the immersion of the believer in water, we shall be the better able to

understand the reality of the one baptism in Ephesians 4:

`Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus, were

baptized into His death?  Therefore we were buried with Him by baptism

into death, that, like as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of

the Father, so also we should walk in newness of life.  For if we have

been planted together in the likeness of His death, we shall be also in

the likeness of His resurrection' (Rom. 6:3-6 author's translation).

When we turn to the epistle to the Ephesians, we find that we have been:

`Made alive together with Christ ... and raised together, and made to sit

together in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus' (2:5,6 author's translation).

Ephesians 4:5 states there is One baptism.  It is nothing less than a

piece of self-deception to make One read Two, for if one baptism can mean two,

then one Body may well mean two, one Spirit two, etc.  During the Acts of the

Apostles, there were Two baptisms, viz. water and Spirit, the type and the

reality.  The reality has always been the baptism of the Spirit, and when the

type has no dispensational place, the reality still remains untouched and

True baptism united the believer with his Lord in His death and

resurrection -- a unity typically set forth in the ceremony of water baptism.

What therefore can have possessed the mind of believers when we find them

reasoning that while the reality is the baptism of the Spirit, and the type that

of water, the removal of the Type removes the Reality?  Is there no true

Tabernacle which the Lord pitched and not man, because the earthly type has

crumbled to dust?  Is there not one sufficient Sacrifice because the typical

offerings have ceased?  What distorted logic is it that dares to say that those

believers who, by the Divine sentence, are united by one Spirit to the death,

burial, resurrection and present glory of the ascended Lord, are un-baptized?

Colossians 2:11,12 speaks emphatically on this point:

`In whom ye were circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, in

the putting off the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ,

having been buried with Him by baptism, wherein also ye were raised with

Him through the faith of the inworking of God Who raised Him out from the

dead' (Author's translation).

Doubtless in the days of the apostles, and after, there were those who

would strenuously deny that the Gentiles were the true circumcision (Phil. 3:3),

simply because they had not submitted to an external rite; nevertheless the

circumcision without hands was the real thing, while many who boasted of the

carnal rite were foreigners to the reality.  In the same way, that baptism which

unites the believer with his Lord is independent of the carnal ordinance.  When

the nature of the dispensation required typical ordinances, God commanded water

baptism in association with the real invisible baptism.  When the dispensation

changed and believers were `no longer children' and `put away childish things',

the external ceremony was not imposed upon them, but the reality remained.  The

one baptism of the one Spirit is the only baptism that figures in the unity of

the Spirit.