SPEAKER_1: Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast.
SPEAKER_1: I am Corey J.
SPEAKER_1: Mahler.
SPEAKER_2: And I'm still Woe.
SPEAKER_2: On today's Stone Choir, we're going to be discussing the subject of Baptism.
SPEAKER_2: On Stone Choir, we are obviously talking about theology in general, but we don't typically get too much into systematics.
SPEAKER_2: We don't delve into specific issues, certainly ones that are well fleshed out in church history.
SPEAKER_2: Today is probably going to be one of the rare episodes where we're going to talk about something where we have literally nothing new to say.
SPEAKER_2: The reason that we're doing this is, one, we've had a number of quests from folks asking us to describe the sacraments from a Lutheran perspective.
SPEAKER_2: Lutherans are good at theology, not because we have smart Lutherans today, but just because we inherited something that was correct and competent from better men.
SPEAKER_2: Unfortunately, Lutherans today are incredibly terrible at telling people, A, we exist or B, what we believe or why we believe it.
SPEAKER_2: So I think most people, if you hear about Lutherans, the only thing you have in mind is, you know, the tranny.
SPEAKER_2: That's frankly the vision of Lutheranism in the West today.
SPEAKER_2: And it's not wrong.
SPEAKER_2: Most Lutherans are like that.
SPEAKER_2: But, you know, no true Scotsman fallacy is not an absolute because there's such a thing as a Scotsman.
SPEAKER_2: There's also such a thing as an actual Lutheran.
SPEAKER_2: And that's what Corey and I are.
SPEAKER_2: So today's episode is going to discuss the Sacrament of Baptism in the future.
SPEAKER_2: We'll do one on the Sacrament of Holy Communion.
SPEAKER_2: The reason that we're doing it in addition, just a number of people asked, is that these are things that are instituted by God that are foundational to the Christian faith.
SPEAKER_2: And it was a natural follow on from last week's episode where we're discussing forgiveness.
SPEAKER_2: And in that episode, we were chiefly focused on the forgiveness from God that we extend to each other and interceding on behalf of each other to God for the forgiveness of our mutual sins.
SPEAKER_2: And we mentioned in the episode that there are the means of grace, there are means by which God provides forgiveness to us in this life.
SPEAKER_2: In time and space, forgiveness is delivered, not only at the cross, but personally.
SPEAKER_2: And so I want to briefly acknowledge a couple of things.
SPEAKER_2: One, when a Lutheran says Sacrament, we don't mean the same thing as the Roman Catholics, for example.
SPEAKER_2: I know we have the majority of our listeners at this point are not Lutheran.
SPEAKER_2: So for the folks who are Lutheran, a lot of what we say is probably going to be old hat.
SPEAKER_2: For the rest, we're trying to make the best form of the argument for what we believe is a scriptural view of baptism.
SPEAKER_2: This is effectively, if this were a formal debate, this would be the affirmative side for the premise.
SPEAKER_2: We're making the argument.
SPEAKER_2: And part of that is that we're going to be saying things that will contradict what the majority of our audience believe about these things.
SPEAKER_2: And I want to acknowledge that up front that we're not trying to pick a fight.
SPEAKER_2: We're not trying to pick on anyone or to talk down to you or to condemn you or your churches.
SPEAKER_2: This is Christian doctrine.
SPEAKER_2: I think we all agree that this stuff is worth getting right.
SPEAKER_2: I think we all agree that this stuff is important.
SPEAKER_2: We disagree on the details.
SPEAKER_2: And in Scripture, it talks about that being part of the Christian life.
SPEAKER_2: You know, when you look at the New Testament, inside the New Testament, as the earliest church in the very first century was being formed, they were arguing about things.
SPEAKER_2: There were disagreements and there was a right side and there was a wrong side.
SPEAKER_2: But those errors existed inside the church.
SPEAKER_2: You know, there's a case where Paul rebukes Peter to his face for his false teaching.
SPEAKER_2: These are apostles we're talking about.
SPEAKER_2: And, you know, Peter straightened out.
SPEAKER_2: Paul got it right.
SPEAKER_2: Peter was wrong.
SPEAKER_2: He was an heir.
SPEAKER_2: He was called to repent and they had that sorted out.
SPEAKER_2: So it is not outside of proper church practice for brothers in the faith to talk to each other, frankly.
SPEAKER_2: And it's not so much in concern that, oh, I'm concerned that you're wrong or you're concerned that I'm wrong.
SPEAKER_2: It's that this is God's stuff.
SPEAKER_2: This is not our stuff.
SPEAKER_2: And so the approach that Corey and I take and that we encourage everyone to take is to treat God's things as his and to receive them on his terms as he intends.
SPEAKER_2: And when we find in our own circumstances that our churches are failing in some way, you know, great way or small way, to deliver God's things as God describes them, that is an immediate problem for us in our own personal circumstances to deal with.
SPEAKER_2: So as we go through this, I want to acknowledge that we're going to say some things that some of you are not going to like.
SPEAKER_2: I know that one of us is wrong, at least maybe both of us are wrong.
SPEAKER_2: But just as a reasonable argument, if we say one thing about baptism and you say the opposite, one of us must necessarily be wrong.
SPEAKER_2: So it's not accusatory to say somebody is wrong here.
SPEAKER_2: It's simply an evaluation of the equation.
SPEAKER_2: The equation doesn't balance.
SPEAKER_2: You got to balance that before both sides can be right.
SPEAKER_2: So we're going to make the case for what we believe scripture says about these things.
SPEAKER_2: And obviously, it will be from a Lutheran perspective, but we believe this is what scripture says.
SPEAKER_2: I don't want people to come away from this feeling doubts or concerns that you have a bad church or if you think negative things about us, that's fine.
SPEAKER_2: I don't want you to listen to this and suddenly have deep concerns about your church.
SPEAKER_2: First, worry about scripture and about whether or not you believe it.
SPEAKER_2: And if in that evaluation, you find that you have concerns about your church, you know, those are problems we all face in our own lives.
SPEAKER_2: We're not going to tell you what to do.
SPEAKER_2: But I want to acknowledge that some of these things are contrary to some of your church teachings.
SPEAKER_2: And we all know this.
SPEAKER_2: These are five hundred year old discussions.
SPEAKER_2: So they said we have nothing new to say here, but we're going to try to make the case clearly for what we believe scripture teaches, because particularly for Lutherans, the sacraments, baptism and communion are foundational to our approach to the Christian life.
SPEAKER_2: You know, a lot of what we talk about on Stone Choir is about the Christian life for us personally, by virtue of our theological frame.
SPEAKER_2: The sacraments underpin all of that.
SPEAKER_2: And we allude to it sometimes.
SPEAKER_2: We want to spend an hour or so here today specifically laying out the case for what we believe scripture says about baptism, because it underpins everything else that we believe and what else comes up.
SPEAKER_2: And as we said elsewhere, when there's discussion and debate around doctrine, it's not about winning arguments.
SPEAKER_2: It's not about beating up on someone.
SPEAKER_2: It's about having more of what God wants us to have.
SPEAKER_2: God gave us these gifts in scripture.
SPEAKER_2: He gives us these gifts in time for our benefit.
SPEAKER_2: And so the reason that these things are worth fighting for and fighting against and about, is that when we don't get them right, we have less of the good things that God wants for us.
SPEAKER_2: And that's our chief concern is why we're talking about it, even knowing that some of you are going to disagree.
SPEAKER_2: So I hope that when you disagree with some of the things we say, one, I hope that you'll receive it in the spirit in which it's given, which is not to beat up on you, even though some of the things that we're going to say are going to be very stark.
SPEAKER_2: I don't want that to be taken as a personal attack.
SPEAKER_2: And also, ultimately, is a concern that downstream from these beliefs is the comfort of the gospel.
SPEAKER_2: It's the comfort of the things that God wishes for us to have.
SPEAKER_2: And everything that we talk about is in view of God's gifts to us, in view of the fact that there will come a day in your life where everything's on fire, where you are at rock bottom, where something is just unspeakably horrible.
SPEAKER_2: And those are the moments when having your theological ducks in a row is paramount.
SPEAKER_2: Because if you have a mess going into the battle, you're already way behind.
SPEAKER_2: You're already down points before you even come under fire.
SPEAKER_2: And we don't want that for each other.
SPEAKER_2: So we're going to go through the passages.
SPEAKER_2: This is basically a Bible study today.
SPEAKER_2: We have more Bible than we're going to get through in an hour or so.
SPEAKER_2: But we want to make clear the case for what baptism should mean in the Christian life, because it means a great deal.
SPEAKER_2: To begin with, I want to just give a brief example of framing.
SPEAKER_2: Imagine a scenario where you walk up to me and I hand you a $100 bill, and then you put it in your pocket and you walk away.
SPEAKER_2: Later on, you describe that scene to someone else.
SPEAKER_2: There are two ways you can describe it.
SPEAKER_2: I walked up to this guy and he handed me a $100 bill, and I looked at it and it was a real $100 bill.
SPEAKER_2: I was amazed and I put it in my pocket and I walked away.
SPEAKER_2: That's one telling of the story.
SPEAKER_2: That's true.
SPEAKER_2: It's accurate.
SPEAKER_2: It's what happened.
SPEAKER_2: I walked up to this guy and he was holding a $100 bill, and he reached out to hand it to me, and I looked at it and I saw the $100 bill and I wanted it, and I grabbed it in my hands, and I took it between my fingers and I pulled it close, and I held it up to my eyes and I looked at it and I peered it intensely, and I saw this is a $100 bill.
SPEAKER_2: This is real.
SPEAKER_2: I was excited and I put it in my pocket and I walked away.
SPEAKER_2: That's also accurate.
SPEAKER_2: That's a retelling of the same events.
SPEAKER_2: Both are factually correct, but what's the difference between them?
SPEAKER_2: In the first one, the emphasis is on me handing you a $100 bill.
SPEAKER_2: And in the second one, the emphasis is on you taking it and making it yours.
SPEAKER_2: And so in the second telling, I very quickly vanish.
SPEAKER_2: And it's just you and the $100 bill and you interacting with it.
SPEAKER_2: And in both of those cases, there's a giver and there's a receiver.
SPEAKER_2: And the emphasis is on whether you focus on the giver or you focus on the receiving.
SPEAKER_2: And so as we talk about the Sacraments, fundamentally when there are disagreements, particularly among Protestants, Roman Catholics and Lutherans are actually almost entirely on the same page about baptism, with one important exception.
SPEAKER_2: But it's kind of peripheral.
SPEAKER_2: It's important, but it's not the main thrust of the question.
SPEAKER_2: For everyone else, there are varying degrees of substantial disagreement.
SPEAKER_2: And it has to do with that framing.
SPEAKER_2: Is this a giving and a giver, or is this an action by someone where God was somehow involved?
SPEAKER_2: But as soon as we came on the picture, it's all about us.
SPEAKER_2: And those two frames really separate the two different views of the Sacrament of Baptism.
SPEAKER_2: And when Lutherans say Sacrament, we mean something slightly different than Roman Catholics.
SPEAKER_2: For Lutherans, there are two chief sacraments based on this definition, instituted by Christ himself with physical means for the forgiveness of sins.
SPEAKER_2: So there's some other things that Roman Catholics have that they call sacraments that are, some of them are very salutary.
SPEAKER_2: Marriage in particular was instituted by God in the garden.
SPEAKER_2: It's older than either Baptism or Communion.
SPEAKER_2: Lutherans don't consider that sacramental because although it's holy, which is the root of sacrament, one of the roots, it doesn't impart forgiveness of sins.
SPEAKER_2: So when we're talking about sacraments, the emphasis is on God giving a physical means for forgiveness of sins.
SPEAKER_2: So when we use that term, that's specifically what it means.
SPEAKER_2: The word also forgives sins.
SPEAKER_2: Absolution also forgives sins.
SPEAKER_2: There are other places that these come to us, but it's only in the word, only in Baptism and Communion, that there's a physical means tied to the promise of forgiveness, which is why we call these the means of grace.
SPEAKER_1: So to start with the scripture, we will turn first to Matthew 28, the end of the Book of Matthew.
SPEAKER_1: This is, of course, the Great Commission.
SPEAKER_1: Undoubtedly, almost all of you will be familiar with this before I even read it.
SPEAKER_1: Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them.
SPEAKER_1: And when they saw him, they worshiped him.
SPEAKER_1: But some doubted, and Jesus came and said to them, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.
SPEAKER_1: Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.
SPEAKER_1: And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.
SPEAKER_1: This is one of two verses, two sections of scripture we will be going over today, where we're going to take some time to slow down and break down exactly what is going on here, and yes, look at the Greek a little bit.
SPEAKER_1: And the reason for that is that too often when we're reading this, we just kind of read through it quickly, and we sort of fly over this, instead of actually looking at what exactly is being said, what is scripture telling us, what are the words being used, what do they mean, why do they matter, what doctrine is being put forth here.
SPEAKER_1: And so let's look at exactly what Christ is telling us.
SPEAKER_1: He's giving commands here, and He's giving a reason for it.
SPEAKER_1: And so we have the imperative, to start off the command, go, go therefore, therefore.
SPEAKER_1: To what does that refer?
SPEAKER_1: Why go?
SPEAKER_1: Because all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Christ, and therefore He is commanding us to go.
SPEAKER_1: And what are we to do in this going?
SPEAKER_1: We are to make disciples of whom?
SPEAKER_1: Of all nations.
SPEAKER_1: Incidentally, this is tied into other episodes, other matters we've discussed, because it is the word for nation or race there.
SPEAKER_1: We are to make disciples of all races, of all nations.
SPEAKER_1: You can use either word.
SPEAKER_1: But now we come to the part that is key for what we will be discussing about baptism in this episode.
SPEAKER_1: We are told to go and make disciples of all nations.
SPEAKER_1: But then we are told how to do that, how we are to make these disciples.
SPEAKER_1: There are two things that are given.
SPEAKER_1: The first is baptizing.
SPEAKER_1: Baptism is given first.
SPEAKER_1: That's noteworthy.
SPEAKER_1: Out of two things we are to do to make disciples, we are first to baptize.
SPEAKER_1: Then we are to teach them.
SPEAKER_1: Now, the underlying Greek terms, which thankfully do come through in the English translation, are in the same tense here, baptizing and teaching.
SPEAKER_1: Baptisantes and didascantes are the two words there in the Greek.
SPEAKER_1: But this tells us how we make Christians.
SPEAKER_1: This is the standard way that you make a Christian.
SPEAKER_1: You baptize the person in the triune name of God.
SPEAKER_1: Then you teach the person all that Christ has commanded us to observe.
SPEAKER_1: That's how you make a Christian.
SPEAKER_1: Now, today we may look at that and think that maybe it's backward to some degree, but that's only because everything around us is in shambles.
SPEAKER_1: Because if you think about it, how does one usually come to faith?
SPEAKER_1: Well, one usually comes to faith because one's parents take one to church.
SPEAKER_1: You don't usually come to faith because someone convinced you, or however you wish to word this, as an adult.
SPEAKER_1: That is unusual.
SPEAKER_1: That is outside the normal Christian experience, because the normal Christian experience, what God wants for us, is to grow up in a Christian nation, in a Christian family, to be Christian from birth.
SPEAKER_1: That is the goal.
SPEAKER_1: That is how things should be.
SPEAKER_1: And so it is baptizing.
SPEAKER_1: And yes, we Lutherans do believe in infant baptism.
SPEAKER_1: We will go over this at some point in this episode, but really it runs through the entirety of the scripture sections dealing with baptism.
SPEAKER_1: But so we baptize infants, and then we bring them up in the faith.
SPEAKER_1: It's not just a matter of being baptized and, oh, well, I'm over the line, I'm good, I'm done.
SPEAKER_1: No, you are baptized, and then you progress in the faith.
SPEAKER_1: That's, of course, sanctification as part of that, but just being instructed in the faith.
SPEAKER_1: And so here, just to start off, we have the words of Christ commanding us to make disciples of all nations, of all races, by doing two things, the first of which is baptizing them.
SPEAKER_1: This is an incredibly important part of the Christian life.
SPEAKER_1: It is not something that is ancillary or secondary or something that can be ignored.
SPEAKER_1: It is placed right here in Christ's command to spread the faith as the first item.
SPEAKER_1: We have to pay attention to the words of Christ and the way that he spoke them, the words he chose, the order in which he put them.
SPEAKER_1: And he says, baptize and teach.
SPEAKER_2: And it's notable here in Matthew 28 that these are the very last words of that gospel.
SPEAKER_2: It doesn't say it, but Jesus obviously sent it into heaven.
SPEAKER_2: We know that from the other gospels.
SPEAKER_2: So this is the very end of Jesus' earthly ministry, the very last thing that he says, which is pretty important.
SPEAKER_2: The very last thing that God says before he ascends into heaven is go and baptize.
SPEAKER_2: I think that throughout church history, we've taken that seriously.
SPEAKER_2: And again, virtually basically every Christian denomination, including by definition, believes that baptism is something.
SPEAKER_2: You know, God had some to do with it.
SPEAKER_2: There's some called baptism.
SPEAKER_2: What we disagree on are the details.
SPEAKER_2: And so today's episode is to talk about the details.
SPEAKER_2: But I think as Cory just laid out up front, this is the cornerstone of the Christian faith.
SPEAKER_2: And it's notable that this is where God tells us how to baptize, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_2: This is the Trinity.
SPEAKER_2: One of the atheist Reddit tier memes is that, oh, the Trinity was unknown until AD 325.
SPEAKER_2: And then Constantine made it up.
SPEAKER_2: Before that, there was no Trinity.
SPEAKER_2: No one who's ever read the Bible would believe that.
SPEAKER_2: That's stupid beyond comprehension.
SPEAKER_2: Jesus Christ says the names of the persons of the Trinity and says, you will baptize in my name.
SPEAKER_2: This is Elohim.
SPEAKER_2: This is God Almighty.
SPEAKER_2: This is the three persons and one God that are confessed in all three ecumenical creeds.
SPEAKER_2: I think what's particularly interesting about Jesus' earthly ministry ending with baptism in Matthew 28 is that it perfectly bookends where Jesus' earthly ministry begins in Matthew 3.
SPEAKER_2: Matthew 1 and 2, you have his genealogy, his conception of the birth, and then John the Baptist.
SPEAKER_2: In Matthew 3, the very first thing that Jesus does at the beginning of his earthly ministry is to be baptized by John the Baptist.
SPEAKER_2: Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to John to be baptized by him.
SPEAKER_2: John would have prevented him, saying, I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?
SPEAKER_2: But Jesus answered him, let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.
SPEAKER_2: Then he consented.
SPEAKER_2: And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were open to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him.
SPEAKER_2: And behold, a voice from heaven said, This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.
SPEAKER_2: This is notable for two reasons.
SPEAKER_2: One, Jesus is being baptized.
SPEAKER_2: And as John said, like, why would you come to me to be baptized?
SPEAKER_2: I need to be baptized by you.
SPEAKER_2: And Jesus said that all good things would be fulfilled.
SPEAKER_2: All righteousness would be fulfilled.
SPEAKER_2: The reason I think that this book ends Matthew 28 so perfectly is that this is the physical manifestation of the Trinity.
SPEAKER_2: You have the Son, the second person of the Trinity, emerging from the waters of baptism.
SPEAKER_2: You have the Holy Spirit alighting on him as a dove.
SPEAKER_2: And you have God the Father speaking audibly for all to hear, saying, This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased.
SPEAKER_2: So here's the Trinity in baptism, Matthew 28.
SPEAKER_2: You have the Trinity as part of baptism.
SPEAKER_2: There's never been any doubt about the Trinity.
SPEAKER_2: From the first time that God referred to himself as plural in Genesis until now, until the creeds and the councils, Christianity has always worshipped a triune God.
SPEAKER_2: God revealed more of himself over time, but the simple fact is that anyone who just read the Bible and never read Reddit would never have any doubt that there's something triune.
SPEAKER_2: Now, triune was a neologism that was created specifically to try to describe what's going on here, to try to give one name to the three persons and one God.
SPEAKER_2: In a great many of the early debates in the Christian church were, how do we deal with three persons?
SPEAKER_2: How do we have a father and a son and the Holy Spirit?
SPEAKER_2: What is the difference?
SPEAKER_2: Is there a difference?
SPEAKER_2: Is it permissible to say different?
SPEAKER_2: All those debates are part of the controversies around the Trinity and around Christology as well.
SPEAKER_2: The fact that Jesus went into the water and then came out and all three parts of the Trinity appeared, bookends 28 so perfectly because this is the moment where Jesus put the power of baptism into the water.
SPEAKER_2: Jesus did not have his sins washed away in the Jordan, as we will get to in a minute, what baptism does for us.
SPEAKER_2: When Jesus was baptized, he was putting into the water that which we receive by faith in time, in the future.
SPEAKER_2: And so God is laying this out perfectly for us to know, A, this is really important and it's coming from me, and B, it's a physical thing.
SPEAKER_2: You know, the combination of the water and the word in baptism is what makes this a sacrament.
SPEAKER_2: God said, do this, he said, say this, and he said, use this.
SPEAKER_2: And the third this is the water.
SPEAKER_2: When the water is present and the word is spoken, that is baptism.
SPEAKER_2: That's what God promises.
SPEAKER_2: And so all the promises that we're going to get to elsewhere in Scripture that are attendant to this sacrament hinge on those things being done.
SPEAKER_2: And the fact that God commanded it, again, that goes back to what the story I gave at the beginning about the $100 bill.
SPEAKER_2: When God says, do this, and then we do it, if we put the focus on ourselves and say, here's, look, look what I did.
SPEAKER_2: I went to the Jordan.
SPEAKER_2: I went to the Jordan three times, as my grandparents did.
SPEAKER_2: My grandparents were Baptist.
SPEAKER_2: They were baptized in the Jordan at least twice.
SPEAKER_2: They were baptized many times over their lives.
SPEAKER_2: And it worked.
SPEAKER_2: The first one worked.
SPEAKER_2: We'll talk about multiple baptisms, but on my dad's side, they were Baptist for I don't know how long.
SPEAKER_2: So if you're Baptist and you're listening, I'm not trying to pick on you.
SPEAKER_2: My grandmother and grandfather are in heaven right now.
SPEAKER_2: They were Christians.
SPEAKER_2: I think they got some things wrong and it didn't impair their faith.
SPEAKER_2: But again, when we talk about what God promises and what He gives to us, it's not about saying, well, you got this wrong.
SPEAKER_2: It's not about getting a higher score on the test.
SPEAKER_2: It's about receiving the gifts that God is giving to us, as He describes in Scripture in our lives.
SPEAKER_2: And the beauty of the sacraments of baptism and of Holy Communion is that with the physical element that we're going to get to, that was here with John the Baptist, the application of water and the Word, that becomes a physical touchstone in the life of a Christian to point to a moment in time, in space, where something happened.
SPEAKER_2: And I think that's a key element of the Lutheran sacramentology, is that here's a physical thing that actually happened.
SPEAKER_2: It removes theology from the realm of the theoretical or kind of metaphysical.
SPEAKER_2: I'm thinking and loving and worshiping, but it's all inside.
SPEAKER_2: It's all attitudinal.
SPEAKER_2: And the problem with framing your faith in terms of how I feel or what I think or what I'm doing because of how I think or feel, is that there are days when you're going to fall short.
SPEAKER_2: There are days when you're just not going to feel it.
SPEAKER_2: There are days when you're going to get it wrong.
SPEAKER_2: And if the root of your faith is, I'm doing the stuff, on the day when you don't feel like doing the stuff or you doubt maybe that you ever sincerely believed or did the stuff in the past, that's an open door for Satan to slide through and to say, haha, gotcha, you were never a Christian in the first place.
SPEAKER_2: And so the promise of salvation that we're going to get into, that Christ puts in the water of baptism here, seals a promise from God that no man can take away.
SPEAKER_2: Satan can't take it away.
SPEAKER_2: We can throw it away.
SPEAKER_2: It is possible for us to despise our baptisms, but God keeps his promises to us.
SPEAKER_2: He will do what he says he's going to do.
SPEAKER_2: And so when we talk about all of this, we're emphasizing what God is doing in baptism, precisely so that in those moments where we doubt ourselves, we still have something to cling to.
SPEAKER_2: We still have God's promises to cling to, because you can always count on that.
SPEAKER_2: There may come a time in your life when literally the only thing you can comprehend, I believe that God is God.
SPEAKER_2: That may be all you have.
SPEAKER_2: You may not believe that your sins are forgiven.
SPEAKER_2: You may not believe that even that Jesus died for you.
SPEAKER_2: If you can still believe that God is God, scripture will give you the chance to work your way back through faith, through the Holy Spirit, to where God wants you.
SPEAKER_2: But if you root your faith and your confidence in my stuff and my doing and my past actions and my beliefs, then you're being deprived of one of the greatest sources of joy and comfort in the Christian life.
SPEAKER_2: And that's why this is so fundamental to Lutheran.
SPEAKER_2: And we move to Christian theology.
SPEAKER_2: It's not just sacramentology.
SPEAKER_2: This is a key part of the Christian life because it's how Jesus began his ministry and it's how he ended it.
SPEAKER_2: And he ended it at the beginning of the Church Age, saying, go and do this for everyone else.
SPEAKER_2: This thing that I have now done for you, give it to everyone because this is my thing.
SPEAKER_2: I need everyone to have it because it does what I promise it's going to do.
SPEAKER_1: If you go up to a random Lutheran and ask what baptism is, you should get an answer that is roughly what we have said thus far.
SPEAKER_1: Because in part, it's just going to be a quote from The Small Catechism.
SPEAKER_1: And this is my putting on notice all of the Lutheran listeners that you should have this answer memorized and in mind if someone asks you.
SPEAKER_1: But from The Small Catechism, what is baptism?
SPEAKER_1: Baptism is not simple water only, but it is the water comprehended in God's command and connected with God's Word.
SPEAKER_1: And I want to read two paragraphs from The Large Catechism that expand on this and also preemptorily respond to a particular objection.
SPEAKER_1: From this now learn a proper understanding of the subject and how to answer the question what baptism is, namely thus, that it is not mere ordinary water, but water comprehended in God's Word and command, and sanctified thereby, so that it is nothing else than a divine water, not that the water itself is nobler than other water, but that God's Word and command are added.
SPEAKER_1: Therefore, I exhort again that these two, the water and the Word, by no means be separated from one another and parted.
SPEAKER_1: For if the Word is separated from it, the water is the same as that with which the servant cooks, and may indeed be called a bathkeeper's baptism.
SPEAKER_1: But when it is added, as God has ordained, it is a sacrament, and it is called Christ baptism.
SPEAKER_1: Which is the central point that we're making here about the difference between the sacrament and mere water.
SPEAKER_1: Mere water is not a baptism.
SPEAKER_1: If I run up to you and throw a bucket of water at you, that doesn't count as a baptism, because in order for it to be a baptism, we have to do what Christ commanded us to do.
SPEAKER_1: And what did He command us to do?
SPEAKER_1: He commanded us to baptize in the triune name, yes, with water.
SPEAKER_1: Both elements have to be present, or it is not the sacrament.
SPEAKER_1: Because the sacrament is instituted by God in a certain way.
SPEAKER_1: And so it is that sacrament if it is done in that way.
SPEAKER_1: This is not to say, and I know that some of the audience who are a little more versed in theology will be thinking in the back of their mind, ex oper operato.
SPEAKER_1: That's not what I'm saying.
SPEAKER_1: That's not what we're advocating here.
SPEAKER_1: It is not the sacrament simply because the thing is done.
SPEAKER_1: Faith is still required.
SPEAKER_1: It is still faith that receives the gift.
SPEAKER_1: Yes, faith itself is also a gift, but faith receives the gift of regeneration, the gift of salvation.
SPEAKER_1: And so it's not simply because you speak the words and there's water.
SPEAKER_1: Faith is also present because faith is the central part of the Christian religion.
SPEAKER_1: These gifts of God can be received only in faith, just as a promise can be trusted only in hope or faith.
SPEAKER_1: That's the only way to receive a promise.
SPEAKER_1: The only way to receive the good things of God is via faith.
SPEAKER_1: But I would also like to expand here on something that Woe just said, and that is, when discussing baptism with others, I will often receive the question, why do we need baptism?
SPEAKER_1: Why do we need a physical sign?
SPEAKER_1: Now, of course, my first instinct is going to be the instinct for most Lutherans, is to shut my sinful mouth and not question why God has done what God has done.
SPEAKER_1: However, in this case, I think that it is reasonable and I think that we can give an answer.
SPEAKER_1: To some degree, there's some speculation in this, but it is also based on the totality of the verses dealing with baptism and also the Lord's Supper in Scripture.
SPEAKER_1: And incidentally, also circumcision, which is typological of baptism.
SPEAKER_1: We'll get more into that later.
SPEAKER_1: But why do we have this physical sign?
SPEAKER_1: And the reason is simple.
SPEAKER_1: We're physical.
SPEAKER_1: You're listening to this with physical ears.
SPEAKER_1: Or if you're reading it, you're reading it with physical eyes.
SPEAKER_1: Presumably no one has translated or copied it over into Braille yet.
SPEAKER_1: But you are interacting with this in a physical way, because you are physical.
SPEAKER_1: Now you aren't just physical, because you are, of course, a spirit, a soul, and a body.
SPEAKER_1: Again, this is not where we're getting into tripartite versus dipartite, or that whole philosophical theological argument.
SPEAKER_1: That's not the point.
SPEAKER_1: The point is that you are not simply physical and not simply spiritual.
SPEAKER_1: You are both joined together.
SPEAKER_1: And so, we have both.
SPEAKER_1: In Scripture, because God is coming to you as the totality of what you are, because God is superabundant with His grace and His gifts, He doesn't just give you one way for the forgiveness of sins.
SPEAKER_1: He gives you many.
SPEAKER_1: You have the Lord's Supper, you have baptism, you have confession and absolution, you have confessing your sins directly to God, you have the Word, you have all of these various ways, because God's gifts are superabundant.
SPEAKER_1: And so the reason we have baptism is because if you hear the Word, well, that's received by the mind, and we'll, again, not dwell on the distinction between the mind and the spirit here, but that is received not so much by the physical you as by the spiritual you.
SPEAKER_1: And so what is the body doing in that interchange?
SPEAKER_1: Well, it's sort of passively listening and relaying that information.
SPEAKER_1: However, if you are immersed under water, well, the body understands water quite well.
SPEAKER_1: And so in the Sacraments, we have this joining together of the physical element and the Word, so the whole man, the total man, the body and the spirit together, can grasp this thing.
SPEAKER_1: That is God helping you to truly believe that he is bringing his gifts to you.
SPEAKER_1: That is why you have the physical combined with the Word.
SPEAKER_1: That is why they are both important.
SPEAKER_2: And as that Small Catechism quote discussed, it's not the simple water that's doing it.
SPEAKER_2: It's the water and God's promise.
SPEAKER_2: And I think one of the hangups that some Protestants have is that it's just simple water.
SPEAKER_2: You look at it like it's just water.
SPEAKER_2: It came from the tap.
SPEAKER_2: And when we do the episode on Communion, it's the same thing.
SPEAKER_2: It's bread and it's wine.
SPEAKER_2: It's not magic bread and magic wine.
SPEAKER_2: It's normal stuff, normal material stuff, plus the Word of God.
SPEAKER_2: And there is a big strain in theology where people flee from that.
SPEAKER_2: Like, well, that's too simple.
SPEAKER_2: That's too easy.
SPEAKER_2: I don't see it.
SPEAKER_2: I don't believe it.
SPEAKER_2: Part of the reason that this sacramental understanding is pivotal is that if you deny that simple things can also be God's things, that's a Christological heresy.
SPEAKER_2: That is denying God.
SPEAKER_2: Because how did God come among us?
SPEAKER_2: As a baby, he was an infant lying in a manger.
SPEAKER_2: He was in a stall for livestock.
SPEAKER_2: He was swaddled and his parents loved him.
SPEAKER_2: He was probably a very cute baby, but Jesus pooped his diapers.
SPEAKER_2: Mary had to clean him up because he pooped himself.
SPEAKER_2: You look at this baby and you trust in the promise of God that this is the Messiah, but you're also looking at a tiny screaming infant that's pooping and peeing because it's what humans do.
SPEAKER_2: And so the natural material mind to look at that thing, to look at that small child, say, Oh, I can't be God.
SPEAKER_2: Look at that.
SPEAKER_2: It's small and weak and doesn't know anything.
SPEAKER_2: How can that be God?
SPEAKER_2: That can't be really God.
SPEAKER_2: Well, if you trust in God's promises that he had made up to that point and the miracle of the birth, then it becomes very easy because you're not trusting in a magic baby, you're trusting in God's promises.
SPEAKER_2: And then it ceases to be magic.
SPEAKER_2: It's simply God.
SPEAKER_2: It's something that is supernatural and transcendent in a way that we cannot possibly comprehend, and we're fine with that.
SPEAKER_2: Sacrament is something that we get through Latin from the Greek word mystery.
SPEAKER_2: These things are mysteries.
SPEAKER_2: When God, the Almighty, the Infinite, the Eternal, the Omniscient, the Omnipresent, acts in space and time, within creation, it's gonna look weird.
SPEAKER_2: So you end up with Jesus in a manger, and yet he's fully God and fully man at the same time.
SPEAKER_2: It's not two halves glued together.
SPEAKER_2: There are all sorts of Christological heresies that go along with trying to rationally explain what's in the manger and what's on the cross.
SPEAKER_2: When we believe and confess what Scripture says about all of these things, there come times when we're talking about the Sacraments and we're talking about Christ's union of God and man, where reason fails us.
SPEAKER_2: And there are not many places in the faith where that's the case, but this is one of them.
SPEAKER_2: And I think chief among the arguments that we have among denominations about the Sacraments is fundamentally unbelief that God can do these miraculous things that he says he can do when we're talking about the material world.
SPEAKER_2: In John 3, man came to Jesus by night and said to him, Rabbi, we know that you're a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.
SPEAKER_2: Jesus answered him, truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.
SPEAKER_2: Nicodemus said to him, how can a man be born when he is old?
SPEAKER_2: Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?
SPEAKER_2: Jesus answered him, truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.
SPEAKER_2: That which is born of flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is Spirit.
SPEAKER_2: Do not marvel that I said to you, you must be born again.
SPEAKER_2: The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.
SPEAKER_2: So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.
SPEAKER_2: So when Jesus answers Nicodemus, you must be born of the water and the Spirit, this is Catechesis about baptism.
SPEAKER_2: Anytime word and water are connected, the Spirit and water are connected in Scripture, it's pointing to baptism.
SPEAKER_2: It's pointing to the promise that God placed on the water when Jesus was himself baptized.
SPEAKER_2: I think one of the chief hangups that a lot of Protestants have come from a misunderstanding of the solas.
SPEAKER_2: You know, Corey was talking a minute ago about receiving these things by faith, including baptism imparting faith, as we'll get to some of those verses, and then faith receiving that gift itself.
SPEAKER_2: It's a case where reason kind of falls down, but it's important for us just to acknowledge that when God's acting, we can't necessarily make sense of it, but we have to believe it.
SPEAKER_2: And so when God connects water to a promise, we take it at face value.
SPEAKER_2: And I think that a lot of the arguments against this view of baptism come down to misunderstanding the solas.
SPEAKER_2: Corey did a video a while ago that's up on YouTube.
SPEAKER_2: We'll put in the show notes specifically going into what sola fide actually means.
SPEAKER_2: This is not what most of you think.
SPEAKER_2: If you actually understand the Latin behind it and the arguments that were being made at that time, baptism, faith alone does not mean faith and nothing else.
SPEAKER_2: Because it's not what we find in Scripture.
SPEAKER_2: We find faith in other things.
SPEAKER_2: But along with all of that, wherever you have God's Word and you have His promises, you will also have other things.
SPEAKER_2: And sometimes those are signs, sometimes they're symbols.
SPEAKER_2: That does happen.
SPEAKER_2: Baptism is more than a symbol because it is doing something.
SPEAKER_2: When Jesus says you must be born of water and the Spirit, think about your birth.
SPEAKER_2: We've talked in the past about the obedience the Lazarus had when Jesus says, Lazarus, come out.
SPEAKER_2: How much cooperation was there in that moment where a dead man hears God and obeys him from the grave, from death?
SPEAKER_2: It's the same thing at the other end of life here.
SPEAKER_2: When Jesus says you must be born of water and the Spirit, talking about a rebirth, it's saying you're starting from scratch.
SPEAKER_2: You don't have agency in your birth.
SPEAKER_2: We have no control over the day of our birth, the hour of our birth.
SPEAKER_2: We're along for the ride as God doing something through our mothers in a miracle.
SPEAKER_2: It's a miracle that plays out every day, but it's no less miraculous for it.
SPEAKER_2: So when we are born of water, it is the same sort of passive birth that we have in baptism.
SPEAKER_2: And the fact that there is human participation in baptism goes back to the allusion to receiving a $100 bill.
SPEAKER_2: If I hand you a $100 bill and you make the story about all the activity that you did related to you grasping it and receiving it and taking it, if it's all about you, like that's not really the story.
SPEAKER_2: That's not a fair accounting of what actually happened.
SPEAKER_2: And when Jesus talked about you being born of water in the Spirit, that is a rebirth that he's giving us.
SPEAKER_2: It's a rebirth that he put into the water for us to receive.
SPEAKER_1: And there is, of course, the even more blunt statement in Mark 16.
SPEAKER_1: Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.
SPEAKER_1: And I think this is a good point to go over another point of confusion with regard to what Lutherans teach.
SPEAKER_1: Many do not understand this, and in part it can potentially be a little bit confusing.
SPEAKER_1: And I know that the rationalists, or those who are, let's say, rationalists adjacent in the audience, are going to hate the way that I phrase this, but I will explain it, and it won't be so bad when I'm done.
SPEAKER_1: And the question, of course, is baptism necessary?
SPEAKER_1: The Lutheran answer, the best way that I can find to formulate it, is yes, but no, but yes.
SPEAKER_1: And the reason for that is that the first answer to is baptism necessary is yes.
SPEAKER_1: Because what does Scripture say?
SPEAKER_1: Well, I just read it.
SPEAKER_1: Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved.
SPEAKER_1: That makes baptism necessary.
SPEAKER_1: As a Christian, you must be baptized.
SPEAKER_1: However, is it absolutely necessary to be baptized to be saved?
SPEAKER_1: To that we must answer no, because it is, of course, conceivable that one could come to faith, believe in Christ, and not have the opportunity to be baptized, because, for instance, you could be brought to faith through the Word, planned to be baptized in three days and hit by a bus.
SPEAKER_1: Would you be saved?
SPEAKER_1: Yes.
SPEAKER_1: And so is baptism absolutely necessary?
SPEAKER_1: The answer must be no, because there are those who could be saved in the absence of being baptized.
SPEAKER_1: But the final but yes is that baptism is indeed necessary, because if you neglect to be baptized, if you dishonor baptism, if you consider baptism to be an unimportant thing, and so neglect to be baptized, that is proof that you are not actually a Christian.
SPEAKER_1: And so if someone lives and proclaims himself to be a Christian for 40 years but is never baptized, that is very strong evidence that he was not actually a Christian.
SPEAKER_1: And so that is the but yes, baptism is necessary.
SPEAKER_1: And so that's the Lutheran position, because that's the position taken from Scripture, that baptism is necessary for the Christian, but not absolutely necessary, but not something that is optional or can be ignored and so is a true sign of a true Christian.
SPEAKER_1: And so at first it may seem like that is, when you just hear the way that it's phrased initially, irrational, but it's not once it's explained.
SPEAKER_1: It's very clear and it is taken directly from Scripture.
SPEAKER_2: And of course, the most obvious example, that is the thief on the cross.
SPEAKER_2: There was a man on one side of Jesus who was mocking him, saying, you're the son of God, take yourself down.
SPEAKER_2: And there's a man on the other side that said, why do you mock him?
SPEAKER_2: We're under condemnation for we're going to die and we deserve it, but this man doesn't.
SPEAKER_2: And then he turned to Jesus and said, Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.
SPEAKER_2: And Jesus said, I tell you this day, you will be with me in paradise.
SPEAKER_2: There's no reason to believe that that man was baptized.
SPEAKER_2: There is, however, reason to believe he had faith because he confessed his faith.
SPEAKER_2: He confessed that Jesus was innocent.
SPEAKER_2: He confessed that he was going to be in his kingdom that day.
SPEAKER_2: And his plea was simple.
SPEAKER_2: Lord, remember me.
SPEAKER_2: And he was, he's the example that's often given to say, well, baptism can't possibly count for anything because here's a man who wasn't baptized.
SPEAKER_2: The hypothetical, which is absolutely necessary, is what Corey just said.
SPEAKER_2: If that man had then some, you know, if the earthquake had struck before Jesus died, and somehow they all fell down and that thief had run off and not died that day.
SPEAKER_2: If he had despised baptism, if he had been called upon to be baptized, which remember at that time he knew about Jesus, he may not have known about John.
SPEAKER_2: We don't know exactly what he knows.
SPEAKER_2: We know he witnessed some miracles.
SPEAKER_2: When the teaching of baptism came to him, as it came to all Christians shortly thereafter, had he despised and said, no, I'm good, I've got faith, I don't need baptism, he would have been condemned, and Jesus would have had a different answer for him.
SPEAKER_2: The fact that he confessed and did not have the opportunity for baptism, frankly, that's the whole history of believers prior to the institution of baptism.
SPEAKER_2: Heaven for 4,000 years was filled up with men who were not baptized.
SPEAKER_2: They were circumcised, which was a type of baptism, but it was a different thing.
SPEAKER_2: There are times when God uses different things in different places, and the fact that one group of people is not given something and then the other one is at a different time, doesn't mean that we get to ignore what the thing was when God gave it.
SPEAKER_2: We have to treat it for what it was and what it is in the time in which it's given.
SPEAKER_2: And baptism is given to us, is given in the Church in Matthew 3.28.
SPEAKER_2: Go therefore and baptize all nations.
SPEAKER_2: That's us.
SPEAKER_2: We're the nations.
SPEAKER_2: We're not Jews.
SPEAKER_2: We are, you know, most of the audience is sons of Japheth.
SPEAKER_2: We're Europeans.
SPEAKER_2: We're white guys.
SPEAKER_2: We're receiving the gift sent to the nations by Paul and the other apostles who spread out from that time.
SPEAKER_2: And so we are the recipients of the very thing that God desired for us.
SPEAKER_2: And that included foremost among them baptism.
SPEAKER_2: We'll get into here in a minute the baptism of households.
SPEAKER_2: And we've talked in past episodes, particularly the one on election and the one on Christian nationalism about how nations are a superset of the household.
SPEAKER_2: And so historically, the Christian faith has been spread by prophets often going to the king, going to the man in charge.
SPEAKER_2: This is what Jonah did in Nineveh.
SPEAKER_2: He went to the king of Nineveh, told him to repent, said, God's going to kill you all in 40 days.
SPEAKER_2: The king of Nineveh repented.
SPEAKER_2: He told his people to repent and they were saved from God's wrath by God's mercy.
SPEAKER_2: They received the word.
SPEAKER_2: They were not Jews.
SPEAKER_2: They were outside of all the covenants that we talk about.
SPEAKER_2: And yet when the word came to them, they confessed, they repented, and they were forgiven.
SPEAKER_2: And that came from the top down.
SPEAKER_2: That was absolutely Christian nationalism in Jonah.
SPEAKER_2: And the same thing is the history of the Christian faith in European nations.
SPEAKER_2: Not exclusively.
SPEAKER_2: It's not the only way that it happens.
SPEAKER_2: There are many listeners today, as Corey said, it's weird and kind of broken that there are people who are listening to us where in some cases this may be one of the first times that some of you are hearing about the Christian faith.
SPEAKER_2: And that's wonderful.
SPEAKER_2: And that's a miracle from God that he's able to use this to reach you.
SPEAKER_2: And one of the things that you're realizing as you come to that knowledge is that your parents sinned against you, your grandparents.
SPEAKER_2: Like at some point, your ancestors who knew about God forgot him and despised him.
SPEAKER_2: And so your inheritance was one of damnation.
SPEAKER_2: This is what happened to all the nations after the flood and after Babel.
SPEAKER_2: They scattered and most of them forgot about God.
SPEAKER_2: And it was only, it was as far as we can tell, it was exclusively in the end, God preserving the faith through the Jewish people that any belief was preserved.
SPEAKER_2: Because everyone else was apostatizing, just as the Jews tried to repeatedly for hundreds of years, they were constantly trying to throw God away.
SPEAKER_2: God hung on to his people because they're elect, they're his.
SPEAKER_2: He will not let them get out of his hand.
SPEAKER_2: And so the gift of baptism, the gift of these means of grace, acts in time as a particular touchstone.
SPEAKER_2: And the belief and the knowledge of that actual activity, again, it takes it away from the realm of the hypothetical and the realm of the intellectual and makes it something concrete.
SPEAKER_2: I have a certificate from the day I was baptized.
SPEAKER_2: I was about three years old.
SPEAKER_2: I actually remember that day.
SPEAKER_2: I was able to develop memories pretty early.
SPEAKER_2: I don't remember being baptized, but I can remember my dad and the narthex with my mom and the pastor because the pastor was trying to show my dad how to hold me and he was holding me the wrong way.
SPEAKER_2: And I remember the pastor correcting him.
SPEAKER_2: That's one of my earliest memories.
SPEAKER_2: But I do remember that day in 1980.
SPEAKER_2: One of the blessings of the traditional Christian understanding of baptism is that I can point back to that day.
SPEAKER_2: That's part of the reason for giving a certificate of baptism.
SPEAKER_2: It's not congratulations.
SPEAKER_2: Look at the great job you did.
SPEAKER_2: It's not an achievement certificate.
SPEAKER_2: It's a commemoration of an important event in my life.
SPEAKER_2: And one of the very interesting things, if you do any genealogy for Christians in the West, it's generally...
SPEAKER_2: Sometimes you may not even have a birthday for someone, but you may have a baptismal day instead.
SPEAKER_2: And you know, there's birth, baptism, wedding and death are the four days that are traditionally preserved for every Christian historically in the West.
SPEAKER_2: And genealogies will always have some combination of those.
SPEAKER_2: And frequently you'll have all four.
SPEAKER_2: Baptism is included because Christians have always known that it was important.
SPEAKER_2: Not as something that we do, but as something that God does for us.
SPEAKER_2: And so when Jesus talked to Nicodemus about being born from water in the Spirit, it was that baptism that's given to us.
SPEAKER_2: And pointing to that blessing is a comfort.
SPEAKER_2: I can take comfort in that to know that no matter what happens to me, God made a promise when His name was placed on me, the name of the Father and of the Son of the Holy Spirit was placed on me in my baptism 43 years ago.
SPEAKER_2: That's a permanent marker in my life, just as my name being written in the Book of Life from before eternity is permanent.
SPEAKER_2: But I can't see that book.
SPEAKER_2: I can't see that.
SPEAKER_2: That's not real to me in the sense that my baptism was.
SPEAKER_2: There was actual witnesses.
SPEAKER_2: There was an actual act.
SPEAKER_2: I was a recipient of it and I received faith.
SPEAKER_2: Now, as we look at these things, the reason that we're focusing on them is for that purpose.
SPEAKER_2: It's for comfort.
SPEAKER_2: And so we're going to talk about some things that are going to, as I said earlier, they're going to make some of you feel like, oh, we think you're doing something wrong.
SPEAKER_2: The point is not whether or not we're getting stuff wrong.
SPEAKER_2: The point is whether we're receiving what God tells us faithfully.
SPEAKER_2: Because if we do that, then we're receiving the full measure of what it is He wants us to have.
SPEAKER_2: And whenever you don't believe God about anything, you're losing out.
SPEAKER_2: And so it's not principally for a Christian a question of, oh, am I sinning?
SPEAKER_2: Oh, am I damned because I did this?
SPEAKER_2: Those are concerns, but the chief concern is, am I missing out?
SPEAKER_2: We should be jealous of God's things.
SPEAKER_2: We should want God's stuff, because we know that we're adopted sons of God.
SPEAKER_2: And as Christians who have a proper sacramentology, we understand that our baptism is the certain moment of that adoption, of that rebirth.
SPEAKER_1: I have one of my many Bibles sitting here and turning to the beginning of it, it has a page, although in this Bible it's only one page, but for births, marriages, baptisms, confirmations and deaths.
SPEAKER_1: Of course, confirmations you're not going to find in every Bible because that's going to be specific to those traditions that have a confirmation rite.
SPEAKER_1: But that has historically been the standard for Christians.
SPEAKER_1: Those were the things that were recorded, and often they were recorded in the family Bible.
SPEAKER_1: And that is part of how genealogical research is done.
SPEAKER_1: If you can get a hold of the old family Bible, you can get these dates and information.
SPEAKER_1: Sometimes they're stored in the church records as well, if you can get a hold of those if they've been preserved adequately.
SPEAKER_1: That is properly the history of our people.
SPEAKER_1: That is properly the history of the European peoples, is Christianity and the transmission of the Christian faith from father to son down through the ages.
SPEAKER_1: That is how it is supposed to be.
SPEAKER_1: And part of how that is done is through baptism.
SPEAKER_1: It is through the baptizing of one's children.
SPEAKER_1: Now, notably, I was not raised Lutheran, so I wasn't baptized until I was 11, but so I was a little older than Woe was, but still baptized as a child.
SPEAKER_1: You're still a child when you're 11.
SPEAKER_1: And if you baptize a child at 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, whatever it happens to be, as I've said before, it's not really that different from baptizing that same child at one or two weeks old, or however old it happens to be.
SPEAKER_1: We're not bound by the stricture of the old covenant.
SPEAKER_1: We do not have to baptize on the eighth day.
SPEAKER_1: It is advisable to baptize as early as possible, but it doesn't have to be on the eighth day.
SPEAKER_1: But the reason I would say that there's not much of a functional difference is the child is still, if the child has been instructed properly, the child is still going to follow what his father has told him to do.
SPEAKER_1: And so the ten-year-old should be obeying his father no less than the one-week-old.
SPEAKER_1: Yes, the ten-year-old can walk up to the baptismal font or the pool, whatever it happens to be, and actually verbalize his faith in Christ, but that doesn't make for a real difference between that and the infant, because as we've been saying and as we will show with additional Scripture proofs, that faith that is given you in baptism is a gift from God.
SPEAKER_1: If you have faith before you're baptized, well, that faith is still a gift from God.
SPEAKER_1: The baptism is reinforcing your faith.
SPEAKER_1: It is affirming your faith.
SPEAKER_1: It is God coming to you again to help you and guide you, to strengthen you in the faith, to lead you on the path of regeneration, sanctification.
SPEAKER_1: Yes, you're regenerated when you are given the gift of faith, but sanctification is a lifelong process, depending on how you define the term regeneration anyway.
SPEAKER_1: And just to be extremely clear, Woe said God's people.
SPEAKER_1: When we say God's people, I don't want anyone in the audience who may be listening to this as the first episode to come away thinking the wrong thing.
SPEAKER_1: When we say God's people, we mean the true Israel, the Church.
SPEAKER_1: We mean believers.
SPEAKER_1: We mean you, those who have faith.
SPEAKER_1: From Adam is the first believer to whatever unfortunate man is the last one on this earth who has faith.
SPEAKER_1: Fortunate because he has faith, unfortunate because he's lived through whatever came directly before that.
SPEAKER_1: Those are God's people.
SPEAKER_1: God's people are the elect.
SPEAKER_1: We do not mean the ethnic Jewish people.
SPEAKER_1: There are ethnic Jews who are among the elect, who are Christians.
SPEAKER_1: Very few these days, more historically.
SPEAKER_1: But the elect are God's people.
SPEAKER_1: That is all that term means.
SPEAKER_1: These terms are interchangeable.
SPEAKER_1: We did an episode on this.
SPEAKER_1: I'll put it in the show notes for those who did not listen to that yet, so they can go back, or if you need a refresher.
SPEAKER_2: A couple other passages I want to read that talk about what baptism actually does, in God's words.
SPEAKER_2: From Ephesians 5, Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish, in the same way husbands should love their wives as their bodies.
SPEAKER_2: So here we're talking about Jesus washing his bride, the church, that's all of us, that's all believers, that's the elect, washing with water and the word.
SPEAKER_2: Mirrod, again, from Matthew 28, talking about baptism and teaching.
SPEAKER_2: That's the water and the word.
SPEAKER_2: So not only do we have water here, talking about washing to present the church, to present you as without spot or wrinkle or as blameless, but Jesus is doing the washing.
SPEAKER_2: I think that's crucial for us when we're discussing baptism, because this is one of the chief points of dispute among some Protestants.
SPEAKER_2: Who's doing the baptism?
SPEAKER_2: Because if it's me doing it, say that Corey had weren't baptized until he was adult, and I met him, we were friends, and for whatever reason, I felt it was appropriate for me to baptize him.
SPEAKER_2: Generally, that's disorderly.
SPEAKER_2: Generally, it's best if a pastor does it, but there are circumstances where it may be appropriate for one Christian to baptize another.
SPEAKER_2: That's legitimate.
SPEAKER_2: It's a question of order.
SPEAKER_2: It's not a question of legitimacy.
SPEAKER_2: If Corey had come to me and I had baptized him in view of Ephesians 5, would you conclude that I had washed away his sins, or that he had somehow cleansed himself?
SPEAKER_2: Who's doing the cleansing in the baptism?
SPEAKER_2: It can only possibly be God.
SPEAKER_2: So as I said, there's going to be the video that we'll link to explaining the solas.
SPEAKER_2: When we talk about faith alone, one of the simplistic and completely incorrect arguments against this view of baptism is, well, that's works.
SPEAKER_2: You're talking about doing works.
SPEAKER_2: If you believe Ephesians 5, how can you possibly say that that's works?
SPEAKER_2: When Jesus talks about cleansing us, cleansing the church with a washing of water in the Word, where's the us in that except as the cleansed, except as the recipient of the grace, the recipient of the washing of the baptism?
SPEAKER_2: And it is the same thing.
SPEAKER_2: Everywhere that you find washing and water, it is about baptism.
SPEAKER_2: And one of the things that happens when these discussions occur interdenominationally is that all these passages that very clearly describe what baptism is doing, folks have to ignore them and say, well, it's got nothing to do with baptism because it can't possibly mean that if you stick to a works righteousness view of these actions.
SPEAKER_2: And the point is that this is not works righteousness because they're not our works, they're God's works.
SPEAKER_2: The story is not you reaching out and taking the $100 bill.
SPEAKER_2: The story is the $100 bill being handed to you.
SPEAKER_2: You're receiving a gift.
SPEAKER_2: And to whatever extent you are physically participating, it's passive, it's incidental, it's necessary to the reception.
SPEAKER_2: But you are the receiver of the gift.
SPEAKER_2: You're not the one doing it.
SPEAKER_2: The same is the case in Titus 3.
SPEAKER_2: But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, He saved us not because of works done by us and righteousness, but according to His own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior.
SPEAKER_2: So that being justified by His grace, we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.
SPEAKER_2: The saying is trustworthy and I want you all to insist on these things.
SPEAKER_2: The washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit is exactly the same kind of speech as in Ephesians 5, washing of water with the Word.
SPEAKER_2: The Word and the Spirit come together through the water.
SPEAKER_2: The Word is always paramount.
SPEAKER_2: The Word is always spoken at all of these moments, even if it's only the Word.
SPEAKER_2: The Word is efficacious on its own.
SPEAKER_2: Every Christian knows that.
SPEAKER_2: There's no disagreement that the Word is not efficacious on its own.
SPEAKER_2: The Word, when combined with these physical elements and sacraments, is equally efficacious.
SPEAKER_2: The additional benefit of the physical means in the means of grace is not that there's extra stuff in baptism, but that there's physical certainty that perhaps Satan can deprive you if it's only mental.
SPEAKER_2: So if you come to faith by hearing as an adult and then you desire baptism, as is often the case in Scripture, there are many who came to be believers and then they were baptized.
SPEAKER_2: They received the gift of faith and they were baptized.
SPEAKER_2: And there's some who point to this and say, well, see clearly baptism is a sign of faith that's already received.
SPEAKER_2: God gives us the baptism because Satan can come along later and attack your belief, can attack your confidence in your own belief.
SPEAKER_2: And so what the sacraments do, what baptism does, that one moment in time, you know, maybe you got a certificate, you have witnesses to it.
SPEAKER_2: When you are, when you are baptized, past tense, past perfect progressive, it's an ongoing permanent state of affairs.
SPEAKER_2: I am baptized, not I was baptized.
SPEAKER_2: It is who I am.
SPEAKER_2: Now I am baptized into Christ.
SPEAKER_2: Even if I had faith before I was baptized, and I may well have.
SPEAKER_2: My parents were probably reading the Bible too, even when I was, you know, two or three, and then they had me baptized.
SPEAKER_2: It was pretty much all happening at the same time.
SPEAKER_2: There are many of you where maybe you hear the word, you come to faith, and then you're baptized.
SPEAKER_2: God gives us the superabundance of His grace precisely because ten years from now, you suffer some calamity, you suffer a crisis of faith, and you are doubting if you ever believed in God.
SPEAKER_2: If your faith is rooted in, yeah, I believed in God really hard, and I got baptized because of what I believed, and I was doing all this stuff, and you know, God was there, but I was a doer, I was a prime mover.
SPEAKER_2: Satan can use that attitude, even if in a narrow sense it's true.
SPEAKER_2: Ultimately, if you understand faith, you understand that you're not doing anything, because you were dead in your trespasses, you were reborn in faith.
SPEAKER_2: That is the gift of God that he gives to us.
SPEAKER_2: Even if it's narrowly true that you believed, and then you were baptized, and then you went on, Satan knows that that gap of time between when you were a believer and when you were baptized, if you throw the baptism out and say that I did the baptism too, I did the believing, and I got the believer's baptism because I was believing and I was really doing a really good job with my faith, I was me doing stuff, me, me, me.
SPEAKER_2: Satan could come along and say, cast doubt on that, and say, well, did you really believe?
SPEAKER_2: Didn't you have doubts?
SPEAKER_2: Wasn't there something about that that didn't add up?
SPEAKER_2: Or maybe you were a hypocrite when you were doing it.
SPEAKER_2: Maybe you were a believer, but you were still committing these other sins, and you ignored it.
SPEAKER_2: And later on, when those hit you like a ton of bricks, you look back and you think, well, did I ever really believe?
SPEAKER_2: And some people reach that crisis of faith, and Satan gets a hold of some of them and tears them away from God completely.
SPEAKER_2: Baptism, when it is received by a believer, is still a stopgap, because baptism is an anchor of God's promise in your life, saying, it doesn't matter what happened before.
SPEAKER_2: It doesn't matter if you were a believer before you were baptized, because whatever happened before that day, when God's Word was given to you with the promise in the water, that is a moment that is God acting to you.
SPEAKER_2: God is pouring out His blessings on you, He is washing and cleansing you by the water with the Word.
SPEAKER_2: If your confidence is in that, then you will be confident that no matter what else, you can believe all of Satan's lies about you, you can believe his lies about how evil you are and how much wrath you deserve.
SPEAKER_2: They may be true, but the lie is that you then don't deserve God's mercy, that He hasn't given you His mercy.
SPEAKER_2: If you subscribe to everything that Satan says about you and about your past, but you have the anchor of your baptism and the certainty in God's promise in that moment, you cannot be snatched from God's hand.
SPEAKER_2: Because when you look at that and you say, yes, God gives this to me.
SPEAKER_2: He did this for me.
SPEAKER_2: That, as I said, it's a stopgap.
SPEAKER_2: It's like a fire break and you're fighting a forest fire.
SPEAKER_2: Sometimes you set a backfire, so you just you have to burn everything out, so there's nothing combustible for the fire to jump across.
SPEAKER_2: This is a break.
SPEAKER_2: It's a stopgap that ensures that whatever goes wrong in your life, it can't go beyond the promise of baptism.
SPEAKER_2: And that's the reason that the Sacraments matter.
SPEAKER_2: That's a reason that God acting in time matters.
SPEAKER_2: I've talked to a number of people in the last few months who, you know, have heard the show and some of them have not been away from the church for a long time.
SPEAKER_2: And I always ask each of them, were you baptized?
SPEAKER_2: It's not judgmental.
SPEAKER_2: I'm just curious.
SPEAKER_2: And if someone says, yes, I was baptized a long time ago, and I've wandered away, like I quit believing, I've been an atheist, I just, I quit caring, I'll get to stay in the church.
SPEAKER_2: I'm like, I don't want any part of this.
SPEAKER_2: I can always point any of those people to God's promise in their baptism that God put his name on them and see the blessing of the gift of a sacrament.
SPEAKER_2: Is it by taking us out of the equation, by eliminating works, by eliminating our needing to get things right, by us needing to have the right faith and the right beliefs, when we cling to God's promises, you can hang on to that even after a lifetime of depravity.
SPEAKER_2: You can do terrible things.
SPEAKER_2: And if you are coming back around by a miracle of the Holy Spirit, when someone comes to me, I'll tell them, I believe that that's God through the Holy Spirit given to you in baptism calling you back to the Church, calling you back to the faith in these final days.
SPEAKER_2: You know, whether it's, you know, five years or a century, a thousand years, I don't know, but it certainly feels like the end.
SPEAKER_2: And we should always have that sense that I don't have much time left.
SPEAKER_2: I can't put this off because at some point you're going to be, you're going to be like the thief on the cross.
SPEAKER_2: You're going to be facing your final moments.
SPEAKER_2: And if you can say confidently, Lord, remember me in your kingdom in view of your baptism and God's premises there, you have confident faith because you're not hinging it on how well you did or how much you knew.
SPEAKER_2: You're hinging it on, I believe in God's promise because I believe God.
SPEAKER_2: Not because of any strength or merit in me, but God is God.
SPEAKER_2: I know that.
SPEAKER_2: And I trust that despite the fact that I deserve the worst, God desires for me the best and he gave it to me on the cross and he gave it to me in baptism.
SPEAKER_2: And knowing that you receive that past tense in a moment in time, in a date that can be written on a certificate or in a Bible, there may come a time in your life, maybe you never care.
SPEAKER_2: For me, I've never particularly had to worry about it because God has bolstered my faith in other ways.
SPEAKER_2: But I always know, you know, all the other bolstering, all the other stuff is like, oh, I have really strong faith.
SPEAKER_2: I don't need that stuff.
SPEAKER_2: No.
SPEAKER_2: My baptism underpins all of the other confidence that I have.
SPEAKER_2: I know that that's a foundation.
SPEAKER_2: It's not me.
SPEAKER_2: It's not my parents.
SPEAKER_2: It's not the water.
SPEAKER_2: It's God's promise in the water with the Word.
SPEAKER_2: When those are together, we can be certain.
SPEAKER_2: And having that is a gift that's worth more than anything in this life.
SPEAKER_2: And so the reason for discussing these things and for calling some of you out for what your churches have taught is that teachings that are contrary to this deprive you in some cases of that stopgap.
SPEAKER_2: They deprive you of the certainty that someone who believes, not in myself, I don't believe that I did anything or that I deserved anything good, but I believe that I was baptized.
SPEAKER_2: I know that.
SPEAKER_2: That's a certainty.
SPEAKER_2: And that is a permanent state for me because I do not reject it.
SPEAKER_2: And every day that I am baptized and I cling to it is another day that I remain a Christian as a gift from God.
SPEAKER_2: And when we have that confidence in His promises through the Sacraments, all the other things that we talk about on the show, we talk about just belief in the face of terrible hatred and awful things happening.
SPEAKER_2: We can be unflappable in our faith.
SPEAKER_2: We can be cheerful spiritual warriors.
SPEAKER_2: What can happen?
SPEAKER_2: I'm baptized.
SPEAKER_2: What are these people going to do to me when God places His name on me?
SPEAKER_2: I don't worry about anything when I trust in God.
SPEAKER_2: That's a gift, and it's one that can only possibly come from a belief in the promises God has given in time to us physically.
SPEAKER_1: In a very real sense, the division here, when it comes to how different Christian traditions view the Sacraments, and in this episode, specifically Baptism, is whether the Sacraments are viewed as law or gospel, whether they are viewed as a command from God, something that we must do in order to be saved, which, notably, that would be righteousness, because that would be a requirement placed on us, a work that we must do in order to achieve salvation, or in order to retain salvation, however you want to look at that, versus the Sacraments as gospel.
SPEAKER_1: The Lutheran view is that the Sacraments are gospel.
SPEAKER_1: The Sacraments are God coming to us to offer his gifts to us.
SPEAKER_1: All of the actual active part of this is on God's side.
SPEAKER_1: We receive the gifts.
SPEAKER_1: We benefit.
SPEAKER_1: God is the one giving us the gifts.
SPEAKER_1: God is the one doing the work, which, notably, Christianity is a work's righteousness religion.
SPEAKER_1: The distinction between Christianity and other religions that tell you that you must do these works to be righteous is that the works are already done and they were done by Christ.
SPEAKER_1: It is his works that make us righteous.
SPEAKER_1: And so, yes, it's work's righteousness, but it is not your works.
SPEAKER_1: Your works will not avail you.
SPEAKER_1: And so, baptism and the Lord's Supper are beneficial.
SPEAKER_1: They work forgiveness of sins.
SPEAKER_1: They salve the wounded or the worried conscious because they are from God.
SPEAKER_1: And that is a major point.
SPEAKER_1: If your theology, if what your church teaches, causes you to doubt when it comes to the sacraments, there's a very real problem because these are gifts from God meant to soothe the conscience, not to cause you distress or worry or doubt.
SPEAKER_1: These are meant to strengthen your faith.
SPEAKER_1: That is properly what the sacraments are.
SPEAKER_1: That is the distinction there.
SPEAKER_1: And so if the sacraments are being preached to you as law, that's not what they are.
SPEAKER_1: And this is something that we have mentioned previously.
SPEAKER_1: I've mentioned in a few places.
SPEAKER_1: This is a distinction between, fundamentally, between Lutherans and other traditions, is the view of what the Divine Service actually is.
SPEAKER_1: And the sacraments are a big part of this.
SPEAKER_1: Because we view the Divine Service first and foremost as God bringing His gifts to us.
SPEAKER_1: This simply follows, of course, from Scripture.
SPEAKER_1: What does Scripture say about why we love Him?
SPEAKER_1: Well, we love Him because He first loved us.
SPEAKER_1: In the Divine Service, we return thanks to Him because He first brings His gifts to us.
SPEAKER_1: We are not going to church.
SPEAKER_1: We are not going to the Divine Service first and foremost to offer our sacrifice of thanks and praise to God.
SPEAKER_1: We do that, but we do that in response to His bringing gifts to us.
SPEAKER_1: That is the Lutheran view.
SPEAKER_1: And we believe that is what is consonant with what Scripture teaches.
SPEAKER_1: God brings good things to us.
SPEAKER_1: We give thanks for those good things.
SPEAKER_1: God loved us first, so we can love Him in return.
SPEAKER_1: And that comforts the troubled conscience.
SPEAKER_1: There is no comfort if you believe that it works righteousness, if you believe that you have to do X, Y, and Z in order to be good enough for salvation, because that ultimately leads to despair, because you will never be good enough, because you are still fallen and sinful.
SPEAKER_1: It is comforting to know that you do not have to do all of these things.
SPEAKER_1: Yes, there will be good works in your life, as we continually say.
SPEAKER_1: We are not denying the Christian will.
SPEAKER_1: The Christian must have good works.
SPEAKER_1: What we are saying is that, just like in the last episode, you're forgiven because Christ already completed the work.
SPEAKER_1: The work is done, and so your good works are meritorious, even if imperfect, because of the perfect work of Christ.
SPEAKER_1: You are able to return to God thanksgiving and praise because He has first brought His gifts to you.
SPEAKER_1: When you were a child in baptism, or if you converted as an adult, as an adult in baptism, every time you go to the Lord's table and receive His gifts there, every time you hear the Absolution, every time you read His Word, that is God bringing His gifts to you because He is super abundant in how He brings His gifts and His grace to you.
SPEAKER_1: God is not a stingy Father.
SPEAKER_1: God's gifts are overflowing.
SPEAKER_1: He gives them to us in many different ways to keep us strong and steadfast in the faith.
SPEAKER_1: And Woe just read from Ephesians 5, and this should bring to mind Ephesians 4 as well.
SPEAKER_1: There is one body and one spirit, just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call, one Lord, one faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.
SPEAKER_1: But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ's gift.
SPEAKER_1: And I hope that when you read that, you think of the Nicene Creed, because that is just part of the Nicene Creed right there from Ephesians 4.
SPEAKER_1: I will recite the last part of the Nicene Creed, part 3.
SPEAKER_1: And I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets.
SPEAKER_1: And I believe in one Holy Christian, an Apostolic Church.
SPEAKER_1: I acknowledge one Baptism for the remission of sins, and I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
SPEAKER_1: Amen.
SPEAKER_1: The one Baptism point, which is here both in the Creed and in Ephesians 4 and elsewhere in Scripture as well, is very important.
SPEAKER_1: And this is to respond to an objection that is sometimes raised.
SPEAKER_1: There are those who will try to divide Baptism into two separate things.
SPEAKER_1: They will try to say there's a Water Baptism and there's a Spirit Baptism.
SPEAKER_1: Scripture doesn't do that.
SPEAKER_1: The Creed don't do that.
SPEAKER_1: The Church has never done that.
SPEAKER_1: The Fathers of the Church don't write about that.
SPEAKER_1: This is not something that is part of Christianity.
SPEAKER_1: This is an enthusiastic position in the technical, philosophical, or theological sense.
SPEAKER_1: It is something that is not part of Christianity.
SPEAKER_1: Ephesians is very clear here.
SPEAKER_1: Scripture is very clear.
SPEAKER_1: One Lord, one faith, one Baptism.
SPEAKER_1: So if someone comes to you and says, well, water baptism, whatever is going to come after that is most likely going to be blasphemous.
SPEAKER_1: Because there is one Baptism.
SPEAKER_1: That is the teaching of Scripture.
SPEAKER_1: There is no division between, suppose, water baptism and spirit baptism.
SPEAKER_1: As was mentioned earlier when I was going over why do we have Baptism?
SPEAKER_1: Why do we have this physical thing?
SPEAKER_1: There is the water which the body can comprehend.
SPEAKER_1: There is the word which the mind can comprehend.
SPEAKER_1: Because you are both body and spirit.
SPEAKER_1: And so God brings both together in the Sacrament to bring them to you.
SPEAKER_1: So it is one Baptism.
SPEAKER_1: Yes, it has water.
SPEAKER_1: Yes, the spirit, capital S, is involved.
SPEAKER_1: But it is one Baptism.
SPEAKER_2: And this constant reminder of our Baptism is often a part of the architecture of many Lutheran churches.
SPEAKER_2: There's no set way for a church to look, so it's not universal.
SPEAKER_2: But very frequently, especially in older Lutheran churches, you will find that the baptismal font is in the way.
SPEAKER_2: You know, there are pews on either side.
SPEAKER_2: There's the altar at the front.
SPEAKER_2: There are the doors in the back from the narthex.
SPEAKER_2: And frequently, the baptismal font will be in the aisle.
SPEAKER_2: Sometimes it's right in the middle in the back.
SPEAKER_2: Sometimes it's right in the middle in the center.
SPEAKER_2: They actually cut the pews out in the center.
SPEAKER_2: So there's the baptismal font right in the middle of the church.
SPEAKER_2: Sometimes it's right up front in front of the altar.
SPEAKER_2: And sometimes it's off to one side of the front or the rear.
SPEAKER_2: But it's always prominently featured, even though it's rarely used.
SPEAKER_2: And the reason that we will position the fonts in such a way is, again, as a reminder of your one baptism.
SPEAKER_2: To remind you that on the day you were baptized, you were washed and cleansed and brought into this family.
SPEAKER_2: Even if you had faith before.
SPEAKER_2: You see, the superabundance of God's gifts is always something to be celebrated.
SPEAKER_2: And we're always thankful for the gift of faith that we receive, however we receive it.
SPEAKER_2: Maybe we received it from a missionary at church camp or something.
SPEAKER_2: That was the first time you heard.
SPEAKER_2: And then later on you're baptized.
SPEAKER_2: Maybe your baptism was your introduction into God's family as an infant, as a child.
SPEAKER_2: Maybe that was the very beginning.
SPEAKER_2: Whatever it was, the baptism is that touchstone.
SPEAKER_2: It's saying, yes, this moment.
SPEAKER_2: There may have been other moments before.
SPEAKER_2: They don't diminish this moment just as this moment of baptism doesn't diminish the others.
SPEAKER_2: I think one thing that does actually diminish our baptism is then to think, well, maybe it didn't count.
SPEAKER_2: Maybe I got to do it again.
SPEAKER_2: Because then you're turning into something that you're doing.
SPEAKER_2: And when you insert yourself into the equation as the doer, what's left for God?
SPEAKER_2: Like if it's an outward sign of what you believe, you're robbing God of the glory that he promises he has in Scripture.
SPEAKER_2: In Acts 22, Paul actually talks about this in his own conversion experience.
SPEAKER_2: And one Ananias, a devout man, according to the law, well spoken by of all the Jews who lived there, came to me and standing by me said to me, Brother Saul, receive your sight.
SPEAKER_2: And at that hour I received my sight and saw him.
SPEAKER_2: And he said, The God of our fathers appointed you to know his will, to see the righteous one and to hear a voice from his mouth.
SPEAKER_2: For you will be a witness to him, to everyone of what you have seen and heard.
SPEAKER_2: And now, why do you wait?
SPEAKER_2: Rise and be baptized and wash away your sins calling on his name.
SPEAKER_2: Now here's Paul describing Ananias telling him, Rise and be baptized and wash away your sins.
SPEAKER_2: And baptize and wash away your sins is not two separate things.
SPEAKER_2: It's baptized to wash away your sins.
SPEAKER_2: It's one joint act.
SPEAKER_2: The baptism is the washing of sins.
SPEAKER_2: And Ananias is telling Paul to do this.
SPEAKER_2: He's saying, Paul, wash away your sins.
SPEAKER_2: Well, can Paul do that?
SPEAKER_2: Does Paul have the power to wash away his sins?
SPEAKER_2: No, only God can wash away sins.
SPEAKER_2: And yet Christians are free to phrase this thing in this way, because God's the doer.
SPEAKER_2: We are the proximate actors for these things.
SPEAKER_2: When we're talking about sacraments, whether it's baptism or the Eucharist, there's a man doing something in physical space and time with a physical element.
SPEAKER_2: Whether it's the bread or the wine or the water in baptism, someone's doing something.
SPEAKER_2: And when we believe scripture, we believe that that act of the man is not any sort of act unto itself.
SPEAKER_2: It's obedience only in the sense that it is performing that which God has ordained.
SPEAKER_2: This is God's thing.
SPEAKER_2: When Ananias told Saul, rise and be baptized and wash away your sins, he was describing God's action, God's action in baptism to wash away sins.
SPEAKER_2: And so we have confidence that God does that in baptism because he says he does.
SPEAKER_2: And again, the only way to have a view of baptism that makes it strictly us doing something and God just kind of watching and maybe applauding, like, oh, good job.
SPEAKER_2: Well done performing that ordinance.
SPEAKER_2: If you do that, you eliminate all the forgiveness of sins that God promises he has there.
SPEAKER_2: If it's just me doing something, if it's just me washing away my sins in baptism, I'm toast.
SPEAKER_2: I'm not going to make it.
SPEAKER_2: I can't wash crap.
SPEAKER_2: I can't do anything by myself.
SPEAKER_2: I'm dead in my sins and trespasses.
SPEAKER_2: It is only God acting through the water and the word that makes anything possible that has any spiritual significance.
SPEAKER_2: And it is spiritually significance.
SPEAKER_2: Washing away your sins, that's everything.
SPEAKER_2: That is the Christian life.
SPEAKER_2: That is the gospel in a nutshell.
SPEAKER_2: To have your sins washed away is the promise of the cross.
SPEAKER_2: We got to believe that.
SPEAKER_2: It's central.
SPEAKER_2: It is the foundation of the Christian faith.
SPEAKER_2: And so it's tragic to me that for centuries, there have been disagreements among various church bodies.
SPEAKER_2: Because I'm sympathetic to some of the Roman Catholic claims that the Reformation was a disaster because they're not entirely wrong.
SPEAKER_2: When we realized that the Pope was lying, that the Pope was doing bad things, one of the reactions to that realization was to say, let's burn it all down.
SPEAKER_2: The Pope lied about something.
SPEAKER_2: Let's assume he lied about everything.
SPEAKER_2: Everything he ever told us to do, we're going to do the opposite.
SPEAKER_2: We're not going to do that anymore.
SPEAKER_2: Which was foolish and it was evil because it was never the Pope saying to do this stuff in the first place.
SPEAKER_2: That's a denial of the history of the Christian church.
SPEAKER_2: The Christian church didn't start with any Popes.
SPEAKER_2: The Christian church started at Pentecost.
SPEAKER_2: There's no Pope there.
SPEAKER_2: If you want to have a Pope, if you want to have the Pontiff of Rome, it was James, the brother of Jesus, biological brother, the son of Mary James, was the first Bishop of Rome.
SPEAKER_2: So the notion that came about in the Reformation that, well, those guys got something wrong, let's get rid of everything, was tremendously disastrous because what we're describing of a view of baptism is very much what Rome believed for the most part.
SPEAKER_2: The one specific distinction that I think is crucial, not so much for this argument, but for other discussions, is that the Roman Catholics believe that when you are baptized, that it also washes away your original sin, your concupiscence, meaning that you are now free to either sin or not sin, that it's possible for you to live a sinless life after your baptism, which is the opposite of what Paul says.
SPEAKER_2: He says that he struggles against his own flesh and does the very things that he wishes he couldn't do.
SPEAKER_2: He clearly still has original sin.
SPEAKER_2: Scripture is clear about that, so it's one specific distinction.
SPEAKER_2: Both Rome and the East will say that baptism washes away original sin.
SPEAKER_2: That has other errors downstream, but they're not really what we're talking about today.
SPEAKER_2: But the rest of what they believe is basically what we're saying, because it was the historic view of the church, including infant baptism.
SPEAKER_2: You can go back to the very earliest church fathers and the very earliest archaeological evidence of the church, and infants were baptized.
SPEAKER_2: There was never any notion that you had to be of a certain age to have a certain agreement, to have faith, before you could receive this outward sign of an inward turning.
SPEAKER_2: That was not the Christian view for over a thousand years.
SPEAKER_2: There were some that thought that, but it was not what the church predominantly held, which is why Rome ended up on the same side as Lutherans, because they just went along with the majority, because it was correct.
SPEAKER_2: The majority is not an argument for something being right.
SPEAKER_2: We're Lutherans.
SPEAKER_2: We're happy to say, like, a bunch of people got a bunch of stuff wrong.
SPEAKER_2: The question is always, what does Scripture say?
SPEAKER_2: So you don't appeal to the church fathers.
SPEAKER_2: You don't appeal to popes or swamis.
SPEAKER_2: You appeal to what Scripture says, which is why this episode is a Bible study.
SPEAKER_2: And when you look at what all these things say, they say that there's a washing of regeneration.
SPEAKER_2: They say that sins are washed away in baptism.
SPEAKER_2: So we believe it.
SPEAKER_2: And we also believe that we cannot save ourselves.
SPEAKER_2: That faith alone is true.
SPEAKER_2: And so we know that we're receiving faith in baptism, and that is the saving grace of baptism.
SPEAKER_2: The reception of faith is the reception of salvation.
SPEAKER_2: Which is what God promises.
SPEAKER_2: So it all adds up when you just believe God, and you don't make it too complicated.
SPEAKER_2: If you try to start saying, well, it looks like I'm doing something.
SPEAKER_2: Well, are you?
SPEAKER_2: I mean, is that, you know, this is the argument that comes up with James and those who say that we can save ourselves.
SPEAKER_2: The Epistle of James is a lot of stuff about the law.
SPEAKER_2: A lot of stuff about here's what the Christian life looks like.
SPEAKER_2: That's not an epistle that's addressed to unbelievers.
SPEAKER_2: That does not belong to unbelievers.
SPEAKER_2: It belongs to those who have the Holy Spirit saying, okay, the Holy Spirit dwells within you.
SPEAKER_2: Here's what the Christian life looks like.
SPEAKER_2: When you have God, you do this.
SPEAKER_2: When you don't have God, you do the other thing.
SPEAKER_2: Just as when you have life, your heart beats, you breathe.
SPEAKER_2: You don't have a choice.
SPEAKER_2: You can momentarily stop your breathing, but you can't control your heart.
SPEAKER_2: You can't control your breathing for very long because you would die.
SPEAKER_2: These are functions of life.
SPEAKER_2: Good works are a function of the Christian life.
SPEAKER_2: It's not an activity that we willingly engage in.
SPEAKER_2: It's an activity that is a sign that the life is present.
SPEAKER_2: That's a distinction.
SPEAKER_2: And when you try to take credit for stuff, it's like taking credit for your heartbeat.
SPEAKER_2: It doesn't even make any sense.
SPEAKER_2: The same is true of our good works.
SPEAKER_2: When a Christian has good works, they're not for us to take credit for.
SPEAKER_2: They're the heartbeat of the Christian life, and they're gifts that God gives us to give to others.
SPEAKER_1: Undoubtedly, when many of you started listening to this episode, a particular verse came to mind, and it should.
SPEAKER_1: It should come to mind.
SPEAKER_1: A verse from 1 Peter.
SPEAKER_1: I'll actually read the surrounding verses as well, not just the verse itself.
SPEAKER_1: For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the Spirit, in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, because they formerly did not obey, when God's patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water.
SPEAKER_1: Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers having been subjected to him.
SPEAKER_1: Now, there are a few reasons that I wanted to read the additional context, not to dwell on the descent into hell, that's for another day, another episode, but we have, in 1 Peter 3.21, a reference to this, and which corresponds to this.
SPEAKER_1: Well, we have to know what that this is.
SPEAKER_1: And that this is, in the previous verse, that is the ark, that is Noah and his family being preserved in the ark.
SPEAKER_1: And what we have here is typology.
SPEAKER_1: Now, there's typology all throughout scripture.
SPEAKER_1: Typology is one of the favorite devices God uses when teaching through scripture.
SPEAKER_1: We have types of Christ.
SPEAKER_1: We have types of regeneration.
SPEAKER_1: We have types of justification.
SPEAKER_1: We have the comparison of marriage to the relationship of Christ to the church.
SPEAKER_1: There is typology all throughout scripture.
SPEAKER_1: And that is what we have here in 1 Peter 3.21.
SPEAKER_1: Baptism is the anti-type.
SPEAKER_1: And the verse is very clear.
SPEAKER_1: Baptism now saves you.
SPEAKER_1: And so if someone comes up to you and tells you, Baptism does not save you, there's a very real problem because what he's just told you is directly contrary to the literal word-for-word statement from 1 Peter.
SPEAKER_1: Baptism now saves you.
SPEAKER_1: And some of you may be thinking, well, there's a clause in the middle there.
SPEAKER_1: When you translate something, you can move around dependent clauses.
SPEAKER_1: That's fine.
SPEAKER_1: But here, the dependent clause just emphasizes the point, because it says, Baptism, which corresponds to this.
SPEAKER_1: And as I've already said, the this here, this is Antitype.
SPEAKER_1: Baptism is the Antitype and corresponds to the type.
SPEAKER_1: Well, let's look at the nature of a type and an Antitype.
SPEAKER_1: What is the relationship of a type to an Antitype?
SPEAKER_1: A type, presages, prefigures, comes before, points to, it is in a way related to the Antitype, but it is necessarily inferior to the Antitype.
SPEAKER_1: State another way, the Antitype is the fulfillment, the perfection, or the completion of the type, or of the types, usually there's more than one.
SPEAKER_1: Here we have the type as Noah and his family being saved by the ark from the flood.
SPEAKER_1: We have water, of course, which is typological here, the water of the flood, which did indeed save Noah and his family from the wicked world, the waters of baptism being the Antitype of that.
SPEAKER_1: But from what was Noah saved?
SPEAKER_1: Noah and his family were saved from temporal death.
SPEAKER_1: Yes, they were also saved from the sinful wicked world, but primarily here, by the ark, they were saved from temporal death.
SPEAKER_1: Well, that's the type.
SPEAKER_1: And again, the Antitype must be greater.
SPEAKER_1: And so if baptism is the Antitype, what is the only thing that is greater than temporal death?
SPEAKER_1: Well, that's eternal death.
SPEAKER_1: That is the only thing that is greater than temporal death.
SPEAKER_1: And so baptism being the Antitype must save you from something that is greater than temporal death.
SPEAKER_1: And so it saves you from eternal death.
SPEAKER_1: Well, how are you saved from eternal death?
SPEAKER_1: This is important.
SPEAKER_1: You must know this as a Christian.
SPEAKER_1: You are saved from eternal death by faith because it is faith that receives salvation.
SPEAKER_1: It is faith that regenerates.
SPEAKER_1: And so baptism gives you faith.
SPEAKER_1: That's all this verse means.
SPEAKER_1: Because if baptism saves you and it saves you from something greater than temporal death, it must save you from eternal death.
SPEAKER_1: Well, the only means by which you can be saved from eternal death is faith.
SPEAKER_1: Baptism now saves you simply means baptism gives you faith.
SPEAKER_1: Now, if you already have faith, baptism is going to strengthen your faith.
SPEAKER_1: But if you are an infant and you are without faith, baptism will give you faith.
SPEAKER_1: And this is one of the reasons that we baptize infants.
SPEAKER_1: There are other scriptures we will get to shortly.
SPEAKER_1: But baptism is not limited only to adults, only to those who can profess their faith.
SPEAKER_1: Now, typically, if we have an adult convert, we do wait to baptize that person because we want the person to understand baptism.
SPEAKER_1: But that isn't truly a necessary part of the sacrament, and it's certainly not necessary for the infant.
SPEAKER_1: Because this is, again, God's work, not man's work.
SPEAKER_1: And that is the fundamental question.
SPEAKER_1: If you come to this thinking about it as it being God's work, then you are less concerned about the state of the man being baptized, because God doesn't rely on that.
SPEAKER_1: It's the same as when we speak of whether or not the sacraments could be administered by wicked men.
SPEAKER_1: Those who say they cannot are called Donatus, and they are heretics, because the sacraments are God's work.
SPEAKER_1: And so it does not depend on the man administering the sacraments as to whether or not they are valid.
SPEAKER_1: It depends upon God's work, because He is the one who has promised to be present to do certain things in the sacraments.
SPEAKER_1: And so here we don't look to the nature of the one being baptized.
SPEAKER_1: We don't look to whether or not the infant can profess faith.
SPEAKER_1: We know, of course, that an infant cannot profess faith.
SPEAKER_1: Now that does not mean that an infant does not have faith, because incidentally, when Scripture speaks of Timothy, it says that he is familiar with the Scriptures from his infancy.
SPEAKER_1: It's not childhood, because the word that is used there is brephos, which is Greek for infant or even fetus, which is also the word that is used in some other parts of Scripture, some other Scripture passages dealing with little children, because often Christ speaks about bringing the little children to him, not hindering them, and in some of those verses where he speaks of not hindering the little children, he uses brephos, which is again the smallest of infants.
SPEAKER_1: That is an infant that you carry around or even a reference to an unborn child, because we have several different words for children or infants that are used in Scripture that sometimes unhelpfully are all translated as children into the English, sometimes we do have the word infant, but you have technon, paideon, and brephos, brephos being again the youngest.
SPEAKER_1: It can literally mean fetus in Greek.
SPEAKER_2: So I want to read again briefly a passage from Ephesians 5 and compare it to the 1st Peter quotation.
SPEAKER_2: As Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word.
SPEAKER_2: Now compare this with baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you not as removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_2: Now how do you have an appeal to God for a good conscience?
SPEAKER_2: Am I just going to go to God in prayer and say, you know, I feel pretty good about today.
SPEAKER_2: I didn't do too bad.
SPEAKER_2: I think I have a clean conscience.
SPEAKER_2: I go to bed and I think, yeah, this is, I really nailed it today.
SPEAKER_2: I didn't do any sins, no sins at all in this house.
SPEAKER_2: A, if that's your prayer, you're not going to be praying to begin with because you're not a Christian.
SPEAKER_2: And B, it's just, it's absurd.
SPEAKER_2: It's the exact opposite.
SPEAKER_2: So in 1 Peter 3, when he says baptism is not a removal of dirt, remember Ephesians 5 is talking about washing away filth.
SPEAKER_2: The filth is the sins.
SPEAKER_2: And the only possibility for an appeal of a clean conscience before God is without sins.
SPEAKER_2: And the only way to have that state is through washing of baptism.
SPEAKER_2: And so this is one of the reasons that Lutherans always point back to baptism because in contradistinction to the Roman Catholic view that it washes away your original sin and all your sins at that point, and then you basically reset the clock and you're back to zero sins.
SPEAKER_2: And then you start racking up sins and you have to go to confession and you keep getting those new sins taken away.
SPEAKER_2: The scriptural view is that all of your sins are washed away in baptism.
SPEAKER_2: Well, what about the sins I commit after baptism?
SPEAKER_2: Yes, just as all of your sins are paid for at the cross.
SPEAKER_2: Well, what about all the sins that I committed after Jesus died on the cross?
SPEAKER_2: Well, in this day, that's literally all of them.
SPEAKER_2: None of us are over 2000 years old.
SPEAKER_2: Every sin we've ever committed was committed after Jesus died on the cross for it.
SPEAKER_2: And this is one of the places where the illogicality of God's action in time and creation makes it possible for us to say dumb stuff.
SPEAKER_2: Because if suddenly you start bounding God's promises by time, which is created, time is part of creation, it's not inherent.
SPEAKER_2: It is a product of what God desires.
SPEAKER_2: And then he works within it, but he's not bound by it, which is why every sin you're ever going to commit was paid for on the cross.
SPEAKER_2: And so when we are washed in baptism, and the reason that we say I am baptized, is precisely because of this.
SPEAKER_2: All of your sins are washed away.
SPEAKER_2: Are you going to keep sinning?
SPEAKER_2: Yes.
SPEAKER_2: Are those sins also washed away in baptism?
SPEAKER_2: Yes.
SPEAKER_2: Your baptism is a permanent state because it's a moment in time for you to point to for comfort.
SPEAKER_2: But it's not the only moment that that forgiveness is given.
SPEAKER_2: That forgiveness, that washing away, is the new state you have as a Christian.
SPEAKER_2: When we are adopted as sons of God in baptism, the adoption is permanent because the baptism is permanent.
SPEAKER_2: It's part and parcel.
SPEAKER_2: You become a part of the body of Christ, you become a part of the bride of Christ, who in Ephesians 5 is washed clean from this filth, from our filth, so that the clean conscience that we have, that we can make an appeal to God for, is in view of the baptism that's taken away those sins.
SPEAKER_2: The last passages that we are going to get to today is from Acts 2.
SPEAKER_2: Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, Brothers, what shall we do?
SPEAKER_2: And Peter said to them, Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, for the promises for you and for your children, for all those far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.
SPEAKER_2: So here again, we have God saying, Repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of your sins.
SPEAKER_2: It's always the same thing.
SPEAKER_2: The repentance imparts forgiveness, the baptism imparts forgiveness, the baptism and the forgiveness work together.
SPEAKER_2: It's all one thing.
SPEAKER_2: And I think that one of the real weaknesses of systematic theology and of the sort of autistic view that we often bring to Scripture is trying to figure out if it's this thing or it's that thing.
SPEAKER_2: Because if it's one thing, it can't be the other.
SPEAKER_2: If it's water, it can't have forgiveness.
SPEAKER_2: Well, if it's man, it can't be God, like I said earlier.
SPEAKER_2: You have to be really careful when you're talking about God's things because one thing can also be another thing.
SPEAKER_2: It can be two things at once.
SPEAKER_2: This is, you know, when we've been talking in this episode about typology, that is a methodology that men used to understand Scripture.
SPEAKER_2: Sometimes they go overboard.
SPEAKER_2: Some of the early Church Fathers went completely nuts with typology and just made a mess of everything.
SPEAKER_2: They wanted every word, every passage to have seven layers of typology, which is just, it's silly.
SPEAKER_2: The reason that typology is important is that God introduced it, just as, you know, poetry and storytelling.
SPEAKER_2: These are things from God.
SPEAKER_2: They're not human things that God is operating, you know, in our human language, so we understand.
SPEAKER_2: He's the originator of this stuff.
SPEAKER_2: Art, beauty, poetry, all these things that are desirable, wonderful parts of human life are from God.
SPEAKER_2: They're typological, too.
SPEAKER_2: All the stuff that we like, we think, oh, these are human endeavors.
SPEAKER_2: These are human expressions.
SPEAKER_2: They're fundamentally from God.
SPEAKER_2: He did it first, and then we have a smaller version of it, an imperfect version.
SPEAKER_2: So when we're talking about typology, it's not like this theological concept that some people came up with and were sticking it in scripture.
SPEAKER_2: God explicitly says in some places, this is a type of this other thing, as Corey was saying earlier.
SPEAKER_2: So when you're looking at something and the desire is to say, well, if it's one thing, it can't be the other thing, you have to be really careful that you're not making claims against what God is able to do.
SPEAKER_2: Because as soon as you say God can't, you just stop talking probably for the rest of the day, because you got some sort of problem.
SPEAKER_2: You have some spiritual gas that you need to get burped out, because you should never say God can't.
SPEAKER_2: That's not a thing.
SPEAKER_2: It does happen when we try to make sense of these things, and we make mistakes.
SPEAKER_2: They're well intentioned mistakes.
SPEAKER_2: It is a good thing for Christians to try to figure these things out, to try to speak faithfully as God speaks, and to, when you have a conviction of conscience, to stick to your guns.
SPEAKER_2: I don't want someone who hears us to change their mind just because some podcaster told you something different.
SPEAKER_2: That's not a firm foundation for faith.
SPEAKER_2: The firm foundation needs to be Scripture, which is why this has been a Bible study, because we're talking about these in Lutheran terms and from a Lutheran perspective, but we could do a bunch of citations from some of the Lutheran fathers.
SPEAKER_2: I think they're interesting sometimes, but it's still only them making arguments from Scripture.
SPEAKER_2: We also can make arguments from Scripture.
SPEAKER_2: Now, as I said at the beginning, we're not telling you anything new.
SPEAKER_2: We're not making up, this is not like Stone Choir baptism.
SPEAKER_2: There's one baptism.
SPEAKER_2: There's one baptism in Scripture, and so we should all sound the same because we're all working from the same book with the same God.
SPEAKER_2: And the one Lord, one faith, one baptism thing is very real.
SPEAKER_2: And the interesting thing about baptism, as we've talked about a little bit earlier, it is not in the faith of the doing that the thing has its efficacy.
SPEAKER_2: It's in God's promise.
SPEAKER_2: And so even those who don't believe that baptism does what it says, God will still keep His promise.
SPEAKER_2: Even when the men who are doing it say, I don't believe this.
SPEAKER_2: Because God doesn't say anything to the contrary.
SPEAKER_2: God says, do this and the gift is yours.
SPEAKER_2: That's another reason why the one baptism thing is important.
SPEAKER_2: There's no such thing as rebaptism.
SPEAKER_2: The only possibility where it might be appropriate to baptize someone who thinks they were baptized before is if you're not sure if they were baptized in the name of the Trinity.
SPEAKER_2: If there's doubt, if you believe that there may have been an erroneous baptism or is literally not what it says in Matthew 28, then it is permissible to do effectively a provisional baptism.
SPEAKER_2: And it should be in full view that we're not trying to rebaptize this person.
SPEAKER_2: We're trying to obey God.
SPEAKER_2: We're trying to make sure that we are doing what God commands.
SPEAKER_2: You know, in this case, it is very much in ordinance.
SPEAKER_2: It's God saying, do this.
SPEAKER_2: And if we think that someone has failed in the past, we're still going to do it.
SPEAKER_2: That's an act of faith that's perfectly permissible.
SPEAKER_2: That's entirely Christian.
SPEAKER_2: What is not permissible is to say, well, you know, I don't, I think Rome's wrong about a bunch of stuff, and so we got to rebaptize you so you can be made a real Christian.
SPEAKER_2: You're going to be a Lutheran.
SPEAKER_2: You got to have a Lutheran baptism.
SPEAKER_2: The Orthodox very commonly do that.
SPEAKER_2: They reject all baptism except their own.
SPEAKER_2: That's not scriptural.
SPEAKER_2: Again, there's one baptism.
SPEAKER_2: A baptism in the name of the Triune God is valid.
SPEAKER_2: That's part of the promise.
SPEAKER_2: That's part of the confidence is that even when we have these disputes, even when we have these disagreements about what's actually going on, we still can have confidence that God has done what He said He would do.
SPEAKER_2: And I hope that if someone is listening and, you know, maybe some of this probably rubbed many of you the wrong way, if some of you are feeling unsettled, know that whatever unsettling feeling you have about the theology doesn't undermine God's promise.
SPEAKER_2: That's the whole point of this entire episode.
SPEAKER_2: God's promises are kept because it's God that's making them.
SPEAKER_2: So when we get stuff wrong, when we are foolish, when we are unbelieving, when we're doubting, we can't break God's things.
SPEAKER_2: Even we break our own, even we mess up our own lives, we sin against each other, we lie, we get stuff wrong inadvertently, whatever mess we make, we can be confident in God's promises.
SPEAKER_2: And I hope that whatever else you take away from this is, you'll keep that in mind.
SPEAKER_2: It's fundamentally rooting this, not an, oh, you have to have the perfect confession of this stuff.
SPEAKER_2: It's that when you believe that God does the things He says He'll do, you have them.
SPEAKER_2: It's done.
SPEAKER_2: It's God we're talking about.
SPEAKER_2: He's gonna do what He said He did.
SPEAKER_2: He's already done it.
SPEAKER_2: You are baptized.
SPEAKER_2: That is a promise written in the Book of Life from before eternity.
SPEAKER_2: Your name is in the Book of Life saying, I elect you from eternity by God.
SPEAKER_2: You receive baptism in time, marking you as His child, placing His triune name on you, on a tiny screaming baby who, just like Jesus in the manger, who was helpless and didn't know anything, and was completely dependent.
SPEAKER_2: We're fundamentally like that spiritually at any age until we have God.
SPEAKER_2: You can be the smartest, most well-versed man in the world.
SPEAKER_2: You're a spiritual infant until God comes to you and gives you faith.
SPEAKER_2: And very often that comes in baptism.
SPEAKER_2: So the confidence that God is going to keep His Word is the whole point of this.
SPEAKER_2: It's the whole benefit of this type of sacramentology.
SPEAKER_2: Again, it's not like here's a strategy for a greater, confident faith.
SPEAKER_2: This is what God says we should have, and when we believe it, everything works out.
SPEAKER_2: That's a recurring theme on Stone Choir.
SPEAKER_2: If you have a normal, healthy family and you do normal, healthy family things, you will be blessed, and you will have the things that God promises.
SPEAKER_2: When we do the thing the way God says to do it, we get the good things that come from it.
SPEAKER_2: That's the case in everything.
SPEAKER_2: So this is just another example of that, but it's a crucial one because everything else may go wrong.
SPEAKER_2: But because your baptism is past tense, because it's a moment in time, when you realize that that past tense is actually present tense, you can have faith and confidence throughout your life.
SPEAKER_2: Whatever goes wrong, whatever happens, you're confident that you are baptized.
SPEAKER_2: And in that gift that God promised, He continues to deliver to you every day.
SPEAKER_1: There's one more point that I would like to cover before we close out this episode, and then a couple sections of Scripture related to infant baptism, just because I know that's going to be a difficult one for some people.
SPEAKER_1: But the issue that I want to address first is a seemingly minor one, but it has been an ongoing fight in the history of the Church between traditions.
SPEAKER_1: And that is the method or the mode, the means of baptism.
SPEAKER_1: There are four.
SPEAKER_1: There's aspersion, effusion, immersion, and submersion.
SPEAKER_1: And for those who are unfamiliar with the terms, aspersion is sprinkling, effusion is pouring, and then I think we all know what immersion and submersion are, the distinction being whether or not you go completely under the water.
SPEAKER_1: These are all valid.
SPEAKER_1: And the reason they are all valid is because the wording of Scripture, what Scripture says, is what is required for baptism.
SPEAKER_1: And what does Scripture say?
SPEAKER_1: Scripture says water and word.
SPEAKER_1: Scripture does not specify the amount of water.
SPEAKER_1: Scripture does not say that you have to use a certain method of applying the water.
SPEAKER_1: Scripture simply says water and the word.
SPEAKER_1: Now, many of those who were baptized in Scripture were indeed baptized by immersion or submersion.
SPEAKER_1: We don't necessarily know which one of those two, because they were baptized in a river.
SPEAKER_1: We know that.
SPEAKER_1: But there are probably others who were baptized with alternative methods, because do bear in mind this is a part of the world where freshwater is not always available in large quantities, particularly depending on the time of year.
SPEAKER_1: Even the Jordan largely dries up.
SPEAKER_1: Now, of course, speculation is not a valid reason to draw a conclusion when it comes to Scripture, but I already pointed out that Scripture simply requires water and the word.
SPEAKER_1: It does not require an amount of water.
SPEAKER_1: And also we have the historical argument, not in terms of historical practice, although that is somewhat compelling, but the historical argument that God has given faith to those who were baptized using aspersion or effusion.
SPEAKER_1: There are those who were baptized as children using those methods, and they were given faith.
SPEAKER_1: They became Christians because of that baptism.
SPEAKER_1: God is not going to bring his gifts if we are deliberately or even accidentally not complying with what he has said is the requirement.
SPEAKER_1: And God has given his blessing very clearly to all four of these methods.
SPEAKER_1: Because again, this just goes back to the fundamental difference that we have, whether it is God's gift he is bringing to men or something men are doing for themselves.
SPEAKER_1: Because certainly the amount of water is not going to matter if it is God's gift, if God is the one doing it, because Scripture doesn't specify.
SPEAKER_1: But if it's men doing it, then perhaps we need more of a show, we need more water.
SPEAKER_1: And so this is going to flow naturally from your belief about the nature of baptism.
SPEAKER_1: The same thing is true of infant baptism, which I will get to in a minute here.
SPEAKER_1: Now, there is one final point about the method that I want to make, that is sort of an ancillary point, but it is worth addressing.
SPEAKER_1: Submersion is the best method in terms of the picture it portrays.
SPEAKER_1: Because what is baptism?
SPEAKER_1: Baptism fundamentally is being buried with Christ and resurrected to a new life.
SPEAKER_1: And submersion shows that, illustrates that, in the best way.
SPEAKER_1: And so for almost aesthetic reasons, but for clearly typological reasons, submersion there is a very good argument for it.
SPEAKER_1: Now, perhaps not for infants, we're not saying do what the EO do, and triple-submerge infants, that's probably overboard, pouring or sprinkling perfectly fine for the infant, but typologically for adults, submersion is probably best.
SPEAKER_1: And Luther said the same.
SPEAKER_1: This has long been something that Lutherans and others who do practice these other methods would still agree.
SPEAKER_1: Part of the reason we do pouring is as a statement of belief that this is something from God, and so it is not something man is doing, it is not the amount of water that matters.
SPEAKER_1: But then to close out this episode, I said I wanted to read a couple passages that deal with infant baptism.
SPEAKER_1: I already addressed one, I didn't read it, but that was from 2nd Timothy, dealing with Timothy who had been familiar with the scriptures from, it says childhood in the English standard version, but the word there is actually infant or infancy, breathos.
SPEAKER_1: And I want to read from Luke, Luke 2.
SPEAKER_1: Actually, I'll start with Luke 18.
SPEAKER_1: And then from Luke 2.
SPEAKER_1: And this will be a sign for you.
SPEAKER_1: You will find a baby, Brephos, wrapped in swaddling cloths, and lying in a manger.
SPEAKER_1: And so we have here in these two verses taken together a picture of God's great gifts to us, the Christian life, and how we are to share these gifts, how we are to facilitate God bringing these gifts to the next generation, to our fellow Christians, to our own children.
SPEAKER_1: Christ is very clear.
SPEAKER_1: Do not hinder the little children, but let them come unto me.
SPEAKER_1: Bring them to Christ.
SPEAKER_1: You are supposed to bring your children to Christ.
SPEAKER_1: Well, how do you bring your little children, your Brephos or Paideon, whichever one it happens to be, because Paideon is still a little child, how do you bring your children to Christ?
SPEAKER_1: Well, we saw at the beginning, it's the Great Commission.
SPEAKER_1: You bring them to Christ by baptizing them and then teaching them.
SPEAKER_1: And so you baptize your children.
SPEAKER_1: This is why Lutherans and others teach that infant baptism is proper.
SPEAKER_1: It is why it has been the practice of the Church from the beginning.
SPEAKER_1: Yes, there's also the fact that it is typologically related to circumcision, which was done on the eighth day.
SPEAKER_1: Certainly, an eight-day-old child is an infant still.
SPEAKER_1: But fundamentally, we are simply obeying the words of Christ when he tells us to let the children come to him.
SPEAKER_1: Do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God.
SPEAKER_1: And so we hear and obey.
SPEAKER_1: He says to bring the children to him, we bring them to him.
SPEAKER_1: How do we bring them to him?
SPEAKER_1: By giving them faith.
SPEAKER_1: How do we give them faith?
SPEAKER_1: The only way that God has given us to give them faith, by baptizing them.
SPEAKER_1: We baptize them, but really it is God using our hands to do the work.
SPEAKER_1: God is the one baptizing them, and that is why they are baptized in the triune name, because it is the triune God who is baptizing them.
SPEAKER_1: Because it is his baptism, it is his sacrament.
SPEAKER_1: It belongs to him, not to man, because it is his work, not man's.
SPEAKER_1: And we see this connection here, in Luke, with the term brephos.
SPEAKER_1: You have the infants who are brought to Christ, and you have that infant Christ lying in the manger.
SPEAKER_1: All of the promises of Scripture are in that manger with that infant, and all of the promises of Scripture are brought to infants in baptism, because that is how God has created it, that is how God has organized it.
SPEAKER_1: And so we simply obey.
SPEAKER_1: And so baptism is a gift from God to the Church.
SPEAKER_1: It is a gift from God to the elect.
SPEAKER_1: It is a gift from God to me and to you and to your children.
SPEAKER_2: We're going to close simply with the words from Romans 6.
SPEAKER_2: What shall we say then?
SPEAKER_2: Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?
SPEAKER_2: By no means.
SPEAKER_2: How then can we who died to sin still live in it?
SPEAKER_2: Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into his death?
SPEAKER_2: We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death.
SPEAKER_2: In order that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.
SPEAKER_1: Amen.