Baptized Into Christ

It was a marvellous and totally unexpected thing, as undeserved as it was unexpected -- he was baptized into Christ. No-one had told him what would happen to him and that is why so much of this man's a teaching was so personal. He was not a product of the Church; he had persecuted it. He did not learn the way of salvation from it, nor from the apostles of Christ (he had hated them also); quite the opposite from that, the Church has learned from him. What happened to him, that is to say, what Christ did to him at Damascus first of all and then revealed to him afterwards, became the substance of all Paul's ministry. Quite simply, the Christ he had first met on the Damascus road baptized him in the Spirit in that city three days later. He baptized him into His death and into His resurrection, and via these into Himself, into His nature, His life and self.

That day Saul of Tarsus passed from death unto life for the first time, and from that moment he was conscious of being kept alive in Christ in whom the law of the Spirit of life is constantly in operation. This is how it must be with everyone. Eternal life is not possible to a man otherwise; it is no use a man trying to walk according to the Spirit unless he is first baptized into Christ. Until this happens to a man the law of sin and death continues to operate, working condemnation in him. No number or manner of assurances to the contrary will ever persuade him that it is not so. To be free from condemnation and guilt a man must be baptized into Christ. There and nowhere else does the law of the Spirit of life make a man free from the law of sin and death so that he can walk after the Spirit. Doing so he does not then need assuring that he is not under condemnation, because he has the assurance of the Spirit within himself and he knows he is not condemned. Moreover, by his walk he proves this both to himself and also to all other knowledgeable persons who observe him.

The life in Christ Jesus can only be known and lived by this law of the Spirit. Unless this baptism takes place and this spiritual law be realized in experience so that the whole personality is brought into obedience to it, no man can possibly live the eternal life. We may observe how this law operates by reading the events that led up to the birth of Jesus. Unless the Holy Spirit had come upon Mary in the beginning there would have been no human Jesus Christ. His life came from the Holy Spirit and not from her; she only gave Him His human body. All the biological processes by which a human body is formed were taken over in Mary by the Holy Spirit, who activated and commenced and superintended their function. Thereby Jesus was made of a woman: (1) under the law of Moses (which law was the law of God and very strong against adultery); (2) according to biological law; (3) according to the law of faith; (4) according to the law of the Spirit of life. Biological processes are laws -- God's laws -- and when He sent His Son into the world He did not work apart from female biological law but through it. Jesus was born as a result of voluntary co-operation between God and a woman. Two laws co-operated and combined; one human and one divine -- the law of the body of Mary and the law of the Spirit of God. The spirit of each co-operated by the law of faith to produce the human Son of Man.