How is baptism a seal?

Rev. Mike Glodo explores how baptism functions as both a sign and a seal of God’s new covenant. Baptism visibly symbolizes our union with Christ in his death and resurrection, and when we believe, it becomes a means by which God communicates his grace, allowing us to participate in the promises of salvation throughout our lives.

The following is a transcript of the video above. 

How is baptism a seal?

We speak of baptism as a sign and a seal of God’s new covenant, and the sign thing is pretty intuitive. We see the water applied or a person immersed in water, whichever mode we’re using. And we say, Oh, that symbolizes certain things. Most people associate that signing with washing, which. That’s certainly one of them. Romans 6 tells us that it is a sign of actually going down to death. We’ve been united to Christ in his death, death through baptism. So it’s a little bit colloquial. But one thing baptism symbolizes is dying, being buried, and being put in the grave. And of course, when we’re united to Christ by faith, we also come out of the grave in baptism. And so, in baptism, one thing symbolized besides washing is deliverance —not just from death, but through death, the death of Christ, to new life. So the symbolism there is fairly straightforward, although the latter one is often neglected. But what’s a little bit harder is seal. And a lot of people think, okay, seal is just another way of saying sign. But that’s not what it means.

Seal means authentication, the actual presence of the real thing. In other words, in baptism, we actually receive something. It’s not just symbolic, but we actually receive something. It’s funny. Peter, in 1 Peter, says something that is the exact opposite of what I hear many pastors say. He says, and corresponding to this, baptism now saves us. And we’re so quick to say, baptism doesn’t mean you’re saved, that we neglect actually how baptism is one of the things that God uses as an ordinary and outward means of grace to save us. Just like the word of Scripture, it doesn’t do us any good if we don’t believe it. Put faith in it. But baptism as a visible word, when believed, actually is the means by which God communicates to us his grace. And so when we believe the word of baptism about ourselves, we claim and participate and improve upon that which is ours in Christ. As the Westminster Larger Catechism 167 describes it at great length, our baptism is to be improved by us our whole life long. And that’s how we partake in the sealing. We see what baptism says in the signing, and we participate in it as a seal by believing the word that God says to us about baptism.