Why the Baptism by the Holy Spirit Really Matters; Romans 6:1-4

 

One of the interesting arguments following the Reformation was trying to understand the relationship between justification and sanctification. In the plan of salvation there is phase one, phase two and phase three: phase one (justification); phase two, the spiritual life (experiential sanctification). The question is: What is the relationship between those two? We pretty much understand this, but for many people in Christianity, and down through the 2000 years of Christianity, this has not been very clear at all.

 

Sometimes when we talk about lordship salvation, free grace gospel, and things of this nature, people are not always sure what these terms describe. Basically, lordship salvation sees and integral and necessary connection between phase one and phase two. What that means is that if you are truly justified you will necessarily—because you are justified and a new creature in Christ—show certain signs of your regeneration. And those signs of your regeneration are the evidence that you are saved.

 

We have all made the kind of mistake before where we have looked at someone and asked how in the world that person could be a Christian? As soon as we have done that we have stepped away from the divine viewpoint, not because we are judging them but because we are assuming that somehow the actions of a person’s life tell us if he is a member of God’s royal family or not. We all know that there are a lot of children who do not live according the standards of their family. That is as true for God’s family as for any other family.

 

What happened after coming out of almost 1500 years of Roman Catholic confusion there was this belief that if you were saved you lived a certain way, and the only way that you could know that you were saved was if you lived a certain way. That was your evidence. It wasn’t the promise of God in Scripture that if you believed in Jesus as your saviour that you were therefore saved and that was all there was to it—which would make the distinction between phase one and phase two. In Roman Catholic theology actually you don’t know if you’re saved because salvation or justification isn’t a one-shot thing; it is not something that occurs at the moment you trust in Christ. You get a little more grace every time you participate in a sacrament, and when you get enough grace them you are justified. But how do you know when you have enough grace? It is going to be exhibited in your life. So the evidence of salvation is your life, not what you believe, not the promise of God.

 

When we get to the Protestant Reformation, initially when Martin Luther nailed his 95 thesis on the door of the church at Wittenberg he didn’t have a real clear focus on justification by faith at that point. He was close. He was subsequently influenced by a young brilliant theologian by the name of Philipp Melanchthon. He snapped to the doctrine of justification by faith very quickly and understood that there had to be this demarcation between justification and sanctification, and that these were not related in the sense that if you were justified that had certain necessary implications for sanctification. What that is basically saying is that if you are saved you are going to live some form of the Christian life. That is what their view was. And so if you weren’t living any form and there was no evidence in your Christian life then you must not be saved. Melanchthon understood this and he made it clear to Luther.

 

When Calvin first wrote his Institutes he had a clear grasp on the separation of justification and sanctification, and he had an extremely clear grasp on justification by faith. This is in the 1530s. By the late 1540s the Protestants began to get a lot of blow-back from the Roman Catholic church, i.e. if grace is true then how are you going to keep everybody under control? How are you going to keep them moral? If all they have to do is believe in Jesus and they are going to go to heaven then everybody is going to go out and live in sin and be as immoral as they can be and you won’t have any moral controls on people anymore.

 

Unfortunately, Calvin didn’t have an answer for that. He began to fudge, and so what they developed was this idea that if you are truly saved then your life is going to show it. So he back-doored works. Works weren’t up in front saying that if you want to be save you have to believe in Jesus and be good, so they slipped in that if you have real faith then your life will show it. So they came up with this little cliché that many writers have used that goes something like this: “While we are saved by faith alone, the faith that saves is never alone.” And what they mean by that is that the faith that saves is not the same kind of faith as the faith that you and I exercise everyday. When we get up in the morning and are running late to work we believe (have faith) that when we get out to the car, stick the ignition key in and turn it on the car is going to start. That is just a belief.

 

In this whole issue of understanding salvation they got into the issue of defining what faith is. In Calvinism there was the development of the idea that there is a different kind of faith that is saving, and it is not the same as everyday faith. So the kind of faith that is saving, they said, is a gift from God. They began to change the translation and interpretation of Ephesians 2:8, 9 which says, “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, {it is} the gift of God; not of works …” They understood that “the gift of God” referred back to faith. But “it is” is a neuter pronoun in the Greek; “faith” is a feminine noun, and the basic rule of grammar is that your pronoun has to agree in case, number and gender with its antecedent. You can’t have a neuter pronoun referring to a feminine noun, so it has to refer to something else. Grace is also a feminine noun, so to what does the “it” refer? It refers contextually to the whole process of salvation as being the gift of God. It is not saying that faith is the gift of God, but that is how Calvinists will present it. They say that God will only give the gift of faith to the elect, and if you are not the elect then God doesn’t give you the gift of faith.

 

All of that is to emphasise why it is important to understand this distinction between phase one and phase two. Phase two does not automatically come out of phase one. Just because you have trusted in Christ as saviour doesn’t mean that you are automatically going to grow. The lordship position says that you are.

 

Getting into the eighteenth century under the influence of revivals, which were really mixed in terms of their impact—the first great awakening was more positive than negative, the second great awakening around 1800-30 was probably a lot more negative than it was positive—revivalism took over when people wanted to imitate what had happened in the second great awakening because they had their eyes on experience, and all through this period they were asking the question: How do we live to please God? It can be a good question but it can also lead off on the wrong trail. As they did that, for the first time really in the history of theology, theologians, pastors and others starting probing the whole doctrine of the spiritual life. What is interesting is that within the whole Calvinistic Reformed tradition, through most of the Lutheran tradition, and through the Wesleyan tradition, there wasn’t anybody really talking about the Holy Spirit.

 

Then in the mid-19th century there was a woman Methodist Bible teacher by the name of Phoebe Palmer who was teaching ladies’ Bible studies in New York at a time when there was a tremendous decrease in church attendance. People were asking what was wrong; they could observe it. So they did what most of us do and became very self-absorbed and said: ‘Oh, it’s all our fault; we must be doing something wrong, we are not walking with God. God is punishing us.’ They didn’t lift their head up to look around to see what else was going on in the world. What had happened was that people were going west. They were leaving their churches and homes and everything else and going west in a mass migration and so the churches on the eastern seaboard were losing their membership. And what happened with Phoebe Palmer and others was a decision to seek a “second blessing” after salvation. The idea was, “We’ve missed out on something.”

 

As soon as you hear people say we want to figure out how to get more of the Holy Spirit, or that we have somehow missed something in our spiritual life because somehow things are not quite as enthusiastic, exciting or as wonderful as they were when we were first saved, your radar ought just start pinging loudly that something is seriously wrong. It always leads to a problem.

 

Then out of the 19th century revivals was what was later called holiness theology, the idea that you get justification and blessing at the cross but then you have to “bring it all to the altar.” (The pulpit and communion table is not an altar) There was the influence of Charles Finney’s revivalistic techniques coming out of the second great awakening, the idea that people need to do something. All of this kind of merged together to develop this two-step theology of one step where you get justification at salvation and another step subsequent to salvation where when you dedicate your life to Jesus, where you lay it all on the altar, you go through some sort of post-salvation secondary experience, and then you are going to make it, that is where you get the second blessing.

 

That was holiness theology. Then at the turn of the century and the development of Pentecostalism that is when they identified that second blessing as the baptism of the Holy Spirit that was necessarily evidenced by speaking in tongues. So there was the development of Pentecostal theology.

 

Into that whole matrix there was another trajectory that went off into what became known as Keswick teaching or victorious life teaching. Victorious life teaching had elements, some similar to Keswick and some that wasn’t, and Roman Catholics also developed within that stream something called the mystical, contemplative view of spirituality, and that has really made a huge recovery in the last thirty years.

 

Some of the Keswick speakers were also dispensational and pre-Trib. and they spoke at a lot of the huge Bible conferences that were held. This was the era of Dwight Moody. Others were C.I. Scofield, Louis Sperry Chafer, and others. L.S. Chafer fitted into this because he heard these men and he picked up some of the vocabulary, but he doesn’t really approach it the same way. He doesn’t have a victorious life, Keswick view of the spiritual life. He had a solid understanding of grace and the spiritual life which he got from C.I. Scofield. This is our heritage. It is built on this understanding and as you go from generation to generation these theologians are thinking through these issues and each generation becomes a little clearer and a little tighter on their understanding of what the Scripture is saying. And those who held to some form of human effort or works in the process are the ones who are headed off on sidetracks.

 

With what is called the Chaferian view there is a clear distinction between justification and sanctification. It is not that they aren’t related because at the instant of salvation we are positionally sanctified, but then it is in the process of our spiritual growth we become experientially sanctified. The difference is that in our view of the spiritual life spiritual growth, fruit bearing, is not necessarily connected; it is not an automatic consequence of being saved. In the lordship view it is an automatic consequence of being saved, which means they end up being fruit inspectors because they have to figure out if they have enough fruit. In other words, you don’t know if you are really saved unless you have the right kind of fruit. It is not so much that you are looking at other people’s fruit; you are just trying to examine your own fruit to know if you are really saved.

 

The late 70s was when the lordship view was really beginning to bubble up in evangelicalism, but it was not until about the late 1980s that it really reached a sort of fever pitch. Zane Hodges at Dallas Seminary wrote a book called The Gospel Under Siege, which really opened the door, and then there was a response to that by John MacArthur with a book called The Gospel According to Jesus in 1988. MacArthur was invited to a large Christian bookstore in Irving, Texas, to talk for an hour on the basic ideas of the book. They also invited pastors for Q and A. Dr Tommy Ice and Dr Robert Dean sat dead center, right in front of John MacArthur. At the end Dr Dean ask him a question: How sure are you that if you were to die right now that you would go to heaven? He said: About 98 or 99 per cent sure.

 

Why isn’t it more than that? Because he doesn’t know if he might apostasize in the rest of his life. He doesn’t know if the fruit is really qualitative fruit of the Holy Spirit because he is putting his faith in the fruit and not in the promise of God. That is really the issue.

 

Question: What were all these people mentioned above looking at—the ones that were not quite on target on sanctification? They were all looking at their life as a criterion for whether or not they are saved or are growing in Christ. It is experience-based over and over and over again, and it is based on how they feel about their relationship with God. Ultimately when you get right down to the bottom line it is how they feel about it.

 

When we look at what Paul says in Romans chapter six this has nothing to do with how any of us feel about Jesus. He is answering the question: How do we live this spiritual life? How as a justified person do we live a righteous life? Paul says, we are going to get right down to the basics. And the basics are that we have to understand some profound spiritual realities that occurred at the instant of salvation that are completely non-experiential. What we have to do is understand something that God says happened the instant we were saved, and we need to make that a reality in our thinking. That is the foundational faith-rest drill for the Christian life. It is to recognise that I am completely a new creature in Christ and I am dead to sin. My relationship to sin and my sin nature that I have always had has now been totally broken, and I have to believe that is true every moment of every day.

 

We are justified but that is not a necessary connection to spiritual growth. Just because we are justified doesn’t mean we are going to grow one little bit. We are going to be born again, regenerate, but if there is no feeding then our spiritual life isn’t going to go anywhere. We are not going to lose our salvation, our justification, but we are never going to grow. Feeding comes from the Word of God. We have to learn something about the Word before we can grow.

 

When we go through Romans 6 Paul says, v. 3, “…do you not know?” The first thing out of his mouth almost as he sets up this discussion has to do with knowledge. We have to know something; we have to learn something; we have to learn what happened at salvation. We have to learn the dynamics of what Jesus Christ did on the cross and the dynamics of what happened when we trusted in Jesus Christ as saviour. And that is described in Romans 6:3 under this term “baptism into Christ, baptism into His death”—the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Paul starts of in his transition asking the rhetorical question: “How shall we say (in light of all that he has said in chapters 4 & 5)?  Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase?” No, how shall we who died to sin still live in it?” That is his basic point, the topical sentence. If you are a Christian you are dead to sin; if you are dead to sin you have no reason to continue to live in it. His language here is a complete and total break.

 

The problem is, experientially that is not true in our lives. The reason is that the sin nature isn’t removed from us, it is still there and we have a habit pattern from the day we took our first breath of letting the sin nature control us. The sin nature becomes our primary security blanket, our comfort zone. We are all minus and no matter what happens we can’t give up our security blanket. The sin nature is our security blanket because that is what gives us our comfort zone from the time we are born until the time we are saved. All of our habits of thought are formed under that. Every one of us was abused growing up, sone one way and some another way, but unless our parents were immaculately conceived they had sin natures and they abused you. We all come from dysfunctional homes. The sin nature put the dys in dysfunctional. There is no home and no parent that is not dysfunctional. We all grow up responding to the issues in life out of our sin nature. We find techniques and skills and habits from our sin nature that give us security and comfort in life.

 

Then when we get saved and all of a sudden we understand what sin is and begin to understand the different categories of sin and learn that we can’t operate on that basis anymore. This sets up a huge conflict in our souls, because what we are told we can’t do is what we feel like we must do in order to have security and comfort in a world that is against us. And the orientation of our sin nature tells us it is all about us. So we have to learn and believe what this passage says: you have died to sin. There is a real break that took place there. It is not experiential but nevertheless it is real, and as we have grown up since Immanuel Kant in the late 1800s then we can’t really understand what real is apart from experience because we have been brainwashed by western culture to think that real is what we’ve experienced. Only by studying the Word can we ever break out of that mindset.          

 

In verse 3 Paul starts to explain that. Romans 6:3 NASB “Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? [4] Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death …” Notice that. We were baptized into His death and we are buried with Him. Baptism means identification. Identification with anything in Jesus is identification with everything in Jesus; it is not just part. We are identified with the totality of who Jesus is; we are in Him. “… so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”

 

What Paul has done in vv. 2-4 is taken us from an extremely abstract doctrine called the baptism by the Holy Spirit and has ended up in something that is extremely practical, the newness of life. How do we have a changed life? There are many of us who are rather cynical and sceptical, and think that people can’t really change. But if we believe that it runs 180 degrees opposite to what the Word of God promises: that there is real change. But there is only real change if it is done God’s way. Real change from who we were as a fallen creature, totally dependent upon the sin nature to give us security and comfort and strength to a person who gets security, comfort and strength from God and God alone takes a long time. We have to be really digging into the Word and learning how to think biblically. It involves a lot of different categories. It is not a direct linear sort of thing where you just run these 10 or 15 things and we are there; it is a process and it is more circular. It is a learning process because we have to learn things that may not appear to have anything to do with what we are facing at the time, but they are laying a foundation and changing the way we think and approach life and it is more practical in that sense.

 

There was a man by the name of Miles Stanford who wrote some books on the Christian life called the Green Letters. He was a dispensationalist and he loved Louis Sperry Chafer but he thought Chafer was a fool on the spiritual life. He held the Keswick view and just didn’t understand Chafer’s view and he kept saying that Chafer didn’t emphasise the identification truths of Scripture. And that is not true. But the identification truths of scripture in Romans 6 are not isolated from the Holy Spirit emphasis in Romans 8; they go together. It is not an either/or; it is both. Our role is to understand who we are in Christ. It is our role then to depend on the Holy Spirit and make sure we are walking by the Spirit. That is where 1 John 1:9 comes in.

 

The foundation goes back to the baptism by means of the Holy Spirit where we are identified with Him and that connects us eternally and irrevocably in Christ. But the temporal reality is that we still have a sin nature and we have to learn how to be filled by the Spirit, to walk by the Spirit, to walk in the light; but we have this terrible habit that we develop from the instant of birth to live out in the black zone. Before we were saved there was no white zone, just the black zone in carnality. But after salvation we can walk in the light as He is in the light, but we have to confess our sin.

 

Baptism by the Holy Spirit is an eternal reality. This is an abstract doctrine that has been misunderstood in the past by many people but it is foundational. Paul spends virtually the first eleven verses of Romans chapter six developing everything on this, and if we don’t understand the baptism by the Holy Spirit we can’t understand Romans 7 or Romans 8. He doesn’t mention the Holy Spirit here, he just mentions baptism. “Or do you not know that all of us … have been baptized into Christ Jesus.” How do we know that is the baptism of the Holy Spirit? Basically because that is what baptises us into Christ. But there are two types of baptism in the Scripture. A lot of people think that baptism always involves getting wet, and that is not true.

 

So what kind of baptism is Paul talking about here in Romans 6? Baptism was really important in the early church—Christian baptism. There has been a lot of confusion about that since but that doesn’t negate the reality and the importance in the early church. If we think about Acts, in Acts chapter two Peter preaches a sermon and there are 5000 who were saved. They are immediately baptized. Then in Acts chapter three there is more baptism. In Acts chapter eight when Philip explained the gospel to the Ethiopian and he trusts Jesus as the Messiah, as soon as they found a pool of water he was baptized. We see the same kind of thing in Acts 10 when Peter went to Caesarea and explained the gospel to Cornelius and the Gentiles in his home. They trusted in Christ as saviour—Acts 10:44-47 NASB “While Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit fell upon all those who were listening to the message. All the circumcised believers who came with Peter were amazed, because the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out on the Gentiles also. For they were hearing them speaking with tongues and exalting God. Then Peter answered, ‘Surely no one can refuse the water for these to be baptized who have received the Holy Spirit just as we {did,} can he?’” So there was this pattern from the very beginning that if you trusted in Christ they didn’t wait a week, two weeks, two years before being baptized; it was instantaneous. We see it in Acts 16:14, 15 NASB “A woman named Lydia, from the city of Thyatira, a seller of purple fabrics, a worshiper of God, was listening; and the Lord opened her heart to respond to the things spoken by Paul. And when she and her household had been baptized …” Immediately after their salvation there is baptism. In the same chapter 16 there is the account of the Philippian jailer. Acts 16:33 NASB “And he took them that {very} hour of the night and washed their wounds, and immediately he was baptized, he and all his {household.}”

 

The point is that in the early church water baptism was something that should be done immediately. There are a lot of people who over the years have thought that what Paul is talking about in Romans 6 is water baptism. This isn’t water baptism. Baptism is used in other places, e.g. in the Gospels. It is also used for death and that is the focal point here. We are baptized into Christ’s death, and it is that death separation from the sin nature that is being emphasised in Romans 6. Jesus used it to refer to His death on the cross on Matthew 20:22; Mark 10:38; Luke 12:50. That was His baptism of death where He was identified with the sins of the world.                

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