What Baptism Says

Paul answers a bad question with a picture. The bad question is whether we should keep sinning so grace can keep increasing. His answer is not a scolding but a reminder of something the Romans had already done. Do you not know, he asks in verse 3, that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? They had gone under the water. They had come up out of it. Paul says that the act meant something, and what it meant was burial and resurrection.

The logic of the passage runs like this. Christ died to sin once for all. Christ was raised and death no longer has mastery over him. You have been united with him in a death like his. Therefore you will also be united with him in a resurrection like his. Your old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with. The chain is tight and every link is Christ. Nothing in it depends on your willpower.

The one idea to take from this is that sin's claim on a Christian has been broken at the root. Not weakened. Broken. Paul does not say sin will never trouble you; verse 12 tells you not to let it reign in your mortal body, which would be an odd command if sin had no pull at all. But there is a difference between a pull and a reign. A defeated ruler can still make noise. He cannot issue binding orders.

The turn toward life is in verse 13. Do not offer the parts of yourself to sin as instruments of wickedness, but offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life. Your hands, your eyes, your voice, your hours, are instruments, and instruments get used by someone. The question each morning is who gets them. Paul's answer is that you were brought from death to life precisely so that God could have them. Whatever your baptism looked like, a river or a font or a tank at the front of a church, it was saying this. You went down as one person and came up as another. Live like the second one.