I'm going to record this so that we can inflict this on anyone who happened to not be here today. So before we get to this, I should probably just tell you as a starting point where I grew up. I grew up in an independent Baptist church. And I saw my baptism certificate when we were moving here and it's in a box someplace. But I think it says on there that I was baptized in that church. which was actually not in the church, but behind the church in an old mill pond that we used to baptize people in. Baptized by immersion because of belief when I was, it says, I think it says July of 1976, which means I would have been five and a half years old. And I can still remember going down the street in my dad's car in the passenger seat, this old 67, I think, Volkswagen Bug. He was driving down the street and he said, son, tomorrow you're going to be baptized. And I remember saying, I, that's where they put you underneath the water, right? And he said, yeah. And I said, I said, uh, I don't know if I want to do that. That looks kind of scary to me. And then he said, why should I, why am I going to do that? And he said, well, cause I've got a list in my pocket right here of all the people that have made professions of faith in Sunday school or in church or in classes at our school and your names on the list three times so it's time for you to be baptized and so They had me and a bunch of other people. I think it was after church on a Sunday at some kind of a dinner, you know, and then all of the baptizees went out to this pond and our of course we have to dress up because we were independent bachelors so we had on black dress pants and socks and a white shirt and you know Sunday best down into the mill pond right so that's when I was baptized and I remember when I was about 18 I was 18 it was my beginning of my sophomore year of college when I first really sort of on my own with God's help, obviously, started to think through what we refer to as the doctrines of grace. And it really was one doctrine. It was predestination. And so I was in college and started to wrestle with that. And I didn't understand words like Calvinism or reform or even five points of Calvinism. All that stuff, I had no idea. Even though my dad was a five-point Calvinist, I had no idea about all that stuff. It had just gone over my head. for all those years. I didn't know doctrines of grace. I didn't think of myself in any of those categories at all. So I was trying to grapple with this one doctrine. And after I felt like I understood it and embraced what predestination had to say, then I began to understand, okay, somebody said, this is part of something called systematic theology, which means that these five points are really like gears in a machine and they work together. And so you need to kind of understand that You know, there's a long history, centuries and centuries long, of people working on these doctrines and they fit together in a certain way so that when you embrace one, you really need to look at some of the others because your questions are really answered by other doctrines. And so I can remember growing up and hearing doctrine, doctrine, doctrine, doctrine. I never really understood how important that was until I got to this place in my life where I felt like I was just sort of drifting around, and I knew Bible content, I knew all the stories, I could name all 66 books of the Bible, I knew all of the basic stuff, but I just felt a little bit like there was not as much context for all of the things that I knew. And as I was being taught doctrine, some of these doctrines, I thought, oh, okay, now I understand that there's a rhyme and reason for some of these things that are going on. As I kind of grew up into what you would call Reformed faith, it took from 18 until about 25 before I was ready to say, okay, I think I understand enough, I'm ready to embrace what the PCA and other Presbyterians and other Paedo-Baptists believe about baptism. The reason why it took me so long, I think, is because coming from being a Baptist, Baptism is like the tent pole, or it felt like the tent pole holding up the whole works. So whenever someone would start talking to me about baptism, I kind of had a lot invested in it. Personally, my whole family were Baptists. They still are Baptists, even though my dad's a five-point Calvinist. We got married in the Southern Baptist Church. My father-in-law was a deacon for many years in the Southern Baptist Church. My mother-in-law still is a member of the Southern Baptist Church. My dad's an associate pastor in the Southern Baptist Church. Those of my family that are not in the Southern Baptist Church, like aunts and uncles, are in some other sort of Baptistic type of denomination. So I kind of have a lot invested over there. So as I've kind of grown up, and sort of seen another side of things, it took me a while because of a larger context that I couldn't quite embrace. And so, when we want to talk about what does the Bible say about baptism, I think the first question really is, what's the big idea? What's the biggest idea of the Bible is the kingdom of God. Underneath the umbrella of kingdom of God, which is the big tent, underneath that is covenant. So you don't have covenants without kingdom. And then underneath covenants is baptism or signs of the covenant. So it took me a long time to sort of work backwards from this individual doctrine to see that even if you're in a Baptist church, that individual doctrine fits into bigger ideas than just a standalone thing. So when I started thinking about this lecture, this Q&A, and by the way, this is a discussion, not just me, and some of the other guys are gonna present ideas too, I think it's important to start with covenant. So what is covenant in the Bible? So a covenant is a solemn relationship between God and his people. We can define it in all kinds of ways, but there are at least, there properly are six covenants in the Bible. Covenant with Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, and then the new covenant in Christ. These covenants can be thought of in a variety of ways. Perhaps two ways is universal covenants and national covenants. So an example of a universal covenant is when God made the covenant with Adam and Eve in the garden, it affected all of humanity. Universal, right? They were to rule over all the beasts of the field, rule, subdue. Everything was under their authority. when they sinned and plunged all of Adam's race into sin, right? It affected all of humanity, all of creation, thorns, thistles, all the rest, universal. We see a renewal of the universal covenant later on in the book of Genesis chapter 6, 7, 8, 9 with Noah, where you actually see the words repeated after the ark, right? Rules subdue the earth once again. You see that same cultural mandate, fill the earth, repopulate it and so forth. But then when you get to Abraham, there's definitely a covenant going on there where God himself makes a solemn agreement with Abraham, but it's more specific than to the whole earth. It's to one man and his descendants after him and to the kings and nations that will come from them, right? You see it even more explicitly in Moses, which we'll see in a few weeks when you get to Exodus chapter 19 in there at Sinai. And God delivers the law to Moses, and that law is for the governance of Israel. He delivers Israel from bondage in Egypt into the land of promise that he promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. You see a deepening of the same national sentiments in the covenant with David, where God promises David that one of his descendants will remain on the throne throughout and forever. Christ, the covenant with Christ, the new covenant, though, is a little different because the context changes a little bit. You could probably say that there are elements of nationalism, national covenant, as well as universal covenant within the new covenant with Christ, but it changes slightly because it's not specifically just for Israelites, it's for this new thing that Christ is doing where he's breaking down the walls that separate male, female, slave, free, Jew, Gentile, and all of that. It's a universal, but it's set within the context of church, the community of the church, not the identity of ethnic or national Israel. So in order to kind of understand that, let's sort of click the drop down menu on that a little bit and talk about universal and national covenants as it relates to believers and unbelievers. So we should understand that even back in the Old Testament, when we're talking about the nation of Israel, even the covenant with Abraham, where it kind of all started, that there's an understanding that there would be people who believe that live in Israel, that really believe in the God, Yahweh, and want to follow after Him faithfully, and there's also those that are not going to believe. So we get this image of those that really believe, those that don't believe, but they both live underneath the same governance of the same covenant, and they're expected, if they live in Israel, no matter where they come from, that the law of the land, the God of the land, is the God of the Bible, Yahweh. So, as kind of an outline for this, if you look at Hebrews chapter 10, 26 to 27 and 29 to 30, you get some of this sense in the New Covenant, where the book of Hebrews, written to Hebrew believers, is going back into the Old Testament, and it's capturing some of those sentiments of believers and unbelievers in the same pot or group of people. And this is what it says. If we go on applying to New Covenant, if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries. because they treat as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified them. How much worse punishment do you think will be deserved by the one who trampled underfoot the Son of God and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified? and has outraged the spirit of grace. For we know him who said, vengeance is mine, I will repay. And again, the Lord will judge his people. You should focus on the phrase that's in verse 29 that says, he has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified. Okay, so one of the mysteries of the book of Hebrews is, And one of the often sort of discussion points is this is describing people losing their salvation. No, it's not. It's discussing people who have embraced the covenant, have come into the church, and then rejected at some point later. So you have this idea that there will be people in the church, on the church rolls, people that join churches that are not really truly safe. They have not truly experience new birth. They've given assent to these things, but later on they turn their back, they walk away, or whatever. So we have to have biblical categories. How do we talk about this so that we don't, again, damage another doctrine that we believe that's biblical that would tell us, once you're saved, you're saved, because it's not you that saved you, it's God that saved you. He saved you eternally, and no one can snatch those that the Father has given you out of my hand, right? Okay, so we have this idea that in the New Covenant, just as in the Old Covenant, we've got this group of people that belong to the visible community that may not belong to the invisible community. Jeremiah 31, 33 says, a new covenant, we know this, probably have quoted it. I will put my law in their minds and hearts. They will be my people, no longer will a man tell his neighbor, no, the Lord. This talks about sort of the already and the not yet. He's talking about a new covenant that will come where you won't have to say to your neighbor, know the Lord. They already will because he will put the law in their heart and mind. This is an expression though, not of just a new covenant in the sense that we have it now, but a day that's coming when there will not even be a need for preachers and teachers anymore because the people that are still around will already know all there is to know. This is not describing just the church on earth. This is describing the yet to come aspect of what will be embraced in the future. So how this applies to baptism is that baptism doesn't save, it brings people into covenant with God. Baptism doesn't save, it brings people into covenant with God. Okay, so we have visible community. Wow, we have to turn that off. Sorry. We have visible community and we have invisible community. The pathway to the visible community is baptism. Baptism is not designed to save people, it's to put them into relationship with God, covenant relationship with God. So, adults and their children. I gave you blanks so you could fill this in, because I felt like these were the two most important statements. God never made covenant in the Bible with an adult without also including their children. God never made a covenant in the Bible with an adult without also including their children. Genesis 618 says, this is Noah, I will establish my covenant with you and you will enter the ark, you and your sons and your wife and your sons' wives with you. You get that? He's talking to Noah. I'm gonna make a covenant with you. Remember what it said? Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord, so God made a covenant with him, included his wife, included his children, who were adults and were married, included their wives, After them, all right included the whole family Genesis 17 7 Abraham I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you threw out their generations for an everlasting covenant To be God to you and to your offspring after you clearly you can see God made a covenant with Abraham Made a covenant through Abraham with his children, with his wife, with his sons, daughters, their children, all of his offspring after him. Universal covenant, national covenants. specific, but with their children as well. Exodus 25 and six, the second commandment, I am the Lord, your God, the Lord, your God, I'm a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on their children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. Psalm 132 is about the covenant with David. The Lord swore to David a sure oath from which he will not turn back. One of the sons of your body I will set on the throne if your sons keep my covenant and test my testimonies that I shall teach them their sons also forever shall sit on your throne. You see that God makes covenant with adults, but he includes their children. He never makes a covenant with an adult and it excludes their children ever. So when we talk about what is it we believe in this church about baptism, the first thing we believe is that it's covenant baptism. We sometimes talk about it and we say it's paid-off baptism. I think that really shortchanges it, because that gets down to the practice of baptism, not so much the doctrine of baptism. The doctrine of baptism is not paid-off baptism. The doctrine of baptism we embrace as covenant baptism. So whether you're baptized as an adult, believer, or as a baby. What we believe is covenant baptism. God makes a covenant with his people, with the adults, and he includes their children. That's the pattern that scripture develops for us, and the momentum of that scripture, you need to see that it's not just a one-and-off thing, that from the beginning, The understanding is that God makes covenant with his people through the adults, but he includes the children. Okay, so does the pattern of adults with their children extend to the new covenant? You can probably imagine that I'm going to say yes. So Acts chapter 2, 38 and 39, with all of that momentum of the whole scripture bearing down on him, At Pentecost, Peter gets up and preaches the first Pentecost sermon, and Peter said to them, repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, for the promise is for you and for your children, and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself. He keeps the expectation. Covenant for you, covenant for your children. Not just meaning once they grow up and can embrace this for themselves, meaning right now. In the same way he meant, God meant it to Adam and Eve, same way he meant it to Abraham, Moses, David, covenant families. 1 Corinthians 7.14 says something very interesting. For the unbelieving husband is made holy because of his wife, and the unbelieving wife is made holy because of her husband. Otherwise, your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy. We shouldn't mean, shouldn't interpret that to mean saved by. So if a non-believing husband is married to a believing wife, what it's saying is that that marriage is set apart as a holy thing. Likewise, if a believing wife is married to an unbelieving husband, the marriage is holy because It's set apart unto God, not self-ific. Nobody is being made saved because of the marriage. One person saved, the other person not saved. But likewise, it says, even if you have a mixed marriage, a believer and a non-believer, the children are set apart wholly because this is a covenant. God recognizes it. He blesses it. Because one is a believer, the children are set apart as wholly. Our children are the expected heirs of the covenant of grace. That's why we baptize our children. That's what covenant baptism is, is our children are the expected heirs of the covenant of grace. Okay, just a starting point. Anybody have questions? I was gonna say, I've seen it in my own life. My dad's a believer and my mom's not. Is that right? My brother's a believer. I think that was a good question for you. Back to Jeremiah 31, 33. It says, they will be my people. Can you just, since I don't remember, can you provide us the context with which that's being written or spoken? I'm trying to determine, okay, who says they will be my people, and my people is a special phrase, so I go, okay, well is that a national, it would seem to be more leaning towards a national, Yeah, I think you've got to see it from their perspective. So here's Jeremiah the prophet talking to a group of people who are post-Babylonian, during the Babylonian exile, right? That's where Jeremiah, we're coming up on that, enduring that. where there's a lot of nationalistic hope that has fallen through the floor, and Jeremiah the weeping prophet is mourning the loss of the kingdom of God on earth, and the decimation of those people, the people of God, by the Babylonians. Is this it? Is this the end? We never got to see the revival of David. We never got to see all our messianic hopes lived up to. And so, Jeremiah's trying to preach and give an oracle of hope that there's a future coming, right? That's what Jeremiah 31's about. And that's why everybody's always, you know, tattooing themselves a Jeremiah 2931 or whatever it is. This is all part of the nationalistic hopes, the eventual coming to fruition of the resurrection of all the hopes of David and, you know, the kingdom of Solomon and all of that. And so that's, from their perspective, yes, very nationalistic. But even in their nationalistic hopes, when you go back to Abraham, they understood, at least they should have understood, that the hope of Israel is the hope of the nations, right? The people who are walking in darkness have seen a great light. God raised up Abraham to bless, not just Abraham, not just to bless his people, but through him the whole earth would be blessed. And so that's the context of this, is let's look down into the future and talk about a time that's coming when God will restore the captives, will rebuild this kingdom, but no longer will even the prophet who's giving this message be necessary because God's gonna write this message on the hearts of people. when there won't be the possibility that they'll stray from the law and need to be led into Catholic or chastised because they will already know the Lord. So it's an Old Testament picture of heaven, is what he's describing, but put into nationalistic terms for them, but a lot broader than that. When the remnant is brought to fruition and there is nothing, there is no one else, There is no unbelievers around. Okay, just a foundation. Anybody else have a question? Again, big idea. Yeah, exactly. I think that if you don't see the context of the book being written to Hebrew believers to explain to them how and you know very little is given in the book I know to set the context but most I think most scholars believe this is probably a group of people that are living maybe even around Qumran around where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found they're living apart from like almost like Essenes trying to keep pure the the covenant and trying to live as best they can how do they grapple with those that came out of Judaism and embraced Jesus, but then when the persecution came in Acts chapter 8, 9, and 10 against the Jewish church in Jerusalem, and these people ran away to get away from that, then Judaism started to flourish again in Jerusalem for a little while, and their friends are going, huh, now we're living out here in obscurity, we have no temple, we left everything behind, they're hunting us now, and those people start to, peel away and go back to Judaism. How are we supposed to think about that? And so I think that's why Hebrews was written is to address that. So you have people that have gone back from embracing Christ and salvation by grace to let's go back to the temple. Let's go back to sacrifices. Let's go back and embrace all these things that Christ fulfilled and negated. How should we think about them? And the writer says, if they tasted the heavenly gift and they've been in the community of believers where the Holy Spirit lives, and they can resist that and go back, there isn't another sacrifice to be made to make, there isn't anything greater than Christ. So if you can turn away from Christ, then, you know, of course, there's hope as long as they're alive that they will re-embrace Christ, but, you know. Anybody else? So Grant's gonna come next, and he's gonna talk to you about the next page, which is the covenant sign of baptism. You ready, Graham? I'm ready. I'll save the mode stuff for the end, because it's probably the least important thing that we have to skip. There's stuff up here by Johann Sebastian Bach and Andres de Govia. I'm not going to talk about that. I'm hoping that my Seminole shirt won't be a stumbling block for any of the people in the audience here. No one in particular. So Pastor Toby talked about the covenant, the people of the covenant from the Old Testament foundations and how that included both the believer and the family of the believer. As he said, I'm going to transition from that to talking about baptism as the sign of the covenant. So the part two in your outline, which I'm basically following, but it's a little bit different. But for the most part, it should be pretty similar to that. So how do we get to this idea of covenant and the children as that 1 Corinthians 7.14 passage talked about the children being cleansed and holy. So that's a kind of statement about the people of the covenant, both in the Old and the New Testament. How do we get from that to baptism? So first, I think we should talk about the former, the founder of the Baptist Church, John the Baptist. That's a joke. Not actually the founder of the Baptist Church. But from Pastor Toby's Independent Fundamental Baptist background, I'm sure he would have heard that once or twice. So John came on the stage and he said, repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand, be baptized. And the people said, yes. All Judea and Jerusalem was going out to be baptized, right? But the question we should ask ourselves then is, why did the people not say, okay, we'll be baptized, what's baptism? I don't know what that is. The reason is because this was a part of their community going back all the way to Old Testament times. This wasn't just some new thing that John was doing. So, in order to understand baptism, let's first look at some of the Old Testament roots of baptism. All right, let's look up a few passages, starting with Exodus 19.10. We'll just look at these real quick. Exodus 19.10. When Moses told the words of the people to the Lord, and the Lord said to Moses, go to the people and consecrate them today and tomorrow and let them wash their garments and be ready for the third day. So this is in the context of Sinai, the people are there washing with water their garments to be ceremonially cleansed. It wasn't that God was so concerned that they did not have any actual dirt and they had clean clothes. This is a ceremonial type of thing, ceremonially being clean. Leviticus 8.6 then gets into some of the more cultic and just ritualistic kind of activities that were happening. And Moses brought Aaron and his sons and washed them with water. So again, a ritualistic type thing happening, setting apart the priesthood here, Aaron and his sons as holy to the Lord for their tasks and they're essentially baptized here, they're washed. Then Leviticus 16.4, This is talking about the sons of Aaron again. Well, Aaron himself actually on the Day of Atonement and then the high priest that would follow after him. He shall put on the holy linen coat and shall have the linen undergarment on his body and he shall tie the linen sash around his waist and wear the linen turban. These are the holy garments. He shall bathe his body in water and put them on. Okay? So, Again, a baptism of sorts happening here. Then Hebrews 9-10 is an interesting passage in the Old Testament where you see some additional commentary on these... It's a passage in the New Testament where you see some interesting commentary on these Old Testament baptisms. Again, going beyond that. We won't look up all of them, but I think it's instructive. I'll give you what the Old Testament citations are if you want to look at them on your own time. Go ahead and do that. Hebrews 9.10 says, well, let me start up a little bit above that, starting at 8. By this the Holy Spirit indicates that the way into the holy places is not yet opened as long as the first section is still standing, which is symbolic for the present age. According to this arrangement, gifts and sacrifices are offered that cannot perfect the conscience of the worshipper, but deal only with food and drink. In various washings, the ESV says, but the Greek is baptisms, various baptisms, regulations for the body imposed until the time of Reformation. And then if you continue on down in the same chapter of Hebrews, he cites some of those various baptisms. And you can see that, one, two things to note from one, all of them are bloody, and two, they're often just sprinklings. So I'm not going to talk about mode, but I think that's certainly something to consider as you look at this. The New Testament writers are calling these baptisms, and they're not all immersions. In fact, they're often not. Okay, verse 13, farther down in 10. For if the blood of bulls and goats and the sprinkling of defiled persons with ashes of a heifer sanctify the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, the eternal spirit, offer himself without blemish to God purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God. Look that up when you have a chance to Numbers 19.4. Numbers 19.4 is a comparison to that verse. Then verse 19, still in Hebrews, For when every commandment of the law had been declared by Moses to all the people, he took the blood of calves and goats with water and scarlet wool and hyssop and sprinkled both the book itself and all the people. Compare that to Exodus 24, 8, where Moses was sprinkling blood on the book of the covenant and the people. And then in verse 21 here of Hebrews 10, and in the same way he sprinkled with blood both the tent and all the vessels used in worship. and that corresponds to Leviticus 16, 16. So just some background in baptism in the Old Testament. Again, this practice of a ritual purification rite is not new when John came on the scene and said, be baptized, both with water and blood, bloody baptisms. Okay, so that's the context for New Testament baptisms. Then Jesus gives the apostles the Great Commission, commanding them to baptize disciples. So why is that? Basically, the point to be made here is that circumcision is the Old Testament or the historical precedence of baptism. So let's talk about that a little bit. Let's look at Colossians 2, 11-12. Colossians 2, verses 11 and 12. The apostle says, In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands by putting off the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. So here we see all people, both males and females, so that's an interesting point to be made there. A circumcision has been done, but this is a circumcision done by Christ. This is a spiritual circumcision, but then the identification there of those who are circumcised is happening in the baptism. buried with him in baptism, by the circumcision of Christ having been buried with him in baptism. So, you can see in Paul's mind there's an equating here of what's happening spiritually, what's being represented by both circumcision and baptism. And the next point I want to make, In addition, this kind of tying in in the explicit scriptural passage is also just what we see is happening in both circumcision and baptism, that they're both basically serving the same purpose, circumcision in the Old Testament and baptism in the New Testament. So, four points I'll make on this. First, they both mark out the people of God as distinguished from the unbelieving world. In Exodus 12, 48, Let me go ahead and read that real quick. X is 1248. "'If a stranger shall sojourn with you "'and would keep the Passover to the Lord, "'let all his males be circumcised. "'Then he may come near and keep it. "'He shall be as a native of the land, "'but no uncircumcised person shall eat of it.'" So there's this distinction of the people of Israel. Israel, those people who can come into the camp in this ritualistic way and be identified with the people, they must be circumcised. And of course, in the New Testament, we see that is the common thing when people are brought into the church, that they are baptized. Acts 2.38 is an interesting passage there. I won't read that for sake of time. Acts 22.16, or sorry, Sorry, I'm looking down at my notes. One thing too far. Matthew 28, 19, the Great Commission, then Acts 2, we see those who believe are to be baptized. So that was both mark out the people of God as distinguished from the unbelieving world. Number two, both indicate purification from defilement. with circumcision, in Exodus 6, the people were commanded to circumcise, or they were talked about being of uncircumcised lips. And then they're commanded throughout the Old Testament to circumcise their hearts. There's this indication of purity. that is supposed to be coming from the circumcision. Then now we're getting to Acts 2.38 where in the New Testament, baptism is said to be baptism for the remission of sins. And then Acts 22.16, Paul is told by Ananias there to arise and be baptized and wash away your sins. So both indicate purification from defilement. Third, both point to righteousness by faith as the only way of salvation, of our relationship to God. And that might be an interesting thing to think of when you think of, okay, how is circumcision doing that? We're circumcising a child who doesn't have the faith. But the point there is that it's the sign, it is a symbol that the circumcision is coming, or that the righteousness is coming by faith. It's not a testimony to that person's individual faith. We see this in Romans 4.11 with the inspired New Testament writer's description of what was happening in Abraham's circumcision. So that's Romans 4.11. He received the sign, that's Abraham, he received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised. So here, circumcision is a sign and a seal of his faith. And that faith we see is the righteousness, that is his righteousness before God is this faith. And of course, we know that was applied to the children as well. Then with baptism, let's look at Acts 16, 31 to 34. Acts 16, 31 to 34. This is there with the Philippian jailer. And they said, believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved, you and your household. And they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all those who were in his house. And he took them the same hour of the night and washed their wounds. And he was baptized at once, he and all his family. Then he brought them up into his house and set food before them. And he rejoiced along with his entire household that he had believed in God. So here we see the belief in God, believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved. This is the salvation by faith accompanied with the baptism. And then the fourth point as far as circumcision and baptism being tied to the same thing, representing the same thing, both point to covenantal union and communion with God. So following along with Pastor Toby's point about being in communion with God as a covenant, this is what's happening in the New Testament with baptism as well. We talked about that pretty clearly, or we know that clearly in the Old Testament with circumcision. Think of Genesis 17. I will establish my covenant with you and with your seed after you. And this even says, this is my covenant. you shall be circumcised. So there's this identification of the covenant with this sign, the sign of the covenant. And then looking at Romans six, three to seven, with how baptism is identified with this union with Christ, this covenantal union with Christ. Romans six, three to seven. Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with Him by baptism into death, in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with Him in a death like His, we shall certainly be united with Him in a resurrection like His. And we know that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin, for one who has died has been set free from sin. So here this covenantal union that we all rely on for any hope before God, this union with Christ is identified with baptism. That's when it happened is the description here. Alright, so just to review those four points real quick. Baptism and circumcision. First off, circumcision as the historical precedent of baptism. And one of the ways we see that is the similar use and meaning of baptism and circumcision. Marking out the people of God from the world. Both indicating purification from defilement. Both pointing to the righteousness by faith as the only way of salvation. and four, both point to covenantal union with God. And one last thing I'll mention, just following on with the 1 Corinthians 7.14 passage that the pastor mentioned before, we see in 1 Corinthians 7.14, this is a key passage, for understanding this doctrine of Covenantal Baptism because it's one of the most explicit points in the New Testament where the designation of people, the families of believers is made and I think we need to look at the old, our approach to scriptures in general should not be that God needs to repeat himself in the New Testament in order for us to believe something in the New Testament. Rather, has he explicitly done away with something? Certainly that isn't the case, but much beyond that, we see not only just silence here, but here in 1 Corinthians 7, 14, we see explicitly a declaration that the children and the unbelieving spouse even in this case, but his point specifically, that is the obvious point that he's kind of making in passing, is that the children are both holy and cleansed. They're holy and not unclean, which means they are clean. So let me just talk really quick about what that means and how that's relevant. So holy, what does holy mean? You had to put holy in different words. Set apart, yeah, consecrated, set apart for a special purpose. I just scratched down a few things in the Bible that are called holy. We have the holy place, the holy city, holy Jerusalem, the holy kiss in the New Testament, holy angels, holy prophets, holy covenants, holy apostles, holy nations. and there's many more that could be said there. So yes, being set apart, there's a specific designation for that particular city, for that particular, those prophets, that particular covenant, those apostles, that city. It's a special designation. And then we see this term is used throughout the New Testament for God's people, the church. What are they called? What do the apostles often call the church? The saints. The saints. And so saints, don't think of saints as what we often hear in just our general cultural conversation about saints as these people that are super spiritual and that they have some kind of merit that's way above ours that we can get a hold of because they're so wonderful. That's the Roman Catholic view, which is not a biblical view. The biblical view is that the saints, are us, all those who are believing in Christ, all those who are part of the church, they're the set-apart ones. So I guess the point, one of the points there is that to be a saint, to be in the church is to be holy in that sense, and the children are called holy, then clean. We'll see also, let me just cite two quick passages and then I'll be done here about a call of the church to be the clean ones, to be pure. And we see how this is, it's interesting to point these things out just in light of 1 Corinthians 7, 14, where the children are called clean and holy, like we talked about. 1 Thessalonians 4, 7, the apostle says, for God has not called us for impurity or uncleanness, but in holiness. So that's the church that's called to holiness. 2 Corinthians, 6, 14-18. Anyone from an IFB background heard this one once or twice? 2 Corinthians 6, 14-18. Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers, for what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God said, I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Therefore, go out from their midst and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing. then I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty. So here, the apostle picking up from those Old Testament themes of clean and unclean, this ritual cleanliness is also then given to the church as distinct from the world. Just like it was in the Old Testament, that hasn't changed in that sense. Okay, so the people are, the children, in addition to the people, the believers, are clean, they are holy, and these, in this certain sense, What do you do with people that are clean and holy in the New Testament? The point here is that you baptize them. Baptism is the sign of being clean and being holy in the New Testament. Look at Ephesians 5, 25 to 27 for that, and also Hebrews 10, 22, just for the sake of time. I won't go there and read those, but Ephesians 5, 25 to 27, Hebrews 10, 22. And an interesting one that's kind of a little bit of an offhanded passage about it, but I've found this in my studies, John 3, 22 to 25, there's this kind of argument that the disciples of Christ are having about baptism. And well, it's spurred on by them seeing baptism, but the argument is about purification. So you see baptism as the sign, the symbol there of purification. Tying again to the cleanliness, the ritual cleanliness of the people of God. And that's all I have in this section of Baptism as a Covenant Sign. Any questions specifically about that, what I said here? So you said the verse, so Ephesians 5.25. Yeah, 5.25 to 27 in Hebrews 10.22. It's more along the lines of the washing cleanliness associated with those ritual terms of holy and clean. And the washing associated with that washing with water. Any other questions? All right. So Matt's going to come up and talk a little bit more about the significance of baptism then. I think the fact that we're here today is a good example of the transformative work of Jesus in our lives, at least for me. I woke up this morning, Izzy woke up, I pulled her into bed and kind of fell asleep again and woke up with vomit on my shoulder, snot on my face. Jim Gaffigan, the comedian, who's got five kids, has this really hilarious bit about how if children were roommates, they would have been thrown out a long time ago. But as it is, we love them. God's working in our hearts, and so we're here. Praise be to God. You know, I'll say my personal experience with baptism, well, I should say our personal experience with baptism, Dean and myself, is we both grew up in a reformed Presbyterian environment, so practicing infant baptism, but you don't really, it's not really something you wrestle with as a kid, really, per se, at least I didn't. And so until, or an adult, until Des came along, and then we were really confronted with the question, and it just so happened that we were going to an independent church that practiced sort of Baptistic baptism. And so, I don't know, that was a learning experience for me, just wrestling with that, and what should we do, and then continuing to learn, you know, one of my medical trainers in my career, as he was assigning me, or right before he assigned me a big talk, was, I have an opportunity for learning for you. So these things are always good opportunities for learning. All right, so significance of baptism. This section is fairly, you know, I think the bullet points here in your handout are actually quite good. It's briefer, shorter, I think for many, the main reason being, I think there's a lot of mystery to baptism that the Bible doesn't really communicate. I think there's more that happens in the moment of baptism or the practice of baptism than I think God has communicated to us. The whole origin of the word sacrament, the idea of a sacrament, we get it from the Latin sacramentum, which was the oath that the Roman soldiers would give to Caesar. But then also early on in the church they would refer to the baptism in the Lord's Supper as Mysterios, the Greek word from where we get mystery. And they sort of used that word to refer to pagan rites of initiation. But that whole idea of mystery, I think there really is definitely a mystery behind the sacraments that we don't fully appreciate. I don't want to get into a lot of that conjecture. Let's stick with what the Bible talks about. So two things, significance of baptism, the meaning to believers and the meaning to children or infants. So we've already touched a lot on baptism and the passages in this section sort of reiterate, I think, most of what's already been said. So it talks about Abraham starting off, so Romans 4.11. which we already read, but let me go back a little bit further in it. Okay. So starting sort of midway through verse 9, we have been saying that Abraham's faith was credited to him as righteousness, but under what circumstances was it credited? Was it after he was circumcised or before? It was not after, but before. And he received circumcision as a sign, a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith, while he is still uncircumcised. And then it talks about, and then 1 Peter 3, turn of 21, talks about, basically says that baptism is not as a removal of dirt from the body, there's nothing physical in it, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience through the resurrection of Jesus. And I think it's fairly clear in the Bible that for the believer, a believer's baptism, right, there's nothing, the significance of the baptism is it's a sign of the faith that God has already put in our hearts. And it's a sign of us entering into this covenant with him. So entering into the covenant and entering with the faith that, or a sign of the faith that he has already given us. I think it, you know, There's less scripture when it comes to what's the significance, what's the meaning for children or infants. It talks about, as Toby iterated with all the different covenants, each one, the children are included as part of the covenant. But the specific significance of what it means to them isn't necessarily addressed very much in the Bible. So certainly, circumcision, So Jeremiah 4.4 talks about, it says, circumcise yourselves to the Lord, circumcise your hearts. He was in the midst of basically proclaiming to the Israelites that you're doing all these rituals, circumcision being the initial one, but it's really not about what you're doing, it's about what's in your heart. So this idea of, for children, obviously, there's not an expression They haven't expressed faith, especially at eight days old when they got circumcised, I think. Obviously no real, at least conscious expression of faith at eight days old. But this understanding that they're part of the covenant, they've been born into this family, they're under the covenant, that's number one. And then sort of calling them, you can use it to call them to faith. I remember my parents talking about my baptism. I have no recollection of my baptism. And there's a picture of me wearing one of those really long, white dresses when I was a baby that apparently belonged to my great-grandfather. But the moment of baptism had no meaning to me because I didn't remember it. But it was my parents talking about my baptism. I don't know, it's a way, I think, of helping children understand that, this is my perspective on it, that they're a part of something, a part of something really special, and a way of calling them to pursue life within the covenant. Questions, as I think about the other point I was going to make that skipped my mind. It'll come to me. So, and then I like the, in the third and fourth bullet points under meaning to infants, the whole idea of, for adults, the significance of baptism starts with faith in us. And the baptism is the outward expression of that. And for children, it's sort of the outward expression calling them to an inward change. So kind of, Altay and I like, for me, that sort of mental picture. Yeah, I remember what I was gonna say. The other thing, I think, as I approach this, I realize that I'm limited by my own background, my own cultural understanding. I was reading a book, the book Ravi Zacharias did on, Has Christianity Failed You? And he talks about, and at one point sort of laments that most of the exegesis and doctrine has risen out of the Western culture. when he said his point is, you know, this really is an Eastern book, you know, it's written out of an Eastern culture, and he was sort of lamenting the fact that there's not more Eastern people approaching the Bible from an Eastern perspective, more relational, more family-centered, more family-driven, and I don't really know You know, for me, I'm an introvert, as we talked about earlier. So the idea of individual is great for me. And obviously, when we're in that moment where we're standing before God, well, we're not even an individual at that point because we've got Jesus there covering us. But that's an individual moment. But I think in His providence, most of our relationship, most of our walk in life is more relational than I'd like to give it credit for. That's pretty much all I had on that. There's definitely a lot of mystery there that I don't think we are meant to understand. So I have a lot of questions, I just wasn't sure which group to start with. And Tony's got one more section on the mode of baptism. Yeah, that's a very good way to go back to not answer the question. But if you want to direct the question, I'm happy to. Well, I'll direct it at you. So I think I'm just thinking back to when we had the team testimony and a lot of baptism discussion. And one of the phrases that was said was, you know, there was confusion about, well, sprinkling versus immersion. But the phrase was, you know, what if the sprinkling doesn't take? And so there was this kind of confusion between maybe election and baptism. And so my question is, like, we talk about the covenant, and we talk about circumcision, but presumably, Jacob and Esau would have both been circumcised, and Ishmael was circumcised. Mm-hmm. How do we, like, there is a confusion about what we're doing when we're baptizing, and what we're doing for our children, and what the significance is. Like, it's not saving them, that they're not part of the elect, it is a covenant sign, like, I don't know, do you want to just talk about that a little bit? I mean, I think that for me, the covenant sign is That's a big thing for me. I mean, you know, God has blessed me with us, with these children, and He has graciously included us under His covenant. And our children are, the fact that they're given to us, they're now under this, in this covenant. But recognizing, yeah, that that's not saving, that's not a saving grace. I don't know. So maybe you could phrase the question in a different way. I think most of us would go, baptism is significant just because you just hear it all the time, right? So you're just going to do it. I guess the practical question is the why, right? Why is it significant? Because by virtue of their birth from believing parents, and most of our kids this year, they would be Are they part of the covenant without baptism? Are they part of the covenant without baptism? Good question. So I guess I would say what makes a person in covenant or not in covenant? Is it something you do? Well, I think the answer to that is no. It's not something we as humans, as humans got to work, right? I guess the logical question after that is, well, if it's not something we do, then why are we doing anything? We'll go back to Pastor Toby's sermon a couple weeks ago with the Zipporah and the flint and the thrown foreskins. You know, I think It's kind of tongue-in-cheek, but there's a seriousness there that, yes, the people were still God's people in covenant with Him, but they were not obedient to the command, and there was some significance there. I don't know exactly to say, OK, what's it doing, what's the effect? It was already covenant anyway, but it was at least serious enough to cause that incident. Sure. So I'm kind of playing the foil here, because I feel that the lack of obedience in this case to the command, if you will, is a serious thing. But I don't think that is necessarily an answer to why. Does that make sense? Because we're commanding because there is some sort of, we're being commanded to do so, not to be disobedient, but in order to help us or protect us in some way. Right. So what is that reason? You know, how do we crystallize that? Okay, so the nature of sacraments, I mean, I think this gets at the nature of sacraments and their relationship to the church. So we never ask that question about, about Lord of Supper, like what's the benefit of this and why do we do it so much? In fact, we have people in the church that think we should do it every single time we meet for worship, because that's the practice of But we never ask, why do we even do this? And the answer to that would be the same as it would be for baptism. So why do we take the Lord's Supper? Not just to prove that we're obedient, but because both of our sacraments are acting out the Gospel. they are as valuable as a sermon, if not more so, because a sermon is not a sacrament. It is the word of God, which is a means of grace, obviously, and we're told to do that. But we don't just preach the gospel so we can check the box that says, look, we were obedient, now give us the goods. I mean, I think at some point with maturity, you can kind of say that humbly to God, yes, I've been obedient, God, now You know do what you promise to do, but that's the wrong orientation, right? So the right orientation is that these are sacraments and means of grace and while we're commanded to do them we do them because There is grace for us in the doing of it. So we might look at like just Forget all the arguments for or against Baptizing our babies. We have this, we have this idea that when we baptize our children, our event is over with. We stop, we stop baptizing once we baptize the last child, right? We're baptized, our kids are baptized, we're done with that, right? But now we've got Lord's Supper that we can participate in, and that's communion together with everybody. Not true. Baptism is still a community activity. So every time a baby is baptized in this church, or an adult, or a believer of any age, the whole community is involved in that. So, in my own personal case, the thing that pushed me over, after seven years of studying, why don't I see it in scripture, you know? Like those 3D pictures that used to hang in the mall, and you'd stand outside, and you'd stare at it, and stare at people like, oh, I see it, the spaceship, right? I never could see it. And so you stare at it for a long, long time until you finally see it. Well, the thing that pushed me over was not a book, but after all the content was in, and sitting for week after week after week after week, watching and hearing other people's children being baptized, one day sitting on the back row, bing, I suddenly saw it. Because we were all doing it. And every time somebody's baptized, it's a covenant renewal ceremony. for the whole church. We're renewing for every generation. We're being obedient to what God told Abraham for every generation that comes after you. And in doing this, he said, yes, we'll agree to help those parents raise their children in the fear and admonition of the Lord. We are joining in the covenant with them. So it's not, so just to be clear here then, because I know, I guess I know the answer to the first question. The real thing is, for lack of a better term, communing in the grace, in a covenant community, if you will. It is about the communal act, not necessarily the individual. And getting back to what he just said a minute ago about that Eastern orientation versus this very post-Enlightenment existential me and my Jesus and my little piece of wafer and my little tiny cup of juice. That's what communion is. And getting in the broader context of family, that we're the family of God. Church is about the family of God. What happens to one happens to all. So, when you look at the Old Testament, remember what happened right before they crossed the Jordan River. Circumcised the whole generation, right? Remember, from time to time, they would just stop circumcising their children. And God took that very seriously. And so did the leaders take that very seriously, because it indicated something. It indicated something that had creeped in systemically to the whole of the community, is if I can't trust you, I kind of think I said this maybe a little bit in that sermon about Zipporah, is, I mean, I cannot imagine, because I'm not a doctor, but even if I were a doctor, even if I were a surgeon, They don't let surgeons work on their own children for this reason. It's because you're emotionally involved. And when we had our children circumcised, I did not want to be in the room. I didn't want to be there for the shots even, because it just sort of creeps me out a little bit. But the idea that you would take an eight-day-old baby and stand before the Lord in front of the whole community and circumcise that child, Yes, it's at the minimum about obedience, but I think that it embraces a whole lot more than just, look, I'm gonna prove what a man I am. I'm gonna step up here and yeehaw, believe in Jesus. That is not, I think there's a whole lot more mystery going on than that. And if God says to you, trust me with your children, and you're able to trust him with your children in that simple little act, then teaching them, who God is, and the Memorized Bible verses is probably a piece of cake, I think. Just one thing I'd add to that, and then I was going to answer Dean's question too, but I think I kind of had some stuff in mind on that real quick. But I think, like you just mentioned here, what Matt said on the mystery part of the sacraments is an important thing here, and it's hard, because I have the same you know, prying kind of questions. Okay, what's this doing? It kind of... I think that is, again, part of the cultural thing of everything's got to have a cash value to us. What do I know? And then also, I've got to understand. You know, we live in the scientific day. I've got to be able to get my mind around every, you know, kind of inch of what's going on there. But it seems like when we look at the New Testament description of, you know, the sacraments of the Lord's Supper and baptism, It seems like you kind of want to poke it one direction more towards the memorial only type of thing, symbolic only. But if you do that too far, then you start running into passages that are memorial. There's actually something happening. There's a means of grace that's happening. Then you poke it too far that way, and it gets to be more of this magical type of thing. where I'm just going to arm wrestle God to get him there. And then you run into other kind of problems that way. And so that's what I like about the reform position is that it seems to take the middle road to that, but there is a mystery at the end of the day. I can't describe how exactly all that works, but it does seem that there's some middle ground between a memorial only, a sign only, and you know, actual grace happening, it's something happening by the word of God. I don't think we do these things out of fear, although that is what I would call a motivator. But I think ultimately the mystery is in all of these sacraments, I mean, you know, acquitting baptism in communion is very interesting because we very rarely do ask why, but ultimately there is faith here. Without that, I mean, that's kind of, I guess another thing about Moore, that is kind of the answer to the question. You know, it is a demonstration of faith. It's a profession of faith. It is a profession of faith. I think about the sprinkling. I love it. I appreciate that you mentioned the many modes and the sprinkling of blood. And I think about it, and I think, wow, if I had been, and I was there, I mean, in the heart, maybe I would just want to run away from that, because who wants to get blood all over you as a reproach? You know, but then you think, I would not want to have that all over myself and my children because of what it represents, the remission of sin and the cleansing and, you know, without the share of blood. So I think of how important that is. You know that we are all covered. It is all his work. So Dean's question about was linking election together with baptism. I think that was a big hurdle for me is seeing how the two were linked together. I think that the only way to get there is by faith, not by thought, because I kept slamming into, I think, I think that I thought of baptism as a response to faith. I was trying to think about covenant theology from the mindset and perspective of non-covenantal brain, right? So my brain was not wired, if you want to say it like this, with covenant categories, but I had embraced predestination as a standalone doctrine. And so trying to think about covenant theology from a if you will, pseudo-dispensational framework. Did that make sense, right? So here I am, camped out in, you know, you're supposed to believe and get baptized, that's it, that's it. The Bible says, just stop talking about it after that. So trying to think back about circumcision and election from that perspective was very difficult. And there's a lot of arrogance and youth wrapped up in all of that, right? So I thought, you know, predestination's for people who've got it figured out, and not for people who don't have it figured out. But I think that if you look at what God said to the people about circumcising their babies, what you get at is you're acting out what God does. You're saying your ability to choose God is about as relevant as a newborn baby is to choosing circumcision. And I think this is where trust and faith really, the rubber hits the road of your belief and practice. What you think, what you believe, and what you're actually willing to practice, it just collapses them into this one spot. So that what you're saying is, this child is a gift from God, and from the very earliest, he is marking them as his own. And so, if I can do it kind of like this, so if this is the line of demarcation, the DMZ between belief and unbelief, how are we commanded to raise our babies? Whether you are a covenant theologian or not, we all agree, all my Baptist friends, all my non-covenantal friends all say, raise them in the fear and admonition of the Lord. Well, how do you do that? Do you treat them like an unbeliever until they grow up to the place where they're ready to stand up here as a believer? Not a single one would say that. Not a single one. They would all say, you don't stand them over here and say, now, honey, when you're ready to make a choice, you can come to church. No. From day one, you're coming to church. Long as you live, I have people in this church, by the way, as long as you live under my roof, we're going to church, right? When you get to be 18 and you live on your own, if you want to go someplace else on Sunday, fine. But as long as you're eating my food and sleeping in my bed, we're going to church. End of it, right? Well, there's a lot more to it than that, but what covenant says is we're raising them with the expectation from the earliest day that you're a believer. And that means we're restricting you and your choices by the restrictions that God places on you. which means that you're gonna be raised as a believer when you're rising up, when you're laying down, when you're sitting at the table, when you come in and you go out and walk along the road. What you think and what you do, marked on your head and marked on your arm with the phylactery of God, right? The word of God is gonna rule everything you do. You don't get a choice on that. I think it's exercising faith, too, of the passage that says, if you train like a child, the more you should go, the more you won't depart from it. And faith, and believing that God says that in his word, that's true. I think that assaults are sort of... Western we've got to present them with as many choices and let them stand objectively apart from them and choose for themselves That's where the that's where the easternness of our faith comes in is that's just not an expectation that God gives us is they're marked out from the very beginning and raised as the people of God and should they choose to depart from that then the other A side, B side of all the sacraments comes in, right? Blessings for obedience, curses for disobedience. You circumcise the child so that Zipporah doesn't have to do it when God comes out to kill one of you because of your massive disobedience and not following along with the Lord in covenant with him. You circumcise your child not just to avoid the punishment, but to enjoy the blessing. But should you set apart from that, you need to understand that you've been marked. Right? And baptism does it. And we're warned about the same thing before we come to the table, right? Don't take it in an unworthy fashion. Definition of unworthy is without faith and discernment of the body of Christ. Because many are sick and have fallen asleep. Same thing is said about baptism. If you depart from the Lord, you will be sick and fall asleep, if not in this life, in eternity. Right? And that's what it's saying, even in baptisms. I've told you the story, right? One of the places that baptism comes from is these ancient judgment rituals, where when ancient societies didn't know whether someone was guilty or innocent, Someone was accused of a crime, and they just could not, for whatever reason, present enough evidence to secure a verdict of guilty or not guilty. They would take the person down to a raging river and throw them in the water. And they would say, if the god spares their life, then they're innocent. If they drown, they're guilty. There's a little bit of that in baptism. They're marked with water. They're cleansed. And should they depart from cleansing, the dirt will kill them. So like, just bringing my own subjective experience into this, so like, taking a grain of salt, you know. I was baptized in a very local church. And I feel like I was reborn at eight, but lived a very nominal Christian life until I was 25. And I was in a non-denominational lot of the church. They encouraged baptism. And I was baptized for the second time with my mom. My dad didn't, because he just moved on. He said, well, why don't you baptize a different kind of woman, too? In that stepping in and getting baptized a second time, I felt a whole direction in my life where I cut ties with things that I needed to cut ties with. There was definitely a drastic turning point. And maybe that's just some psychology to it. I don't think so. I felt like I was like, no. being obedient to the Lord in it. And after that, it was a whole change in direction in my life. Sure. So maybe it's like Luther's like, if someone wants to be baptized a second time, pull them under the water. And I don't know. But it's just my own experience. So I started with when I have kids, Maybe twice they can do it. I don't know. But yeah, so that's a very real experience I had in the church, you know. But sorry I missed your first... Oh no, you got mine. You missed Granton. Yeah, sorry. So I would think that's the experience of a lot of us, right? So I wasn't baptized a second time, but when I was 20 years old and joined the very first PCA church I ever went to, I asked that question because I'd seen from growing up an independent Baptist, where people came from Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian, or non-baptized, whatever. And they would come in, and if they'd been baptized before, and they were making a profession of faith, then we almost always baptized them. And so when I went to the Presbyterian church, the PCA church, I joined. And by the way, I didn't believe in infant baptism at the time. And after I joined that church, I became the youth director of the church as a non-believer in infant baptism, which I think is a remarkable sign of grace on their part. So I asked the question, do I need to be baptized? And they said, weren't you already baptized? And I said, yeah, as a five and a half or six-year-old. And they said, why would you think you need to be baptized again? I said, well, isn't that the way you do it? Like, no, no. Were you baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit? Uh-huh. then why would you want to do it again? And I just thought, well, aren't you supposed to? And they said, no. And I thought, wow, that's pretty interesting. That's a good question. So yeah, I think because of it being married up to circumcision as a single act, in that respect and also the symbolic value is It's connected to what the Holy Spirit does in our lives Yeah We kind of made the OK circumcision baptism link, I guess, to make the correlation. But then we talk about sprinkling, which it would seem that that's a fairly continual act in some of these cases. I don't think it's a poor question in the least bit. I think it's a good question. I think it speaks to, OK, well, why only once? It would certainly be inconvenient, but. Sure. Well, in a sense, it's only once when we look at it in an individual way. Right. But if you look at it in the covenant community, it's continual, because there are always babies being brought into the community, just as in the covenant way, the Lord's Supper is celebrated. Sure. So let me let me let me do this because this was so from a Baptist perspective I grew up hearing all of the arguments for right then I went to Liberty University for two years and heard all the arguments with passion for you know immersion and so I I always heard, I can still remember standing there, sitting there in my eight o'clock freshman class. Professor Dr. Sumner Wimp, W-E-M-P, who was the guy on evangelism, right? And so, I mean, he was a old school, he's about 80 when I had him for class. He was this old school, grind his voice, slam in the pulpit, Bible slapping against everything evangelist, right? He was like Billy Sunday incarnate. And all of his stories were about, this weekend I was going to an evangelistic meeting, and I got on an airplane to fly to Southern California, and sitting right next to me was a young lady. And you know, the stories always ended the same. And I looked at her, and she looked at me, and I said, don't you want to know about Jesus? Yes, I do. With tears in her eyes, she threw herself down to the floor and repented. And I took her to some church, we found a church, and we dunked her into the water because baptism means immersion. And he just kept on saying that. So at some point you just accept that that must be what the word means, but it's a little more complicated than that. So here we go on that. So baptize does not mean immerse. Baptize is connected to two words, baptizo and bapto, two different words. In general, the word baptizo Can mean immerse, but bacto means to dip, immerse. Usually it means dipping a hyssop, you know, like a branch with leaves on it, or a finger. Almost always it refers to something being dipped in. and then used as an instrument to baptize someone. Okay? It's not as simple as just saying, to baptize someone means to dump them underneath blood or water. Not quite that simple. Exodus 12.22, Leviticus 4.6, 4.17, and 9.9. Same word, bapto, for dipping one's feet in the Jordan River, Joshua 3.15. Our word baptize is baptizo, not bapto. Bapto might mean to dip or immerse. Baptizo, this is the important part, does not refer to a mode but to a process and an effect. Baptizo refers to a process and an effect. So who cares whether you were dumped underneath something? Did the process and effect take Right? Okay, so what's the process in effect? Well, baptism may include dipping or immersing. Baptizo does not itself mean to immerse. Baptizo means to wash or to cleanse. Right? Just think about that for a second. So going back to Grant did a lot on Hebrews 9. So if you look at Hebrews 9, it lays this out and connects to at least three or four instances in the Old Testament. Hebrews 9.10 correctly translated refers to various baptisms in the Old Testament. So what do these baptisms do? Hebrews 9.13 is connected to Numbers 19.17-18. The blood of bulls and goats and the ashes of a heifer, sprinkling the unclean, sanctifies them for the purifying of the flesh. Remember, process and effect, baptizo. Baptism is about process and effect. The blood of bulls and goats did not affect cleansing. What did affect cleansing? Faith, right? Here a clean person in Hebrews 9, Numbers 19, here a clean person takes hyssop, this branch, dips it in a vessel filled with water and the ashes of a heifer, of a cow, right, that has been used as a sacrifice and then sprinkles those on persons or things that are to be cleansed ceremonially. Right, so you get this. The bapto part is this. The baptizo is that. So in these different instances, right, what is the Greek word? Because we're using many different words in English. Right. So would the Greek, in this case, lend itself to a different meaning? This is something that doesn't particularly bother me. Sure. I look at the word terrorize, the root word of terrorize. Tara right, right, so I don't necessarily you know Baptism doesn't necessarily mean this. So this is not a struggle for me per se, well maybe for some, but for the accuracy portion, what are we saying? So, it's cleansing, it's washing. So baptism means washing, cleansing or purifying, not dumping under the water. So like when I've had these discussions or debates with my hardcore Baptistic friends, they want to marry up. obedience to baptism with putting people underwater. So I had a new believer in my church, my first church. He was about 10 or 11. No, he's 12 years old. And he had never been baptized. And he was a believer. Elders interviewed him, asked him all the questions. He gave all the right answers. I've been watching him for three years, four years. Brought him in front of the church as a 12-year-old, said the words, put the water on his head, handfuls of water on his head. They left our church and went to a Reformed Baptist church where he was told, you know, he went to summer camp and had some recoming back to Jesus moment. And so they asked him the question, have you been baptized? Yes. Where were you baptized? What were the circumstances? Presbyterian church. Were you immersed? No. Then you weren't baptized. You got to be baptized. Period, right? Because baptism is immersion. And they came to talk to me about that. And I said, So we've backed up to, now you weren't obedient because you didn't go underneath water. But what does that mean? Well, you have to be buried with Christ. If you're not, if you don't reenact that, then you haven't been baptized, which we'll get to in a second. But the word for here in Hebrews 9.10 is bapto, sprinkling, purifying, is what's going on, the process and effect of cleansing, right? What's the word in the Greek mission? Which one is it? Baptizo. I'm sorry, I just said that wrong. Bapto refers to dipping the finger or the hyssop. Baptizo is always process and effect, cleansing, right? So Hebrews 9.19, which is connected to Exodus 24, Moses took the blood of calves and goats with water, scarlet wool, and hyssop and sprinkled, baptized both the book and itself and all the people. What Hebrew word is that? Baptizo. That's the Greek, right? And so you see, it sounds like you're referring to the Hebrew, the New Testament Greek, and then also, are you referring to the, like the Septuagint, the Greek translation? Almost always they are, but in the New Testament, these, when they're quoting, almost always, almost all New Testament writers are not quoting Hebrew. That's why when you read the New Testament and they jump over to the Old Testament, sometimes the words are a little differently. It's because two things. One, they are reciting, especially Peter is notorious for this, for giving you, so that passage in Isaiah that says, and he's quoting what he knows, but what he memorized is Septuagint. And so it's not always bang on, word for word, the same as somebody who went to the Hebrew translation of the Bible of the Old Testament and then translated that into English. It's not gonna look the same as Hebrew to Greek to English. I mean, it's just gonna be slightly off. But on these things, yeah, it's pretty clear that they're trying to line up some ideas. So the process again, Old Testament baptism was to dip the hyssop and the wool into the blood and sprinkle it as a means of ceremonial purification. You still see this in Catholic rituals where you see them doing that right there to people. The idea is the same. Hebrews 9.21 connected to Leviticus 8.19, and in the same way, he sprinkled with the blood of both He sprinkled with the blood both the tent and all the vessels used in worship. The priest was to dip his finger in the blood of a bull used for sacrifice and then sprinkle the blood on the mercy seat representing atonement. A ceremonial means of removing uncleanness of the children of Israel. In every case, the process of baptism includes dipping the instrument used to baptize into the substance such as blood or water. The instrument was then used to sprinkle the persons or things to be baptized. Baptism was not the dipping, but the process of dipping and sprinkling according to God's order. So it's not as much about mode. In fact, I skipped over this. If you want to know what do we believe about it, so the Westminster Confession of Faith speaks to this in chapter 28 in section 3 it says dipping of the person into the water is not necessary but baptism is rightly ministered by pouring or sprinkling water on upon the person so not necessary does not mean forbidden so when i went to seminary One of the revolutionary classes that I took was by St. Clair Ferguson, who's from Scotland, from the Scottish Presbyterian Church. And he did a whole section on baptism, on sacraments. And he stood before us and he said, if we're going to make any headway, we've got to separate mode from meaning. He said, so I come from the Church of Scotland. My wife comes from the Church of Scotland. I'm 60 years old, or however old he was at the time, and he said, millions and millions of Scottish babies have been immersed, including my wife. And it just, we all just went, oh. What did you just say? If you immersed babies? You know, and the Baptists looked at the Presbyterians and we all went, let's all move to Scotland. Case closed, right? I was reading a blog a friend of mine has that When I tell the story of how I became a Calvinist at Liberty, the guy who was instrumental for that was a guy named Bruce Buchanan, whose dad is an OPC pastor. And about a year ago, it's been 25 years, no, 27 or 8 years, 28 years ago is when I met him and we had those conversations. I knew him for my two years at Liberty. Well, I lost touch with him after I left there in 1989. So I was looking for him on the internet, never could find him. He's not on Facebook. And one day I was on a reform blog, and I saw Bruce Buchanan's name underneath. And I said, this is just too good to be true. I've got to email this guy and see if it's the same guy. So I emailed him. He said, yeah, I remember you told me. Yeah, blah, blah, blah. So we went back and forth about that. was instrumental in helping me understand this because he came from this OPC background. And he would say all the time, this is the historic nature of the church that we're dealing with. This is the history of the church we believe in is this infant baptism sprinkling thing. But it's got to be separated. The mode and the meaning have to be separated from each other. I have a question just for the history. At what point did it become a question? Yeah, I think really during the Reformation. So the question that he asked, so you understand Anabaptists, right? What that means. So during the Reformation, this was a huge controversy. People were coming out of the Catholic Church during the Reformation. What are we supposed to do now? Our baptism was in the Catholic Church. And so there was not a consensus on that. Some, really a minority, which called themselves the Anabaptists, said, no, we have to repudiate that. You need to be baptized. And Calvin Luther and the majority were saying, no, no, there's one baptism. And so no, you don't have to be rebaptized. And they actually wrote, kind of created a doctrine about the effectiveness of the baptism isn't in the person. doing the baptizing any more than it is in the priest offering the elements of communion. It rests on... That's exactly right. Yeah, I was going to say on the last page of this, under additional considerations or something like that, on the very last part of it, early church history, Ancient catacombs and ruins associated with early Christians often contain subjects, John the Baptist, pouring water over Jesus in baptism. According to a guide to ancient symbols, John is often depicted baptizing Christ with water poured from a scallop shell. The shell has become a common symbol of baptism. Furthermore, scholarly Catholic source, much of the earliest Christian artwork, picks baptism, but not baptism by immersion. If the recipient is in a river, he is always shown standing in the river while the water is poured over his head from a cup or a shell. So one of the things that, the study that we're doing going inside the city, one of the comments that R.C. I think it was R.C. He made it was like, if you have an idea that hasn't been explored in the past 1500 years, It's probably not a good idea. The arrogance of thinking that, well, this has never been done before, but I must have this wonderful revelation. I was going to say, as a general category, if we accept that it's the Holy Spirit that is the substance that water represents, the connection that we're making is the water of cleansing is not... So we have this symbol, Old Testament symbol of washings that went on all the time. So they were sprinkling blood or water or whatever on the altar, on the people, on the book, on the tent to ritually cleanse it. And then prophets crying out over and over and over again, not circumcision made with hands. Remember, you're all circumcised, Jeremiah is saying. Look at that symbol now that you're adults, you're all been circumcised, but want for the circumcision of heart. You've all been sprinkled and washed clean ceremonially, but it's gotta be a lot more than that. There's something that's gotta happen on the inside of that. What does that point to but the role of the Holy Spirit in our life? So every time you read about Holy Spirit being administered to people, Pentecost and all, it's pouring, right? Poured out on them. So probably the best symbol for the receiving of the Holy Spirit that washes the conscience clean, the very thing that makes the New Covenant better, the better covenant, is the presence of Holy Spirit in people's life, washing clean their conscience, not just sprinkling their outsides to set them apart as the holy people of God, is almost, not almost, is always seen as being poured out on people. Right? I mean, that's Joel, that's Pentecost, Isaiah even. For I will pour water on the thirsty land and streams on the dry ground. I will pour my spirit upon your offspring and my blessing on your descendants. Psalm 51, wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean. Wash me and I'll be whiter than snow. You know that nobody in the Old Testament, when they took a bath, they had a drawn tub of water in their hovel that they lived in, and they jumped in it and stuck themselves underneath the water. Almost never. Yes, if you had a river that you lived near, maybe you would go down to the river. But the idea of immersing yourself in the river, you can see this if you ever watch, you watch people who are Catholic to some degree, when they walk in a church, they dip their hand in the in a thing at the back of the church and they splash themselves with water or they just do this. You see it a lot in Islam. They understand the symbolic nature of cleansing rituals. So you almost always see them when they go into their mosque to pray. What do you see them do? You see them do this thing right here, even when there's no water. And what do they do? What is that symbolizing? If there is water there in a basin, They put their hands under the water, and they do this to their face, or to their neck, if they have a beard, which they almost always do. And that's, it's a symbolic washing, the idea that out there, I'm walking around, and I don't just have dirt on me, but I have this transactional profanity, this uncleanness, and I need to clean myself before I come to God. That's ceremonial washing that's in the background behind New Testament. And the idea of the Holy Spirit is what really cleanses us to come to God. But it's not go underneath the water of the Holy Spirit and come up clean. The idea is almost always sprinkling or pouring. But the mode is not the important part. It's the meaning. I think the reason people have trouble with this is the largest example of this in the New Testament. the river Jordan in this case. I just look at the Middle East in general and go, not a lot of rivers. Not at all. So that strikes me. But I'll kind of come back to something that was said earlier. I mean, ask the question like, hey, the timing of these things, you know, life's path isn't a one-time thing versus communities everywhere. Sure. And then I think, Lindsey, you know, all of this, and just to kind of make sure, you know, I, we, whoever we're orienting ourselves right, we tend to look at baptism as an individual event because there's one person being baptized. But I think the more I'm more set back from it, This is really a communal or family event that we are participating in. It just seems to us, at least, that this is very much about that particular individual. Which to me, it sounds like we need to stop thinking about that like that, and more it's like this is about Us as a community of believers, from a belief standpoint, but from a community standpoint, it's not about this particular individual, but really this is about us. Is there, is that incorrect? No, that's absolutely correct, in fact. Because I think, you see, because people will get this confused because this is very much as many people, an individual. So, along the lines of that, I think that one of the places that the church has really lost a lot of ground in sort of a, amongst millennials, I'll say, is the current generation is You get saved and you get baptized, and that might happen to you at summer camp, that might happen to you at some kind of a Hillsong event, it might happen to you, all these different things, and baptism is something that's between you and Jesus. That is not proper to think like that. I mean, it's just not biblical. To me, it just tears the guts out of everything 4,000 years of redemptive history has done. And for the first 2,000, well, at least for the first 1,950 years of Protestant church history, the idea of just being baptized was not some standalone thing between you and Jesus and some evangelist minister or some happening that you did. But the keys of the kingdom, the doorway to the church is baptism. I mean, the idea of being baptized just nakedly into Jesus is like, so I'm going to have a baby. And as soon as the baby is born, I'm going to leave the baby and just go off Because they're just born into humanity. We know babies are born into families, right? They don't just happen. They're not just born and abandoned. Naturally, they're born into a family. So new birth in the church, the visible community of faith, begins when a person is baptized into the visible community. That's the front door. So I have a lot of respect for evangelist who will say, I'm just an evangelist. I just came through town, and yes, we think you should believe. Yes, we think you should be baptized. But we're not your church. You've got to join a church. Let us help you connect to a church. Properly speaking, that baptism is what connects you to that church, because those are the people that are swearing and promising along with you to raise your children if you're in that mission or war. Historically, I mean, there are two types of baptism. There's believer's baptism, and there's an infant baptism. Historically, believer's baptism is more of the exception to the rule. Like, if you look at the history of Israel, most of the people that were being circumcised were men. It was like, those were the onesies and twosies that were coming in as part of the community, and the rest of them, it was like, morning days later, you're officially welcomed into the community. Right. So that national thing? So the sign of the covenant with Abraham is circumcision, right? National covenant. You get to Christ, the covenant with Christ, and it's like this. And so John starts telling Jews who've been circumcised, you need to be baptized. So for a little while, you've got baptism and circumcision doing this thing right here. Acts chapter 15, where the first huge controversy hits as Gentiles start flooding into the church, start flooding into all these Jewish people, the Jews, the Judaizers say they ought to be circumcised and made to be Jewish because this is a Jewish thing that's going on. It's Judaism 2.0, but they need to become us so they can follow after Jesus. So Peter, James, John, all the apostles meet together with all the elders that can come to Jerusalem, and what do they say? They say, no, they do not need to be made to be circumcised. And from that point forward, there's one sign of the new covenant, and it's baptism, no longer circumcision. In fact, Paul goes out of his way to say that to people in Galatia who are saying, no, no, you must be, you must, you must, you must, you must. And he gets really frustrated with that thinking and says, if circumcision was of any value, I know we're running out of time, but I think we could do a better job messaging this. Oh, sure. Because if this is an us thing, we've got to do a better job of that. And if we look at it as an us thing, and it is a continual event, it's not a one-time ish. Here's what I really believe after 27 years of this, is that this is covenant. This is covenant and covenant baptism. Okay, go back to Genesis chapter 17. Who was there at the first circumcision? A 90-some year old man, a bunch of teenage boys, and eventually newborns, along with slaves from Egypt, right? Who got circumcised? All of them. Those that were old enough to believe were circumcised. Those that were too young to know what was going on were circumcised. Okay, so there's room in Trinity Reformed Church to embrace the whole of that. We're going to have people that are teenagers and have in the last year who come who've never been baptized, we baptize them. We've had children that are 5, 6, 7, 8 years old, never been baptized, we baptize them as believers. But at the same time, we're going to embrace the covenant Baptism, which says, suffer all the little children, the babies to come to me and forbid them not, as members of the community of faith. In that sense, we do practice believer's baptism. We would not say that someone outside the church should just be baptized because they come. They should not be baptized if they don't have a faith in that sense. Or so they? No, I mean someone that's an adult that is... But an adult comes to the covenant community through faith, through saying, yes, I submit to God, you know, and come in. It's the same way in the Old Testament, like that passage I read about the people keeping Passover before they could come into the community. Those people that wanted to come in, and then it was people in their house as well. Yeah, same kind of thing. you know, there's a faith in those that have not been given the sign of initiation to read in the Old and New Testament. That's why, you know, it was, that's why you see the belief to be baptized to the initial, to the adults of the initial, you know, converse. That's what we believe to believe to be baptized. But then, just like the household baptisms, Lydia, you know, for instance, she believed And her house was left, and her household was left. So was her husband? I mean, I guess she wasn't married, but. It doesn't say it just says her household was left. Most people think that it's probably when it says her household, because of what she did for a living, she employed a lot of people and would have had household servants. But there was adults, too. Like, we used that to talk about. There would have been adults and children who worked for her and were her servants. To be a seller of purple and a woman meant She was not begging in the street and to entertain the apostles the way she did. She had a household. She had a house full of people. Whether they were her mother and her father that were living with her, or sisters and brothers, there was a household of people. I guess my question is, so like, so would those adults have their baptism? Because you're saying it's probably not. But if they're all in the same household, then they're part of it. Because we use it to justify, like, all kids. Sure. Well, I mean, similar to Abraham's situation, there were servants that were part of the house that were adults. And because they're part of this house, they're baptized as part of that house. Yeah. I guess they could have. They're old enough, you know, I don't know enough about the culture to know if they have any right to run away. I guess they could have ran away. You know, if they said no, I don't want any part of it. That expectation is kept up, though, after Exodus 19 and 20, is if you're going to live in Israel, I mean, there's different kinds of designations, right? The foreigner and the sojourner, which is actually the technical term. I think you talked about this when we were talking about how to deal with immigration. There's different technical terms that indicate One is living in the land as a resident alien, and the other is somebody who lives outside the land that comes in to do commerce. Different rules apply. Different blessings, if you were, are treated differently. So like taxes or usury could be applied or not applied. But if you're living on the land, even as a resident alien or a slave, you will be circumcised. I think that you and your household, That tends to be more of a stumbling block. Sure. You know, and I think, you know, when that comes up, I think we might be scratching the wrong itch. Okay. There necessarily, but when we say believers baptism, You know, if I had to put that differently, I'd go, yeah, this baby is a believer's baptism. You want to know why? Because all of us here believe it. Sometimes, I guess, a believer's baptism for an adult, I mean, it is also a covenant baptism, too. Like, what you're saying, it's not just baptism. It's covenant. And as, like, the covenant community, I don't know if that person is really a believer or if they follow that Hebrew. You know what I mean? Like, I guess I'm just thinking of those people that are sort of in between, like the enlightened person might not necessarily have faith, but is part of the community, right? Where do they fall in? Even the Baptist church that believes in good believers, baptism only, it's not believers. They're not baptizing only believers. They're baptizing only professed believers, but we know that there's people that go out and arrive from them that weren't true believers, so... No one can baptize only believers in that sense, true believers. It's impossible. That gets to the point that it's a covenant thing, which includes truly redeemed and non-redeemed that are in the covenant community, both in the Old Testament and the New Testament. And there's plenty of examples in the Old Testament of people who were circumcised who didn't turn out to be what we would refer to as saved, or covenant keepers. And I just wanted to add, you know, the idea of the covenant family, you know, or church, the church whole, but also the church generational. I mean, and this isn't just baptism, but the whole idea of the covenant family. You know, my testimony is very tied into the fact that generations going back have been covenant families. And so God's means of grace in their lives, in their acts of faith, have directly translated to mine, absolutely. That is an easy grace for me. So, you can really hold on to the promise that when I do these things and claim these blessings, you know, they'll die. And that's interesting because it makes me remember the verse, you know, showing mercy to a thousand generations of those who loved Him. And you just see that. And I see Toby's family going all the way back to Peter and I see the grace of God that's poured out on him that came through persecution, you know. I just think, And yet, on the other hand, I can point to examples in my family of people who didn't believe. Like, my dad's dad was not a believer his whole entire life, even though he was raised in a Christian family, went to Methodist Church. He had brothers and sisters that were then and are believers. but died a pagan, and yet my great-grandfather recognized, even though I never had a chance to ask him, like, why did you do this? What were you thinking? He died when I was 10 or 11 years old. But he would come, knowing that his son was a pagan and married to a pagan, came to their house on Sunday morning to pick my dad and his brothers up and take them to church. And it was important to him. And so I look at that and I think, this is what covenant, this is what covenant people do. And yet, I wrote an article a couple weeks ago about what do we tell our kids about transgender students? And it got posted, I wasn't thinking, I posted to a family website, a family Facebook page that's full of hundreds of people that have my last name that I don't really know. And, boy, it took, Hardly any time at all before I started getting messages back. How dare you? Don't you know there's plenty of people that are DuBose's that are transgender, that are gay, that are LGBTQ? How dare you, you know, assume? So sorry. So I have one last question. I know we have a lot of time. Yeah. But is there something to say at the beginning about the moment Jesus was baptized? Like, so we had a few minutes of history. And so, But my question is like, so for those of us that maybe have been put back to zones, like if there are scenarios where I'm thinking of harm ministries, or healing ministries, like, I don't know, if there's some sort of moment where you're being re-baptized, like, I don't know, before you become a parent, after you become a parent, like, before you go to college, like, why isn't it something that, and maybe I just don't understand in that sense, I would say that that itch that he was talking about, of that, our desire to make it our own and own it, if we were infant baptized, and to see it a reality in our adult life, that moment that you're looking for is when your children are baptized. Because what's on display at that moment is not their faith, it's your faith. Right? But secondarily, what does Jesus' baptism have to do with all this? I would say that John's... I'll say this just really clearly. I say this to my Baptist friends all the time. Despite the fact that John the Baptist is sort of your patron saint, you do not practice John the Baptist's baptism. Okay, John said his baptism was a baptism of preparation for Messiah. So if you look at who John was, John is the Elijah who was to come before Messiah. In every respect, this is true, that John the Baptist was the last prophet of the Old Testament. Even though his story takes place on the first pages of the New Testament, John was the last prophet of the Old Testament. So during the intertestamental period and even before then, if you were a Gentile and you wanted to join and become a Jew and practice Yahwehism, You come to them and say, I'm an adult. I'm a male. I believe in Yahweh. I want to join your covenant community and worship the God of the Hebrews. They would say, you're fine. You need to make a public profession of faith in front of the synagogue or in front of the community. You need to be circumcised if you're male. And the third thing is you need to take a bath. You need to be baptized. That's what John was doing. And the thing that got him killed, the thing that made the people mad, was when the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the righteous ones, what their name means, the Set-apart Ones, the holiest people in the land, were being told Be baptized with repentance of your sins. Behold, the kingdom of heaven is at hand, the Lamb of God." And they said, how dare you tell us that we need to wash our sins off? We are the righteous ones. The rest of you are the ones that need to take a bath. And so Jesus said, I need to do this to fulfill all righteousness. So if you were living at the time of Jesus and you wanted to become a Pharisee, you want to become a Sadducee, you want to become an Essene, and leave just the rabble to join one of the truly committed, they would say to you, your initiation rite is a baptism, a ceremonial washing. We're going to haul you in and say, I have now embraced The chosen people now want to be a Pharisee and they would say, okay, let's baptize you and make you swear an oath and teach you the secret handshake. That's what they would do because they thought of themselves as the righteous remnant of Israel. So when Jesus presents himself for baptism to John, he's identifying himself as fulfilling all righteousness. I am part of the righteous remnant of Israel. And even though I'm the one who John's baptizing people to prepare to come to me, I'm going to come to this moment and I'm going to fulfill all their expectations fill this cup up with meaning, and fill this water up that they're being baptized with, with meaning. The idea that I'm the one that this points to. And you can tell that's what God thought too, because at that moment that he was baptized, he says, Amen, this is my son with whom I'm well pleased. This is God the Father speaking. And the Holy Spirit descending on him as a dove would come down from heaven. And John reports, I saw the Holy Spirit coming down on him. So if we're looking for any watershed moment in the life of Christ, that's it, but with change. And I think to some degree you can see with change when at the institution of the Lord's Supper, what does he do? He goes around and washes all their feet. And what do they say? Not just my feet, Peter says. Not just my feet, but my whole. No, no, no. The part for the whole, right? The dirtiest part of you, your feet, is the part I'm going to cleanse. pointing forward to what is just about to take place. Death on the cross, the sprinkling of blood. Are you going to take a bath in blood? No, I'm going to sprinkle you with it. I'm going to wash the dirtiest part because if I wash your dirtiest part, the rest of you will be clean. If I wash your filthy, stinking soul, the rest of you is made clean. How does that happen? How does Jesus' atonement by blood on the cross, how does that get imparted to you, the scripture says, by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit applies redemption to you. What does it look like? It looks just like when Moses dipped that thing, the hyssop, and sprinkled you. Jesus dips himself in the blood, his blood. Holy Spirit sprinkles you clean in your conscience, your dirtiest part, making the rest of you clean from the inside out. But you're sort of saying, is there any sort of ritual? Like, in the season of baptism, when you're at Mars? No, like, once you think you're saying, like, I was kind of thinking, oh, it would be really nice here before you have kids and, like, destroy their lives. Like, if there was some sort of ritual cleansing ceremony, there is. It's their baptism. Yeah. So I guess, like, so I guess there are, there is a significant moment where we need to relive that. Absolutely. And that's. But there are some churches that will do, like, an anointing, right, service. Like in significant moments, like before you go out on a mission, do you do that kind of thing? No, I don't know. Ordination, we do ordination. We're going to do that tomorrow. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I think with the baptism of John, you know, there's so many, there's continuities there that we can always make from Old Testament to New Testament, but there's also discontinuities. And I think that's the key thing is, you know, not confusing the continuities and discontinuities so that when things are separate, you don't apply them the same way. Whereas there were various baptisms in the Old Testament, but the New Testament is only one. And the one that Jesus said, go, you know, and make disciples of the nations, and when you make disciples, then you baptize them. It says that, I think, in 2 Corinthians, there's one baptism, one repetition of sins, one name, one church, one body. One, one, one. So if I could draw a bottom line, I would say, instead of repetition of baptism, what we need to do is invest it with all that it was intended to be. To allow it to be, for us, all that It should be. And yeah, we don't do as nearly good a job communicating all of it in its wholeness as we should. But I think that there's a... By practicing it a lot, it does what it's supposed to do. Instead of becoming an apologetic argument between two good people, if you will, I think it just stands alone, and it affects... It affects us the way it's supposed to. Just like when you go to a wedding ceremony, you are in fact participating as a married person or a single person. You're participating in marriage. If you are married, I had a college professor, my first English professor in college. She said, I have the coolest story about how she just got engaged. She said, I have the coolest story, engagement story. So my fiance, my now fiance and I were just dating and we went to a good friend's wedding. And right when he said to the groom, do you have the ring? He says, yes. He turns around and says, would you like to get married? And he holds out my ring to me. And I thought, that's a really cool story because you're getting engaged at a wedding. That's what happens to us when we are in the congregation of a child that's being baptized. It's repeating that back to us. We're participating again in it. Not just passively. We're joining in again with baptism. It's a covenant renewal ceremony. Any other questions? All right, let's pray. Lord Jesus, thank you for your scripture, and we pray that where we have questions and we have, more importantly, doubts about a doctrine like baptism or covenant baptism, that you would bring us back again and again to scripture, and that you would season our thinking with what you say and less with what we say, more with what you've done and less with what we've done. And more than that, even in our best attempts to be obedient to what we've been taught, remind us that there's always mystery and there's always more than what we know. There's more than what we've done. There's what you intend and what you're trying to picture for us. This mysterious union of Christ with this church's bride, how that takes place, we don't fully understand. even after studying it seemingly exhaustively. So bear with us patiently and give us great grace, both as we try to understand what you're doing in our lives, in our children's lives, in our church, and in those that will come into both. We pray that as we prepare for worship tomorrow, that you will be with us and you prepare us heart, soul, mind, and strength. to come and worship the God of the universe who condescended to become a baby in a manger. In Jesus name we pray, amen. I recorded that, so.