All right, let me ask you to take your Bibles and your catechisms. We're just going to spend a little bit of time this week rounding off our thoughts on baptism. Okay, so last time we were together, which I think was about four weeks ago, we talked about the movement from the old covenant sign of circumcision, that was the old covenant sign of the people of God, to the new covenant sign of baptism. And I tried to show you how to tease out which one applies to you and why. And if you remember, I said take any command, any imperative, any right, any symbol, any promise, and ask to which symbol, right, imperative, to which promise is this symbol, rite, or imperative attached? And you have basically two options. It's either attached to the old covenant or the new covenant. And then the next question is to ask, am I a party to that covenant? And if you are not a party to that covenant, then it doesn't apply to you. Now there are some things that apply to both covenants, and that's where it gets tricky when it comes to a sign that goes on the covenant people of God. There is a sign in both the old covenant and the new covenant, but the trick is it's a different sign. And so what I tried to tease out last week was. that whenever you have a different anything, I don't care what it is, but in this particular case, a different sign, it is the covenant within which that sign emerged that determines and controls the function of that sign. Let me say that again. Whenever you have a new whatever, a new command, a new sign, a new promise, whatever, it is the covenant out of which that sign has emerged that controls and controls how that sign functions within the covenant community. So with respect to baptism, we do not look to the old covenant to know how to understand baptism. We look to the old covenant to know how to understand circumcision. And then when we get to the new covenant, the new covenant does two things. First, it tells us what to think about the present state of circumcision, which according to Paul, he said in various different ways, circumcision means nothing. Uncircumcision means nothing, but what? A new creation. He said that in Galatians and then in 1 Corinthians he said, circumcision means nothing. Uncircumcision means nothing, but keeping the commands of God, which is very interesting. Because isn't be circumcised a command of God? Isn't it? It was. It was. What thing? Well, yeah, that'd take a lot of time. I'll try to, I'll try to flesh it out though. Okay. If I think of it on the fly while I'm going, I'll try to put it up. Okay. But Paul said circumcision means nothing and uncircumcision means nothing but keeping the commandments of God. Well, isn't that interesting because circumcision was a commandment of God back in the Old Covenant, but now in the New Covenant, as a spokesman of the New Covenant, he's saying keep the commandments of God. And guess what? Circumcision is no longer one of them for the New Covenant people of God. So do you see the emphasis here? The new covenant drives and controls how we understand the sign. And so the old covenant sign circumcision was a sign of God's promise to Abraham. It was for his physical descendants. And now in the new covenant, baptism is a sign of whether or not you are a spiritual descendant of Abraham. To be a spiritual descendant of Abraham, you have to do two things, repent and believe in Jesus Christ. Once you do that, you are a child of Abraham and the sign goes upon you. Okay. So All the promises that were attached to the majority of the promises, the physical promises that were attached to circumcision in the old covenant attached to the Abrahamic covenant that Abraham would have a great name, that his offspring would be multiplied. and that the people that bless Him would be blessed, and the people that curse Him would be cursed. We find fulfillment of all those things. And ultimately, what circumcision pointed us to was whom? Jesus Christ, right? Remember that circumcision was put on the males. It wasn't put on females. Why? Because they did not expect a female Messiah. They expected a male Messiah. And so the sign was put on all males in hopes that perhaps that male would be the Messiah. But now once the Messiah comes, that sign is no longer applicable in the New Covenant. So what I want to do this evening very briefly is touch on three things, and they come out of Catechism questions 100, 101, and 102. So I do hope you have your catechisms with you. Here are the three things that I'd like to touch now on baptism in the new covenant, and if I behave, I'll leave a little time at the end for questions, okay? So if you do have a question, please write them down. So number one, we're gonna look at baptism's hermeneutical control. Baptism's hermeneutical control, and we'll look at that in question 100. Number two, baptism's illustrative mode. Okay, question 101. And then finally, baptism's corporate obligation in question 102. So let's start with baptism's hermeneutical control in question 100. So in question 100 the catechist asks are the infants of such as are professing believers to be baptized and we answer The infants of such as are professing believers are not to be baptized Because there is neither command nor example in the holy scriptures Nor certain consequence from them to baptize such now somebody give me the proof text for this question There is none. It is the only question in the whole catechism that has no proof text. Why? What is it trying to prove? It's trying to prove that there's no command and no example of infant baptism, nor is there good necessary consequence in the Bible. So what proof text do you show for something that's not there? Nothing. OK, there is no command to baptize your infants and there is no example now. As I've been saying, because baptism is a New Covenant sign, the New Covenant itself must give the command and or example of the person upon whom that baptism is to be given. Do you understand? I've probably beat this dead horse to no end, but it's important that you understand that because our Presbyterian brothers and sisters would say, well, no, I could look for instructions about upon whom I will put the covenant sign of baptism from the old covenant. Because the old covenant, Abraham received the promise in Genesis 12, 15, 17, 22. And what did he do when he got that promise? He put that sign of the promise circumcision on his children. So if Abraham put the sign of the promise on his children and all of those children are covenant members and we serve the same God and have the same religion, then in the new covenant, I put the same sign on my children. Now it's a different sign. It's just the The form is a little bit different, but the meaning is the same, they would argue. But we would argue, no, if when you get a new sign, you also need new controls for how to apply it. And so the New Testament must give you, it must give you the instructions on who gets that sign. And here's the thing, it does. In every example in the new covenant of people who receive the sign of baptism, what are the two things that they did before they repented and they believed in Jesus Christ? What are the two things that the apostles command people to do before they get the sign, repent and believe in Jesus Christ? And sometimes it was attended with the Holy Spirit. Sometimes the Holy Spirit came after the whole book of Acts kind of does a little bit of both. But the bottom line is that the New Testament must control hermeneutically. That is, that's how we interpret the Bible. The New Testament must give us the controls for the subjects of baptism. OK, now. In this question, it says there's neither command nor example. That there is no command to baptize your infant in the New Testament, every single Presbyterian will agree. But they will say, once again, we don't need a command because the precedent was in the Old Covenant, and the New Covenant didn't say stop doing that, so we continue to do it. But with regard to whether or not there is an example of infant baptism, Presbyterians and others who buy into infant baptism, which is also called pedo-baptism, would say that there are examples in the new covenant. Can anybody think of what those examples would be? Bill. That's right, that's right. There are a handful of household baptisms in the book of Acts. Almost all of them are in the book of Acts. There is one referred to in 1 Corinthians 1.16, the house of Stephanas, which is mentioned again in the same letter by Paul in chapter 16, verse 15, that Paul personally baptized the household of Stephanas. So here's how this argument goes. Presbyterians say, look, The Philippian jailer believed and all of his household was baptized, okay? But if you look, I'm obviously not gonna look at all of these tonight, but I'm just gonna give a blanket statement for all of them. There is no case in which in any of these household baptisms, each one of the people within the household individually repented and believed. In many of the cases, it says, and everyone in the household heard the message of Paul or heard the message of people or of Peter, and they believed. Or if it doesn't say that they believed it, say it says that once, for example, the Philippian jailer was baptized, the whole household rejoiced. Now, we all know that babies can rejoice. There's no doubt about that, okay? Babies, you know, coo and smile and laugh all the time. But the text says that they rejoiced because the Philippian jailer had been saved. And I would add to that, and that they were saved too. But is it possible to say that a baby can be cognizant that their dad has been saved and rejoiced as a result of that? That's really, really stretching it. OK, so in every case of household baptisms, it's it's clear from the text from just about every single one of them that the people involved in the households were of age. They repented and they believed and were baptized. Now, what you have to do as a Presbyterian is you have to assume that there was a baby there, and that's what many of them do. They say, well, their whole household was baptized. There must have been a baby. Ergo, you can baptize infants. Well, that's a lot to build a doctrine on, right? That's an assumption and a speculation. Now, the better of the Presbyterians will say, I'm not building a whole argument on this. I'm building my argument from the Old Testament, but the household baptisms supplement my argument. Well, this is why in the catechism question, it says very interestingly. There is neither command nor example in the Holy Scriptures nor certain consequence from them to baptize such. Now where is that coming from? That's actually coming from Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 1, Paragraph 6. You'll remember that the London Baptist Confession of Faith is virtually patterned off the Westminster Confession of Faith with a few exceptions. But listen to Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 1, Paragraph 6. The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man's salvation, faith in life is either expressly set down in scripture or listen by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from scripture. by good and necessary consequence. Now listen to the London Baptist Confession of Faith, chapter one, paragraph six. The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man's salvation, faith, and life is either expressly set down or necessarily contained in scripture. What did they do? They took out the section about something being good and necessary consequence. Why? Because the early primitive Baptists knew that it was this clause in their paragraph that allowed the Presbyterians to get to infant baptism. They assumed that because, for example, Abraham put the sign of the promise on his children and were the same people of God, we could put the sign on our children and that's good and necessary consequence. Well, it's bad and unnecessary consequence. What is a good example of good necessary consequence? I'll give you the best one, okay? Nowhere in the Bible will you find the term trinity. Nowhere in the Bible will you find our handy little diagrams where we have, you know, God, the Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God, but the Father is not the Spirit, the Father is not the Son, et cetera, et cetera. You won't find that in the Bible. But here's how we reason from Scripture that the Trinity is true. Deuteronomy 6.4, here O Israel, the Lord our God is one. There's only one God. We are monotheists, we believe in one God. And yet we find throughout scripture that the Father is worshipped as God, the Son is worshipped as God, and the Spirit is worshipped as God. So now we have a few different options. We could say, well, I'm gonna ignore that, and I still believe in monotheism. Or you could say, well, if all three are worshipped, then there's three gods, now I'm a polytheist. Or you can say, well, this is monotheism. This is polytheism. There's a contradiction. I'm going to check the Bible out. We're not going to do that either. So what do we do? By good necessary consequence, we come to a doctrine that says there is one God who exists in three persons. That is good and necessary consequence. We have no other avenue by which we can get out of this dilemma than by concluding in the Trinity. Now when it comes to baptism, there are good options to get out of baptizing your infant. And it's by taking the New Testament as the ground and saying, the New Testament says anyone who's gonna receive the sign must repent and have faith. A baby can't do that, therefore babies cannot be given the sign of baptism, okay? All right, so I'm just gonna jump very quickly to number two, baptism's illustrative mode. And I'm just gonna be really quick here. This has to do with how baptism is administered, and I'm just going to skip through. We're not going to cite it because time is getting away from us here. We are less concerned with the mode of baptism than we are with the subjects of baptism. OK, we care more about who's baptized rather than how we baptize. However, that being said, we do believe the scriptures have told us how to baptize, and we believe that it's by immersion, which means that the religious subject goes under the water and come up. And I've talked a lot about this. Now, is there good reason to believe that? And the answer is very simple. Yes, here's why. The very word itself, baptizo, it means to immerse or dip. I mean, so if you just went from the meaning of the word itself, do you notice that baptizo and baptism in English are very similar? What does that tell you? That tells you that they transliterated the word. They didn't even translate it. It's kind of like music and other languages, right? Everybody knows what music is in Spanish. What is it? Musica. And it's probably something very similar in Italian, right? Because it's an international concept. You don't translate it. You just transliterate it, which means that You just spell it in English letters based on the form of the word in the target language. And so that's what we did with baptism. We didn't translate it, we just transliterated it because there wasn't really a good equivalent in English to translate it over to. But as a result, people have tried to smuggle in different meanings like sprinkle. That's not what it means. Or asperse, that's not what it means. Asperse means to pour water over people. But here's, so the meaning of the word itself is enough to determine that it means to immerse or dip. But here's the other thing. The symbolism of itself I think is enough to conclude that it means to dip, and here's why. It all has to do with your union with Christ. Christ went into the grave, he raised on the third day, you go down into the grave, you die to yourself, and you raise with Christ. It also represents the waters of cleansing forgiveness. So you go down and it washes your sins from you. Now, the idea of immersion is great because that means it washes all your sins. Think about sprinkling. Does that mean that just the part of my body that got sprinkled is the part, is the sin? Like that doesn't make any sense to me. But the whole idea of immersion is perfect because A, it fits our union with Christ, that we died with him and we rise with him. And B, it means that it cleanses all of our sins. Okay, so yes, the mode is immersion. It's only once in the name singular of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. So how did we get to sprinkling? There's a lot of reasons why, but here's the Reader's Digest version. First off, when I was in Israel, and we went around to all the church, the existing churches in the land of Israel, which was basically just like rock formation. All the churches that had baptismal fonts still extant were from the 5th century on. And even then, all those churches that had baptismal fonts like for children, right next to them was a baptismal tub. So all of them had both, sprinkling and immersing. But from the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, and even 4th century, Every church from those early centuries had the baptismal tub and no baptismal font. So what does that tell you? It tells you that the early church believed in immersing. Even John Calvin when he comments on John the Baptist in John chapter 3 verse 23, baptizing near Salim because there was much water there. John Calvin, who sprinkled people who was a Presbyterian, he said, well, everybody knows that John the Baptist immersed. That's just what he did. But we make all our arguments on different, different reasons, basically. So even John Calvin admitted that immersing is the reason was the original custom of the church. So why did people start sprinkling? Because in the early church, there were many who believed that salvation was so connected to baptism that if somebody died without baptism, they would not go to heaven. And so what do you do when an infant is born but it is about to die? Well, you need to baptize it. and you're not gonna put that little baby underwater, so what do you do? You sprinkle it. Or somebody on the other end of life, on their deathbed, has never been baptized, they're literally on their deathbed, and they call for the priest, and they say, baptize me so I can go to heaven. They're not gonna immerse them, they're gonna sprinkle them. And so a different mode begin to take place, and then it just caught on with the theology of infant baptism, and lo and behold, it became the majority opinion for much of church history. So finally, baptism's corporate obligation. What is the duty of such who are rightly baptized? It is the duty of such who are rightly baptized to give up themselves to some particular and orderly church of Jesus Christ, that they may walk in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless. Baptism not only has a vertical dimension to it, it's my relationship with the Lord, it also has a horizontal dimension. And I was talking to Christina on the way over, and I was trying to think of a good example to press why baptism is so important. And we kind of came up with one, and then I added another one later. When you are playing basketball, it is supreme of importance that you know who's on your team, right? So you can know who to pass the ball to. I remember even when I was in fourth grade, and we had recess for 15 minutes, and we didn't have jerseys to go play basketball, so what'd we do? What'd you guys do? Skins and shirts, right? You have to know who's on your team. And it's the same thing with baptism. How do I know who is a recipient of God's promise? They've been baptized. How do I know who to pass the cup of communion to? They've been baptized. How do I know who to confront for sins within the community of the church? They've been baptized. They're on the team, okay? And then the other example is a wedding, a ceremony, a covenant that we make. In the context of the church, again, there's that vertical dimension, but there's also that horizontal dimension. When you are baptized, you are joining yourself to the people here that you see. You're joining yourself to the church and that means, and that's why the catechism question goes into, joining an orderly church of Jesus Christ so that you could walk blamelessly with them. You are committing yourself, not only to God, but to these people. To be confronted by them, to confront them. To be encouraged by them, to encourage them. To share communion in the cup with them. and so on and so forth. So baptism is a very important thing. I don't think it's a minor issue that some people give it to infants. I think it's a very, very grievous error. I don't think it's of the first order that we should break. Well, I think that they're saved, those churches that do that, but I think that it has caused no little bit of false expectation and false hope in families and in churches. And I could tell you stories. of quote unquote covenant children who have grown up with just this and this expectation that they're saved because they've been baptized. And and I think that what we should instead do is preach the gospel to our children every day, every week, and hold out to them the prospect of baptism and hold out to them the prospect of the Lord's Supper and make them things that they anticipate and look forward to so that they can be a part of the people of God. Okay. All right. Any questions about baptism? Yes. Mm hmm. Mm. Hmm. Right. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. It's not interesting that they'd have a nurse do that. Sometimes nurses did serve in a priestly function in the early church. Very rare exceptions. Any other questions? So you guys are all convinced Credo Baptist, huh? Well, good. Yeah. You know, those are those are in-house debates. The Baptists have had and I've seriously at Southern Seminary, I've gone in lunchrooms and seen people be very heated about these things. There are some people that would think that, you know, you can make an exception and others that you can't. And, you know, I just my personal opinion is do everything you can to do it the way the Lord intended it to be done. And if you can't, then, yes, there's exceptions. But I think you should do everything in your power possible. So. Yeah, no, I think you should. And by the way, if you think of ancient Israel, you know, John the Baptist was not in a convenient place, right? He was out in the wilderness. I mean, you know, plenty of room for parking. But still, I mean, there was it was it was very inconvenient to go out there. But yet people went out to the Jordan to be baptized. But I would also say in the temple on the day of Pentecost, there were make votes, which were basically large basins uh... for baptism on which uh... peter in all the apostles baptized three thousand people and by the way uh... early on we did not know that archaeologically into the pato baptist would always give us our time oh yeah you baptist how did they baptize three thousand people on the day of pentecost we've got an answer cuz we just sprinkled but what about you and then must've been fifty years ago uh... our archaeological studies came up with these huge basins and like there's our answer three thousand people get a man So, yes. Mm-hmm. Sure. Yeah. I think, yeah, so number one, I don't think it's inconceivable. I think it could. That was kind of like a cherry on the top argument. But my thing is, again, you align your view of the sign with the covenant in which you find yourself. And in the covenant which we find ourself, every time union with Christ is talked about, it's talked about in his being united with his death and resurrection. So going down and coming up, being immersed in his death, being immersed in his life. The book of Hebrews does talk about sprinkling quite a bit because it's drawing from those Old Testament categories. So you're right. It's not impossible. It's not impassable. It could work as a symbol because that's all it is. But I think when you have the rest of the evidence, it just kind of tilts it toward immersion. But you're right. Absolutely. OK. Yes. I was just looking at it. Yeah, go ahead. You're fine. Yeah, that's a great question. I would say most Baptists would say it was the preliminary steps toward the New Covenant. So think about it. I mean, Jesus gave teaching that I would consider to be part of the New Covenant, even though the New Covenant had not been ratified by his death on the cross. So what we can say is what John the Baptist was doing was radically different and new than what had been taking place in the Old Covenant. And if you look carefully at John the Baptist's teachings, his baptisms were closely connected with Christ because he would tell people, you need to look to the one that's coming after me. And so the focal point of his baptisms were still Jesus Christ. Now, were they still shrouded in a little bit of mystery? Yeah, because we're coming off the heels of the Old Covenant, but they were certainly the most revelation that anybody in the Old Covenant had had, and the least revelation that anybody in the New Covenant had. But if the question, which is what I think you're asking is, was John the Baptist's baptism a New Covenant baptism, Yes, I think it was in a few cases need to be redone because there were some elements that were missing and we see that in the book of Acts. But yes, it was essentially new covenant baptism to the point where I don't know that somebody, generally speaking, who had been baptized with John's baptism needed to be rebaptized. There's only one example in the book of Acts. OK. Yeah. Because that was a time, a very, very different political, religious time where, for lack of a better way of explaining it, the government was something of a theocracy. Church and state was connected. So who you worshiped was a matter of capital issues, essentially. So if you didn't worship the way that the church that was in charge told you to worship, then it was a capital offense and you had to die. So we have a very radically different government today and I praise God for that. I don't think it should be the way that it was back then. Catholics killing Presbyterians and then Presbyterians get in power and Presbyterians kill Catholics and Baptists. We never got in power. I don't think we would have killed anybody if we did. I'd like to think that we wouldn't because we actually championed religious liberty. In fact, Baptists were the forerunners of what we now enjoy and will enjoy today as religious liberty. So it was just a different time, is the answer to your question. All right, we're going to pray and go get those kiddos. Father God, forgive us of our sins and give us grace to go into this week. We ask these things in your son's name. Amen.