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An honest look at the New Testament data
confirms that there are different methods of baptism recorded there. For
example, Jesus never told us to baptize in his name; he told us: “Go ye
therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” (Matthew 28:19.)
However, as we survey the rest of the New Testament, we discover something
quite different: people were baptized in the name of Christ, other times
in Christ Jesus, or the Lord Jesus. (Acts 2:38; 8:16; Romans 6:3;
Galatians 3:27)
What is the solution to these discrepancies? There are several ways that
people have tried to resolve this.
1. This is a contradiction. I would reject that completely. After knowing
the Lord Jesus for over forty years and having become a daily Bible
student for thirty-nine years, having taken seven years of Greek and three
of Hebrew and reading the Bible in the original languages for many years,
I can testify that I have never found any reason to doubt that the Bible
is infallible or that there is anything in the Bible that could not be
reconciled.
2. The verse in Matthew 28 is a description of the titles or roles of the
one person, Jesus; the other verses are explicit commands about how to
baptize. This view assumes that in Matthew 28:19 we are given the titles
or roles that the one person, Jesus, fulfills. Just as Sandy Vincent is a
wife to me, a daughter to her father, a mother to our five children and a
grandmother to our six grandchildren, so were we to baptize in her name we
would say, “I baptize you in the name of Sandy.” But we could also
refer to this as baptizing in the name of the one who is wife, daughter,
mother and grandmother.
There are several problems with this view.
2.1. The book of Acts is the Spirit inspired description of historical
events, as well as the statements about baptism in Romans and Galatians,
but Matthew’s words are the literal and exact command of the Lord Jesus
Christ himself. So the weight should be given to what is an explicit
commandment of our Lord, rather than to historical descriptions of how
that was carried out.
2.2. This view presupposes the Oneness Pentecostal view that the one
person Jesus functioned at times as a Father and sometimes as a Son and
that God’s name is Jesus. However, “Jesus” is not the name of the
Father or the Holy Spirit. God’s name is Yahweh, and when we speak of
Yahweh, we are speaking of the one God, who eternally exists in three
persons.
Jesus is the name that the Son of God was given when he became a human
being. It is called the Father’s name, simply because it is the Father
who gave him that name. I have my mother’s name, because she named me
“Robert.” As I point out in the article
about God’s name, the name “Jesus” and the name “Joshua” are
identical in both Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek; it was a very common name for
Jewish boys, because it uses God’s proper name, Yahweh, and combines it
with the Hebrew word for salvation: “Thou shalt call his name JESUS: for
he shall save his people from their sins.” (Matthew 1:21.)
Therefore, when Jesus explicitly commanded us to baptize people in the
name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, he could not have been commanding
us to baptize in the name of Jesus.
2.3. This view also rests on the Oneness Pentecostal view that there is no
distinction between God the Father and the Lord Jesus.
2.3.1. I have a lot of friends who are United Pentecostals. Most do not
understand what Trinitarians actually believe and think that Trinitarians
are tritheists. (tri, “three,” combined with theos, “god”.)
The Mormons (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) believe the
Father and the Son are separate gods, but they are polytheists (poly,
“many,” combined with theos, “god”.), not Trinitarians.
Trinitarians believe in only one God, because that is what the Bible
teaches, as is stated in Deuteronomy 6:4, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our
God is one LORD.”
Revelation 4 and 5 is a vision of God’s throne room, and much is beyond
our minds’ ability to grasp, but there is clearly a distinction between
the One who sits on the throne, the Lamb and the seven Spirits of God, “sent
forth into all the earth.” Consider, for example, Revelation 4:2 (“And
immediately I was in the spirit: and, behold, a throne was set in heaven,
and one sat on the throne.”) and Revelation 5:6. (“And I beheld, and,
lo, in the midst of the throne and of the four beasts, and in the midst of
the elders, stood a Lamb as it had been slain, having seven horns and
seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God sent forth into all the
earth.”)
This distinction is brought out even more clearly by our Lord in the Upper
Room, before he was crucified, especially in John 14:15-27.
“I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, (16) .
. . Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it
seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with
you, and shall be in you. (17) I will not leave you comfortless: I will
come to you. (18)
“At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I
in you.” (20)
“If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him,
and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.” (23)
“These things have I spoken unto you, being yet present with you. But
the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my
name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your
remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.” (25, 26)
What are some of the things that we can learn from John 14:15-27?
First of all, it is very obvious that more than one person is in view:
there is Jesus, who is the speaker, then there is the speaker’s Father,
who is distinct from Jesus. Jesus refers to himself and the Father as “WE”
in verse 23. Furthermore, in verse 26, the Lord tells us about yet a
third, distinct person, “the Comforter,” which is the Holy Ghost, whom
the Father will send in my name.”
Secondly, we discover that each believer is indwelt by each of these three
persons. Not only will Jesus dwell in us, but he adds, “my Father will
love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.” (23)
Then he tells us that the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, “shall be in you.”
(16, 17.)
2.3.2. But before we look at that more closely, we need to be sure of our
terms. What is a person? When we speak of persons, we often are referring
to human beings. But God in eternity is not a human being. Different
angels are different persons, just as different humans are different
persons, and so are different demons. Not to be overly simplistic, but
personhood is “the composite of characteristics that make up an
individual personality.” We may even say that my dog, Hamilton, is one
person, while my wife’s cat, Edgar, is another.
The above Scriptures make it plain that we are dealing with three distinct
persons, and each of these three persons fulfills a distinct function in
securing salvation. We can see this clearly in 1 Peter 1:2, where each of
these three persons takes on a different role: “Elect according to the
foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit,
unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ.” These
Scriptures make it plain that it is not one person fulfilling different
roles and relationships the way, as I said above, my wife does: daughter,
wife, mother and grandmother. That is not the case with what we read about
in the New Testament; there each of the three persons plays a distinct
role, and we do not have Modalism, with one person playing three different
roles, as in the old Peter Sellers’ film, “The Mouse that Roared,”
where the late Mr. Sellers played most of the major characters.
While trick photography can give the illusion of one actor playing two or
more roles at once, real life does not. In real life, water can be three
different forms: ice, a solid; water, a liquid; or steam, a vapor. But the
same molecule of water cannot exist in these three modes at one and the
same time. In real life, at the same moment when Jesus was baptized on
earth, his Father spoke from heaven, and the Spirit of God came down.
(Matthew 3:16, 17.)
The Lord Jesus spoke of himself not only as one with the Father (John
10:30), but also as different from him—even saying, “the Father is
greater than I.” (John 14:28.) As we compare the different role of the
Son from the Father, the Son takes the inferior role, the role of the
Servant of the Father; the Son becomes the Suffering Servant who does the
will of God even unto death. (Cf. Philippians 2:5-11.) And Jesus purchases
the Holy Spirit, whom he pours out on the Church. (Acts 2:33.)
2.3.3. The real difficulty comes when we discover that each of these three
persons is God.
First of all, the New Testament clearly speaks of the Father as God; take,
for example John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his
only begotten Son.”
Also, it is clear that the Holy Ghost is not only God, he is more than a
force—inanimate objects cannot feel pain, but the Holy Spirit can be “grieved.”
(Ephesians 4:30.) He has intelligence and a distinct personality; his
distinct personality is to bring honor to the Son of God: “He shall
glorify me.” (John 16:14.) As we read above in John 14:26, “The
Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost . . . shall teach you all things, and
bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.”
In Acts 5:3, 4, he is lied to and called God: “Why hath Satan filled
thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost . . . thou hast not lied unto men,
but unto God.” (By the way, contrary to some teaching, the Holy Ghost
and the Holy Spirit are identical and refer to the same person. For some
reason, the translators of the King James Version translated the same
Greek word, pneuma, sometimes as “ghost” and sometimes as “spirit.”)
2.3.4. The most difficult of these three persons to comprehend is the Lord
Jesus, because in him we are confronted with someone who is both like us
and yet altogether different. Jesus of Nazareth is presented to us as a
truly human person who had emotions and intelligence similar to ours. He
felt pain and loneliness, just as we do. And even though he never sinned,
he wrestled with the same kinds of temptations we all face: pride,
self-pity, fear, doubt, dishonesty, hate and the misuse of his human
sexuality. (Hebrews 4:15.) When a close friend of his died, he “he
groaned in the spirit and was troubled;” he wept. (John 11:33, 35.) He
knew fatigue, hunger and thirst. (John 4:6; Matthew 4:2.) He even
confessed ignorance regarding the time of the end of the world, saying
that only his Father knew when that would happen. (Matthew 24:36.)
At the same time the New Testament presents this person, Jesus, as someone
altogether different from other people. He is called God (John 1:1-3;
20:28.) and identified as Yahweh, the God of Israel. (Hebrews 1:10-12 with
Psalm 102.) He declared, “Before Abraham was, I am.” (John 8:58.) His
religious contemporaries understood the implication of what he said—in
effect “making himself equal to God”—and “so they picked up stones
to throw at him.” (John 5:18; 8:59.)
2.3.5. So, as I said above, the difficulty comes when we discover that
each of these three persons is God—not three gods, as in tritheism—but
God, the one true God. “I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is
no God beside me . . . I form the light, and create darkness: I make
peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.” (Isaiah
45:5-7.)
2.3.6. What do we do with the biblical data? Do we emphasize the
three-ness of God at the expense of the oneness, as do tritheists? Or, do
we emphasize the oneness of God at the expense of the three-ness, as do
the Unitarians (many of whom reject the deity of the Lord Jesus and view
him as a mere human being.)? Or, do we say that God is both one and three
in the exactly the same way, which is a logical contradiction? I submit
that we confess what Christians confessed long before the time of the
Roman emperor Constantine: There is only one God, and he eternally exists
in three persons, not two or four: the Father, the Lord Jesus and the Holy
Spirit.
3. When the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, told the gathered apostles
to baptize people in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, he meant
that exact thing, those actual words, “in the name of the Father, and of
the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” and not the words, “in the name of
Jesus.” The rest of the New Testament describes what often took place,
namely, that people did not always follow our Lord’s explicit
commandment.
Immediately we must ask the question “why?” -- Why would Peter say “be
baptized . . . in the name of Jesus Christ,” when the Lord Jesus Christ
explicitly commanded the apostles to baptize people in the name of the
Father, Son and Holy Spirit?
3.1. The Bible didn’t come to us the way that Mohammed claims he
received the Quran, out of the blue, without human
involvement. As the Lord Jesus is both fully God and fully human in his
one person, so the Bible is both fully God’s word and yet also a fully
human document, too. This does not take away from the Bible’s being
infallible, because just as Jesus is without sin, so the Bible is without
error. Therefore, the Bible is a divine instruction book, but it is more
than that: it is the Holy Spirit’s, infallibly guided, human
interpretation of God’s mighty acts. As such, it unfolds in a specific
historical context, and its revelation is progressive: we gain more and
more insight into the nature of God and his dealings with us as the
history of redemption unfolds.
Nobody in the early Church had a copy of the Bible the way that we do
today. It is true that local churches may have possessed hand-written
copies of the Hebrew Old Testament, probably in the form of its Greek
translation, the Septuagint, but it would be rare that individual
believers possessed a complete copy of the Old Testament. They would also
have hand-written copies of various New Testament books, as these were
written, circulated and hand-copied, but it would be the end of the first
century before those books were complete, and it would be after A. D.
1455, when Gutenberg printed the first book on a movable type printing
press, before a complete copy of the whole Bible would become affordable
to any but the richest individuals. When Peter spoke on the day of
Pentecost, he did not have a copy of Matthew’s Gospel, containing our
Lord’s explicit instructions about baptism, nor did he have the Gospels
of Mark, Luke or John. But what he had was adequate for the needs of the
fledgling, New Testament Church: what he had was the Holy Spirit who
guided him into all truth, bringing to his mind the things that the Lord
Jesus taught. It’s simply that the Holy Spirit did not see fit to lay
down an explicit and rigid liturgy that had to be absolutely followed in
all circumstances. So as we study the Bible, we discover that revelation
is progressive: Isaiah had a greater revelation of God than did Moses, and
John, writing near the end of the first century, had a depth of
understanding beyond some of the other apostles, in part, because he lived
almost thirty years beyond Peter and wrote near the end of his life.
3.2. There are some basic differences in the Old Testament way of worship
and that of the New.
3.2.1. While people are saved the same way in the New Testament as they
were in the Old, God administered these two Testaments differently. That
is especially true with regard to the different rituals that are laid out
in the two Testaments. Things simply are not as spelled out in the New as
they are in the Old.
3.2.1.1. Under the Law, everything that is to be done in worship is given
in the most minute detail, and no variation was tolerated. Blood was to be
sprinkled seven times, not six or eight, on the lid of the Ark of the
Covenant on the Day of Atonement. The first time it must be blood from a
bull, then blood from a goat. Even the kind of underwear that is to be
worn in worship is explicitly commanded. (Leviticus 16:4.) The whole
structure of Tabernacle, and later Temple worship is to impress people
with the enormous barrier between them and God.
3.2.1.2. When the Lord Jesus died on the cross, the veil of the Temple was
torn from top to bottom, thereby removing the barrier between sinful
humanity and a holy God. (Matthew 27:51; Hebrews 6:19, 20.) The ancient
and fearful rites, which if performed incorrectly brought death (Leviticus
10:1 ff.; 2 Samuel 6:6 ff.), now pass into a new form, one marked by life
and freedom. So it is, when we come to descriptions of New Testament
worship, we find the covenant community experiencing freedom and
spontaneity under the leadership of the Holy Spirit within the structure
of biblical revelation. The Bible gives the structure and is normative,
but the details are not so delineated. Very different from the Old
Testament’s rigid structure of worship is the picture one gets about New
Testament worship from reading passages such as Acts 20:7 ff. or 1
Corinthians 14:26 ff. This is why God’s standard for worship works out
very differently in the two Testaments.
3.2.3. In the Holy Spirit guided evolution of doctrinal emphases, the
prophets stress the importance of the heart, not external ceremonies: “rend
your heart, and not your garments.” (Joel 2:13.) That emphasis is given
full voice in the preaching of the Lord Jesus: “the hour cometh, and now
is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in
truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him.” (John 4:23.) It is
echoed by his apostles: “we are the circumcision, which worship God in
the spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the
flesh.” (Philippians 3:3.)
This emphasis on the heart and freedom within biblical structure can be
seen with regard to such things as the words that are used with the
sealing ceremonies of the New Testament. For example, as we lift the cup,
should we say, “This cup is the new testament in my blood,” as Paul
and Luke have it? (1 Corinthians 11:25; Luke 22:20.) Or, should we follow
Matthew and Mark and say, “This is my blood of the new testament”?
(Matthew 26:28; Mark 14:24. If we get the formulae wrong, will we turn the
bread into mouse flesh or the wine into urine? Such ridiculous thoughts
are more fitting for Medieval folk, rather than for serious students of
the New Testament message.
3.3. The important thing is always God’s act, not man’s. It is what
God does in baptism, not my superstitious conformity to a religious group’s
view of ceremonial purity. It isn’t how I am baptized but that
I am baptized that is important. And always it is a matter of the
intention of the heart.
3.4. Since people sometimes dropped dead from a misuse of the Lord’s
Supper, (1 Corinthians 11:30.) and we never read about such a thing
happening in baptism, surely God is not less concerned with the words we
use in the one ordinance than he is in the other. So, just as people didn’t
use exactly the same language when they observed the Lord’s Supper,
neither did they use exactly the same language when they baptized people.
It is for that reason when we come to the descriptions of New Testament
baptism we do not find a clear and uniform picture of how it was done.
Sometimes it is by pouring and sometimes by immersion. (Acts 1:5; 2:33;
Romans 6:3-5.) Sometimes it is in the name of Christ, other times in
Christ Jesus, or the Lord Jesus. (Acts 2:38; 8:16; Romans 6:3; Galatians
3:27.) And, of course, we have the Lord Jesus’ explicit command in
Matthew 28:19 to baptize people in the name of the Father, the Son and the
Holy Spirit.
3.5. To put it succinctly, the New Testament isn’t focused on strict
observance of rituals, especially on the exact use of specific words, as
if they were magic formulae. It’s focus is the heart, and we do not get
a picture of the various congregations of the New Testament era following
an exact liturgy: they sang different songs with different tunes, met at
different times, had different length services, had different styles of
worship and celebrated the Lord’s Supper and baptism differently.
Undoubtedly, people were baptized in different ways, at different times
and places, as I pointed out above. In time, especially, as Christianity
began to focus more on the world of the gentiles after Acts 11, and
especially after Acts 13, the Gospel summons was not so focused on a
Jewish audience, confessing Jesus as the Messiah of Israel, but on the
gentiles turning to God from their false gods. By the end of the first
century, Matthew’s formula, quoting our Lord’s explicit command became
more and more the standard.
Bob
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