THE JEWISH ROOTS TO A BELIEVER’S BAPTISM BY IMMERSION
If you have not been baptized with true believer’s Baptism, you’re in one of these categories. Either you haven’t been taught correctly, you aren’t willing to humble yourself. It doesn’t matter to you. You refuse to be baptized because you don’t want to put your life on record that way or you’re hiding in the church as a non-believer. Apart from that, I can’t figure any reason or any category where we could place you. So I want to help you to understand the importance of Baptism.
When a Gentile came along and wanted to become a proselyte, or wanted to become a worshiper of Jehovah, of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the true and living God, the Creator and the Redeemer, he would go through a three-stage ceremony.
First was called Melah.
This was the painful part, circumcision, the unique sign of the people of God to demonstrate in symbol their identification with God’s people. It was even more than that. They needed to demonstrate in circumcision that they were sinful. And listen carefully, there is no place on the human body in which the evidence of our sinfulness is more profound than in the reproductive area because if you ever question the sinfulness of man and woman, all you have to do is look at what they produce, nothing but more sinners. Circumcision, then, was a way to ceremonially demonstrate not only that you belong to the people of God, but that you needed a soul cleansing at a profound level. A Gentile would have to go through that. Not easy to say I want to belong to the people of God and worship the true God, melah.
Then there was Tebalaw
That was the second aspect of the ceremony, immersion in water. That’s right, immersion in water. Why? To demonstrate they were dead as to the old life. It was a kind of water burial. They were dead to the old life, apart from God’s Word, apart from God’s truth, apart from God’s promises, apart from God’s people, and that old life was buried and they had risen into a new life and a new family.
And then there was Corban
That was the third phase when an animal was sacrificed. The blood of that animal was sprinkled on the person, on the Gentile, symbolizing the need for forgiveness of sins, provided through the death of a substitute. That substitute would be eventually the Lord Jesus Christ.
So there was a proselyte baptism, very, very familiar to the people in Jerusalem and Judea.
By the time we come then to the New Testament, they are familiar with immersion. They know what it is to be baptized. They know it is connected to coming to worship the true God. It is a symbol of the death of the old life, and the beginning of a new life. It is not surprising to them, then when John the Baptist appears. He is the last of the Old Testament prophets, and he begins his ministry by calling for baptism. And it’s an amazing thing because all these people are coming to him, the gospels tell us all Judea was coming out to him. And these masses of people were being baptized because John was saying the Messiah is coming, the Kingdom is coming, you must repent, you must be ready for the Messiah and the Kingdom.
You need to be washed. You need to be cleansed. You need to be prepared for the Messiah’s arrival. And he was calling on them to repent and be baptized, and listen to this, to literally view themselves as if they were Gentiles, as if they were outside the covenant, outside the Kingdom, aliens of God, strangers to the promises. And they prided themselves on being the people of God.
They prided themselves on being the Jews. It was for them enough that they were Jewish. God was bound to love them and embrace them forever in His Kingdom just because they were Jewish, they thought. That wasn’t John’s message. John’s message was you need to view yourself as if you were an alienated Gentile outside the covenant, outside the promises, under judgment. This was a bitter pill for them to swallow.
But they came and they were baptized with a proselyte baptism. John preached repentance from sin and a call to righteousness, to be ready for the Messiah; called for people to turn from iniquity to holiness, to die to the old life, and to come into a new life.
And there was no better outward symbol for that then what they were familiar with, baptism—to testify that they were willing to make that dramatic confession of their alienation and turn to God in righteousness.
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