92 Word Studies In The New Testament.

the obligation of the outward rite, He asserted likewise, as its necessary complement, the presence and creating and informing energy of the Spirit with which John had promised that the coming one should baptize. That as John’s baptism had been unto repentance, for the remission of sins, so the new life must include the read no less than the symbolic cleansing of the old, sinful life, and the infusion by the Spirit of a new and divine principle of life. Thus Jesus’ words included a prophetic ref- erence to the complete ideal of Christian baptism—“ the wash- ing of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Ghost ” (Tit. ili. 5; Eph. v. 26); according to which the two factors are in- separably blended (not the one swallowed up by the other), and the new life is inaugurated both symbolically in the baptism with water, and actually in the renewing by the Holy Spirit, yet so as that the r2de, through its association with the Spirit’s energy, is more than a mere symbol: is a veritable vehicle of grace to the recipient, and acquires a substantial part in the in- auguration of the new life. Baptism, considered merely as a rite, and apart from the operation of the Spirit, does not and can- not impart the new life. Without the Spirit it isa lie. Itisa truthful sign only as the sign of an inward and spiritual grace. 6. That the ideal of the new life presented in our Lord’s words, includes the relation of the regenerated man to an organization. The object of the new birth is declared to be that a man may see and enter into the kingdom of God. But the kingdom of God is an economy. It includes and implies the organized Christian community. This is one of the facts which, with its accompanying obligation, is revealed to the new vision of the new man. He sees not only God, but the kingdom of God; God as King of an organized citizenship; God as the Father of the family of mankind; obligation to God implying obligation to the neighbor; obligation to Christ implying obligation to the church, of which He is the head, “ which is His body, the fulness of Him that filleth all things with all things” (Eph. i. 23). Through water alone, the mere external rite of baptism, a man may pass into the outward fellowship of the visible church without seeing or entering the kingdom of God. Through water and the Spirit, he passes indeed into the outward fellow-