Baptism Faith TrainingVzorec

Day 2: Where did Baptism Come From?

Another tricky thing about baptism is that it seems to come out of nowhere in the New Testament. Try doing an Old Testament word study. You won’t find the word (not in English, anyway).

The water rite of baptism finds its roots in the old Levitical law. Remember those odd passages about being clean and unclean? Most of them involve washing in some way. One is especially pertinent:

Exodus 30:18-21. Make a bronze basin, with its bronze stand, for washing. Place it between the Tent of Meeting and the altar, and put water in it. Aaron and his sons are to wash their hands and feet with water from it. Whenever they enter the Tent of Meeting, they shall wash with water so that they will not die. Also, when they approach the altar to minister by presenting an offering made to the LORD by fire, they shall wash their hands and feet so that they will not die.

Washing was pretty important for Aaron and his sons if they wanted a low mortality rate.

Here’s the setup. God brought the Hebrews out of Egypt and into the wilderness, where they wandered for 40 years. Though the goal was a promised land, God promised to be with them and live in their presence in the wilderness. One way he did this was by saturating his presence in the tabernacle (translated here as “Tent of Meeting”) – basically a big fancy tent that the Israelites could bring with them wherever they went.

The theological underpinning is that the Holy and unholy just don’t mix. God is holy. Israel was not. But the holy God wants to live among his unholy people. So how does an unholy Israelite come into the presence of a holy God without bursting into flames a la Raiders of the Lost Ark? God enacted a series of buffers and “detox” points for people as they came closer and closer into his presence. The bronze basin in Exodus 30 is one of these.

As the sons of Aaron (the priests—or middlemen—between God and the Israelites) would approach the tabernacle and thus nearer to the presence of God, they would have to pass this bronze basin first as a place to get clean. Now the cleaning involved actual washing – it was a dirty, bloody job being a priest sacrificing and burning animals all day. But it was also symbolic. “Lord, cleanse me of what I’ve done with my hands and where I’ve been with my feet.”

From this, rabbinic tradition states the practice grew to where the priests would also rub water on their heads and their hearts. “Lord, forgive me my thoughts and my motives.”

Eventually, the Israelites made it to the Promised Land, and eventually, this tabernacle was replaced with a permanent structure (since they weren’t nomads anymore) called the temple. But then something devastating happened. In 587 BC, the temple was destroyed.

Now, to us, the razing and pillaging of a church might seem like a big deal, but to the Israelites, it was an even bigger deal because the temple was the place where they met God. With it gone, so was their access to God. God’s blessing. God’s presence. And their ability to worship him. Imagine finding out that you could no longer be in God’s presence. Imagine wondering whether God would even listen to you. Imagine no longer being able to offer sacrifices for your sins – the very sins that caused God to vacate the temple and hand it over to be destroyed. If you can wrap your mind around that, you’ll start to understand the impact this had on the Israelites.

This forced Israel to reevaluate and reinterpret everything. They knew from what God told them that he could not be contained to a tent or a temple. Now, they were forced to deal with that reality of no longer being able to come to him in that place.

What does this have to do with baptism? All those cleansing rituals could no longer be done at the temple – because there was no longer any temple – but they still held a deep place in the hearts of believers. So, Jews would still wash to be ritually clean. Furthermore, as the Israelites were scattered into foreign lands among foreign peoples, foreign people began to take notice of the Israelites and their God. Eventually, some of them came to believe in the Israelites’ God, too. What eventually developed from Exodus 30 and other temple cleansing rituals was a ritual called mikvaoth.

When a Gentile (a non-Jew) would come to a local gathering of Jewish worship held in a place called a synagogue (another Greek word that just means “meeting together”) – especially if there was a desire to give his or her life, love, and trust to God – he or she would first have to be plunged into an immersion pool outside its doors. (Archaeologists have found these – think of something the size of a luxury bathtub.) It would have to be clean water, preferably “living water” (running water, like a spring or stream), and was typically done by immersion. Just as the priests of old washed their hands and feet, these Gentiles would come to be “cleaned.” They would then be considered converts to Judaism, someone who went from darkness to light, from judgment to God’s favor, from outside the community of believers to inside the community of believers. Sound familiar?

Enter John the Baptist.

The New Testament says that John came to prepare the way for Jesus. And John the Baptist was controversial. He was baptizing Jews! The thrust of John’s message is that everyone needs to repent and turn back to God. Repentance and washing were not just for Gentiles. The Jews needed to get right with God and turn back to him, too.

John drives this home, where he baptizes. He goes back to the wilderness and immerses people in a river. John separates mikvaoth from the rebuilt temple and the local Jewish synagogue and brings it back to that place where God initially called a people to be his people from a tent. In a time and among a people who assumed that status and ethnic standing made them God’s people, this was revolutionary!

Just as water purified someone as they entered the presence of God (the temple) and counted them among the people of God (Jews), so John baptized Jews in water to prepare them for the coming of a greater presence of God (Jesus) where judgment and vindication wouldn’t be determined on ethnic lines.

John takes mikvaoth and applies it to all people, opening the door to what we think of as baptism today. But John’s baptism is not quite the same as Christian baptism. Instead, it’s a prototype of it.

Question

1. Share a time or season of life when you’ve felt separated from God. What was your biggest fear during that time?