We are going to move away from Matthew, to talk about baptism. Yesterday, when I decided to do this, I was thinking that I wish I would have gave Chase the option to talk about baptism or what he talked about last week. If I would have been paying attention, I would have done that, because it would have been nice if Chase chose baptism; to hear his take on it and what it is. But instead, you guys are going to hear my words again on baptism.
We are going to actually be covering a little bit of ground, so we will move kind of fast through some sections, and hopefully that won’t be a distraction to anybody. I want to talk a little bit about the history of baptism, and then we’ll talk about some of the scripture surrounding the baptism, etc.
First of all, the word baptizo means “to immerse, to plunge under, to die.” And because of those words, it became to mean “to be overwhelmed.” The idea, of course, is to be covered.
I pulled this book off my shelf; this is a history of baptism, the first 500 years of the church. Baptism is a big deal. And it always has been. This guy wrote a book History, Theology, and Liturgy in the First Five Centuries. And it’s just a book of what baptism meant, what it came to mean, and how it changed in those first five centuries. And just the size of the book; you realize this obviously is something that is crucially important. There is a lot – a lot – of information about baptism, because virtually everybody does it in some way, shape, or form.
The history of baptism will start, of course, in the Old Testament.
The ceremonial washing and purity washings – they were common practice. Back in the book of Numbers – it is Numbers 19 – there are passages talking about how to deal with sin issues and about sprinkling, of course, blood, on people; but then that person, after he goes through a certain ritual, is going to be washed in water completely, and bathed. So there is a consistent, constant theme throughout the Old Testament, relating to the purity washings and the ceremonial washings that took place. Remember in John, chapter 2, when Jesus was at the wedding feast. We call it His first miracle, where He turned the water into wine. He turned the water into wine in six ceremonial washbasins or tubs, I guess we could say. And then in Mark 7:3 there is another time where it talks about the ceremonial washbasins and things. When you walked into the temple, you had to wash your hands, had to go through not necessarily a full-on body, but some sort of ceremonial washing. It was just a constant. (Of course the priests had to go through them regularly.)
So, when Jesus began to talk about baptism, it was not something new to the Jewish people; they were already immersed in the baptism thought. That is why John’s baptism was not, for them, something unique, per se, because the idea of being baptized into something was a common practice. But John’s baptism brought something, and then, of course, Jesus was baptized by John. Jesus talked about the baptism of the Holy Spirit and you get into the book of Acts then, and we find baptisms throughout the book of Acts on a consistent and constant basis. It was a vital part of the early church and it should be, actually, a vital part of our religious life too; our Christian life.
The church actually practiced immersion, which is what we practice. I prefer to immerse people. There have been a couple times in my life as a pastor where somebody wanted to have a child baptized and I went ahead and did that. I didn’t consider that baptism like, say, the Catholic church or the Lutheran church would, but I considered it to be a dedication to the Lord; they wanted to have that done to their child, and so we went through that ceremony. So even though I believe that immersion is the way, I am also open to the understanding that there is the possibility that other things could be okay. Not biblical, necessarily; but okay.
Immersion would not necessarily have been submersion, because of water issues. It is possible that they would actually take jugs and buckets of water and just pour it over somebody. Again, the idea of being soaked, or having your body washed.
Infant baptism appeared around 180 a.d., in the time of Aurelius, and actually the catechism of the Catholic church is where we get that information about it. It was defended by Calvin and by Luther and of course by the Catholic church. It became a fight; the Anabaptists appeared at that time and infant baptism was a struggle for the church to maintain, as far as their doctrinal views. Many churches, of course, do not practice that; again, us being one, except on occasion. And I feel like the Lord is okay with that.
Those who disagreed with Calvin, he called “presumptuous disturbers of the church of Christ.” I thought, ‘Man, I love that’ because if people disagree with me…
I know I’m not John Calvin, but the idea of thinking, ‘These people are presumptuous disturbers of the church of Christ.’ I mean, Calvin and Luther and those guys had such a powerful presence and figure, and they were so sure that they were right that they would not back down on things. And this was one of them.
Luther went so far as to say that he was not willing to deny 300 years of church tradition just because it could not be found in the Bible. Luther said that! He later began to find scriptures – or turn scriptures – to try to make sense of it. But nonetheless, it is a powerful practice and the debate on it still rages today.
The next thing I want to talk about is what those churches actually believe about baptism.
Churches that believe in baptism as regeneration (in other words, that is how you are saved, or something similar) would be Catholic, Lutheran, there are several Pentecostal churches that do it, the Anglican church, the Church of Christ, and Eastern Orthodox church. So, many churches actually have this as their doctrinal bent. The Catholic church thinks that the power of infant baptism is unconditional, and quoting from the Catholic church catechism: “Faith comes after baptism.” “Baptism erases original sin.” And then the Catholic Church says in their catechism: “The Church does not know of any means other than baptism that assures entry into eternal beatitude.”
So the Catholic church takes a very hard stand on it. The Lutheran church is not quite that way but they also have some of that bent. Luther believed in the need for vicarious faith on the part of the church or parents. Luther, who believed that we are saved by grace through faith, didn’t necessarily believe that baptism itself was the salvation point, but it was the parents bringing their child up to be baptized – and the church witnessing it. Luther believed that was the thing that provided the possibility the child would be saved at some point in time. He added faith to it. It wasn’t the water that did it; it was the faith in the water by those around the infant. Of course with an adult, it would be the faith of the adult and the faith of the church that watches it and sees what has happened.
Calvin said infant baptism “did not secure salvation, but placed the child in covenant relationship with God.” But he was willing to concede that a covenant child could still be lost of if he was not part of the elect. Neither Luther nor Calvin would go so far as to say ‘if you are baptized, it means you are saved,’ but Calvin also said (to almost not make sense of what he wrote in his catechism): “How do you know yourself to be a son of God in fact as well as in name?” And his answer was: “Because I am baptized in the name of God the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.” So Calvin and Luther both, and many reformed churches also, followed this pattern of infant baptism; and then that we have some salvation experience even at that infant age.
I used to listen to the Lutheran station in McCook, and now I listen to the Catholic station in McCook when I’m listening to religious stuff. But on many days, I would run across a pastor who would say something to the affect of: ‘Whenever I question where my faith is at, I go look at my baptismal certificate, and that assures me again that I am okay with God.’ And I, honestly, don’t agree with that, but I understand. Because baptism is so important to the body of Christ, I understand why somebody would go down that road, as we’ll see.
So now, stepping into the questions that we need to ask ourselves.
First of all: Who can be baptized?
The question, in my opinion, is not one whether infants or adults should be baptized. The question for me comes down to whether a believer or someone incapable of believing should be baptized. And that is where I have drawn that line, I guess you could say, is that I believe that if you are not capable of consciously believing in Jesus Christ, then your baptism for sure could be a symbol of another day coming in the future, but it does not hold the weight of somebody who is being baptized who says, “I believe that Jesus died for my sin.” And I hold that because throughout the Scripture, that is the condition. We will start with Matthew, then we’ll jump over to the book of Acts. Matthew 28:19 says, “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.”
‘Make disciples’ is the first thing. There has to be a precursor to baptism, and that is that you actually come into the kingdom of God. Acts 2:41 is another one. It says, “So then, those who had received His word were baptized...” Acts 8:12, Acts 18:8 – both of those have that same connotation: Those who have received His word were baptized; those who believed were baptized. And when I want to know how doctrine should play out, the book of Acts is a great place to go, because we actually get to see the church doing it, not just talking about it. In the book of Acts I think we can find a lot of fallacies in things we believe, and we can actually begin to believe rightly about things. And this is one of those things, I think. The book of Acts plainly indicated that baptism comes after faith and not before.
The second question is: How should I be baptized?
Again; we practice immersion. I am confident that I could run into situation where somebody, for whatever reason, could not be immersed, but they really want to be baptized, and I’d be willing to accommodate so much as is possible. I don’t think we are looking at doctrinal absolutes – like the immersion itself is the crucial thing – but we practice it because that is what the early church practiced and that is what it indicates throughout the Scripture: this is the way it’s done. So we do it simply because this is how it has always been done in history. Like I said before, it wasn’t until 1311 that the Catholic church decided that you could actually do something else. Up until that time, were they doing other things? They were – they were sprinkling and doing all sorts of other things, but it wasn’t until then that they said it was okay. So people were doing it but the church was fighting about it. Finally they said, ‘You know what? If you just want to sprinkle somebody, then that is great with us. We can do that.’ Many of you that were raised in the Methodist church like I was (at least up until the time I was confirmed – we were talking about that the other day – then my parents didn’t care whether I went or not), we did some sort of a sprinkling or like a water-on-the-head thing.
By the way, I have lost the sense (and I am not for sure what that means), but after I gave my life to Jesus Christ, for a decade maybe, or 20 years – it was a long time – when I thought about baptism and thought about that event in my life, I could remember standing there and I could feel the cool water on my head. And I realize that in the Methodist church they would call that a baptism. That dedication, whatever we want to call it, for me impacted something in me that I wasn’t able to comprehend. And that is why, again, if somebody wants their infant child baptized, because of my own experience I’m going to not deny that. If somebody really believes that it is important to them, that makes it important to me. Unless that person thinks that means their child is saved. Then we will have to have a conversation, because it absolute cannot, nor does it, mean that. But I would have no problem with it. So again, we practice by immersion.
And the next question we ask ourselves is: When can I be baptized?
We have kind of already asked that. In Romans 1:17, “The righteous man shall live by faith.”Ephesians 2:8-9, “For by grace you have been saved through faith…” Faith is the precursor to baptism. 1 Corinthians 1:17 tells us Paul is actually frustrated with the Corinthians at that point in time because they are talking about Paul and Appollos and Cephas and he says, “For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, not in cleverness of speech less the cross of Christ would not be made void.” So Paul actually states in that point that baptism was not his mission, his mission was the Gospel message. And that scripture alone should actually settle a lot of questions we might have about baptism. Paul would have gone on and said there is a necessary baptism – which he talked about oftentimes – but baptism, for him, was not a point of salvation. It was a point, possibly, of some reassurance of regeneration, or some measure of blessing that is going to come to the saints when they are obedient. But we are“saved by grace through faith and that not of yourself, it is a gift of God.” We exercise faith and believe in Jesus Christ and we come into the kingdom of God. Once we cross that line, we take the steps that the church has asked us to take and one of those is almost always baptism. And we do it because we know that this is part of who we should be. We do it out of obedience. So are we saved in baptism? Absolutely not. Should you be baptized? Absolutely you should.
And so the next question maybe we should ask ourselves: Well if I’m not saved in baptism, why should I do it?
And the reason you should do it is because it has always been a part of the Christian walk in the scripture. In the book of Acts, over and over and over again (we have read a couple of them), baptism was always something that took place after salvation. The Ethiopian eunuch, when Phillip is talking to him and he comes to grips with who Jesus is, says, ‘There’s water. What prevents me from being baptized?’ Maybe they thought it would seal the deal, or maybe they thought, ‘this is my public confession.’ If you live in a country like Nepal, which is a very anti-Christian country, you can go to prison for having parts of the Bible; you can go to prison for all kinds of instances.
If you are baptized, publically? That is a death sentence.
Even pagan countries recognize that in baptism, something takes place that is unique to the saint that will cause them to not be able to reject Christ. It is a powerful testimony that baptism is that thing that sets you apart rather than just you confessing Christ. So why should we do it? Obedience, guys, to God always brings blessing. We do it because biblically, it is commanded in some places, but in all places it is just done. It’s just done.
So then we can come to the question: What does baptism do for me?
If we are not saved in baptism, what is the point of it? And what I’m going to do here is use five baptismal pictures in the Old and New Testament.
The first picture is the idea of the purification shadow in the Old Testament. Why would you be baptized? Because throughout the Bible, from Genesis on, there are purification rites that take place; and this is one of those. And I want to reiterate, it does not mean that that moment in time is when you come to salvation; but it means that you are taking a step to continue your obedience to Christ and have a purification experience with the Lord God Most High. And it is throughout the Old Testament. It rolls into the New and continues on throughout the New Testament. So the idea of that shadow of purification in the Old Testament becomes part of our life experiences as well as those in the Old Testament.
If you want to turn over to the book of Romans 6:1-11 of course the picture that is the most prominent is the one that talks about death and resurrection. It says,
“What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it? Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; for he who has died is freed from sin.
Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.”
And this is a passage why – although I wouldn’t agree on the salvation part of it – why I would think a man would look at his baptismal certificate and faith would be able to touch him again and say, ‘By faith you entered into this.’ And when we read Romans chapter 6, it says “your old self is crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be done away.” The analogy, or the picture that we see in this, is that in baptism we leave the flesh in the water. And I think that is one of the things that maybe we, and I myself, are not fully comprehending. That in baptism, there is this picture of a death taking place; and when I am risen up, it isn’t me anymore, in the truest sense of the word. And we say to ourselves, ‘Well that doesn’t even make sense because I can’t live my life like that.’ But, when we appropriate faith to that past experience, and we begin to believe ‘This is who you really are,’ that is where your life can turn around. That is where you can overcome sin, you can get past the issues of your life, you can begin to comprehend the great love that Christ has for you. It is when faith takes hold of things like this and you begin to realize, ‘No, I left myself in the baptismal waters. My flesh is no longer who I am. I came up resurrected in Christ, and that is now who I am.’ When we begin to grasp the truth of that and not see it as just strictly some symbol of a future glory we get to have with Jesus, we begin then to live day-to-day in a richer and deeper faith with Jesus Christ.
Karl Barth says, “It is impossible to understand the meaning of baptism unless we keep in mind that it implies a threat of death and a deliverance to life.” We cannot think of baptism outside of that biblical truth of death and life.
The third thing. In Colossians there is another picture, which would have to do a little bit with death and resurrection. Colossians chapter 2:9-15,
“For in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form, and in Him you have been made complete, and He is the head over all rule and authority; and in Him you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, in the removal of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ; having been buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised up with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead. When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross. When He had disarmed the rulers and authorities, He made a public display of them, having triumphed over them through Him.”
So, this picture has to do not just with death and resurrection, but with baptism being what people call the sign of the New Covenant. The sign of the Old Covenant was circumcision; the sign of the new covenant is baptism. You were a Jew – full-on Jew – before you were circumcises. You did not become a Jew when you got circumcised. You were a Jew, and then you were circumcised. Likewise, we become saints of the Living God, and then we are baptized as a sign of the New Covenant. So we partake of baptism for the purpose of not just obedience to Christ and the idea of death and resurrection, but the idea of revealing that we are actually part of the New Covenant. We are a part of the New Covenant family. In this text it is talking, in a greater sense than in Romans, about us realizing that when we are baptized, we are baptized with Christ. We get to experience the death of Christ and the resurrection of Christ. So we need to make a distinction between youdoing it and it being done toyou. Baptism is not something you do; it is something that is done to you. Someone else puts you in the water. You release yourself; someone else puts you in the water, someone else pulls you out of the water. That passiveness which which we react is that Gospel message of Jesus, both coming to save, reveal Himself, present every tool we need to come to Him; and then causing us to die and be risen from the dead in Christ. In Christ. When I think about this text, I don’t think just strictly about my death and resurrection, but I think about Christ’s death and resurrection. I partook of Christ’s death and resurrection in baptism. Because if it is simply me being regenerated, what is the use? I don’t want to come back a better person. I want to come back in Christ. So many times we get caught into just being a better person, and that’s not what this is about.
And this is the thing I want you to get, maybe of all things: These are things we appropriate by faith. If you don’t believe it, it will have no effect on your life. But if you believe it, I guarantee you it will affect the way you live your life.
The fourth thing is 1 Peter 3:21. Peter says, “Corresponding to that, baptism now saves you—not the removal of dirt from the flesh, but an appeal to God for a good conscience—through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” He is talking of course about the “days of Noah during the construction of the ark,” in which eight persons were brought safely through the water. This is a text that people use and say, ‘Well that just absolutely proves that baptism saves you.’ But in actuality if you would look up all the verses in the Bible that talk about saved, salvation, saves, save, one of the things that you are going to find is that the early church never thought of salvation like we think of salvation. We have an extremely narrow view of what “saved” means. The early church, when they came and said, “What must we do to be saved?” they were not thinking about an eternity with God. They were thinking about their present condition: How can this be changed? And what we have done is, we have taken that word and we’ve talked about it in terms of a future glory with Jesus Christ (which is absolutely going to happen), but what we need to do is understand: when Peter says, “Corresponding to that, baptism now saves you,” he doesn’t mean that it’s going to save you after you die, he means this is going to change your life. You are going to be a new person. Everything is going to change. First Corinthians 5:21 says that we are a new creature in Christ, “behold all things have been made new.” And when he uses the analogy of the ark, that analogy even shares with us: it is not about the water. Because it was not the water, it was the ark. We went through the water. They went through the Red Sea. They went through the Jordan River; all the pictures in the Old Testament that revealed it, but it was always with someone. And in the ark’s case, that is definitely a picture of Jesus Christ. Even in the case of Moses, taking them through the Red Sea; Moses is a depiction of Jesus Christ. He is leading them through the Red Sea. They go through the water and we get caught in the water part of it but what we need to focus on is the ark part of it. The ark floated on the water; the ark is the thing that saved them. The waters of baptism presented the opportunity for it, but it was the ark that actually did the saving.
Peter also, by the way, points out “not the removal of dirt from the flesh but an appeal to God for a good conscience.” One of the things that comes out of baptism, when we take it by faith and believe that we are doing it in obedience to Him and He is moving on our behalf, is your conscience for sure will clear, and you’ll be able to understated things in the Scripture better.
Galatians 3:27 is the last picture: “For all of you who were baptized into Christ Jesus have clothed yourself with Christ.” I love that. One of the pictures I get out of baptism is that when I go in the water, my flesh stays in the water. It is buried. When I come out of the water, my flesh does not come with me. And I get it; we’re all saying, ‘That’s not my experience,’ but I’m telling you that the reason that we are struggling is that this is something done in a spiritual world – by faith – and we’re trying to transmit it in to a physical act. The physical act is simply a symbol of what is taking place in that spiritual world. Is your flesh still alive and well in you? Yes it is! But it’s alive and well because we are not appropriating, by faith, what Jesus did for us on the cross. And the tools He gave us – like baptism – to help to change the way we think about what He did for us. But the idea that, in baptism, I am clothed with Christ, that picture of coming out of the water of baptism and being a new creature. He did not take you and remodel you. In baptism, when you hit the water, the Holy Spirit didn’t say, ‘These are some things I want to keep. These are some things I’m going to fix- this room and this room, but this room is really good.’ It doesn’t happen. In baptism we die, we come out of the water a new creature in Christ, and we are raised up and clothed with Christ, which is why we’re a new creature in Christ. We come up out of the water clothed with Christ. It’s the reason why, I believe, in many baptismal circles you wear white robes going into the water; because that is absolutely what is taking place. They can only do that because you can’t change clothes in the water. If we could change clothes in the water, we would wear a black robe into the water and come out with a white robe. The idea that Christ wants us to get, that the Bible wants us to understand, is that in baptism your obedience to Christ is going to enable you to grasp, by faith, things that are deeper than just mental ascent to doctrinal pictures or views or whatever the case may be. Baptism is an experience. It’s an experience.
And I get it, some of you might think of your baptism and you think, ‘I don’t remember what happened that day or how it took place,’ and I understand that. But for many people, baptism becomes that moment in time when there was a transaction between them and the Lord and their life began to change.
Again, I’m not talking about them being saved. They did not get baptized before they were saved, but they were obedient to Christ and all of a sudden things began to turn in their life, and they came out of the waters rich.
I mean, I’m excited about today because I don’t think we are serious enough about it. I don’t think we fully comprehend what takes place. I get it, why some churches actually have baptismal fonts ready all the time. Because if somebody wants to be baptized, they want to baptize them right then and there. That makes perfectly good sense to me. I’m blessed that we get to go out to Hahles’ and experience it out there just because of the beauty and the richness of history that we have and things like that, but I’m excited about today and I’m excited that the people that are going to be baptized will experience a newness in their relationship with Christ; something that they probably have not experienced before. Looking forward to that.
With that said; if anybody else in this room feels like they need to be baptized, you can certainly come talk to me and we can have a conversation about that. If you are a believer, if you confess Jesus, in my opinion that makes you eligible for baptism. In the early church, after the first 70 years or so, they created a system in which you came to Christ, then you had a probationary period, and then you finally got baptized. And in the probationary period they made sure you were repentive enough, that you did good works; when they put you in the water they were going to make sure that you were the best possible person you could be. And many churches actually still follow that kind of a model. And my opinion is: I can’t be the best possible person I can be unless I allow myself to do the things that God asks me to do; and one of them is to be baptized. So, I want to be baptized.
And I mentioned before, I was three years a preacher of the Gospel; had a church for three years before I was baptized. And my experience was- I was thinking about this during worship- I finally got baptized and I remember like, the next day I started to read the Scripture and it seriously was like a veil had been taken away. Still when I read the Scripture, there are veils, by the way. But in the experience that I had, there was something that happened and, literally, it was like the Lord peeled back something. All of a sudden there was clarity in things I didn’t have clarity in. And again, I am not saying I don’t experience that still, but it changed my relationship with the Word. Forever.
So, whatever the satins will experience today, Lisa and Doug and whoever else (because they may not have my experience) I am encouraged that they will have an experience with the Lord.
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Heavenly Father, we thank you for your mercy and grace. We thank you again for the opportunity for this day that we have. When we get to experience, get to see, get to watch baptisms, to be a part of it, to witness it, to be in many ways as Luther said, Jesus, those of us who are witnesses of it, we exercise our faith in Your great mercy and grace when we watch somebody go under the water and they come up a new creature and we begin then to encourage them and live with them in a way that is precious in the sight of the Lord. And so we pray today for an immense amount of faith being exercised as we spend time out there. I thank you Lord Jesus just also for the opportunity to eat together, to fellowship with one another, to be outside. I thank you for the opportunity to bless Bill, who is so excited whenever his property gets to be used for the Kingdom of God. Just pray, Jesus, that I would somehow emulate that. That when my property, Lord God, in meetings at our house or Bible studies or potlucks, I want to have that same excitement that we get to use our property for the Kingdom of God. Just thank you Jesus. Pray a blessing on today. Blessing especially Lord Jesus, on Lisa and Doug.
We ask that in Jesus’ precious Name.
Amen and Amen.
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The Lord bless you guys.
Go in peace.
09-22-2019
Baptism
Rob Putz, Pastor
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