Galatians 3:27

For as many of you as were baptized into Christ did put on Christ.

Baptized into Christ ... is here used in exactly the same manner that "Faith" was in the preceding verse, that is, as a synecdoche for the primary steps of accepting the gospel and becoming a Christian; and by the use of it, Paul testified to the essentiality of it. It violates the rules of grammar to use in such a synecdoche any non-vital, unnecessary or unessential part to stand for the whole. Yet there is a difference between "faith" and "baptism," for here it is declared that people are baptized "into" Christ, a declaration nowhere existing in the New Testament with regard to "faith."

As many of you as were baptized into Christ ... is only another way of saying that "all of the Galatians" had been so baptized. Howard was certain "that this refers to the initiatory rite of water baptism."[30] Ramsay correctly read Paul's meaning here as follows: "Beyond all doubt Paul considered that, practically, to become a part of Christ implied membership in the church of Christ."[31] The use of "As many of you ..." means that any who might not have been baptized were not in Christ. Ridderbos was correct in seeing this verse "as a limitation on the preceding verse,"[32] making the "ye all" of Galatians 3:26, to be modified and restricted to those who had received Christian baptism, thus clearly denying that any persons whomsoever had believed themselves into Christ without being baptized as Jesus commanded.

Of course, there are trainloads of books coming off the presses every month denying the obvious truth of this verse; and among the countless objections alleged against the truth, perhaps the most common is that "Well, not everyone who is baptized is saved." Such an error is due to a misunderstanding of the pre-requirements of baptism, faith and repentance. Now, any person being immersed without those vital prerequisites to baptism is not baptized at all, but merely wet. It must be confessed that perhaps there are those who have thus been immersed without being saved; but nobody was ever saved without being immersed. See note 1, at the end of the chapter.

[30] R. E. Howard, op. cit., p. 67.

[31] William M. Ramsay, op. cit., p. 386.

[32] Herman N. Ridderbos, op. cit., p. 147.