BAPTISM AGAIN
There are those believers who think that talking about baptism is a waste of good time and energy. There are others who think it isn’t a complete waste of time and energy but it’s so far down the list of “things to do and things to discuss” that they immediately lose interest when the subject is raised. “Faith and living in the image of Jesus Christ is what really matters,” they insist.
Now and then you hear someone say that sort of thing as if the NT didn’t know that. The centrality of faith in God through Jesus is seen everywhere in the NT and Paul will insist in 1 Corinthians 7:19 that what really matters, in light of Jesus, is “keeping the commandments of God.”
So the NT writers don’t need instruction from us on what really matters and with that in mind let me say that those who read the NT and don’t see that baptism is everywhere related to faith in Jesus Christ and making him the Lord of our lives have been and are being deprived of crucially important truth. Click here. [Let me say too that there are those who speak about baptism as if it were the only truth in the Bible we should bother about. More ignorance.]
A question often raised by those who take notice of baptism is: “What makes for a ‘valid’ baptism?” Infant Baptism is an interesting subject and should be pursued but it isn’t something you find documented in the NT as even those who practice it will tell you. In the NT, baptism is administered only to persons with personal faith in Jesus.
There are those who fully confess that that is what the NT presents to us but they still feel they can move beyond that to baptizing infants. For a number of reasons that includes the doctrine that infants are born alienated from God through Adam’s sin, they feel compelled to have the infants baptized and joined to Jesus for salvation. [Luther in his plain-speaking way insisted that a baby is not baptized to become a prince but to become a Christian.]
Those who hold that personal faith is required in the one to be baptized hold that “infant baptism” is not NT baptism and therefore invalid. As an ordinance it doesn’t “work” precisely because it isn’t NT baptism and only NT baptism “works” in a NT way. Whatever NT baptism “does” it is only NT baptism that “does” it
NT baptism is what it is! It isn’t for each person to decide what it should be or mean or do, but for all who take the NT as their teacher and guide to learn, to do and teach (as is said of Ezra).
If, for example, someone took the view that whether they are baptized or not is entirely up to them because that’s the nature of NT baptism—if they took that view they certainly didn’t get it from the NT and what is not got from the NT should be forthrightly rejected or regarded with strong suspicion depending on the nature of the case.
But what if these people in their ignorance submitted to a baptism that they fully believed they could take or leave would that invalidate their baptism? Perhaps not! For God has a way of tolerating good-hearted ignorance (not all ignorance is the same—click here).
But does their ignorance alter the nature of NT truth?
Should we keep from them the truth of the NT on this matter?
Should we ourselves adopt their ignorance as if it were our own?
If someone came to us to be baptized but insisted with passion that they wanted nothing to do with a baptism that was “into” Jesus and “unto” salvation, claiming that such a baptism was foreign to what they had in mind—should we baptize them, professing it was NT baptism?
Whatever we should do, surely we shouldn’t embrace such ignorance as NT truth and practice it as loyalty to NT truth.
The issue isn’t easily settled and in the end we should speak the truth as we find it in Scripture and permit God to render the final decision on our ignorance. This doesn’t give us the right to withhold truth or knowingly ignore it much less practice it.
It’s eye-opening to see how we can miss the obvious. Two fine men who both believed that NT baptism was “unto” or “for” the forgiveness of sins and found that truth in the same text (Acts 2:38) differed on how much a person needed to know if baptism was to be valid. One argued that the phrase “for the forgiveness of sins” was part of the command and that without knowing that, a person wasn’t obeying the command to be baptized in Jesus’ name. In his anxiety to establish that baptism was for the forgiveness of sins he made this convoluted argument rather than taking the text at face value.
The other gentleman believed that the person being baptized didn’t have to know it was “for” or “unto” the forgiveness of sins so long as the person had faith in Jesus and thought he/she was “obeying God”. He believed that NT baptism was “for” or “unto” the forgiveness of sins; he simply insisted that the person didn’t have to know it.
Both men were working with the same text and if we allow the text itself to tell us what was happening on that occasion it seems to me that it greatly eases our difficulties.
Did the something like 3,000 believers seek forgiveness?
Did they know they were seeking forgiveness?
Did they know that to gain forgiveness they were to be baptized?
Did the apostle mean for them to know that?
Did they know that in baptism they were taking on them the name of
Jesus as Lord?
Did the apostle mean for them to know that?
This is the record the Holy Spirit gives us of NT baptism on this occasion and I know of no NT case of baptism that differs from it in essentials.
Had we asked any one of the three thousand (no exceptions!) why they were being baptized they would have told us they were taking on them the name of Jesus the Lord so that they might receive forgiveness of sins and God’s promise of the Holy Spirit.
Had we been one of the three thousand we would have known we were becoming Christ’s and in him finding forgiveness and blessing.
To go to texts like that and ask, “Yes, but what did they have to know?” is to miss the point. What they did know and what were they meant to know is what the NT brings to and lays on us. We find this to be true in all the cases of NT baptism.
I would have thought that that places us under obligation to teach and practice what the Spirit has shown to us and called us to.
“Yes, but what of those who are ignorant of this?” This is a legitimate question but we’re not to allow it to offset the truth the NT lays on us.
God will deal with issues of ignorance and weakness and religious shaping and we should be happy that he will but we are not to presume to make decisions for him; decisions which lead us to withhold truth in teaching and practice because of difficult questions generated by those truths. To knowingly leave people in their ignorance is not the proper response and it certainly isn’t the cure for it.
There is more to NT baptism than how it relates to individuals. It has a profound message to the entire human family.
Finally: Imagine meeting a smiling person leaving that multitude. We ask him why he's smiling and he says he just found the truth about Jesus and committed himself to Him for forgiveness and the Holy Spirit. He hasn't been baptized and we ask him why not and he says, "Oh, that, well that's optional. It's important in its way but I can take it or leave it." We ask him if he and the three thousand learned that from Peter and he says, "No, but just the same it's only baptism; it's faith that really matters." Hmmm.
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