A New Dawn
God is bigger than the boogeyman!
- Mar 18, 2004
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You are free to believe what you wish, but Jesus clearly identified being born by water with being born of flesh. A concept known to Nicodemus, with or without the knowledge of ritual washings.You spoke of these as "baptisms", those were your words. As though the distinction is between "physical" or "water" baptism and "spiritual" baptism; and then spoke of the first as childbirth. Do you consider childbirth a baptism? That's the only way that this can make sense to me because your wording seems to me otherwise rather confused.
Ritual bathing was standard Jewish practice for a number of things, one of those things was conversion to Judaism. Both in the past and today when a person converts to Judaism they undergo a ritual washing (tevilah) in a mikveh. It was also used for ritual purification such as when a man had a "night time emission" or a woman after her menustration. Priests were required to ritually bathe to make themselves pure before performing their priestly duties in the Temple.
What John was doing in the wilderness was a kind of tevilah, John's message was that the Messiah was coming and so the people of Israel needed to turn to God in repentance, and he called them to this preparation and repentance though a ritual washing, but in the Jordan. To make themselves clean in preparation for Messiah's coming. That's what John was doing.
Christian Baptism is based on this, but the meaning of the ritual washing was no longer attached to ritual purification but attached to Jesus and what Jesus had done; they were to be washed in the name of--by the authority of--Jesus the Messiah. It was not, as John's baptism was, a washing of repentance in preparation for the coming of the Messiah, but a washing for the forgiveness of sins (Acts 2:38) in the name and authority of Jesus the Messiah.
Baptism as the rite of conversion to Christianity is directly predicated on the Jewish tevilah as part of the process of conversion. But the meaning of Christian baptism is fundamentally different than both Jewish tevilah and John's tevilah/washing/baptism; the meaning being redefined in and by and on account of Jesus the Messiah; by which one is washed and enters into the covenant people of the Messiah--that is the Church. To which Paul will write, that we who were baptized were baptized into Christ's death, that we who were baptized into Christ are clothed with Christ, that we have received a spiritual circumcision in baptism, etc.
And so we see here in John's Gospel, Jesus speaking to Nicodemus, a rabbi, and Jesus speaks of being born of water and Spirit and Nicodemus should know what Jesus is talking about. Not childbirth, but what would have been readily and easily known by any practicing Jew, especially a rabbi. When one enters into the mikveh for tevilah for the purpose of conversion they are entering into the people of God's covenant and at least in some sense made members of the kingdom/nation of Israel (if this language is in error, I freely welcome our resident Jewish members to correct me).
For more information, try this article:
http://www.chabad.org/theJewishWoman/article_cdo/aid/1541/jewish/The-Mikvah.htm
-CryptoLutheran
Thanks for the discussion.
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