Miscellaneous commentaries on Baptism found when preparing renewing of my mind.
Galatians 3:27
baptized into Christ — (Rom_6:3).
have put on Christ — Ye did, in that very act of being baptized into Christ, put on, or clothe yourselves with, Christ: so the Greek expresses. Christ is to you the toga virilis (the Roman garment of the full-grown man, assumed when ceasing to be a child) [Bengel]. Gataker defines a Christian, “One who has put on Christ.” The argument is, By baptism ye have put on Christ; and therefore, He being the Son of God, ye become sons by adoption, by virtue of His Sonship by generation. This proves that baptism, where it answers to its ideal, is not a mere empty sign, but a means of spiritual transference from the state of legal condemnation to that of living union with Christ, and of sonship through Him in relation to God (Rom_13:14). Christ alone can, by baptizing with His Spirit, make the inward grace correspond to the outward sign. But as He promises the blessing in the faithful use of the means, the Church has rightly presumed, in charity, that such is the case, nothing appearing to the contrary.
JFB
Romans 6:3
Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ — compare 1Co_10:2.
were baptized into his death? — sealed with the seal of heaven, and as it were formally entered and articled, to all the benefits and all the obligations of Christian discipleship in general, and of His death in particular. And since He was “made sin” and “a curse for us” (2Co_5:21; Gal_5:13), “bearing our sins in His own body on the tree,” and “rising again for our justification” (Rom_4:25; 1Pe_2:24), our whole sinful case and condition, thus taken up into His Person, has been brought to an end in His death. Whoso, then, has been baptized into Christ’s death has formally surrendered the whole state and life of sin, as in Christ a dead thing. He has sealed himself to be not only “the righteousness of God in Him,” but “a new creature”; and as he cannot be in Christ to the one effect and not to the other, for they are one thing, he has bidden farewell, by baptism into Christ’s death, to his entire connection with sin. “How,” then, “can he live any longer therein?” The two things are as contradictory in the fact as they are in the terms.
jfb
Galatians 3:27
See on Mat_28:19. Not in relation to Christ (Meyer), but into spiritual union and communion with him. Comp. Rom_6:3 (see note); 1Co_12:12, 1Co_12:13, 1Co_12:27. Paul here conceives baptism, not as a mere symbolical transaction, but as an act in which believers are put into mystical union with the crucified and risen Lord. Comp. Rom_6:3-11.
VWS
Col 2:12 Having been put to death with him in baptism, by which you came to life again with him, through faith in the working of God, who made him come back from the dead.