John MacArthur and ancient baptism

A little further reaction to John MacArthur's sermon on 1 Peter 2:
It's actually a good sermon overall, encouraging believers to fill their lives with God's word. But besides reading the whole text through Calvinist glasses, John twists Christian History itself when he makes this claim:

There was an interesting routine that was followed by some early Christians in their baptism where they would be baptized in their old clothes, and then when they came out of the waters they would go to a dressing room and they would be given new clothes. This was a symbol of the fact that salvation marked the shedding of all that was old and the beginning of all that was new.

Alas, as longtime readers of this blog are aware, the ancient custom involved removing clothes, all right: but BEFORE the baptism, not after. Cyril of Jerusalem, for example, in his teaching on the Mystery of Baptism, is recorded as saying:
"As soon as you entered, you put off your tunic; and this was an image of putting off the old man with his deeds. Having stripped yourselves, you were naked; in this also imitating Christ, who was stripped naked on the Cross, and by His nakedness put off from Himself the principalities and powers, and openly triumphed over them on the tree."

John MacArthur and 1 Peter 2:2

I concluded this post with, "Calvinism, of course, does not stand or fall upon a paraphrase of 1 Peter 2:2. It is able to twist any scripture to its ends, and this one need be no exception. So why not just translate it as it stands, and leave its (mis)interpretation up to the theologians?" and I observed an interesting example of this in a sermon by the late John MacArthur that I heard recently on Christian radio.
John was exegeting 1 Peter 2 and read the verse in its entirety. Since his favourite Bible version contains the phrase, "with respect to salvation," he read that part too--but then went on to exegete the verse exactly as he would have had it not been present.

EDIT: Oh, what do you know--Grace to You has made the whole sermon available on their website, so you don't have to take my word for it.
Note what he did here: he took the words "with respect to" which are, at best, a loose paraphrase of the Greek word εις, ַand applied them literally--something I'm sure would be frowned upon if any of his homiletics students at The Masters College (formerly the Los Angeles Baptist College) tried it on virtually any other passage in the New Testament. It's a metaphor of salvation, he says. A figure of speech, not meant to be taken literally.
John, who started out preaching from the New Testament using the King James Version, switched early on to the NASB because, he said, it was so literal and close to the Greek (well, except for this verse, I guess). It should have bothered him, knowing Greek as well as he did, to see what liberties the NASB translators--some of whom he knew personally--took with this verse, but even when he helped oversee a revision of the NASB--the Legacy Standard Bible--he kept in the paraphrase, I suspect because it suited his Calvinist worldview like a literal, close-to-the-Greek translation (one that stands in the text of the ESV, but in the LSB was relegated to a footnote) never could have.

I thought that Calvinism, to pass itself off as a scriptural worldwview, would not have to rely upon a paraphrase that turned something literal on its face into a metaphor. But if that were indeed the case, why couldn't a Calvinist expositor and Bible translator, one who prides himeself in being as accurate to the literal meaning of the original languages as can reasonably be expected, handle a literal interpretation of this one verse?