Baptized and Alive, or Baptized and Dead.

Paul frequently assaults your mind with complex reasoning that even his fellow apostles sometimes found challenging to understand (2 Peter 3:15-16). But this isn’t necessarily the case in the first several verses of Romans 6.  Yes, Paul is using complex and challenging reasoning with multiple layers of depth in that passage, but he also presents a very clear, easy-to-understand outline of what happens when someone genuinely trusts Christ for salvation.  In this section of scripture, Paul is rhetorically arguing against others who might twist his teaching in order to justify increasing their sinful behaviors as a means of weirdly magnifying the grace or favor of God. The core of his argument is that such twisted perversions of his teachings are complete gibberish because when a person trusts Jesus, they become dead to sin, and alive to God. In fact, he says that their immersion into the life of Christ is also an immersion into his death (Romans 6:1-11). Paul uses the Greek word we transliterate into “baptism” to make his case. In English, the denotative meaning of that Greek word is to immerse or to overwhelm. Water baptism is, indeed, a symbolic representation of the process Paul is describing, but he probably didn’t have that ritual in mind in this passage. Instead, he is recognizing a real and comprehensive, immersive, overwhelming, personal identification with Jesus. In other words, Christ died, and we emulate that by allowing our sinful selves to be crucified with him. Christ arose from the dead, so we also arise with Christ after our own crucifixion in a spiritual “newness” of life.  This process of immersing ourselves in the life of Christ is another way of saying that we identify with him so completely that we wholly reject the life we led before we knew him. Our sins died with his sinlessness. We rise again in his glory and holiness.

Paul is asserting with this argument that it isn’t possible to increase sinning as a means of increasing grace. A follower of Christ isn’t oriented to think that way, and the idea of employing such a strategy would be repulsive to any serious Christian. Since he is honest about his own struggles with sin, Paul’s point isn’t that Christian’s don't battle with it (Romans 7:15-20). His point is that our identity is so radically changed that even when we do sin, it’s a stumble from which we arise as quickly as possible and then continue on in our daily march toward holiness. Our love of Christ engenders a hatred of sin so that our lives and identities will be neither immersed in it nor permanently overwhelmed by it.  Every time we truly trust God, we become more alive or sensitive to him, and more deadened to the things he hates. His Spirit ensures this (Ephesians 1:13-14).  This is not so for the unsaved. Every time they trust in the pleasures of sin, their consciences become more seared or deadened to the goodness of God, and more comfortable with self-destruction (1 Timothy 4:2). Their lives become immersed and overwhelmed to the point that they are identified with death and their own animal impulses (Romans 1:24-32). Marriage is an imperfect picture of this. When I chose to marry my wife, I also chose to become dead to other women in the intimate sense. I became one with my wife and acquired the new identity of “husband”. When I immersed myself in our oneness, my previous identity of “bachelor” was crucified. While the beauty of women still sometimes caught my eyes and fanned primal flames, I made conscious decisions to die to that beauty and to quell those flames because I realized that the total beauty of the gift God had given me in my wife is greater. With each passing year of the past three and a half decades I have become ever increasingly alive to her beauty and ever increasingly uncomfortable with entertaining temptations. 

In what ways can you immerse yourself in the life of Christ?