So What's All the Fuss About Baptism?
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I. What is Baptism?
I. What is Baptism?
John the Baptist is called that because he baptized Jews as declaration of repentance Luke 3:3. This isn’t yet Christian baptism, because there isn’t a church yet. But it is what Christian baptism grew out of. They are repenting and seeking forgiveness for their sins. To repent is to change their mind, so the question is, what did they need to change their mind about?
And he went into all the region around the Jordan, preaching a baptism of repentance for the remission of sins,
They aren’t changing their mind about accepting the coming Messiah. Eventually Israel will reject their Messiah, but he hasn’t come yet. Israel was alive with Messianic expectation. Everyone (except the leadership) wanted a Messiah, so that isn’t what they need to change their mind about.
But notice what he does say Luke 3:7-9. The average Jew didn’t worry about going to heaven, or even about entering the Kingdom of God. He tended to assume that he was automatically in because he was a part of God’s chosen people. That is why John has to tell them not to rest in their ancestry of Abraham. Instead, John was telling them that when the Messiah came, he would destroy all the sinners in Israel and only the righteous would survive his judgment Luke 3:16-17.
Then he said to the multitudes that came out to be baptized by him, “Brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?
Therefore bear fruits worthy of repentance, and do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I say to you that God is able to raise up children to Abraham from these stones.
And even now the ax is laid to the root of the trees. Therefore every tree which does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”
John answered, saying to all, “I indeed baptize you with water; but One mightier than I is coming, whose sandal strap I am not worthy to loose. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.
His winnowing fan is in His hand, and He will thoroughly clean out His threshing floor, and gather the wheat into His barn; but the chaff He will burn with unquenchable fire.”
John’s message was that the Messiah was almost here, so the time to be cleansed from sin and become one of the righteous was short. They needed to change their mind about what would personally secure their entrance into the Messiah’s Kingdom, and confess that they weren’t good enough.
Now John’s Baptism wasn’t Christian baptism yet. When Paul met some disciples of John in Acts 19, he rebaptized them because they hadn’t yet heard of Jesus, and so hadn’t been truly baptized. They were caught in something of a dispensational time-warp, for they truly followed and worshipped God and were ready for the Messiah’s coming, they just hadn’t heard that he actually came.
Now that Jesus has come, in addition to everything John’s baptism symbolizes, it also symbolizes our being united with Christ through faith, and by being united, we participate in his death, so we will also participate in his resurrection
Romans 6:1-5, 8
What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?
Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it?
Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death?
Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.
For if we have been united together in the likeness of His death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of His resurrection,
Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him,
II. Why should you be baptized?
II. Why should you be baptized?
But why would that confession mean baptism? In the Law of Moses, there’s a concept called ritual cleansing. That is, certain activities, sin obviously, but also some things that are just a part of life make you unfit to stand before God, and by extension unfit for public society. To be eligible to worship God in the temple, you must be ritually clean. Now the various laws about this are quite complex, and the details are not important for our purposes, since none of them is quite like baptism, exactly. But the effect of these laws is that each Jew had as his daily experience the need to become ritually pure so he could be fit to stand before God in the temple. For a lot of these conditions, part of the cleansing was a ritual bath. Once sit was confessed, or the disease healed, and sometimes a sacrifice offered, then the final step of cleansing was to take that bath and by evening they would be clean again.
Now if people accepted John’s message that their sin would prevent them from entering the Kingdom, then they were unclean due to their sin. John needs to get them to admit that their Jewishness is not enough to gain acceptance with God. If they take a ritual bath, then that is immediately understood by everyone that they were admitting this very fact.
Christian baptism is derived from John’s Baptism. Since Jesus has come, the Messiah to Come is now a specific person - Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God. But John’s original warning that Jesus will judge between the righteous and the wicked - yeah, that’s still on. Except a man be born again, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God. Jesus reigns over the entire earth folks. The only way to not enter it is to not be alive when it comes.
But there’s a couple of extra things as well.
Baptism is the command of Christ for all his disciples. Matt 28:19-20.
Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Amen.
III. Who should be baptized?
III. Who should be baptized?
Who should be baptized depends on what it is. Since Baptism involves confessing the gospel - that we are sinners and need a savior, that we unite with Jesus through our faith in Him, and therefore we will participate in his resurrection - then it follows that only believers can practice genuine Christian baptism.
Notice I didn’t say that we ought to baptize believers, but that only believers can practice Christian baptism. That’s because you cannot confess your faith in Jesus Christ unless you do in fact believe. Infants cannot believe, therefore they cannot practice genuine Christian baptism.
Now since Christian baptism is a confession of your faith, and you can only believe once, therefore you can only be truly baptized once. Thus, if you’ve already been baptized at another church, you don’t need to be baptized again.
IV. How should we be baptized?
IV. How should we be baptized?
Now the Greek word βαπτίζω means to dip or immerse. That’s the normal meaning of the word. Our word Baptize was invented by the KJV translators because they didn’t want to suggest that immersion was the Biblical manner of baptizing, so rather than translate the Greek word, they transliterated it, inventing a new word just to avoid the painfully obvious conclusion.
So if that’s true, why don’t all churches immerse? Because of church history. In the early days of the church immersion was the only mode. However, the ritual of baptism began to become excessively important within a 100 years or so. People gradually began to forget that the ritual was only God’s ordained way of expressing your faith, and began increasingly to think that the baptism itself was the thing that mattered. So if you believe that you must be baptized to go to heaven, then there are a few situations that will cause you a lot of anxiety. If you are so sick you might die, but you’ve never been baptized, and you believe that you must be baptized to go to heaven, you’ll really worry. But if you’re that sick, you’re probably too sick to be baptized by immersion. that’s why fairly early on pouring or sprinkling came to be used just so these people could be baptized as they thought they had to be.
As this became more and more common, churches began substituting pouring or sprinkling for everyone, not just the sick and elderly. At first, people began to put off baptism until the very end, since it was believed wrongly that the act forgave only your past sins. Thus many people would delay baptism until the very end so they would have no chance to mess it up with sin later. But as people increasingly confused doing the ritual with what it stood for, they became convinced that it didn’t matter what you thought, only that you did it. So parents began to want their children baptized.
But by now we are very far away from God’s original design. God commanded this ritual bath, yes. But the importance and value of the ritual is in what it stands for, not in the act of getting wet. Jesus saves those who believe - those who believe, normally, are baptized because they believe. But since it is the faith that saves; and it saves forever, there’s no worry if you sin after baptism. And you will, since Christians aren’t yet delivered from the presence of sin until Jesus returns. Since it is faith that saves, baptizing an infant is quite harmful to their spiritual life. If they believe that they are on their way to heaven, when they do not actually believe, then you’ll at best delay their salvation and at worst actively prevent it.