Sacrament Sunday: Baptism and God's Promise

The Bible is full of stories about God entering into Covenant agreements with people like you and me. A covenant is a very special kind of promise that is made between God and a person or a group of people.  There are two kinds of covenant agreements that God makes: unconditional promises which do not depend at all upon how we behave and conditional promises whose results depend upon the choices we make.

When Adam and Eve were ordered to leave the Garden of Eden, God made a covenant with Adam and Eve. He told them that even though their choices had introduced death to human kind and now all men would die, there would come a day when mankind would be saved. God promised that He would use the woman's child to crush evil and put an end to death for good. The next big promise he made was to Noah, right after the flood that destroyed most of the earth's people. He told Noah that He would never again use water to destroy humanity and gave us the rainbow as a sign of that promise.

God made a third really big promise to a shepherd named Abraham. He told Abraham that he would become the father of many nations and that they would inherit the land of Canaan. The sign that was to mark Abraham and his children as being part of this covenant was to be circumcised. Any male who was not circumcised would be cut off from that covenant. (Genesis 17)

When Jesus was born of Mary, God fulfilled that promise he made to use the woman's child to crush evil. His death on the cross led to the resurrection and God's fulfillment of the second half of that promise: that He would put an end to death for good.  Jesus took the water that had once destroyed humanity and used it as a sign of a brand new covenant between God and humanity - this covenant was made to everyone, not just the direct descendants of Abraham.

Jesus said that anyone who allowed themselves to be Baptized as a sign of their obedience to God would have their sins washed clean. They would become members of the body of Christ, heirs to the kingdom of Heaven, and able to enter it with Him. This was a conditional promise. His conditions were that we had to be faithful to His teachings and obedient to His commandments or we would lose our place in Heaven. The two commandments we absolutely had to obey were to love Him above all things and to love our neighbor as ourselves.  Baptism does for those who live under the New Covenant what circumcision does under the old covenant: It marks us as belonging to that covenant, allowing us to claim the promises made for ourselves.