Summary: The Bible is the source of Christian doctrine and practice, and because of that it is vital that Christians are able to read it and understand what it is saying. Yet the Bible uses language that can be confusing to Christians. The language was not confusing to the Greeks, who spoke the language of the New Testament and knew its idioms. One of the idioms of the Greek New Testament that confuses Christians is the use of the word "in" (sometimes translated "into" in our English Bibles) to describe relationships. For example, 1 Corinthians 15:22 says, "For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive." We might expand that for clarity in English to say, "In connection with Adam we all die, and in connection with Christ we will all be made alive." Some contexts are easier for us to grasp than others, for example, for us to be "baptized into (in) Christ" or "baptized into (in) his death" (Rom. 6:3) are more difficult to understand than "in Adam," but we need to know what those verses are saying. Since the relationship described by the word "in" can vary from a loose relation to a very tight one, even a union, we must discover the exact nature of the relationship by reading the context. In this teaching, John Schoenheit covers the meaning of New Testament phrases that use "in" (or "into"), and gives very helpful explanations and translations of what some of the important verses that use these phrases mean.
