What Baptism Reveals about God’s Heart and Our Identity
Becoming a Son in the Son: What Baptism Reveals about God’s Heart and Our Identity
What words and ideas come to mind when someone asks you, “Who are you?” How do you describe yourself? Maybe you use a label that reflects your primary relationships and stage in life. Perhaps you use a category from a personality test or psyche model. Or maybe you use your job title.
Using labels and categories to tell others who we are is inescapable and even necessary. Yet many of us Christians today often use labels and categories that do not capture the essence of who we really are.
Consider how Martin Luther described himself when he felt his person and identity were under spiritual attack and therefore in question: “I am a son of God, I am baptized, I believe in Jesus Christ crucified for me.”[i] Or, “The only way to drive away the Devil is through faith in Christ, by saying: ‘I have been baptized, I am a Christian.’”[ii]
Luther described himself as a Christian, which most of us do. But he also described himself as a baptized person and a son of God, as though all three identity markers went hand in hand.
Luther was able to describe himself as a baptized person because baptism is an event concerned with identity and belonging. Baptism, which means “immersion,” is used in the New Testament to signify that people are united to Christ, bound to him, when they come to faith in him (see Gal. 3:26–27). It points to the reality of being immersed into Christ, of being plunged into a new existence in relationship to him. Baptism represents that we are now in Christ.
This is the very reason that Luther was able to say that he was also a son of God. Baptism signifies not only that we belong to Christ; it signifies that we have taken on the identity of Christ.
Consider what Paul famously says in Galatians 3:27: “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” We have been clothed with Christ, given his very identity, and we have been given a “new self” that is being shaped after his likeness (Col. 3:10).
Central to this new identity that we have by virtue of our immersion into Christ is a sonly status. After all, we are joined to Christ the Son. To have faith in Christ, to be baptized into him, is therefore to be a son of God (Gal. 3:26; 4:5–7).
We All Are Sons in the Son
At this point, we moderns may feel uncomfortable. Wouldn’t it be more politically correct and sensitive to gender differences to say that Christians are children of God? After all, Paul says in Romans 8:16–17 that we are “children of God” (see also Phil. 2:4). Yet in both Galatians and Romans, Paul intentionally uses the masculine term “son” (huois in Greek) to convey something theologically profound (Gal. 3:7, 26; 4:5–6; Rom. 8:14–15, 19, 23).
In applying the masculine term “son” to all believers indiscriminately, he is signaling that both males and females have been adopted by God and therefore share in Christ’s sonship. As New Testament expert Grant Macaskill explains, “It is important that we retain this gendered dimension . . . because it expresses our identity as God’s adopted children specifically with reference to our participation in the Son. That is, the gendered particularity is a function of the personal particularity of the one in whom we are saved.”[iii]
All of us Christians, no matter our gender—which is a good, God-given gift and something we cannot discard or change—have been granted the sonly identity of Christ when we are immersed into him by faith.
We All Are Equal in the Son
Paul’s understanding of adoption in Christ defied cultural norms and expectations in the first-century Greco-Roman world. In Paul’s context, males were preferred adoptees, and for practical reasons. They were the ones who could continue the family line and usually the family business. Moreover, they were usually the ones who had access to the family inheritance. Women had limited rights in comparison to men—which is still common in many contexts today.
But this is not so with the gospel. As Paul says in Galatians 3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” No matter our ethnicity, social and economic status, or gender—all of us who have faith in Christ belong to Christ and are adopted by God. There is no discrimination of persons when it comes to being a son in the Son. All of us, regardless of our personal differences, share in Christ’s sonship and thus in his inheritance.
We All Are Loved as the Son Is Loved
Our share in Christ’s sonship means many things—and chief among them is that we are loved by the Father as the Son is loved by the Father (John 17:23). Because we are sons in the Son, we have his Father as our Father, and his Father cannot but shower us with his paternal indulgence.
At this point, it is helpful to consider again baptism. In many ways, Jesus’s baptism at the Jordan parallels our own baptism—though there are certainly some differences between the two. When Jesus was baptized, the Father declared his love for him as his only and eternally begotten Son, and the Holy Spirit came on him (Matt. 3:16–17; Mark 1:10–11; Luke 3:22; John 1:32–34). Something similar happens in our baptism, which represents and confirms our adoption as sons and our reception of the Holy Spirit. Because we are immersed into Christ the Son, we are immersed with the same love and delight that the Father has for the Son. We are in Christ and exist, by the Spirit, where he is: in the very bosom of the Father (John 1:18; 17:24). By virtue of our immersion into Christ, we are immersed into the loving communion of the Trinity.
How wonderful is our salvation! God did not want to just forgive our sins and clean us up. To be sure, God does justify and sanctify us. He desires that we be holy as he is holy. Ultimately, God wanted to grant us the experience of being sons in his Son. He wanted us to experience by grace what the Son is and has by nature.
Christian, you are a baptized person. You have been immersed into Jesus Christ. And by virtue of your immersion into Christ the Son, you are a son of God. Make Luther’s self-description your own. Lay hold of the truths represented and confirmed in your baptism, your adoption rite. It reveals the inestimably benevolent heart of God, and it preaches a better message than the world ever could about who you are.
Kevin P. Emmert (PhD, London School of Theology) is an academic book editor at Crossway and the author of The Water and the Blood: How the Sacraments Shape Christian Identity and John Calvin and the Righteousness of Works. He is married to Ashley, and they have three sons: Jack, Charlie, and Noah.
[i] Martin Luther, D. Martin Luthers Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Tischreden (Weimar: Böhlaus, 2000), 5:295. Translation by Wes Bredenhoff, “Luther: Baptizatus sum (I Am Baptized),” Bredenhoff (blog), January 26, 2017, https://bredenhof.ca/; translation slightly altered.
[ii] Quoted in Heiko Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil, trans. Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart (1989; repr., New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 105.
[iii] Grant Macaskill, Living in Union with Christ Paul’s Gospel and Christian Moral Identity (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2019), 63n2; emphasis original.