What is Baptism?

Dear Holy Ones of the Most High!

We are excited to join in with you at Mosaic again this Sunday! I heard you are having a baptism celebration later this month. It got me thinking…”the Christian church has been doing baptism since its beginning, but do we really even know why?” Have you ever found yourself doing something, even something good, over and over and then you eventually wonder why you even do it? You don't even know why you're doing it, but you just keep doing it! It can be said that baptism could fit into this category. We've been doing it a long time—2000 years—but do we really know why?

The most obvious answer is, “Of course we know why: it's to celebrate the death, burial, & resurrection of Jesus and our union with HIm!” Well, yes, that's a big part of it. That's the part we can see and with which we are familiar. But is that it? Are we doing this odd (let's face it, it is odd) ritual of being dunked under water and brought back up just to acknowledge our union with Jesus and His work? It's not that this acknowledgment is a small thing, but why the water? Why the dunking? Why the coming back up (other than so you don't drown!)?

In addition to the obvious acknowledgement of our union with Jesus, we will look this Sunday at what was going on in the minds of the first century Christians when they thought about and participated in BAPTISM! Here's a hint, it involves spiritual beings (ELOHIM), horrific sins of these ELOHIM, the FLOOD (Gen 6), God's DISINHERITANCE of the nations (Gen 11), God's placement of His ELOHIM over the nations at BABEL (Deut 32), Rebellion of these ELOHIM and their JUDGMENT (Psalm 82), the IMPRISONMENT of these SPIRITS (1 Peter 3), and US switching our LOYALTY from these lesser ELOHIM to the MOST HIGH Himself! I hope that's enough of a teaser to get you to read your Old Testament, to come to Church Sunday, and to get baptized later this month if you haven't been yet!

Hope to see you there!

Walt Davis