Our New Identity: Baptism by Means of the Holy Spirit
Romans 6:1–2
Romans Lesson #067
July 26, 2012
www.deanbibleministries.org

Romans 6 is dealing with our identity in Christ in relation to our spiritual life. Here Paul lays the foundation for how a justified (declared righteous) believer can live a righteous life. And the foundation for that is understanding our identity in Christ. Romans 7 deals with the problem of trying to accomplish the goal of living as a slave to righteousness on our own without dependence upon the Holy Spirit. Most of Romans 7 is Paul’s personal story, his attempt to try to grow spiritually and be spiritual on the basis of just obeying the law, or just basically being moral, being religious. But that didn’t cut it; he couldn’t do it on his own because of the power of the sin nature that was still in his life. He didn’t have the means to really impact that even though that power was broken. Then we get to Romans 8 which gives the solution: that the real issue is that walk by means of the Holy Spirit, that the Christian life is a supernatural life built on understanding that relationship with God the Holy Spirit. It starts in Romans 6:1-4 with understanding our new identity in terms of the baptism by means of God the Holy Spirit.

In these first two verses Paul is using a time-honored pedagogical technique. You ask questions. If all of this is true, Paul says, and if God’s grace came because people become so corrupt and sinful in Adam, then let’s go sin some more and we can get more grace. And there are people who think that way: that God’s grace is so great it really doesn’t matter what I do. That is called licentiousness or antinomianism. It ignores consequences and it ignores the fact that we are not supposed to do it because we haven’t been saved so that we can abuse grace.

Grace means that we have freedom. We have freedom to obey and we have freedom to disobey. God is not making us obey. There are going to be consequences from bad decisions and disobedient decisions but God doesn’t make us; we have freedom.

Romans 6:1 ^NASB “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase?” What is interesting is the word he uses (“continue”) is a compound word intensification of the basic verb MENO—he adds an intensifying preposition to it, EPIMENO. MENO is the word Jesus used (predominant in the Gospel of John) in the upper room discourse when He said: “If you abide in Me and My word abides in you …” It is that word “abide,” and it shows up again in the first epistle of John. It is a word that describes fellowship. We remain in fellowship with Christ. There is almost a tongue-in-cheek here that when he uses MENO what is going to come up in a person’s mind is the idea of fellowship. But sin is antithetical to the idea of fellowship and so he sort of catches the attention and says, “Are you going to abide in sin?”—instead of abiding in Christ. He is making a subtle point there. The word for “increase” is a word that means to grow, to increase, be prosperous, something that is expanding a lot. So we are not going to get more grace by sinning more.

Paul completely rejects that. Romans 6:2 ^NASB “May it never be! ...” He uses a word that is a very strong denial of something, e.g., Absolutely not! –ME GENOITO. Then he raises the real pedagogical point in the next question: “… How shall we who died to sin still live in it?” What he is saying is that if you are a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ you are a dead-to-sin type of person. That is your new identity. You are the kind of person for whom sin has no place in your life. That is who we are at the instant of salvation. So Paul is asking, “How shall we who are these dead-to-sin kind of people continue to live in sin?” That is not who we are. Peter calls it the dog returning to his vomit. The “died to sin” is an aorist tense verb—past tense; “still live in it” is a future active indicative. So the question is: You died in the past, so why in the world in your future are you going to live in it?

The problem we have is this thing called a sin nature. The sin nature has a core motivator, and that is a lust pattern. There are all kinds of lusts. We are living in a world where there is an incredible amount of unhappiness, not just because of the way the world is but because we are divorced from God. And there is something in the very core of our being that says that the life I am experiencing isn’t the life that it should be. Every one of us has had that experience at some point or another. Because we are living in a fallen world where is this great vacuum because of the absence of God we are constantly trying to find things that are going to fill it up. That’s the lust pattern. We are looking for something in creation to fill the void that has been left by the loss of that relationship with God. This is what motivates everybody and it produces the actions in our lives. We can go in one of two different directions. We can produce that which is morally good and we can produce that which we understand to be sin. It all comes out of the sin nature. From the time we are born to the time we trust in Jesus Christ as our savior the only thing motivating us is our sin nature. It can’t come out of any other place because we are spiritually dead and corrupt.

We also have trends. One trend is towards asceticism, that somehow I am going to make God happy with me by the things that I give up or the things that I do. That is asceticism and legalism, and this can lead to moral degeneracy like the Pharisees in the New Testament. Or there is the other trend toward licentiousness and lasciviousness. And some of us are masters at one second running one way and the next second running the other way. That is just the complexity of our sin nature. Then we like to cover it up with the façade of how sweet and wonderful we are.

This sin nature is what controls us and it produces habits. From the time we are about two seconds old we start developing habits where this sin nature is helping us satisfy what we think we need to be happy. It pushes all those lust pattern buttons and all the trends, and everybody is a little different—for a lot of different reasons and different factors—but this is what is at the core of it. And it controls us; it is the boss. Then we trust Jesus as savior and something happens; the boss now has competition. The competition is that we have a new nature because we are born again, we are regenerate, we have a new life in Christ and we have new power source that is more powerful than the sin nature, and that is the Holy Spirit. But we have to make a choice as to who is in control. Understanding that is what Romans 6 is all about.

Romans 6:3 ^NASB “Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? [4] Therefore we have been 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 newness of life.”

As soon as they see the word “baptism” people get into a bit of a quagmire because this has been such a battleground for so many years that people automatically think of water baptism. But that is not what this is talking about. It isn’t because of the phraseology here related to what we are baptized into. The Greek verb is BAPTIZO, a word that didn’t get translated, it got transliterated. The reason it was transliterated was because nobody had the courage to translate it because it would create a huge ecclesiastical battle. They decided to just transliterate it and then nobody would know what they were talking about. If you translated it you would translate with the word “immerse,” and by the time this came along people were not immersing anymore, they were sprinkling. In verse 6 it is used twice in an aorist passive verb. That is important because the aorist again is referring to something that has happened in the past, and the passive means that we received this action. It is something that is done to us; it is not something we do for ourselves. So in verse 3 somebody baptized us but it doesn’t tell us who did. Then this new place that we are put into is in Christ Jesus.

The word BAPTIZO means to dip, plunge, immerse. That is its basic dictionary meaning. But in its action the word was used in a figurative sense to talk about identifying someone with a particular course of action of a person or an object or a new status in life. It was often used as an initiation rite. For example, in Judaism if you were a male Gentile and you wanted to completely convert to Judaism then you had to go through circumcision and then there had to be an initial rite of ceremonial purification. It was a baptism. So the idea of ceremonial washings and purifications was not unknown in the ancient world but was very much a part of what was going on there. It signified that you were now identified with something new. In the ancient Greek world they would take the spears of the recruits in the army when they had finished their training and plunge their spears and plunge them into a bucket of pig’s blood, indicating that now this recruit was trained and ready to go out and be a warrior. There was that identification there indicating a progress into a new state.

We diagram this in terms of using two different perspectives of what happens in terms of our relationship with God. One side expresses the eternal realities that we have in Christ and all that God does for us in Christ. At the instant that we trust in Christ we are identified with Christ, placed in Christ by what is called the baptism by means of the Holy Spirit. This is something that happens instantaneously at the moment we are saved. In terms of our experience our relationship with the Holy Spirit is described in terms of the phrases “filling by the Spirit, walking by the Spirit, and walking in light.” Then we have the option of being out of fellowship which is when we sin and are under the control of the sin nature, in carnality. When we sin we are out in carnality and when we confess our sin (1 John 1:9) we are back in fellowship. But we are always identified with Christ no matter whether we are in or out of fellowship. We are always in Christ; we are always indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and those realities never change, they are eternal.

When we talk about baptism there are eight different baptisms. The first three are ritual baptisms which involve water. There is the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist which is a unique, distinct baptism. It wasn’t John’s normal baptism. John was calling people to be baptized for repentance of their sins. Jesus had no sins to repent from, so He was not going through John’s baptism. It was an initiation of Jesus into His new ministry as prophet and priest offering the messianic kingship to the nation Israel. The second category is the baptism of John the Baptist (immersion). Then there is the believer’s baptism which occurs after a person trusts in Christ as savior, and it is a ritual in order to express the reality of what Paul is describing in Romans 6:1–4. Just as communion uses two concrete objects, the bread and the cup, to express the abstract realities of the hypostatic union and substitutionary atonement, so water baptism is a physical, literal ritual that depicts what happens in the spiritual realm of our identification with Christ in His death, burial and resurrection.

There are five real baptisms in the sense that these are baptisms that are not ritual and they don’t involve water, except for the first one which is the baptism of Noah. The ones who got wet died. The ones who were baptized with Noah were dry. Then there is the baptism of Moses. This also involved some water because the Jews who followed Moses through the Red Sea didn’t get wet. They are identified with Moses in his trust in God. The ones who got wet were the Egyptians, and they all were drowned. Then there is the baptism by fire which is the baptism related to judgment which comes at the end of the Tribulation period. The baptism of the cross, which is Christ’s identification with our sins on the cross. Then the baptism by means of the Holy Spirit, which takes place at the instant of salvation. The baptism we are talking about here in Romans 6 is the baptism by the Holy Spirit, because this is the fundamental spiritual reality for the church age believer.