Before Jesus Christ's ministry began, John the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness about repentance from sin and baptism. Water rituals like baptism were common in antiquity, and God instructed the Levitical priests to use water in many of the purification rituals, for instance in the cleansing of a leper. We tend to think of baptism as a New Testament thing, but it can be found early in the Old Testament. On the last day of Unleavened Bread, God symbolically baptized the children of Israel as they went down into the Red Sea during the night and stepped out of their watery grave the next morning. As they looked behind them in the dawn, hundreds of Egyptian soldiers and horses lay dead along the shore, and many others floated in the waves. They could literally see that God had destroyed those who had oppressed them for hundreds of years. The Egyptians would never again be able to afflict them in any way, as God had washed away and destroyed what had enslaved them. They were clean and free. Seeing this, the Israelites feared God and broke into a song of praise to the Lord. Even this baptism of the Israelites in the Red Sea was not the first baptism recorded in Scripture, although the earlier event is mentioned as a baptism only in the New Testament. The apostle Peter mentions Noah and his family being saved through water and Christian baptism being its antitype. In the Flood story is an example of baptism by water, when the world of that time was cleansed of sin by the destruction of all humanity but for eight people. The entire earth was plunged into a watery grave, and only Noah's family rose out of it to new life. There might have been an even earlier baptism when the earth was covered with water at Creation. God may have baptized the earth to cleanse it of the sins of the angels who did not keep their proper domain. Genesis 1:2 informs us that the earth was covered in water, and on the third day God gathered the waters into seas to let the dry land appear. Earth rose out of the water cleansed and prepared for new life. From these examples God seems to begin every instance of new life and new creation with a baptism, a cleansing in water for the remission of sins, making baptism an essential and vital early step in His creative work with humanity. The children of Israel were indeed baptized in the sea, and God swept their slavery away. They came up from the Red Sea singing for joy at the victory God gave them. But they could never see past their physical needs and fleshly desires. Almost none of them ever received the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and so, without genuine faith in God, they all died in the wilderness, never entering the Promised Land.