Still, the outward ordinance is not of any saving merit. It is but an object-lesson, a symbol of the real thing.

So when Paul mentions the fact that we were “baptized into Jesus Christ,” he does not mean the ordinance itself placed us in union with Christ. He does mean that ordinance was a public profession and representation of the union with Christ we experienced by faith.

Our union with and identification with Christ, which was visibly portrayed in our baptism, was especially a union and identification with His death.

Thus this was the effective part of Christ’s work which must be put on our accounts, so to speak, and by which justification is applied to us.

The believer was baptized into Christ, and thereby baptized into His death (3); therefore this baptism was a burial of one dead.

Paul’s point is right plain: Living men are not buried. When the believer submitted to that burial of immersion under water he was declaring himself a dead man, one dead and buried with Christ.

Can the one baptized into Christ (assuming his water baptism is a true profession) live as a sinner?

Christ’s death was not the end of His work. The resurrection was just as essential to the whole. Just so, we did not merely die when Christ died; we arose when He arose.

Note in verse four that the verb “we also should walk” is expressed (in Greek) in the tense that refers to decisive, crisis action. The time when the believer committed himself to that new walk is referred to. And this verb “walk” is the one that goes with the “that.” This could be rendered as follows: “(in order) that … we might set ourselves to walk in newness of life.” Again Paul is looking back to the time the believer took his stand for Christ.

Our “planting” together with Him then is the same as the “burial” of verse 4; our being in the likeness of His resurrection is the same as the newness of life of verse 4.

We shall be, as Christians in the here and now, new persons, thus manifesting our identification with His resurrection. Some interpreters disagree with this and see a reference to the future bodily resurrection here.

The believer by his baptism declares that he buried, as dead, the person he used to be. He declares that he arose a new person with an entirely new and different life. And he declares that all this was effected by virtue of the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ. That declaration is totally out of keeping with the idea of continuing in sin, the basic issue under discussion.