The title comes from a story about John Gerstner, a Presbyterian theologian of the last century. On one occasion, Gerstner was supplying the pulpit at a church on a Sunday morning. When he arrived, the person who greeted him asked if he would mind performing an infant baptism during the service. Gerstner replied that he would be glad to do so.
He was then led to the front of the church and shown the baptismal font. There was water in the font, and beside it lay a white rose. The person explained that during the baptism, Gerstner was to dip the rose in the water and then sprinkle the child with the rose. Gerstner asked what the symbolism of the rose was. The answer came quickly: the child’s innocence.
Gerstner then asked a simple follow‑up question: “So what’s the water for, then?“
What Gerstner was getting at was this: if the child being baptized is innocent, there is no need to apply water at all. We use water when something is unclean, not when it is clean. When our children take a bath, we put water on them because they are dirty. When we take a shower, we put water over our bodies because we need to be washed. Water is for cleansing.
What the Water Means
The same is true in Christian baptism. The water symbolizes washing and forgiveness. It is applied to the person being baptized precisely because that person is unclean, not clean—sinful, not righteous; guilty, not innocent.
This is why we baptize babies here at Tenth with water and without a rose. We do not view them as innocent, but as guilty. Of course, by God’s grace, they are born into a covenant home and are, in that sense, positionally holy. But they are not essentially holy. By nature, they are sinners like all mankind and in need of God’s cleansing grace.
The good news held out in Christian baptism is that God comes to them as their covenant God and offers them forgiveness of sins through the gospel of his Son, Jesus Christ.
When we baptize a child, what we are saying is this: May what we put on the outside of you as a sign—water for cleansing—become a reality on the inside of you in truth: a clean heart, forgiven and regenerated.
So this morning, this is a baptism with water and without a rose. He is not innocent, but guilty before God. And yet God, in his grace, comes to him in the gospel and offers him forgiveness of sins.
Why the Sign Comes Before Faith
At this point, some may ask: Why not wait and put the sign on him after he repents and comes to faith in Jesus? Why put the sign on before the reality, rather than after the reality?
There is a very simple answer. This is the order God himself instituted in the Old Testament.
Under the covenant of grace in the Old Testament, God required that circumcision—the sign of his covenant—be placed on the children of believers before they grew up to repent of their sins and put their trust in him. Think of Isaac and Jacob. They received the sign of God’s covenant on the eighth day of life, long before they expressed repentance and faith toward God.
Circumcision symbolized the same realities that baptism symbolizes today. It represented the cutting away of the old flesh and the old life so that a new life might come forth. It symbolized cleansing, repentance, regeneration, adoption, justification, and a righteousness received by faith, as Paul explains in Romans 4:11.
If that is what circumcision meant in the Old Testament—and if it was applied to the children of believers before they repented and believed—then placing the water of baptism on a child before repentance and faith is entirely consistent with how God has always dealt with his people.
And since God does not change in the way he relates to his covenant people throughout history, we continue this pattern today. Simply put, if the order of sign first, faith later was good enough for the Isaac of the Old Testament, it is good enough for the children of the New Testament.
The Church’s Responsibility
The parents’ role, and our role as a church, is to raise little children to believe in Jesus and to receive by faith what is offered to him in this covenant sign of baptism. Our prayer is that what is placed on the outside of him this morning will, in God’s time and by God’s grace, become a reality on the inside of him.