot be more so than any of the numerous explanations which have been made of these two texts. A clear view of the historical antecedents embodying the principles now represented in baptism, must cast much light on its nature; nay, is essential to the right understanding of its import, and may contribute something to weigh on one or other side of the two questions, namely—Who are the proper subjects? and, what is the proper form of administration? But, meantime, we deal only with the question—How came water to have a place in the church's ritual? and what is its import there?

It is said, referring to Noah and his house, that they were saved by water—not from or out of the water. 1 Peter, iii. 20. God brought in the Flood on the world of the ungodly, and saved the godly Noah from being overcome and destroyed by that world—that godless association then occupying this earth, so far as it was then occupied. And in reference to this, it is said in the same place: "The like figure page 7 whereunto baptism doth now also save us,"—v. 21. That is, the flood was a figure of what is now signified by baptism. As the flood is thus spoken of by the Apostle, and as its effect was direct and palpable, it may be called a saving baptism: and thus it did save. It destroyed the outward and human associations and life carried on without God, and thereby saved and freed that godly life in midst of, and endangered by the antagonism of the worldly life. In that deed the godly was saved by devoting the wicked to destruction. Viewed thus, the flood was a symbolic act, the meaning of which was to be, and has been, symbolically preserved in the institution of grace, which God has given the world.

We say that the flood destroyed the outward associations and life; there is no need of saying more, as there is no room for asserting or implying that all who died in that event perished forever. Many swept from this life thereby, knew not right hand from left—that death was to them the effect of parental or ancestral disobedience—and there might many grown men and women be involved in that judgment on the earth, whose souls were not involved in eternal condemnation for sin.

We refer in the second place to Israel's passing through the Red Sea. In that passage they are said by Paul (1 Cor. x. 2) to have been baptised unto Moses by the cloud and the sea. As far as the present is concerned, no distinction need be made between the cloud and the sea—both may be regarded as one. The sea, then, was the instrument of saving the Israelites unto that salvation of which Moses was the captain, and which by his hand was granted to the tribes of Jacob in that great crisis of their history. Now, in this case, as in that of the flood, water was the instrument employed by God in saving the Israelites from the power of Egypt, as it was the instrument made use of in saving Noah and his house from the power of the ungodly world.

The two cases are alike in all essentials. In both there was a double effect. There was mercy and judgment, deliverance and destruction, and water was the instrument by which that effect was wrought. In each of the cases the persons or people that called on the name of God, crying to him for deliverance from, or help against, that evil world of which they were bodily a part, and which threatened to consume them, were delivered. The one was a household of eight persons; the other, a people numerous enough for a nation, and page 8 descended directly from one progenitor. In the one case, the Creator of heaven and earth was the God of the household, the head of which walked with him in favour; in the other, he was the God of the people, whose ancestors stood to him in a covenant relation, and to whom they inherited relationships in virtue of their ancestors' standing. The Almighty, who made heaven, earth, and sea, was the God of the house of Noah and of the tribes of Jacob, and Noah's house and Jacob's tribes were in conflict with a world alienated from the Creator, and at enmity against him. Noah was in conflict with the world as a whole, and about being consumed by it, and Jacob's tribes were hard pressed by Egypt—a chief head of the world's power—and on the point of being overcome. Noah cried to God to save him and his house from being swallowed up of the spiritually-devouring world, and God heard him, and destroyed that world that would not be warned. He swept it away by the waters of the flood, and left Noah and his house safe in the midst of the earth. So, likewise, heard he the cry of Jacob's tribes for help; and when Egypt—a great head of the dragon world—with opened mouth, was about to devour them, the God of Jacob heaved upon him the waters of the sea, engulfing him in destruction, and left the people of Jacob's line safe on the free desert shore.

Now, both these events—that at the Red Sea in the days of Moses, and that in the valley of the Euphrates in the days of Noah—are recorded in the Bible for our learning, and by inspired men both are called baptisms. They were two deeds in which God dealt with the church and with the world, and, like the cloud that guided and protected Moses' march, they had each a side bright and a side dark—a side shedding mercy, and a side inflicting judgment—that brought deliverance and brought destruction. In them, we feel persuaded, there was a display, though mysterious, of the principles by which men individually could be saved from sin,—the church collectively from the power of the hostile world, and the human world from becoming a territory of Satan's—a province of Pandemonium, as that adversary must have meant to make it, to complete his conquest, but from which it has been conclusively and gloriously saved by the reconciliation effected by Jesus, the Christ between God and man.

It is from the salvation by the flood, and the salvation by the sea, that water has come to be used as a symbolic sign, and a covenant seal between God and men. From those events it has acquired an his- page 9 torical import in the dealings of God with the church and with the world. In both instances there were two decisive deliverances effected for the church, by inflicting two decisive judgments on the world, and in each water was the instrument used. Those two interpositions of heaven—that in which Noah was saved by destroying the world, and Moses and the tribes he led by destroying Pharaoh, the then leader of one of the foremost, hosts of the world's power, and with him the host which he led—were two prophetic and significant acts; and from them water has acquired an historical sacredness and a symbolic import which demand for it a place in the ritual of the church, in whose behalf those two opportune interpositions were made when the Almighty saved her by water, and the record of which the Divine Spirit has caused to be embodied in the infallible history he has given of the church.

The physical properties of water may not, we believe they are not, excluded from its symbolic import—but, we believe, it was not originally, nor is it mainly, because of those properties, but originally and mainly because of its historical use in the double sense of a saving and judicial instrument in the hand of God, that it got, and continues to hold its use among the ordinances of the church. It had a place in her ritual when she was limited to Israel and to Canaan, with Moses as her embodied mediator, and formally founded on her pascal sacrifice; and it has a place, now, in her ritual, when she is constituted an institution of grace for all families of the earth, with Jesus, the Son of God, as her Mediator, and formally founded on the blood of the lamb of God, that hath taken away the sin of the world. It had one place in the church's ritual when she was associated with the name of Moses and limited to Israel; it has another now, when it is associated with the name of Jesus Christ, and opened alike to all nations. What should be the place, and what the symbolic and prophetic import of water in any of the church's dispensations, must be his appointments whose institution the church is.

According to the above view, water had in the Israelitish, and has in the Christian Church, an historical and commemorative import. It commemorates the Flood—that intervention wherein God saved those trusting ill him, and made manifest the power of his judicial wrath against unrighteousness and ungodliness; and it commemorates the church's memorable night passage through the Red Sea, when she was pursued and pressed on by one of the finest and fiercest armies of the page 10 world's power, led by the bravest captain of the world's soldiery—when, interposing his two-sided cloud, Jehovah prevented the world's shout of victory being mingled with the frightened shriek and dying groan of the people called after his own name. Thus rerewarded, his people, throbbing and thankful, oozed out on the friendly shore; then, calling the waters amain, he left armed men, caparisoned horses, and war chariots strewn on the weedy bottom of the sea. That morn' Arabia's bright sun looked over Sinai and Horeb upon a scene showing and emblemizing the blissfulness of being in covenant with the living God, and showing and emblemizing, too, the end of defiant conflict, against him.

Such, we feel assured, were the historical glory and saving benefit of those two interpositions of God in behalf of his church, and such their symbolic and prophetic import, that a memorial of them should have, and has a place in the sacramental ceremony of a church that is one from beginning to end—from Eden to Sinai—from Sinai to Calvary —from Calvary to the Second Advent. And most meet is the presence of water in our simple baptismal ceremony, whereby the covenant of salvation is formally entered into by incorporation in the visible church. It is historically sacred in consequence of its instrumental application in God's dealings with the church and with the world. It commemorates deeds of mercy and of judgment, of most remote antiquity; deeds of deliverance for the church of the most signal nature. As a seal and sign of the covenant of grace, it is now historico-symbolical—its historical import is embodied in its prophetic symbol. As a seal, it is most assuring; and as a sign, most solemnising. It assures us that He who saved Noah and his house, and who saved Moses and the twelve tribes, will save the christian church, the christian house, and the christian individual—it assures us that his counsel to do so is concluded and confirmed. And its sign is, that He may answer their cry for deliverance by fearful works. The church, the family, the individual, may get deliverance, perhaps only can get it, by judgments that will leave them throbbing and thankful, as were Noah and his house on Ararat, and Moses and Israel on the shore of the sea. Throbbing: because they have seen Jehovah's judicial anger displayed against sin; thankful; because they have seen it and yet live. J. W.

The Manse, Warepa, December 14, 1871.