What is Covenantal Baptism?
By: Ian Holbrook
“Know therefore that the LORD your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations.” – Deuteronomy 7:9
At Covenant Community Church, we rejoice to see so many young families growing in faith together. We gladly baptize the children of believers because it is the consistent pattern of scripture that God includes families in His promises. It is our belief that covenant baptism is biblical baptism. The Bible is one cohesive story of redemption, and baptism is our visible entry point into that story, our sign and seal of belonging to God’s covenant people.
Covenants
No period in history, from creation to now, stands outside the realm of God’s covenantal dealings with His creation and His creatures. Covenants are the primary framework to understand the Bible. Each covenant is directly tied to the previous covenant and brings those former promises and concepts to a fuller stage of development. The covenants are one continuous story that moves forward as more truth is revealed across time. As this story unfolds across millennia, we see with increasing clarity, how God is drawing nearer to us and making a people for himself. This is the essence at the heart of all the covenant administrations and indeed, the Bible itself. God is making a people for Himself and will dwell among them.
We see God drawing nearer to His people with each subsequent covenant. He first promises to create a people for Himself immediately after the fall of Adam and Eve in the garden. He then establishes that people for His own possession with Abraham. He leads them with pillars of fire/smoke and tabernacles among them in a tent with Moses. He takes up a more permanent residence in the city of God (Jerusalem) and resides in the Holy of Holies in the Temple under David. Then God takes on flesh and becomes one of us in Jesus. He ascends to Heaven in order to send the Spirit to indwell us with the Spirit of Christ. We believers now make up the body of Christ on earth, temples of the Spirit all housing Christ in us. Ultimately, the covenant of grace climaxes when He returns and ushers in the consummation of all things and we experience our truest union with Christ in eternity, living with Him, fully present.
Sacraments
In this new covenant reality, we have been given sacraments, namely baptism and the Lord’s supper, which are ordained by God and given to man. These are His signs of the new covenant, given to us, not man’s signs to God. He gives us physical means (water, bread and wine) that point toward spiritual realities, to show us what He is doing for us. They are not primarily things that we do towards God, but things that God does towards us. Just as a king would seal a proclamation or royal decree with his signet ring, God seals His covenant promises to us through the sacraments. They are the visible word or a visible promise to His people. The Gospel is dramatized in the sacraments demonstrating our union with Him. They are the visible word/promise just as the Gospel is the audible word/promise. In some mysterious way, God actually uses these sacraments to confer grace to His people. He actually uses these specific physical means, as an instrument, to apply spiritual blessings. They are not bare symbols of remembrance, but actual conduits or means of grace.
Household Baptisms
The reformed view of baptism sees this rite as our entry point into the visible church, God’s covenant people on the earth. The sign of entry in the old covenant was circumcision. In the new covenant era, circumcision has been fulfilled in baptism because the bible teaches that the spiritual meaning of circumcision and baptism are the same (Col 2:11-12). The Bible tells us plainly that circumcision was always an OT sacrament with a spiritual reality (Deut 10:15-16; 30:6, Jer 4:4, Rom 2:28-39) and functioned as sign and seal of faith (Romans 4:9-12). In the new covenant, baptism is the new sign and seal of faith and continues to be applied covenantally, to believers and their households. It is clear that all of the biblical covenants explicitly include children. In fact, children feature more prominently in the new covenant than they did in the old covenant, retaining their place amongst the people of God (Mark 10:13-16, 1 Cor 7:14, Eph 6:1-4, Acts 2:37-39). Additionally, the new testament shows us that baptisms typically included the entire household. In fact, every single time a named individual is baptized in the new testament, and they had a household, their entire household was baptized as well, continuing the biblical pattern of covenantal headship (Acts 10; 16:14-15, 25-40, 1 Cor 1:16).
“The argument in a nutshell is simply this: God established his Church in the days of Abraham and put children into it. They must remain there until He puts them out. He has nowhere put them out. They are still then members of His church and as such entitled to its ordinances.” – BB Warfield
The Witness of Church History
In addition to covenantal household baptism being the practice of the apostles themselves, the clear and consistent witness of church history is also decidedly in favor of infant baptism. Essentially, all Christian sects practiced infant baptism until the 16 th century. Historical evidence supports its acceptance as far back as we have records for the church. Paedobaptism has been, and is still, practiced by the majority of Christian denominations worldwide. Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants alike have practiced this for millennia and it had full acceptance from the early Church fathers and the Reformers. The biblical and historical evidence strongly supports this beautiful, time-tested practice.
For a more thorough treatment of these and other topics related to baptism, we recommend reviewing the recorded Sunday School class materials on the Sunday School page of our website. Additionally, our session of elders would be happy to entertain additional questions for ongoing discussion.
