So Kendra asked, uh, or said, "I was a little confused by the lesson on baptism." The quotes from the early church leaders sounded like they may have believed that you were not born again until you were baptized. Is that the case, and if so, what did they do with verses like 1 Corinthians 1:17, "For Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect"?
Okay, so, Kendra, you basically asked the same question that I asked myself when I first started reading the early Christian writings, which was, let's say, 35-plus years ago, and I was not expecting to come across a different view of baptism. I probably grew up with a somewhat similar view that you grew up with. Baptism was something we did, but it was not connected with the new birth.
And I noticed writer after writer after writer, they were all saying the same thing: that we are born again, our sins are forgiven in baptism. And I was really shocked. I mean, I didn't know what to do with that. Of course, it wasn't the only surprise. There were a number of other doctrines that surprised me that they were teaching.
And somewhere, I don't know, I'd been reading for 3 or 4 months every night in the early Christian writings, and I finally— I was so confused I thought, "I'm just going to stop, and I'm going to just take an evening and read the whole New Testament through." I think I skipped Mark and Luke and just read Matthew for the synoptic gospels. And, you know, I started at about 5 in the afternoon, and I just read till I don't know when, you know, 2 in the morning, all the way through Revelation.
I just wanted to get the whole New Testament all at once. And I couldn't believe it as I read. There was just verse after verse after verse popping out about baptism that were so clear. And I thought, "How on earth did I not see all of these verses all of my life?" Well, the answer was clear. The church I belonged to, they explained every one of these verses away. And so even though I read them numerous times, probably hundreds of times, they never sank in because everything was explained away.
And so I realized, okay, I'm going to just clear my mind out, start with a blank slate, hear what the early Christians are saying, and see if it matches Scripture. And when I did that, I saw just about everything they taught, it just lined right up with Scripture. So I want to share the verses that I noticed that night when I just read through the whole New Testament. I didn't read Mark that night, but I've added that in here. So Clara's going to put them up, and I'm just going to read them.
I want to read them all together, just so the impact of it hopefully will be fairly strong. So we'll start with John 3:5. "Jesus answered, Most assuredly I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God." Now, of course, that verse had been explained away most of my life.
But it was interesting, when I read that as a young boy, my first thought was, "Oh, that's talking about water baptism and spirit baptism." That seemed obvious to a child, but then it was explained away, and so I had forgotten it. But they all understood that to be water baptism and spirit baptism. But then it gets stronger. Okay, Mark 16:16, "He who believes and is baptized will be saved." This is Jesus talking. And I noticed, yeah, He tied in baptism with salvation.
But the big one that I just— I couldn't believe I had ignored it my whole life, Acts 2:38. "Then Peter said to them," this is on the day of Pentecost, "Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit." So He told them right there, baptism was for the remission or forgiveness of sins, and that they would receive the Holy Spirit right after baptism. Acts 22:16, this is Paul when he's relating his testimony.
He relates what was said, "Arise and be baptized," I think Ananias is talking to him, "and wash away your sins, calling on the name of the Lord." So there with baptism, it tied it into washing away your sins. Again, I had read that so many times, it just never sank in. Galatians 3:27, "For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ." You can't put on Christ if you haven't been baptized into Him.
Romans 6:4, "Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life." So the early Christians understood that very clearly. We're buried with Him, we die to our sins, we come out to walk in the newness of life just as He was resurrected.
Paul says something similar, but in more detail, in Colossians, Colossians 2, "In Him also you were circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ." Okay, so what is that? He says, "Having been buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised with Him through faith in the powerful working of God who raised Him from the dead.
And you were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh; God made alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our trespasses by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands." This He set aside, nailing it to the cross. So He's tying in forgiveness, the newness of life, everything, with baptism, that we're baptized into Christ.
Again, Titus 3:5, "According to His mercy, He saved us through"— I notice there's a comma there, which shouldn't be there— "according to His mercy, He saved us through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit." I mean, again, that had been explained away, but it's so clear, the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit. Again, baptism of water, baptism of the Holy Spirit. We are regenerated at the time of baptism.
And then one more, 1 Peter 3:21, "There is also an antitype which now saves us, namely baptism, not the removal of the filth of the flesh." In other words, it's not the fact that we're in the water that would wash away the dirt on our skin. He said, "But the answer of a good conscience toward God." So in baptism is where, because we receive the forgiveness of sins, we now have this good conscience with God that we want to have.
So like I say, after reading those that night, it was like, "How could I not have seen all of this all of my life?" Well, like everyone else, the way we're indoctrinated is the way we tend to read Scripture. But I realized, how can I doubt the early Christians when they all teach this, every single one of them? Am I to believe that within a few years, after the Apostle John died, they all went through some kind of brain transplant and no one remembered what baptism was anymore?
That they all came to this same wrong conclusion, separately, independently? These people, you know, were all over the world. They all believed the same thing. So, yeah, that's why the early Christians believed that the new birth, the forgiveness of sins, is tied in with water baptism and the baptism of the Holy Spirit. You can't leave that out. The two have to be there at the same time. Now, you asked an interesting question, and this is not by any means a put-down, Kendra. It was just interesting.
You quoted there 1 Corinthians 1:17, where Paul says, "For Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect." And I say, why it's interesting is the only group in the days of the early church who doubted that baptism was something more than a symbol, that it was something essential for salvation in the normal realm of things, were the Gnostics. They did not believe in water baptism.
Some of them practiced it and said it was just, you know, just something you do, a ritual that had no particular meaning. A lot of them didn't baptize it at all. But this is the Scripture that so many of them pointed to, was 1 Corinthians that say, "Oh, Paul said he didn't send me to baptize. See, we don't need to baptize." Well, as the early Christians pointed out to the Gnostics, go back and read what Paul is talking about. What's the context of that statement?
He was talking about divisions in the church, and he said, "Yeah, I'm glad I didn't baptize many of you, because then you would be saying, 'Oh, I was baptized by Paul. You know, somehow I'm better than the rest of you.'" And he lists a couple of people he did baptize, a couple of households, and he says he was glad it was, you know, none other, because he was sent to preach. He left the baptism up to other people, which proved to be wise because it would have caused even more division.
So again, I would encourage you to go over again the message we have on the historic faith about what the early Christians believed on baptism, which obviously you've listened to, but I encourage you to go back, listen to it again, look at those Scriptures. And, yeah, just, if you weren't already preconditioned, if you were just reading the Bible by itself, could you really doubt that in baptism there is a saving effect, there is a forgiveness of our sins?
Not that it's magical, that by itself it can do any of this, but this is how the blood of Christ is applied to us. This is the occasion He gave us. How do we become born again? How do we become united with Him? How do we receive justification? Okay, He gave us a way to do it, and it wasn't come forward and invite Jesus in your heart. You don't read anyone in Acts doing that. You read every single time they got baptized.
As soon as they believed, Paul or whomever it was immediately baptized them from the day of Pentecost onwards. Okay.
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