‘The Baptism of Christ was a competitive alternative to the baptism of Herod. Its offer of citizenship into the Kingdom of God required an exclusive allegiance to that kingdom and a willingness to sacrifice for one’s neighbor voluntarily rather than compel one’s neighbor to sacrifice for them through Herod’s bureaucratic socialist projects and covetous offers of benefits. This competition is the premise of the whole message of Christ, the Gospel of the Kingdom of God.

In fact, the image of Baptism: the washing away of an old civil obligation and putting on a new, pure one, is borrowed by other Biblical metaphors, like “being born again” “as a new creature.”…

This takes us back to the differences between the corruptible seed of the flesh and the incorruptible seed of the spirit (1 Peter 1:23) where the people were once destined to bear the image of God, but were instead born into the sin of civil bondage characterized by “the flesh”, inheriting their parents’ curses through birth certification and social security, as they inherited it from their parents “unto the third and fourth generation” which keep the people spiritually dead in their kingdoms of death. However,

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead…” (1 Peter 1:3)

This notion of being “born again” and becoming a “new creature” is not just some hyper-spiritual mantra meant to make professing Christians convince themselves that they are faithful through the witchcraft of repeating Biblical phrases and rhetoric, without grounded context or practical application. The notion explicitly refers to classical Sumerian Cuneiform, to ancient Abrahamic history, of which Christ expected Nicodemus to be familiar: “Art thou a master of Israel, and knowest not these things?”’