In the ordinances, we “put on Christ,” and
participate in his life and his atoning sacrifice. Through our ritual action,
we embody how Christ was in the world. Through our ritual action, we embody how
Christ was in the world. We are all familiar with the explanation, clearly
elaborated in Paul’s writings, that in baptism by immersion we symbolically
die, are buried, and are resurrected with Christ.
In Galatians 3:27, Paul says, “For as many of
you have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” Paul explains how we
put on Christ in baptism. When we are “baptized into Jesus Christ [we] were
baptized into his death” (Romans 6:3). Our immersion is a participation in his
death. Then after “we are buried with him by baptism into death,” we also participate
in his resurrection, “that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the
glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life” (Romans
6:4).
The ordinance of baptism allows us to
ritually put on Christ. His way of being is modelled in the ordinance of
baptism. It is a submission to the will of the Father and a separation from the
worldliness, the death of the man of sin. The ordinance is not the end but the
beginning. Paul tells the saints to live out what they have symbolically done
in the ordinance of baptism: “put . . . on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not
provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof” (Romans 13:14). We must
go forward and walk in newness of life, putting on Christ in our daily life, just
as we did in the ordinance.
Another explanation of how ordinances allow
us to embody Christ is found in 2 Nephi 31. Nephi explains how the ordinance of
baptism is an embodiment of and participation in Christ’s life because Christ’s
own baptism was an embodiment of submission. Christ submitted to immersion and “according
to the flesh he [humbled] himself before the Father and [witnessed] unto the
Father that he would be obedient unto him in keeping his commandments” (2 Nephi
31:7).
The ordinances are the way in the sense that
Christ is the Way. Baptism “showeth unto the children of men the straitness of
the path, and the narrowness of the gate, by which they should enter, he having
set the example before them” (2 Nephi 31:9). The submission embodied in being
immersed in water models an entire life of submission—the life of Christ: “And
he said unto the children of men: Follow thou me. Wherefore, my beloved
brethren can we follow Jesus save we shall be willing to keep the commandments
of the Father?” (2 Nephi 31:10).
Our ritual embodiment of Christ in baptism
continues in the ordinances of the temple. President Harold B. Lee commented, “the
receiving of the endowment requires the assuming of obligations by covenants which
in reality are but an embodiment or an unfolding of the covenants each person
should have assumed at baptism” (The
Teachings of Harold B. Lee: Eleventh President of The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints [Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1996], 574) Through the
ordinances, we gain a knowledge of God, Through the ordinances, we ritually
embody the kind of obedience and submission that we need to develop in our
lives through the process of conversion of conversion and becoming. (Jennifer
C. Lane, Finding Christ in the Covenant
Path: Ancient Insights for Modern Life [Provo and Utah: BYU Religious
Studies Center and Deseret Book, 2020], 160-62)
