Sermon - Baptism In The Early Church

Apologia Studios

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:08

God. Go ahead and take a seat. All right.

00:33

Now, as most of you know, we have for quite some time now been studying the subject of baptism as a part of, really we've been covering both the ordinances given by the

00:45

Lord to His church. So we did five sermons on the supper, and so far

00:51

I believe we have done ten sermons on the subject of baptism. We laid out the plan that we had quite some time ago now, and we come to that section of that plan where we ask the question, all right, in light of what we have seen in the

01:10

Scriptures, how did we get to where we are now? Because as we know, there are many different views on baptism, there are many different practices on the subject of baptism, and that means looking at the subject of church history.

01:23

Now, I confess that in light of the fact that we are having baptisms today,

01:30

I am going to really make a serious effort to be as brief as possible.

01:36

Some of you are laughing internally right now, that's okay, but I'm going to make the attempt so that we can have plenty of time to do what we're talking about.

01:47

I figure that's probably a very, very positive, good thing to do. Let me mention, let me just mention a book to you if you want to dig much more deeply into this subject.

02:01

Well, actually there are volumes and volumes and volumes of books that you could obtain on this particular subject.

02:11

There seems to be no end of writing on it, but one that is accessible, it's only 192 pages long.

02:18

Unfortunately, most books on baptism and church history are between 500 and 900 pages long, with numerous footnotes, all sorts of Latin and Greek and, and all sorts of fun stuff like that.

02:32

That's a bit of a problem. This is much more understandable. It's called

02:37

Baptism Nearly Church by Hendrick F. Standard and Johannes P. Lowe. They are

02:42

South African scholars. It was originally written in Afrikaans, which is very closely related to Dutch.

02:51

And in the years that I would go down to South Africa, I was interested in how many times when

02:58

I was hearing people speaking Afrikaans, I could pick up something of what was being said, because Dutch and German have a lot of loan words and a lot of similarities to one another.

03:07

So it was originally written in Afrikaans and then was translated into English, Baptism Nearly Church. It is an

03:14

Arbica and Cary publications. I don't know.

03:19

Sometimes somebody will do a run of them and they become more easily available. It all depends. But it's not like it's a big seller.

03:26

Amazon's probably not really pushing it very hard. But Baptism Nearly Church by Standard and Lowe would be a book that I would highly recommend to you.

03:33

They are classical scholars, and I think that's one of the reasons that the book is so usable.

03:39

One of the problems that we have is we come to this subject with our own traditions.

03:48

And believe it or not, I know some of you are going to be shocked by this, but when historians look at history, sometimes they see what they want to see in the historical data.

04:03

Please try not to pass out. If you're going to be shocked, fall over on your neighbor to the right, not to your left.

04:12

And the reality is that there are, as I said, huge works by well -known names that are so plainly and clearly prejudiced in their argumentation, in their use of materials and citations.

04:31

The problem is most of us don't do enough reading in history to be able to identify those things. And so we have to sort of trust when people say that this is how things are supposed to work and this is what this person said and I'm accurately representing them and things like that.

04:47

So that's why we need to start here by having a little bit of an introduction as to how to do church history.

04:57

And that's hard to put into a sermon, but stick with me because I'm under a lot of pressure here to do this quickly.

05:05

And some of you know that only a matter of months ago I was made professor of church history at Grace Bible Theological Seminary, so it's even harder for me to do this in a brief period of time, because I want to say so much more than I will have the time to say in this particular period of time.

05:24

Now, first thing you must understand is that ancient history is much different than modern history.

05:32

How we do history today, even today, let's just think about today, this very day, what are we talking about constantly in our society?

05:41

Fake news. Fake news. Making things up, spinning things.

05:49

I mean, today we can do what are called deep fakes, and you can put people's faces on other people's bodies, and you can, with CGI, you can put people places where they never were.

06:03

I mean, it's getting pretty scary, that kind of thing that we're doing today.

06:08

And you can spin things, and how many, how often just during the past 11 days of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia has there been instances where there has been video, and this took place, you know, here's the

06:28

Russians doing a terrible thing here, and then you find out it was from 2013, or it was from 2014 in a different place.

06:34

And so you end up going, we can't trust anything. We don't have any way of knowing.

06:40

And sometimes there are. I noticed that just yesterday, Saturday, if you probably started hearing the term

06:46

Irpin, Irpin, I -R -P -I -N, under attack in the attempt to get into Kiev.

06:53

Irpin is where I did most of my teaching when I was in Ukraine, starting in 2014.

06:59

And so I can recognize those places and go, well, I've seen that before. Oh, it just got blown up.

07:05

Okay, so you have that kind of a situation going on there. But we have too much information today, and there's so much twisting of the information today.

07:17

But you go back into the ancient world, you go back into the first century at the time of of Christ, and we have such limited information and material to draw from.

07:34

Today you have video, and you have audio, and you have the Internet, and there's just this massive amount of documentation.

07:43

And we all just go, I could never, I could never keep up with all of it. I mean, there's just so much stuff.

07:50

But that's really a modern problem. When we go back to the first century, the only way that you can communicate what happened in the first century to our century is how?

08:07

Well, let's think about it. It would be nice if you, if you had newspapers and journals and things like that, but you don't have that kind of thing.

08:17

You do have historians. You have Latin historians. You have Greek historians who wrote records of things.

08:24

But how did they know? They didn't have, they didn't have the

08:29

Internet. They didn't have access to media. And so where did they get their information?

08:35

Well, some of them actually had access to imperial records, but imperial records, how, how trustworthy are they?

08:44

I mean, think about it. If you're a pilot and you wanted and you needed to write up a report to be sent to Rome as to what happened in regards to this man named

08:55

Jesus, do you think that the official report he sent to Rome was overly accurate?

09:03

Was, was unbiased? Probably not. And so even if you have historians writing, you don't know exactly what sources they have access to, right?

09:14

And then what you need to remember is anything that was written in the first century, on average, our first copies of the

09:26

Bible were of those books are written five to 900 years after the original was written.

09:34

So they have gone through centuries of transmission, and we don't have those manuscripts.

09:40

We have manuscripts from maybe the 5th or 6th century, 7th, 8th, 9th century. So they've been copied numerous and numerous times.

09:48

Now you might go, isn't that the same with the New Testament? No, amazingly, the New Testament has the earliest attestation of any work of antiquity.

09:55

We have portions of the New Testament within 100 years of the original writings. But for most secular works, that's not the case.

10:04

Five to 900 years. And so there are only certain numbers of those.

10:11

Other people were writing histories. Some of those things have just completely disappeared. There were a lot of people writing letters, and we did have an explosion of that information that took place last century, in the 1930s, with the discovery of, for example, the

10:26

Nag Hammadi Library and the Oxyrhynchus Library and various papyri finds, where all of a sudden we have letters that people were writing back and forth in that day.

10:36

But we very frequently, those papyri are extremely damaged. They're brief.

10:42

They only give us a tantalizing picture into what was going on at that particular point in time.

10:49

But you don't have any audio recordings. You do, once in a while, have inscriptions.

10:56

And so a fascinating source of information is inscriptions, especially on tombs.

11:03

And maybe next week, if we have time, we'll look at some of the inscriptions that are relevant to this, because especially beginning in the late 2nd century and the 3rd century, we'll have these inscriptions.

11:15

And Stander and Lowe go into some of that information as well, these inscriptions, because they're on tombstones, and tombstones tend to last for a long time.

11:24

But they have to be extremely brief. They're not going to give you a lot of background, and you have to try to interpret them.

11:31

And obviously, those things can be interpreted in many different ways. And so when you think about it, we are looking, when we look back all the way to the 1st, the 2nd, the 3rd centuries, what we're looking at are snippets, little portions.

11:52

It would be a little bit like if there was a major disaster today, and 2 ,000 years from now, people are digging up what we did now.

12:01

What if they ran into the remnants of a Christian bookstore? Wow, what a mess would that be, huh?

12:10

I mean, can you imagine that most of the books have been destroyed, but they found fragments of Calvin's Institutes and books by Benny Hinn.

12:25

You think they might be a little confused? I mean, we're confused today. They would be very confused.

12:32

And so that's sort of the situation that we're in. We do not have an encyclopedic representation of what people believed when they came to Christianity in every part of the church in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd centuries.

12:51

Instead, we have particular books that have either survived, and we have manuscripts, manuscript copies of them, even though some of the earliest books we have, the earliest manuscripts were found in the 16th, 17th century.

13:10

But we believe they go back to that time period because their languages, it represents the language of that time and the context and things like that.

13:19

Or you'll have something really important like Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History. Now, that again is not one of the top sellers on the

13:30

Amazon bestselling list, but it is the first serious attempt of writing a church history, and it's coming from the middle of the 4th century.

13:40

And what's fascinating is you will see Eusebius quoting books we do not have anymore.

13:47

We just, he had copies, we don't. For example, there was a, there was a horrible disaster in Alexandria, Egypt, in church history, and you, and the disaster took place because Christians were dumb.

14:05

The Christians destroyed a massive library in Alexandria. It was the

14:10

Christians that did it. Now, when you destroy stuff like that, you're not only destroying, well, there are bad books in there that teach bad things.

14:18

Well, okay. But book burning has never been a good thing. It's always better to refute a book than to burn a book.

14:26

You want to make a book eternal? Burn it instead of refute it. And so who knows what was lost?

14:33

Who knows what was lost? Another really good example is, is one of the early church writers, Irenaeus.

14:39

He's writing around 171 AD in Gaul, modern -day France, that general area,

14:45

Spain, France, that area. And he is refuting the massively anti -Christian movement called

14:55

Gnosticism, especially Valentinian Gnosticism. And for many centuries, all we knew about the

15:06

Gnostics was because of what Irenaeus wrote. And then last century, we discovered an entire library buried in the sands of Egypt of Gnostic books.

15:21

And you might say, well, that doesn't sound like really good news. Well, okay, yeah, there has been a, I guess what you'd call a revival of Gnosticism in light of the discovery of these books, but it's actually been very, very important.

15:35

It's been very important for our study of history, and what was fascinating is Irenaeus got it really, really accurately well.

15:46

I mean, he really did accurately represent the teachings of the people he was refuting.

15:52

Give him two thumbs up on that one. But for a long, long time, that's, that's the only information we had.

16:00

And so you've got people quoting other people as the sources of information that we are utilizing.

16:08

What this means is, what has happened in regards to the doctrine of baptism, is we have massive tomes that have been written by men who will find some of the most obscure citations and references, and can thereby read into their words what they want to find in church history.

16:37

And all of us are tempted to do that. We are all tempted because of the idea that we want the early church to look like us.

16:54

But why? Well, because we assume that the early church is going to be this pure, pristine, these are the people that were taught by the disciples, and so they must have just had everything absolutely perfect.

17:10

Right? Have you read Paul's epistles to the church at Corinth recently?

17:19

Have you read 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John? Oh, goodness, have you read

17:24

Galatians? The reality is that during the ministry of the apostles, there were real problems.

17:37

While Revelation was still taking place, there were real problems.

17:46

And so, you notice, for example, that when Paul writes the church at Colossae, this is a church he has not found.

17:52

This is sort of a second -generation church. He had founded the church in Ephesus, and because of the church in Ephesus, naturally people go out from the church there, they go up the

18:05

Lycus River Valley, and they're preaching the gospel, and so a church is founded in Colossae.

18:10

That was the whole point. That was why Paul did the things that he wanted to do, and the way he did it. So, when

18:17

Paul writes to Colossae, what does he have to do? He has to warn them, because he's heard there is this strange teaching coming into the church.

18:26

We know it today as proto -Gnosticism. We know that much of the language they were using would be the language the

18:31

Gnostics would be using for many decades and many, actually literally many centuries to come.

18:37

And so he's having to warn them. And so, even when revelation is still being given, there are challenges.

18:48

And so, when we start looking at the earliest documents we have from the early church, the assumption that we're making is that they're all just going to be just,

19:02

I mean, just like reading Romans, man. But they're not. They're not.

19:09

Oh, some are wonderfully encouraging and wonderfully orthodox, but there are others where it's just really obvious that this person did not have a great level of understanding of the entirety of the

19:26

New Testament, and there was a reason for that. There is a period of time during which the church is recognizing, not because the church has the authority to do this, but because, remember, something happens today, in our day, and this is the first time in history it's ever been like this.

19:49

But there are people that will tweet something today, and that tweet will go around the world and be headline news in a matter of ten minutes.

20:03

We need to recognize there has never been a time in history when that could have ever happened before.

20:09

It could have ever happened before. The vast majority of human history, you did not have any knowledge of what happened ten miles away for days, let alone hundreds or thousands of miles.

20:28

News took a tremendous amount of time to get from one place to another. Correspondence would take forever.

20:36

And by the way, that wasn't a bad thing. I'll be honest with you. Social media and instant communication may allow us to communicate very quickly, but it has deeply shallowed the resultant conversation.

20:54

When you can respond in five seconds, when it used to be you would have, at least you had to get a piece of paper out, find a pen, and write stuff down, and then go, eh, that's dumb.

21:08

Right? That's dumb. That has made a huge difference in the way things go. We need to recognize that we live in an absolutely unique period, but the tendency is for us to transmit our way of doing things back into the past, and that's not how it worked.

21:26

That's not how it worked. And so when we look back at that first century, that second century, we need to recognize that the church, when

21:40

Paul writes his epistle to Philemon, how did that end up in North Africa?

21:47

How did copies get there? How long did it take? How long until there were collections?

21:54

We know the earliest collection we have of Paul's writings, a manuscript called

21:59

P46, it's not all of Paul's writings. It's his major epistles. But that's toward the end of the second century, so that's between 180 and 200, and it's not complete.

22:12

So you don't, you don't, you don't get to have a New Testament at that period of time.

22:18

Your church may only have 70 % of the New Testament available to it. So what if you didn't have

22:28

Galatians and Romans? Where would your theology be? Could it be a little man -centered?

22:36

Could you have some misunderstandings? Yeah, you could. No question about it.

22:43

So we have to keep all of these things in mind when we start looking at some of the earliest references that we have outside of the

22:52

New Testament. Well, what are some of them? Well, you have one of them, you have a quote from one of them, and I did not even hand out, and that is from,

23:09

I believe, the Didache is there. But even here, now let me, let me tell you a funny story, and I'm going to make,

23:20

I'm going to make fun of myself here. Most of the time everybody else is doing that, but I might as well get in on the fun.

23:26

Seems to be very popular these days. I had already started studying

23:31

Greek when I did one of my first radio debates with an atheist on KFYI back when, back when they did stuff like that live on the radio here.

23:45

It was, I was like 20, 19, 20 years of age, and I had been looking stuff up, and I was doing some reading, and I was excited, and in this debate that I had with this atheist on the

24:00

Tom Likas show, anyone remember Tom Likas? Wow, about 7 % at best, is on the

24:08

Tom Likas show, and I had seen this reference, and so I gave this citation,

24:14

I gave this reference. The proper pronunciation is Didache. It's a Greek term. It means the teaching, the teaching of the twelve apostles.

24:22

But I didn't realize it was a Greek term, so on that radio program, if you go back and listen to the recordings, which I've tried to destroy all of them,

24:28

I called it the Didache. The Didache, yeah. And I was already studying

24:35

Greek. I just didn't make the connection. I was 20 years old. What do you want? So you have a quote from the

24:41

Didache. Now here's the problem. Who wrote the Didache? We have no idea.

24:48

When was it written? We have no idea. Well, that's a problem, isn't it? Yeah. So when you look,

24:56

I'm working, I'm actually editing a book. It's the first time

25:02

I've mentioned this publicly. But I'm editing a work that contains some of these early writings for Canon Press.

25:12

And the Didache will be in there. And so there will be an introduction, and in that introduction

25:19

I'll talk about the range of possible dates for the Didache. And there are some people who believe the

25:26

Didache is as early as about 65. In other words, it's apostolic. It's during the period when the apostles were still alive.

25:34

And there are some that would say it was toward the end of the first century, and there's some that would put it all the way to the end of the second century.

25:41

The problem is there's no dating on it. It doesn't say this was written in the year of so -and -so.

25:49

That's normally how you'd have it. You'd have something along the lines of this was written in the third year of governor so -and -so when so -and -so was emperor, and that'll give you a really nice solid period of time, and you'll know when it was written.

26:05

They don't have that kind of thing. So how can we know? Well, partly because of what it addresses and how it's how very primitive the worship that is being described is.

26:20

And since we have liturgies from later on to become much more advanced, that gives us some idea.

26:26

But it could have come from an area where they didn't really have an advanced liturgy yet, and so it could come from later. It's hard to say.

26:34

There are a few sources that are a little bit different than that. Remember about two years ago, we would have a number of quotations from the letter to Diognetus.

26:48

We were doing the voices thing before everybody was saying, man, we're getting out of here really late, so we're not doing the voices thing as much anymore.

26:58

But I provided a bunch of citations from the epistle to Diognetus.

27:04

And who wrote that? We call him Mothetes. Anybody know what Mothetes means?

27:11

Disciple. So it's just a Christian disciple. We don't know what his name was. But he wrote this letter to an unbeliever seeking to win him to the

27:22

Christian faith, and it's fascinating. And we can tell something. We know the Christians are being accused of all sorts of things by what's contained in the letter, but we don't know when that was written.

27:34

I think it was around 120, in that ballpark that fits, but we can't know for certain.

27:44

And it's not even complete. So it gives us just a snapshot, just a little, a brief flash of the flashlight that sort of freezes everything in place, you know?

27:55

And here's what was going on, and it looks like it was around this time period. And in this earliest period of the church, that's what you get.

28:05

You've got the Didache, you've got the epistle to Diognetus, and then you have a fascinating full epistle written by traditionally

28:17

Clement from the church at Rome to the church at Corinth.

28:24

And again, scholars will date that some pre -70, most in the 90s, some into the beginning of the second century, so 110, 115, 120, somewhere around in there, depending on how you view it, whether you feel it's been redacted or edited or what the intentions were in writing it.

28:45

There's all sorts of things that can go into all of these types of considerations. And there you get some fascinating insights into what's going on in Corinth, what the church at Rome looks like.

29:00

Very, very important information. And then you have some books that were considered as Scripture in some portions of the church, never in the entire church, but in some portions of the church.

29:12

And it's interesting, normally considered that way around the area where we think it was originally written.

29:20

And so you have the Shepherd of Hermas, and you have the Epistle of Barnabas.

29:27

Not the Gospel of Barnabas. Make sure to make a difference between those two. The Epistle of Barnabas is a real ancient work going back to the second century.

29:36

The Gospel of Barnabas is a fake produced by Muslims no earlier than the twelfth century.

29:42

So there's no comparison between those two particular works. Keep that in mind. And we'll look briefly next week at some of the things that those works say.

29:56

We don't find them overly super orthodox in their understanding of the entirety of the

30:02

New Testament, but they do give us fascinating information about what some people believed who call themselves

30:07

Christians at that time point. One other really quickly, and it's one of the most important, you have the

30:14

Epistles of Ignatius. The Epistles of Ignatius. Ignatius wrote seven genuine epistles.

30:25

There's all sorts of... Here's another problem. Church history is filled with fraudulent works.

30:31

If you wanted to get a book published, it always helped to attach somebody else's name to it who was well -known.

30:39

And so there are pseudo -Ignatian epistles that were written, and then there are later

30:46

Latin recensions that are much longer and add all sorts of stuff. And in fact, what ended up happening a thousand years after Christ is, most people don't know this, but the entirety of papal authority, the whole concept of the papacy was built up out of utterly fraudulent citations from the early church.

31:09

This, what's called the pseudo -Isidorian decretals, were cited over and over again at the point where the papacy was receiving its greatest authority, and everybody today knows they were all fake.

31:23

They were all fake citations. History has washed away the historical foundation of the papacy, but it's still there.

31:31

Francis is still doing his thing. It's fascinating. So there have been all sorts of fakes and frauds down through the centuries.

31:40

Ignatius, we have seven genuine epistles that he wrote as he was going to Rome to be martyred in about 107 or 108

31:49

A .D. And they are gold mines of information. They reveal to us the difference between the

31:57

Eastern Church and the Western Church. He's coming from the East going to Rome in the

32:03

West. There are tremendous, it's a tremendous recognition, and I've, I've included some of the citations in the, in the bulletin in, in a couple years ago, where you have incredible, in -depth

32:19

Christology in the very first generation after the time of Christ.

32:25

That's, that's important stuff. But we don't have everything that Ignatius ever wrote, and how would you like it if 2 ,000 years from now someone tried to determine the entirety of your theology based on seven emails that you've written?

32:45

You see what I mean? Seven emails that you've written. Now, they're important emails because they were the ones you wrote right before you were going to be executed.

32:55

So the, the ones you write right before you're going to be executed are probably pretty important. But that's, we don't have his sermons.

33:04

That would have helped, right? So do you see what I'm saying is we can't expect church history to give us an encyclopedic newspaper -style recitation, the early church believed this about baptism in this place for the following years.

33:28

You just don't have anything like that. And some people will say, well, if a certain belief is not represented in what we have in the writings that have come down to us, that doesn't necessarily mean that it, it wasn't held.

33:46

It's just that the sources we have never make reference to it. That's a, that's an argument from silence, but there are some people who will make that kind of an argument.

33:59

And one of the ways in which that is made is relevant to us in our understanding of baptism.

34:09

And that is, we have zero evidence of infant baptism in the first century and well into the middle of the second century as far as the sources that are available to us can testify.

34:30

It starts appearing after that, but one of the vitally important things that we're going to be talking about is why did it start appearing?

34:41

Why did it start appearing? And let me just say something up front and then we'll, we'll look at some of the citations that I've provided for you.

34:50

Let me say something up front. As far as I can tell, and you see,

34:57

I'm a weird professor of church history. You all know that. Why?

35:04

Because I'm an apologist and being an apologist, I just automatically have this filter that I have to run.

35:17

If I'm going to say it, then I may have to defend it in a debate.

35:23

And so I've got pretty high standards for what I'm going to have to say. But as far as I can see and understand from the historical records, there was no one who believed on the subject of baptism exactly as John Calvin believed until John Calvin.

35:53

Were there people who practiced infant baptism before John Calvin? Of course. That's why he practiced it.

36:00

But why did they practice it? Why were infants being baptized in the fourth and fifth century?

36:08

Not for the reasons John Calvin said infants should be baptized. Keep that in mind.

36:16

Let's go ahead and look at the citation you have in your bulletin. It is from the Didache, right? I just want to double, double check, make sure

36:23

I sent the right one. This is right, if you read the

36:30

Didache, and you can read the Didache in a matter of minutes. It's not long. It's available online.

36:35

All this stuff's available online. So, the beginning of the

36:42

Didache lays out, it's sort of like the book of James.

36:48

It's how to live life, wisdom, godliness. It's stuff that you would want

36:55

Christians to understand who especially come from a pagan background where there was just all sorts of debauchery and everything else.

37:01

So it's sort of a summary of like the Sermon on the Mount and James all sort of mixed together. And then we have this brief little section.

37:13

But concerning baptism, thus shall you baptize. Having first recited all these things, which

37:20

I would assume is in reference to what came before this. In other words, this is how to live a holy life.

37:26

This is how Christians live, not how pagans live. Having first recited all these things, baptize in the name of the

37:35

Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit in living, that is running, water.

37:41

But if you do not have living water, then baptize in other water. And if you are not able in cold, then in warm.

37:51

So those of you who have been baptized recently here, you realize that we have been following the Didache very closely. We've got a heater in there right now, but I'm not sure it's really done a whole lot.

38:03

So we're sort of following the Didache. Anyway, but if you have neither, then pour water on the head thrice in the name of the

38:12

Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. But before the baptism, let him that baptizes and him that is baptized fast, and any others also who are able, and you shall order him that is baptized to fast a day or two before.

38:33

That's it. That's all it says. All right. Let's think about what it says.

38:42

Having first recited all these things, to whom? Well, to the one being baptized.

38:49

Oh, so the one being baptized needs to be able to understand moral, ethical, and religious commandments in regards to how they are to live, right?

39:01

So having first recited these things, baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the

39:07

Holy Spirit in living or running water. Now obviously, given that it says if you have none of these, then pour water, what kind of baptism is taking place in the first two sections?

39:21

It's immersion. There's no question about it. This isn't sprinkling. This is the immersion of individuals who can understand the teachings and agree to the teachings of the

39:38

Christian faith, and they're to be baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the

39:44

Holy Spirit. Now that's, by the way, we won't take time to emphasize this, but that's an extremely important reference because there's a lot of folks, especially the

39:51

Oneness Pentecostals, that believe that Matthew 28, 19 through 20 is a later addition to the

39:57

Gospel of Matthew, and that you're not to baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, only in the name of Jesus. So they don't like to dedicate at all, and they want to try to make it very, very late, and so on and so forth.

40:08

But here you have a clear recognition at the time of this writing of what we have at the end of the

40:16

Gospel of Matthew. It is clearly in the possession of the Christian people. And you're to do it in like a river.

40:25

So when I was in Israel back in 2018, I think it was, we went to the

40:31

Jordan River. I'm going to tell you something. I don't want to be baptized in the Jordan River.

40:36

Not in the modern Jordan River. Back then, it may have been okay, but the modern

40:42

Jordan River is a mud hole. But oh, there were all sorts of folks down there because they figured if I get baptized in the

40:50

Jordan River, that's going to have some super spiritual something to do with something. And I'm not sure that was living or running water down there.

40:59

I really, there was stuff living in there, but I'm not sure that it's stuff you want to have living in there.

41:05

Let's put it that way. So in running water, but if you do not have running water, then baptize in other water.

41:15

And if you're not able in cold, then in warm. So, so baptistries would not have been normative at this time for what reason?

41:25

Because there weren't any churches yet. What do you mean there weren't any churches? Church buildings.

41:32

Church and church building are not the same thing. And the churches met in houses and you generally did not have a swimming pool in the house.

41:44

So this makes perfect sense, but it's all by immersion and it's all of believers.

41:52

And this may be the earliest reference we have outside the New Testament to how baptism, baptism was being practiced.

42:01

Then, and if you do not have either of those, then pour water on the head thrice and name the

42:08

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It's fascinating. I subscribe, I support Voice of the Martyrs, Barnabas Aydin, Voice of the

42:14

Martyrs. And this is the current one. It just arrived, I think, two days ago. And I, you know,

42:20

I, I put the mail down and, and did the thing and I looked down at it. And right down here at the bottom, it says baptism in a tarp.

42:29

Baptism in a tarp, page six. Okay. Baptism in a tarp. All right.

42:36

So here are these guys and they are rather well disguised because they're in Muslim areas.

42:46

Understandable. And they're doing missionary work. And if you look at the map, in the middle of the

42:55

Sahara Desert, I mean, we're talking the deep, deep desert. And so there is a picture.

43:03

And so you can see one woman is being baptized and it's in a, it's a tiny little, it's like a trough type thing.

43:12

Haven't I seen video of you guys doing that early, early on? Sort of a trough type thing.

43:18

Was it in a park or something that y 'all were doing? Okay. All right. Similar. And then here in like a, like an oasis, but where there is just, there don't, there's no bodies of water.

43:30

I mean, you're in, you're literally in the middle of the Sahara Desert. They have a tarp and this, this believer is in the tarp and they're baptizing him as best they can in a tarp.

43:43

Now you might go, well, the folks in the Didache would have disagreed. Why not just pour water on the head?

43:49

Well, they didn't have plastic tarps during the day at the Didache. So who, who knows what they would have done if they had something that would have been waterproof.

43:55

I don't know. I appreciate the fact that they're trying to follow the apostolic example, even in a context where they have very, very little water available to them.

44:05

But this is going on today. So the issues were real. We have indoor plumbing, sort of a heater.

44:15

And so we have it pretty easy. But in many places, even yet in this world, folks,

44:23

Christianity is illegal. So you don't have anything like this. And so there are people, especially in the

44:30

Saharan Desert, where most of those nations are Muslim, being baptized in a tarp may be your death sentence.

44:41

It may be the last thing you ever do. You're marking yourself out. It means, it makes baptism mean a little something more.

44:52

So if you not have living water, then baptize in other water. If not, not able and cold and warm, pour water on the head thrice in the name of the

45:00

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If you do not have any of those things available, you do not have sufficient water for immersion.

45:05

That's the only way to understand these words. The Didache presents to us believers' baptism by immersion as the earliest outside the

45:19

New Testament example of baptism, and that is not arguable. That is not arguable.

45:27

But before the baptism, let him that baptizes and him that is baptized fast.

45:33

Okay, moms, how good are eight -day -old infants at fasting?

45:43

Yeah, that doesn't work, does it? No. But before the baptism, let him that baptizes and him that is baptized fast, and any others also who are able, and you shall order him that is baptized to fast a day or two before.

46:02

This is what baptism looked like. This is primitive. This is early. No question about it.

46:09

No question about it. Now, let's jump, depending on where we put the time, let's jump, let's go with a super early date for the

46:21

Didache and say it's pre -70. So let's jump 80 years into the future to a man by the name of Justin Martyr, and I've got to be quick here.

46:32

Justin Martyr wrote this between 155 and 157

46:37

A .D., so we're talking about right in the middle of the 2nd century. Justin Martyr was a philosopher converted to Christ.

46:48

He continued to wear what's called the pallium, the philosopher's cloak, his entire life.

46:55

Fascinating person. Obviously, he was not named Justin Martyr by his mommy. You're all looking at me like, why not?

47:04

Because he was a martyr, okay? So she wasn't predicting that. This is something we call him later on, but he was one who gave his, sealed his testimony with his own blood.

47:17

He was executed by the state. Here's what he wrote. I will also relate the manner in which we dedicated ourselves to God when we had been made new through Christ, lest if we omit this we seem to be unfair in the explanation we are making.

47:31

As many as are persuaded, and notice what he says, we had been made new through Christ. He does say we're made new through Christ.

47:40

Don't read our modern categories back into Justin. Just listen to what he says and we'll wrap up with this.

47:49

As many as are persuaded and believe that what we teach and say is true, who?

47:56

Those who are persuaded and believe that what we teach and say is true, and undertake to be able to live accordingly, sounds like the

48:07

Didache. Yes, I will commit myself to live this way. Are instructed to pray and to entreat

48:13

God with fasting. For the remission of their sins that are past, we praying and fasting with them.

48:24

Then they are brought by us where there is water. Well, why not the baptistry in the church?

48:31

Because again, this is the middle of the second century. They ain't building churches yet, because Rome is still, it will be persecuting for another 150 years.

48:41

Then they are brought by us where there is water, and here's the, here's the key, now listen to this, and are regenerated in the same manner in which we ourselves were regenerated.

48:52

See, immediately what we do is we take all of our modern arguments about regeneration, the nature of, and we read it back into this.

48:59

That's not what Justin's talking about. He is saying that baptism is a complete break with the old life and a pledge to walk in a new life.

49:12

And in fact, what we'll discover, I'm not sure how much time we'll have next week, what we'll discover is that in some places, not most, but in some places, you would take your clothes off, be baptized, and put different clothes on going the other direction as a picture of old life left behind, new life that I'm now embracing.

49:39

We'll also find out that sometimes you were baptized three times in the name of the Father, and of the

49:45

Son, and of the Holy Spirit. And sometimes it was forward. That would have been freaky. Here we go, face forward, whoosh, you know, three times.

49:56

There were lots of interesting different ways that it took place. Then they were brought by us where there is water, and are regenerated in the same manner in which we ourselves are regenerated.

50:07

For in the name of God, the Father and Lord of the universe, and of our Savior Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit, there's your

50:13

Trinitarian formula, they then receive the washing with water. For Christ also said, except you be born again, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.

50:21

Now that it is impossible for those who have once been born to enter into their mother's wombs as manifest to all, and how those who have sinned and repent shall escape their sins as declared by Isaiah the prophet, as I wrote above, he thus speaks, wash you, make you clean, put away the evil of your doings from your souls, learn to do well, judge the fatherless, and plead for the widow, and come and let us reason together, says the

50:45

Lord. And though your sins, and though your sins be as scarlet,

50:53

I will make them white like wool, and though they be as crimson, I will make them white as snow. But if you refuse and rebel, the sword shall devour you for the mouth the

51:01

Lord has spoken. It's a quotation, obviously, from the prophet Isaiah that is being applied here. And for this right we have learned from the apostles this reason, since at our birth we were born without our own knowledge or choice by our parents coming together, and were brought up in bad habits and wicked training, in order that we may not remain the children of necessity and of ignorance, but may become the children of choice and knowledge, and may obtain in the water the remission and sins formerly committed.

51:28

There is pronounced over him who chooses to be born again and has repented of his sins, the name of God the

51:33

Father, the Lord of the universe, who leads to the laver the person that is to be washed, calling him by this name alone.

51:42

For no one can utter the name of the ineffable God, and if any dare to say that there is a name, he raves with a hopeless madness.

51:49

And this washing is called illumination, because they who learn these things are illuminated in their understandings.

51:56

And the name of Jesus Christ, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and in the name of the Holy Ghost, who through the prophets foretold all things about Jesus, he who is illuminated is washed.

52:05

But we, after we have thus washed him who has been convinced and has assented to our teaching, bring him to the place where those who are called brethren are assembled, in order that we may offer hearty prayers in common for ourselves and for the baptized person, and for all others in every place, that we may be counted worthy, now that we have learned the truth, by our works also to be found good citizens and keepers of the commandments, so that we may be saved with an everlasting salvation, having ended the prayers, we salute one another with a kiss."

52:33

He goes on to then say, now this person can then partake of the Lord's Supper once they have been baptized.

52:41

Now, there's a lot of stuff there that you could try to unpack. There's a lot of things that we could discuss in regards to what

52:49

Justin's understanding of this, that, or the other thing was, but what is obvious? What is clear in looking at these two, there's 80 years between them, at least, 80 years between them.

53:03

What do we hear? There is instruction that is understood by the person to be baptized.

53:12

There is confession of faith by the person being baptized. There is fasting by the person being baptized and by others.

53:27

These are all believers. Plainly, the method of baptism is immersion in water.

53:40

There is nothing, there is no discussion here of what if you don't have enough water. You go to a place where there is sufficient water, and the person is immersed in water in the name of the

53:55

Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. And then in this instance, Justin says, and then those who are baptized are brought back to where the assembly would be, maybe in a house type of a situation, and prayer is made for them, that they may be able to live in a way that is right and proper in God's eyes.

54:20

That's what you have taking place here. There is nothing about infants.

54:26

There is nothing about children being sprinkled. Knows nothing about it at all.

54:35

It's just not there. Now, I actually find that somewhat interesting for one reason, and we'll close with this.

54:45

The reason that infant baptism first appears in the history of the church has nothing to do with covenant theology and has nothing to do with the idea of a mark of the covenant going back to Abraham.

55:06

You know why it is? We don't understand this because we live in a wonderfully blessed day.

55:15

But in those days, for example, in the days of Luther, a woman would have to have 10 live births to normally get one child through to maturity, an adult.

55:28

Infant mortality was huge. Most babies died, and maternal mortality was huge as well.

55:44

Many women died in childbirth. That's been the history of the world. And the initial drive for infant baptism is real easy to understand.

55:57

Once the theology develops that baptism is a method of washing away sins, not something that represents that having happened by faith, but that that's the mechanism itself, and your baby isn't doing well, there is a huge push, a huge desire to provide that grace to that little child.

56:24

That's where it starts. And what's fascinating is we'll see, once we get to Tertullian at the end of the second century, the beginning of the third, there are two opposite poles.

56:38

There is this pole, baptize the baby if it looks like it's going to die.

56:44

But then do you remember Constantine? Remember Constantine? Constantine, the

56:50

Roman emperor that stopped the persecution against Christians and claimed himself to be a

56:55

Christian? When was Constantine baptized? On his deathbed.

57:01

On his deathbed. The idea being, you are completely cleansed by baptism, so hold it off as long as possible.

57:14

So at the same time, you had two completely different poles, both due to a misunderstanding of what baptism actually is.

57:27

And you'll find people arguing against it, going, no, once you proclaim faith in Christ, you're going to be baptized.

57:33

So you really have three different perspectives all at the same time. And not a one of them substantiates the modern -day argument of our dear brothers and sisters regarding infant baptism.

57:53

Not a one of them. Like I said, that view has to wait for a man named

57:59

John Calvin in Geneva in the 16th century. In the 16th century.

58:06

Keep that in mind. Now, how do we wrap this up and go into a baptismal service?

58:15

Well, I'm awful thankful that we have the entirety of the

58:21

New Testament, and we're able to read everything that God has given to us to help us to understand that the people that are going to go through the water in that tank are not going to receive spiritual life by walking into the water.

58:41

Their heart rate may go up because it's fairly cold, but that's not spiritual life.

58:49

What this represents, just as what the elements here represent, is our participation in Jesus Christ, being united with Him in His death, burial, and resurrection.

59:06

And yes, walking out of that water, we are to walk in newness of life.

59:14

When I was baptized as a fairly young person, I remember the words that I heard as I came up out of that water, raised to walk in newness of life.

59:28

And that is what every person who comes before us this day is saying to all of us.

59:35

I am trusting in Christ, His death, His burial,

59:41

His resurrection alone. And we can learn, even from these early sources, that that was not an empty commitment.

59:56

That is, I will now live as He would have me to live.

01:00:04

And back then, during that time, receiving the sign of baptism could end up in your death at the hands of the

01:00:12

Roman Empire, because then you could no longer say, Kaiser curia, Caesar is Lord.

01:00:17

You could only say, Jesus is Lord. And today, in the Sahara Desert, it's the same thing.

01:00:26

You can be baptized in a tarp and then be killed, because you had once been a

01:00:34

Muslim, and now you've come to know Jesus. And that's what Islam says has to happen to you if you change your religion.

01:00:44

There is a sense in which experiencing baptism in that context where you know that by doing this, you are signing your death warrant, makes the reality of your passing from the old life into a new life, which may be a brief life, all the more real.

01:01:07

All the more real. And so let us be praying for those who are baptized, for the young people who have come to know

01:01:17

Christ at an early age, as I did. Pray that God will make them strong.

01:01:22

My friends, this generation, the young people in this congregation, you may well face tremendous challenges to your faith.

01:01:35

And I'm not just talking about being mocked at the university. I'm talking about being willing to lose your freedom to stand for Christ.

01:01:49

Let's pray for all of those who are being baptized that Christ will give to them a deep commitment to walk in His way and to honor and glorify

01:02:03

Him. And so before we partake in the Lord's Supper together, once again, if you are going to be baptized this evening, then you need to go now to change and to be prepared to meet over here, to go down through this door here and meet with the pastors there, and you'll be given further instructions before baptism while we are partaking of the

01:02:31

Lord's Supper here at that particular point in time. So now's the time to go. Let's pray and then partake of the

01:02:38

Supper together. Father, we do thank You for this time to consider Your truth, to consider the history of Your people.

01:02:46

We ask You to help us to remember these things, to make proper application. Lord, we thank You that at this time we can not only discuss baptism, but we can celebrate those who are making this profession before all of us.

01:03:02

Lord, we thank You for this time. We thank You that Your Spirit continues to draw Your people unto Yourself. May we rejoice and be encouraged in these things, we pray in Christ's name.