Baptism - Basic Meaning by Dr. James White (2nd in series)

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We have begun a series of sermons. I'm not sure that I will actually finish them up.

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Luke might inherit it, I don't know, somewhere in the 2040s, 2050s.

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I'm just trying to follow Jeff's example with the Matthew stuff, wanna be thorough, wanna make sure to cover everything, sort of a

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Puritan way of doing things. We've started a series on the subject of baptism.

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We did the Lord's Supper last year, and so it seemed logical and rational and spirit -guided to look at the other of the two ordinances, sacraments, as many would say, that have been given to the church by our

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Lord. Some people might say, but we're in the midst of such difficulties, this is so many challenges, and while that's true,

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I don't think the time will ever come where we need to stop dealing with the foundations and the basics, we need to have that solid foundation under us, and I'm warning you ahead of time that today's sermon will sound a little bit more like a seminary classroom than you might want, but there's a reason for that.

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Foundational basic issues need to be understood, and when we address a subject such as that of baptism, you have to start with such things as the meaning of the word, and you might say that shouldn't take you more than 60 seconds.

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Well, I could certainly give it to you in that way, but here's the problem. We're dealing with a topic where there are literally dozens of different understandings that have developed down through the ages on the form of baptism, when to baptize, who to baptize, the way that you're to baptize, when everything is up for grabs, and if we're going to come to a meaningful conclusion, one that's fair, one that's not just a knee -jerk reaction,

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I mean, I'll be honest with you, if you're raised within a primarily fundamentalist concept, then you're simply gonna be told that everybody who baptizes any differently than we do just isn't a

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Christian, don't even worry about them, and don't even listen to a word they have to say. Well, that's gonna end up cutting you off from a large portion of church history, that's gonna cut you off from our

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Presbyterian brothers and our Lutheran brothers and our Episcopalian brothers and Anglican brothers and all sorts of things like that, and so that's not really an option, but that's where a lot of people end up going, and most people hold their doctrine of baptism by tradition, not because of an extensive, full study of the issues both biblically and historically, and so that's the first reason that we need to make sure to start at the beginning and look at the very meaning of the term baptism, but likewise, we want to provide you with an example of how you should approach any subject.

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It is our desire, as the eldership of this church, to model for you, in the way that we preach the word of God, a consistent and appropriate handling of the text of Scripture.

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You have all sorts of examples of how not to handle the text of Scripture available to you online, on television.

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This used to be a funny joke, but I used to be able to talk about the channel between 20 and 22, and I would never mention what it was, but now most people just stare at me going,

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I have no earthly idea what you're talking about. We used to have a channel here in the

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Phoenix area, Channel 21, TBN, the Trinity Broadcasting Network, but who knows that anymore?

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Now it's all online and everything else, and there's lots and lots of examples of how not to handle the word of God.

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We want to show you how to do that, and in this particular instance, maybe a little bit more explicitly than we would normally do from the pulpit, but again, the subject itself demands that we look at it in this way.

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So let me mention two passages of Scripture to you as we start off. Ephesians chapter four, verses four through six, contains what seems to be a poetic or creedal statement from the

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Apostle Paul. Either he was the originator of it, or it was something that was already there in the church before he came along, but you will notice that it says, literally, again, just giving you a free translation, one body and one spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling, one

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Lord, one faith, one baptism, one

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God and Father of all, the one who is above all, and the one who is the above all things and through all things one and in all things one is the way that it really is literally rendered there, referring to God as the creator of all things.

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Please note the phrase, one Lord, one faith, one baptism. This is clearly a poetic construction.

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In the Greek, it's heis kurios, miapistis, hen baptisma. Now, if you know anything about Greek, you know that heis miahen is what you learn when you learn the word one, singular, and that's in three different genders.

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Sorry, the Greeks were not politically correct. They had a masculine and a feminine and a neuter.

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Yes, they only had the three. They did not have 148, and so you have heis miahen, one

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Lord, one faith, faith is feminine in the Greek language, one baptism.

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Now, it's interesting that that particular form, baptisma, baptismatos, is only found in Christian writings.

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There is a masculine form that's used outside of Christian writings, but there is only one, that's the only place you find this form is in Christian writings, and there is one baptism.

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There's no explanation. There's no, it does take time to expand upon that, but clearly for the

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Christian people, this idea of baptism was an understood thing.

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It was a shared thing. Why? Well, Matthew chapter 28, 19 through 20. You know the

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Great Commission. You know it very well, that we are to go, therefore, and discipleize all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the

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Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to keep or observe all things whatsoever

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I have commanded to you, and behold, I am with you always, even unto the end of the age.

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And so now you have the verbal form, baptizing them in the name of the

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Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and so we have these terms being used in the

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New Testament, and most of the time, there is no stopping and having a discussion about all the questions that you and I would like to ask about the subject.

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We have to derive from their contexts and their uses at the time what this meant, but notice, one of these is a verbal form, baptizing them, that's the commandment, that's an action, but there is one, baptism, and so the accomplished reality of experiencing being baptized is your baptism, but we need to keep these terms straight in our minds.

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Now, when we ask ourselves the question, what does a word mean, most of us have been trained in our lives to go over to, well, this is how

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I was trained, it's not how it works now, now you go to a computer, but in my days, over in the room, you had a whole set of dictionaries.

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Yes, they were paper books, normally large paper books, and by the way, I would highly recommend to you the obtaining of an older, big dictionary in paper for your home, why?

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Because now, George Orwell got it right, 1984 is here, the ministry of truth is busily changing the language.

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We've even had situations where the definition, for example, of herd immunity in regards to COVID -19 has now been changed from this past summer on the

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WHO website to December, and now it has a completely different meaning, and this is happening, men, women, dictionaries are changing the very definition of what man and woman means, go get yourself something from before 1950, and it'll do you good, you'll need to have it in your home, because if you got it on your device, they can change it there too, so you might wanna do that.

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That's how most of us look up what a word means, but how did they get the meaning? I mean, if they can change the meaning, then are all the meanings of words just completely malleable, and isn't it true that languages develop over time?

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Well, certainly they do, and certainly there has been, for example, in my own lifetime, there was no problem back when

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I was a kid to sing the Christmas song, and it mentioned gay, because have a gay old time, and things like that, because when

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I was a kid, that meant happy, that meant smiling, that meant laughing, that's not what it means anymore, and so there are changes over time, documenting those changes can be very, very helpful, but when we talk about a word that was used 2 ,000 years ago, how does anyone know what it meant?

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Well, this is extremely important, and even young people, you can tune into this, this is extremely important, you can understand this, anybody can understand what

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I'm about to explain to you, and in learning this, you will be, we are giving you, we're giving you a

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Christmas gift today, because Christmas really isn't over, you may think that it is, but remember, it's a

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Christmas season, it goes from December 25th to January 6th, 12 days of Christmas, all that type of stuff, so if your wife has already pulled down the

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Christmas tree, shame on you, anyway, hasn't happened at my house, well, it has happened in the past, but not this year, anyway, we are giving you a

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Christmas gift, a set of tools that you can use to understand the meanings of ancient words, and that's what we have, we even have a beautiful song about ancient words, the ancient words of the text of scripture, you as an individual need to understand these things, yes, you do not have to depend upon others, you can understand these things, so what do

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I refer to, well, let's talk about the word baptism, the problem with the word baptism is that we are not translating it, we have transliterated it, because the

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Greek words we're looking at are bapto, baptizo, baptismatos, is the genitive form, baptisma, and baptismos, which is a masculine form, you can hear the same root in all of these, and that's what we have in English, baptize, or baptism, we didn't translate it, we transliterated it, that means we just simply brought it wholesale over into the

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English language, there's a lot of words that we've done that with, our English language is a mix mash, it's just got so many different things of coming in from Greek and Latin, via German and all sorts of other sources, that a lot of our words are that way, but this is a particularly unfortunate one, because it doesn't do much good to look up, you open up your

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Greek dictionary, and you look up baptizo, and it says to baptize, well thank you very much,

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I had no idea, well what does that mean? And so, when you are looking at any word, whether it's, for example, in the beginning was the word, the term logos in Greek, if you look up logos, you will probably be shocked to discover that it has a wide range of meanings, a wide range of meanings, there are other words that have very narrow words, they're very technical, they can only refer to one thing, and so when we talk about a word, here's something that kids, quiz your parents on this, you get in the car on the way home, ask, see if your, find out if your parents were listening as well as you were, okay, kids?

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Every word has a semantic domain, semantic domain, that would really work in Scrabble too, wouldn't it, that'd be a good one to remember, it's two words, semantic domain, now what does that mean?

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You could picture it as the range of possible meanings associated with that particular word, and then when an author uses that word, what the author does is finds a particular portion of that range that fits what he wants to say, and so poets, for example, are always aware of the semantic domains of the words that they are using, so they can try to find proper rhymes and rhythms and things like that while still communicating something within their poetry, that happens a lot in, for example, the

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Old Testament, in the Psalter, and so every word has a semantic domain, and that semantic domain can develop over time, so when we see the earliest uses of bapto, and bapto is the most primitive form, that's the most basic form of the term we're looking at, when we see the most basic earliest appearances of this term, it simply means to dip or to immerse primarily in a liquid, okay?

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So it means to dip or immerse in a liquid, so it is used of a ship, sinking, well, that will immerse the ship in water, won't it?

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Yep, if your ship sinks, it has been baptized, hopefully not the way we baptize, we don't want you to bubble, so it's pretty quick, but that's its basic meaning, is to dip and to immerse, it is a plunging into normally a liquid medium, now it's interesting that fairly quickly, bapto began to expand its semantic domain, why?

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Because how would you change cloth from a bland color into a beautiful color?

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Well, the process is called dyeing, and I'm actually old enough to remember, have you ever seen a tie dye shirt?

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I remember the 60s and the 70s, I was alive then, my parents wouldn't let me have a tie dye shirt because that's what hippies wore and we weren't allowed to do that, so that was something

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John Denver would do and you don't wanna do anything with John Denver, so even though I know all of his music now, but anyways, you would dip the cloth into the dye and then remove it and that would change the color, and so bapto, that would be the immersion of the cloth, then when you bring it out, it has now been dyed, and so many authors, many writers simply began to use bapto to refer to the whole process of dyeing and staining something a particular color, but the meaning of the word didn't change or disappear because it was still there at the root, how do you dye something?

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Well, you have to immerse it, you have to put it all the way in, you never dyed something by doing this number at it, that's just gonna get you a bunch of, that's gonna get you modern art, that's what that's gonna get you, it's gonna get you lots of money at a museum someplace, look, you just threw a bunch of paint on it, it's great, wonderful, but anyway, the meaning of the word does not change even though its use can be expanded in a way like that, and so bapto means to immerse, to dip, it was also used of when you would create a sword and you've seen the process of hammering the sword into shape and you're using the bellows and the heat, and then when you want to temper that steel and you want to make it strong, you plunge it into the water, again, you don't just spray a little water on it, you plunge it into the water, you are immersing it, and this becomes also a part of the utilization of that kind of term.

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Then you have the term baptismos, which is a baptism, so instead of bapto, which is a verb, baptismos is a noun, but it's a noun based upon a verbal concept or a verbal idea, and so you have washing, cleansing, and this is where you start getting this used in the sense of a religious concept of washings that would result in being cleansed and putting you at right relationship to a deity that could happen in some of the

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Greek religions, it certainly is used in some aspects within Jewish law, the baptisma form is also used in that way by Christian writers of a ceremonious use of water for the purpose of renewing or establishing a relationship with God based on its more basic meaning, plunging, dipping, washing a water right, and so the basic meaning doesn't disappear, what it means to immerse or to plunge, but you can have metaphorical uses, so for example, we would talk about someone drowning in debt, right?

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Now what do we mean by that? Well, we're not talking literally, we're speaking metaphorically, we're speaking about someone who has so many debts that they cannot get out of the load of debt, they have been buried under their debts, but if we didn't, if the word drowning didn't have a more basic meaning, then the metaphorical use wouldn't make any sense, it wouldn't communicate anything to us, and so in the same way, this term baptisma and baptismos and baptismatos could be used in that metaphorical sense of something going over your head, troubles or woes and difficulties and you've been immersed in these things, and again, it's still used in its literal sense of ships sinking and things like that, we could say that the

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Titanic had its own baptism in that sense, that would be described in a proper way.

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And finally, we get to the verbal form that we have in the New Testament, baptizo, which is baptize, baptizing them, the name of the

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Father, Son, Holy Spirit, that's what we have in Matthew chapter 28, and so once again, the basic meaning, plunge, dip, wash, and wash, there weren't any spray guns, didn't have hoses back then or anything like that, washing involved the immersion of something in a liquid medium, and so that kind of washing is there, and then you get the metaphorical idea that comes with that, that we see with the swords and things like that, these are all there, but the fundamental foundational meaning always remains the same, it is an immersion into something, and so when we are baptized into the name of someone, for example, how can you be baptized in a name?

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Clearly, you cannot just go, well, we're only talking here about literal immersion in water, every use of the term will be literal immersion in water, no, that's not true, being baptized in the sea, when you talk about the deliverance of the people of Israel, for example, being baptized into Moses, these are metaphorical uses that are dependent upon your first understanding the basic meaning of the term to immerse, and that's what baptism is, it is an immersion, we cannot just stop there and say, every word's gonna be that way, in fact,

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I remember very clearly when I was very young, I remember hearing someone, and you may hear this as well, teaching that when you study the

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Bible, what you do is you find the first use of any word, first use of any word, and whatever its meaning is there, will be the meaning to the rest of the

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Bible, I remember being very clearly, I was in a class, for some reason, I remember what the classroom looked like, and I thought, well, that's interesting, that would be really neat and easy if that's really how it works, but I can assure you, that is not how it works, and no one translates that way, no one interprets that way, it would create, it would just create absolute chaos, but there are those who present the idea that there are these simplistic mechanisms, because the

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Bible's different than anything else, no, the reality is that the Bible's communicated in human language, and different writers wrote in different ways, they had different styles, and so we have to look at any term that is used, and is it appropriate to talk about a biblical meaning of baptism, of course, but there's also an appropriate way of speaking of Paul's use of that term, there's a

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Old Testament use, a New Testament use, for example, in,

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I believe it was, let me see if I can find it here, da -da -da -da -da -da -da, where did

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I, there we go, Leviticus chapter four, I believe it is, yes,

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Leviticus 4 .17, in Leviticus 4 .17, in the Old Testament scriptures, you have a specific differentiation between bapto, to dip or immerse, and sprinkle, chronai, in the

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Greek, so the priest was to dip his finger in the blood, that means immerse it, and then he was to sprinkle upon one of the sacrifices, two different terms that are being used there, because it's two different things, he wasn't immersing his finger in the sacrifice, he had immersed his finger in the blood, and now that blood is on it, he then can sprinkle some of that blood off, so the text itself actually differentiates between this kind of an idea in the mind of the author, and this is important for us to be able to understand, we need to recognize that words have basic meanings, and then authors can choose where in that, what's the term, kids?

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Semantic domain, they want to place their usage, and you normally do that through context, the context of the sentence, the context of the paragraph, however it is you're expressing what you want to express, and so logos, for example, oh my goodness, wide, wide variety of meanings, and so when we have

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John saying, in the beginning was the logos, then we need to look at John 1 1 very carefully, we need to look at the time frame, and that's how we determine what his meaning is for that particular term, there are no simple ways around this, some translations that are a little bit more paraphrases than literal translations will do some of this work for you, but you have to trust the translators at that point,

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I think the best place for that type of interpretation to be done is right here, in the church, in the preaching and teaching of the word of God, but you have to do it in your own study as well, every one of us is called to understand these basic things, so what's the meaning of baptism, it means to immerse, it means to plunge, it means to dip, and hence by use and metaphor can become to die, to temper steel, a ship sinking, we understand the basic definitional core, then gives rise to less literal and metaphorical uses, within the church then the question's going to become, when we talk about the actual act of baptism, should we stick close to the original meaning of the word, or should we feel a great freedom to expand that out into many different types of actions, that becomes one of the questions that we will deal with, now you might say, oh, so wow, we're ready to go, this is gonna be the fastest service ever, well here's the issue, eventually in this series, we will look at church history, we will look at what various people believed at times in church history about the subject of baptism, and that is a complex and difficult subject, but when it comes to this issue, the issue of what baptism means, and how it is to be done, there is an amazing amount of unanimity, that you will find down through the history of the church, and you might go, but if you for example, are a former

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Roman Catholic, you might say, well, they didn't get the message, because what you all do back there isn't what they do, and the very fact that there's wood over that right now, shows that we're in a

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Presbyterian church, and they don't do it the same way as we do it, and so how could there have been unanimity of understanding, well, the fact is there was, but there were developments over time, that led to differing ways, in which baptism would be practiced.

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Now, let me read you from one of the earliest, extra

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New Testament writings, Christian writings that we possess, it's called the

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Didache, the teaching of the 12 apostles, the Didache. When was it written?

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Well, we don't know, there's no date on it, it could have been written as early as the first century, it could have been written as late as about the 140s, so there's about a 50, 60, 70 year date range in there, where it could have been written, but what it does do, and it's not scripture, but what it does do, is it gives us an insight, into a particular early period of time, and here is the entire description of baptism, okay?

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So, maybe, even contemporaneous with the apostles, or shortly thereafter, here's a picture of one source, one writing, on the subject of baptism.

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Here's what it says, this is chapter 70, if you wanna look it up, all this is available online, you can grab it yourself.

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And concerning baptism, baptized this way, having first said all these things, which is the moral instruction that came before this, baptized in the name of the

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Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, in living water, if you have not living water, baptized in other water, and if you cannot in cold, in warm, but if you have not either, pour out water thrice upon the head, into the name of the

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Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, but before the baptism, let the baptizer fast, and the baptized, and whatever others can, but you shall order the baptized to fast one or two days before.

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There it is, that's it, that's all of it. Now, what is living water?

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Well, that's a popular name for churches. But that's not what they're talking about. The living water, of course, would be running water.

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A stream, a river, and that's always been a very popular place for baptisms to take place, and a lot of people are baptized in that way, and when

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I was in Israel a couple years ago, we stopped at the Jordan, and I saw all sorts of Eastern Orthodox folks getting baptized in the

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Jordan River, though I would not call that living water, I would call that green water. It wasn't flowing, and I wouldn't have touched that with a 10 -foot pole, but God bless them,

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I hope they survive whatever diseases they picked up in that thing. But you get why they would have done it at that particular location.

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So living water is flowing water, but if you have not living water, baptize in other water.

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So they would say that this would not be living water, it's not a lake or a stream or something like that, and I'm not sure a lake would,

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I'm not sure if they would say a lake would be living water, and I think it probably would be, because it's moving. But okay, if you don't have that, then baptize in other water, a small pond or something like that.

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And then, did you notice, if you cannot in cold, in warm. Now there's one of the places where we've left the early church behind.

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We have a heater, doesn't always work, and certainly in July, right, cold water, where are you gonna get that at?

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Down at Circle K, all right, fine. But from their perspective, cold water was best, not in warm water.

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But if you have not either, and so I can certainly envision some places in the

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Middle East where you would have not either, you would not have access in that way.

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There was an option for a different form of baptism.

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Pour out water thrice upon the head in the name of the Father, and the Son, and of the

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Holy Spirit. Now what we're gonna see, we're not doing the church history stuff now, even though I'm reading you a bunch of church history stuff.

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What we're gonna see is that eventually, once infant baptism arises, and I do not think there is any meaningful historical evidence that that was an apostolic practice,

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I just don't see it, our paedo -baptist friends can say otherwise, but we'll get to that when we get to that, but once you started having infant baptism as a regular aspect, then immersion becomes somewhat of a problem.

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But not always. In Orthodox churches today, there are many priests who will immerse the baby.

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The baby does not enjoy this in any way, shape, or form, hence the parents don't necessarily enjoy this because they have to get the baby back after it's been dunked in cold water, sometimes three times, and is therefore not happy for the rest of the day.

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But these changing situations then expanded the options that needed to be made available, especially when it came to the sick, and that had a lot to do with the development, as we'll see, with the idea that baptism is the means of grace of salvation itself, and so the sick want to be baptized, they don't want to die being unbaptized, but if they can't get into the water, then you have to come up with other ways of doing it.

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That's not addressed here in the Didache, but it's there. Let me read you another quote.

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I gotta get through these as the clock is ticking. Tertullian, who is writing the end of the second century, beginning of the third century, depending on what part of his life you're looking at.

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Tertullian writes this in writing against Praxeas. After his resurrection, he promises in a pledge to his disciples that he will send them the promise of his father, and lastly, he commands them to baptize into the

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Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, not into a unipersonal

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God, and indeed, it is not once only, but three times that we are immersed into the three persons at each several mention of their names.

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Now, let me mention that a friend of mine, Chris Wisenant, has put together a bunch of these quotations.

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If you wanna know where to get them, go ahead and contact me. I'll send you the links, and I stole most of these directly from him, because they're nice and quick and easy that way, but I didn't bring it with me.

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There's a huge work by Ferguson. It's 954 pages long on baptism in the early church if you really, really wanna get into it.

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I can give you the Amazon link to that. Like I said, it's not only really deep, 954 pages, but it stops most bullets, too, so it has other uses.

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Just seeing if you're all still awake. I'm not sure all of you still are at this point, but notice what Tertullian says.

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Not only do you have baptism named in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Why do I keep emphasizing that? Because some Unitarians will say that they don't think that was originally a part of the

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Gospel of Matthew. There is no evidence of that. There is no manuscripts that we have that don't have it, et cetera, et cetera.

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It is always there, but notice in this instance, Tertullian is arguing against Unitarianism, a unipersonal

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God, but what does he say? We are immersed into the three persons not once, but three times.

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It was very common in the early church to be baptized trine three times.

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Baptized you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

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Okay, three times, and as I said in the first sermon, sometimes it was in the name of the Father, face forward, and of the

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Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Okay, so you had trine, triple baptism, sometimes even facing only a particular direction.

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Guess what? Toward the east. There were some people who developed that idea, but the point is that for Tertullian, what is this baptism?

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He's talking, he's actually arguing about, he's arguing against Unitarians, but he can use the common

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Christian baptism that everyone had experienced by immersion as his example.

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That is very, very important. Cyprian, who was a martyr to the faith in 254, when the great

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Roman persecution began, 250 to 313, writing to Magnus wrote these words.

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You have asked also, dearest son, what I thought of those who obtained God's grace in sickness and weakness, where they are to be accounted legitimate

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Christians, for that they are not to be washed, but sprinkled with the saving water.

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In this point, my diffidence and modesty prejudges none so as to prevent any from feeling what he thinks right, and from doing what he feels to be right.

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As far as my poor understanding conceives it, I think that the divine benefits can in no respect be mutilated and weakened, nor can anything less occur in that case where with full and entire faith, both the giver and receiver is accepted what is drawn from the divine gifts.

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In the sacraments of salvation, when necessity compels and God bestows his mercy, the divine methods confer the whole benefit on believers, nor ought it to trouble anyone that sick people seem to be sprinkled or effused when they obtain the

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Lord's grace. Once it appears that the sprinkling also of water prevails equally with the washing of salvation, and that when this is done in the church where the faith both the receiver and giver is sound, all things hold and may be consummated and perfected by the majesty of the

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Lord and by the truth of faith. Now what is behind all of this? We can have an interesting discussion about Cyprian's theology of sacraments and things like that, but what's behind all of this?

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What is the normative mechanism of baptism in Cyprian's day?

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Immersion of confessing believers. Because he wouldn't be having this discussion with Magnus about those that are too sick to be immersed if the normative way that everyone was being baptized was being baptized as a child by sprinkling in the first place.

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There wouldn't be any reason to have this discussion. This is in the middle of the third century. This is in the middle of the third century.

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So there you go. But I do want to just mention in case you're going, that Cyprian guy didn't sound very sound.

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First of all, he was only a Christian for a short number of years. He died as a martyr, remember that. And thirdly, remember he kept talking about if the faith is sound, if the faith is sound.

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He was emphasizing the necessity of there being a truth -saving faith there all the way through.

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How about Jerome? Now Jerome's much later on. Jerome's the one who translated the Latin Vulgate. So now we're talking about the beginning of the fifth century, end of the fourth century, beginning of the fifth century.

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And monasticism has developed and there's been a lot of human tradition that has entered into the church at this point.

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But listen to what Jerome says. The savior himself does not preach the kingdom of heaven until by his baptismal immersion, he has cleansed the

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Jordan. Water is the matter of his first miracle and is from a well that the Samaritan woman has bidden to slake her thirst.

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To Nicodemus, he secretly says, unless a man be born of water and the spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. As his earthly course began with water, so it ended with it.

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His side is pierced by the spear and blood and water flow forth, twin emblems of baptism and of martyrdom.

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After his resurrection also, when sending his apostles to the Gentiles, he commands them to baptize these in the mystery of the

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Trinity. Notice again, even though you have much more evidence of the establishment, the beginning, the establishment of infant baptism in a wider point at this point, and what has happened?

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The Roman Empire has now become quote unquote Christian. Right around this period of time is when the

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Roman Empire says this is a Christian empire. And so infant baptism becomes more and more popular, but you still have immersion.

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In fact, as we'll see when we do church history, you can go back in archeology and when you look at the churches that were around in the fourth century, guess what they all had?

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Not a little teeny tiny little thing. They had a big old baptistry that people could get down in, you could baptize adults in.

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This is what we find even archeologically speaking. Here you see it found from a Jerome as well.

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Cyril of Jerusalem, I'm reading as fast as I can. Cyril of Jerusalem, when going down therefore into the water, think not of the bare element, but look for salvation by the power of the

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Holy Ghost. For without both, you cannot possibly be made perfect. For you go down in the water bearing your sins, but the invocation of grace, having sealed your soul, suffers you not afterwards to be swallowed up by the terrible dragon.

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Having gone down dead in sins, you come up quickened in righteousness. For if you have been united with the likeness of the

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Savior's death, you shall also be deemed worthy of his resurrection. For as Jesus took upon him the sins of the world and died, that by putting sin to death, he might rise again in righteousness.

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So thou by going down into the water and being in a manner buried in the waters as he was in the rock, art raised again walking in newness of life.

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Here you have Cyril of Jerusalem, and what does he see in baptism? He sees the likeness of the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ.

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And what does that require you to do? To go down into the water and to come out of the water. Okay, so this is still early church, but well into the period of the development of monasticism and things like that, yet they see very clearly that this is still an issue regarding immersion.

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Now I had some others, don't have time to read them. Look up Christ was in sight and you'll get this.

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I had a bunch of stuff. I want to come up to the more modern period, okay? Here, listen to this quotation.

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In Greek, baptism is baptismos, and in Latin, it is mercio. It means to submerge something so deeply that it is covered by the water.

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It is no longer a common practice to immerse infants, but to scoop water from the font and pour it over them. We should restore the practice of immersion, however, because it agrees the meaning of the word, taufe.

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That should give you an idea right there. That's a German word. Taufe, the infant or whoever is to be baptized should be submerged in the water and drawn out again.

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In the German language, the word taufe comes undoubtedly from the word teif. Therefore, those who are baptized should be dunked.

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Immersion is also suggested by the significance of baptism as we shall hear, signifies that the old person and our sinful birth from flesh and blood are to be altogether drowned by the grace of God.

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We should therefore do justice to its meaning and make the act of baptism an accurate and perfect symbol.

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If it's German, who was that? Martin Luther. You said, wait a minute.

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I was raised as a Lutheran, and that's not how we did it. That's right, because, and I've got some lectures on this online if you want to listen to them.

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This is Martin Luther in 1519. The early Martin Luther, the

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Martin Luther between the beginning of the Reformation and 1525. There is a major change in Luther's life in 1525.

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And the later Luther is different from the earlier Luther. And I don't have time to develop that right now.

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As I said, I did an entire discussion of the two Luthers back in November, December, a couple years ago, 2017.

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And you can find that online. But the early Luther even said that we will never have a pure church unless we baptize only those who make profession of faith.

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He played with the idea. 1525 changed it all. 1525 was a peasant's revolt.

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He realized they needed the support of the princes, and so he went back to the old way. But he recognized what the actual meaning of the

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Greek and the Latin were. Here's another quote from him. This is also in 1520.

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Hence it is indeed correct to say that baptism washes sins away, but that expression is too weak and mild to bring out the full significance of baptism, which is rather a symbol of death and resurrection.

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This reason I would have the candidates for baptism completely immersed in the water, as the word says and as the sacrament signifies.

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Not that I deem this necessary, but it would be well to give it so perfect and complete a thing, a perfect and complete sign.

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Thus it was also doubtless instituted by Christ. The sinner does not so much need to be washed as he needs to die in order to be wholly renewed and made another creature, and to be conformed to the death and resurrection of Christ with whom through baptism he dies and rises again.

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Although you may properly say that Christ was washed clean of mortality when he died and rose again, yet that is a weaker way of putting it than if you said he was completely changed and renewed.

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In the same way, it is far more forceful to say that baptism signifies that we die completely and rising to eternal life than to say that it signifies merely our being washed clean from sins.

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And so the early Luther clearly saw what the meaning of baptism was.

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But how about someone as great, as great as Francis Turretin?

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If you don't know who Francis Turretin is, Francis Turretin is a second, is really into the period of the dogmatic development of reformed theology, okay?

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Very staunch defender of infant baptism, but he says the following words.

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For as in baptism, when performed in the primitive manner, by immersion and emersion, descending into the water and again going out of it, which descent and ascent we have example in the eunuch in Acts 8 .38.

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Yea, and what is more, as by this right, when persons are immersed in water, they are overwhelmed and as it were buried in a manner buried together with Christ.

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And again, when they emerge, seem to be raised out of the grave and are said to rise again with Christ. I could not help but fully agree with the brother's interpretation and understanding of the significance of what immersion is.

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But you have a quotation in your bulletin, which I'm sure you're going to keep with you from now on.

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Even Jeff liked this one, because as brother Jeff has stood right here and has said to you many times, he hasn't read

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Calvin. Now Jeff thinks that that is an advantage that he has, that he can be a better Calvinist by not having read

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Calvin, because I just got it from the Bible, brother. And I keep telling brother

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Jeff, Jeff, read Calvin, it's great, it's fantastic.

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It's like the ink smudges, the first three books of the Institute, absolutely fantastic.

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Fourth, yeah, you know, okay, I've got some issues there, but it's still well worth reading. And in the fourth book of the

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Institutes, we have these words, where the person baptized is to be wholly immersed and that whether once or thrice, or whether he is only to be sprinkled with water is not the least of the least consequence.

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Churches should be at liberty to adopt either according to the diversity of climates. Although it is evident that the term baptized means to immerse, and that this was the form used by the primitive church.

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John Calvin institutes the Christian religion, and that's from the 1559 Latin edition.

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He died in 1564. And so that's after all of the controversies and everything else, he did not change what he had written in the

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Institutes. He understood that not only was it the form used by the primitive church, but baptized means to immerse.

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How did he know that? Because he was a tremendous scholar. And in fact, if you're familiar with Calvin's work before his conversion, that was his whole area of expertise was the early church and the writings of the early church.

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Those are the things that he was immersed in to use the term. So all the way up through this period of time, there really honestly, my friends, is no question about what the word means.

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And I think most Pado Baptist scholars would agree with almost everything that I've said this evening.

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What they would say is, while that was the original meaning, and that was the primitive use of the church, there are sufficient compelling reasons to change the mode of baptism.

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What would those sufficient compelling reasons be? Well, we saw in case of the sick, but most importantly, because of the rise and the advent of infant baptism as the primary act of baptism, that is really where the mode changes in history.

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And when we look at why that took place, keep one thing in mind, I'm not gonna develop this today.

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I'm sorry to my Pado Baptist friends, you can listen to the second debate I did, the one with Dr. Strawbridge, if you want to hear this expanded out some more.

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But no one prior to John Calvin had the same understanding of covenantal, baptismal meaning and efficacy that John Calvin had.

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It was a theological novum, it was a new development. The reasons why people adopted infant baptism in the ancient church were not all the same reasons.

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There were a number of different reasons, as we will see. The thing is, me and almost all of my

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Pado Baptist brethren would agree, the reasons that they held were all wrong. And so the question then becomes, why did

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Calvin continue it? Having rejected the theology that gave rise to it, why come up with a new theology that no one else has ever had?

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That's the question. That's the question. We're not ready to answer that question yet in this sermon series, because from here, we need to start looking at the specific incidences of baptism in the

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New Testament. We need to look at John's baptism, we need to look at the practice of baptism in the

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Book of Acts, and then we need to look at the references to baptism, primarily in Paul, but also in Peter, in the universal experience of the church, to have a proper understanding of what the

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New Testament doctrine is, before we then look at the developments over time in church history, how we got to where we are.

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And all of this, I hope, will allow us, as a church with a confession of faith, that believes in baptism of believers, we are

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Credo Baptists. And yet I think I can speak for the eldership, we love our

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Presbyterian brothers, we work with our Presbyterian brothers. I am so thankful that when

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I debated Pastor Bill Shishko of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, years ago on Long Island, the

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Wednesday night before we debated, he had me preach from his pulpit on the doctrine of justification by faith alone.

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So what happens? You have people who jump over to one side, that says, well, that means it doesn't matter, let's not even talk about it.

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I don't think that's true. And on the other side, you have the people that say, you people are compromisers, that's papalism, you should be evangelizing those folks, okay?

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You've got two extremes. And we're sitting here trying to be in the middle, loving on people that are preaching the gospel, without losing our commitment to what we believe the scripture teaches on this subject.

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It's a balancing act. And that's why we're doing this series. That's why it's important.

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And that's why I hope you're listening closely, taking some notes, because like I said,

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I'm not sure I'm gonna live long enough to actually finish this sermon series. So whoever inherits it from me, they'll need to press on from there, all right?

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Okay, pretty close, pretty close on time, pretty close on time. All right, let's close the word of prayer, then we are going to have the

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Lord's Supper together. Father, we thank you so much for this time when we have been able to, without distraction, without interruption, to look at your word and consider what your word teaches, to consider certain truths about how we can handle your word of rights, so that we are truly listening to you speak, not to our past traditions.

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Even though you have taught us to respect those who came before us, we do do so.

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We recognize you've been building your church, but we always test everything by the word of God.

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And so help us to remember, help us to be consistent with what we've said now, when we look at all the passages on baptism, help us to be consistent in handling your word of right, all to your honor and glory in the edification of your people.