Transcript: Episode 0045

“Baptism Now Saves You”

This transcript:
  1. Was machine generated.
  2. Has not been checked for errors.
  3. May not be entirely accurate.
WEBVTT

00:00:00 – 00:00:10:	Don't.

00:00:10 – 00:00:24:	What?

00:00:24 – 00:00:44:	Welcome to the Stone Choir podcast. I am Corey J. Moeller, and I'm still woe.

00:00:44 – 00:00:50:	On today's Stone Choir, we're going to be discussing the subject of baptism. On Stone

00:00:50 – 00:00:55:	Choir, we are obviously talking about theology in general, but we don't typically get too much into

00:00:55 – 00:01:01:	systematics. We don't delve into specific issues, certainly ones that are well fleshed out in

00:01:01 – 00:01:07:	church history. Today is probably going to be one of the rare episodes where we're going to talk

00:01:07 – 00:01:12:	about something where we have literally nothing new to say. The reason that we're doing this is,

00:01:12 – 00:01:19:	one, we've had number of requests from folks asking us to describe the sacraments from a

00:01:19 – 00:01:25:	Lutheran perspective. Lutherans are good at theology, not because we have smart Lutherans

00:01:25 – 00:01:29:	today, but just because we inherited something that was correct and competent from better men.

00:01:29 – 00:01:35:	Unfortunately, Lutherans today are incredibly terrible at telling people, A, we exist, or B,

00:01:35 – 00:01:41:	what we believe, or why we believe it. I think most people hear about Lutherans. The only thing

00:01:41 – 00:01:47:	you have in mind is the tranny. That's frankly the vision of Lutheranism in the West today.

00:01:47 – 00:01:54:	It's not wrong. Most Lutherans are like that, but the no true Scotsman fallacy is not an absolute

00:01:54 – 00:01:59:	because there's such a thing as a Scotsman. There's also such a thing as an actual Lutheran,

00:01:59 – 00:02:05:	and that's what Cori and I are. Today's episode is going to discuss the sacrament of baptism.

00:02:05 – 00:02:12:	In the future, we'll do one on the sacrament of Holy Communion. The reason that we're doing it in

00:02:12 – 00:02:16:	addition to just a number of people asked is that these are things that are instituted by God

00:02:16 – 00:02:22:	that are foundational to the Christian faith. It was a natural follow-on from last week's episode

00:02:22 – 00:02:28:	where we're discussing forgiveness. In that episode, we were chiefly focused on the forgiveness

00:02:28 – 00:02:34:	from God that we extend to each other and interceding on behalf of each other to God

00:02:35 – 00:02:41:	for the forgiveness of our mutual sins. We mentioned in the episode that there are the

00:02:41 – 00:02:48:	means of grace, the means by which God provides forgiveness to us in this life, in time and

00:02:48 – 00:02:55:	space forgiveness is delivered, not only at the cross, but personally. I want to briefly acknowledge

00:02:55 – 00:03:00:	a couple things. One, when a Lutheran says sacrament, we don't mean the same thing as

00:03:01 – 00:03:05:	the Roman Catholics, for example. I know the majority of our listeners at this point are not

00:03:05 – 00:03:10:	Lutheran, so for the folks who are Lutheran, a lot of what we say is probably going to be old hat

00:03:10 – 00:03:16:	for the rest. We're trying to make the best form of the argument for what we believe is a scriptural

00:03:16 – 00:03:24:	view of baptism. Effectively, if this were a formal debate, this would be the affirmative side for

00:03:25 – 00:03:31:	the premise. We're making the argument. Part of that is that we're going to be saying things

00:03:31 – 00:03:36:	that will contradict what the majority of our audience believe about these things.

00:03:36 – 00:03:41:	I want to acknowledge that up front that we're not trying to pick a fight, we're not trying to pick

00:03:41 – 00:03:49:	on anyone or to talk down to you or to condemn you or your churches. This is Christian doctrine.

00:03:49 – 00:03:53:	I think we all agree that this stuff is worth getting right. I think we all agree that this

00:03:53 – 00:04:01:	stuff is important. We disagree on the details. In scripture, it talks about that being part

00:04:01 – 00:04:08:	of the Christian life. When you look at the New Testament, inside the New Testament, as the earliest

00:04:08 – 00:04:13:	church in the very first century was being formed, they were arguing about things. There were

00:04:13 – 00:04:19:	disagreements and there was a right side and there was a wrong side, but those errors existed inside

00:04:19 – 00:04:27:	the church. There's a case where Paul rebukes Peter to his face for his false teaching. These are

00:04:27 – 00:04:32:	apostles we're talking about. Peter straightened out. Paul got it right. Peter was wrong. He was

00:04:32 – 00:04:39:	in error. He was called to repent and they had that sorted out. It is not outside of proper

00:04:39 – 00:04:47:	church practice for brothers in the faith to talk to each other, frankly. It's not so much in concern

00:04:47 – 00:04:52:	that, oh, I'm concerned that you're wrong or you're concerned that I'm wrong. It's that this is God's

00:04:52 – 00:04:59:	stuff. This is not our stuff. The approach that Cory and I take and that we encourage everyone to

00:04:59 – 00:05:08:	take is to treat God's things as His and to receive them on His terms as He intends. When we find in

00:05:08 – 00:05:14:	our own circumstances that our churches are failing in some way, a greater way or a small way,

00:05:14 – 00:05:20:	to deliver God's things as God describes them, that is an immediate problem for us in our own

00:05:20 – 00:05:26:	personal circumstances to deal with. As we go through this, I want to acknowledge that we're

00:05:26 – 00:05:31:	going to say some things that some of you are not going to like. I know that. One of us is wrong,

00:05:31 – 00:05:36:	at least. Maybe both of us are wrong, but just as a reasonable argument, if we say one thing about

00:05:36 – 00:05:44:	baptism and you say the opposite, one of us must necessarily be wrong. It's not accusatory to say

00:05:44 – 00:05:49:	somebody's wrong here. It's simply an evaluation of the equation. The equation doesn't bounce.

00:05:50 – 00:05:55:	You've got to balance that before both sides can be right. We're going to make the case for what

00:05:55 – 00:06:01:	we believe Scripture says about these things. Obviously, it will be from a Lutheran perspective,

00:06:01 – 00:06:06:	but we believe this is what Scripture says. I don't want people to come away from this

00:06:06 – 00:06:12:	feeling doubts or concerns that you have a bad church. If you think negative things about us,

00:06:12 – 00:06:19:	that's fine. I don't want you to listen to this and suddenly have deep concerns about your church.

00:06:20 – 00:06:27:	First, worry about Scripture and about whether or not you believe it. If, in that evaluation,

00:06:27 – 00:06:33:	you find that you have concerns about your church, those are problems we all face in our own lives,

00:06:33 – 00:06:36:	we're not going to tell you what to do. I want to acknowledge that some of these things are

00:06:36 – 00:06:43:	contrary to some of your church teachings. We all know this. These are 500-year-old discussions.

00:06:44 – 00:06:49:	They said, we have nothing new to say here, but we're going to try to make the case clearly for

00:06:49 – 00:06:54:	what we believe Scripture teaches because, particularly for Lutherans, the sacraments,

00:06:54 – 00:07:01:	baptism and communion are foundational to our approach to the Christian life. A lot of what

00:07:01 – 00:07:07:	we talk about on Stone Choir is about the Christian life for us personally, by virtue of our theological

00:07:07 – 00:07:14:	frame. The sacraments underpin all of that. We allude to it sometimes. We want to spend an hour or so

00:07:14 – 00:07:19:	here today specifically laying out the case for what we believe Scripture says about baptism,

00:07:19 – 00:07:26:	because it underpins everything else that we believe and what else comes up. As we said elsewhere,

00:07:27 – 00:07:32:	when there's discussion and debate around doctrine, it's not about winning arguments,

00:07:32 – 00:07:37:	it's not about beating up on someone. It's about having more of what God wants us to have.

00:07:37 – 00:07:44:	God gave us these gifts in Scripture. He gives us these gifts in time for our benefit. The reason

00:07:44 – 00:07:51:	that these things are worth fighting for and fighting against and about is that when we don't

00:07:51 – 00:07:56:	get them right, we have less of the good things that God wants for us. That's our chief concern,

00:07:56 – 00:08:00:	is why we're talking about it, even knowing that some of you are going to disagree. I hope that

00:08:00 – 00:08:04:	when you disagree with some of the things that we say, one, I hope that you'll receive it in the

00:08:04 – 00:08:08:	spirit in which it's given, which is not to beat up on you, even though some of the things that we

00:08:08 – 00:08:13:	are going to say are going to be very stark. I don't want that to be taken as a personal attack.

00:08:14 – 00:08:21:	Ultimately, is a concern that downstream from these beliefs is the comfort of the Gospel. It's

00:08:21 – 00:08:29:	the comfort of the things that God wishes for us to have. Everything that we talk about is in view

00:08:29 – 00:08:35:	of God's gifts to us, in view of the fact that there will come a day in your life where everything's

00:08:35 – 00:08:41:	on fire, where you were at rock bottom, where something is just unspeakably horrible. Those

00:08:41 – 00:08:47:	are the moments when having your theological ducks in a row is paramount, because if you have a mess

00:08:47 – 00:08:53:	going into the battle, you're already way behind. You're already down points before you even come

00:08:53 – 00:08:59:	under fire, and we don't want that for each other. We're going to go through the passages. This is

00:08:59 – 00:09:05:	basically a Bible study today. We have more Bible than we can. We're going to get through in an hour,

00:09:05 – 00:09:12:	but we want to make clear the case for what baptism should mean in the Christian life,

00:09:12 – 00:09:18:	because it means a great deal. To begin with, I want to just give a brief example of framing.

00:09:19 – 00:09:24:	Imagine a scenario where you walk up to me and I hand you a $100 bill,

00:09:25 – 00:09:30:	and then you put it in your pocket and you walk away. Later on, you describe that scene to someone

00:09:30 – 00:09:38:	else. There are two ways you can describe it. A, I walked up to this guy and he handed me a $100

00:09:38 – 00:09:43:	bill, and I looked at it, and it was a real $100 bill. I was amazed, and I put it in my pocket,

00:09:43 – 00:09:48:	and I walked away. That's one telling of the story. That's true. It's accurate. It's what happened.

00:09:49 – 00:09:54:	B, I walked up to this guy and he was holding a $100 bill, and he reached out to hand it to me,

00:09:55 – 00:10:00:	and I looked at it, and I saw the $100 bill, and I wanted it, and I grabbed it in my hands,

00:10:00 – 00:10:05:	and I took it between my fingers, and I pulled it close, and I held it up to my eyes, and I looked

00:10:05 – 00:10:11:	it, and I peered it intensely, and I saw this is a $100 bill. This is real. I was excited,

00:10:11 – 00:10:17:	and I put it in my pocket, and I walked away. That's also accurate. That's a retelling of the

00:10:17 – 00:10:24:	same events. Both are factually correct, but what's the difference between them? The first one,

00:10:24 – 00:10:30:	the emphasis is on me handing you a $100 bill, and then the second one, the emphasis is on you

00:10:31 – 00:10:37:	taking it and making it yours. In the second telling, I very quickly vanish,

00:10:37 – 00:10:42:	and it's just you and the $100 bill, and you interacting with it. In both of those cases,

00:10:42 – 00:10:49:	there's a giver, and there's a receiver, and the emphasis is on whether you focus on the giver

00:10:49 – 00:10:55:	or you focus on the receiving. As we talk about the sacraments, it's fundamentally when there

00:10:55 – 00:11:00:	are disagreements, particularly among Protestants. Roman Catholics and Lutherans are actually almost

00:11:00 – 00:11:07:	entirely on the same page about baptism with one important exception, but it's kind of peripheral.

00:11:07 – 00:11:12:	It's important, but it's not the main thrust of the question. For everyone else, there are varying

00:11:12 – 00:11:18:	degrees of substantial disagreement, and it has to do with that framing. Is this a giving and a

00:11:18 – 00:11:26:	giver, or is this an action by someone where God was somehow involved, but as soon as we came on the

00:11:26 – 00:11:34:	picture, it's all about us? Those two frames really separate the two different views of the sacrament

00:11:34 – 00:11:41:	of baptism. When Lutherans say sacrament, we mean something slightly different than Roman Catholics.

00:11:42 – 00:11:49:	For Lutherans, there are two chief sacraments based on this definition, instituted by Christ

00:11:49 – 00:11:55:	himself with physical means for the forgiveness of sins. There are some other things that Roman

00:11:55 – 00:12:00:	Catholics have that they call sacraments that are very salutary. Marriage in particular was

00:12:00 – 00:12:05:	instituted by God in the garden. It's older than either baptism or communion. Lutherans don't consider

00:12:05 – 00:12:12:	that sacramental because, although it's holy, which is the root of sacrament, one of the roots,

00:12:13 – 00:12:18:	it doesn't impart forgiveness of sins. When we're talking about sacraments, the emphasis is on

00:12:18 – 00:12:23:	God giving a physical means for forgiveness of sins. When we use that term, that's specifically

00:12:23 – 00:12:29:	what it means. The word also forgives sins. Absolution also forgives sins. There are other

00:12:29 – 00:12:35:	places that these come to us, but it's only in baptism and communion that there's a physical

00:12:36 – 00:12:41:	means tied to the promise of forgiveness, which is why we call these the means of grace.

00:12:43 – 00:12:50:	So to start with the Scripture, we will turn first to Matthew 28, the end of the book of Matthew.

00:12:50 – 00:12:54:	This is, of course, the Great Commission. Undoubtedly, almost all of you will be familiar

00:12:54 – 00:13:00:	with this before I even read it. Now, the 11 disciples went to Galilee to the

00:13:01 – 00:13:05:	mountain to which Jesus had directed them, and when they saw him they worshiped him,

00:13:05 – 00:13:10:	but some doubted, and Jesus came and said to them, All authority in heaven and on earth has

00:13:10 – 00:13:16:	been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the

00:13:16 – 00:13:22:	Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded

00:13:22 – 00:13:32:	you. And behold, I am with you always to the end of the age. This is one of two verses, two

00:13:32 – 00:13:36:	sections of Scripture. We will be going over today, where we're going to take

00:13:36 – 00:13:41:	some time to slow down and break down exactly what is going on here. And yes, look at the Greek a

00:13:41 – 00:13:48:	little bit. And the reason for that is that too often when we're reading this, we just kind of

00:13:48 – 00:13:54:	read through it quickly, and we sort of fly over this. Instead of actually looking at what

00:13:54 – 00:14:00:	exactly is being said, what is Scripture telling us? What are the words being used? What do they

00:14:00 – 00:14:07:	mean? Why do they matter? What doctrine is being put forth here? And so let's look at exactly

00:14:07 – 00:14:15:	what Christ is telling us. He's giving commands here, and he's giving a reason for it. And so we

00:14:15 – 00:14:22:	have the imperative to start off the command, go, go therefore, therefore. To what does that refer?

00:14:22 – 00:14:28:	Why go? Because all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Christ. And therefore,

00:14:28 – 00:14:35:	he is commanding us to go. And what are we to do in this going? We are to make disciples of whom,

00:14:35 – 00:14:42:	of all nations. Incidentally, this is tied into other episodes, other matters we've discussed,

00:14:42 – 00:14:47:	because it is the word for nation or race there. We are to make disciples of all races,

00:14:47 – 00:14:56:	of all nations. You can use either word. But now we come to the part that is key for what we will

00:14:56 – 00:15:02:	be discussing about baptism in this episode. We are told to go and make disciples of all nations.

00:15:03 – 00:15:09:	But then we are told how to do that, how we are to make these disciples. There are two things

00:15:09 – 00:15:18:	that are given. The first is baptizing. Baptism is given first, that's noteworthy. Out of two

00:15:18 – 00:15:26:	things we are to do to make disciples, we are first to baptize. Then we are to teach them.

00:15:27 – 00:15:34:	Now, the underlying Greek terms, which thankfully do come through in the English translation, are

00:15:34 – 00:15:41:	in the same tense here, baptizing and teaching. Baptizantes and didescantes are the two words

00:15:41 – 00:15:50:	there in the Greek. But this tells us how we make Christians. This is the standard way that you make

00:15:50 – 00:15:58:	a Christian. You baptize the person in the triune name of God. Then you teach the person

00:15:59 – 00:16:04:	all that Christ has commanded us to observe. That's how you make a Christian.

00:16:05 – 00:16:09:	Now, today we may look at that and think that maybe it's backward to some degree,

00:16:10 – 00:16:15:	but that's only because everything around us is in shambles. Because if you think about it,

00:16:16 – 00:16:22:	how does one usually come to faith? Well, one usually comes to faith because one's parents

00:16:22 – 00:16:30:	take one to church. You don't usually come to faith because someone convinced you, or

00:16:30 – 00:16:37:	however you wish to word this, as an adult. That is unusual. That is outside the normal

00:16:37 – 00:16:42:	Christian experience. Because the normal Christian experience, what God wants for us,

00:16:42 – 00:16:47:	is to grow up in a Christian nation, in a Christian family, to be Christian from birth.

00:16:48 – 00:16:53:	That is the goal. That is how things should be. And so it is baptizing. And yes,

00:16:53 – 00:16:59:	we Lutherans do believe in infant baptism. We will go over this at some point in this episode,

00:16:59 – 00:17:04:	but really it runs through the entirety of the scripture sections, dealing with baptism.

00:17:05 – 00:17:10:	But so we baptize infants, and then we bring them up in the faith. It's not just a matter of being

00:17:10 – 00:17:15:	baptized and, oh, well, I'm over the line. I'm good. I'm done. No, you are baptized,

00:17:15 – 00:17:20:	and then you progress in the faith. That's, of course, sanctification as part of that,

00:17:20 – 00:17:25:	but just being instructed in the faith. And so here, just to start off, we have

00:17:25 – 00:17:32:	the words of Christ commanding us to make disciples of all nations, of all races,

00:17:32 – 00:17:38:	by doing two things, the first of which is baptizing them. This is an incredibly important

00:17:38 – 00:17:44:	part of the Christian life. It is not something that is ancillary or secondary or something that

00:17:44 – 00:17:52:	can be ignored. It is placed right here in Christ's command to spread the faith as the first item.

00:17:54 – 00:17:58:	We have to pay attention to the words of Christ and the way that He spoke them,

00:17:58 – 00:18:04:	the words He chose, the order in which He put them. And He says, baptize and teach.

00:18:06 – 00:18:13:	And it's notable here in Matthew 28 that these are the very last words of that gospel. It doesn't

00:18:13 – 00:18:17:	say it, but Jesus obviously ascended into heaven. We know that from the other gospels.

00:18:17 – 00:18:23:	So this is the very end of Jesus' earthly ministry, the very last thing that He says,

00:18:23 – 00:18:28:	which is pretty important. The very last thing that God says before He ascends into heaven is go and

00:18:28 – 00:18:38:	baptize. I think that throughout church history, we've taken that seriously. And again, virtually,

00:18:38 – 00:18:43:	basically every Christian denomination, including by definition, believes that baptism is something.

00:18:44 – 00:18:49:	God had some to do with it. There's some called baptism. What we disagree on are the details.

00:18:49 – 00:18:55:	And so today's episode is talked about the details, but I think as Corey just laid out up front,

00:18:55 – 00:19:02:	this is the cornerstone of the Christian faith. And it's notable that this is where God tells us

00:19:02 – 00:19:09:	how to baptize, baptizing them them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

00:19:10 – 00:19:18:	This is the Trinity. One of the atheist reddit tier memes is that, oh, the Trinity was unknown

00:19:18 – 00:19:24:	until AD 325. And then Constantine made it up. Before that, there was no Trinity. No one who's

00:19:24 – 00:19:31:	ever read the Bible would believe that. That's stupid beyond comprehension. Jesus Christ says

00:19:32 – 00:19:37:	the names of the persons of the Trinity and says, you will baptize in my name.

00:19:38 – 00:19:45:	This is Elohim. This is God Almighty. This is the three persons and one God that it confessed

00:19:45 – 00:19:51:	in all three ecumenical creeds. I think what's particularly interesting about Jesus' earthly

00:19:51 – 00:19:58:	ministry ending with baptism in Matthew 28 is that it perfectly bookends where Jesus' earthly

00:19:58 – 00:20:06:	ministry begins in Matthew 3. Matthew 1 and 2, you have his genealogy, his conception of the birth,

00:20:06 – 00:20:13:	and then John the Baptist. In Matthew 3, the very first thing that Jesus does at the beginning of

00:20:13 – 00:20:20:	his earthly ministry is to be baptized by John the Baptist. Then Jesus came from Galilee to the

00:20:20 – 00:20:26:	Jordan to John to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, I need to be baptized

00:20:26 – 00:20:32:	by you, and do you come to me? But Jesus answered him, let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for

00:20:32 – 00:20:38:	us to fulfill all righteousness. Then he consented. And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went

00:20:38 – 00:20:44:	up from the water and, behold, the heavens were open to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending

00:20:44 – 00:20:50:	like a dove and coming to rest on him. And, behold, a voice from heaven said, this is my beloved Son

00:20:50 – 00:20:59:	with whom I am well pleased. This is notable for two reasons. One, Jesus is being baptized.

00:20:59 – 00:21:05:	And as John said, why would you come to me to be baptized? I need to be baptized by you.

00:21:06 – 00:21:11:	And Jesus said that all good things would be fulfilled, all righteousness would be fulfilled.

00:21:12 – 00:21:17:	The reason I think that this book ends Matthew 28 so perfectly is that this is the physical

00:21:17 – 00:21:23:	manifestation of the Trinity. You have the Son, the second person of the Trinity, emerging from

00:21:23 – 00:21:30:	the waters of baptism. You have the Holy Spirit alighting on him as a dove. And you have God the

00:21:30 – 00:21:37:	Father speaking audibly for all to hear, saying, this is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased.

00:21:37 – 00:21:43:	So here's the Trinity in baptism. Matthew 28, you have the Trinity as part of baptism.

00:21:44 – 00:21:48:	There's never been any doubt about the Trinity. From the first time that God referred to himself

00:21:48 – 00:21:58:	as plural in Genesis until now, until the creeds and the councils, Christianity has always worshiped

00:21:58 – 00:22:05:	a triune God. God revealed more of himself over time. But the simple fact is that anyone who just

00:22:05 – 00:22:10:	read the Bible and never read Reddit would never have any doubt that there's something

00:22:11 – 00:22:17:	triune. Now, triune was a neologism that was created specifically to try to describe what's

00:22:17 – 00:22:23:	going on here, to try to give one name to the three persons and one God. In a great many of the

00:22:23 – 00:22:28:	early debates in the Christian church were, how do we deal with three persons? How do we have a

00:22:28 – 00:22:34:	Father and a Son and the Holy Spirit? What is the difference? Is there a difference? Is it permissible

00:22:34 – 00:22:41:	to say different? All those debates are part of the controversies around the Trinity and around

00:22:41 – 00:22:49:	Christology as well. The fact that Jesus went into the water and then came out and all three parts of

00:22:49 – 00:22:56:	the Trinity appeared, book ends 28 so perfectly because this is the moment where Jesus put the

00:22:56 – 00:23:03:	power of baptism into the water. Jesus did not have his sins washed away in the Jordan. We'll

00:23:03 – 00:23:09:	get to in a minute what baptism does for us. When Jesus was baptized, he was putting into the water

00:23:09 – 00:23:16:	that which we receive by faith in time in the future. And so God is laying this out perfectly

00:23:16 – 00:23:23:	for us to know, A, this is really important and it's coming for me, and B, it's a physical thing.

00:23:23 – 00:23:30:	You know, the combination of the water and the word in baptism is what makes this a sacrament.

00:23:31 – 00:23:37:	God said do this, he said say this, and he said use this. And the third this is the water.

00:23:38 – 00:23:44:	When the water is present and the word is spoken, that is baptism. That's what God promises. And so

00:23:44 – 00:23:48:	all the promises that we're going to get to elsewhere in Scripture that are attendant to this

00:23:48 – 00:23:56:	sacrament hinge on those things being done. And the fact that God commanded it, again that goes

00:23:56 – 00:24:02:	back to what the story I gave at the beginning about the $100 bill. When God says do this,

00:24:02 – 00:24:08:	and then we do it, if we put the focus on ourselves and say here's look what I did,

00:24:08 – 00:24:13:	I went into the Jordan. I went into the Jordan three times as my grandparents did. My grandparents

00:24:13 – 00:24:17:	were Baptists. They were baptized in the Jordan at least twice. They were baptized many times over

00:24:17 – 00:24:25:	their lives. And it worked. The first one worked. We'll talk about multiple baptisms, but on my

00:24:25 – 00:24:29:	dad's side they were Baptists for I don't know how long. So if you're Baptists and you're listening,

00:24:29 – 00:24:33:	I'm not trying to pick on you. My grandmother and grandfather are heaven right now. They were Christians.

00:24:35 – 00:24:40:	I think they got some things wrong and it didn't impair their faith. But again when we talk about

00:24:40 – 00:24:45:	what God promises and what he gives to us, it's not about saying well you got this wrong. It's not

00:24:45 – 00:24:52:	about getting a higher score on the test. It's about receiving the gifts that God is giving to us.

00:24:52 – 00:25:00:	As he describes in scripture in our lives, and the beauty of the sacraments of baptism and

00:25:00 – 00:25:06:	holy communion is that with the physical element that we're going to get to that was here with John

00:25:06 – 00:25:12:	the Baptist, the application of water and the word, that becomes a physical touchstone in the life

00:25:12 – 00:25:20:	of a Christian to point to a moment in time, in space, where something happened. And I think

00:25:20 – 00:25:27:	that's a key element of the Lutheran sacramentology is that here's a physical thing that actually

00:25:27 – 00:25:35:	happened. It removes theology from the realm of the theoretical or kind of metaphysical. I'm thinking

00:25:35 – 00:25:42:	and loving and worshiping, but it's all inside. It's all attitudinal. And the problem with framing

00:25:43 – 00:25:49:	your faith in terms of how I feel or what I think or what I'm doing because of how I think or feel

00:25:50 – 00:25:53:	is that there are days when you're going to fall short. There are days when you're just not going

00:25:53 – 00:25:59:	to feel it. There are days when you're going to get it wrong. And if the root of your faith is

00:26:00 – 00:26:07:	I'm doing the stuff on the day when you don't feel like doing the stuff or you doubt maybe that you

00:26:07 – 00:26:14:	ever sincerely believed or did the stuff in the past, that's an open door for Satan to slide through

00:26:14 – 00:26:20:	and to say, aha, gotcha. You were never a Christian in the first place. And so the promise of salvation

00:26:20 – 00:26:27:	that we're going to get into, that Christ puts in the water of baptism here, seals a promise from God

00:26:27 – 00:26:33:	that no man can take away. Satan can't take it away. We can throw it away. It is possible for us

00:26:33 – 00:26:41:	to despise our baptisms, but God keeps his promises to us. He will do what he says he's going to do.

00:26:41 – 00:26:46:	And so when we talk about all of this, we're emphasizing what God is doing in baptism,

00:26:47 – 00:26:52:	precisely so that in those moments where we doubt ourselves, we still have something to cling to.

00:26:52 – 00:26:57:	We still have God's promises to cling to because you can always count on that. There may come a

00:26:57 – 00:27:02:	time in your life when literally the only thing you can comprehend, I believe that God is God.

00:27:03 – 00:27:09:	That may be all you have. You may not believe that your sins are forgiven. You may not believe that

00:27:09 – 00:27:15:	even that Jesus died for you. If you can still believe that God is God, Scripture will give you

00:27:15 – 00:27:20:	the chance to work your way back through faith, through the Holy Spirit, to where God wants you.

00:27:21 – 00:27:26:	But if you root your faith and your confidence in my stuff, in my doing, in my past actions,

00:27:26 – 00:27:32:	in my beliefs, then you're being deprived of one of the greatest sources of joy and comfort in the

00:27:32 – 00:27:37:	Christian life. And that's why this is so fundamental to Lutheran and we live to Christian

00:27:37 – 00:27:42:	theology. It's not just sacramentology. This is a key part of the Christian life because

00:27:43 – 00:27:48:	it's how Jesus began his ministry and it's how he ended it. And he ended it at the beginning

00:27:48 – 00:27:53:	of the church age saying, go and do this for everyone else. This thing that I have now done for

00:27:53 – 00:27:59:	you, give it to everyone because this is my thing. I need everyone to have it because it does what I

00:27:59 – 00:28:04:	promise it's going to do. If you go up to a random Lutheran and ask what baptism is,

00:28:04 – 00:28:11:	you should get an answer that is roughly what we have said thus far, because in part it's just

00:28:11 – 00:28:17:	going to be a quote from the small catechism. And this is my putting on notice all of the

00:28:17 – 00:28:21:	Lutheran listeners that you should have this answer memorized and in mind if someone asks you,

00:28:21 – 00:28:28:	but from the small catechism, what is baptism? Baptism is not simple water only, but it is the

00:28:28 – 00:28:35:	water comprehended in God's command and connected with God's word. And I want to read two paragraphs

00:28:35 – 00:28:43:	from the large catechism that expand on this and also preemptorily respond to a particular objection.

00:28:45 – 00:28:50:	From this now learn a proper understanding of the subject and how to answer the question what

00:28:50 – 00:28:57:	baptism is, namely thus, that it is not mere ordinary water, but water comprehended in God's word

00:28:57 – 00:29:03:	and command, and sanctified thereby, so that it is nothing else than a divine water, not that the

00:29:03 – 00:29:10:	water itself is nobler than other water, but that God's word and command are added. Therefore,

00:29:10 – 00:29:16:	I exhort again that these two, the water and the word, by no means be separated from one

00:29:16 – 00:29:21:	another imparted, for if the word is separated from it, the water is the same as that with

00:29:21 – 00:29:27:	which the servant cooks, and may indeed be called a bathkeeper's baptism, but when it is added,

00:29:27 – 00:29:35:	as God has ordained, it is a sacrament, and it is called Christ baptism, which is the central

00:29:35 – 00:29:42:	point that we're making here about the difference between the sacrament and mere water.

00:29:44 – 00:29:49:	Mere water is not a baptism. If I run up to you and throw a bucket of water at you,

00:29:49 – 00:29:53:	that doesn't count as a baptism, because in order for it to be a baptism,

00:29:54 – 00:29:59:	we have to do what Christ commanded us to do, and what did He command us to do?

00:29:59 – 00:30:06:	He commanded us to baptize in the triune name, yes, with water. Both elements have to be present,

00:30:06 – 00:30:12:	or it is not the sacrament, because the sacrament is instituted by God in a certain way,

00:30:13 – 00:30:21:	and so it is that sacrament, if it is done in that way. This is not to say, and I know that

00:30:21 – 00:30:25:	some of the audience who are a little more versed in theology will be thinking in the back of their

00:30:25 – 00:30:31:	mind, ex opre operato, that's not what I'm saying, that's not what we're advocating here. It is not

00:30:32 – 00:30:39:	the sacrament, simply because the thing is done. Faith is still required, it is still faith

00:30:39 – 00:30:46:	that receives the gift, yes, faith itself is also a gift, but faith receives the gift of regeneration,

00:30:46 – 00:30:51:	the gift of salvation, and so it's not simply because you speak the words and there's water,

00:30:52 – 00:30:59:	faith is also present, because faith is the central part of the Christian religion. These gifts of

00:30:59 – 00:31:06:	God can be received only in faith, just as a promise can be trusted only in hope or faith.

00:31:07 – 00:31:12:	That's the only way to receive a promise, the only way to receive the good things of God is via faith.

00:31:14 – 00:31:19:	But I would also like to expand here on something that Woe just said, and that is,

00:31:20 – 00:31:25:	when discussing baptism with others, I will often receive the question,

00:31:26 – 00:31:29:	why do we need baptism? Why do we need a physical sign?

00:31:29 – 00:31:37:	Now, of course, my first instinct is going to be the instinct for most Lutherans is to shut

00:31:37 – 00:31:43:	my sinful mouth and not question why God has done what God has done. However, in this case,

00:31:43 – 00:31:49:	I think that it is reasonable and I think that we can give an answer. To some degree,

00:31:49 – 00:31:54:	there's some speculation in this, but it is also based on the totality of the verses dealing

00:31:55 – 00:32:01:	with baptism and also the Lord's Supper in Scripture, and incidentally also circumcision,

00:32:01 – 00:32:07:	which is typological of baptism, we'll get more into that later. But why do we have this physical

00:32:07 – 00:32:15:	sign? And the reason is simple, we're physical. You're listening to this with physical ears,

00:32:16 – 00:32:21:	or if you're reading it, you're reading it with physical eyes. Presumably no one has translated

00:32:21 – 00:32:26:	or copied it over into Braille yet. But you are interacting with this in a physical way because

00:32:26 – 00:32:33:	you are physical. Now, you aren't just physical because you are, of course, a spirit, a soul,

00:32:33 – 00:32:40:	and a body. Again, this is not where we're getting into tripartite versus dipartite or

00:32:40 – 00:32:45:	that whole philosophical theological argument. That's not the point. The point is that you are

00:32:46 – 00:32:55:	not simply physical and not simply spiritual. You are both joined together, and so we have both

00:32:56 – 00:33:02:	in Scripture because God is coming to you as the totality of what you are, because God is super

00:33:02 – 00:33:08:	abundant with His grace and His gifts. He doesn't just give you one way for the forgiveness of sins.

00:33:09 – 00:33:15:	He gives you many. You have the Lord's Supper, you have baptism, you have confession and absolution,

00:33:15 – 00:33:20:	you have confessing your sins directly to God, you have the Word, you have all of these various

00:33:20 – 00:33:27:	ways because God's gifts are super abundant. And so the reason we have baptism is because if you hear

00:33:28 – 00:33:35:	the Word, well, that's received by the mind, and we'll, again, not dwell on the distinction

00:33:35 – 00:33:41:	between the mind and the spirit here, but that is received not so much by the physical you

00:33:41 – 00:33:46:	as by the spiritual you. And so what is the body doing in that interchange?

00:33:46 – 00:33:50:	Well, it's sort of passively listening and relaying that information. However,

00:33:51 – 00:33:56:	if you are immersed under water, well, the body understands water quite well. And so

00:33:57 – 00:34:03:	in the sacraments, we have this joining together of the physical element and the Word,

00:34:03 – 00:34:08:	so the whole man, the total man, the body and the spirit together can grasp this thing.

00:34:08 – 00:34:15:	That is God helping you to truly believe that He is bringing His gifts to you.

00:34:16 – 00:34:22:	That is why you have the physical combined with the Word. That is why they are both important.

00:34:23 – 00:34:29:	And as that small catechism, quote, discussed, it's not the simple water that's doing it,

00:34:29 – 00:34:36:	it's the water and God's promise. And I think one of the hang-ups that some Protestants have is that

00:34:37 – 00:34:44:	it's just simple water. It came from the tap and we do the episode on communion. It's the same

00:34:44 – 00:34:53:	thing. It's bread and it's wine. It's not magic bread, it's magic wine. It's normal material stuff

00:34:54 – 00:35:05:	plus the Word of God. And there is a big strain in theology where people flee from that. Like,

00:35:05 – 00:35:09:	well, that's too simple. That's too easy. I don't see it. I don't believe it.

00:35:11 – 00:35:18:	Part of the reason that this sacramental understanding is pivotal is that if you deny that

00:35:18 – 00:35:26:	simple things can also be God's things, that's a Christological heresy. That is denying God

00:35:27 – 00:35:34:	because how did God come among us as a baby? He was an infant lying in a manger. He was in a stall

00:35:35 – 00:35:41:	for livestock. He was swaddled and his parents loved him. He was probably a very cute baby,

00:35:41 – 00:35:47:	but Jesus pooped his diapers. Mary had to clean him up because he pooped himself. You look at

00:35:47 – 00:35:53:	this baby and you trust in the promise of God that this is the Messiah, but you're also looking at

00:35:53 – 00:36:00:	a tiny screaming infant that's pooping and peeing because it's what humans do. And so the natural

00:36:01 – 00:36:06:	material mind to look at that thing, to look at that small child and say, I can't be God,

00:36:06 – 00:36:12:	look at that. It's small and weak and doesn't know anything. How can that be God? That can be

00:36:12 – 00:36:18:	really God. Well, if you trust in God's promises that he had made up to that point and the miracle

00:36:18 – 00:36:25:	of the birth, then it becomes very easy because you're not trusting in a magic baby. You're trusting

00:36:25 – 00:36:31:	in God's promises. And then it ceases to be magic. It's simply God. It's something that is

00:36:31 – 00:36:36:	supernatural and transcendent in a way that we cannot possibly comprehend and we're fine with that.

00:36:37 – 00:36:44:	Sacrament is something that we get through Latin from the Greek word mystery. These things are

00:36:44 – 00:36:51:	mysteries. When God, the Almighty, the Infinite, the Eternal, the Omniscient, the Omnipresent,

00:36:51 – 00:36:59:	acts in space and time within creation, it's going to look weird. So you end up with Jesus

00:36:59 – 00:37:06:	in a manger and yet he's fully God and fully man at the same time. It's not two halves glued together.

00:37:06 – 00:37:11:	You know, there are all sorts of Christological heresies that go along with trying to rationally

00:37:11 – 00:37:17:	explain what's in the manger and what's on the cross. When we believe and confess what Scripture

00:37:17 – 00:37:22:	says about all of these things, there come times when we're talking about the sacraments and we're

00:37:22 – 00:37:31:	talking about Christ's union of God and man, where reason fails us. And there are not many

00:37:31 – 00:37:36:	places in the faith where that's the case, but this is one of them. And I think chief among the

00:37:36 – 00:37:42:	arguments that we have among denominations about the sacraments is fundamentally unbelief that God

00:37:42 – 00:37:47:	can do these miraculous things that he says he can do when we're talking about the material world.

00:37:48 – 00:37:55:	In John 3, a man came to Jesus by night and said to him, Rabbi, we know that you're a teacher,

00:37:55 – 00:38:00:	come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him. Jesus answered him,

00:38:00 – 00:38:06:	truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus

00:38:06 – 00:38:11:	said to him, how can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb

00:38:11 – 00:38:18:	and be born? Jesus answered him, truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the

00:38:18 – 00:38:23:	spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of flesh is flesh and that which

00:38:23 – 00:38:28:	is born of the spirit is spirit. Do not marble that I said to you, you must be born again.

00:38:28 – 00:38:33:	The wind blows where it wishes and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from

00:38:33 – 00:38:40:	or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the spirit. So when Jesus answers Nicodemus,

00:38:40 – 00:38:47:	you must be born of the water and the spirit, this is catechesis about baptism. Anytime word

00:38:47 – 00:38:53:	and water are connected, the spirit and water are connected in Scripture, it's pointing to baptism.

00:38:54 – 00:38:59:	It's pointing to the promise they got placed in the water when Jesus was himself baptized.

00:39:01 – 00:39:06:	I think one of the chief hang-ups that a lot of Protestants have come from a misunderstanding

00:39:06 – 00:39:12:	of the solace. Corey was talking a minute ago about receiving these things by faith, including

00:39:13 – 00:39:18:	baptism, imparting faith, as we'll get to some of those verses, and then faith receiving that gift

00:39:18 – 00:39:26:	itself. It's a case where reason kind of falls down, but it's important for us just to acknowledge

00:39:26 – 00:39:31:	that when God's acting, we can't necessarily make sense of it, but we have to believe it.

00:39:32 – 00:39:39:	And so when God connects water to a promise, we take it at face value. And I think that a lot of

00:39:39 – 00:39:47:	the arguments against this view of baptism come down to misunderstanding the solace. Corey did

00:39:47 – 00:39:52:	a video a while ago that's up on YouTube, we'll put in the show notes, specifically going into what

00:39:52 – 00:39:57:	sola fide actually means. This is not what most of you think. If you actually understand the Latin

00:39:57 – 00:40:04:	behind it and the arguments that were being made at that time, faith alone does not mean

00:40:05 – 00:40:11:	faith and nothing else, because it's not what we find in Scripture. We find faith and other things,

00:40:12 – 00:40:18:	but along with all of that, wherever you have God's word and you have his promises, you will also

00:40:18 – 00:40:23:	have other things. And sometimes those are signs, sometimes they're symbols. That does happen.

00:40:24 – 00:40:33:	Baptism is more than a symbol because it is doing something. When Jesus says you must be born of

00:40:33 – 00:40:39:	water and the Spirit, think about your birth. We've talked in the past about the obedience

00:40:39 – 00:40:46:	the Lazarus had when Jesus says Lazarus come out. How much cooperation was there in that moment?

00:40:46 – 00:40:53:	We're a dead man. Here's God and obeys him from the grave, from death. It's the same thing at the

00:40:53 – 00:40:59:	other end of life here. When Jesus says you must be born of water and the Spirit, talking about a

00:40:59 – 00:41:06:	rebirth, it's saying you're starting from scratch. You don't have agency in your birth. We have no

00:41:06 – 00:41:11:	control over the day of our birth, the hour of birth. We're along for the ride as God doing

00:41:11 – 00:41:17:	something through our mothers in a miracle. It's a miracle that plays out every day, but it's no

00:41:17 – 00:41:24:	less miraculous for it. When we are born of water, it is the same sort of passive birth

00:41:24 – 00:41:31:	that we have in baptism. The fact that there is human participation in baptism goes back to the

00:41:31 – 00:41:37:	allusion to receiving a $100 bill. If I hand you a $100 bill and you make the story about

00:41:37 – 00:41:41:	all the activity that you did related to you grasping it and receiving it and taking it,

00:41:41 – 00:41:47:	if it's all about you, that's not really the story. That's not a fair accounting of what

00:41:47 – 00:41:52:	actually happened. When Jesus talked about you being born of water and the Spirit,

00:41:53 – 00:41:59:	that is a rebirth that He's giving us. It's a rebirth that He put into the water for us to receive.

00:42:01 – 00:42:05:	And there is, of course, the even more blunt statement in Mark 16.

00:42:06 – 00:42:11:	Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.

00:42:12 – 00:42:19:	And I think this is a good point to go over another point of confusion with regard to what

00:42:19 – 00:42:26:	Lutherans teach. Many do not understand this, and in part it can potentially be a little bit

00:42:26 – 00:42:31:	confusing. And I know that the rationalists or those who are, let's say, rationalist adjacent

00:42:31 – 00:42:35:	in the audience are going to hate the way that I phrase this, but I will explain it,

00:42:35 – 00:42:40:	and it won't be so bad when I'm done. And the question, of course, is baptism necessary?

00:42:41 – 00:42:48:	The Lutheran answer, the best way that I can find to formulate it, is yes, but no, but yes.

00:42:49 – 00:42:55:	And the reason for that is that the first answer to is baptism necessary is yes.

00:42:56 – 00:42:58:	Because what does Scripture say? Well, I just read it.

00:42:58 – 00:43:01:	Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved.

00:43:03 – 00:43:09:	That makes baptism necessary. As a Christian, you must be baptized. However,

00:43:09 – 00:43:16:	is it absolutely necessary to be baptized to be saved? To that we must answer no,

00:43:16 – 00:43:21:	because it is, of course, conceivable that one could come to faith, believe in Christ,

00:43:22 – 00:43:28:	and not have the opportunity to be baptized, because, for instance, you could be brought to faith

00:43:28 – 00:43:32:	through the Word, planned to be baptized in three days and get hit by a bus.

00:43:33 – 00:43:39:	Would you be saved? Yes. And so is baptism absolutely necessary? The answer must be no,

00:43:39 – 00:43:44:	because there are those who could be saved in the absence of being baptized.

00:43:45 – 00:43:53:	But the final but yes, is that baptism is indeed necessary, because if you neglect to be baptized,

00:43:54 – 00:44:01:	if you dishonor baptism, if you consider baptism to be an unimportant thing,

00:44:01 – 00:44:07:	and so neglect to be baptized, that is proof that you are not actually a Christian.

00:44:08 – 00:44:13:	And so someone lives and proclaims himself to be a Christian for 40 years, but is never baptized.

00:44:14 – 00:44:19:	That is very strong evidence that he was not actually a Christian, and so that is the,

00:44:19 – 00:44:25:	but yes, baptism is necessary. And so that's the Lutheran position, because that's the position

00:44:25 – 00:44:32:	taken from Scripture, that baptism is necessary for the Christian, but not absolutely necessary,

00:44:32 – 00:44:38:	but not something that is optional or can be ignored, and so is a true sign of a true Christian.

00:44:39 – 00:44:45:	And so at first it may seem like that is, when you just hear the way that it's phrased initially,

00:44:46 – 00:44:52:	irrational, but it's not once it's explained, it's very clear, and it is taken directly from Scripture.

00:44:53 – 00:44:58:	And of course, the most obvious example that is the thief on the cross. There was a man

00:44:58 – 00:45:03:	on one side of Jesus who was mocking him, saying, you're the Son of God, take yourself down.

00:45:04 – 00:45:07:	And there's a man on the other side that said, why do you mock him? We're under condemnation.

00:45:09 – 00:45:14:	We're going to die, and we deserve it, but this man doesn't. And then he turned to Jesus and said,

00:45:14 – 00:45:18:	Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom. And Jesus said, I tell you this day,

00:45:18 – 00:45:23:	you will be with me in paradise. There's no reason to believe that that man was baptized.

00:45:24 – 00:45:29:	There is, however, reason to believe he had faith, because he confessed his faith. He confessed

00:45:29 – 00:45:34:	that Jesus was innocent. He confessed that he was going to be in his kingdom that day.

00:45:35 – 00:45:43:	And his plea was simple, Lord, remember me. And he's the example that's often given to say,

00:45:43 – 00:45:48:	well, baptism can't possibly count for anything, because here's a man who wasn't baptized.

00:45:50 – 00:45:56:	The hypothetical, which is absolutely necessary, is what Corey just said. If that man had then,

00:45:57 – 00:46:03:	if the earthquake had struck before Jesus died, and somehow they all fell down and that thief

00:46:03 – 00:46:12:	had run off and not died that day, if he had despised baptism, if he had been called upon to be

00:46:12 – 00:46:17:	baptized, which remember at that time, he knew about Jesus, he may not have known about John.

00:46:17 – 00:46:20:	We don't know exactly what he knows. We know he witnessed some miracles.

00:46:22 – 00:46:26:	When the teaching of baptism came to him, as it came to all Christians shortly thereafter,

00:46:27 – 00:46:30:	had he despised and said, no, I'm good, I've got faith, I don't need baptism,

00:46:31 – 00:46:35:	he would have been condemned, and Jesus would have had a different answer for him.

00:46:35 – 00:46:42:	The fact that he confessed and did not have the opportunity for baptism, frankly, that's the whole

00:46:43 – 00:46:51:	history of believers prior to the institution of baptism. Heaven for 4,000 years was filled

00:46:51 – 00:46:56:	up with men who were not baptized. They were circumcised, which was a type of baptism,

00:46:56 – 00:47:02:	but it was a different thing. There are times when God uses different things in different places,

00:47:02 – 00:47:07:	and the fact that one group of people is not given something, and then the other one is at a

00:47:07 – 00:47:14:	different time, doesn't mean that we get to ignore what the thing was when God gave it. We have to

00:47:14 – 00:47:20:	treat it for what it was and what it is and the time in which it's given. And baptism is given to

00:47:20 – 00:47:27:	us as given in the Church in Matthew 3.28, go therefore and baptize all nations. That's us,

00:47:27 – 00:47:33:	we're the nations, we're not Jews, most of the audience is sons of Japheth, we're Europeans,

00:47:33 – 00:47:40:	we're white guys. We're receiving the gift sent to the nations by Paul and the other apostles who

00:47:40 – 00:47:46:	spread out from that time. And so we are the recipients of the very thing that God desired

00:47:46 – 00:47:52:	for us, and that included foremost among it baptism. We'll get into here in a minute the

00:47:52 – 00:47:57:	baptism of households, and we've talked in past episodes, particularly the one on

00:47:57 – 00:48:04:	election and the one on Christian nationalism about how nations are a superset of the household.

00:48:05 – 00:48:11:	And so historically, the Christian faith has been spread by prophets often going to

00:48:12 – 00:48:17:	the King, going to the man in charge. This is what Jonah did in Nineveh, he went to the

00:48:17 – 00:48:21:	King of Nineveh, told him to repent, said, God's going to kill you all in 40 days.

00:48:22 – 00:48:27:	The King of Nineveh repented, he told his people to repent and they were saved from God's wrath.

00:48:27 – 00:48:32:	By God's mercy, they received the word, they were not Jews, they were outside of all the

00:48:32 – 00:48:37:	covenants that we talk about. And yet when the word came to them, they confessed they repented,

00:48:37 – 00:48:42:	and they were forgiven. And that came from the top down. That was absolutely Christian

00:48:42 – 00:48:48:	nationalism in Jonah. And the same thing is the history of the Christian faith in European nations,

00:48:48 – 00:48:53:	not exclusively, it's not the only way that it happens. There are many listeners today, as Corey

00:48:53 – 00:49:00:	said, it's weird and kind of broken that there are people who are listening to us, where in some

00:49:00 – 00:49:06:	cases, this may be one of the first times that some of you are hearing about the Christian faith.

00:49:06 – 00:49:11:	And that's wonderful. And that's a miracle from God that he's able to use this to reach you.

00:49:11 – 00:49:15:	And one of the things that you're realizing as you come to that knowledge is that

00:49:15 – 00:49:19:	your parents sinned against you, your grandparents. Like at some point,

00:49:19 – 00:49:26:	your ancestors who knew about God forgot him and despised him. And so your inheritance was one

00:49:26 – 00:49:31:	of damnation. This is what happened to all the nations after the flood and after Babel.

00:49:32 – 00:49:38:	They scattered and most of them forgot about God. And it was only, it was as far as we can tell,

00:49:38 – 00:49:46:	it was exclusively, in the end, God preserving the faith through the Jewish people that any

00:49:46 – 00:49:51:	belief was preserved, because everyone else was apostatizing. Just as the Jews tried to repeatedly,

00:49:51 – 00:49:56:	for hundreds of years, they were constantly trying to throw God away. God hung on to his people

00:49:56 – 00:50:02:	because they're elect, they're his. He will not let them get out of his hand. And so the gift of

00:50:02 – 00:50:08:	baptism, the gift of these means of grace acts in time as a particular touchstone. And

00:50:11 – 00:50:16:	the belief in the knowledge of that actual activity, again, it takes it away from the realm of the

00:50:16 – 00:50:22:	hypothetical and the realm of the intellectual and makes it something concrete. I have a certificate

00:50:22 – 00:50:27:	from the day I was baptized. I was about three years old. I actually remember that day. I was able

00:50:27 – 00:50:32:	to develop memories pretty early. I don't remember being baptized, but I can remember my dad and the

00:50:32 – 00:50:38:	Narthex with my mom and the pastor, because the pastor was trying to show my dad how to hold me,

00:50:38 – 00:50:43:	and he was holding me the wrong way. And I remember the pastor correcting him. That's one of my earliest

00:50:43 – 00:50:52:	memories. But I do remember that day in 1980. One of the blessings of the traditional Christian

00:50:52 – 00:50:57:	understanding of baptism is that I can point back to that day. That's part of the reason for giving a

00:50:57 – 00:51:02:	certificate of baptism. It's not congratulations. Look at the great job you did. It's not an

00:51:02 – 00:51:09:	achievement certificate. It's a commemoration of an important event in my life. And one of the very

00:51:09 – 00:51:15:	interesting things, if you do any genealogy for Christians in the West, it's generally,

00:51:16 – 00:51:20:	sometimes you may not even have a birthday for someone, but you may have a baptismal day instead.

00:51:21 – 00:51:28:	And there's birth, baptism, wedding, and death are the four days that are traditionally preserved

00:51:28 – 00:51:33:	for every Christian historically in the West. And genealogies will always have some combination

00:51:33 – 00:51:39:	of those. And frequently you'll have all four. Baptism is included because Christians have

00:51:39 – 00:51:45:	always known that it was important. Not as something that we do, but as something that God does for us.

00:51:45 – 00:51:50:	And so when Jesus talked to Nicodemus about being born from water in the Spirit,

00:51:50 – 00:51:57:	it was that baptism that's given to us. And pointing to that blessing is a comfort. I can

00:51:57 – 00:52:02:	take comforter than that to know that no matter what happens to me, God made a promise when his

00:52:02 – 00:52:07:	name was placed on me. The name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit was placed on me

00:52:07 – 00:52:17:	in my baptism 43 years ago. That's a permanent marker in my life. Just as my name being written

00:52:17 – 00:52:22:	in the Book of Life from before eternity is permanent, but I can't see that book. I can't

00:52:22 – 00:52:27:	see that. That's not real to me in the sense that my baptism was. There was actual witnesses,

00:52:27 – 00:52:33:	there was an actual act. I was a recipient of it and I received faith. Now, as we look at these

00:52:34 – 00:52:38:	things, the reason that we're focusing on them is for that purpose. It's for comfort.

00:52:39 – 00:52:44:	We're going to talk about some things that are going to, as I said earlier, they're going to

00:52:44 – 00:52:49:	make some of you feel like, oh, we think you're doing something wrong. The point is not whether

00:52:49 – 00:52:55:	or not we're getting stuff wrong. The point is whether we're receiving what God tells us faithfully.

00:52:55 – 00:52:59:	Because if we do that, then we're receiving the full measure of what it is he wants us to have.

00:53:00 – 00:53:06:	Whenever you don't believe God about anything, you're losing out. It's not principally for a

00:53:06 – 00:53:11:	Christian a question of, oh, am I sinning? Oh, my damn, because I did this. Those are concerns,

00:53:11 – 00:53:17:	but the chief concern is, am I missing out? We should be jealous of God's things. We should

00:53:17 – 00:53:23:	want God's stuff because we know that we're adopted sons of God. As Christians who have a

00:53:23 – 00:53:28:	proper sacramentology, we understand that our baptism is the certain moment of that adoption,

00:53:28 – 00:53:37:	of that rebirth. I have one of my many Bibles sitting here and turning to the beginning of it,

00:53:37 – 00:53:42:	it has a page, although in this Bible it's only one page, but for births, marriages,

00:53:42 – 00:53:47:	baptisms, confirmations and deaths. Of course, confirmations you're not going to find in every

00:53:47 – 00:53:52:	Bible because that's going to be specific to those traditions that have a confirmation right.

00:53:53 – 00:53:59:	But that has historically been the standard for Christians. Those were the things that were recorded

00:53:59 – 00:54:04:	and often they were recorded in the family Bible. And that is part of how genealogical research is

00:54:04 – 00:54:09:	done. If you can get a hold of the old family Bible, you can get these dates and information.

00:54:09 – 00:54:13:	Sometimes they're stored in the church records as well. If you can get a hold of those, if they've

00:54:13 – 00:54:21:	been preserved adequately. That is properly the history of our people. That is properly the

00:54:21 – 00:54:28:	history of the European peoples is Christianity and the transmission of the Christian faith

00:54:28 – 00:54:35:	from father to son down through the ages. That is how it is supposed to be. And part of how that is

00:54:35 – 00:54:41:	done is through baptism, it is through the baptizing of one's children. Now notably, I was not raised

00:54:41 – 00:54:50:	Lutheran, so I wasn't baptized until I was eleven, but so I was a little older than Woe was.

00:54:51 – 00:54:54:	But still baptized as a child. You're still a child when you're eleven.

00:54:55 – 00:55:01:	And if you baptize a child at nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirty, whatever it happens to be,

00:55:01 – 00:55:08:	as I've said before, it's not really that different from baptizing that same child

00:55:09 – 00:55:15:	at one or two weeks old or however old it happens to be. We're not bound by the

00:55:15 – 00:55:19:	stricture of the old covenant. We do not have to baptize on the eighth day.

00:55:20 – 00:55:26:	It is advisable to baptize as early as possible, but it doesn't have to be on the eighth day.

00:55:27 – 00:55:31:	But the reason I would say that there's not much of a functional difference is the child is still,

00:55:32 – 00:55:39:	if the child has been instructed properly, the child is still going to follow what his

00:55:39 – 00:55:45:	father has told him to do. And so the ten-year-old should be obeying his father no less than the one

00:55:45 – 00:55:54:	week old. Yes, the ten-year-old can walk up to the baptismal font or the pool, whatever it happens to

00:55:54 – 00:56:03:	be, and actually verbalize his faith in Christ. But that doesn't make for a real difference between

00:56:03 – 00:56:08:	that and the infant, because as we've been saying, and as we will show with additional

00:56:08 – 00:56:14:	scripture proofs, that faith that has given you in baptism is a gift from God.

00:56:16 – 00:56:20:	If you have faith before you're baptized, well, that faith is still a gift from God.

00:56:20 – 00:56:26:	The baptism is reinforcing your faith. It is affirming your faith. It is God coming to you again

00:56:27 – 00:56:33:	to help you and guide you, to strengthen you in the faith, to lead you on the path of regeneration

00:56:33 – 00:56:38:	sanctification. Yes, you're regenerated when you are given the gift of faith, but sanctification is

00:56:38 – 00:56:43:	a lifelong process, depending on how you define the term regeneration anyway.

00:56:45 – 00:56:50:	And just to be extremely clear, Woe said God's people, when we say God's people, I don't want

00:56:50 – 00:56:55:	anyone in the audience who may be listening to this as the first episode, to come away thinking

00:56:55 – 00:57:01:	the wrong thing. When we say God's people, we mean the true Israel, the church, we mean believers,

00:57:01 – 00:57:09:	we mean you, those who have faith from Adam is the first believer to whatever unfortunate man

00:57:09 – 00:57:13:	is the last one on this earth who has faith, fortunate because he has faith, unfortunate

00:57:13 – 00:57:20:	because he's lived through whatever came directly before that. Those are God's people.

00:57:20 – 00:57:28:	God's people are the elect. We do not mean the ethnic Jewish people. There are ethnic Jews

00:57:28 – 00:57:35:	who are among the elect, who are Christians, very few these days, more historically,

00:57:37 – 00:57:42:	but the elect are God's people. That is all that term means. These terms are interchangeable.

00:57:42 – 00:57:47:	We did an episode on this, I'll put it in the show notes for those who did not listen to that yet,

00:57:47 – 00:57:54:	so they can go back or if you need a refresher. A couple other passages I want to read that talk

00:57:54 – 00:57:59:	about what baptism actually does in God's words. From Ephesians 5,

00:57:59 – 00:58:28:	So here we're talking about Jesus washing his bride,

00:58:28 – 00:58:33:	the church, that's all of us, that's all believers, that's the elect, washing with water and the word,

00:58:34 – 00:58:41:	mirrored again from Matthew 28 talking about baptism and teaching, that's the water and the word.

00:58:41 – 00:58:47:	So not only do we have water here talking about washing to present the church, to present you

00:58:47 – 00:58:55:	as without spot or wrinkle or as blameless, but Jesus is doing the washing. I think that's

00:58:55 – 00:59:00:	crucial for us when we're discussing baptism, because this is one of the chief points of dispute

00:59:00 – 00:59:10:	among some Protestants. Who's doing the baptism? Because if it's me doing it, say that Cory had

00:59:10 – 00:59:14:	more baptized until he was an adult, and I met him, we were friends, and for whatever reason,

00:59:14 – 00:59:18:	I felt it was appropriate for me to baptize him. Generally, that's disorderly. Generally,

00:59:18 – 00:59:23:	it's best if a pastor does it, but there are circumstances where it may be appropriate for

00:59:23 – 00:59:27:	one Christian to baptize another, that's legitimate. It's a question of order, it's not a question of

00:59:27 – 00:59:37:	legitimacy. If Cory had come to me and I had baptized him in view of Ephesians 5, would you

00:59:37 – 00:59:45:	conclude that I had washed away his sins, or that he had somehow cleansed himself? Who's doing the

00:59:45 – 00:59:51:	cleansing and the baptism? It can only possibly be God. So as I said, there's going to be the video

59:51 – 01:00:01
that we'll link to explaining the solas. When we talk about faith alone, one of the simplistic

01:00:01 – 01:00:06:	and completely incorrect arguments against this view of baptism is, well, that's works,

01:00:06 – 01:00:13:	you're talking about doing works. If you believe Ephesians 5, how can you possibly say that that's

01:00:13 – 01:00:19:	works? When Jesus talks about cleansing us, cleansing the church with a washing of water

01:00:19 – 01:00:27:	and the word, where is the us in that except as the cleansed, except as the recipient of the grace,

01:00:27 – 01:00:33:	the recipient of the washing of the baptism? And it is the same thing. Everywhere that you find

01:00:33 – 01:00:39:	washing and water, it is about baptism. And one of the things that happens when these discussions

01:00:39 – 01:00:45:	occur interdenominationally is that all these passages that very clearly describe what baptism

01:00:45 – 01:00:49:	is doing, folks have to ignore them and say, well, it's got nothing to do with baptism because it

01:00:49 – 01:00:57:	can't possibly mean that if you stick to a works righteousness view of these actions. And the point

01:00:57 – 01:01:03:	is that this is not works righteousness because they're not our works. They're God's works. The

01:01:03 – 01:01:09:	story is not you reaching out and taking the $100 bill. The story is the $100 bill being handed

01:01:09 – 01:01:16:	to you. You're receiving a gift. And to whatever extent you are physically participating, it's

01:01:16 – 01:01:22:	passive. It's incidental. It's necessary to the reception. But you are the receiver of the gift.

01:01:22 – 01:01:27:	You're not the one doing it. The same is the case in Titus 3. But when the goodness and loving

01:01:27 – 01:01:33:	kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us not because of works done by us and righteousness,

01:01:33 – 01:01:40:	but according to his own mercy by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit,

01:01:40 – 01:01:45:	whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior. So the being justified by

01:01:45 – 01:01:51:	his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life. The sayings trustworthy

01:01:51 – 01:01:58:	and I want you all to insist on these things. The washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy

01:01:58 – 01:02:03:	Spirit is exactly the same kind of speeches in Ephesians 5. Washing of water with the Word.

01:02:03 – 01:02:09:	The Word and the Spirit come together through the water. The Word is always paramount. The Word is

01:02:09 – 01:02:15:	always spoken at all of these moments. Even if it's only the Word, the Word is efficacious on its own

01:02:15 – 01:02:20:	every Christian knows that. There's no disagreement that the Word is not efficacious on its own.

01:02:21 – 01:02:27:	The Word when combined with these physical elements and sacraments is equally efficacious.

01:02:27 – 01:02:34:	The additional benefit of the physical means in the means of grace is not that there's

01:02:34 – 01:02:41:	extra stuff in baptism, but that there's physical certainty that perhaps Satan can deprive you if

01:02:41 – 01:02:48:	it's only mental. So if you come to faith by hearing as an adult and then you desire baptism,

01:02:48 – 01:02:54:	as is often the case in Scripture, there are many who came to be believers and then they were baptized.

01:02:54 – 01:02:59:	They received the gift of faith and they were baptized and there's some who point to this and

01:02:59 – 01:03:06:	say well see clearly baptism is a sign of faith that's already received. God gives us the baptism

01:03:06 – 01:03:11:	because Satan can come along later and attack your belief, can attack your confidence in your own

01:03:11 – 01:03:18:	belief, and so what the sacraments do, what baptism does, that one moment in time, you know, maybe

01:03:18 – 01:03:27:	you got a certificate, you have witnesses to it. When you are baptized, past tense, past

01:03:27 – 01:03:34:	perfect progressive, it's an ongoing permanent state of affairs. I am baptized, not I was baptized.

01:03:34 – 01:03:42:	It is who I am now. I am baptized into Christ. Even if I had faith before I was baptized, and I

01:03:42 – 01:03:46:	may well have, my parents were probably reading the Bible to me when I was, you know, two or three,

01:03:46 – 01:03:50:	and then they had me baptized, but it was pretty much all happening at the same time. There are

01:03:50 – 01:03:53:	many of you where maybe you hear the word, you come to faith and then you're baptized.

01:03:55 – 01:03:59:	God gives us the super abundance of his grace precisely because

01:03:59 – 01:04:07:	10 years from now, you suffer some calamity, you suffer a crisis of faith, and you are doubting

01:04:07 – 01:04:14:	if you ever believed in God. If your faith is rooted in, yeah, I believed in God really hard,

01:04:14 – 01:04:18:	and I got baptized because of what I believed, and I was doing all this stuff, and you know,

01:04:18 – 01:04:24:	God was there, but I was a doer, I was a prime mover. Satan can use that attitude,

01:04:24 – 01:04:29:	even if in a narrow sense it's true. Ultimately, if you understand faith, you understand that you're

01:04:29 – 01:04:35:	not doing anything because you were dead in your trespasses, you were reborn in faith. That is

01:04:35 – 01:04:40:	the gift of God that he gives to us. Even if it's narrowly true that you believed and then you were

01:04:40 – 01:04:46:	baptized and then you went on, Satan knows that that gap of time between when you were a believer

01:04:46 – 01:04:51:	and when you were baptized, if you throw the baptism out and say that I did the baptism to,

01:04:51 – 01:04:55:	I did the believing, and I got the believer's baptism because I was believing, and I was really

01:04:55 – 01:05:00:	doing a really good job with my faith. That was me doing stuff, me, me, me.

01:05:01 – 01:05:05:	Satan could come along and say, cast doubt on that and say, well, did you really believe,

01:05:05 – 01:05:08:	and didn't you have doubts? Wasn't there something about that that didn't add up, or

01:05:08 – 01:05:13:	maybe you were a hypocrite when you were doing it. Maybe you were a believer, but you were still

01:05:13 – 01:05:17:	committing these other sins and you ignored it, and later on when those hit you like a ton of

01:05:17 – 01:05:23:	bricks, you look back and you think, well, did I ever really believe? And some people

01:05:23 – 01:05:28:	reach that crisis of faith and Satan gets ahold of some of them and tears them away from God

01:05:28 – 01:05:37:	completely. Baptism, when it is received by a believer, is still a stopgap because baptism is

01:05:37 – 01:05:45:	an anchor of God's promise in your life, saying it doesn't matter what happened before. It doesn't

01:05:45 – 01:05:49:	matter if you were a believer before you were baptized because whatever happened before that day,

01:05:50 – 01:05:55:	when God's word was given to you with the promise in the water,

01:05:57 – 01:06:03:	that is a moment that is God acting to you. God is pouring out his blessings on you,

01:06:03 – 01:06:09:	he is washing and cleansing you by the water with the word. If your confidence is in that,

01:06:09 – 01:06:14:	then you will be confident that no matter what else, you can believe all of Satan's lies

01:06:14 – 01:06:20:	about you. You can believe his lies about how evil you are and how much wrath you deserve.

01:06:20 – 01:06:26:	It may be true, but the lie is that you then don't deserve God's mercy, that he hasn't given you his

01:06:26 – 01:06:31:	mercy. If you subscribe to everything that Satan says about you and about your past,

01:06:32 – 01:06:37:	but you have the anchor of your baptism and the certainty in God's promise in that moment,

01:06:37 – 01:06:41:	you cannot be snatched from God's hand because when you look at that and you say, yes,

01:06:41 – 01:06:49:	God gives this to me, he did this for me, that, as I said, it's a stop gap. It's like a fire break

01:06:49 – 01:06:54:	and you're fighting a forest fire. Sometimes you set a backfire, so you have to burn everything

01:06:54 – 01:07:00:	out so there's nothing combustible for the fire to jump across. This is a break, it's a stop gap

01:07:00 – 01:07:07:	that ensures that whatever goes wrong in your life, it can't go beyond the promise of baptism.

01:07:08 – 01:07:12:	That's the reason that the sacraments matter. That's the reason that God acting in time matters.

01:07:13 – 01:07:19:	I've talked to a number of people in the last few months who have heard the show and some of them

01:07:19 – 01:07:25:	have not been away from the church for a long time. I always ask each of them, were you baptized?

01:07:25 – 01:07:31:	It's not judgmental, I'm just curious. If someone says, yes, I was baptized a long time ago and I've

01:07:31 – 01:07:36:	wandered away. I quit believing, I've been an atheist, I quit caring, I'll get the state of

01:07:36 – 01:07:42:	the church, I don't want any part of this. I can always point any of those people to

01:07:42 – 01:07:48:	God's promise and their baptism, that God put His name on them and see the blessing of the gift

01:07:48 – 01:07:56:	of a sacrament is it by taking us out of the equation, by eliminating works, by eliminating our

01:07:58 – 01:08:03:	needing to get things right, by us needing to have the right faith and the right beliefs,

01:08:03 – 01:08:09:	when we cling to God's promises, you can hang on to that even after a lifetime of depravity.

01:08:09 – 01:08:15:	You can do terrible things. If you are coming back around by a miracle of the Holy Spirit,

01:08:15 – 01:08:19:	when someone comes to me, I'll tell them, I believe that that's God through the Holy

01:08:19 – 01:08:23:	Spirit given to you in baptism, calling you back to the church, calling you back to the faith

01:08:24 – 01:08:30:	in these final days. Whether it's five years or a century or a thousand years, I don't know,

01:08:30 – 01:08:34:	but it certainly feels like the end and we should always have that sense that

01:08:34 – 01:08:39:	I don't have much time left, I can't put this off because at some point you're going to be

01:08:41 – 01:08:44:	you're going to be like the thief on the cross, you're going to be facing your final moments

01:08:45 – 01:08:51:	and if you can say confidently, Lord, remember me and your kingdom in view of your baptism

01:08:51 – 01:08:58:	and God's promises there, you have confident faith because you're not hinging it on how well you did

01:08:58 – 01:09:03:	or how much you knew, you're hinging it on, I believe in God's promises, I believe God.

01:09:04 – 01:09:09:	Not because of any strength or merit in me, but God is God, I know that and I trust that

01:09:09 – 01:09:14:	despite the fact that I deserve the worst, God desires for me the best and he gave it to me on

01:09:14 – 01:09:20:	the cross and he gave it to me in baptism and knowing that you receive that past tense in a

01:09:20 – 01:09:25:	moment in time in a date that can be written on a certificate or in a Bible, there may come a time

01:09:25 – 01:09:30:	in your life, maybe you never care, for me I've never particularly had to worry about it because

01:09:30 – 01:09:35:	God has bolstered my faith in other ways, but I always know, you know, all the other bolstering,

01:09:35 – 01:09:39:	all the other stuff, it's like, oh wow, I have really strong faith, I don't need that stuff, no.

01:09:40 – 01:09:46:	My baptism underpins all of the other confidence that I have, I know that that's a foundation,

01:09:46 – 01:09:52:	it's not me, it's not my parents, it's not the water, it's God's promise in the water with the word,

01:09:52 – 01:09:59:	when those are together, we can be certain and having that is a gift that's worth more than

01:09:59 – 01:10:05:	anything in this life and so the reason for discussing these things and for calling some of

01:10:05 – 01:10:11:	you out for what your churches have taught is that teachings that are contrary to this

01:10:11 – 01:10:17:	deprive you in some cases of that stopgap, they deprive you of the certainty that someone who

01:10:17 – 01:10:21:	believes not in myself, I don't believe that I did anything or that I deserved anything good,

01:10:22 – 01:10:28:	but I believe that I was baptized, I know that, that's a certainty and that is a permanent state

01:10:28 – 01:10:34:	for me because I do not reject it and every day that I am baptized and I cling to it is another

01:10:34 – 01:10:40:	day that I remain a Christian as a gift from God and when we have that confidence in His promises

01:10:40 – 01:10:44:	through the sacraments, all the other things that we talk about on the show, we talk about,

01:10:44 – 01:10:48:	you know, just belief in the face of terrible hatred and awful things happening,

01:10:49 – 01:10:53:	we can be unflappable in our faith, we can be cheerful spiritual warriors,

01:10:53 – 01:10:57:	because what can happen? I'm baptized, what are these people going to do to me when God

01:10:57 – 01:11:03:	placed his name on me? I don't worry about anything when I trust in God, that's a gift

01:11:03 – 01:11:08:	and it's one that can only possibly come from a belief in the promises God has given in time to us

01:11:08 – 01:11:14:	physically. In a very real sense, the division here, when it comes to

01:11:16 – 01:11:21:	how different Christian traditions view the sacraments, and in this episode specifically

01:11:21 – 01:11:29:	baptism, is whether the sacraments are viewed as law or gospel, whether they are viewed as

01:11:29 – 01:11:36:	a command from God, something that we must do in order to be saved, which notably,

01:11:37 – 01:11:41:	that would be work's righteousness, because that would be a requirement placed on us,

01:11:41 – 01:11:48:	a work that we must do in order to achieve salvation, or in order to retain salvation,

01:11:48 – 01:11:52:	however you want to look at that, versus the sacraments as gospel.

01:11:54 – 01:12:01:	The Lutheran view is that the sacraments are gospel. The sacraments are God coming to us

01:12:01 – 01:12:08:	to offer his gifts to us. All of the actual active part of this

01:12:09 – 01:12:16:	is on God's side. We receive the gifts, we benefit, God is the one giving us the gifts,

01:12:16 – 01:12:23:	God is the one doing the work, which notably, Christianity is a work's righteousness religion.

01:12:24 – 01:12:30:	The distinction between Christianity and other religions that tell you that you

01:12:30 – 01:12:35:	must do these works to be righteous, is that the works are already done, and they were done by

01:12:35 – 01:12:43:	Christ. It is his works that make us righteous, and so yes, it's work's righteousness, but it

01:12:43 – 01:12:50:	is not your works. Your works will not avail you. And so, baptism and the Lord's supper are

01:12:50 – 01:12:56:	beneficial, they work forgiveness of sins, they salve the wounded or the worried conscious

01:12:56 – 01:13:01:	because they are from God. And that is a major point.

01:13:02 – 01:13:09:	If your theology, if what your church teaches, causes you to doubt when it comes to the sacraments,

01:13:11 – 01:13:16:	there's a very real problem, because these are gifts from God meant to soothe the conscience,

01:13:16 – 01:13:23:	not to cause you distress or worry or doubt. These are meant to strengthen your faith. That is

01:13:23 – 01:13:30:	properly what the sacraments are. That is the distinction there. And so, if the sacraments

01:13:30 – 01:13:37:	are being preached to you as law, that's not what they are. And this is something that we have

01:13:37 – 01:13:43:	mentioned previously, I've mentioned in a few places. This is a distinction between,

01:13:45 – 01:13:51:	fundamentally, between Lutherans and other traditions, is the view of what the divine

01:13:51 – 01:13:58:	service actually is. And the sacraments are a big part of this. Because we view the divine service

01:13:58 – 01:14:07:	first and foremost as God bringing his gifts to us. This simply follows, of course, from scripture.

01:14:08 – 01:14:13:	What does scripture say about why we love him? Well, we love him because he first loved us.

01:14:14 – 01:14:20:	In the divine service, we return thanks to him because he first brings his gifts to us.

01:14:21 – 01:14:27:	We are not going to church. We are not going to the divine service first and foremost

01:14:27 – 01:14:33:	to offer our sacrifice of thanks and praise to God. We do that, but we do that in response to

01:14:33 – 01:14:40:	his bringing gifts to us. That is the Lutheran view, and we believe that is what is consonant

01:14:40 – 01:14:46:	with what scripture teaches. God brings good things to us. We give thanks for those good things.

01:14:47 – 01:14:54:	God loved us first, so we can love him in return. And that comforts the troubled conscience.

01:14:54 – 01:14:59:	There is no comfort if you believe that it is works righteousness, if you believe that you

01:14:59 – 01:15:05:	have to do X, Y, and Z in order to be good enough for salvation, because that ultimately leads to

01:15:05 – 01:15:11:	despair. Because you will never be good enough. Because you are still fallen and sinful.

01:15:11 – 01:15:17:	It is comforting to know that you do not have to do all of these things. Yes,

01:15:17 – 01:15:22:	there will be good works in your life, as we continually say. We are not denying the Christian

01:15:22 – 01:15:28:	will. The Christian must have good works. What we are saying is that just like in the last episode,

01:15:28 – 01:15:35:	you're forgiven because Christ already completed the work. The work is done. And so your good works

01:15:35 – 01:15:42:	are meritorious, even if imperfect, because of the perfect work of Christ. You are able to return

01:15:42 – 01:15:48:	to God thanksgiving and praise, because he has first brought his gifts to you. When you were a

01:15:48 – 01:15:55:	child in baptism, or if you converted as an adult, as an adult in baptism, every time you go to the

01:15:55 – 01:16:01:	Lord's table and receive his gifts there, every time you hear the absolution, every time you read

01:16:01 – 01:16:07:	his word, that is God bringing his gifts to you, because he is super abundant in how he brings

01:16:07 – 01:16:14:	his gifts and his grace to you. God is not a stingy father. God's gifts are overflowing.

01:16:15 – 01:16:21:	He gives them to us in many different ways to keep us strong and steadfast in the faith.

01:16:23 – 01:16:28:	And Woe just read from Ephesians 5, and this should bring to mind Ephesians 4 as well.

01:16:29 – 01:16:34:	There is one body and one spirit, just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your

01:16:34 – 01:16:41:	call, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is overall and through

01:16:41 – 01:16:47:	all and in all. But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ's gift.

01:16:48 – 01:16:54:	And I hope that when you read that, you think of the Nicene Creed, because that is just part of

01:16:54 – 01:17:01:	the Nicene Creed right there from Ephesians 4. I will recite the last part of the Nicene Creed,

01:17:01 – 01:17:07:	part 3. And I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the

01:17:07 – 01:17:12:	Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified,

01:17:12 – 01:17:18:	who spoke by the prophets. And I believe in one holy Christian, an apostolic church. I acknowledge

01:17:19 – 01:17:23:	one baptism for the remission of sins, and I look for the resurrection of the dead,

01:17:23 – 01:17:26:	and the life of the world to come. Amen.

01:17:29 – 01:17:33:	The one baptism point, which is here both in the Creed,

01:17:34 – 01:17:38:	and in Ephesians 4, and elsewhere in Scripture as well, is very important,

01:17:39 – 01:17:45:	and this is to respond to an objection that is sometimes raised. There are those who will try

01:17:45 – 01:17:50:	to divide baptism into two separate things. They will try to say there's a water baptism

01:17:50 – 01:17:56:	and there's a spirit baptism. Scripture doesn't do that. The creeds don't do that. The Church has

01:17:56 – 01:18:00:	never done that. The Fathers of the Church don't write about that. This is not something

01:18:00 – 01:18:05:	that is part of Christianity. This is an enthusiastic position in the technical,

01:18:05 – 01:18:10:	philosophical, or theological sense. It is something that is not part of Christianity.

01:18:11 – 01:18:17:	Ephesians is very clear here. Scripture is very clear. One Lord, one faith, one baptism.

01:18:19 – 01:18:24:	So if someone comes to you and says, well, water baptism, whatever is going to come after that

01:18:24 – 01:18:31:	is most likely going to be blasphemous, because there's one baptism. That is the teaching of

01:18:31 – 01:18:36:	Scripture. There's no division between supposive water baptism and spirit baptism.

01:18:36 – 01:18:41:	As was mentioned earlier, when I was going over why do we have baptism? Why do we have this physical

01:18:41 – 01:18:47:	thing? There is the water which the body can comprehend. There is the word which the mind

01:18:47 – 01:18:53:	can comprehend, because you are both body and spirit. And so God brings both together in the

01:18:53 – 01:19:00:	sacrament to bring them to you. So it is one baptism. Yes, it has water. Yes, the spirit,

01:19:00 – 01:19:04:	yes, the spirit, capital S is involved, but it is one baptism.

01:19:05 – 01:19:12:	In this constant reminder of our baptism is often a part of the architecture of many Lutheran

01:19:12 – 01:19:19:	churches. There's no set way for a church to look, so it's not universal. But very frequently,

01:19:19 – 01:19:24:	especially in older Lutheran churches, you will find that the baptismal font is in the way.

01:19:25 – 01:19:29:	You know, there are pews on either side. There's the altar at the front. There are the doors in

01:19:29 – 01:19:35:	the back from the narthex. And frequently, the baptismal font will be in the aisle. Sometimes

01:19:35 – 01:19:39:	it's right in the middle in the back. Sometimes it's right in the middle in the center. They actually,

01:19:39 – 01:19:44:	you know, cut the pews out in the center, so there's the baptismal font right in the middle of the

01:19:44 – 01:19:49:	church. Sometimes it's right up front in front of the altar. And sometimes it's off to one side of

01:19:49 – 01:19:57:	the front or the rear. But it's always prominently featured, even though it's rarely used. And the

01:19:57 – 01:20:03:	reason that we will position the fonts in such a way is, again, as a reminder of your one baptism,

01:20:04 – 01:20:09:	to remind you that on the day you were baptized, you were washed and cleansed and brought into

01:20:09 – 01:20:16:	this family. Even if you had faith before, you see, it's the superabundance of God's gifts

01:20:17 – 01:20:21:	is always something to be celebrated. And we're always thankful for the gift of faith that we

01:20:21 – 01:20:28:	receive, however we receive it. Maybe we received it from a missionary at church camp or something.

01:20:28 – 01:20:32:	That was the first time you heard, and then later on, your baptize. Maybe your baptism was

01:20:32 – 01:20:39:	your introduction into God's family as an infant, as a child. Maybe that was the very beginning.

01:20:39 – 01:20:44:	Whatever it was, the baptism is that touchstone. It's saying, yes, this moment. There may have

01:20:44 – 01:20:49:	been other moments before. They don't diminish this moment, just as this moment of baptism

01:20:49 – 01:20:56:	doesn't diminish the others. I think one thing that does actually diminish our baptism is then

01:20:57 – 01:21:01:	to think, well, maybe it didn't count. Maybe I got to do it again. Because then you're turning

01:21:01 – 01:21:06:	into something that you're doing. And when you insert yourself into the equation as the doer,

01:21:08 – 01:21:15:	what's left for God? If it's an outward sign of what you believe, you're robbing God of a glory

01:21:15 – 01:21:22:	that He promises He has in Scripture. In Acts 22, Paul actually talks about this in his own conversion

01:21:22 – 01:21:29:	experience. And one Ann and I, as a devout man, according to the law, well spoken by of all the

01:21:29 – 01:21:35:	Jews who lived there, came to me and standing by me, said to me, Brother Saul, receive your sight.

01:21:35 – 01:21:39:	And at that hour, I received my sight and saw him. And he said, the God of our fathers appointed

01:21:39 – 01:21:44:	you to know his will, to see the righteous wanted to hear a voice from his mouth. For you will be a

01:21:44 – 01:21:51:	witness to him, to everyone of what you have seen and heard. And now, why do you wait? Rise and be

01:21:51 – 01:21:58:	baptized and wash away your sins, calling on his name. Now here's Paul, describing Ann and I as

01:21:58 – 01:22:05:	telling him, rise and be baptized and wash away your sins. And baptize and wash away your sins

01:22:05 – 01:22:13:	is not two separate things. It's baptized to wash away your sins. It's one joint act. The baptism

01:22:13 – 01:22:18:	is the washing of sins. And Ann and I is telling Paul to do this. He's saying, Paul, wash away your

01:22:18 – 01:22:25:	sins. Well, can Paul do that? Does Paul have the power to wash away his sins? No, only God can

01:22:25 – 01:22:32:	wash away sins. And yet Christians are free to phrase this thing in this way, because God's the

01:22:32 – 01:22:37:	doer. We are the proximate actors for these things. When we're talking about sacraments,

01:22:37 – 01:22:45:	whether it's baptism or the Eucharist, there's a man doing something in physical space and time

01:22:45 – 01:22:48:	with a physical element, whether it's the bread of the wine or the water in baptism.

01:22:49 – 01:22:55:	Someone's doing something. And when we believe scripture, we believe that that act of the man

01:22:56 – 01:23:02:	is not any sort of act unto itself. It's obedience only in the sense that it is performing

01:23:02 – 01:23:09:	that which God has ordained. This is God's thing. When Ann and I told Saul, rise and be baptized

01:23:09 – 01:23:16:	and wash away your sins, he was describing God's action, God's action in baptism to wash away sins.

01:23:16 – 01:23:22:	And so we have confidence that God does that in baptism because he says he does. And again,

01:23:22 – 01:23:29:	the only way to have a view of baptism that makes it strictly us doing something and God

01:23:29 – 01:23:34:	just kind of watching and maybe applauding like, oh, good job. Well done performing that ordinance.

01:23:36 – 01:23:42:	If you do that, you eliminate all the forgiveness of sins that God promises he has there.

01:23:42 – 01:23:46:	If it's just me doing something, if it's just me washing away my sins and baptism,

01:23:47 – 01:23:54:	I'm toast. Am I going to make it? I can't wash crap. I can't do anything by myself. I'm dead in

01:23:54 – 01:24:00:	my sins and trespasses. It is only God acting through the water and the word that makes anything

01:24:00 – 01:24:07:	possible that has any spiritual significance. And it is spiritually significant. Washing away your

01:24:07 – 01:24:12:	sins, that's everything. That is the Christian life. That is the gospel in a nutshell. To have

01:24:12 – 01:24:22:	your sins washed away is the promise of the cross. We got to believe that. It's central. It is the

01:24:22 – 01:24:28:	foundation of the Christian faith. And so it's tragic to me that for centuries there have been

01:24:28 – 01:24:37:	disagreements among various church bodies because I'm sympathetic to some of the Roman Catholic

01:24:37 – 01:24:44:	claims that the Reformation was a disaster because they're not entirely wrong. When we realized

01:24:44 – 01:24:51:	that the Pope was lying, that the Pope was doing bad things, one of the reactions to that

01:24:51 – 01:24:57:	realization was to say, let's burn it all down. The Pope lied about something. Let's assume he

01:24:57 – 01:25:01:	lied about everything. Everything he ever told us to do, we're going to do the opposite. We're not

01:25:01 – 01:25:06:	going to do that anymore. Which was foolish and it was evil because it was never the Pope saying

01:25:06 – 01:25:11:	to do this stuff in the first place. That's a denial of the history of the Christian church.

01:25:11 – 01:25:16:	The Christian church didn't start with any popes. The Christian church started at Pentecost. There's

01:25:16 – 01:25:21:	no Pope there. If you want to have a Pope, if you want to have the Pontiff of Rome, it was James.

01:25:22 – 01:25:29:	The brother of Jesus, biological brother, the son of Mary James, was the first Bishop of Rome.

01:25:29 – 01:25:34:	So the notion that came about in the Reformation that, well, those guys got something wrong.

01:25:34 – 01:25:40:	Let's get rid of everything was tremendously disastrous because what we're describing of

01:25:41 – 01:25:47:	view of baptism is very much what Rome believed for the most part. The one specific distinction

01:25:47 – 01:25:51:	that I think is crucial, not so much for this argument, but for other discussions, is that

01:25:52 – 01:25:58:	the Roman Catholics believe that when you are baptized, that it also washes away your original

01:25:58 – 01:26:05:	sin, your concupiscence, meaning that you are now free to either sin or not sin, that it's possible

01:26:05 – 01:26:11:	for you to live a sinless life after your baptism, which is the opposite of what Paul says.

01:26:11 – 01:26:15:	He says that he struggles against his own flesh and does the very things that he wishes he couldn't

01:26:15 – 01:26:21:	do. He clearly still has original sin. Scripture's clear about that. So it's one specific distinction,

01:26:21 – 01:26:27:	and both Rome and the East will say that baptism washes away original sin. That has other errors

01:26:27 – 01:26:31:	downstream, but they're not really what we're talking about today. But the rest of what they

01:26:31 – 01:26:36:	believe is basically what we're saying because it was the historic view of the church, including

01:26:36 – 01:26:40:	infant baptism. You can go back to the very earliest church fathers and the very earliest

01:26:40 – 01:26:47:	archaeological evidence of the church, and infants were baptized. There was never any

01:26:47 – 01:26:53:	out notion that you had to be of a certain age to have a certain agreement, to have faith before

01:26:53 – 01:26:59:	you could receive this outward sign of an inward turning. That was not the Christian view for

01:26:59 – 01:27:05:	over a thousand years. There were some that thought that, but it was not what the church

01:27:05 – 01:27:11:	predominantly held, which is why Rome ended up on the same side as Lutherans, because they just went

01:27:11 – 01:27:15:	along with the majority because it was correct. Majority is not an argument or something being

01:27:15 – 01:27:21:	right. We're Lutherans. We're happy to say a bunch of people got a bunch of stuff wrong.

01:27:21 – 01:27:26:	The question is always, what does Scripture say? So you don't appeal to the church fathers. You don't

01:27:26 – 01:27:33:	appeal to popes or swamis. You appeal to what Scripture says, which is why this episode is a

01:27:33 – 01:27:37:	Bible study. When you look at what all these things say, they say that there's a washing of

01:27:37 – 01:27:45:	regeneration. They say that sins are washed away in baptism, so we believe it. We also believe

01:27:45 – 01:27:51:	that we cannot save ourselves. That faith alone is true. We know that we're receiving faith in

01:27:51 – 01:27:59:	baptism, and that is the saving grace of baptism. The reception of faith is the reception of salvation,

01:27:59 – 01:28:05:	which is what God promises. It all adds up when you just believe God and you don't make it too

01:28:05 – 01:28:10:	complicated. If you try to start saying, well, it looks like I'm doing something, well, are you?

01:28:12 – 01:28:16:	This is the argument that comes up with James and those who say that we can save ourselves.

01:28:16 – 01:28:21:	The epistle of James is a lot of stuff about the law, a lot of stuff about, here's what the

01:28:21 – 01:28:27:	Christian life looks like. That's not an epistle that's addressed to unbelievers. That does not

01:28:27 – 01:28:33:	belong to unbelievers. It belongs to those who have the Holy Spirit saying, okay, the Holy Spirit

01:28:33 – 01:28:39:	dwells within you. Here's what the Christian life looks like. When you have God, you do this.

01:28:39 – 01:28:44:	When you don't have God, you do the other thing, just as when you have life, your heart beats.

01:28:45 – 01:28:51:	You breathe. You don't have a choice. You can momentarily stop your breathing, but you can't

01:28:51 – 01:28:55:	control your heart. You can't control your breathing for very long because you would die.

01:28:56 – 01:29:03:	These are functions of life. Good works are a function of the Christian life. It's not an

01:29:03 – 01:29:10:	activity that we willingly engage in. It's an activity that is a sign that the life is present.

01:29:10 – 01:29:15:	That's a distinction. And when you try to take credit for stuff, it's like taking credit for

01:29:15 – 01:29:19:	your heartbeat. That doesn't even make any sense. The same is true of our good works.

01:29:20 – 01:29:23:	When a Christian has good works, they're not for us to take credit for.

01:29:24 – 01:29:29:	They're the heartbeat of the Christian life, and they're gifts that God gives us to give to others.

01:29:31 – 01:29:35:	Undoubtedly, when many of you started listening to this episode,

01:29:35 – 01:29:40:	a particular verse came to mind, and it should. It should come to mind.

01:29:40 – 01:29:47:	A verse from 1 Peter. I'll actually read the surrounding verses as well, not just the verse

01:29:47 – 01:29:54:	itself. For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous,

01:29:54 – 01:29:58:	that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit,

01:29:59 – 01:30:04:	in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, because they formerly did not obey,

01:30:04 – 01:30:09:	when God's patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared,

01:30:09 – 01:30:13:	in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water.

01:30:14 – 01:30:19:	Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body,

01:30:19 – 01:30:25:	but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ,

01:30:25 – 01:30:29:	who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels,

01:30:29 – 01:30:32:	authorities, and powers having been subjected to him.

01:30:34 – 01:30:38:	Now, there are a few reasons that I wanted to read the additional context,

01:30:38 – 01:30:42:	not to dwell on the descent into hell, that's for another day, another episode,

01:30:43 – 01:30:51:	but we have in 1 Peter 321 a reference to this, and which corresponds to this,

01:30:51 – 01:30:56:	but we have to know what that this is, and that this is in the previous verse,

01:30:57 – 01:31:03:	that is, the ark, that is, Noah and his family being preserved in the ark,

01:31:04 – 01:31:09:	and what we have here is typology. Now, there's typology all throughout scripture,

01:31:10 – 01:31:16:	typology is one of the favorite devices God uses when teaching through scripture,

01:31:17 – 01:31:24:	we have types of Christ, we have types of regeneration, we have types of justification,

01:31:24 – 01:31:29:	we have the comparison of marriage to the relationship of Christ to the church,

01:31:29 – 01:31:35:	there is typology all throughout scripture, and that is what we have here in 1 Peter 321.

01:31:37 – 01:31:44:	Baptism is the anti-type, and the verse is very clear, baptism now saves you,

01:31:45 – 01:31:48:	and so if someone comes up to you and tells you, baptism does not save you,

01:31:49 – 01:31:54:	there's a very real problem, because what he's just told you is directly contrary to the

01:31:54 – 01:32:00:	literal word for word statement from 1 Peter, baptism now saves you,

01:32:02 – 01:32:05:	and some of you may be thinking, well, there's a clause in the middle there,

01:32:05 – 01:32:09:	when you translate something, you can move around dependent clauses, that's fine,

01:32:10 – 01:32:18:	but here the dependent clause just emphasizes the point, because it says baptism, which

01:32:18 – 01:32:24:	corresponds to this, and as I've already said, the this here, this is anti-type,

01:32:25 – 01:32:28:	baptism is the anti-type, and corresponds to the type.

01:32:30 – 01:32:33:	Well, let's look at the nature of a type and an anti-type.

01:32:35 – 01:32:38:	What is the relationship of a type to an anti-type?

01:32:39 – 01:32:47:	A type, presages, prefigures, comes before points to, it is in a way related to the anti-type,

01:32:47 – 01:32:55:	but it is necessarily inferior to the anti-type, state another way, the anti-type is the fulfillment,

01:32:55 – 01:33:00:	the perfection, or the completion of the type, or of the types, usually there's more than one.

01:33:01 – 01:33:11:	Here, we have the type as Noah and his family being saved by the ark from the flood.

01:33:11 – 01:33:17:	We have water, of course, which is typological here, the water of the flood,

01:33:17 – 01:33:20:	which did indeed save Noah and his family from the wicked world,

01:33:20 – 01:33:25:	the waters of baptism being the anti-type of that, but from what was Noah saved?

01:33:27 – 01:33:33:	Noah and his family were saved from temporal death, yes, they were also saved

01:33:33 – 01:33:39:	from the sinful wicked world, but primarily here by the ark, they were saved from temporal death.

01:33:41 – 01:33:48:	Well that's the type, and again, the anti-type must be greater, and so if baptism is the anti-type,

01:33:48 – 01:33:53:	what is the only thing that is greater than temporal death? Well, that's eternal death,

01:33:53 – 01:33:59:	that is the only thing that is greater than temporal death. And so baptism being the anti-type

01:33:59 – 01:34:05:	must save you from something that is greater than temporal death, and so it saves you from

01:34:05 – 01:34:10:	eternal death. Well how are you saved from eternal death? This is important, you must know this as

01:34:10 – 01:34:18:	a Christian, you are saved from eternal death by faith because it is faith that receives salvation,

01:34:18 – 01:34:27:	it is faith that regenerates. And so baptism gives you faith. That's all this verse means,

01:34:27 – 01:34:32:	because if baptism saves you, and it saves you from something greater than temporal death,

01:34:32 – 01:34:38:	it must save you from eternal death. Well, the only means by which you can be saved

01:34:38 – 01:34:46:	from eternal death is faith. Baptism now saves you simply means baptism gives you faith.

01:34:47 – 01:34:52:	Now, if you already have faith, baptism is going to strengthen your faith. But if you are an infant

01:34:52 – 01:34:58:	and you are without faith, baptism will give you faith. And this is one of the reasons that we

01:34:58 – 01:35:06:	baptize infants. There are other scriptures we will get to shortly. But baptism is not limited

01:35:07 – 01:35:15:	only to adults, only to those who can profess their faith. Now, typically, if we have an adult

01:35:15 – 01:35:22:	convert, we do wait to baptize that person because we want the person to understand baptism. But that

01:35:22 – 01:35:27:	isn't truly a necessary part of the sacrament. And it's certainly not necessary for the infant.

01:35:29 – 01:35:35:	Because this is, again, God's work, not man's work. And that is the fundamental question.

01:35:35 – 01:35:42:	If you come to this, thinking about it as it being God's work, then you are less concerned

01:35:42 – 01:35:49:	about the state of the man being baptized. Because God doesn't rely on that. It's the same as

01:35:49 – 01:35:53:	when we speak of whether or not the sacraments could be administered by wicked men.

01:35:54 – 01:36:00:	Those who say they cannot are called donatists and they are heretics. Because the sacraments

01:36:00 – 01:36:05:	are God's work. And so it does not depend on the man administering the sacraments as to whether

01:36:05 – 01:36:12:	or not they are valid. It depends upon God's work. Because he is the one who has promised

01:36:12 – 01:36:19:	to be present to do certain things in the sacraments. And so here, we don't look to the nature

01:36:19 – 01:36:25:	of the one being baptized. We don't look to whether or not the infant can profess faith. We know,

01:36:25 – 01:36:29:	of course, that an infant cannot profess faith. Now, that does not mean that an infant does not have

01:36:30 – 01:36:38:	faith. Because incidentally, when Scripture speaks of Timothy, it says that he is familiar with the

01:36:38 – 01:36:45:	Scriptures from his infancy. It's not childhood because the word that is used there is brephos,

01:36:45 – 01:36:53:	which is Greek for infant, or even fetus, which is also the word that is used in some other parts

01:36:53 – 01:36:59:	of Scripture, some other Scripture passages, dealing with little children. Because often,

01:36:59 – 01:37:06:	Christ speaks about bringing the little children to him, not hindering them. And in some of those

01:37:06 – 01:37:14:	verses where he speaks of not hindering the little children, he uses brephos, which is again

01:37:15 – 01:37:21:	the smallest of infants. That is an infant that you carry around or even a reference to an unborn

01:37:21 – 01:37:28:	child. Because we have several different words for children or infants that are used in Scripture

01:37:28 – 01:37:33:	that sometimes unhelpfully are all translated as children into the English. Sometimes we do have

01:37:33 – 01:37:40:	the word infant, but you have technon, pideon, and brephos, brephos being again the youngest.

01:37:40 – 01:37:47:	It can literally mean fetus in Greek. So I want to read again briefly a passage from Ephesians 5

01:37:47 – 01:37:53:	in contrast or compare it to the 1st Peter quotation. As Christ loved the church and gave

01:37:53 – 01:37:59:	himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with

01:37:59 – 01:38:06:	the word. Now compare this with baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you not as removal

01:38:06 – 01:38:11:	of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of

01:38:11 – 01:38:18:	Jesus Christ. Now how do you have an appeal to God for a good conscience? Am I just going to go

01:38:18 – 01:38:24:	to God in prayer and say, you know, I feel pretty good about today. I didn't do too bad. I have a

01:38:24 – 01:38:29:	clean conscience. I go to bed and I think, yeah, I really nailed it today. I didn't do any sins,

01:38:29 – 01:38:35:	no sins at all in this house. A, if that's your prayer, you're not going to be praying to begin

01:38:35 – 01:38:42:	with because you're not Christian. B, it's just absurd. It's the exact opposite. So

01:38:43 – 01:38:51:	in 1 Peter 3, when he says baptism is not a removal of dirt, remember Ephesians 5 is talking

01:38:51 – 01:38:58:	about washing away filth. The filth is the sins and the only possibility for an appeal of a clean

01:38:58 – 01:39:06:	conscience before God is without sins. And the only way to have that state is through washing of

01:39:06 – 01:39:12:	baptism. And so this is one of the reasons that Lutherans always point back to baptism, because

01:39:13 – 01:39:19:	in contradistinction to the Roman Catholic view that it washes away your original sin and all

01:39:19 – 01:39:24:	your sins at that point, and then you basically reset the clock and you're back to zero sins,

01:39:24 – 01:39:28:	and then you start racking up sins and you have to go to confession, and

01:39:28 – 01:39:36:	yeah, keep getting those new sins taken away. The scriptural view is that all of your sins

01:39:36 – 01:39:41:	are washed away in baptism. Well, what about the sins I commit after baptism? Yes,

01:39:42 – 01:39:45:	just as all of your sins are paid for at the cross. Well, what about all the sins that I

01:39:45 – 01:39:50:	committed after Jesus died on the cross? Well, in this day, that's literally all of them. None of us

01:39:50 – 01:39:55:	are over 2,000 years old. Every sin we've ever committed was committed after Jesus died on the

01:39:55 – 01:40:02:	cross for it. And this is one of the places where the illogicality of God's action in time and creation

01:40:03 – 01:40:09:	makes it possible for us to say dumb stuff, because if suddenly you start bounding God's

01:40:09 – 01:40:17:	promises by time, which is created time as part of creation, it's not inherent. It is a product

01:40:17 – 01:40:22:	of what God desires. And then he works within it, but he's not bound by it, which is why every

01:40:22 – 01:40:29:	sin you're ever going to commit was paid for on the cross. And so when we are washed in baptism,

01:40:29 – 01:40:34:	and the reason that we say I am baptized is precisely because of this. All of your sins are

01:40:34 – 01:40:40:	washed away. Are you going to keep sinning? Yes. Are those sins also washed away in baptism? Yes.

01:40:41 – 01:40:47:	Your baptism is a permanent state because it's a moment in time for you to point to for comfort,

01:40:48 – 01:40:55:	but it's not the only moment that that forgiveness is given. That forgiveness,

01:40:55 – 01:41:02:	that washing away, is the new state you have as a Christian. When we are adopted as sons of God

01:41:02 – 01:41:08:	in baptism, the adoption is permanent because the baptism is permanent. It's part and parcel.

01:41:09 – 01:41:13:	You become a part of the body of Christ, you become a part of the bride of Christ,

01:41:13 – 01:41:19:	who in Ephesians 5 is washed clean from this filth, from our filth, so that the clean conscience

01:41:19 – 01:41:24:	that we have, that we can make an appeal to God for, is in view of the baptism that's taken away

01:41:24 – 01:41:29:	those sins. One of the other last passages that we're going to get to today is from Acts 2.

01:41:30 – 01:41:33:	Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the

01:41:33 – 01:41:37:	apostles, Brothers, what shall we do? And Peter said to them, Repent and be baptized. Every one

01:41:37 – 01:41:42:	of you in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive

01:41:42 – 01:41:46:	the gift of the Holy Spirit, for the promises for you and for your children, for all those far off.

01:41:47 – 01:41:53:	Everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself. So here again we have God saying,

01:41:54 – 01:42:00:	repent and be baptized, for the forgiveness of your sins. It's always the same thing. The

01:42:00 – 01:42:06:	repentance imparts forgiveness, the baptism imparts forgiveness, the baptism and the forgiveness

01:42:06 – 01:42:12:	work together. It's all one thing. And I think that one of the real weaknesses of systematic

01:42:12 – 01:42:17:	theology and of the sort of autistic view that we often bring to Scripture is

01:42:19 – 01:42:23:	trying to figure out if it's this thing or it's that thing. Because if it's one thing,

01:42:23 – 01:42:30:	it can't be the other. If it's water, it can't have forgiveness. Well, if it's man, it can't be God.

01:42:30 – 01:42:34:	Like I said earlier, you have to be really careful when you're talking about God's things,

01:42:34 – 01:42:38:	because one thing can also be another thing. It can be two things at once.

01:42:38 – 01:42:41:	This is, you know, when we've been talking in this episode about typology,

01:42:42 – 01:42:48:	that is a methodology that men use to understand Scripture. Sometimes I go overboard. Some of

01:42:48 – 01:42:52:	the early church fathers went completely nuts with typology and just made a mess of everything.

01:42:52 – 01:42:58:	They wanted every word, every passage to have seven layers of typology, which is just silly.

01:42:59 – 01:43:05:	The reason that typology is important is that God introduced it just as poetry and storytelling.

01:43:06 – 01:43:13:	These are things from God. They're not human things that God is operating in our human language,

01:43:13 – 01:43:19:	so we understand he's the originator of this stuff. Art, beauty, poetry, all these things that are

01:43:20 – 01:43:27:	desirable, wonderful parts of human life are from God. They're typological too. All the stuff that

01:43:27 – 01:43:30:	we like, we think, oh, these are human endeavors. These are human expressions.

01:43:31 – 01:43:36:	They're fundamentally from God. He did it first, and then we have a smaller version of it, an

01:43:36 – 01:43:41:	imperfect version. When we're talking about typology, it's not like this theological concept that some

01:43:41 – 01:43:47:	people came up with, and we're sticking it in Scripture. God explicitly says in some places,

01:43:47 – 01:43:53:	this is a type of this other thing, as Corey was saying earlier. When you're looking at something

01:43:53 – 01:43:56:	and the desire is to say, well, if it's one thing, it can't be the other thing,

01:43:57 – 01:44:01:	you have to be really careful that you're not making claims against what God is able to do,

01:44:02 – 01:44:06:	because as soon as you say God can't, you just stop talking probably for the rest of the day,

01:44:06 – 01:44:11:	because you've got some sort of problem. You have some spiritual gas that you need to get

01:44:11 – 01:44:18:	burped out, because you should never say God can't. That's not a thing. It does happen when we

01:44:18 – 01:44:24:	try to make sense of these things, and we make mistakes. They're well-intentioned mistakes.

01:44:25 – 01:44:30:	It is a good thing for Christians to try to figure these things out, to try to speak faithfully

01:44:30 – 01:44:37:	as God speaks, and to when you have a conviction of conscience to stick to your guns. I don't want

01:44:37 – 01:44:41:	someone who hears us to change their mind just because some podcasts are told you something

01:44:41 – 01:44:48:	different. That's not a firm foundation for faith. The firm foundation needs to be Scripture,

01:44:48 – 01:44:53:	which is why this has been a Bible study, because we're talking about these in Lutheran terms and

01:44:53 – 01:44:58:	from a Lutheran perspective, but we could do a bunch of citations from some of the Lutheran

01:44:58 – 01:45:04:	Fathers. I think they're interesting sometimes, but it's still only them making arguments from

01:45:04 – 01:45:09:	Scripture. We also can make arguments from Scripture. Now, as I said at the beginning,

01:45:09 – 01:45:12:	we're not telling you anything new. We're not making up, this is not like

01:45:12 – 01:45:19:	Stonequire baptism. There's one baptism. There's one baptism in Scripture. We should all sound the

01:45:19 – 01:45:25:	same because we're all working from the same book with the same God. The one Lord, one faith,

01:45:25 – 01:45:30:	one baptism thing is very real. An interesting thing about baptism, as we've talked about a little

01:45:30 – 01:45:38:	bit earlier, it is not in the faith of the doing that the thing has its efficacy. It's in God's

01:45:38 – 01:45:45:	promise. Even those who don't believe that baptism does what it says, God will still keep his promise,

01:45:45 – 01:45:51:	even when the men who are doing it say, I don't believe this, because God doesn't say anything

01:45:51 – 01:45:57:	to the contrary. God says, do this and the gift is yours. That's another reason why the one baptism

01:45:57 – 01:46:03:	thing is important. There's no such thing as rebaptism. The only possibility where it might be

01:46:03 – 01:46:08:	appropriate to baptize someone who thinks they were baptized before is if you're not sure if they're

01:46:08 – 01:46:13:	baptized in the name of the Trinity. If there's doubt, if you believe that there may have been

01:46:13 – 01:46:19:	an erroneous baptism or is literally not what it says in Matthew 28, then it is permissible to do

01:46:20 – 01:46:25:	effectively a provisional baptism. It should be in full view that we're not trying to rebaptize

01:46:25 – 01:46:32:	this person. We're trying to obey God. We're trying to make sure that we are doing what God commands.

01:46:33 – 01:46:38:	In this case, it is very much in ordinance. It's God saying, do this. If we think that someone has

01:46:38 – 01:46:43:	failed in the past, we're still going to do it. That's an act of faith that's perfectly permissible.

01:46:43 – 01:46:50:	That's entirely Christian. What is not permissible is to say, well, I think Rome's wrong

01:46:50 – 01:46:54:	about a bunch of stuff. We've got to rebaptize you so you can be made a real Christian. You're

01:46:54 – 01:46:58:	going to be a Lutheran. You've got to have a Lutheran baptism. The Orthodox are very

01:46:58 – 01:47:03:	commonly do that. They reject all baptism except their own. That's not scriptural. Again,

01:47:03 – 01:47:10:	there's one baptism. A baptism in the name of the triune God is valid. That's part of the promise.

01:47:10 – 01:47:13:	That's part of the confidence is that even when we have these disputes, even when we have these

01:47:13 – 01:47:19:	disagreements about what's actually going on, we still can have confidence that God has done what

01:47:19 – 01:47:27:	He said He would do. I hope that if someone is listening in maybe some of this, probably many

01:47:27 – 01:47:33:	of you the wrong way, if some of your feeling unsettled, know that whatever unsettling feeling

01:47:33 – 01:47:40:	you have about the theology doesn't undermine God's promise. That's the whole point of this

01:47:40 – 01:47:47:	entire episode. God's promises are kept because it's God that's making them. When we get stuff wrong,

01:47:48 – 01:47:54:	when we are foolish, when we are unbelieving, when we're doubting, we can't break God's things.

01:47:54 – 01:47:58:	Even when we break our own, even when we mess up our own lives, we sin against each other,

01:47:58 – 01:48:03:	we lie, we get stuff wrong inadvertently, whatever mess we make, we can be confident

01:48:03 – 01:48:10:	in God's promises. I hope that whatever else you take away from this is you'll keep that in mind.

01:48:10 – 01:48:14:	It's fundamentally rooting this, not, I know you have to have the perfect confession of this

01:48:14 – 01:48:22:	stuff. It's that when you believe that God does the things He says He'll do, you have them. It's

01:48:23 – 01:48:27:	God we're talking about. He's going to do what He said He did. He's already done it.

01:48:27 – 01:48:35:	You are baptized. That is a promise written in the book of life from before eternity.

01:48:35 – 01:48:40:	Your name is in the book of life saying I elect you from eternity by God. You receive baptism in

01:48:40 – 01:48:47:	time, marking you as his child, placing his triune name on you, on a tiny screaming baby who just

01:48:47 – 01:48:53:	like Jesus in the manger, who was helpless and didn't know anything and was completely dependent.

01:48:54 – 01:49:00:	We're fundamentally like that spiritually at any age until we have God. You can be the smartest,

01:49:00 – 01:49:05:	most well-versed man in the world. You're a spiritual infant until God comes to you and gives you

01:49:06 – 01:49:13:	faith. Very often that comes in baptism. The confidence that God is going to keep his word

01:49:13 – 01:49:18:	is the whole point of this. It's the whole benefit of this type of sacramentology. Again,

01:49:18 – 01:49:24:	it's not like here's a strategy for a greater confident faith. This is what God says we should

01:49:24 – 01:49:29:	have and when we believe it, everything works out. It's a recurring theme on Stone Choir.

01:49:30 – 01:49:34:	If you have a normal, healthy family and you do normal, healthy family things,

01:49:35 – 01:49:39:	you will be blessed and you will have the things that God promises. When we do the

01:49:39 – 01:49:43:	thing the way God says to do it, we get the good things that come from it. That's the case in

01:49:43 – 01:49:49:	everything. This is just another example of that, but it's a crucial one because everything else may

01:49:49 – 01:49:55:	go wrong. But because your baptism is past tense, because it's a moment in time, when you realize

01:49:55 – 01:50:01:	that that past tense is actually present tense, you can have faith and confidence throughout

01:50:01 – 01:50:07:	your life. Whatever goes wrong, whatever happens, you're confident that you are baptized. In that

01:50:07 – 01:50:11:	gift that God promised, he continues to deliver to you every day.

01:50:12 – 01:50:17:	There's one more point that I would like to cover before we close out this episode,

01:50:18 – 01:50:25:	and then a couple sections of scripture related to infant baptism, just because I know that's going

01:50:25 – 01:50:32:	to be a difficult one for some people. But the issue that I want to address first is a seemingly

01:50:32 – 01:50:38:	minor one, but it has been an ongoing fight in the history of the church between traditions.

01:50:40 – 01:50:48:	And that is the method or the mode, the means of baptism. There are four. There's aspersion,

01:50:48 – 01:50:54:	effusion, immersion, and submersion. And for those who are unfamiliar with the terms,

01:50:54 – 01:51:00:	aspersion is sprinkling, effusion is pouring, and then I think we all know what immersion and

01:51:00 – 01:51:04:	submersion are, the distinction being whether or not you go completely under the water.

01:51:06 – 01:51:13:	These are all valid. And the reason they are all valid is because that the wording of scripture,

01:51:13 – 01:51:19:	what scripture says, is what is required for baptism and what does scripture say?

01:51:20 – 01:51:25:	Scripture says water and word. Scripture does not specify the amount of water.

01:51:26 – 01:51:31:	Scripture does not say that you have to use a certain method of applying the water.

01:51:31 – 01:51:36:	Scripture simply says water and the word. Now,

01:51:38 – 01:51:43:	many of those who were baptized in scripture were indeed baptized by immersion or submersion. We

01:51:43 – 01:51:49:	don't necessarily know which one of those two, because they were baptized in a river. We know that.

01:51:49 – 01:51:55:	But there are probably others who were baptized with alternative methods, because

01:51:55 – 01:52:00:	do bear in mind this is a part of the world where fresh water is not always available in

01:52:00 – 01:52:05:	large quantities, particularly depending on the time of year. Even the Jordan largely dries up.

01:52:08 – 01:52:13:	Now, of course, speculation is not a valid reason to draw a conclusion when it comes to

01:52:13 – 01:52:18:	scripture. But I already pointed out that scripture simply requires water and the word. It does not

01:52:18 – 01:52:26:	require an amount of water. And also we have the historical argument, not in terms of historical

01:52:26 – 01:52:31:	practice, although that is somewhat compelling, but the historical argument that God has given faith

01:52:31 – 01:52:38:	to those who were baptized using a spursion or a fusion. There are those who were baptized as

01:52:38 – 01:52:45:	children using those methods and they were given faith. They became Christians because of that

01:52:45 – 01:52:54:	baptism. God is not going to bring his gifts if we are deliberately or even accidentally

01:52:54 – 01:53:00:	not complying with what he has said is the requirement. And God has given his blessing

01:53:00 – 01:53:06:	very clearly to all four of these methods. Because again, this just goes back to the

01:53:06 – 01:53:13:	fundamental difference that we have, whether it is God's gift he is bringing to men or something

01:53:13 – 01:53:19:	men are doing for themselves. Because certainly the amount of water is not going to matter.

01:53:20 – 01:53:24:	If it is God's gift, if God is the one doing it, because scripture doesn't specify,

01:53:25 – 01:53:29:	but if it's men doing it, then perhaps we need more of a show, we need more water.

01:53:29 – 01:53:35:	And so this is going to flow naturally from your belief about the nature of baptism. The same thing

01:53:35 – 01:53:44:	is true of infant baptism, which I will get to in a minute here. Now, there is one final point about

01:53:44 – 01:53:49:	the method that I want to make that is sort of an ancillary point, but it is worth addressing.

01:53:51 – 01:54:01:	Subversion is the best method in terms of the picture it portrays. Because what is baptism?

01:54:01 – 01:54:07:	Baptism fundamentally is being buried with Christ and resurrected to a new life. And

01:54:07 – 01:54:16:	submersion shows that illustrates that in the best way. And so for almost aesthetic reasons,

01:54:17 – 01:54:22:	but for clearly typological reasons, submersion, there is a very good argument for it. Now,

01:54:22 – 01:54:28:	perhaps not for infants, we're not saying do what the the EO do and triple submerged infants,

01:54:28 – 01:54:33:	that's probably overboard, pouring or sprinkling perfectly fine for the infant.

01:54:35 – 01:54:41:	But typologically for adults, submersion is probably best. And Luther said the same,

01:54:41 – 01:54:46:	this is long been something that Lutherans and others who do practice these other methods would

01:54:46 – 01:54:53:	still agree. Part of the reason we do pouring is as a statement of belief that this is something

01:54:53 – 01:54:58:	from God. And so it is not something man is doing, it is not the amount of water that matters.

01:55:00 – 01:55:05:	But then to close out this episode, I said I wanted to read a couple passages

01:55:05 – 01:55:11:	that deal with infant baptism. I already addressed one, I didn't read it, but that was from Second

01:55:11 – 01:55:16:	Timothy, dealing with Timothy, who had been familiar with the scriptures from, it says,

01:55:16 – 01:55:21:	childhood in the English standard version. But the word there is actually infant or infancy,

01:55:22 – 01:55:29:	brephos. And I want to read from Luke, Luke two, actually I'll start with Luke 18.

01:55:30 – 01:55:35:	Now they were bringing even infants, brephos, to him that he might touch them, and when the

01:55:35 – 01:55:39:	disciples saw it, they rebuked him. But Jesus called them to him saying,

01:55:40 – 01:55:45:	let the children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God.

01:55:46 – 01:55:51:	Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter

01:55:51 – 01:55:58:	it. And then from Luke two, and this will be a sign for you, you will find a baby,

01:55:58 – 01:56:02:	brephos, wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.

01:56:04 – 01:56:13:	And so we have here in these two verses taken together, a picture of God's great gifts to us,

01:56:14 – 01:56:21:	the Christian life, and how we are to share these gifts, how we are to facilitate God bringing

01:56:21 – 01:56:25:	these gifts to the next generation, to our fellow Christians, to our own children.

01:56:27 – 01:56:33:	Christ is very clear, do not hinder the little children, but let them come unto me.

01:56:33 – 01:56:38:	Bring them to Christ, you are supposed to bring your children to Christ. Well how do you bring

01:56:38 – 01:56:43:	your little children, your brephos, or pydion, whichever one it happens to be, because pydion

01:56:43 – 01:56:49:	is still a little child, how do you bring your children to Christ? Well we saw at the beginning,

01:56:49 – 01:56:56:	that's the great commission, you bring them to Christ by baptizing them and then teaching them.

01:56:58 – 01:57:04:	And so you baptize your children, this is why Lutherans and others teach that infant baptism

01:57:04 – 01:57:08:	is proper, it is why it has been the practice of the church from the beginning.

01:57:10 – 01:57:16:	Yes there's also the fact that it is typologically related to circumcision, which was done on the

01:57:16 – 01:57:23:	eighth day, certainly an eight day old child is an infant still. But fundamentally we are simply

01:57:23 – 01:57:28:	obeying the words of Christ when he tells us to let the children come to him, do not hinder them,

01:57:29 – 01:57:36:	for to such belongs the kingdom of God. And so we hear and obey, he says to bring the children to

01:57:36 – 01:57:41:	him we bring them to him, how do we bring them to him? By giving them faith, how do we give them

01:57:41 – 01:57:49:	faith? The only way that God has given us to give them faith, by baptizing them. We baptize them,

01:57:49 – 01:57:54:	but really it is God using our hands to do the work, God is the one baptizing them,

01:57:54 – 01:57:59:	and that is why they are baptized in the triune name, because it is the triune God who is baptizing

01:57:59 – 01:58:05:	them, because it is his baptism, it is his sacrament, it belongs to him not to man, because it is his

01:58:05 – 01:58:15:	work not man's. And we see this connection here in Luke with the term brephos. You have the infants

01:58:15 – 01:58:23:	who are brought to Christ, and you have that infant Christ lying in the manger. All of the promises

01:58:23 – 01:58:31:	of Scripture are in that manger with that infant, and all of the promises of Scripture are brought

01:58:31 – 01:58:39:	to infants in baptism, because that is how God has created it, that is how God has organized it,

01:58:39 – 01:58:47:	and so we simply obey. And so baptism is a gift from God to the church, it is a gift from God

01:58:48 – 01:58:55:	to the elect, it is a gift from God to me and to you and to your children.

01:58:55 – 01:58:59:	We're going to close simply with the words from Romans 6.

01:59:01 – 01:59:05:	What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound, by no means?

01:59:06 – 01:59:11:	How then can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been

01:59:11 – 01:59:16:	baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by

01:59:16 – 01:59:22:	baptism into death, in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father,

01:59:22 – 01:59:33:	we too might walk in newness of life. Amen.