Baptism and the Survival of Fish

As I ate my cinnamon biscuit at a fast food restaurant near Nashville, Tennessee recently, I listened to a group of men reminisce. One spoke of growing up in a small Texas town, where new converts for the Church of Christ he attended were baptized in a nearby pond. After hearing that a man with less than stellar reputation would be baptized, he said, a man in the small town had protested that the church must not baptize the convert in the pond. He insisted that all the fish would die if the other man’s body entered the water. Sin corrupts our influence in the world, but rarely does it affect the environment. Although prospective visitors to church services have confessed fears of the church building ceiling cracking when they entered, I have yet to see such happen. I have seen a person’s appearance deteriorate markedly in a five-year period when he abused drugs and engaged in other criminal behavior. Choosing unethical or immoral behavior has destroyed relationships and ended employment. The greatest impact of sin, however, is on the sinner’s soul. “Wickedness burns like a fire,” the prophet Isaiah wrote, “it consumes briers and thorns; it kindles the thickets of the forest, and they roll upward in a column of smoke” (Isaiah 9:18 ESV). The symbolic language of the prophet describes how rebellion against God consumes and destroys. Sin will rarely destroy literal fish (The exception would be if someone intentionally poisoned a lake.); it does destroy dreams and relationships. If we turn from sin and confess our faith through baptism, God cleanses us and equips us for work he has prepared for us to do (Acts 22:16; Ephesians 2:10). No fish die; no roofs collapse. Scars remain, but as we continue to obey God, they too begin to heal. Turn to the Lord today.