Baptized into Moses

Let’s look at a little-known Bible passage—one which uses the phrase baptized into Moses. You’ve heard of the baptism of John the Baptist, you’ve heard of baptism in the name of Jesus, and you’ve heard of the baptism of the Holy Spirit, but what exactly does it mean to be baptized into Moses?

For I do not want you to be unaware, brethren, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea; and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea (1 Corinthians 10:1-2; NASB).

Is this enigmatic for you? It doesn’t have to be. The meaning of baptized into Moses can be unlocked if we understand three themes:

1. The meaning of baptism.

2. The Israelites.

3. What the cloud and the sea were in the Exodus story.

Concerning point 1, there’s not much to say than we haven't already said. We have already looked at the theme of baptism at length. But as a review: a) baptism is for the forgiveness of sins, b) baptism saves, and c) baptism is the washing away of former sins.

In addition, a person who has been immersed in water should only do so if they are at the age of accountability. They need to be responsible for their newfound commitment to God. They must be of the appropriate age to understand what it means to enter into a covenant. And they must exercise their own free will as they put their faith in Jesus. Baptism can never be under compulsion.

When a repentant sinner enters the water, they do it so that they might be buried and resurrected with Jesus. Once they are buried and raised with him in baptism, they attain full identification with Christ.

Only after a person is baptized does the death of Christ count for them. Prior to baptism, the death of Christ does not count for them. It's only available to them, but they appropriate the saving power of the Cross through baptism.

The Israelites

Now on to theme 2, the Israelites. The subject of Paul’s teaching is our fathers. What Paul means is not the patriarchs as we know them. Normally the term the fathers refers to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob with his 12 sons. But here our fathers refers to the group of Jews who escaped slavery in Egypt, a group of people known in the Bible as the Children of Israel---or the Israelites. Don't confuse them with modern-day Israelis.

Today, there are approximately 9,400,000 Israelis, citizens living in the modern state of Israel—and about 7 million of them are Jews. Another 20% of them are Muslim Arabs. But the Israelites were all Jews. In fact, they were direct descendants of Jacob. They returned to the land of Canaan after more than 430 years of slavery in Egypt.

The story of the Israelites is a story of redemption. They were freed from Pharaoh through the power God exerted by sending plagues upon the Egyptians. After Pharaoh lost his son in the final plague, he released the Israelites from their servitude, and they marched into the desert heading towards Mount Sinai. However, before getting to the Sinai Peninsula, they encountered a massive obstacle—the Red Sea.

The Red Sea was too vast and deep for the Israelites to cross, so standing before it, they could only hope for a miracle. They needed God to save them, and he did. Pharaoh pursued them with his armies to the edge of the sea, and the Israelites were either going be slaughtered, drown, or experience a miracle.

God gave them the latter. God gave them one of the greatest miracles in history--the parting of the Red Sea.

The Egyptians—all Pharaoh’s horses and chariots, horsemen and troops—pursued the Israelites and overtook them as they camped by the sea… the Israelites looked up, and there were the Egyptians, marching after them.

They were terrified and cried out to the LORD. They said to Moses, ‘Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die?’

… Moses answered the people, ‘Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the LORD will bring you today. The Egyptians you see today you will never see again. The LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still.’

Then the LORD said to Moses, ‘Why are you crying out to me? Tell the Israelites to move on. Raise your staff and stretch out your hand over the sea to divide the water so that the Israelites can go through the sea on dry ground’ (Exodus 14:9-15).

Moses did so. He raised his staff and God sent a strong wind to open up the Red Sea and to establish dry ground for the Israelites to cross over.

The Cloud and the Sea

We’re still aiming at getting the right interpretation for the expression baptized into Moses. To do so, we have reviewed the meaning of baptism and the meaning of the term our fathers. Now, seeing that these fathers were the ones who were baptized into Moses, we have to ask ourselves in what manner they were baptized. The passage says that they were baptized 'in the cloud and in the sea.'

Grasping the meaning of in the cloud and in the sea is the last challenge for interpreting this passage. Paul says that ‘…all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea’--a double-baptism. And Paul mentions this cloud/sea motif twice in the same 2-verse passage, making it emphatic. In other words, it’s really important to him to get across to us that baptism has two facets.

Paul presents baptism by explaining that the Israelites were ‘… under the cloud and… through the sea’ (1 Corinthians 10:1; NASB), which helps us because we get two prepositions giving us positions for the baptisms: under and through.

Prepositions are words that clarify the position of an action—that’s why we call them pre-positions. In this case, the Israelites were under the cloud, so the cloud was over them. And they went through the sea, which is perfectly rational since the sea became a wall on each side of them.

This dual baptism the Israelites experienced as they walked under the pilar of cloud/fire through the Red Sea was the equivalent of the current dual baptism every human being must experience to become a Christian. We must be baptized in water and the Spirit. Jesus insisted:

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless someone is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God (John 3:5; NASB).

Exodus Experience

Those who walked with Moses had one experience, and those of us who walk with Jesus have another, but they are parallel experiences. That is, they mean the same thing, and they produce the same fruit. They mean burial and resurrection. They mean death and life.

And the Angel of God who was going before the camp of Israel set out and went behind them. And the column of cloud set out ahead of them, and it stood still behind them, so that it came between the camp of Egypt and the camp of Israel. And it was a dark cloud, but it gave light to the night, so that neither approached the other all night.

And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and Yahweh moved the sea with a strong east wind all night, and he made the sea become dry ground, and the waters were divided. And the Israelites entered the middle of the sea on the dry land. The waters were a wall for them on their right and on their left (Exodus 14:19-22; LEB).

This pair of supernatural events of the Exodus parallel New Testament baptisms. The cloud—that is, the column of smoke by day and fire by night—was equal to our Holy Spirit baptism. The crossing of the sea equals our water baptism. Paul says we should not be unaware of these parallels.

…  I do not want you to be unaware, brethren… (1 Corinthians 10:1; NASB).

We should not ignore that the New Testament is in the Old Testament concealed, and the Old Testament in the New revealed. But, most churchgoers today are completely oblivious to the meaning of the events in the Old Testament. They cannot interpret the pilar of cloud by day and the pilar of fire by night.

By becoming aware of the Old Testament parallels to our New Testament experience, you will understand that two-fold baptism is not new. You’ll also understand that grace is not new, that covenants are not new, and that inheriting the Earth is not new. These are ancient aspects of the message which today we call the Gospel.

... indeed the Gospel was preached to us as well as to them; but the word which they heard did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in those who heard it (Hebrews 4:2; NKJV).

Baptized into Moses

Now you should be able to understand what the expression baptized into Moses means. It means that the 600,000 Israelite men (plus their wives and children, making the group easily over 2.4 million people) were saved. Those people were freed from slavery to Pharaoh by following the man God sent them, a man who carried an object of wood—Moses.

Their deliverance foreshadowed ours! We also renounce the World, and are freed from the power of the one who enslaved us, the Devil, by following the man God sent us. And the man God sent us also carried an object of wood—Jesus.

We are baptized into Jesus because when we go into the waters of baptism, we are buried with him. They were baptized into Moses as they boldly passed into the waters of the Red Sea. And, like us, the Israelites experienced a double-baptism because the pilar of cloud/fire represented the Holy Spirit.

Now, if the pilar of cloud/fire actually had been the Holy Spirit, then the Israelites would have been baptized in the Holy Spirit, but the baptism of the Holy Spirit was only made available after the ascension of Jesus to Heaven. They did not receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

A Prefiguration

All of the Old Testament prophets up to John the Baptist longed for the baptism of the Holy Spirit, but it did not come until Pentecost. Although nobody under the Old Covenant got it—they knew about it through God’s prefigurations of it. The pilar of cloud/fire was one of those.

We, as participants of the New Covenant, experience the baptism of the Spirit after we are baptized in water. The Israelites entered a covenant with God through Moses and immediately were put under the cloud. That meant that they were experiencing a picture of what it means to be in the New Covenant. The Old Covenant contained shadows of the things to come.

… do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration, or a Sabbath day. These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ (Colossians 2:17).

A Taste of Things to Come

The Israelites got a taste of what we have now, the baptism of the Spirit. And the taste they got helped them to understand the promises of Ezekiel and Jeremiah better. The promise God gave the Israelites through the Old Testament prophets (including Joel, as we’ll see in a moment) were of a cleansing and an empowerment.

God promised to wash them in water and to put his Spirit in them.

I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a New Spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws (Ezekiel 36:25-27).

I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land. Then you will know that I the LORD have spoken, and I have done it, declares the LORD (Ezekiel 37:14).

Likewise, Jeremiah promised that a New Covenant would supersede the Old. God promised through Jeremiah that the New Covenant would be different in that he would write his Law on their hearts, and not just present it to them on tablets of stone. In addition, he would forgive all of their sins. He prophesied of days that were to come, and those new times started at Pentecost.

‘The days are coming,’ declares the LORD, ‘when I will make a New Covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my Covenant, though I was a husband to them,’ declares the LORD.

‘This is the Covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time,’ declares the LORD. ‘I will put my Law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will they teach their neighbor, or say to one another, ‘Know the LORD,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,’ declares the LORD. ‘For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more (Jeremiah 31:31-34).

The Promise

Jesus and the Apostles used the expression the Promise to refer to the fulfillment of the promises found in the passages we just read from Ezekiel and Jeremiah. Jesus and the Apostles had the right interpretation of the Old Testament promises—they were assurances of the Spirit’s arrival at Pentecost.

Look at how Jesus exhorted the Apostles to wait for this Promise:

Behold, I send the Promise of my Father upon you; but tarry in the city of Jerusalem until you are endued with power from On High (Luke 24:49; NKJV).

He commanded them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the Promise of the Father, ‘which,’ he said, ‘you have heard from me; for John truly baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now’ (Acts 1:4-5; NKJV).

And when Pentecost finally came, Peter demonstrated before all that he knew what was happening. The Promise had come! The baptism of the Holy Spirit had become available to all who would repent, trust in Jesus, and be baptized.

This was Peter’s explanation of the unique opportunity given to those present in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost:

Exalted to the right hand of God, he [Jesus] has received from the Father the Promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear… Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The Promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off… (Acts 2:33, 38-39)

Availability of Spirit Baptism

Pentecost has passed, but today the Promise is still within reach of everyone who will repent and be baptized. As it says in the last passage: ‘Repent and be baptized… and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, the Promise…’ After Pentecost, the Church was born, and the apostles wrote of the Holy Spirit as someone who was among us. He still is. The Promise of his coming was fulfilled, and the availability of his baptism—the One Baptism—remains.

… we know that he [God] lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us (1 John 3:24).

He [God] has given us of his Spirit (1 John 4:13).

… having also believed [in the Gospel], you were sealed in him [Jesus] with the Holy Spirit of the Promise (Ephesians 1:13; NASB).

The only way for us to get this Promise is for us to be redeemed from the curse of the Law. That only happens when we enter the New Covenant.

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law… in order that the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles in Christ Jesus, so that we might receive the Promise of the Spirit tough faith (Galatians 3:13-14; LEB)

The difference between Christians and Jews is that Christians are committed to God through Jesus under the New Covenant. The Jews were committed to God through Moses under the Old Covenant. They were baptized into Moses, but we have a far superior baptism: We are baptized into Christ!

The Big Question

Have you been baptized in the name of Jesus? The big question is “Into what were you baptized?” If you were baptized into Jesus, then the result should be new life in the Spirit.

If you were baptized in Jesus’ name, did you then receive the Holy Spirit? You need to answer these questions honestly because if you are not born of water and the Spirit, you will not enter the Kingdom of God.

It’s not enough to be baptized into Moses. It wasn’t enough for the Israelites who died in the wilderness, and it won’t be enough for you. Eternal life is not committing to God through Moses and the Ten Commandments. It’s a committing to God through Jesus and the Law of Love.

Whenever Paul met believers, he would grill them on matters of baptism. We’re grilling you on it now. Have you been baptized by the Holy Spirit? Have you received the Promise of the Father, or not? If not, then seek baptism, the One Baptism in the Spirit. You must be baptized in water and the Spirit to enter the Kingdom of God.

Paul, having passed through the upper regions, came to Ephesus. And finding some disciples he said to them, ‘Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?’

So they said to him, ‘We have not so much as heard whether there is a Holy Spirit.’

And he said to them, ‘Into what then were you baptized?’

So they said, ‘Into John’s baptism.’

Then Paul said, ‘John indeed baptized with a baptism of repentance, saying to the people that they should believe on him who would come after him, that is, on Christ Jesus.’

When they heard this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. And when Paul had laid hands on them, the Holy Spirit came upon them, and they spoke with tongues and prophesied. Now the men were about twelve in all (Acts 19:1-7; NKJV).

New Life in Jesus

Observe that there were twelve men in the Ephesus encounter. Would that each of the Twelve Tribes of Israel were as open to the New Covenant as those twelve men were. The Jews will come to the New Covenant eventually. Their conversion will come when they see Jesus in the clouds. They will recognize Jesus as the Messiah when he appears in glory.

There’s only one name given under Heaven by which we must be saved—the name of the Lord Jesus. Only through him will the Jews or anybody else obtain eternal life.

Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under Heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12).

Receiving baptism in Jesus’ name is the door for a person to receive the Holy Spirit. Everyone at Pentecost understood this. Do you? Everyone present at Pentecost understood that once they were baptized in Jesus’ name, that they would receive the Holy Spirit. And they knew that the Promise of the New Covenant was new life in the Holy Spirit.

The Times We Live In

The men and women present on the birthday of the Church, Pentecost, recalled the words of the prophet Joel. They realized that its fulfillment had come. The Holy Spirit had been poured out on them.

And afterward, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days (Joel 2:28-29).

Peter was able to explain this prophecy very clearly to those who were witnessing the baptism of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

… Peter stood up with the Eleven, raised his voice and addressed the crowd: ‘Fellow Jews and all of you who live in Jerusalem, let me explain this to you; listen carefully to what I say… this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel:

‘In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people… Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy’ (Acts 2:14-18).

Peter explained baptisms 2000 years ago to the Church. Here we are 2000 years later. Has the Church forgotten the lesson? Does the Church understand the doctrine of baptisms? Is the Church ashamed to hold to the foundation of baptism in water and baptism in the Spirit?

We don’t live in times when our experiences are a shadow of things to come. That was for the people who followed Moses. That was for the Old Testament believers all the way up to John the Baptist. But for us is the reality. We experience the baptisms previous generations only dreamed of. The reality is Christ!

… [the Law of Moses was] a shadow of what is to come, but the reality is Christ (Colossians 2:17; LEB)

Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptized by John. But John tried to deter him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’ (Matthew 3:13-14).