Christian Worldview Oral Presentation

Introduction

Hello,

My name is Shawn Decker and today we are going to talk about Water Baptism. Specifically I want to talk about why water baptism is significant even if it is not required for salvation.

To me this aligns with a topic that I am very passionate about. That is this, when we as the church label what is important only in the context of personal salvation. We treat salvation as the end goal of our faith and our all encompassing purpose and that is a narrow view misses the grandeur of the Gospel that is revealed in scripture.

It misses the heart of God for us and our world.

It is selfish and reeks of humanism.

It is entirely pointless to talk about why any specific thing has value if I can not first thoroughly dissuade you of the notion that salvation is our end goal but rather it is just the opening act in our much grander purpose.

To do that we are going to discuss:

1. Gods overall plan for the kingdom

2. Where does baptism fit in the sequence and what is it symbolic of?

3. Why it matters in the life of the believer.

God’s overall plan for the kingdom (abridged)

Firstly we need to talk in generalities due to time constraints on what the overall plan is for creation.

We can find it in Genesis 2:

Genesis 2:5 “before any plant of the field was on earth, and before any plant of the field had sprung up, because Yahweh God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no human being to cultivate the ground,”

Genesis 2:5 LEB

before any plant of the field was on earth, and before any plant of the field had sprung up, because Yahweh God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no human being to cultivate the ground,

Genesis 2:15 “And Yahweh God took the man and set him in the garden of Eden to cultivate it and to keep it.”

Genesis 2:15 LEB

And Yahweh God took the man and set him in the garden of Eden to cultivate it and to keep it.

We see here that God intended us as humans to co labour with Him in the working of His beautiful creation. God brings rain, we work the land…it’s a partnership.

The word work here is the word for servant or rather in context to serve at the behest of another in this case God…its God ordained. To keep here is an ongoing duty of care. To watch over , to be vigilant in the keeping of the thing, in this case God’s good creation.

So we can see from the very beginning this has been God’s intention, to rule all of creation, WITH us. It is relationship based collaboration between God and His prized creation Humans which He made in His image.

This goal HAS NOT CHANGED.

Revelation 21:1-3 “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea did not exist any longer. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared like a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling of God is with humanity, and he will take up residence with them, and they will be his people and God himself will be with them.”

Revelation 21:1–3 LEB

And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea did not exist any longer. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared like a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling of God is with humanity, and he will take up residence with them, and they will be his people and God himself will be with them.

God will bring this about, the only issue with this from the beginning was us. Us Humans. We messed this up, we let our side of the covenant down so because God didn’t want His creation without us He made a way to restore us. This restoration is our salvation, but our salvation is not the end goal its part of the process for the real end goal which is the new earth and new heaven and a perfect realisation of what God made good in the first place.

This is why Jesus spoke in the context of the kingdom of heaven/God not how to save the individual. When we stop at the individual we miss God’s real intention which is His Kingdom with us

Now that we have the end goal in mind, lets keep it there because that is the overall context for all of Scripture. So everything else that we read and see is going to fit into that overall destination.

Where does baptism fit in?

So baptism. Baptism is more than symbolic it is sacramental. Again due to time constraints suffice it to say that the paradigm that we have about the spiritual and the physical being separate and yet sometimes they intertwine is rather false and not the narrative of the bible nor what the biblical authors intended to communicate but rather that what is spiritual is the root and life of what is material. That what we see is the material world is the realisation of what is spiritual…that is well and truly a rabbit hole worthy of hours of discussion but it is fair to say what is material is spiritual and what is spiritual is material and that they are inseparable. So baptism is not merely symbolic but a spiritual act that is meant to connect us as believers into a heritage that stretches all the way back

1. To creation where God brought land, life and order out of the chaos waters in Genesis 1,

2. To Noah where God brought humanity out of the death waters into life via the ark (Christ)

3. To Moses where God delivered Israel from death to life through the parted Red Sea

4. To Joshua where God delivered Israel from the death waste and wandering through the Jordan River into the Promised Land.

5. To Jesus when He was Baptised

6. To Jesus when God delivered Him from Death to Life in Resurrection.

7. Baptism is our immersion into and through death to emerge in resurrected life into the Kingdom of God.

So we can see that Baptism is a spiritual/material immersion into the heritage of God’s work of redemption in creation.

Why does this matter?

It matters to me and I believe it ought to matter to us because this theme, salvation and sacraments infuses massive debates. This topic reveals a massive gap in knowledge for the Protestant Church or rather an over emphasis on salvation and not on the overall goal of the Kingdom Come. I mean for me when I see the kingdom come goal…then the great commission makes sense…when I am only looking at my own salvation…the way Jesus talks, the way He told us to pray and the great commission don’t make sense…they seem out of place…in reality the focus of my own salvation is the thing that is out of place. This is what Jesus would call a key of the kingdom. This truth, this apocalypses, this revelation helps us to understand where our place is in the kingdom and what our purpose is in it.

Summary

We have talked about what Gods overall purpose in Kingdom Come.

We have talked about what baptism is and what it means

We have talked about what this topic means to me and how it matters to us as believers.