Will, I, too, am glad to see your interest in the truth. Perhaps the best way to understand baptism is that it is something the subject does not do. It is act performed on someone by someone else. If someone dies and you bury them, the dead person does no work. We are to die to sin and be buried in baptism (Romans 6). Peter told the Pentecost crowd, "Let everyone of you be baptized..." If baptism is done TO someone who dies spiritually, then how does the dead one do a work?

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"that in all things he might have the preeminence." Colossians 1:18