Extending Grace In Baptismal Practice

A sermon by Nate Wilson for Christ The Redeemer Church, Manhattan, KS,
17 Feb 2008, 21 Feb 2016, 8 Dec 2024

1. HOW Does God instruct us to Baptize?

2. In our modern culture, Christians have some deeply-entrenched positions which are mutually exclusive about how to do water baptism.

   1. The London Baptist Confession of Faith from the year 1677 says that “Immersion or dipping of the person is necessary to the due administration of this ordinance,”

   2. But the Westminster Confession of Faith from the year 1648 says that “Dipping of the person into the water is not necessary, but baptism is rightly administered by pouring or sprinkling water upon the person.”

   3. They can’t logically both be right. They’re mutually exclusive.

   4. I tried to join a Baptist church once, but was denied membership because they said I hadn’t been baptized; I had only been sprinkled as an infant, and that would not do. They still let me lead worship though!

   5. On the other hand, I’ve watched credo-baptists join Presbyterian churches and get frustrated, because being credo- is generally considered a disqualification for eldership, so godly men are barred from leadership because of their desire to wait until their children make a profession of faith before baptizing them. If Presbyterians were consistent, they would oppose the teaching ministries of Charles Spurgeon, John Piper, and John MacArthur too, on this basis, but thankfully, not everyone is consistent.

3. Who’s right? and Must it be this way? I am convinced that the only way Christians can reach unity is through the Word and the Spirit. So I want to ask today, what is the witness of the Word and the Spirit on this subject?

4. I want to begin by looking at the baptisms recorded in the New Testament to see if we can find clues as to how baptism was done.

   1. Circumstantial evidence weighs in that John the Baptizer may well have immersed¹.

      1. He baptized Jesus “into (eis) the Jordan,” and

      2. John 3:23 states that “John was also baptizing in Enon [which is near the Jordan River] because there was much water.” Having “much water” would support immersion, although that is not absolutely conclusive.

   2. Later on, when Jesus’ disciples baptized people, they stopped doing it in the Jordan, but rather did it in some unspecified location in Judea (John 3:22-4:2).

      1. We also read in Acts 2 of the apostles baptizing 3,000 souls on the Day of Pentecost. If you were one of those apostles, how would you go about baptizing 3,000 people in a single afternoon in the middle of a city that had no swimming pool²?

      2. The Bible doesn’t actually give us the details.

   3. In Acts 8:36, The Ethiopian Eunuch is in the desert with Phillip the Apostle. He “sees water” and asks to be baptized by Phillip. They go down into the water, then Phillip baptizes the eunuch, then they come up out of the water.

      1. (The same wording is used in Matthew's account of Jesus' baptism: They “went down,” then one “got baptized,” then they “came out.”)

      2. In other words, the “coming into” the water and the “going out” of the water are mentioned separately from “baptizing.” So, these passages don’t really address the question of how the water was applied in the baptism of the eunuch or of Jesus.

         1. Some Christians assume that the “going in” and “coming out” of the water are the description of the baptism, but the grammar of the verbs contradicts that assumption.

         2. The “going in” and “coming out” are active verbs describing what the baptized person did, but the verb “baptized” is a passive verb, describing something done to them, not something they did, so the “going in” and “coming out” of the river have no bearing on how the person was baptized, other than the location of where the baptism happened. The person could have been sprinkled or washed or immersed by the apostle while standing in the river; the Bible just doesn’t say.

   4. Acts 10:47 In the baptism of Cornelius, Peter said, “Can any man forbid the water, that these should not be baptized?” Peter's question is interesting.

      1. Caesarea was located beside beside the Mediterranean Ocean, between the Hadera Riv­er and the Barkan River, so there were convenient bodies of fresh and salt water near­by, in which a new convert could have been immersed, so why does Peter talk about whether or not to “forbid” water? Could he forbid the Mediterranean Ocean to exist?

      2. No, but a servant could be forbidden from carrying water in a container from the river or spring up to the house before it was applied to the new believers!

      3. As fun and as meaningful as it may be to “gather by the river” for a baptism, Peter chose water carried in a container instead of a river or ocean for this baptism. This lets us know that the Apostles did not see the source of the water as an essential issue in baptism.

   5. Acts 9:18-19 “And straightway there fell from [Paul’s] eyes, as it were, scales, and he received his sight; and he arose and was baptized; and he took food.”

      1. This appears to be another indoor baptism. Paul apparently did not leave the house between being healed and eating. So how would an indoor baptism be done?

      2. They didn’t have bathtubs in their houses in that culture. You would also expect the verb “he went down” instead of “he went up” if it were done in a body of water. The way this verse is worded, it appears Paul was standing when he was baptized.

      3. Later on, when he recounts his baptism to others in Acts 22:16, Paul quotes Ananias as saying, “Arise, and be baptized, and wash away your sins, calling on His [Jesus’] name.”

      4. “Washing” in that culture was done by pouring water over the body that was being washed³.

      5. I may not be able to prove it with absolute certainty, but these circumstances appear to describe a scenario where Paul stood and had water poured over him for his baptism.

   6. On Paul’s 2^nd missionary journey, the Scriptures describe 2 baptisms in the town of Philippi:

      1. Paul was “alongside the river” when he met and baptized Lydia and all her household in Acts 16:15-33. How he did it is not described, but it would make sense for him to use the Gangites Creek since they were already beside it.⁴

      2. The next baptism in Philippi appears to be an indoor one: The Philippian jailer and the people living in his house were baptized “immediately” after the jailer had washed Paul and Silas, and then he took them into his home. This would suggest that they were in the jail when they were baptized.⁵

         1. (So, if you want a really Biblical baptism, go to jail! J.K.)

         2. The most likely scenario to my mind is that a servant had brought a basin of water into the jail to wash Paul and Silas’s wounds, and that same basin of water was used to baptize the whole family, which makes the likelihood of immersion seem slim.

   7. And that’s every water baptism described in the New Testament.

      1. None of the Bible’s historical accounts give absolutely-conclusive information as to how the first Christians got wet.

      2. Unless you assume that the word “baptize” necessarily means one particular mode of baptism (and I have challenged that assumption in a previous sermon⁶ and don’t have time to address that point today), Jesus left no written instruction on how to apply the water.⁷.

      3. Now obviously we have to get wet somehow, so I believe we are left to pick a mode that is consistent with the range of possibilities in the Scriptures and just do it. Don’t worry if another Christian picks a different mode for themselves. The Bible does not teach us to consider this as important. Nowhere does the Bible instruct Christians to be picky about how the water is applied in baptism.

5. But what if Jesus left spoken instructions that the early church knew about baptism?

   1. The ancient Greek document known as the Didache or the “Teaching of the Twelve” sup­posedly containing instructions from the 12 apostles themselves, lists both immersion and pouring water over the head as acceptable forms of baptism. It is dated to around 100AD. While the Didache does not carry the authority of Scripture, it does provide a window into what the early church did, and that matches other early-church archaeological finds.

   2. Second-century catacomb drawings in the cemetery of Calixtus show Christians standing in water and the pastor pouring water over their heads. Again, while this is not Scripture, it does show how some of the earliest Christians interpreted the command of the Bible long before there was such a thing as a Roman Catholic church.

   3. Moving into the third Century, the earliest-known church building is a Roman residence near the Syria-Iraq border which was converted into a church meeting place around 240 A.D. The baptistery was an anteroom opening off the meeting room with a shallow fountain into which candidates for baptism would step, and then water would be scooped up and poured or sprinkled over them (Michael Walsh, Triumph of the Meek, HarperCollins).

   4. Cyprian, also in the third century A.D. wrote, “sprinkling of water prevails equally with the salutary washing.”

   5. Later, baptisteries of the Nicene age (4th century) in the in the warm southern climates, were built for immersion (Phillip Schaff, History of the Christian Church).

6. I am left to conclude that neither history nor Scripture demand one exclusive mode of baptism, for they support pouring or sprinkling as well as immersion.

7. But could it be different in the case of who is eligible for baptism? What are the criteria for who should be baptized? Again, what does the Bible actually say?

8. WHO does God instruct us to baptize?

9. The New Testament records the baptisms of all the Jews in Judea before Christ’s ministry, and in Jerusalem at Pentecost after Christ’s ascension, the Samaritans and Simeon that Philip baptized, the Ethiopian Eunuch, Cornelius and his household, Paul, Lydia, the Philippian jailer, Crispus and Gaius in Corinth, and the men at the synagogue in Ephesus. That’s every baptism in the New Testament.

   1. In every case, the Gospel was received by at least some of the people, and the adults are the only ones mentioned by name as being baptized.

   2. This leads all Christians to agree that it is Biblical to baptize adults who have responded in faith to the Gospel message. Nobody disagrees with that, so I won’t belabor that point.

   3. To go beyond this and say whether or not there are circumstances in which it is accept­able to baptize someone who is not an adult or who has not responded in faith to the Gospel, that is where the debate lies.

10. The argument from silence that “the Bible doesn’t explicitly mention baptizing babies, therefore no babies should be baptized,” is worth considering.

    1. Those of us who are trying to base our Christian life upon the Bible agree that we should not add practices willy-nilly to the Christian faith.

    2. But this argument can also be turned back on itself, since there is also no command in the Bible to wait on baptizing the children of believers until they are a certain age.

11. And if the Bible does not tell us what age to delay baptism to, then it becomes a matter of human wisdom, and that’s where we need to be careful to allow Christian liberty.

    1. Nowhere in the Bible is there an example of a child or a mentally-handicapped person who tried to get baptized but failed the confession-of-faith test and therefore got ruled ineligible for baptism, so, although Christ did give the keys to the kingdom⁸ to church leaders and we do need to make decisions on who is baptized, we don’t have a clear ruling from the Bible on this particular matter.

    2. Another reason I have heard as to why an infant should not be baptized is that they cannot confess with their mouth that Jesus is Lord.

       1. Romans 10:9 does indeed say, “that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” But baptism is not mentioned anywhere in that passage; the point of that passage is that we are not saved by obeying the law.

       2. Besides, in Psalm 8:2, the Bible says that the “lips of children and infants” can “praise” God.

       3. Of course it is Biblical for Christians to verbally confess faith in Christ, and of course Christians should believe in the resurrection, and of course many of the Bible accounts of baptisms mention that the head of the household or everybody in the household believed, but this is not presented as THE prerequisite for all baptisms⁹.

    3. It is also worthy of serious consideration that, although the Bible upholds the value of maturing in the faith¹⁰, Jesus consistently told adult believers that their faith needed to be more like the faith of little children¹¹ not vice versa. Jesus and the Apostles never said that little children need to have faith like adults before they can be baptized.

    4. Most of the New Testament baptisms were done the same day that the hearers first heard the gospel. According to the Great Commission (Mt. 28:19), baptism was to be done before “teaching [the disciple] all that [Jesus] commanded.”

    5. My point is that, on the topic of when to baptize the children of believers, there is no Bibli­cal, neutral, safe ground upon which we can stand and judge others who do it differently.

       1. Simply having a child puts you in the position of making a choice about baptism for which the Bible doesn’t provide explicit guidelines. Whether you decide to baptize at 6 days or 6 weeks, or whether you decide to wait 6 years or 16 years, you are auto­matically going beyond the explicit commands of the Bible no matter what you do in your practice,

       2. but at some point, we all agree, a Christian should be baptized, so you have to do it at some point. I believe that the silence of Scripture on this topic of when to baptize the children of believers indicates it is not a particularly-important one to God, and we just need to step out in faith one way or the other and just obey God as best we can.

12. Now, I want to pivot from critiquing exclusivism in baptismal practice to positively assert three things I see in Scripture which have led me to honor the requests of parents to baptize their infants:

    1. The Old Testament contains information about God’s people overdozens of generations, so naturally the Old Testa­ment has things to say about the relationship that God has with the children of believers and how to symbolize that.

    2. The symbol in the Old Testament was circumcision, but the New Testament tells us in Colossians 2 that “baptism” is the “circumcision of Christ” and that we should no longer use the symbol of circumcision.

    3. In the presence of the Biblical expectation among Jewish believers of a symbol of faith for the next generation¹², and in the absence of any command against infant bap­tism in the Bible, it was natural for the early church to infer that baptism could be applied to the children of believers in the New Testament in much the same way that circumcision was applied to the children of believers in the Old Testament.

    4. In the midst of fierce controversy over such trivial matters as the date of Easter, the early church found surprisingly little controversy in the baptism of infants¹³:

       • About the only opposition to infant baptism we read of in early church history is in Tertullian’s writings, but he wouldn’t have had to write in opposition to it if nobody was doing it, so obviously some Christians were doing it during the the first century of Christianity.¹⁴

       • Other early church fathers at the same time, like Irenaeus, wrote in favor of infant baptism, saying that Jesus “came to save through means of Himself all who through Him are born again unto God, infants, and little children, and boys, and youths, and old men.”

       • Origen, in the 3^rd century, speaks of infant baptism as a “tradition of the apostles.”

       • And the council of Carthage in A.D. 418 also takes infant baptism for granted, the only controversy being whether an infant could be baptized before the 8^th day!

       • This is all before the Roman Catholic Church.

    5. So this first argument goes that there was no need for the New Testament authors to impress upon Christians the use of a symbol of their children’s relationship with God because that practice was already well-established in the Old Testament, and so it carried on into the New Testament church and has always been practiced widely in churches.

    1. Another reason why I think it could be Biblical to baptize infants is that the New Testament speaks often of household baptisms, which admit the possibility that children or infants in Christian households were actually baptized by the apostles.

       1. The Bible records at least five occasions where a household was baptized along with the head of the household: Cornelius (Acts 10), Stephanus (1 Cor. 1:16), Lydia (Acts 16:15), Crispus (Acts 18:8, 1 Cor. 1:14), and the Philippian Jailer (Acts 16:31-33) “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved, you and your house… and he was baptized – he and all who belonged to him immediately.”

          1. The word “household” normally means all family – including parents and grand­parents, all children, and all slaves in the estate. This would corroborate with the practice of the Old Testament where children and slaves were circumcised.

          2. I don’t believe that these 5 explicit accounts of household baptisms were exceptional. In other words, I don’t believe that God provided a history in the book of Acts and then turns to us and says, “This should not be normal.” Part of the reason for the book of Acts is to give us examples of what is normal for Christianity (although there were certainly some out-of-the-ordinary things that happened in Acts too).

       2. Consider the accounts in the Gospels where, for instance it says in Matthew 3:5 that “Jerusalem… and all Judea and all the district around the Jordan were also being baptized by” John, and the Pentecost baptisms when “3,000 souls... received the word [of Peter] and were baptized” - after Peter had said that the promise of the Holy Spirit was for the men and for their children.

          1. Nowhere does the Bible ever say that they baptized only the adults. As we see from the account of the feeding of the 5,000, it was typical to number only the heads of households and not mention women and children who were present (Mat. 14:21).

          2. It never says that the Apostles baptized a whole household except for the children – or a whole crowd except for the children in it.

          3. Some have tried to explain the children away by suggesting that there were no children present in any of the households or in any of the crowds, but that is not only sociologically impossible, it is also Biblically impossible, because the Gospels explicitly mention children among the crowds and in the houses where Jesus taught.

       3. Why should any hope of salvation be extended to children of believers?

          1. Recent statistics reported by the Baptist Press¹⁵ indicate that when a child is the first person in a household to make a decision for Christ, there is a 3.5 percent probability that everyone else in the household will become Christians.

          2. When a mother is the first to become a Christian, there is a 17 percent chance that everyone else in the household will follow.

          3. But when a father comes under the Lordship of Christ, the impact is dramatically increased to a 93% probability that everyone else in the family will follow and come to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ! 93%!

          4. You see, there is a sociological reason why household baptism was practiced in the Bible. It is God’s design that when the head of the house becomes a Christian, normally the children follow. (Not always, but normally.)

          5. I believe this can also explain why God demands in Titus 1:6 that the elders of the church have “children who believe.” If the salvation of our children were a matter of random chance, it would seem unreasonable for God to demand that only men who had believing children could be leaders of His church. But, you see, the Bible shows that is a normative thing for the children of believers to believe. (Again, don’t misunderstand, I am not saying it’s “automatic;” I am saying it’s “norm­ative,” as in, this is what God’s word teaches us to anticipate¹⁶.)

    2. In addition to infant baptism being in continuity with the way God related to the children of believers in the Old Testament and in continuity with the New Testament practice of baptizing entire households, a third reason why I believe that infant baptism can be Scriptural comes from the Biblical doctrine that God treats the children of believers differently from the children of unbelievers.

       1. First off, all children are sinners, so justice demands that they be punished by the fires of hell, just like adults.

          1. They are imputed with the original sin of Adam and Eve (“sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all” adults? No, sad to say, children die too! (Romans 5:12)

          2. People are “formed in iniquity and conceived in sin” and “go astray as soon as they are born, speaking lies” says David in Psalm 51:5 and 58:3.

          3. “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God,” wrote Paul in Romans 3:23.

          4. John 3:3 makes it clear that no one [not even a baby] who has not been born again by the Spirit can go to heaven.

          5. If making a personal decision for Christ is the way to be saved, and if God does not treat the children of believers differently from the children of non-believers, we would have to expect every one of our miscarriages and every one of our children who died in infancy to be in hell – every one of them.

          6. Yet David prophecied that he would see his son in heaven, even though the child died at 7 days old and was therefore not circumcised (or baptized)! (2 Sam. 12:23). What a glorious promise that our children won’t die and go to hell simply because they are too young or too brain-damaged to express faith in Jesus! What a glorious gospel that we are not saved by what we are capable of doing but by what God is capable of doing to rescue us.

       2. The Biblical truth is that God treats the children of believers differently from the children of non-Christians:

          1. David claimed to have trusted God during the first year or so of his life when he was a nursing infant in Psalm 22:9: “You made me trust when upon my mother's breasts.”

          2. John the Baptizer was “filled with the spirit” “even from his mother’s womb” and leaped in her womb upon his first encounter with Jesus! (Luke 1:15&41)¹⁷

          3. Jesus said that the angels of little children are “in heaven always beholding the face of the father” (Matt 18:10). Here are children with special privileges of getting their prayers answered.

             • Jesus did not say “all children” but “these children” – the children of His followers who were gathered around Him!

             • (Hebrews 1:14 informs us that angels are “ministering spirits sent to render service for the sake of those who will inherit salvation.” Non-Christians who have no promise of inheriting salvation don’t get guardian angels or special attention to prayer, but the children of Jesus’ followers do!)

          4. And Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven,” and then He blessed them (Matt. 19:14).

             • Jesus did not say, “Wait until they are old enough to see whether they will express faith in me or not, and then I will bless them – and then only if they come to me of their own accord – it doesn’t count if their parents bring them to me!”

             • No, Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven is composed of these children, “little children” whose parents believed in Him enough to ask Him to bless them.

          5. In 1 Corinthians 7:13-14, the Bible explicitly states that God considers the child­ren of believers to be “holy,” even if only one of their parents is a believer: “And if any wife has an unbelieving husband and he is pleased to make a home with her, let her not dismiss her husband. For the unbelieving husband has been made holy by his wife and the unbelieving wife has been made holy by the brother (otherwise your children are unclean, but now they are holy).”

             • I believe that a distinction must be made between “saved” and “holy.” Here the husband is “holy” but not a believer – at least not yet.

             • But the assertion that they are “holy” means that they stand in some kind of special relationship with God.

             • Holy is the opposite of “common,” which is the state of the rest of mankind. It means that God will treat the household members of a believing parent differently than the rest of mankind, perhaps with more preferential grace, perhaps with more fierce punishment, but it will be different.

13. Conclusion

14. In Acts 2:38-39, the apostle Peter said, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off.” (Note, he did not say, “the promise is for you and it WILL BE for your children when they are old enough to repent.” He said, it “IS for you and for your children.”)

15. Now, even if God has offered promises to you and to your children, you, like the Old Testa­ment saints in Hebrews 11:33 who “through faith… obtained promises,” must also exercise faith in Jesus for the forgiveness of your sins before you or your children will actually obtain the promises of the Holy Spirit and of eternal life. You must believe in Jesus to be saved.

16. Furthermore, if you are a believer in Jesus and you have not been baptized, that is the next step of obedience you should take. And if somebody practices baptism differently, maybe they have the freedom to do so if the Bible doesn’t actually say they can’t; they can still be your brother or sister in Christ.

17. And if you want to baptize your children, this practice is reasonably Biblical:

    1. to symbolize your children’s relationship with God in continuity with the way God related to His people throughout the Old Testament,

    2. to demonstrate God’s intention that whole households should be blessed by faith in Jesus,

    3. and to mark them as holy, with special blessings and promises from God and special accountability to God.

18. If you can’t in good conscience do that, then keep your conscience clear before God and we’ll wait together for the right time.

19. In the mean time, let’s hold each other accountable:

    1. let the credo-baptists be faithful to remind us to call baptized children to personal faith in Jesus,

    2. and let the paedo-baptists hold us accountable to nurture children’s faith in Jesus.

20. And together let us build up the body of Christ!