TPW 39 Infant and Household Baptism Defended

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Every promise that God made of forgiveness, of salvation, of the land of Canaan, of the new heavens and the new earth is conditioned on faith and repentance, but the visible administration of the covenant of grace in its signs has always included children.
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Remarkably, Malone doesn't even address the key issue at this point in his book, namely that this sign and seal of righteousness by faith was administered to infants incapable of professing faith because of God's wisdom in commanding it to be done.
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Under the promise of witness, this is
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Pastor Patrick Hines here at the Greater Well, Tennessee. And I wanted to go ahead and post the second sermon that I did a while back on infant baptism and a proper view of baptism in general.
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And in this particular sermon, I'm responding to some of the critics of infant baptism.
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Obviously, you can't get to everybody in one sermon, but I hope that the main arguments that are addressed on some of the key texts and passages of scripture will be helpful to you as you sift through this issue and hopefully come out on the right side, which of course
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I believe to be the Reformed Presbyterian and Continental Reformed position. And so I hope that you find this defense of infant baptism against its critics to be edifying.
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Now, please take your Bible and turn to 1 Corinthians chapter 7. 1
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Corinthians chapter 7, verses 12 through 16 is the passage I'm going to read for you all, but this evening's sermon is going to just touch on this passage along with a number of other ones.
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1 Corinthians 7, verses 12 through 16. This is
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God's word. But to the rest, I, not the Lord, say, if any brother has a wife who does not believe and she is willing to live with him, let him not divorce her.
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And a woman who has a husband who does not believe, if he is willing to live with her, let her not divorce him.
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For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband.
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Otherwise, your children would be unclean, but now they are holy. But if the unbeliever departs, let him depart.
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A brother or a sister is not under bondage in such cases, but God has called us to peace. For how do you know,
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O wife, whether you will save your husband? Or how do you know, O husband, whether you will save your wife? May God bless the reading of his infallible word.
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Let's pray, please. Heavenly Father, we again thank you for bringing us here together into your house, into this church, and we're blessed to have one another as brothers and sisters in Christ.
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We do pray you would help us to understand the signs and seals of the one covenant of grace that you have given to your people, that we would rightly apply those, that they would be administered correctly and accurately here in our church, and that you would help us to grow in the grace and knowledge of our
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Lord Jesus Christ and of what he has revealed to us in his holy word this evening. We ask in Jesus' name, amen.
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This morning I tried to focus on a positive presentation of why God's people have, from the beginning of the
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New Testament period, included their children in the visible administration of God's one covenant of grace.
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This evening I would like to try to answer a few objections and interpretations of scripture that are offered by a variety of Baptistic positions.
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I say a variety of Baptistic positions because I have heard a wide array of interpretations of numerous passages of scripture from various Baptistic writers, dispensationalist
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Baptists and some Reformed Baptists, and some that would probably identify as neither dispensationalist or Reformed.
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Some of the names of the men that I have read and listened to and tried to understand are
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Greg Welty, Fred Malone, Brian Borgman, Paul Jewett, John MacArthur, James White, and John Piper.
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Obviously, I have not listened to or read everything that each of these men have said or written on this topic, but I have tried to listen carefully and read carefully their specific comments about the key scripture passages that I raised this morning.
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That's what this evening is going to focus on, is how do they understand the many passages that I've cited to you this morning, and how would we respond to them?
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Before I begin that, however, I want to make a very important point. I've said to people for a long time that I believe
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Reformed Baptists and Reformed Pato -Baptist Presbyterians have more in common than perhaps any two denominations
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I know of. We have the same God, the same gospel, the same understanding of God's sovereignty,
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God's decrees, the doctrines of grace, the doctrines of justification, the doctrine of sanctification, the personal work of Christ, biblical inerrancy, inspiration, and infallibility, the five
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Reformation solos, and many other things. Neither of our camps believe that children or adults are justified by baptism, and when both of our denominations are faithful to their heritage as expressed in our great confessions of faith, the
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Westminster Standards and the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith, the church of the Lord Jesus Christ will always be focused on the pure biblical worship of the triune
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God and upon the reading and exposition of the word of God as the central aspect of God's worship in his church.
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And that's why, as I said, when the two traditions are focused on and the guys that are ordained in those traditions actually believe their confessions, which sadly isn't always the case, but if we actually hold to our confessions and believe what they say, the two traditions are very similar to one another in terms of their commitment to biblical worship and biblical exposition.
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There is much that those two traditions have in common, and in this we always ought to rejoice. We are united in the
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Lord by the biblical gospel. Any discussion of our differences regarding church government or baptism, which devolves into party spirit or rancor, is completely inappropriate and unbecoming those who wish to adorn their profession of faith in the
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Lord Jesus by a godly life. Baptists are my dear friends and Christian family, and I am quite certain that we are going to live together in heaven for all eternity and be able to laugh about the mistakes that they made, and maybe even some that we made.
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So let's look at a few of these passages. Look at, turn in your Bible to Acts 2 .38 and 39. I want to go through this one again.
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Acts 2 .38 and 39. I'll go ahead and read that.
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It's a very familiar passage. I'm sure many of you know this one fairly well. After Peter preaches his
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Pentecost sermon, verse 38, then Peter said to them, repent and let every one of you be baptized in the name of the
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Lord Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and you shall receive the gift of the
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Holy Spirit for the promise is to you and to your children and to all who are afar off, as many as the
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Lord our God will call. In his very large book, The Baptism of Disciples Alone, the
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Reformed Baptist theologian Fred Malone on page 140 makes these comments about this passage, and I quote, the mention of children here is better explained by considering that the apostle wanted to ensure that there was not misunderstanding, that they were not to receive baptism unless they also repented and believed, as did their parents, as verse 38 clearly requires.
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Only those who received Peter's word were baptized, Acts 2 .41. This is why children were mentioned in the invitation to repent, to prevent misunderstanding by Jewish parents who might assume from the
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Abrahamic covenant that it was permitted to baptize their infants without their personal repentance, end quote.
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Malone is arguing here that the, you got to hear this, the only reason that Peter utters the phrase and to your children in verse 39, the only reason
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Peter did that was to make sure everyone listening would understand that they're being excluded from the covenant sign.
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It is difficult to know exactly how to respond to an argument like that. Listen to the text again, verse 39, for the promises to you and to your children and to all who are afar off, as many as the
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Lord our God will call. Do you get the impression that Peter's purpose in saying and to your children is to clear up a misunderstanding that might have arisen among Jewish hearers that their children would be permitted to be baptized?
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Remember how we saw this morning repeatedly and emphatically throughout scripture, the entire
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New Testament, that the Abrahamic promise is itself the very foundation of our justification and our salvation.
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The Abrahamic promise is called the gospel by Paul in Galatians 3, verse 8.
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The Abrahamic covenant is the very foundation upon which the new covenant stands. Paul cites
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Abraham and the promises made to him as being the very heart of his magisterial defense of the gospel of justification by faith alone throughout all of his letters, especially
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Romans and Galatians. The Abrahamic promise has not changed. Indeed, it cannot change.
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We saw this morning, Hebrews 6, 13 through 18 says that that covenant is immutable.
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As Paul said in Galatians 3, the giving of the law did not add or annul anything whatsoever about the promises made to Abraham.
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Remember the passage in Genesis 17, 7, and I will establish my covenant between me and you and your descendants after you and their generations for an everlasting covenant to be
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God to you and your descendants after you. Since all of Christ's apostles understood what
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Paul articulates so clearly in his letters that the Abrahamic covenant is still in effect and is the foundation of our justification.
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Brothers and sisters, does it not make much more sense to recognize that when Peter adds the phrase and to your children, that he is taking this language directly from the everlasting and unchangeable
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Abrahamic covenant. You and your descendants, it says in Genesis 17, 7, you and your children,
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Acts 2, 39. And Peter then adds the third category and to as many as are far off, as many as the
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Lord our God shall call, referring likely there to the Gentiles and all around the world that would one day come in to the faith.
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If our Baptist brethren are correct, I would expect Peter to have said for the promises to you and to as many as are far off, as many as the
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Lord our God shall call. And yet that second clause is there and to your children, the covenantal concept again of the solidarity of the family unit has not changed.
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We see line after line of clear evidence in the New Testament that it remains in effect.
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And so I think Fred Malone is just playing wrong when he argues that the reason Peter said and to your children was to make sure everyone knew they're excluded.
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Another reformed Baptist minister named Brian Boardman argued in a sermon I listened to critiquing our position, argued that we ought to read this passage just follows, that it ought to be understood this way.
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And this is exactly how he quoted it in a sermon. He said, verse 39 is really saying this quote for the promise is to as many of you as the
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Lord our God shall call and to as many of your children as the Lord our God shall call and to as many as are far off, as many as the
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Lord our God shall call. Now I want to comment in response to that. It is not sound exegesis to take a modifier to a third item in a list and then back read it to be modifying the second and the first items in that same list.
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For example, did you hear what Brian Boardman does? He takes to as many as are far off, as many as the
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Lord our God shall call that as many as the Lord our God shall call is saying needs to be taken backwards to the second and then the first clause of the sentence.
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That's brothers and sisters. That's not how you do exegesis. For example, if I said to you, I need you to go to the plant nursery and get me a sapling oak tree, a rose bush, and some flowers that are blue.
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And then you came back to me with a sapling oak tree that you painted blue, a rose bush that you painted blue and some flowers that are blue.
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I would then say, why did you paint the oak tree in the rose bushes blue? And your answer would be because when a modifier is put on the last item in the list, we know clearly we're supposed to take it and apply it to everything else in your list.
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Now you can all understand that's not how human language works. That is not how we would understand such a statement.
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And yet, why does this guy do that? Why does Brian Borgman think that that's how we're supposed to understand
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Acts 239? The answer is very simple. He doesn't like the idea that children are included in the visible administration of the new covenant.
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He doesn't like that idea. And he wants to restrict it to the elect, to those that you can discern in some way are the elect.
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And he's willing to go to that level of an extreme to get around what the passage says. Matthew Henry made some wonderful comments on that text.
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He said, and I quote, when God took Abraham into the covenant, he said, I will be a God to thee and to thy seed.
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And accordingly, every Israelite had his son circumcised at eight days old. Now it is proper for an
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Israelite when he is by baptism to come into the new dispensation of this covenant to ask, what must be done with my children?
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Must they be thrown out or taken in with me? Peter says, taken in by all means for the promise, that great promise of God's being
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God to you is as much to you and your children now as it ever was, though the promise is still extended to your children as it has been yet.
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It is not as it has been confined to you and them, but the benefit of it is designed for all that are a far off.
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And we may add and their children as well. The promises to you and your children, you and your children, that is the consistent teaching all the way through both testaments.
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And here again, it must be emphasized. If you do not recognize the clear biblical distinction between the actual elect members of the
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Abrahamic covenant and the new covenants and the visible administration of them in actual time and space, you will still make the mistake of thinking that what we mean by saying we take our children with us to Christ, that we mean they're automatically saved.
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We're not saying that. Nothing could be further from the truth. Every promise that God made a forgiveness of salvation of the land of Canaan, of the new heavens and the new earth is conditioned on faith and repentance.
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But the visible administration of the covenant of grace in its signs has always included children.
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Peter's statement in Acts two 38 and 39 makes that very clear. Now I'd like you to turn to the passage
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I read to you. First Corinthians seven, 12 through 16, focusing especially on verse 14, first Corinthians chapter seven, 12 through 16, focusing again, especially on verse 14,
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I'd like to read just verse 14 since I just read that to you. Verse 14 says for the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband.
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Otherwise your children would be unclean, but now they are holy.
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Now Fred Malone, the reformed Baptist and John Gill, who was one of the, one of the few Puritans who was a
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Baptistic argue in their commentaries and in their exposition of this passage, that this passage, what's it, what it's addressing in verse 14 is the legitimacy of children born to mix marriages, marriages between believers and unbelievers.
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Fred Malone wrote, and I quote to summarize, it is my conclusion that first Corinthians seven 14 refers either to the children's legitimacy in a legitimate marriage in the eyes of God or to their set apart position for the sake of their parents, gospel heritage.
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The verse does not support a covenantal position for children. Now folks, I want you to think about that for a minute.
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What Malone is arguing is that every non -Christian marriage that has ever happened since the beginning of creation produces illegitimate children.
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Think about that. That the only legitimate children in the world have at least one believing parent, one parent that's a believer.
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Malone offers us two possibilities here regarding what holy versus unclean means. Whether the child is legitimate in the eyes of God, and as I said, that would have to mean that Malone believes and teaches that a non -believers that are married, that he knows none of their kids are legitimate.
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They're all illegitimate children, which is, I think we would recognize a completely untenable position.
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Marriage is a creation ordinance. It is not something unique to Christians. Or two, that what holy versus unclean means here is having a
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Christian influence in your life. Brian Borgman is another reformed Baptist minister who argues for option two, that when the text says your children are holy, that that means having a
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Christian influence versus unclean, meaning not having a Christian influence.
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Now folks, I want you to think about that for a second too. Why would Paul actually take time to say something like that?
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If a child has one Christian parent, why take the time to say that child's going to have a
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Christian influence? What could be more obvious? Is that really what holy versus unclean means?
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When you analyze this passage, the terms that Paul is using here in Greek, the term unclean
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Akathartos, and then holy Pagias, and you look at how they're used in the old Testament and the
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Greek translation of the old Testament, those two terms, holy versus unclean. If you've been reading the book of Leviticus or numbers anytime recently, you know that those terms are used over 200 times together.
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And they are manifestly covenantal terms. Remember all the passages that you read in Leviticus or those passages that are kind of difficult about discharges, about foods, about sores, about skin discolorations and everything else.
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All these other things that rendered a person unclean until evening, you will be unclean if you touch this.
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You're unclean if the, if the sore is white and has this thing on it, it has a discharge or that this or that you're holy versus unclean, holy versus unclean.
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What are those terms talking about? It's referring to those who are inside the camp, inside part of the congregation, unclean outside the camp.
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That's what Paul's talking about here. Children are clean. If they have at least one bleeding parent, they are part of the church.
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They are part of the assembly, part of the ecclesia, the people of God. And here again, why do
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Fred Malone, Brian Borgman, and John Gill offer interpretations which ignore that simple fact that those terms are
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Old Testament terms, covenantal language used over 200 times in Leviticus and Numbers and hold to interpretations that render every child born on earth to unbelieving marriages illegitimate.
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And the answer is because they don't like the idea that children are included as part of the church under the new covenant.
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And yet on nearly the thing that's striking to me when you read these commentaries and look at what people are saying about this from that perspective, the fact is on almost any other theological topic, we would be right together in terms of the way we would defend it.
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We would go to the same text. We have the same interpretive methodology. In fact, I used to listen to a podcast that Fred Malone did.
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In fact, I didn't even know he was a Baptist back then. It was stuff on Calvinism, on the TULIP. He exposited it and defended it exactly the way
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I would. And then I remember seeing that he had this book out, The Baptism of Disciples Alone, and getting it and reading it.
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And you see these kinds of comments. It's troubling. Now, turn to Romans 4, 11 and 12,
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Romans chapter 4, verses 11 and 12. Romans 4, 11 and 12,
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I read that several times this morning. We'll get into it here in just a second. This passage teaches what circumcision signified, and it's generated a very wide array of interesting interpretations from Baptistic commentators.
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Fred Malone gives on page 119 of his book what I think is the most bold interpretation
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I've ever heard of this passage. He says, and I quote, it is certainly true that circumcision was called a sign of the
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Abrahamic covenant, Genesis 17, 11, but it was never called a seal of that covenant. Rather, in only one place in scripture is it called a seal, and that was of the righteousness of the faith which
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Abraham had while uncircumcised. And of course, that's right here in Romans 4, 11. In other words, circumcision was a seal, not of every member of the
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Abrahamic covenant, but of the salvation experience for personal faith of Abraham alone, end quote.
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Remarkably, Malone doesn't even address the key issue at this point in his book, namely that this sign and seal of righteousness by faith was administered to infants incapable of professing faith because of God's wisdom and commanding it to be done.
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Malone's assertion that circumcision signified something to Abraham alone, which it never signified to any other person for the 2000 years in which it was administered is quite simply false.
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When God institutes a covenant sign and tells us what it signifies, that is what it always signifies to every person to whom it is administered, no matter how old they are.
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And I have to wonder at this point what Malone thinks of God's wisdom in ordering the covenant sign to be given to entire households.
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It almost sounds like Malone would think that it was most unwise on God's part to command such a thing, so much so that he argues that the sign of circumcision was a seal of justification by faith to Abraham and never to anyone else.
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That's not what asked the question. Was Isaac a believer? How about Jacob? How about Joseph? How about David?
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How about Hezekiah? Every one of those men was circumcised as a baby. Every one of them was a believer.
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Did they have a sign and seal of the righteousness that they had by faith? Yes, they did. And when did they receive that?
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When they were babies. But from Malone's perspective, none of them did. Abraham alone.
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Sola Abraham. He's the only one that ever had it. John Piper, who was a
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Baptist, John Piper apparently preached a sermon a while back in which he critiques our doctrine of infant baptism.
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And I never heard the sermon, but there's an article on the internet that Piper wrote. After the sermon, he received a letter from a concerned congregant wondering why he did not address
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Romans 411 in the sermon. He preached a sermon against our position and did not address Romans 411 in that sermon.
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And Piper's understanding of how we understand this passage is remarkably accurate. Listen to Piper's words here from this article.
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Quote, then comes the crucial verse 11, which functions as a kind of definition of circumcision.
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He received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith, which he had while uncircumcised.
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So, Abraham's circumcision is described here as a sign, a seal of the righteousness of faith.
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Now, why is this important? It's important because it gives a spiritual meaning to circumcision that is like the meaning of baptism in the
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New Testament. A sign and seal of the righteousness of faith. Continuing on with Piper here. We say that baptism is an expression of genuine faith and the right standing with God that we have by faith before we get baptized.
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This seems to be what circumcision means too, according to Paul in Romans 411. Circumcision is a sign and seal of a faith that Abraham had before he was circumcised.
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So, you see what this means? If circumcision and baptism signify the same thing, namely genuine faith, then you can't use this meaning of baptism by itself as an argument against baptizing infants because circumcision was given to infants.
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Like, he's got it. He continues. In other words, you can't simply say baptism is an expression and sign of faith.
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Infants can't have faith, therefore don't baptize infants. You can't simply say this because Romans 411 says that circumcision means the same thing, a sign of faith, and it was given to infants.
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This is why Romans 411 is considered by some as the linchpin of the defense of infant baptism.
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It defines circumcision in a way that gives it the same basic meaning as baptism. And yet we know from Genesis 17 that circumcision was appointed by God for the infants of all
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Jewish people, end quote. Now, when I read that, I thought, wow, he's got it.
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His response, however, is most disappointing. Listen carefully to this, quote. The main problem with this argument is a wrong assumption about the similarity between the people of God in the
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Old Testament and the people of God today. There are differences between the new covenant people called the church and the old covenant people called
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Israel. And these differences explain why it was fitting to give the old covenant sign of circumcision to the infants of Israel and why it is not fitting to give the new covenant sign of baptism to the infants of the church.
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In other words, even though there's an overlap in meaning between baptism and circumcision, circumcision and baptism don't have the same role to play in the covenant people of God.
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Because the way God constituted his people in the Old Testament and the way he is constituting the church today are fundamentally different.
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The covenant people in the Old Testament were a mixture of believers and unbelievers. They weren't, listen carefully, they were all physical
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Israelites who were circumcised. But within that national ethnic group, there was a remnant of the true
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Israel, the true children of God, end quote. Now, Reform Baptists tend to get a little irritated with us when we drop the
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D word, dispensationalist. But how can we use any other word?
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When Dr. Piper says, quote, there are differences between the new covenant people called the church and the old covenant people called
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Israel. The old covenant people called Israel are called the church 75 times in the
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Old Testament, 75 times. The Hebrew word, kahal, translated by the Greek word, ekklesia.
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The martyr Stephen, as I mentioned this morning, he calls what Piper calls the old covenant people called
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Israel. Stephen the martyr says, the church in the wilderness, he describes them.
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So no, it is not Israel and the church, it is the church and the church. This is basic, not only to reformation and biblical theology, but to classical
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Christianity from the beginning. The oldest Christian creed in existence confesses we believe in how many churches?
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One, holy, universal, and apostolic church. And the most basic assertion of biblical covenant theology is summarized in the
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Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter 7 .6. There are not, therefore, two covenants of grace.
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There are not two covenants of grace differing in substance, but one and the same under various dispensations.
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That is the heart of what it means to be a reformed Christian, to believe in covenant theology.
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Dr. Piper is also completely wrong. He is in error when he says, quote, they were all physical
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Israelites who were circumcised. You hear that? I wanna point out something to you.
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From the very beginning, they were not. They were not all physical Israelites. Every foreign male in Abraham's household, in Isaac's household, in Jacob's household, in Joseph's household were circumcised from the beginning.
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Abraham's servant, Eliezer of Damascus, was not a Jew. And yet he was circumcised the day that circumcision was commanded by God.
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He was not a physical descendant of Abraham. So when John Piper says, there are,
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I'm sorry, they were all physical Israelites who were circumcised. That's just not biblically accurate. That is wrong.
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He's wrong in that. Dr. Piper has also not addressed the fact that church discipline was practiced in the church before the coming of Christ.
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If people were not faithful to the Lord, if they committed idolatry, if they committed grievous sins, over and over and over again, it says, throughout the
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Pentateuch, they are to be cut off from the people. You were not guaranteed to be part of the
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Old Testament church by birth. You had to be faithful to the Lord, and that's why those provisions are there.
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So it wasn't just this big mixture. There was church discipline, and there were foreigners involved from the beginning.
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And my friends, I wanna say, jumping a little bit ahead of myself here, that's really the only direction they can go.
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They've got to try to say circumcision's not about salvation. It's some kind of an ethnic mark. It's some kind of a
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Jewish thing. The problem is, as I said, from the day circumcision started, non -Jews got it.
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From the day it was started, there were non -Jews that had it. Now, there's a subordinate document to the 1689
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London Baptist Confession. It has a long section in which they address Romans 411.
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So the theologians, just like the Westminster Standards, have some subordinate documents. The 1689 Baptist Confession also has subordinate documents to it.
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They have a long excursus on Romans 411, and here are some of their comments.
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Please listen to this very carefully, quote, circumcision was given to Abraham for a seal of that righteousness which he had as yet being uncircumcised, which we will not deny to be, in some sense, true, but we believe that circumcision had chiefly a far different respect, end quote.
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Now, as a pastor, as a Christian, I want to warn you about a certain phrase that they're using here. Anytime you hear a theologian or a commentator read a text of scripture, and they begin telling you what they think it means by quoting it, and then saying,
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I wouldn't deny that in some sense this is true, but I think I have a better understanding of this. That should make red flags go up all over the place.
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And when I read this, I thought, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, that got underlined in red when I was looking at it. Romans 411, it's a description of circumcision.
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I want to say something here. It is not, in some sense, true. It is infallibly true, exactly as it is written.
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Now, these theologians may believe that circumcision has a far different respect that it refers to, and I'm certainly willing to listen to what they had to say.
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But I can assure you that I'm going to stick with what Paul says in Romans 411, when all is said and done.
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Now, I want to read to you, here's what they think circumcision was really all about. Listen carefully. Quote, Abraham had a twofold seed, natural of the
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Jews and faithful of the believing Gentiles. His natural seed was signed with the sign of circumcision.
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First, indeed, for the distinguishing of them from all other nations, whilst they as yet were not the seed of Abraham, but especially for the memorial of the justification of the
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Gentiles by faith, when at length they should become his seed. Therefore, circumcision was of right to cease when the
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Gentiles were brought into the faith. For as much as then it had obtained its last and chief end, and thenceforth circumcision is nothing.
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So what they argue is circumcision is an ethnic sign. It is a sign of identity with Abraham.
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As they say here, his natural seed was signed with the sign of circumcision. Again, was
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Eleazar Damascus Abraham's natural born son? No, he was not. Were all those foreign born slaves and servants, were they the natural seed of Abraham?
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No, they weren't. And what they're arguing here is that circumcision is anticipatory of the incoming of Gentiles later.
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And that's why it says, when Gentiles were brought into the faith, for as much as then it had obtained its last and chief end, and thenceforth circumcision is nothing.
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In other words, it expired as soon as Gentiles started coming into the faith under the new covenant. The problem is, if they're right, then circumcision would have ceased the day it started.
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Because Gentiles got it the day it started. You see my point? It's not an ethnic badge.
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It is not a sign that you're a genealogical descendant of Abraham. That's just not the case.
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Now, this is really the only direction that you can go. You have to downplay, as Fred Malone, as John Piper do, that circumcision was a sign of personal justification by faith, which was commanded by God to be given to infants.
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Try to argue that circumcision was a Jewish sign, not for Gentiles. Try to argue that, as Paul Jewett and David Kingdon do, that circumcision has only to do with land promises.
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Try to get away from what Paul says in Romans 4 .11. And yet the text thunders back.
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What is circumcision? It is a sign of personal salvation by faith.
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And yet it was given to babies. The problem with what the divines of the 1689
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Baptist Confession say here is that circumcision, from the day it was instituted, was given to non -Jews. And I just can't emphasize that point enough to you.
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Circumcision was at no point, at no point, was it a strictly Israelite or Jewish identity marker.
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As an illustration of this, I want you to hear this. Please listen. When the Passover was instituted by God to the people of Israel, just prior to the 10th plague and the death of the firstborn there in Egypt, a provision was made for non -Jews.
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Contrary to the theologians of the Baptist Confession, a provision was made for non -Jews to become part of the people of Israel by being circumcised.
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Exodus 12, verse 48. Listen carefully. And when a stranger dwells with you and wants to keep the
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Passover of the Lord, let all his males be circumcised, and then let him come near and keep it.
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And he shall be as a native of the land, for no uncircumcised person shall eat it.
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Now, had the authors of the Baptist Confession been correct, Exodus 12 would read like this. When a stranger dwells with you and wants to keep the
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Passover to the Lord, he can't because only circumcised people can eat it, and only ethnic
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Israelites are allowed to be circumcised. Now, obviously, that's not what it says.
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The next point I'd like to make is the Hebrews chapter 8 in the New Covenant and Greg Welty's paper against infant baptism.
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If you'd like to turn to Hebrews chapter 8, please do so. Please turn to Hebrews 8. I don't have time to go into an exposition of the whole passage, but that's where we're going now,
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Hebrews 8. When this issue of infant baptism first came on my radar, and as I've told you before,
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I was raised in Baptistic circles. I was not raised in paedo -baptistic circles. I was raised as a
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Baptist. I was directed by a friend of mine who was in seminary at the time, working through the same issue. We worked through it at the same time.
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We used to have long email exchanges talking about what we were learning about it. He forwarded me a link to a paper titled
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A Critical Evaluation of Paedo -Baptism by a man named Greg Welty. At the time,
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I was not fully settled on the issue just yet. I read the entire paper and thought it was pretty compelling.
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But I also felt like something was wrong with it. Something seemed not quite right about it. So I read it again, this time stopping every single time a citation of scripture was given and rummaging through my
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Bible and looking very carefully at the passage in its full context. And that time I caught his error. In fact, others had already caught it and pointed it out to him because he responds with a couple sentences in the paper that I had missed.
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The paper lays a very heavy emphasis upon the New Covenant, Jeremiah 31, verses 31 through 34, and its citation in the eighth chapter of Hebrews.
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Now, the contrasts between the New Covenant and what Jeremiah calls the Old Covenant are hammered home very hard in that paper.
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Now, I want to go ahead and read that. Look at Hebrews 8. Let's look at the citation here of Jeremiah 31 in Hebrews chapter 8.
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And beginning at verse 7. For if that first covenant had been faultless, then no place would have been sought for a second.
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Because finding fault with them, he says, and here starts the citation. Behold, the days are coming, says the
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Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day when
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I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, because they did not continue in my covenant, and I disregarded them, says the
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Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord.
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I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. None of them shall teach his neighbor and none his brother, saying,
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Know the Lord, for all shall know me from the least of them to the greatest of them. For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness and their sins and their lawless deeds.
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I will remember no more. Verse 13. In that, he says, a new covenant, he has made the first obsolete.
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Now what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away. And throughout his paper,
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Welty just hammers and hammers and hammers. The first covenant is obsolete. The old covenant is obsolete.
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It's all passed away. The new covenant has replaced it. The new covenant is a better covenant. And this covenant, it's not going to be know the
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Lord. And this covenant, they will all know me from the least of them to the greatest. The new covenant is not like the old covenant.
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The problem with Welty's interpretation is that he treats the old covenant which in Jeremiah 31 is the covenant that God made with the land of Israel.
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When he brought them out of the land of Egypt at Mount Sinai, that was a legal works -based covenant.
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Welty treats that covenant as if it and the Abrahamic covenant are one.
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That's his error. And I caught it the second time I read the paper and thought, You can't do that. You cannot treat the legal
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Sinaitic giving of the law and the Abrahamic covenant as if together they're the old covenant.
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The old covenant is the Sinaitic covenant. It's not the Abrahamic covenant. And just two chapters earlier in the book of Hebrews, you see the
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Abrahamic covenant is the foundation of the new covenant. It's immutable. It is God swearing the oath.
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It can never pass away. It can never change. The contrast in Jeremiah 31 is not between the new covenant and the
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Abrahamic covenant. It's between the new covenant and the Sinaitic covenant. The legal covenant that God made with the people of Israel, where they swore the oath.
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We will be obedient and do everything that the Lord has said that we are to do. Now, Welty has been confronted with that before.
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Listen to his response. He responds to that in the paper. Listen carefully to him. Quote, Pedo -Baptists may claim that Baptists are failing to recognize that the contrast, which
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Jeremiah is drawing here between the new covenant and the Mosaic covenant, the old covenant, not between the new covenant and the covenant as originally administered to Abraham.
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That's exactly right. That's exactly what we would say. Welty continues since Pedo -Baptists justify infant baptism with reference to the
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Abrahamic, not the Mosaic covenant. The fact that Jeremiah speaks of the new covenant as differing from the
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Mosaic covenant is of no relevance to the question of infant baptism. And that's exactly what I would say. That's what I'm saying to you now.
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That is what Jeremiah says in contrasting the new covenant with the old covenant is irrelevant to the question of infant baptism.
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So Welty has heard this. And listen to his response. Welty says the point is well taken as it should be.
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The Mosaic covenant was indeed added to the Abrahamic promises, not repealing or replacing them, but furthering their ultimate purpose.
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But reflection upon the realities of the Abrahamic covenant will reveal that each of the contrast
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Jeremiah asserts here between the new and the Mosaic covenant is also a contrast between the new covenant and the
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Abrahamic covenant. You catching this? That's it.
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That's his response. He assumes that the law covenant of Sinai, which was conditioned on obedience of the people to stay in the land, that that's identical to the
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Abrahamic promise. Now, why is he doing that? Why is he willing to fold those two together and treat them as if they're the same thing?
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Because if he doesn't, the whole paper falls apart. Now, I would ask the question, would
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Paul agree with that? You think Paul would agree with that assessment? Remember, I preached a sermon on Galatians 4, 21 to 31.
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I just want to read a couple of verses from that section. You tell me, you think Paul would agree the
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Abrahamic covenant and the old covenant are identical, that every contrast between the new covenant and the legal covenant at Sinai would also be a contrast between the new covenant and the
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Abrahamic covenant. Listen to the way Paul describes those two covenants, the Abrahamic and the old covenant. In Galatians 4, he says, for it is written that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bond woman, the other by a free woman.
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But he who was of the bond woman was born according to the flesh and he of the free woman through promise, which things are symbolic.
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For these are the two covenants, the one from Mount Sinai, which gives birth to bondage, which is
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Hagar. For this Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to Jerusalem, which now is and is in bondage with her children.
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But the Jerusalem above is free, which is the mother of us all. Now we brethren as Isaac was our children of promise.
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Nevertheless, what does the scripture say? Cast out the bond woman and her son, for the son of the bond woman shall not be heir with the son of the free woman.
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So then brethren, we are not children of the bond woman, but of the free. What do you think? You think
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Paul would agree with Welty that every contrast between the new covenant and the legal old covenant that gives rise to children of bondage because it's a works -based covenant that nobody can keep, that that would also apply as valid contrast to the covenant of promise by which sinners are made free and are reconciled to God and justified.
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Most certainly not. I'm gonna have to cut this short.
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Point number five this evening, this is the last point. Difficult pastoral questions. Very often these are thrown at us too.
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Difficult pastoral questions. In nearly every debate I have ever listened to on this topic, the Pato Baptists, our side are asked questions like these.
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Would you baptize a 10 -year -old who had declared himself to be an atheist? My answer to that question is, no,
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I would not. Would you baptize a 16 -year -old in a household? Yes, I would.
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What if slaveholders in 1841 came to Christ in Biloxi, Mississippi? Would their slaves and all their slaves' children have been baptized?
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No, they wouldn't. That came up actually in the South before the Civil War happened and the presbyteries in the
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South said no because those really are their own functioning covenantal units. Those are difficult pastoral questions, no question about it.
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But the point of application I wanna make is this. Posing difficult pastoral questions is irrelevant to the practice of infant and household baptism.
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Difficult pastoral questions is not relevant to the propriety of the practice. Think with me. Are these kinds of pastoral situations addressed in the
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Old Testament institution of circumcision? No, they're not. But what if Abraham, Isaac or some other
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Israelite had a 24 -year -old male servant who didn't wanna be circumcised? What should they have done?
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Now, whether or not there was a hard and fast answer to questions like that has no bearing at all upon the fact that God commanded households to be circumcised.
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Posing difficult pastoral questions to paedo -baptists like these and then acting like this is somehow an argument against the propriety of the practice would be the same as this.
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Abraham responding to God. When God told Abraham, all the males in your household, even foreigners bought with money, it would be like Abraham looking back at God and going,
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God, you didn't address what I should do with 16 -year -old male servants who don't wanna serve you. Therefore, I will not practice household circumcision as you commanded.
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Such was not valid then, such is not valid now either. Now, for many in our day, they'll listen to everything
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I've said here, all these passages, some of the arguments and counter arguments, and there's more that could be said. I haven't addressed everything, had to be somewhat selective.
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And they'll respond with a simple argument. They'll say, look, I don't have time to read 100 books on this issue.
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There's a lot of ink that's out there been spilled on the issue of baptism and infant baptism in all of us. The fact is,
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I don't see infant baptism commanded directly in Scripture and I don't see it explicitly practiced for sure.
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Therefore, I'm just not gonna do it. Now, if that's your standard, then you would be forced to conclude that women cannot take the
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Lord's Supper. There is no command for women to take the Lord's Supper in the Scripture. And there's no explicit example of them doing it either.
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And if I wanted to be really stubborn, I don't obviously, but if I wanted to be really, really stubborn,
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I could challenge you. Try to prove to me that women took the communion. And you know what I'm gonna say to every line of argumentation you bring to me?
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I'm just gonna go, you're just assuming there are women there. No matter what you show me. Well, Paul gives instructions to the church of Corinth.
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Surely there had to be women there. I'm not willing to assume that. You're just assuming there are women there. If you hold that position that it's gotta be explicitly commanded or explicitly practiced, there's a lot you're not gonna do.
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And yet I would say, a church that wouldn't give communion to women is sinning. And in fact,
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I would argue the Bible requires you to do that. And so that's the issue before us.
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The reality is what God requires of us when it comes to the administration of his church in this world is supposed to be relatively easy to understand.
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One does not need to have a PhD in theology or exegesis to see this. And the argument is really quite simple.
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I am very thankful. I am very thankful for that Reformed Baptists do see the continuity between the administration of the gospel before and after the coming of Christ much clearer than the dispensationalists do.
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They see it a lot better than they do, but they still don't see it as clearly as they need to. They need to see it more clearly.
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There is one church and one people of God across both testaments. It is not, as John Piper says,
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Israel and the church. It is the one church. Failure to understand this point means a failure to understand the heart of covenant theology over against dispensationalism.
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The administration of the covenant of grace has not changed in the Visible Church with the coming of Christ. It just hasn't.
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It has not changed. Households were circumcised just as households are now baptized. Children are not cut off from membership in the
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Visible Church. Divine wisdom orders us to include our children in our covenant communities.
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Not as a guarantee that they will be saved, but rather as a guarantee that we will not fail to recognize that they're not our children and that they belong to the
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Lord and we need to raise them as His. They belong to God and we are obligated to raise them in the bosom of Christian discipleship while we pray for and seek their conversion and their personal faith and repentance, just as the people of God on earth have done for these past 4 ,000 years.
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Let's close in prayer. Father in heaven, we thank you for your word and how it speaks to this issue.
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And Lord, it was never your intention that your church be divided by the sacraments. And yet, tragically, it is.
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And we do pray, Lord, that you would help us grow in our understanding of these things. And Lord, it's very clear.
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Children are to be considered part of the Visible Church. And just as the association of circumcision with faith and personal salvation was not an argument against the inclusion of children, the association of repentance and faith to baptism is not either.
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And that's why we see the post -advent enactment of the covenantal language taken from the everlasting
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Abrahamic covenant, which is the very foundation of our salvation. And we do pray you'd help us to continue to grow in our understanding of how you have dealt with your people through history and time, and that we would do that which is pleasing in your sight and obey your word.
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We ask in Jesus' name, amen. This is
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Pastor Patrick Hines of Bridwell Heights Presbyterian Church, located at 108 Bridwell Heights Road in Kingsport, Tennessee.
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And you've been listening to the Protestant Witness Podcast. Please feel free to join us for worship any
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Sunday morning at 11 a .m. sharp, where we open the word of God together, sing his praises, and rejoice in the gospel of our risen
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Lord. You can find us on the web at www .bridwellheightspca .org.
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And may the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.