There is One Baptism - Brandon Scalf

Ephesians 4 and the Unity of the Church in the Son

All right everyone grab your Bibles and turn with me to Hebrews, not Hebrews, Ephesians. The light's got to me. Ephesians chapter 4. Ephesians chapter 4 and we will continue on in our series through Paul's letter to the churches in Ephesus.

We will be revisiting verse 5. The title of today's message is simply One Baptism. If you would please stand with me for the honoring and reading of God's holy infallible and all-sufficient Word. For the sake of context I will begin in verse 1 and continue on through verse 6.

This is the Word of God. Therefore I, the prisoner in the Lord, exhort you to walk worthy of the calling with which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, being diligent to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

There is one body and one spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. The grass withers and the flower fades, but the Word of our God endures forever.

Amen? Amen. Go ahead and have a seat. If you've been with us for the past few weeks you will know that we are working our way through verses 4 through 6. And verses 4 through 6 are crucial to our understanding both of what it means to be a Christian but also how to live as the church.

In fact, it is the foundation of our very unity, which is after all what we are commanded to be after. Paul begins this section of Scripture by telling us that we are to walk worthy. That is, that we are to be humble, we are to be gentle, we are to be patient, we ought to bear with one another in our midst in love.

And doing so proves the doctrine that we believe, right? Walking worthy means to live in such a way that the scales, as it were, were balanced. That you are living your doctrine and your doctrine is informing your living.

And then he begins by telling us not just what that looks like but who that looks like, namely the triune God of the Bible. And so we get to these verses and we see that there are these three sets of three, all based around one particular person in the Trinity.

First the Spirit, second the Son, and third the Father. The first one, of course, speaking of our unity in the Spirit. The second, which we are exploring now, our unity in the Son. Or you could say the unity purchased by the Son.

And so right now we are looking at particularly the Son's baptism. And we saw that he is the one Lord of all. We've seen that it is one faith about him that we are to be rooted in, and now we are looking at what it means to take baptism seriously in regard to our unity purchased by the Son.

Now as soon as I say the word baptism and reformed circles, it automatically produces a certain level of fear. And the reason for that is because we don't all agree on who should receive baptism or even in totality what baptism is really about.

Which is somewhat ironic, right? Because this part of Scripture is teaching us how we ought to think about certain things, pivotal things, foundational things, and why those foundational things are to produce unity.

And yet when we talk about baptism, we are oftentimes divided. And that's unfortunate that things are that way. But it is the reality nonetheless. Before we look at what baptism is, I want to just say something on the front end that I think will help govern our hearts as we look at this particular text.

And that is this, that what's really important about baptism is the spiritual reality that baptism itself symbolizes. Its symbolism transcends the particularities of, say for example, motes. That is how one is baptized.

And it's to some degree more important, although it's not disconnected as you will see, than who gets baptized. Really when we're talking about one baptism, we're talking about a baptism that unites every single Christian who bears the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

In other words, what I'm trying to say is that the essence of baptism is found not in the water itself or necessarily or not necessarily even the receiving of it, but in the reality to which it points.

That is, spoiler alert, the believer's death to sin and a resurrection to a new life in Christ Jesus. Baptists believe and have believed. Also, if you didn't know you were in a Baptist church, you are.

That baptism, at least from the human side of things, is an outward sign of an inward reality. A testimony, in other words, to the grace that God has bestowed upon the sinner that has been received through faith in Christ.

In other words, as we think about baptism, what we really need to understand is that at its core, at its essence, it is a holy drama putting on display the beauties and glories and excellencies of Jesus Christ and his gospel.

This is so true, in fact, that even Presbyterians agree with me on this fact. Thomas Watson once said, baptism is the gospel in water. And so, as we look at this text, let us be enthralled, let us be completely drowned, as it were, in the realities that what baptism is, above all else, is a picture of what God has done in Christ through the power of his Spirit for undeserving, ill-deserving sinners.

Amen? Amen. With that being said, we do have to draw some lines in the sand, lovingly, of course, but the Bible tells us to do that. So, if you would, the first thing that I want to do is ask a series of questions.

Now, of course, if you're visiting for the first time, this seems somewhat topical. We are moving verse by verse through the book of Ephesians, and that is the general way that we do things. We believe that exegetical and expositional preaching is the best diet for God's people, but we also understand that sometimes, given specific subjects, particularly as it pertains to baptism, we have to back up a little bit and see what the Bible has to say from Genesis to Revelation.

Now, we have to engage in a type of biblical theology that is completely, utterly dependent upon the text before us. And so, though it's not necessarily a verse-by verse exposition of these two words, it is exegeting words that exist here in its context.

Let's never forget the context. But I'm going to ask a series of questions that, honestly, the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith is going to help us answer, so that we might be able to better ascertain what one baptism actually means.

And so, the first thing that I want to do is I want to ask the question, what does the word baptism even mean? What does the word baptism even mean? Of course, we have this word here, if we look at verse 5 again, 1.

Baptism. Now, baptism is a word that is theologically drenched. It is a word that has been used and is used to promote huge spiritual realities, to talk about parts of the gospel, and it is a word that we must be familiar with.

But we must make sure that we define it properly and biblically. Throwing any definition on it simply will not do. Before we answer this question with a particular definition, I want to help you notice something interesting about the word baptism.

The word baptism is actually a transliteration and not a translation of a particular word. And the reason that that is significant is because it helps us understand both the vast confusion on the topic, but also the heart posture of the ones who translated the Bible.

And it will help us honestly define it, interestingly enough. The word baptism is actually, like I said, a transliteration. If you don't know what that means, it means the translators decided not to translate this word.

In other words, they decided not to give it a meaning. So, for instance, when we see the word humility, if you remember me talking about that a few weeks ago, and we said the Greek word pointed to the reality that this word actually means more in-depthly this thing.

And it is our English understanding of a word that correlates to that, that helps us to better understand what's happening. That's a translation. A transliteration is when they just put the word in there and sound it out in the Greek for you.

So, for instance, holy is agios in the Greek. Sometimes, you know, if you're transliterating a word, it might say, you know, Christians are agios. Nobody knows what agios is unless they study the Greek, but that's a transliteration.

Same thing here happening with baptism. Baptism here is the word baptisma, and it's derived from the lemma baptizo. And the meaning of this word is not obscure. The meaning of this word is not debatable.

The meaning of this word is not something that is hard to get at. It is littered throughout the New Testament. It was used in the Old Testament in the Septuagint. Not to mention that, but it was used elsewhere in antiquity in other Greek writings.

Imagine that. People who lived in and around Ephesus and Rome used language that would have been understood. And so the word actually means to immerse. It means to submerge. It means to dip utterly and fully.

These are all definitions that you can find with just a cursory glance at a Greek lexicon. Now, of course, people who disagree with the type of baptism we are arguing for would try to nuance this word dip to death and wind up actually obliterating the definition altogether.

But this is so true, in fact, that John Calvin even said in his commentary on the passage, this word baptized simply means to immerse, to plunge, and to absorb. In Greek antiquity it actually was used of fabric that would be dipped in ink, and it would absorb all of that ink that it would be dipped into.

So we must start with this understanding that baptizing, or the word baptism, is rooted in the idea of immersion, dipping, plunging, utterly, and fully. That's what it means syntactically. But of course, as I was saying previously, that's not the end of the story.

In chapter 29, in paragraph 1, we are given a definition of what baptism is. The London Baptist Confession gives us this definition, and it is wonderful. It says, baptism is an ordinance of the New Testament ordained by Jesus Christ to be unto the party baptized, a sign of his fellowship with him in his death and resurrection, of his being engrafted into him, of remission of sins, and of giving up into God through Jesus Christ to live and walk in a newness of life.

Now that's a pretty thorough answer as to what baptism is. And if you missed a lot of that, we're going to revisit it, so don't feel like you missed the world. As we begin to think about this, I want to state a few things.

Firstly, that this shows us that baptism is an ordinance. Now, the confession is not the scriptures, and my aim here is not to simply exegete the confession. It's to prove the confession to be biblically accurate.

And those are two different things. The confession is not our Bible, but it teaches what the Bible teaches, and I want to show that to be true. And as we consider that, the first thing I said is, baptism is an ordinance.

It is an ordinance. Now, this differs from the Westminster Confession of Faith, although the Westminster Confession of Faith does use the word ordinance interchangeably with the word sacrament. So you may remember this word, sacrament, being spoken of, and I like that word.

As a matter of fact, the Baptists liked that word as well. They would oftentimes use it interchangeably as well, especially in writings that existed outside of the confession of the 17th century. And so, sacrament or ordinance is seemingly inconsequential to a degree.

But it is obvious that the reason that Baptists chose this word ordinance is because they believed that it was more than just something that we should do. It was actually a command of God. Now, of course, I'm not trying to misrepresent my Presbyterian brothers and sisters, because I think that they might and would oftentimes agree with such a statement, but the thing about confessions, especially when you write them in ways that disagree with some of your contemporaries, you want to be polemical in the way that you write it.

And that is that the Baptists were really trying to help us understand that this was not an option. This was ordained by God, and that we must take it seriously. But what does baptism mean? Not only in its historical context, that it's an ordinance, and not only that it has these undertones in its definition, but what does it actually mean here, right?

The reason that people, when they were translating the Bible in the past, and I don't have time to get into this fully, is because there was a lot of debate about baptism, on whether or not it should be a believer's baptism only, or be given to infants, and the translators thought, well, the best way around this issue is to just not translate the word, right?

Because what they didn't want to do is translate it in a way that would betray the biblical text itself. They don't want to add to it, so they didn't want to say it meant something it didn't mean. It's commendable.

But they also didn't want to, essentially, pick a side, or make people think that they were picking a side, and so they chose to use a transliteration. But in context, we must ask, what does baptism actually mean here?

Not just what does it mean in its definition, or that it's an ordinance, but what does it mean here? Well, it certainly means, first and foremostly, that it is a beautiful and breathtaking illustration of robust biblical realities.

Robust biblical realities. We're trying to ascertain what is actually behind mode and recipients, and we need to understand this is a symbolic ordinance and not a saving ordinance, and we will get to that more in a moment, but it is one that is completely and utterly pointed in a direction that is not you or I.

But we are caught up into it by our unification with the Lord Jesus Christ. So we also need to understand, if we look at our definition again of the London Baptist Confession of Faith, that it is a sign of sinners' fellowship or union with Christ.

If you look back at the definition I gave you on the London Baptist Confession found in chapter 28 in paragraph 1, it says that baptism is a sign of his fellowship with him. There's two people being spoken about there.

The Christian and Christ. It's fellowship with him or union with him. This is a truth that is littered throughout the entirety of the book of Ephesians. This idea that we are, if we are a Christian, saved by the triune God of the Bible, united to him by faith.

We are hidden in him. We have put him on. This phrase, in Christ, is essentially the moniker that illustrates this truth for us. And it is the key theme, if we could say that, of the book of Ephesians.

In the book of Ephesians, this phrase, in Christ, or its various variations, in him, in the Lord, etc., are used extensively and without apology. So much so that it is used 29 times in just six short chapters.

In Christ is used 12 times, most of that being in the first 14 verses of the letter. In him is used eight times when it is referring to Christ. In the Lord, six times. And in him, three times. It is important that we understand that being baptized is reflecting the reality that we are all in Christ.

We have been brought into Christ, and of course the argument being made in context is body. But how do we make sense of such an assertion? I think if we look at 1 Corinthians chapter 10, 1 through 4, it's going to help us.

I mean, Ephesians has already helped us along these lines as it pertains to Christ, covering our sin, and all of these sorts of things. But here, Paul says something very interesting. He says, I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they were drinking from a spiritual rock which followed them, and this is a very important piece of it, and that rock was Christ.

Right? No matter if you were in the Old Testament or in the New Testament times, you were saved by one person, and one person only in his name is Jesus Christ. Amen? Amen. But you see here, it says something interesting, that these Israelites who had passed through the Red Sea had been baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.

What in the world does that mean? Certainly, there is one name in whom we are baptized, and that is, according to Matthew 28, the triune God of the Bible, or in other scriptures, use Jesus in his name we are baptized, because he is the one who makes salvation possible, and it's him who we are united to, and so there must be a way that we can think about this word baptism that is salvific, especially as it pertains to Christ, but also much different and more profound.

Not that salvation can be more profound, but that the idea here of union with Christ is bound up in the idea of baptism. So when it says here that these Israelites were baptized into Moses, what they were saying, or what Paul was saying rather, is that these Israelites were transferred from the sphere of slavery in the land of Egypt, and now have been thrust into the people of God by the power of God, and we're now walking in freedom underneath the leadership of Moses, that they were one with the people of God, and they were moving along with the people of God, and God's Word and God's presence invaded their space.

So it's being completely engrafted into the entire thing. In the same way, when we are baptized into Christ Jesus, we are transferred out of the sphere of this world, that we are transferred from being governed by the flesh, and being tempted by the devil, into Christ's sphere.

So when we are baptized, we are baptized, being unified to Christ, and put into his sphere, out of Satan's leadership, and underneath Christ's leadership, headship, and care. And this way, the book of Hebrews makes the case that Jesus is a better Moses, and we of course are grafted into the body of Christ, much like Israel was grafted into the people.

Of Yahweh. But it's more specific than that, because it's not only that we are in fellowship with this Christ, we're also in fellowship with this Christ, particularly as it pertains to his death and resurrection.

Right? And we've talked about this in a lot of different ways, especially over the last couple weeks, when we talked about the content of our faith, the gospel of Jesus Christ. And baptism is simply a symbolic rehearsal of the very gospel itself, particularly as it pertains to the substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ.

And why do we believe that? We believe that because Jesus told us that. Firstly, in Luke chapter 12, verse 49, Jesus begins to say something that honestly is pretty hardcore and helpful. He says this, I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled.

But I have a baptism to undergo, Jesus says. And how distressed I am until it is finished. Do you think that I came, Jesus says, to grant peace on the earth? I tell you, no, but rather division. For from now on, five members of one household will be divided.

These against two, and two against three. They will be divided, father against son, and son against father, mother against daughter, and so on and so forth. And he was saying also to the crowds, when you see a cloud rising in the West, immediately you say, a shower is coming, and so it happens.

And when you see south wind blowing, you say, it will be a hot day. And it happens. You hypocrites, you know how to examine the appearance of the earth and the sky, but why do you not examine this present time?

Jesus is essentially saying, I've come to do some things, but before I do that, I have to undergo a baptism. I have to undergo a baptism. And I am distressed, he says, until it is finished. Of course, this baptism is the baptism of his death, that he would drink down to the dregs the wrath of Almighty God.

It is in reference to the cup that he will have to drink that he prays not to drink in the garden of Gethsemane before his crucifixion. And if you remember, after he suffers this substitutionary death on the cross, he cries out and he says, well, it is finished.

What is finished? Atonement. The drinking of that cup. The baptism that he was to undergo. Not only that, but Paul said it in Romans chapter 6, verse 36. Romans 6, verses 3 through 6, he says, or do you not know that all of us, speaking of Christians, were baptized into Christ Jesus, were baptized into his death.

You weren't baptized into water. You weren't baptized with a second blessing by the Holy Spirit. You were baptized into Christ's death. Therefore, it says, we were buried with him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in a newness of life.

For if we have become united with him in the likeness of his death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of his resurrection, knowing this, that our old man was crucified with him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin.

Paul here is picking up on Jesus' imagery that he gave us in Luke chapter 12, and also being led by the Holy Spirit, confirms that, as a matter of fact, baptism is about a spiritual reality, where we are spiritually united to Christ's death, and we are unified with what it achieved, and with him personally.

And to put a finer point on this, it means particularly that there is a transfer of headship. You see in Romans chapter 6, this portion of Scripture that we just read, it does not exist in a vacuum, it is in context.

And in Romans chapter 5, verse 12 through 16, there is this lengthy discussion as to what Jesus' death, an act of obedience, accomplished. Namely, a transfer in authority, where we were once under Adam's headship, we are now under Christ's headship.

It says in verse 12 of chapter 5, through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned. For until the law, sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed where there is no law.

Nevertheless, death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over those who had not sinned, in the likeness of the trespass of Adam, who was a type of him who is to come. Adam is a type of him who is to come, right?

He is the second Adam. Jesus Christ is the second Adam who set right what went wrong in the garden. Where Adam failed, Jesus succeeded. Where he thrust his posterity into sin, Jesus gathers and engulfs his people in a newness of life, where they are forgiven of their sin and their trespass.

This is huge. If you don't understand this, you don't understand the gospel, and you certainly will not understand baptism. Because Jesus is not only a type of one to come, but a better version of the one to come.

As it says later on in the passage, this gift is not like that which came through the one who sinned. For the one who had the one hand, the judgment arose from the transgression, resulting in condemnation.

But on the other hand, in other words, Jesus, the gracious gift, arose from many transgressions, resulting in justification. Justified because of Jesus' perfect work on the cross. He died that we might be purchased for God and be seen as perfect, no longer underneath the bondage of sin because of Christ's perfect righteousness.

Secondarily, baptism points to the penalty-absorbing nature and sin-cleansing nature of his work. We can see this in Ezekiel chapter 36, for example. Starting particularly in verse 25, when the new covenant is promised.

By the way, it wasn't already made clear, and I don't think it was, so my apologies. It's obvious that baptism is the sign of new covenant realities, is the sign of the new covenant. Everybody agrees on this point.

Though it's not a seal. It's not a seal as our Presbyterian brothers and sisters would assert. There's no mention of this in the Bible anywhere. The only time a seal is mentioned in the New Testament, it speaks of the Holy Spirit, and we already looked at that in Ephesians chapter 1.

It is a sign, though, and the sign points to the reality that Ezekiel 37 is speaking of. It says, then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean. I will clean you from all your uncleanliness and from all your idols.

Moreover, I will give you a new heart. So what happens when Christ sprinkles a heart with clean water? It changes. You get a new one. It says, you put on a new spirit within you, and I will remove the heart of stone from you and your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.

I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes, and you will be careful to do my judgments. This is almost a parallel passage of Jeremiah 31, 31 and following, which also promises the New Covenant.

This just helps us to understand that this water piece is involved and helps us to understand that it is actually cleansing as well, symbolically. That Jesus' death is cleansing, and we are brought into union with him and his death and what it accomplished.

It also means regeneration. It imparts new life. It imparts new life. We see that in Ezekiel 37. We see that in Jeremiah 31. We have seen this union with Christ being a reality that imparts new life as we work through Ephesians chapter 2, especially as we looked at verse 4, which taught us that in Christ we are begotted, right?

We are given a special merit. We are given a special bit of grace, supernatural grace from God that saves us, and so it remains that we are imparted new life. And that is also part of the definition, right?

Not only is it a sign of this fellowship with him in his death and resurrection of his being and grafted into him, union with Christ, of remission of sins. Oh, this is huge. It is a cleansing unification, and this is important to distinguish because there are people who believe in what's called baptismal regeneration.

That is that the water itself, the sprinkling itself, actually is the regenerating. But that's damnable heresy, and it's not even worth combating because the church has been unanimously agreed upon this since we became Protestant.

This is a horrible symptom of the Roman Catholic Church, and for some reason it seems to be making somewhat of a comeback, and I don't know why that is, but I wish it would stop. But what we need to understand, and this is really what you need to take home at this juncture, baptism is not merely sprinkling water on somebody or dipping them in even to water.

It is the plunging of a soul into the grace of Almighty God that is all-encompassing. It is an immersion into the death and a resurrection of our Savior. We are raised, remember we talked about this, not only are we baptized into his death, but we are resurrected to a newness of life, and Ephesians, a little bit earlier in chapter 1 in the 1718 area, helps us to really understand that it's even bigger than that because we ascend to Christ in the heavenly places.

Now, we've been talking about baptism, and we should, but one of the things that we've skipped over is this word, one. One. And that helps us govern how we think about baptism as well. No matter how many denominations there are, no matter how many disagreements there are, no matter who's right, I think it's me, obviously, and people who disagree with me think it's them.

If there is one, there's one right answer to this thing. And the answer to that question is a unifying reality. And so you must ask the question, what are we united by? Are we united by the idea of a word?

Are we united by simply a church building in a community? Or are we unified in the gospel of Jesus Christ and what it has accomplished on our behalf? When Paul says one baptism here, he reinforces the very Putin idea that there is only one way of entering the covenant.

There's not multiple ways. I want to say that again. There's not multiple ways. And, of course, this bumps up against some of the people that would disagree with us. They would say, yes, grown-ups or adults need to be united in their repentance of sin and confession of Jesus and be baptized, but it's not true of infants.

Well, it's created a second baptism in a myriad of different ways, but more on that in a moment. Children, would you look at me for just a second? I know I've been plowing through some of this content, but I do want to make sure that you understand at least one thing.

Baptism, that is when you see somebody being dipped in water, immersed in water, put underwater by the pastor, and they're brought back up. What that's doing is it's giving us a picture. It's like a cartoon or a TV show in the most reverential way possible that is showing us what actually happens to us when we believe in Jesus, when he changes our hearts, when he saves us from Satan, sin, death, and hell.

And so it's a beautiful and awesome and amazing thing to witness. It's an amazing thing to do when you are ready to do it. As a matter of fact, it's a command from the Lord. Now, that's essentially the sermon.

That's essentially the content that I have for you as it pertains to baptism, because I believe that that's what it's about. When it says there is one baptism, it's saying that there is one unified reality, that we are, in fact, in the church, in the covenant, we are unified to the Lord Jesus Christ, and particularly united to his work, his death that was lived for you, or his life that was lived for you, his death that was died for you, and that we are united to him in such a way that it causes us to be shielded from God's wrath and to walk in a newness of life.

And baptism is a picture of this motif that we are, right, dead in sin, in our transgressions, we're in the grave, and we have been brought to a newness life by the power of the Spirit as the gospel is proclaimed, and that's a beautiful, transcendent, spiritual reality that I think most of us, no matter if you are convinced of a more paedo-baptist covenant theology or a baptist one, can get on the same page of, at least to some degree.

Now, the second part of this, I want to discuss some implications of what I just said, because the truth is we can't leave it there, especially with all of the questions surrounding us in the Reformed community, and also in church history, and also questions that we might have as well.

Well, why can't infants be baptized, and why are you arguing for this particular idea or definition of baptism? Well, the confession answers this question as well. So we're going to ask the question, firstly, who is baptism for?

Right, we've seen what it is and what it means, namely that we are united to Christ, we are immersed in the grace that he has given to us, and we are one in him, and that we have been ultimately baptized into Christ, which means we've been baptized into his body, which is Paul's point here.

He's the head, we're the body. But in chapter 29, in the second paragraph of the confession, it says these are who baptism is for. Those who do actually profess repentance towards God, faith in, and obedience to our Lord Jesus Christ, these are the only proper subjects of this ordinance, this commandment ordained by God.

In other words, it's not to be given to men and women who just happen to be deficient in age, but rather those who have been united to Christ, right? It's his death that we've been united to. And Christ does not mediate for those outside of union with him.

So what must be said is that baptism is for repentant sinners who have placed their faith in Christ and desire to be obedient to him. Or you know, the other way, only those united to Christ are baptized into Christ.

Now, does that mean that Christians can't give a false profession and be dipped in ineffectual water? No, that can happen all the time. People give false professions of faith all the time. People are deceived all the time.

The Bible makes this irrefutably clear. But that is not the problem of baptism. That is not the problem. That's not God's problem. That's the problem of the one who is deceived or is deceiving. But baptism is to represent an inward reality.

An inward reality that is not given to us by the water, but the Word. And what I mean by that is, 1st Peter says in chapter 1 verse 23 through 25, for you have been born again. You've been regenerated, in other words.