One of the best things about being a pastor for me is the questions that people ask us. Sometimes these are phone calls or emails, though the truly funny ones usually occur when we run into someone in the aisles of the grocery store, usually while going down the wine aisle, of course. I have been asked everything from, “What would God say about the Harry Potter books?” to “How can I explain dinosaurs to my granddaughter who has been reading Genesis?” There have been a number of other little head scratchers thrown in there for good measure. While many of these questions do not seem to follow any rhyme or reason, the single most common one tends to be, “What happens when we are baptized?”
In this chapter of Romans Paul wanted to try to answer this the question that I have been asked so many times. He does so with an illustration that I love. In our baptisms, we are baptized into the death of Christ Jesus, which is a way of saying that just as Jesus died for our sins, so we die with him for our sins. In the laws of the Old Testament, God spoke to the Israelites telling them that in order to expiate their sins they would need to offer a sacrifice of atonement on the altar of the Lord. However, the challenge occurs that our sins are never simply a “one and done” occurrence, rather, we continue to sin even when it is not the same sin over and over again. At the heart of that sacrificial system became the understanding that ultimately we would not be able to earn our way free of sin, whether through living in full accordance with the law or through the continued offering of sacrifices.
Thankfully, God provided a different way out through the sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross. Jesus’s death served as the ultimate atonement for sin, not only for the things that we have done wrong but everything that anyone has done that is not in accordance with the will of God. In our baptisms we are baptized into that death, and we become without sin. The part of that image that truly makes my heart stir is that just as we have been united with Jesus in His death, through our baptism, so too have we been united with Jesus in His resurrection, and we “should no longer be slaves to sin.”