After we have been “righteoused” by God for our trust in the faith of Jesus Christ our Lord, there needs to be a change in our lives.
Baptism is so important that the Apostle Paul likens our baptism immersion to being put to death with Christ on the cross and being buried with him in his death.
The Torah Class lesson teacher says that in Romans chapter 6 Paul explains that through our immersion (baptism) into his death (that is, we both identify with Christ and we take on the qualities of his death), we are also buried with Him. Death is one thing; burial is another. Burial signals the logical and culturally accepted way to indicate the end of life. It is also the official end of the old life.
So, Believer’s baptism doesn’t only identify us with Christ’s death, but also with His burial. Thus just as His old life was dead and buried, so is our old life (life before salvation) dead and buried. Christ’s death was by means of crucifixion and that has significance in itself. So Believer’s baptism identifies us as symbolically joining Christ on the cross as the means of death, and also of joining Him in the grave as the finality of death. Understanding this different symbolism between death and burial will help us to see what Paul is getting at as we move along in this chapter.
The last half of verse 4 explains that the reason for our baptism and identification with Christ’s death and burial is in order for us to be able to take the next step, which is to identify with Christ’s resurrection from the dead. So just as the Father resurrected Jesus from the dead into a brand new life, so it will be for us.
It is important that we understand that this resurrection that Believers experience is twofold: first, we are resurrected into a new quality of life in the here and now. Second, in the future we will be bodily resurrected and enter an entire new glorified physical state, just as Christ did when He was resurrected. So the change we undergo upon baptism into Christ is partly immediate and partly in the future.
Paul asserts that when our “old self” was put to death on the cross (that is, in
baptism we have joined Christ on the cross) that is the moment when everything that caused us to sin is laid waste and so we are no longer slaves to sin. The old self means all of us; the whole person. Every aspect of who we were that represents all the effects of fallen man as caused by Adam is involved. But we must not also assume that Paul is saying that our old self
no longer exists; in some mystical way that old self lingers on to be a challenge to us all of our days. These old bodies, so fragile and subject to time, will continue on until our death; we don’t emerge from the cleansing waters of baptism with a new body. Death in Christ, just as resurrection in Christ, is a process: some now, some later. So we must not be surprised when temptation at times still wins out. But the best news for us is that we are no longer slaves to sin; or, from the Jewish view of Paul’s time, no longer is the evil inclination our master to which we are its slave. We have been liberated to be able to respond to God and the good inclination within us.
The mechanism for the change we undergo that Paul is speaking of is our daily renewal by the Holy Spirit. It is the transformation from our own old carnal minds to the mind of Christ. Our old evil inclinations slowly give way to good inclinations and as we grow in this way, so does our hope of the glory to come when we will be clothed with a new spiritual body like Jesus has. Paul called this a mystery (secret) hidden from those in the past and he calls it “Christ in You, the hope of Glory”.
To give each day a good start in our renewal, please open God’s Word and read something that touches your heart and deepens your love for God and the blessing will be a change in you that day that stays with you.
May the God we love bless you and yours.