Scriptural Baptism

Getting wet is not the same as being baptized.

Most people in the world today would treat that statement as a quibble. Pour water on a head, dunk a body in a pool, sprinkle a baby in a chapel. As long as the name of God is spoken over it, why split hairs? Yet across two thousand years of church history, men and women have been killed for the answer to that question. Some of them were drowned by the very ones who claimed to baptize. The third baptism, their persecutors called it, mocking those who refused to count infant sprinkling as the real thing. More blood has been shed over the doctrine of baptism than over almost any other doctrine in the Bible. That fact alone should slow us down.

Scripture says there is only one.

One baptism. Not five. Not three. Not whatever the local custom prefers. One. So the question is not whether a person has been wet. The question is whether he has been baptized. Three things must be in place before the answer is yes.

Proper Authority

The first baptisms in the Bible were not done by a committee. They were done by a single man with a clear commission. John 1:6 introduces him: "There was a man sent from God, whose name was John." Without the commission from God, John could not have baptized anyone. He could have stood in the Jordan all day and gotten people wet. Without the authority, none of it would have been baptism.

That is why Acts 19 is one of the most telling passages on the subject. Paul finds twelve men in Ephesus who already call themselves disciples. They are saved. They know the truth as far as they have been taught it. But Paul stops them and asks a strange question.

Paul did not ask whether they had been baptized. He asked into what. He was examining the authority behind their baptism. They answered that they had been baptized into John's baptism. The trouble is that John was nowhere near Ephesus. He had been dead for years. Whoever did the baptizing in this case had either been baptized by John or by someone who had been, and he had taken it upon himself to pass that authority on. John was never commissioned to grant his commission to anyone else. The chain broke. The water was real. The baptism was not. Paul baptized them in the name of the Lord Jesus.

A. H. Strong put the difference between John's baptism and ours in a single line:

The authority did not die with John. The Lord Jesus laid it on a different shoulder before He left.

Read those three verses carefully. The authority is His. The commission is to His churches. The Lord did not commit baptism to a denomination, to a synod, to a state, or to a freelance evangelist who has decided he is free to baptize whomever he likes. He committed it to the churches that have descended in unbroken fellowship from that first assembly at Jerusalem. But note well, I am not interested in trying to track down endless genealogies (1 Timothy 1:4) for churches. Let the hyper-landmarkers among us spend their time in that if they wish. I can look at you as a person and declare you to be a human being descended from Adam without needing to see a bunch of paperwork. And we can examine a church to know with great confidence it is the Lord's church without rattling chains or having to examine a bunch of papers. Usually the pastor is the one who does the baptizing, but the authority is not his to keep. The church can authorize any male member to administer the ordinance, because the authority rests in the body of the local church, not in the title of one man.

Proper Candidate

The second element of scriptural baptism is the right candidate.

There is one formula in the New Testament and it never varies. Blood before water. The cross before the baptistry. Faith in Christ before the obedience of baptism. From cover to cover there is not one infant baptism, not one forced baptism, no Scripture that places saving power in the water itself. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 1:14 that he thanks God he had baptized only a few in Corinth. If salvation were in the water, that thanksgiving would be heresy.

The clearest example in the book of Acts is the eunuch on the road to Gaza. He had heard the gospel from Philip. He believed. Then the water came into view.

The eunuch could not be baptized until he confessed Christ. Philip would not put him under the water on any other terms. Before the water there had to be a Saviour. The church has no warrant to flip that order. Roman Catholics flip it with infant baptism. Lutherans, Presbyterians, and other Reformers do the same. Every body that pours water on a child who cannot answer for himself has put the water in front of the blood. Baptists, when they are being themselves, refuse to do it. We do not impose religion on a child who cannot believe, and we do not pour water on a sinner who has not been brought to Christ.

Proper Mode

Now the water itself.

The Greek word for baptize is baptizo, and from Matthew to Revelation it means immersion. The English word baptism is not a translation. It is the Greek word with English letters stuck on it. Wherever the New Testament speaks of sprinkling, it does not use the word baptism. Wherever it speaks of pouring, it does not use the word baptism. The Holy Spirit chose the word that means to plunge, to dip, to put under.

John baptized in Aenon near Salim, the text tells us, "because there was much water there" (John 3:23). A pitcher would have done for sprinkling. A bowl would have done for pouring. John needed a river.

The eunuch's baptism settles it. Philip and the eunuch both went down into the water, and they both came up out of it. The man in the chariot did not need to climb out of the chariot to be sprinkled. He climbed out because the ordinance required it.

The mode matters because the picture matters.

Baptism preaches the gospel without saying a word. The believer goes under as Christ went into the grave. The believer comes up as Christ came out of it. Replace the burial with a few drops on the forehead and the sermon changes. If a man told his son to bury the family dog and the boy came back having sprinkled a handful of dirt on top of the animal, the father would not be impressed and the neighbors would not stay quiet for long. A burial is a burial. Sprinkling is not the picture the Lord chose, and we are not free to choose another.

The Door Into the Church

When three thousand people were saved on the day of Pentecost, Luke does not record that they joined a movement or signed a card. He records two things in a specific order.

Saved first. Baptized next. Then added to the church. That is the order Scripture gives, and that is the order the Lord's churches have kept since the beginning. Scriptural baptism is the door into church membership. A converted sinner who has not been scripturally baptized is a brother in Christ, but he is not yet a member of any local church. He cannot be added until he has been baptized, and he cannot be baptized until he has been saved.

Any baptism that lacks any of these three elements is alien baptism and no baptism at all. The work of the Catholics will not stand on the Lord's terms. The Presbyterians, the Amish, the Methodists, and every other body that has departed from Scripture on this point fall under the same verdict. We are not free to receive what the Lord has not approved, and we will not pretend that getting wet under the wrong authority, on the wrong candidate, or in the wrong mode amounts to obedience.

There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism.

Only one.