the Fourth Week after Easter
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Daily Devotionals
Grace for Today
Acts 2:38
Three fatal errors about baptism
Read 1 Corinthians 1:14-31
There are some who flatly deny that baptism is an ordinance of the New Testament church, but their ultra-dispensationalism is so obviously contrary to the Scriptures that few people accept their doctrine. However, there are many who ignorantly receive three common, but fatal, errors about baptism. Such commonly received errors must be exposed.
1. Sacramentalism says that ‘Baptism is a means of grace.’ All Catholics and most Protestants teach that baptism has at least some saving efficacy. No one teaches salvation by baptism alone, but many teach that baptism is a means by which God’s saving grace comes to the soul. The whole basis of infant sprinkling (it cannot rightly be called baptism) is that baptism does have some merit before God. Such doctrine is nowhere taught nor implied in the Word of God.
2. Landmarkism teaches that baptism can only be performed by the pastors of Landmark Baptist churches and that by being baptized into one of their churches a person secures for himself a higher rank, position and reward in heaven. In other words, they would have us to believe that while Christ is sufficient as our Savior, we must earn the gifts of eternal glory by what we do. Though they would deny it, they make baptism a sacrament, ‘a means of grace’. Such doctrine is fatal. Christ plus anything equals eternal damnation. Christ alone is our Savior and our acceptance before God.
3. Ritualism simply goes through the motions of baptism as a matter of meaningless religious exercise, without any knowledge of its meaning.
In truth, baptism is the answer of a good conscience towards God. It is the believer’s first act of obedience to Christ as Lord. And it is a public, symbolic confession of our faith in Christ. Baptism has no saving efficacy, but it is an essential point of the believer’s obedience to Christ. Only unsaved rebels willfully reject the commandments of the Lord. The commandment of God is ‘Repent and be baptized every one of you’ (Acts 2:38).
