The Flood and the Table

THE FLOOD AND THE TABLE

What the Bible teaches about the sacraments

By Pastor Brian Wilbur

Date: March 15, 2026

Series: The Basics of the Christian Faith

Note: Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION

The last nine weeks have flown by, and we now find ourselves in the tenth sermon of this Basics of the Christian Faith series. This morning’s message is about the sacraments of the new covenant. They may be called sacraments or ordinances or tangible signs or visual signposts or ritual enactments of the new covenant. Whatever we may call them, they call for our active engagement with the truth of the gospel, and they direct us to meet with Jesus and have fellowship with Him.

Church historian Michael Haykin remarks that “baptism is the doorway into the Church.”[1] Indeed, baptism is the front door into the realities of the new covenant, the new relationship that God has established with repentant human beings through Jesus Christ. “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” (Acts 2:38) So baptism is connected to the initial establishment of a new relationship with the living God through faith in Jesus Christ.

If baptism is the front door into the realities of the new covenant, then the Lord’s Supper is the dining room table to which we return time and again in order to be nourished and renewed in our relationship with the Lord. The totality of our Christian life is to be characterized by trusting in Jesus and by feasting on His steadfast love, and we express this faith in a particular way every time we come to the table.

In this sermon, I’d like to discuss these New Testament ordinances by anchoring the discussion in the Old Testament and by considering how God brings home the reality of His promises to us.

SOME LESSONS FROM THE OLD TESTAMENT

The Noahic Covenant

When God enters into covenant with people, the heart of the covenant is the promises that God makes to the people with whom He is entering into a covenant relationship. In other words, God makes a promise. But instead of leaving the promise as a bare word, He typically gives a tangible sign that bears witness to the promise. We see this pattern of ‘promise’ and ‘tangible sign’ in Genesis 9, when God made a covenant with humanity and all of creation after the flood:

“Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, “Behold, I establish my covenant with you and your offspring after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the livestock, and every beast with you, as many as came out of the ark; it is for every beast of the earth. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh. And the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.”” (Genesis 9:8-16)

The covenant itself is a promise: never again shall “the waters… become a flood to destroy all flesh.” That promise was then put into the form of a sign as a rainbow in the sky. The sign of the rainbow was meant to be a visual reminder of the promise given. God says, “I will see it [the bow in the clouds] and remember”, not because He is prone to forgetfulness, but exactly the opposite, because He is pledging His faithfulness: every time He sees the rainbow, He will continue to call to mind and enact the promise that He made. But He is telling us all this for our benefit, so that we ourselves would remember the promise that He made, so that we ourselves would live in the conscious awareness of His big sky promise of perpetual mercy to sinful humanity. And though we ourselves may only see a handful of rainbows each year, the fact of the matter is that rainbows occur on a nearly daily basis somewhere on earth, and so it is that God is perpetually mindful of the mercy that He pledged to the descendants of Noah.

The covenant announced to Noah not only illustrates the relationship between covenant promise and covenant sign, but also shows how the sign itself is fittingly related to the nature of the promise. The promise is that the “the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.” Remember that at the onset of the great flood, it rained for “forty days and forty nights” (Genesis 7:4). The waters were relentless, and thus one assumes that the sky above was dark and ominous for this forty-day period. But after the flood, God pledged to never permit the waters to become this relentless ever again. Instead, the wise and merciful God ordained that the light of the sun would shine through droplets of water, producing a beautiful panorama of color, to convey that the waters would be restrained, and not only restrained but constrained into a light-refracting display of beauty, thereby showing in a little miniature drama that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not overcome it. Do you see? God’s promise of mercy is over all that He has made, and God’s sign of mercy is over all that He has made, and this mercy of God is beautiful to our eyes.

Now that may be more than you wish to know about Genesis 9, but it is I think a helpful introduction to the concept of sacraments. It is God’s standard operating procedure to give tangible signs – visual signposts – that represent the promise He has made.

In the case of the rainbow, there was nothing for humanity to do in order to perform the sign. God unilaterally performs this sign: He is the One who “[brings] clouds over the earth” and “[sets His] bow in the cloud”. He does it, not us. We only behold the sign and, if we have our wits about us, allow the sign to be a signpost to the promise that stands behind it. And then, with joy in our heart and a smile on our face, we remember that our preservation upon this fallen earth is a gift of divine mercy. Since this Noahic covenant (as it is often called) is a general covenant with all of humanity, it makes sense that God didn’t call upon us to perform the sign.

The Abrahamic Covenant

But in the covenants that God makes with the particular people that He is redeeming, He does call upon them to perform the sign. So when God established His covenant with Abraham in order to make Abraham exceeding fruitful and to be the personal Redeemer God to Abraham’s offspring, He called upon the community to perform the sign upon its male members: “You shall be circumcised in the flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you.” (Genesis 17:11) Israelites had to see to it that all male children, when they were eight days old, were circumcised.

The Israelite Covenant

In due course, God established His special covenant with Israel. Israel continued to have the sign of circumcision.

They also had the sign of observing the Sabbath every seven days:

“You are to speak to the people of Israel and say, ‘Above all you shall keep my Sabbaths, for this is a sign between me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I, the LORD, sanctify you…. Therefore the people of Israel shall keep the Sabbath, observing the Sabbath throughout their generations, as a covenant forever. It is a sign forever between me and the people of Irael that in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested and was refreshed.’” (Exodus 31:13, 16-17)

The Passover meal, immediately followed by the weeklong feast of unleavened bread, also functioned as a tangible sign of the special covenant relationship that the Lord had graciously established with Israel. We don’t have time to probe the details now, but of the Passover meal Moses said, “You shall observe this rite as a statute for you and for your sons forever.” (Exodus 12:24) And of the feast of unleavened bread, Moses said, “And it shall be to you as a sign on your hand and as a memorial between your eyes, that the law of the LORD may be in your mouth. For with a strong hand the LORD has brought you out of Egypt.” (Exodus 13:9) It is in the context of the Passover meal that Jesus had with His disciples, when He instituted what we call the Lord’s Supper. He took the Passover meal and taught us that He is the fulfillment of it: He is the Passover sacrifice, He is the Passover lamb, and His broken body and shed blood are the means of protecting us from the judgment of God, and of establishing peace with God.

From this background in the Old Testament, what do we learn about the sacraments?

FOUR LESSONS ABOUT THE SACRAMENTS

Our embodied-ness

First, the sacraments show us our embodied-ness. They teach us that our relationship with God is meant to touch upon every aspect of our humanity. Our whole self – the soul and the body and the bodily senses – are to be engaged in relationship to the Lord. We have been instructed, “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” (Deuteronomy 6:5) We are called to demonstrate love for the Lord with our entire being, with our entire embodied life.

When it comes to the signs of the covenant, these signs engage directly with the body. Of course, in the first instance, God speaks to us promises – and we are meant to hear these promises, not only with the ears on our head, but with the ears of our heart. But God didn’t design us to merely be hearts who hear His promises with our heart-ears. For God designed us with bodies, with physicality, and the invisible reality is meant to be embodied – to be experienced bodily – in community with other human beings. God designed us to be a relational community that is embodying our faith in concrete, practical, tangible ways.

Take the rainbow. The rainbow itself is a function of physical dynamics involving light and water that are happening up there in the sky. But we are intended to see them. So the sign of the Noahic covenant is visual. It is meant to be seen. And it is not merely visual, but beautiful. And of course, the whole thing is meant to be memorable: the sign is an aid to memory. We too easily forget what our heart-ears have heard: the sign is a signpost that reminds us of the promise.

Take circumcision. It is a cutting away of the male foreskin. This sign is an intensely physical sign. The parent or some other appointed person takes a knife in hand and cuts away the flesh, and the baby cries. For a tender heart, this is a sobering moment. Of course, the male baby doesn’t really know what is happening, but the parents do. It is a formative experience for the adults who are performing the circumcision. Meanwhile, the male child grows up, bearing in his own body the mark of having been circumcised. The mark of circumcision in his flesh reminds him that he belongs to the God of Abraham. The mark of circumcision in his flesh reminds him that his sexual organ belongs to God and that he is called to be a father bearing fruit in the context of holy marriage. The mark of circumcision in his flesh reminds him that he must also be circumcised in his heart, cutting away the flesh of sin and cultivating a heart for God.

Take the Sabbath. It involved their use of time. Every seven days, they were to see to it that they rested their bodies from ordinary labors, from ordinary production, from ordinary profit-seeking, from ordinary marketplace activity. Cease from working. Rest. Remember your Creator. Remember that He is the One who gives you the ability to gain wealth. Remember that He is the One who gives you the ability to enjoy what you have. Remember that if you forget your Creator, all the productivity and wealth in the world become meaningless. You will perish with your possessions, if you forget the Lord your God. Don’t cheat Him. Don’t try to get an extra day’s output. Close the shop. Put away the tools. Slow down. Relax. See to it that you and everyone else in your household has the day off. Rest. Enjoy what He has given you. Take a walk. Sit down by the brook. Consider the birds of the sky and the lilies of the field. Talk about your Creator, Redeemer, and King. Spend time with your spouse. Play with your kids. Don’t be anxious about anything. Don’t be anxious about what awaits you the next day. Receive this day as a gift from God, and give thanks to God. The sign of the Sabbath is very physical in nature, and it was to be embedded in their weekly rhythm.

Take the Passover meal and the feast of unleavened bread, along with the other annual feasts that the Lord gave to Israel. These feasts were quite obviously physical in nature, and they were to be embedded in their annual rhythms. The physicality of the feasts extended to the hands preparing and holding the food, and the mouth that tasted the food and internalized it into their physical beings. And they were to celebrate these feasts as families and extended families, gathering together around a common table, eating and drinking to the glory of God.

Taken together, what we can see is that Old Testament sacraments were physical, visual (we see them), tactile (we touch them), and in the case of the feasts, they also involve our sense of taste.[2] And when it comes to the new covenant sacraments – the waters of baptism, and the bread and the cup – the same multi-sensory, experiential, and relational dynamics are in play. In other words, the sacraments are perfectly designed for people who were created to be embodied human beings in relationship with other embodied human beings, who together were created to be in relationship with the Lord. The Lord who designed us for this experiential communal embodied-ness treats us that way when He commends His covenant promises to us. In giving us tangible signs, He calls for our whole persons to respond very practically to the promises that He has made. And all of it is relational, in that we experience these things together as a community of believers.

Our participation

Second, the sacraments call for our active participation. This wasn’t the case in regard to the rainbow, but it is the case in regard to the special relationship that God forms with His covenant people. God called upon His people to actively participate in ‘the faith’ entrusted to them; God called upon His people to invest their whole selves, soul and body, in their relationship with Him. Circumcise your male children. Keep the Sabbath. Observe the Passover. Faith is not theoretical. The faith that we have in our heart is meant to be actively expressed in concrete physical actions. Believe from your innermost being, but don’t just say that you believe. Come to the waters, and get immersed. Stop hiding in the pew and keeping your faith a private matter between you and God. Of course your faith is very much a personal matter, but it mustn’t be a private matter. Having faith in Jesus, you are to become an active participant in the body of Christ. Walk through the front door. Take your place among the people of God by getting off the fence and getting into the water, by publicly identifying with Jesus Christ, by publicly confessing the name of Jesus, by publicly committing yourself to follow Jesus forever. And then come to the table all the days of your life, eating the bread of life and drinking the cup of salvation.

Our whole life is punctuated by reminders of God’s grace

Third, the sacraments punctuate our whole life with reminders of God’s redeeming grace.

Think about how this worked out for the Israelites under the Israelite covenant. First, male children received the first sacrament in conjunction with their entrance into the Israelite community – and they entered into the Israelite community through physical birth. And on the eighth day, they were circumcised, effectively receiving the first sacrament at the beginning of their life. For parents and other family members, the circumcision of each male child would remind them all of God’s gracious act in calling Israel into special relationship with Himself.

Second, Israelites were not to sit on the laurels of the circumcision that was given at the beginning of life. They were to tangibly express their relationship with the Lord every seven days by remembering the weekly Sabbath. And beyond that, they were tangibly express their relationship with the Lord by celebrating a number of annual festivals throughout the year. In the early spring, they celebrated Passover and the feast of unleavened bread, and the feast of firstfruits. In the late spring, they celebrated the feast of weeks. And in the fall, they celebrated the feast of trumpets, the day of atonement, and the feast of tabernacles. In fact, the Israelite year began with Passover, so each new year began, not with some brouhaha simply because a new year has begun so let’s stay up late and have a party, but with profound and extended festivals that reminded them that they were constituted as a people by the redeeming grace of God. At the beginning of each year, and in the middle of each year, they were immersed in the reality of their relationship with the Lord.

While Israelites who have come to believe in Jesus may continue to celebrate these Old Testament feasts in a Christ-centered way, the New Testament does not expect or require Gentiles to become culturally Jewish. But Jewish believers and Gentile believers, who are one body in Christ, have been given specific ordinances connected with the new covenant. So it is that male and female disciples receive the new covenant ordinance of baptism in conjunction with their entrance into the new covenant community – and they enter into the new covenant community through faith. Or, if you prefer to say, they are born into the new covenant community through new birth. Thus they are to receive the sacrament of baptism at the beginning of their new life in Christ.

Stemming from their baptism, New Testament believers are to tangibly express their relationship with the Lord and with their fellow believers by partaking of the bread and the cup. Christians don’t often refer to our gathering together on the first day of the week, on the Lord’s Day, as a holy ordinance the way that the weekly Sabbath functioned in the Old Testament, but the parallels are unmistakable. One day in seven, time is set apart for the deliberate cultivation of our spiritual walk in fellowship with other believers. And whether we partake of holy communion weekly, monthly, or periodically throughout the year, it is always an invitation to immerse ourselves in the recollection of God’s grace and to renew our relationship with Him.

Our devotion to the Word is primary

Fourth, the sacraments are subservient to the Word, which means that our devotion to the Word of God must always have the priority.

It is not uncommon within the Christian community for certain people to get irritated by what they perceive to be an inadequate emphasis – an under-emphasis – on the sacraments, and then they set out to correct that inadequate emphasis, which might be just fine, but if they are not careful, they end up placing too much emphasis on the sacraments, as if getting the sacraments right is the main thing after all – as if attending upon the sacraments is the primary place where we encounter and receive God’s grace – as if there is nearly an automatic impartation of grace for anyone who comes to the waters or to the table. In the most extreme cases, the sacraments come to be viewed magically or superstitiously. The thinking then goes: ‘Get baptized, and you’ll be spiritually renewed’; or ‘Get to Mass, and you’ll be right with God’ (at least for a little while!). And not a few people have been drawn into the idea that the sacraments are the main thing, that eating the bread and drinking the cup are the main thing, that the baptismal font and the sacramental altar in the sanctuary are the main thing. And so we turn the sacraments into sacramentalism, and this can become wedded to an overemphasis on whether we are receiving the sacraments from the right order of priests (this is called sacerdotalism), and before you know it, we’ve turned the whole thing into a complex religious system: you’ve got to have the right priests mediating God’s grace, and from their hands you’ve got to receive the sacraments in order to obtain the mediated grace. But all this is far afield from the simplicity of New Testament Christianity.

In fact, let me tell you something really interesting about the three old covenant signs of circumcision, Sabbath-keeping, and Passover observance. They were intended to be radically decentralized practices. They were not administered by an elite priesthood. They were not to be administered by a big central organization. They were entrusted to each family. Now when you come to the New Testament, it is true that there is a shift to the believing community – to small communities of disciples called local churches. But ‘church’ was never intended to become a big centralized top-down organization. Instead, ‘church’ is decentralized into small local congregations where local congregants and local leaders function as an extended family.

And as a decentralized extended family of believers, as brothers and sisters in Christ, we are called to prioritize the Word of God – and this priority is evident in multiple ways.

The Word proclaimed and received has the priority

To begin with, the proclamation of God’s Word and our believing response to God’s Word, is of greater importance than the administration of the sacraments and our reception of the sacraments. I didn’t say that the latter is unimportant, only that it is less important than our faith-response to the Word itself. Paul makes this abundantly clear in 1 Corinthians, when he makes a most remarkable statement:

“For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.” (1 Corinthians 1:17)

We say that ministers of the gospel have been commissioned to preach the gospel and administer the sacraments, but the first task is of much greater importance than the second. So much so, that Paul was thankful to God that he hadn’t baptized many people in Corinth, lest the people in Corinth would be proud that they had been baptized by Paul rather than by a less impressive minister. It is in this context that Paul says, “For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel”. The priority is always the proclamation of the gospel and the reception of the gospel by faith. Paul expresses the priority of gospel preaching not only by his own statement in 1 Corinthians 1:17, but also in the letters known as the pastoral epistles. Where in 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus does he instruct pastors regarding the practice of baptism or the practice of the Lord’s Supper? He doesn’t. In these three letters, Paul takes the opportunity to impress the priorities of gospel ministry upon his protégés, Timothy and Titus. The priority is to preach the Word, teach what accords with sound doctrine, refuse false teachers, raise up additional elders and teachers who will faithfully transmit the Word of God to the people of God, and to do all this as a faithful man who embodies godly character. Do you see?

I am in complete agreement with Alistair Begg when he said, “So the sacraments—baptism and the Lord’s Supper—do not signify, don’t teach us, any other truths than the truths that are taught in the Bible.”[3] That’s right. The sacraments visualize what the Bible verbalizes; the sacraments display what the Bible declares.[4] Yes and amen.

Furthermore, I would add the related point that the sacraments only express in a tangible way what is already happening when by faith we receive God’s Word. Take baptism, for instance. Someone might wish to say that the waters of baptism wash us, cleanse us, renew us. But what does the apostle Peter say? Our hearts are cleansed by faith (Acts 15:9). Paul told the believers in Thessalonica that they had been saved “through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth” (2 Thessalonians 2:13). Jesus told Paul that those who are rescued from the power of Satan “receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me” (Acts 26:18). According to Ephesians 2:1-8, we are saved, that is, we are made alive, raised up, and seated with Christ, by grace “through faith” (Ephesians 2:8). Jesus said, “Already you are clean because of the world that I have spoken to you.” (John 15:3) It is through faith in Jesus that our hunger is satisfied and our thirst is quenched, as Jesus promised: “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.” (John 6:35) We want to be among those who wash their robes and made them white “in the blood of the Lamb” (Revelation 7:14).

The priority of the Word and our faith-response to it doesn’t render the sacraments unnecessary. Instead, the priority of the Word and our faith-response to it renders the sacraments effective. You see, if you think about the sacraments religiously, then you tend to get hung up on the question – if all of these things are already happening by faith, then why bother with the sacraments? But the matter is altogether different if we think about the sacraments relationally. If we love one another, does that render eating together unnecessary? Of course not! It’s about relationships! Loving one another renders eating together enjoyable and profitable. And God invites us to come and relate to Him in a practical and tangible way – not because it’s religiously necessary, but because He wants our whole body to be in relationship with Him and our whole soul to be in relationship with Him. Don’t turn the sacraments into religiosity!

God’s Word institutes and assigns meaning to the sacraments

The sacraments are also subservient to the Word in that the sacraments are instituted by God’s Word, and they are assigned their meaning by God’s Word, and their basic function is to embody, display, and make visible the promise of God’s Word to the believer in the context of the gathered community of disciples. The rainbow has the meaning that God has assigned to it by His Word. Circumcision, and the Sabbath, and the Passover, and the Old Testament feasts, have the meaning that God has assigned to them by His Word. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper have the meaning that God has assigned to them by His Word. Where the Word of God is humbly received by faith, and is internalized by God’s Spirit and through continual meditation upon it, and is practiced in a life of obedience, there you find the blessing of God. In Jesus’s day, people got to thinking in overly physical terms that the woman’s womb that gave birth to Jesus and the woman’s breasts that nursed Jesus must be the special object of divine blessing (Luke 11:27). Jesus might have replied, ‘O yes, a fine point indeed!’ But He didn’t reply that way. Instead He replied, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!” (Luke 11:28)

I heartily embrace the physical, visual, tactile, taste-full, experiential, participatory, and relational nature of the sacraments. They are a wonderful gift to us, because we are by God’s design embodied and sensory human beings in relationship with one another. But the priority must always be on the auditory, that is, on hearing and believing the Word of God.

Observing the Word in general is the context for observing the sacraments in particular

And one final point on the subservience of the sacraments to the priority of the Word: observing the sacraments in particular is a sham if we are not observing the Word in general. I’m not trying to pit one against the other, for we ought to do all that the Word instructs us to do. But one of the recurring experiences of religious communities, including Israel in the Old Testament as well as church communities over the last two thousand years, is that religious practice devolves into empty ritual and gets divorced from faithfulness to the Word in all of life. But what is the value of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, if we do not have a lively faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, if we not have a steadfast trust in God amid the trials of our life, if we do not express our faith in sacrificial love to the people around us, if we do not do justly and love mercy, if we do not pursue holiness which requires that we cut the sin out of our lives and that we cultivate devotion to God, if we are not faithful as husbands and wives and parents and children, if we are not gentle and kind, if we are not peacemakers who build up and strengthen rather than tear down and divide, if the words of Christ are not abiding in us, if we are not learning to rejoice always and pray without ceasing and to give thanks to God in all circumstances? Am I attempting to de-emphasize the importance of the sacraments? Not at all! What I am attempting to do is to situate the sacraments in their proper context as a part of our overall life in and under the Word of God.

BELIEVE AND BE BAPTIZED!

One more thing, and then we’re done. In a roundabout way, I’d like to end where I began and turn once again to Noah and the flood. And I would specifically like to speak to those of you who have been contemplating Jesus but have not yet been baptized. And I would like to challenge you to solidify your relationship with Jesus through the God-appointed sacrament of baptism, not because there is something magical about it, not because you’ve got to check that off your list, but because God promises to meet you there as you call upon the name of the Lord and as you entrust yourself to His mercy.

So look at 1 Peter 3:18-22. It is a wonderful and mysterious passage, the depths of which we cannot explore this morning. But the basic message is clear enough, and I’d like you to see it. Peter writes,

^“For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, because they formerly did not obey, when God's patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water. Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers having been subjected to him.” (1 Peter 3:18-22)

The unrelenting waters of the global flood destroyed all flesh, except for Noah and Noah’s family, who “were brought safely through water”. In other words, they were brought safely through God’s judgment by means of “the ark”. They were in the ark, that is, they were in God’s appointed means of salvation. And Peter tells us that baptism “corresponds to this”. How so?

Well, follow this train of thought. First, Jesus suffered God’s judgment in our place: “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous”. The Righteous One bore our sins in His body on the cross. The divine judgment that fell on the ancient world and destroyed it, also fell upon the innocent sin-bearer on the cross and crushed Him.

Second, Jesus didn’t stay dead, but rose again, thereby showing that His sacrifice functioned as an atonement for sin, and since He made atonement for sin, He effectively defeated sin and death, conquered the devil, satisfied God’s justice, and opened the door for sinners like you and me to enter into fellowship with God.

Third, the crucified and risen Christ, “who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers having been subjected to him”, is the ultimate ark, the appointed means of salvation for sinners who entrust themselves to Him. When the New Testament says, “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ”, it is saying, ‘Come into the ark so that you can be brought safely through water.’ Because outside the ark, the judgment of God is still in effect: “the wrath of God remains” on those who disobey Jesus (John 3:36). But when you come to Jesus, when you enter into the ark, you are safe and secure from the judgment of God.

Fourth, the experience of baptism then, as it involves an immersion into water, is a tangible and tactile experience of bring “brought safely through water”. In the case of the rainbow, God restrains the waters in order to communicate a general promise of mercy over humankind. In the case of the baptism, God restrains the waters in order to wed you to the gracious promise of Christ. These waters won’t harm you, they will only incorporate you into the story of redemption: instead of having to bear your sin any longer, you get to be attached to Jesus – your old self dies with Him, your old self gets buried with Him, and then you get raised up with Him to a brand new life.

Finally, and rightly understood, what all this means is that baptism “now saves you”. Those are Peter’s words, not mine. But it isn’t the physicality of the water that saves you, it’s not the water rushing over your body that saves you, and it’s certainly not the mere fact of undertaking a physical action, and as for who is baptizing you or where they are baptizing you, that is completely irrelevant. Peter says, “Baptism… now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ”. So, baptism is nothing other than coming to Christ by faith, trusting in His vicarious death and victorious resurrection as the answer to your sin problem, and expressing and confessing your faith in the way that God has appointed. Thus entering into the baptismal waters, you are “[appealing] to God for a good conscience”.

Think of the words of one of our hymns. “What can wash away [your] sin?” “What can make [you] whole again?” “Nothing but the blood of Jesus.” What is “all [your] hope and peace”? What is “all [your] righteousness”? “Nothing but the blood of Jesus.”[5]

Trusting Him and no other, you come and get plunged to victory “beneath the cleansing flood”, as we sang about earlier.[6] Jesus has done it all for you, in His death and resurrection. And He calls you to draw near through a tangible act of faith. 

Dear friend, maybe you’re 72, maybe you’re 32, maybe your 12. What keeps you from being baptized and from having your relationship with Jesus sealed in the God-appointed way? Delay no longer, but come the front door and enter into God’s household.

ENDNOTES

[1] From Theology for the Church: Recovering Baptist Sacramentalism with Michael Haykin and Andrew Owen, Oct 2, 2023. Available online: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/recovering-baptist-sacramentalism-with-michael-haykin/id1632823229?i=1000629885110&r=1020.2

[2] The technical word is ‘gustatory’. The Old Testament feasts and the Lord’s Supper are gustatory, that is, they involve the sense of taste.

[3] Alistair Begg, “The Sacraments”. Preached November 2, 1997. Available online: https://www.truthforlife.org/resources/sermon/the-sacraments/

[4] Alistair Begg in “The Sacraments” (see footnote 3 above) speaks in this manner about the relationship between the Word and the sacraments.

[5] Robert Lowry, “Nothing But the Blood”.

[6] Eugene M. Bartlett, Sr., “Victory in Jesus”. © 1967 by Mrs. E. M. Bartlett. In The Hymnal for Worship & Celebration; Waco: Word Music, 1986: Hymn 473.