A New Creation (Baptism)

For everyone who spent any time in Sunday School growing up the story of Adam and Eve is a familiar tale. God creates a perfect world, and at the centre of that world are a human couple, a man and a woman who live in perfect harmony with each other and intimate friendship with God. But there are rules, ok, just one rule: don’t eat the fruit from the tree at the centre of the garden.

Predictably, this idyllic story goes awry when the serpent tricks the couple into eating the forbidden fruit from the aforementioned forbidden tree, telling them it will make them like God. Something in this act of disobedience breaks the world and ruptures its relationships. The couple demonstrates the break in their relationship with God by hiding from him. They show how their sin breaks their interpersonal relationships by playing the blame game: the man blames the woman for giving him the fruit. The woman blames the serpent for her disobedience. And this is all in the first three chapters of the Bible.

If you keep reading, you see things quickly spiral out of control. Brother kills brother. People become so depraved that God wipes the slate almost clean with a worldwide flood, but even when he only keeps the best family, the situation quickly returns to what it was. It seems like the world we live in is inescapably evil.

CREATION: OLD AND NEW

The Adam and Eve Story resonates with us because it is our story. We are people created by God for great things. But, like Adam and Eve, we refuse to trust him and all end up going our own way. And that leads us to dark and lonely places. We are hurt by others. We, in turn, hurt others. God’s loving intention seems to call out to us, but yet we seem unable to realize it. It seems as if we are enslaved to something that frustrates our best intentions. Theologians call this total depravity. We humans will never live up to our aspirations or ideals. Life will always be filled with regret, shame and pain.

And yet, what looks like the end of the story isn’t the end at all. God does something no one saw coming. He comes to this world himself. Not as a booming cloud or as a consuming fire, but as a man, a carpenter named Josh. Josh (that’s one way to translate Jesus’ name) is ordinary and yet, not ordinary at all. He’s a working-class peasant from a nowhere town. He’s an everyman. Except his story is different from ours. While we all have lofty aspirations but fail to realize them, he lives a life free of the corruption that marrs our lives. Nothing he does is about himself. Everything he does is about faithfulness to God’s intentions. He is free to love others in a way that seems alien to us.

Jesus’ faithfulness doesn’t express itself in an air of superiority but with love, compassion, humility and gentleness. He spends his time with the down and out, telling them the good news. God doesn’t hate them. God sees their sin and brokenness, and yet he still loves them with unyielding love. Jesus explains that what God wants is that everyone could live in a world where God’s liberating presence permeates everything. Where humans flourish because everything goes according to the will of their all-knowing, all-loving creator. He preaches about a new kind of kingdom with God as its king.

KINGDOMS IN CONFLICT

But there’s another king with a vested interest in keeping things the way they are. The idea of a new kingdom and a new king is a threat, a threat that must be squashed, and so those who follow this king conspire to take out the messenger of this new kingdom. They hang Jesus up on a cross to die the death of a godforsaken criminal. They crush this revolution before it can even get started.

But on the third day, it all comes undone. This lowly carpenter, who challenged the evil empire and paid for it with his life, rises from the dead. Only then do his closest friends and family begin to understand who he is and what he represents.

Jesus is God himself, come to be with us, and he represents an undoing of the curse that has broken all of our lives and sentenced us to live lives of brokenness and loneliness. In Jesus God has remade humanity. He shows us who we were always meant to be. And then he does something radical, he invites us into this recreated life, a life so powerful even death can’t contain it.

As I said, Adam’s story is all our stories. We are all humans trying to make gods of ourselves. Jesus is like a different kind of Adam: God emptying himself to take on humanity. In describing his wish for the believers in the church of Philippi, the Apostle Paul tells them to be like Jesus,

Who, being in very nature God,

did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;

rather, he made himself nothing

by taking the very nature of a servant,

being made in human likeness.

And being found in appearance as a man,

he humbled himself

by becoming obedient to death—

even death on a cross! (Phil. 2:6-8, NLT)

The Christian life is an invitation out of one storyㅡAdam’s story, the story of old, broken humanityㅡand into a new storyㅡJesus’ story, the story of renewed humanity. When Jesus departs, he promises to be with us. He fulfills this promise by sending the Holy Spirit. And while Jesus is God’s presence among us, showing us who God is, The Spirit is God’s presence within us, renewing our lives turning us into something new.

To get this Spirit, doesn’t require years of philosophical contemplation or heroic acts of spiritual asceticism. Rather, we receive this new-creation life through faith in Jesus, and he makes us new. As Paul tells the Corinthian believers. “If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (2 Cor. 5:17, NLT). By simple trust in God, we can receive the new-creation life of Jesus. This life takes hold of us, and transforms us over our lifetimes, to be like Jesus. As Paul says, “For we died and were buried with Christ by baptism. And just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glorious power of the Father, now we also may live new lives.”

AN INVITATION TO A NEW LIFE

This transformation means leaving behind our old life, the Adam-life, and being resurrected with a new life, a Jesus-life. As Paul tells the Galatian believers: “My old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20, NLT). This isn’t merely a change in beliefs, but ought to entail a change in the way we live our lives. The spiritual reality takes concrete shape in the life governed by trust in God.

One way we embody this change is with baptism. In Judaism, baptism was an act of purification and repentance. It was also a rite practiced by pagans coming into the Jewish community. In its Christian context, baptism symbolizes these ideas and also points to the death and resurrection of Jesus at work in our lives.

Baptism is about the work that God has done in our lives. Going down into the waters symbolizes death and coming up from them symbolizes resurrection. Faith in Jesus involves death. Claiming Jesus as our Lord is an acknowledgement that our life, as we have lived it, is over. That life has led us to a place of desperation, a place where God’s grace meets us. This God washes us clean, freeing us from the guilt of sin and releases us into a new life, life with Jesus alive in us.

But Baptism also points to our faith in God’s promised future action. Barring the imminent return of the Lord, we can all expect to die. Our status as God’s children doesn’t exempt us from this reality. But baptism testifies to us that that will not be how the story ends. Jesus’ resurrection is a sneak preview of God’s intention for his children. As Christ was raised, so we too, shall be raised:

Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who are asleep. For since by a man death came, by a man also came the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, after that those who are Christ’s at His coming, (1 Corinthians 15:20b-23, NLT).

And just as baptism symbolized the new life of a former pagan now as a part of God’s people, Israel, so it symbolizes the new life of an unbeliever as a member of God’s people, the church. Being a part of the new creation comes with a new family. When we baptize someone, we welcome them into the community as a new brother or sister.

So on this occasion, as we baptize someone, those of us who have previously been baptized, have the opportunity to reflect on our baptism. On that day, we dedicated ourselves to a new life, lived in the power of Jesus’ resurrection life. If Jesus’ Spirit has taken hold of our lives and formed us to be like Jesus, we can rejoice in God’s faithfulness to us. If, on the other hand, we look back and don’t see God’s power at work in our lives then this is an opportunity to rededicate our lives to cooperating with God’s transforming work. God is gracious. In David’s famous song of repentance after he is confronted for adultery and murder, David expresses faith in God’s gracious heart of forgiveness: “You will not reject a broken and repentant heart, O God” (Psalm 51:17b, NLT). Just as God forgave David, so he can forgive us. Baptism is, after all, a promise that our past failures do not need to define our future.

So let’s celebrate together. In Spite of our sin and failure, God’s intention towards us is unwavering. His love is unbreakable and unstoppable. He loves us right where we are, but he loves us too much to leave us there. Our present reality isn’t something we have to settle for. Behold, he is making all things new.