Sermon Cloud

Today I want to talk about baptism.  One of the reasons I want to talk about baptism today is because tomorrow at De Anza Cove we are going to have Kaleo El Cajon’s first baptism.  As we do this baptism, I want you to know what we are doing.  I also know that many of you here who love Jesus have already been baptized and I want you to remember your baptism tonight and as you hear about what baptism symbolizes and the great and deep truths that it proclaims, I want you to rejoice.  Others of you here love Jesus and have already experienced the amazing joy of knowing and resting in him as your only hope for salvation.  However, you have never been baptized.  For you, I want you to listen to what baptism is and to understand how beautiful and important it is and if you truly love Jesus I want you to hear God’s call to be baptized.  Lastly, for those of you who do not know Jesus in the way I am going to talk about today, I want you to listen to how beautiful Jesus is.  I want you to consider the salvation that he offers.  And I want you to know that the amazing promises that we will talk about today are promises that can be yours through believing in Jesus and trusting him and him alone as your only hope.  So, this message is for all of us.

Baptism is such a rich and deep event that I am not going to be able to talk about all that it symbolizes.  Instead, I want to focus on one primary aspect of baptism that I find to be amazingly beautiful.  To set it up we need to understand the context of the people who lived in the Old Testament times.

In the ancient days, water, specifically the sea, was seen as a place of chaos and death.  The Greek word for the deep is Abuson which also means the abyss, or hell.  In Genesis 1:2 we see this understanding of the deep was present from the beginning.  Remember how it reads, “The earth was without form and void and darkness was over the face of the deep.  And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”  We will come back to this again, but it is vital to understand that throughout the ancient world, the sea, the deep, abuson, was a place of chaos and a place of death, a place where no life existed.

There is one other ancient phenomena that is really important to understand. At first this might be confusing and you might wonder why I am giving you all this background, but soon I think you will see just how applicable it is.  One of the amazing and crazy things that God does is speak to his people in ways that they can understand.  He condescends and uses human forms and cultural things to communicate to his people.  We know this is true because he uses language.  It’s not like God speaks Hebrew, like he made up that language and its some heavenly language.  No, people made up Hebrew, just like people made up English etc., but God, when he desired to speak to his people, spoke in their language.  Well, I want to tell you about another cultural phenomena during the ancient days that God used to communicate to the world.  You see back in the day a very common judicial procedure was to have a trial by ordeal.  This isn’t something that God commanded the Jewish people to do, but it was common practice for all the surrounding nations and familiar to them all.  What they would do to see if someone was guilty of a crime if there were no witnesses or if there was a disagreement, is the person would have to face a challenge, often a natural challenge. If he won he would be declared innocent and if he lost often he would be declared guilty and punished at the same time.  One of the most common challenges was called the water ordeal.  In this ordeal a man accused of a crime would be thrown into a rushing river and forced to cross to the other side.  If he did, he was innocent and if he failed he would be declared guilty and punished at the same time since failing to make it across the river meant that he had drowned. 

The idea of the nations was that the gods were in control, and by throwing someone in the river they were basically leaving the judgment up to the gods.  They were basically saying, “We don’t know who is lying and who is telling the truth; the gods know, so lets leave the judgment up to them.”  So, I know what you are thinking.  First you are thinking man were they were messed up back then, that is absolutely crazy.  And then you are also thinking, why on earth am I hearing about this sort of craziness at a church service?  Well, I want to tell you something sweet about our God.  Even though this is crazy, in order to communicate to the ancient world in ways that they would understand, God chose at times to use these types of water ordeals.  Isn’t that amazing?  God took their confused attempts at justice and said I will speak to you in a language that you can understand.  You see this is the message that God was sending when he sent the flood.  He was calling out to the world and he was saying the time for judgment is here.  I am the true God and I do control the water and life and death are in my hands.  And the people had grown so wicked, so corrupt, and they were so full of hatred toward the true God that he came and sent a water ordeal upon them.   

We read about this water ordeal in Genesis 6ff.  It was where the whole world was forced to go through a water ordeal and the innocent were saved in an ark and made it to the other side while the guilty were destroyed.  Now I want to take a moment and show you a few beautiful things about the flood.  Now the reason this is so important is that in I Peter 3:20-21, we see that Peter equates the flood with baptism.  Do you see this?  Our baptism is equated to the flood where eight people were brought safely through the waters. 

At first this might seem strange, that the flood and baptism would be equated.  The flood is usually seen as a terrible example of God’s judgment whereas baptism is something we celebrate.  So, how can the two be equated?  Even though when we think of the flood we usually think of it only in terms of judgment, the Bible is clear that it was far more than just judgment.  In fact, the flood was actually salvation for God’s people, and it was judgment for his enemies.  You might wonder how it could be called salvation, but I will tell you.  After the fall Genesis tells us about two different types of people.  It tells us about the people of God, men like Abel and Seth, and the enemies of God like Cain.  And from the very beginning there was a war between the people of God and the enemies of God.  God told Eve that he would put enmity between her seed and the seed of the serpent and this enmity is first seen when Cain killed his own brother Abel in Genesis 4.  By the time we get to Genesis 6 the entire world had been conquered by the enemies of God, all but one man.  One man named Noah was all that was left.  And he was certainly being threatened by the enemies of God.  They were winning.  The seed of the woman which had at one time been a large number of people had dwindled down to only one man and the seed of the serpent had become one massive army of people against God and the one man who loved God.  To show you just how close to extinction the people of God were, the Bible tells us that Noah preached for 120 years while he built the ark, begging people to come and join him and avoid the judgment of God, but no one would listen.  Can you imagine that?  120 years of preaching, begging people to repent.  He was begging them to come and join him, and all they did was mock him.  All they did was laugh and tell him he was wasting his life building this massive ship.  Can you imagine what that kind of life that would have been?  Can you imagine the persecution?  The fear that your children would be corrupted just like so many before?  If the whole world except for Noah had turned away from God, about how many people had been born to parents who loved God, but had fallen away?  And now only Noah is left.  You need to understand this so that you can see that not only did God judge his enemies by sending a flood, but he also saved his people.  He saved them from their constant persecution.  The flood came to save his people from extinction so that the seed of the woman might remain until God would one day bring the promised messiah to crush the serpent’s head.  We see that the waters of judgment were also waters of salvation, saving God’s people from extinction.  An amazing example of how the same waters could be waters of judgment and waters of salvation is the crossing of the red sea.  Here we see a water ordeal where God’s people make it safely across the water and are declared innocent while the Egyptians were drowned in the water and declared guilty.  For the Israelites, the waters that killed the Egyptians were more than a mere judgment upon them, those waters saved the Israelites.  The Israelites had no chance against the Egyptians.  They had no way to fight them on their own, but God stepped up and judged the Egyptians and saved them.

Now that we see that the waters of judgment can also be waters of salvation, I want us to understand that the reason the flood narrative is so important to us is that Peter tells us in II Peter 3 that the flood is a shadow of the day of the Lord.  What happened in the flood is a picture of what will one day happen again.  Just as God came in the flood and judged his enemies and saved his people, one day soon he will come again and judge his enemies and save his people.  II Peter 3:4ff show us that just like the flood, this judgment will be a surprise.  Just like during the flood, people will be getting married and celebrating and going to work up until the day that God’s final judgment comes.  That’s why the flood is such an applicable story to our lives.  It is so applicable because it is a shadow of the Day of the Lord which the Bible tells us we must prepare ourselves for.  So, what can we learn about preparing ourselves for the day of the Lord from the flood? 

Well, this brings us to one of the most amazing things about the story of the flood.  You see just as the flood is a type or a shadow or symbol of the way that the world will end, so the flood is also a shadow of the way God will save his people.  You see in Genesis that Noah is the only one in all the world that God considers righteous.  He is the only one who was following after him.  He is the only one committed to God above all else.  Now, when it says that Noah was righteous, it does not mean perfect, but it means that he and he alone was trusting in God’s promise to Eve.  He and he alone obeyed God when God spoke.  He built the ark and did everything that God commanded.  But, even though Noah is the only one who is said to be righteous how many people survive the flood?  The Bible says eight people survived the flood.  Hebrews 11:7 says, “By faith, Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household.”  Listen to that.  Noah was the righteous one.  Noah constructed the ark to save his family.  Noah’s obedience is what saved his family.  Nothing is said about his family’s righteousness.  Nothing is said about them, only that they were related to Noah.  Because of Noah’s righteousness, because of his obedience to God through faith, God saved his family from the flood.  Now, it is vital to understand that Noah’s righteousness does not earn him eternal salvation, and Noah’s faith did nothing to eternally save his family, but on the horizontal level, on this typological level, Noah saved his family from the flood by obeying God.  Noah didn’t save his family’s eternal souls or even his own soul by what he did, but he did save his family from the physical threat of the water by building an ark.  The fact is if Noah would have refused to build the ark, his family would have drowned.

All of this was done as a type or a shadow of another greater Noah.  Noah’s righteousness was not good enough to save him eternally, only to save him from the flood.  And Noah’s righteousness could do nothing to gain the eternal salvation for his family; all he could do was extend their life by saving them from the flood.  But Noah was a shadow of another man who would come and preach righteousness.  He was the shadow of another man who would come and this one would perfectly obey God. 

After the flood Noah plants a vineyard, gets drunk and dishonors God and proves to everyone who reads the story who is tempted to think that Noah is the hero that God promised to Eve that he is not.  Noah is not the true hero.  But the man who came from heaven, the one who perfectly obeyed God, he is the true hero.  His name was Jesus.  This one was perfect.  The Bible says that God was pleased with him.  And he, like Noah, came to save his family from the judgment.  He came and obeyed God perfectly and because of his perfect obedience he earned the right to save his family from the eternal judgment of God.  You see his assignment was much harder than Noah’s, just as the salvation he came to bring is much greater.  You see, Noah had to work for 120 years building an ark to save his family, but Jesus had to leave heaven, become a man, live a perfect life, and then to save his family he had to go to the cross and pay for their sins with his own life.  God asked Noah to make an ark to save his family and God asked Jesus to take on the sins of everyone who would ever believe in him and become a part of his family and to pay, on the cross, the penalty of their sin.  And Jesus perfectly obeyed his father.  Jesus went to the cross and, though he was perfect, he paid for the sins of his whole family and was buried.  Then, in vindication of his perfect obedience, God raised Jesus up from the dead, and Jesus was proved righteous because he passed through the judgment of God and made it safely to the other side.  His body did not see decay, the grave could not hold him, but he rose again in triumph having conquered sin, death, and Satan once and for all.  And not only did he conquer them for himself, but just as Noah’s obedience saved his entire family simply because they were related to Noah, so Jesus’ perfect righteousness saves all those who are a part of his family.  Paul tells us in Galatians that now that faith has come “In Christ Jesus you are all sons of God through faith.  For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.  There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.  And if you are Christ’s then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.”

You see, we deserve to die in the waters of God’s wrath.  We are all guilty and we deserve, like the people of Noah’s day, to be swept away and drowned in the just punishment of a holy God.  We cannot bear his justice.  We cannot bear the punishment of our own sins.  So what we see is that Jesus has come and he has given his life on the cross in perfect obedience to his Father so that he might save all those who put their faith in him.  He came to save his people.  He came to be our refuge, to bear in his own body the complete wrath of God.  He came and the ark he built, he built with his own flesh.  The storm of God’s wrath that he endured, he endured in his own body.  All so that we might be brought safely through the waters of God’s just wrath against sin.

When I think of the judgment of God as water, I am able to picture it so much more.  Many of us know what it is like to be surrounded by water, to be dunked underwater and to be unable to breathe.  One of the most frightening experiences for both Abbey and me was white water rafting on the Nile River in class five rapids.  The boat flipped over and we were stuck under the boat, and as we tried to come up, we hit our heads on the boat and couldn’t get up and started to freak out.  It was so scary.  Many of you know what it is like to not be able to breathe under water and how frightening that can be.  It is in this way that water is meant to be symbolic of death and the judgment of God.  You see often it is hard for us to understand the serious nature of the wrath of God.  It’s hard for us to truly realize just how devastating and frightening it is to fall into the hands of a just God.  That is why I find water to be such a helpful symbol of the justice that we deserve.  But what is so amazing is that at the cross, Jesus drowned for us.  On the cross he grew to a point where his legs could no longer lift him and he could not push himself up again and so ultimately, when he grew too weak to push himself up, he suffocated.  He died our death, he bore the judgment of God against our sin, he was swept away in the flood, so that he could protect us.

Whenever I think of the waters of God’s judgment, I think about the tsunami that hit Indonesia a few years ago.  I don’t think about it because I think that God was judging evil people with it, but I think in the tsunami we see the best example of what the flood must have been like and the flood is the best example of what the second coming is going to be like. 

One of the reasons that the tsunami was such a meaningful event to me is that I happened to be in Indonesia visiting my sister when it happened.  I remember getting calls from people seeing if we were okay.  I was on the Island of Borneo and our island did not get hit by the tsunami.  It’s not because we weren’t close to the epicenter of the earthquake; we were far closer then some of the other areas that got hit.  What kept us safe from the tsunami was that there was another island called Sumatra right in front of us.  I believe nearly 200,000 people died on Sumatra.  Borneo did not get hit was because Sumatra took the wave for it.  It stood in their place and it absorbed all the power of the storm.  Being in Indonesia during this time and watching Indonesian news was insane because it was so raw.  It showed the people screaming, lines of parents carrying the bodies of their children and dumping them in a huge hole and screaming and weeping.  It was absolutely devastating to watch.  The pain and suffering, the death that saturated Sumatra was absolutely devastating.  And the people living on the shores of Borneo were safe.  They were safe because the Sumatra had borne their suffering. 

Today I want you to know that Jesus is our Sumatra.  Because of our sin, all of us stand under the just tsunami of God’s wrath.  The wages of sin is death.  We deserve eternal separation from God forever.  But Jesus came down from heaven to bear God’s wrath for us if we will put our trust in him.  He came to be our Sumatra.  He came to absorb the storm we deserved, on the cross he screamed the scream that we should have screamed.  He called out in isolation from God, “My God my God why have you forsaken me.”  That was our cry, but he cried it for us.  He cried it out so that we don’t have to be afraid of the water anymore.  He came to rescue us from sin and death by bearing our sin and dying our death.

So, what does all this have to do with baptism?  Tomorrow, as we walk into the water, we know that the water represents the just punishment of God for our sins that we deserve.  We know that the waters represent death.  And yet, we will walk into them tomorrow.  Unlike the world which flees death as hard and as fast as it can, we will walk into the water tomorrow.  Unlike the world which lives fearing death and trying to distract itself from its inevitability, we will walk into the waters.  But we walk into them willingly and unafraid because we do not walk into them alone.  Isaiah 43 says, “But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel; ‘Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.  When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through the fire you shall not be burned and the flame shall not consume you.  For I am the Lord your God, the Holy one of Israel your Savior.’”  We no longer fear the judgment of God because we do not enter the waters alone.  Jesus has gone before us and even now he goes with us.  The Holy one of Israel, our savior, is by our side and so we are not afraid.

You see our savior has gone before us so that he can now be with us.  He has paved the way through the waters.  Just as God parted the Red sea and led his people safely to the other side, so the torn body of our savior has ripped the veil in two and has made a way for sinners like us to make it safely into the presence of God.  So we enter the water unafraid.  And we don’t just enter the water unafraid, we allow ourselves to go under the water, to the place where we cannot breathe, to the place where we are not in control, and we don’t go under kicking and screaming, we don’t go under fighting.  No, we go under willingly for we have faith.  In going down into the water, we are symbolizing our union with Christ.  We are saying I want to be crucified with Christ so that I no longer live but instead I want Christ to live in me.  We are saying, my life is no longer about me, my happiness, my comfort, my rights, but I want to be a part of Jesus’ family.  I want to join my savior.  I want to be unified with him in every way.  So as we go down into the water, we symbolize our unity with Christ in his death.  This is frightening; that is why we can only do it by faith.  By faith we give up our own rights, we give up trying to earn our own salvation, we give up clinging to both our sin and all of the good things we feel like we have accomplished.  We give it all up at the foot of the cross.  We die to ourselves.  We allow our selfishness to be put to death with the death of our savior.  We declare that Jesus’ death was our death.  And the reason we do this is because we know that if by faith we will unite ourselves with him in his death we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.  Look at Romans 6:5-11. 

This is so beautiful and so applicable to our lives.  By going down into the water, we are symbolizing our death to our slavery to sin.  Our baptism is meant to symbolize the spiritual reality that occurs when we put our trust in Jesus.  We cling to his death as ours.  On the cross he dies our death, he pays for our sins, and he puts to death our old selves that were completely controlled and enslaved by our sinful selfishness.  Paul tells us our old self is put to death on the cross.  This means we can be free.  This means that the sins that used to control you, the sins that made you feel absolutely hopeless, the sins that you just couldn’t help but felt like they were this massive vacuum that sucked you into them over and over again—those sins no longer need to control you.  Your old self, the self that was a slave to them has died with Jesus.  It no longer has mastery over you.  It no longer has any right or claim upon you.  Jesus’ death paid the penalty for all your past sins and it not only paid the penalty but it put to death the power of sin.  You need to hear this.  Jesus’ death doesn’t just pay the penalty of our sin; it destroys the power of sin in our lives.

As we come back up from the waters we symbolize our union with Jesus in his resurrection.  Did you know that the bible says that the same power that raised Christ from the dead is at work for us who believe?  Paul longs to know the power of Christ’s resurrection and he longs to know it in his own life.  Our union with Christ is real.  You see when we are converted there is a very real sense that our old self is put to death.  There is a very real sense that we have been raised from the dead, and born again into a new kind of life.  Listen to what Romans 8:11 says, “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.”  Do you see this?  We are free.  We don’t have to despair anymore.  We don’t have to give up.  We don’t have to be hopeless.  Of course if we are trying to obey God on our own then we will despair, and we will fail, and we ought to grow hopeless.  But when we remember that the part of us that wants to obey God through our own power has been crucified with Jesus, then we are freed from the slavery to sin and empowered by the Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead to obey him.

So, let me tell you what this practically means.  Baptism is important because baptism is meant to remind us of these amazing truths that we know we are so prone to forget.  Baptism is a tangible, physical, event that reminds us of the amazing reality that has taken place within us.  You see baptism is this physical event that we are supposed to remember.  We remember what the water feels like, we remember what it was like to go under, we remember what it was like to come back up and these tangible things are meant to remind us of what has taken place in our lives because of the death and resurrection of our savior.  And one of the reasons baptisms are done publicly is that they are a public declaration that these deep realities are true in you.  You are proclaiming to your community as you are baptized that you are dying to your old self.  You are proclaiming that you are trusting in Jesus alone as your only hope.  You are saying that the sins which once controlled you have been put to death and that your life will now be lived in the power of the resurrection that dwells in you.

Of course all of us still sin don’t we?  Yes, we still sin.  You see even though these things are true we often forget them.  II Peter 1:9 tells us that it is when we forget the truth that we have been forgiven of our past sins that we find ourselves nearsighted and blind and falling into sin.  We sin when we forget the Gospel and so we need all the help we can get to remember the Gospel.  That is one of the reasons baptism is so important.  It is meant to remind us of the Gospel.  And it is a public declaration where you are inviting all those who watch you to hold you accountable.  If you begin to run away from God, if you begin to live a life committed to yourself without any regard for God, then we as God’s people are to come to you and we say with Paul, “Don’t you remember your baptism?  Don’t you remember how you publicly declared to us that you were casting your lot in with Jesus so that your old self was crucified with him and you now live by faith?  Do you remember that?  Please, please, don’t forget your savior.  Don’t forget that he died on the cross for your sins.  Don’t forget that.  Don’t run away from the cross.  Run back to it.  Your old self has been put to death.  It drowned with you.  Don’t you remember when you went under the water?  Your addictions, your slavery to sin, it drowned with you.  Don’t let it come back up.  Don’t let it control you anymore.  Look to the cross.  Remember that at the cross your savior paid for the penalty of your sins and it also destroyed the power of sin over you.  The power of your sin died with him.  Now you can live in newness of life.  Because of what Jesus did for you, you don’t have to live for yourself anymore.  Look at the depths of his love for you.  Look at it and remember how beautiful he is.  Remember the joy of resting in him and him alone.  Remember how he bore the wrath of God that you deserved.  Don’t run away from the cross.  Don’t run away from his protection.  Please, please return to him.  Come back to the cross.  Remember that you have been forgiven of your past sins.  Remember your savior, he is for you, he is enough.  You don’t have to run after sin anymore because your savior is better, and he has offered you himself.  Take him again.  Return to him and rest in his unfailing love.”

Jesus left heaven and came to earth.  He lived a perfect life, the life we were supposed to live but failed, and then he willingly went to the cross.  He went to the cross as our Sumatra.  He went to the cross and bore God’s wrath against sin.  He absorbed it all in his body so that we could cast our lot in with him, cling to him in faith, and say, I want to unite my fate with Christ’s.  I want to be part of his family.  Wherever he is I want to be with him.  Whatever the cost, I am giving up trying to please God on my own.  I am giving up trying to please myself on my own.  I am giving up trying to do anything on my own and I am allowing my independence to be crucified with Jesus.  I am casting my entire hope upon him.  We know we can trust Jesus.  We know that the one who bore the tsunami of God’s wrath will not abandon us during the storms of our life.  Cast yourself upon him.