Baptized into the Triune Name

In baptism, we are named for the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, claimed by the triune God to live in His family. Today, Sinclair Ferguson explains what baptism teaches Christians about our fellowship with the Trinity.

Welcome to Things Unseen today, and especially welcome if you’re new to our podcast. This week, we’ve been thinking about what is surely one of the profoundest elements, if not the profoundest element in the Christian faith, the Trinity. I love the saying of Augustine, that no doctrine is more difficult or more dangerous than the doctrine of the Trinity, and yet at the same time, no doctrine is more rewarding.

I hope we caught just a glimpse of that yesterday when we were thinking about the fact that God is love, and being love is Trinity, and that these two truths mesh together beautifully. But there’s a very obvious reason why we should be more Trinitarian in our thinking than I suspect we actually are. And perhaps it’s also the most obvious reason for saying that far from being speculative and impractical, as people often say, the doctrine of the Trinity must actually be the most basic and the most profoundly practical of all doctrines. The reason is actually so obvious that we rarely notice it, and sometimes we tend to obscure it or divert people away from it. I wonder if you can guess what I’m thinking about.

I’m actually thinking about baptism. It’s something that all Christians have in common. I’m not thinking here about the elements that Christians tend to debate together—who should be baptized and how we should baptize. I’m talking about the words that we all use at a baptism—“I baptize you in the name (singular) of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”—the words that go back to Jesus’ Great Commission in Matthew 28.

I think it’s wonderful to remember that this was actually the first time, if I can put it this way, that the full name of God was ever pronounced. We’re baptized into this one name of God, but it’s pronounced Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit, so that right from the beginning of the Christian life, you and I are called to live in fellowship with the Trinity.

The Trinity is the bedrock of the life of the believer. I think it would be a great pity if, as a minister, when I preached at baptisms or about baptism, I spent most of the time defending one view of baptism or another view of baptism—one mode of baptism or another mode of baptism and whether we do it once or twice or three times—but never actually spoke about the wonder and importance of the fact that we are baptized into the one name of the three persons, and this is the foundation of our whole Christian lives and the communion with God in which we live. I wonder if we spend so much time on things about which we differ that we don’t spend enough time on the things that would really cause us to rejoice, living in and acting out the blessedness of our fellowship with the Trinity.

Now, baptism is a naming ceremony, isn’t it? The water doesn’t change us inside, and yet it isn’t that absolutely nothing happens, is it? We’re being given a name; we’re being named for the Trinity. You could think about it this way. At some point in the first few days of my life, I went through a naming ceremony. It went like this: The city register asked my father and mother, “What is the name of your child?” And they said, “Sinclair Buchanan Ferguson.” It’s a grand sounding name, but it didn’t change anything inside me. I’m sure my mom must have sometimes wished it had. But ever since that moment, at least in my consciousness, whenever I hear the word Sinclair Ferguson, inwardly, I respond: “That’s me. That’s who I am. That’s my identity.” If my mom said to me, as she sometimes did, “Sinclair Ferguson,” in the way mothers can do, I knew she was saying, “You’ve been named for this family, but you’re not living as though you were named for this family.” So baptism as a naming ceremony—it doesn’t change us inside.

But in another sense it changes everything, doesn’t it? It tells us that our lives have been claimed by God the Trinity, to live in His family, to live out His lifestyle, to live for His praise and glory, and to enjoy Him forever. And it tells us something else. It tells us that as we live the Christian life, we know that the Father loves us and cares for us, we know that the Son loves us and has died for us, we know that the Spirit loves us and is willing to lead us. I’m sure that’s what Martin Luther was thinking about whenever he was despondent and went outside and said the two Latin words, baptizatus sum, “I’ve been baptized.” I think he was saying: “Martin, remember God the Trinity. Remember that you belong to His family. Remember you’ve got a privilege of fellowship with the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Now, Martin, go and enjoy it and live it out.”

Well, that’s a lesson for us today, to let our baptisms reminder us of this absolutely fundamental truth about us—that we’ve been named for God, the Trinity; for the Father, for the Son, for the Holy Spirit, and there’s surely nothing more practical than that.