Voyage to a new world

This week's verses are 1 Peter 3:19-21:

In it he went and preached to the spirits in prison, after they were disobedient long ago when God patiently waited in the days of Noah as an ark was being constructed. In the ark a few, that is eight souls, were delivered through water. And this prefigured baptism, which now saves you—not the washing off of physical dirt but the pledge of a good conscience to God—through the resurrection of Jesus Christ

I had never thought of Noah's journey as a kind of foreshadowing of baptism. But that's exactly what it is. The symbolism Peter uses is dead accurate.

Normally we think of baptism purely in the cleansing sense, but never as a journey between the world of our past and the world of our future. That's not to say that the symbolic cleansing isn't useful, but it's not enough on its own. Studies have found that people who are aware of their moral failures do feel relieved when they are able to physically clean themselves. But is taking a bath enough?

When Noah boarded his ark and the land was submerged, he was leaving a land of unrighteousness, a damaged irredeemable world. In the ark, he passed in isolation to a renewed land free of the destruction that was waiting in the old. Creation had died and been reborn. When he emerged, the land was more than just wet. It had restarted fresh.

When we're baptised, we make a public declaration to follow the Christian faith. We give up the old life. We leave our previous world that is bound for destruction and emerge into a new life that is free of condemnation. We're not just getting wet; we're going somewhere.