‘And Peter said to them, “Repent you, and be baptised every one of you on the name of Jesus Christ to the remission of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”
Peter summarises what they must do. They are to ‘repent', to have a change of heart and mind about the Lord Jesus Christ, and about their sin, and turn to Him. They are to be baptised ‘on (epi) the name of Jesus Christ' unto the forgiveness of sins. Then they will receive this same gift of the Holy Spirit as the disciples now had, the gift of the coming age.
Peter's first words recall the preaching of John the Baptiser, which Peter had heard so often. In John's case it was ‘the baptism of repentance unto the remission of sins' (Mark 1:4; Luke 3:3), it was ‘unto repentance' (Matthew 3:11). The central thought then was the repentance of which the baptism was the symbol and expression, and repentance signifies a change of heart and mind and will.
In order to understand this we need to be more aware of what this repentance was. It was not primarily repentance from individual sins, however important that might be, it was repentance from a wrong attitude towards God, from a failure to give God His due, from a refusal to recognise Him in their lives, from disobedience to His will. It was thus a change of heart and mind about God, and a turning to a new obedience towards God. It was a recognition of a past failure to respond to Him truly, and a resultant determination not to fail in that way from now on. That did, of course, involve a recognition of sin and a turning from sins, and it did require that those sins be forgiven, but the prime problem was not that they had sinned, but that they had sinned against God. Such a repentance only occurs when men become aware of God and see themselves in His eyes. Then their eye does not become fixed on the sins, it becomes fixed on the One to Whom the person is turning. Although this will in the end result in a deep awareness of sinfulness, for some immediately, for others gradually.
When Isaiah repented it was because of his new awareness of God. He saw God and his mind was changed about God, and he thus became aware that all was not right, and that he was sinful. He had a change of heart and mind because God had broken in on him. So his awareness of sin resulted from His new recognition of God, and his repentance lay in the fact that from now on he would approach God and His requirements in a totally different way. Awareness of God and response to that awareness was the essence of it.
It had been a requirement of John's preaching that men submit to his baptism in water precisely for this reason. The baptism symbolised the coming ‘drenching of the Spirit' (Isaiah 44:1-5), and his followers were baptised because by it they were renewing their dedication to God, and indicating their longing and desire to participate in that ‘drenching'. They were baptised in order to indicate that they had turned back to God ready for His blessing. It was in order to demonstrate true ‘repentance towards God', so that they might receive the forgiveness of sins, with the hope of participating in the new age of the Spirit.
It was the later church subsequent to the New Testament which turned baptism into a cleansing from sin and aligned it with Jewish ritual washings. But John says nothing of that. His concentration was on the coming drenching of the Spirit which would produce a fruitful harvest, and the majority of his illustrations are along that line.
This turning to God did necessarily result in a desire to walk rightly before God, and as a result to behave in such a way as to please Him, for that would be necessary for all who would partake in the blessing of, the coming age, but the baptism signified the power that would bring it about.
How much more then was such a baptism necessary as an outward symbol and sign, and as an expression of repentance and desire to enter the new age, for those who would turn to Christ and receive the fulfilment of that ‘drenching' in the Holy Spirit.
In Acts 3:19 repentance is central, and baptism is not mentioned, but what follows immediately pictures the new age. There is no mention of baptism there because the reality is described and not the shadow. The ‘seasons of refreshing' were what John's baptism had pointed forward to. But the lack of mention of baptism does not mean that there it was not called for by the Apostles, but simply that it was recognised that it was repentance and receiving the blessing of the new age that was central, not the rite that symbolised it. Baptism would then result because it pointed to the blessing of the new age. It suggests that neither Peter nor Luke (nor Paul - 1 Corinthians 1:17) put the same emphasis on baptism as many have since. Baptism was important as the outward expression, repentance and the forgiveness of sins and the times of refreshing were the reality.
His call to them to be baptised echoes Jesus words in Matthew 28:18-20, confirming that Luke knew of those words. Peter had baptised men and women in the early days of Jesus' ministry with a baptism parallel to that of John (John 4:1-2), because he was still a disciple of John. We are nowhere told whether such baptisms continued during the ministry of Jesus, but if they had ceased, as they probably had, Peter now knew that they were to begin again because the Lord had so commanded. They were to be the means by which, now that the King was no longer present, new converts were to express the fact that they were receiving the Holy Spirit and becoming ‘Holy Spirit men' and ‘Christ-men', indwelt by God's Spirit. By such baptism they would be openly marked off as belonging to Him and as having opened themselves to the Holy Spirit.
‘Baptised on the name of Jesus Christ' may signify ‘on the basis of'. There is an advance in the significance of Baptism. They are not only being baptised in order to enter the community of the Spirit but on the basis of what Jesus Christ has done for them, calling on His name for those benefits to be applied to them. Here we can contrast ‘in (en) the name of Jesus Christ' (Acts 10:48) and ‘into (eis) the name of the Lord Jesus' (Acts 8:16; Acts 19:5). Note how when it is baptism ‘into the name', as in Matthew 28:19, it is into the name of ‘the Lord' Jesus. ‘The Lord' (LXX for Yahweh) is the name into which both demand that men be baptised. But here in Acts there is no standard formula.
So having truly repented, and having changed their minds with regard to the Lord Jesus Christ, and having turned from sin, they were to demonstrate their commitment to Him by the baptism which would mark them off as belonging to the new Israel, and then they could be sure that they would receive ‘the gift of the Holy Spirit', which the water baptism symbolised. The Holy Spirit would be poured out on them as He had been on the disciples. ‘The gift' refers back to the giving in Acts 2:1-4. The gift has been given and now they share in it (compare Acts 5:32). In Acts 8:20 it is described as ‘the gift of God'.
This reminds us that baptism was never intended to be separated from the moment of conversion, and in the early days it was not. Once it was it could never quite be the baptism mentioned in the New Testament. For once believers began to be baptised as other than responders to the proclamation of the word it rather looked back to what had been. It ceased to be the moment of receiving the Holy Spirit. It was performed on those who had already received the Spirit (as with Cornelius - Acts 10:44-48).
Unfortunately the main significance of baptism has been misinterpreted in the church. In the New Testament the emphasis on its significance is always the expectancy of receiving of new life and of the Holy Spirit. John's baptism pictured the pouring out of the Holy Spirit like rain as promised by the prophets so that his message was all about the resulting fruitfulness and the harvest that would result. Paul continues the idea and sees it as dying and rising again in newness of life, as the seed did in order to become fruitful (John 12:24). It was the later church that came to see it as washing from sin and then built up all kinds of superstitious beliefs around it so that even leading Bishops put off baptism until they were nearing death. That was the opposite of the purpose of baptism which was to indicate that those baptised were immediately entering into the new community, the new body of Christ, ‘baptised in the Spirit into one body -- which is Christ' (1 Corinthians 12:12-13). As we shall see when we come to Acts 22:16 (the only verse that remotely comes near to possibly teaching ‘washing' when related to baptism) the picture of baptism as washing was not what Ananias meant at all. Nowhere does the New Testament see baptism as washing from sin. It is regeneration and the blood of Christ that wash from sin, not baptism (Titus 3:5; Revelation 7:14; 1 Corinthians 6:11).