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stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.’

Zech. 13:1: ‘In that day there shall be a fountain opened to the house of David and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem for sin and for uncleanness.’

(Cf. Is. 52:15.) We cannot but believe that Christ, when (John 3:22, 25) He administered a baptism through His disciples (4:2), explained to those, who offered themselves, the new birth which John's baptism and this preparatory cleansing typified. At the same time He may have indicated, as to Nicodemus (3:5 f.), the future establishment of Christian Baptism, the sacrament of the new birth.

The sacrament of Baptism presupposes the Death and Resurrection of Christ. In St John's record of the incident of the ‘feet-washing’ (John 13:4-14), where the symbolic meaning of the act as a process of cleansing is introduced at vs. 10; ‘He that is bathed needs not save to wash his feet,’ it seems impossible not to see a foreshadowing of the idea of Christian Baptism in the word ‘ bathed ’ (John 13:8 oJ leloumevno" ) as contrasted with ‘wash’ ( id. ib. nivyasqai ).

There is, however, no evidence to shew that the Apostles themselves were baptized unless with John's baptism. The ‘bathing’ in their case consisted in direct intercourse and union with Christ (cf. John 15:3, ‘Already ye are clean because of the word which I have spoken unto you’).

It was His office to baptize with the Spirit. So John 1:33: ‘the same is He which baptizeth with (or ‘in’) the Holy Spirit’: the Holy Spirit being the atmosphere, the element of the new life. The transference of the image of baptism to the impartment of the Holy Spirit was prepared by such passages as Joel 2:28 (quoted in Acts 2:17), ‘and it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh.’

In John 3:5, ‘Except a man be born of water and (the) Spirit ( ejx u{dato" k. pneuvmato" )’ the preposition used ( ejx ) recalls the phrase (Matt. 3:11) ‘I baptize (plunge) you in water; He shall baptize you in Holy Spirit and fire,’—so that the image suggested is that of rising, reborn, out of the water and out of the spiritual element, so to speak, to which the water outwardly corresponds. The combination of the words water and spirit suggests a remote parallel and a marked contrast. They carry back the thoughts of hearer and reader to the narrative of Creation (Gen. 1:2), when the Spirit of God brooded on the face of the waters. But (2) Water symbolizes purification and Spirit quickening: the one implies a definite external rite, the other indicates an energetic internal operation. The two are co-ordinate, correlative, complementary. Interpretations, which treat the term water here as simply figurative, are essentially defective. The words, taken in their immediate meaning, set forth as required before entrance into the Kingdom of God the acceptance of the preliminary rite Divinely sanctioned—John's baptism—which was the seal of repentance (Matt. 3:11, eij" metavnoian ) and so of forgiveness, and, following on this, the communication of a new life, resulting from the direct action of the Holy Ghost through Christ. But they have also a fuller sense, a final and complete sense for us. They look forward to the fulness of the Christian dispensation.

After the Resurrection the baptism of water was no longer separated from, but united with, the baptism of the Spirit—united with it in the “laver of regeneration” (Titus 3:5 e[swsen hJma'" dia; loutrou' paliggenesiva" kai; ajnakainwvsew" pneuvmato" aJgivou ), even as the outward and the inward are united generally in a religion which is sacramental and not only typical.

Christian baptism, the outward act of faith welcoming the promise of God, is incorporation into the Body of Christ [cf. 1 Cor. 12:13, Gal. 3:27]; and so being born


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