SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 8/5/2017
7:43 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-4 The Appeal
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Acts 2:37-40
Message of the
verses: “37 Now when they heard
this, they were pierced to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the
apostles, "Brethren, what shall we do?" 38 Peter said to them,
"Repent, and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the
forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39 "For
the promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off, as many as the Lord our God will
call to Himself." 40 And with many other words he solemnly
testified and kept on exhorting them, saying, "Be saved from this perverse
generation!"”
We want to focus in on verse 38 this morning where Peter
tells them “Repent, and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for
the forgiveness of your sins.” There are
some who teach that there is something they call baptismal regeneration, which
is a false teaching that baptism is necessary for salvation, and when they read
this verse they use it as a primary proof text to their view.
We have spoken about baptism as a dramatic step for these
first converts to Christianity as it showed that they were breaking away from Judaism,
but physical baptism is not necessary for salvation, although it is one of the
two elements of the Christian faith, with Communion, or the Lord’s Supper as
the other one. Water baptism is a
picture of what happens to a believer when they are saved and perhaps the best
place to see this truth is in the sixth chapter of Paul’s letter to the
Romans. In this case Peter was calling
on them to prove the genuineness of their faith, and this was done through
public baptism. When Jesus spoke to the
rich man in Luke 18:18-27 He wanted him to show the genuineness of his faith by
selling his wealth to help the poor, but the man refused to do it, and so John
MacArthur writes that “salvation is not a matter of either water or
economics. True repentance, however,
will inevitably manifest itself in total submission to the Lord’s will.” Now there are other reasons found in
MacArthur’s commentary that show how the teaching of baptismal regeneration is
wrong and this takes up a fair amount of his commentary on these verses and as
I mentioned earlier that we will be looking at the subject of “The Appeal” for
many days.
Second is that this teaching “violates the important
hermeneutical principle known as analogia
Scriptura (the analogy of Scripture).
That principle states that no passage, when correctly interpreted, will
teach something contradictory to the rest of the Scripture. And the rest of Scripture unmistakably
teaches that salvation is solely by faith (cf. John 1:12; 3:16; Acts 16:31;
Rom. 3:21-30; 4:5; 10:9-10; Phil. 3:9; Gal. 2:16).”
We will only look at one more reason why this teaching is
wrong and then look at two more tomorrow.
“Third, after condemning the ritualistic religion of the scribes and
Pharisees, our Lord would hardly have instituted one of His own. F. F. Bruch remarks, ‘It is against the whole
genius of Biblical religion to suppose that the outward rite [of baptism] and
any value except in so far as it was accompanied by true repentance within.”
Answer to yesterday’s Bible
question: “To treat is as holy.”
Today’s Bible
question: “What promise did God make to
Moses at the burning bush?”
Answer in our next SD.
8/5/2017 8:14 AM
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