Note 14 — CHAPTERS VI.-IX.

It is interesting to look at this entire subject of the ark and deluge, in connection with that most important and deeply significant ordinance of baptism. A truly baptized person, that is, one who, as the apostle says, "obeys from the heart that type of doctrine to which he is delivered," is one, who has passed from the old world into the new, in spirit and principle, and by faith. The water rolls over his person, signifying that his old man is buried, that his place in nature is ignored, that his old nature is entirely set aside; in short, that he is a dead man. When he is plunged beneath the water, expression is given to the fact that his name, place, and existence, in nature, are put out of sight; that the flesh, with all that pertained thereto, its sins, its iniquities, its liabilities, is buried in the grave of Christ, and never can come into God's sight again.

Again, when he rises up out of the water, expression is given to the truth, that he only comes up as the possessor of a new life, even the resurrection life of Christ. If Christ had not been raised from the dead, the believer could not come up out of the water, but should remain buried beneath its surface, as the simple expression of the place which righteously belongs to nature. But, inasmuch as Christ rose from the dead, in the power of a new life, having entirely put away our sins, we also come up out of the water; and, in so doing, set forth the fact, that we are put, by the grace of God, and through the death of Christ, in full possession of a new life, to which divine righteousness inseparably attaches. "We are buried with him by baptism into death; that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life." (See Rom. vi. and Col. ii. passim. Comp. also 1 Peter iii. 18-22.) All this makes the institution of baptism one of immense importance, and pregnant with meaning.