Ask Pastor Mike Fabarez

Speaker 1

Ever wonder about the rite of baptism? Do you have to be baptized to be saved? And what if you are already baptized as an infant, wishing you had a straight answer? Well, stay tuned for today's edition of Ask Pastor Mike here on Focal Point.

Well, it's time for our end of the week Q and A session called Ask Pastor Mike. As a listener, you can submit your own question, too. I'll let you know how in a moment.

But right now we're about to field an important question that's come up a lot from Christians and non-Christians alike about baptism. And it's an issue that often divides us on doctrinal lines. So we're gonna go straight to the source, the Bible, as we join Pastor Mike Favarez with Focal Point's executive director, Jay Wharton.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Dave. I am here with Pastor Mike and Pastor Mike, today we have a about baptism, a listener asks, do I need to be baptized to be saved?

Speaker 3

Wow, that's a big question. That's a loaded question, isn't it? Well, as I always ask around here at the church, when you ask that question, you've got to make some distinctions about what kind of baptism we're talking about.

And you know, the scripture certainly has texts in it that seem to lead people to a quick decision regarding baptism and salvation, because it seems pretty clear you got to believe and be baptized to be saved. Mark 16:16 says, or in Acts 22, even in verse 16, "Why do you wait? Arise and be baptized, then wash away your sins, calling on his name." Or even John 3:5, the passage that is often quoted when Nicodemus and Jesus are talking together, which talks about being born of water and the Spirit. If you're not born of the water and the Spirit, you can't be saved. You can't enter the kingdom of God.

These are the kinds of passages that people go to. They see baptism and salvation or entering the kingdom connected. And so, because they are thinking one kind of baptism, they're thinking of a particular definition to that word. Then people say, well, yeah, of course, the Bible seems pretty clear. And I take the Bible at its word; therefore, I better find a pastor in a church and some water or whatever, my brother, Uncle Steve or whoever's going to put me in a pool of water, get baptized, and then that's when I'm going to get saved.

I mean, that's certainly what people say. But I think we got to go a little deeper than that.

Speaker 2

Well, how do we interpret these passages? What does baptism mean in these passages?

Speaker 3

Well, first of all, let's step back and recognize that the word "baptism" is a word that is translated and transliterated from the Greek New Testament, the original language of the New Testament, into English as "baptizo." The verb "baptizo" is simply transliterated as "baptism." That's our word to baptize someone; it doesn't translate it. For us to translate it, you'd have to get into words like "to submerge," "to immerse," "to place into," "to dunk," or "to dip." I mean, there are lots of words you could use to translate it. So we need to make the distinction.

First of all, in the Bible, when you say, "Does baptism save you?" you've got to ask the question this way: Does being immersed in, does being placed into, does being dipped into, does being submerged into something save you? I guess when I even use the word "something," I guess that's the point. You've got to decide what we're talking about—being placed into what. See, and to make that distinction is so important because if you translate the word and then have to say, "Being baptized into what? Being placed into what?" there are two really clear, distinctive kinds of thought in the scripture regarding baptism.

One is being baptized into water, which is what most people think of when they hear the word "baptism." The other is the concept of being baptized into Christ. See, and that is a word, if you translate it to "be placed into Christ," that it starts to make a lot of sense biblically, because that's the way Paul often talks about our relationship with God. To be in Christ, I'm outside of Christ; I need to be placed into Christ. I'm outside of a relationship with God; I need to be reconciled and placed into a relationship with God. The Bible is very clear that the Spirit does that. At the moment of our conversion, we are placed into Christ. Paul loves that phrase, "being in Christ." There's no condemnation, to quote Romans chapter 8, verse 1, for those who are in Christ.

So when I talk about baptism, I need to ask, which one? Which baptism are you talking about? Are you talking about being placed into Christ, or are you talking about that situation that we do see throughout the book of Acts that I believe is commanded in Matthew 28 to place people into water? You start asking those questions, and you look at Matthew 28, for instance, where it says, "Go make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey all that I commanded." You start recognizing we're talking about a disciple that has been made, right? Apparently, that person's already been placed into Christ. Now I have to go and place them into water as the Book of Acts describes. I place them into water as an external symbolic expression of what's already happened in their lives.

It's just like communion, the Lord's Supper. We take these elements that are not in any way saving us. It's not a re-sacrifice of the body or blood of Christ, but it's a picture symbolically of helping us to remember, to see, to imagine, to picture the death of Christ, which is the saving function of Jesus on a cross. He dies to save me from my sin.

So when you look at a passage like Romans chapter six, or even Romans chapter eight, the phrase "in Christ," these concepts of being baptized into Christ Jesus, and that therefore we're His. We're baptized into the benefits of His death, right? We're buried in baptism with Him into death in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead, we can be raised up and walk in a newness of life. These are the ideas that help us to distinguish one that does save us—being placed into Christ—from the one that simply typifies or expresses, symbolizes being placed into Christ, which is being placed into a body of water.

Speaker 2

You mentioned Acts 22:16. It also says in that verse, "rise and be baptized and wash away your sins."

You're gonna hear people say the same thing about being water baptized, that that's what actually washes away your sins.

Where are they trying to go with that?

Speaker 3

Well, I get that. Again, that's the picture that's such a close connection to that symbolism of water, which if you really go back in the Old Testament, you'll find much of the picture of water being this symbolism of cleansing. This is true if you're dirty in the Old Testament, just like if you're dirty this afternoon; you go take a shower, you go take a bath, you get dipped into water, and you clean your body off. That picture of being cleansed is a symbol, a parable, if you will, of being cleansed of our sins.

Well, in First Peter, chapter three, for instance, it speaks of baptism saving us. The baptism that he's talking about, he clarifies, is not the removal of dirt from the body; it's not being placed into water, which is what happens when you, as a dusty, ancient Near Eastern person, get placed into water. But it's that pledge of a good conscience toward God. It saves you by the resurrection of Christ. Just to quote 1st Peter 3:21, that picture of being baptized in water is something that typifies the reality of one making a pledge to the Lord and saying to the Lord what we're called to throughout the Scripture: we trust you. We trust in Jesus Christ to save us from our sins.

At that moment, you're made a disciple. Now you're going to go and be baptized into water so that you can express that you can identify with the body of Christ. By the body of Christ, I mean the people of God. You can step away from your old life and have this symbolic picture of being placed into Christ and being resurrected or raised up from that dead state before God into a newness of life, into a new connection with God.

See, there's the one baptism by the Holy Spirit into Christ. There's another baptism by a leader in a church, most often a pastor, into water. One obediently solemnizes the other. One saves us by being placed into Christ, that pledge of our conscience. The moment you called out to God in repentance and trusted in Christ by faith, you were saved. You became a disciple. Now you should obediently go and solemnize that. Go and typify that. You could almost put it in an analogy in this parabolic way: to go and be placed into water as a sign of your cleansing from sin.

Speaker 2

What's the attraction to those that are trying to push this belief that you actually have to be water baptized for salvation?

Speaker 3

Well, I get it. We always, as human beings, want to pin something on a tactile, real historic kind of situation, in a kind of something that touches my five senses. In other words, spiritually, the moment you get saved, you get right with God. It would be great if there was some kind of, you know, I don't know, notch on a post or some kind of thing that you could walk through or some kind of wreath you could throw around a statue. I don't know, something.

And of course, baptism is something that kind of gives us a tactile experience, a ceremonial expression of our relationship with Christ. It's like circumcision in the Old Testament. That was an external sign of something that made you identify with the covenant people of God. And so it is with baptism; we are identifying with the covenant people of God. The problem is when you start to say, well, it's that circumcision decision, if you use the Old Testament example, that makes someone a part of the covenant people of the Old Testament, you can start to trust in that as though that's the thing that makes you a part of the people of God.

But in the Old Testament, it says what really matters is the circumcision of the heart. And so it is with us; the thing that matters is not that you got water baptized, though it's very important. It's an act of obedience to solemnize, to express that baptism into Christ. But it's not the reality. The reality is being baptized into Christ by the Spirit, being made a new creature in Christ at the moment of your repentance. But it'd be good for us as human beings to feel like, well, maybe that act did it. I can pin my security or my assurance on that physical act. And I think that's just our tendency as human beings.

So we may gravitate toward that, but the Bible is always trying to get us away from that. Thankfully, in the New Testament, there's only two of these ceremonial, some would even call them ritualistic things that Christ set into place, and that's baptism and the Lord's Supper. The Old Testament was even harder because you could pin it on, you know, whether it's the ceremonial cleanliness laws or the dietary restrictions or bringing an animal to a sacrificial altar in the Old Testament or the priesthood or wearing the priestly garb. You could always point to something that was external and kind of get lulled into thinking that it's those externals that make me right with God.

Which, of course, not even in the Old Testament was that the reality. God was looking for the same things in the Old Testament as he's looking for in the New Testament. And that is a heart that is repentant, that recognizes the severity of sin, and a heart that trusts in the grace of God to save us. That is required both in the Old Testament and New Testament. What's changed in the New Testament is that we have a very clear picture of how God has done this. How has he secured our forgiveness? He's done that through the life, the death, the burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

And so we've got to look to those spiritual realities; the things on the external, right, that's not what really matters. When Paul says to the folks who were still stuck on the Old Testament ceremonial laws, he says to the Corinthians, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything. What matters is keeping the commandments of God, which, of course, is clearly the work of God. And the commandments of God are to trust in Christ.

Think of baptism. Early to the Corinthians, he says, I'm glad I didn't baptize any of you because you're all kind of pinning everything on who baptized you. Well, Paul was very concerned about their salvation. He calls them his father in the faith. But he's saying it's not about the baptism part. And you guys are so stuck on it. You're so, you know, did Paul baptize me or did Apollos baptize me, or did Peter baptize me? I mean, those were the kinds of things that we always like to hang our hats on. We are very much by nature people that want some kind of external assurance.

You know, we think maybe a wedding ring is the thing that makes me married. Right? We need to realize it's the covenant, it's the commitment, it's the connection that we have spiritually in our lives. If we look from the Bible's perspective as it relates to my salvation, it's my faith in Christ, it's the willingness for me to see sin as the problem that it is. And those are the realities that make me right with God.

Now, of course, everyone should be baptized. And I think that that is something that the Bible is clear on. I believe in believers' baptism. You become a follower of Christ; you should do what God asked us to do, and that is to express that through water baptism. So I'm not trying to minimize the act of obedience any more than I would minimize any other New Testament commandment regarding the things that we ought to do as redeemed people. I'm just saying it's not an act of giving, it's not an act of church attendance, it's not an act of baptism, it's not an act of taking the Lord's Supper that saves us or makes us right with God. It's the act of trusting in Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2

As we look at the gospel as it's presented throughout the Bible, is there a consistent component to the gospel that we need to respond to?

Speaker 3

Yes, of course. And that's what I'm getting at. I'm driving at the fact that the Bible, when it speaks of salvation, is always going to come back to faith. The Reformers put it well: we believe that we are saved by faith alone in Christ alone. In other words, our responsible response to Christ's finished work is trusting in Him.

Acts 16:31 states, "Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved." Similarly, Acts 20:21 says, "We are testifying to both Jews and Greeks of repentance toward God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ." These are the consistent words that we have in Scripture—a turning from sin and trusting in Christ, repentance and faith. These are the concepts that are repeated over and over again.

Now, is there a sense of obedience? Some of these passages, like when Peter is preaching in Acts 2 and talks about repenting and being baptized, well, of course, they go hand in hand. I think of John 3:36: "Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life. Whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him."

There is a parallel between a person that trusts and those who don't obey Him. In other words, if you believe Him, then of course you're going to obey Him. If you don't believe Him, if you reject Him, if you don't put your trust in Him, then you're not going to obey Him.

Speaker 2

Him.

Speaker 3

It's the same thing over there in the Mark passage that we quoted early on. Mark 16:16 says, "Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned." It doesn't say, "Whoever does not believe and be baptized will be condemned."

See, the point is, if we believe in Christ, we're going to get baptized. If I said I want to marry my wife and she wants to marry me, and what she wants is a wedding, we're going to go and have a wedding. We're going to have a cake. I'm going to wear a tux. I'm going to buy a ring. Then, of course, I'm going to do that. I'm going to joyfully do that. I love my wife. I want to be married. I want to meet this interest, this requirement, this desire, this request.

And Christ is more, much more than a bride, right? Christ is our king. He's the Lord. He says, "Believe in me." And then he says, "Be baptized." He says, "Obey me." He says, "Follow me. Take up your cross. Deny yourself." So many things are appended to this call to trust him. But it doesn't mean those things save us, right? We're not saved by our works. Ephesians 2:8-9 couldn't be clearer: we're saved by faith.

That's what we're saved by. And by that, I just mean that trusting in him is the consistent call in the Scripture about what it means to be saved. All these other things are the outgrowth of that. So I'm never going to pooh-pooh someone, to put it bluntly, who's going to be all up on baptism. I'm up on baptism. I'm upon everything that the Lord asks us to do: to love him with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind; to love our neighbor as ourselves. We ought to express that by doing what God has asked us to do.

But I am going to be very hard on those who say, "Well, this is the one external rite with God beyond faith. It's faith plus this good work." And I'm never going to concede that we are saved by Christ's finished work on the cross through responding to that. This is the mechanism God works in our heart to respond to that by faith in Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2

How should a Christian approach someone who's coming to them and saying, you need to be baptized to be saved and to have your sins washed away. Is there a good way to approach someone like that?

Speaker 3

Well, I guess I would say to them that I really respect your high view of Scripture because I know that people that believe that they're coming with a high view of Scripture. But I would just want to say I don't want to take away from what the Scripture has said clearly, and the Scripture has said very clearly. It's not by any act of obedience. There's no act of good works, there's no giving. There's nothing that can possibly be appended to our penitent faith that we bring to Christ.

And so anytime you see something like, "Hey, if you want to be my disciple, you got to deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me," all those are expressions of a heart that trusts in Him. So I want to say I love the fact that you are taking the Word at face value. But you need to make sure that you do not in any way impinge upon the grace of the Gospel that is very clear about what it means to be saved. We're saved by trusting in Jesus Christ, and that is what the Bible asks us to do.

Of course, it implies the penitence that is so often articulated with the word faith, the word repentance or turning (a strefo in Greek or metanoia), these two Greek words that are so often used in the New Testament. Clearly, that's a part of what it means to trust Him. We're turning from our old life of independence and trusting in ourselves to trust in Him.

But please don't append any other hurdle, no matter how biblical it might be, whether it's self-denial, whether it's following, whether it's obedience, whether it's baptism. These are expressions. Should they follow? Absolutely. I'm going to win someone to Christ and I'm going to say, "Hey, first step. It's their first act of obedience. We're going to sign up for baptism and we're going to get baptized." That is certainly a high priority.

Just like if I were to say, "Hey, my son wants to marry this gal, and she says yes, and there's an expectation of a wedding. Go plan the wedding and get it going and let's do it." But I'm not in any way going to say this is something on which my salvation hinges. It's an expression of a saved heart. It is not the reason that we are saved.

Speaker 2

How did this word get so muddied, so to speak? Is it because it's a transliteration?

Speaker 1

Yes.

Speaker 3

Yeah, no, for sure. And you said it. I mean, I want to stop you there because that. That I think, is the problem. So often the word baptism is left as a word that we are immediately imagining someone in a tank or in a river or at the beach getting baptized when we need to, in our minds, know that it needs an object to be baptized. Really, it begs a completion of the phrase: be baptized into what? Be placed into what? Be dunked in, submerged, immersed into what? The thing that saves us is being immersed into Christ. Being placed into Christ.

Now, should we be water baptized? Absolutely. Just like joining the body of Christ, the moment I become reconciled to God, I join the people of God immediately. Immediately. And then I wouldn't say, oh, don't worry about going to church. But I wouldn't say going to church is being joined to the body of Christ. I get joined to the body of Christ the moment I put my trust in Christ. Now I'm going to say, hey, go and go to church. Don't forsake the assembling of yourselves together. That's the distinction in your mind that you ought to have.

And baptism, unfortunately, because it just sits there as a word that is really a Greek word that just bleeds its way into English, I think some people struggle in knowing which immersion we're talking about. Which placed into are we talking about? And I think it does help just to remember that when you read that word, you need to translate it in your own mind. Not just transliterate it, but translate it in your own mind by saying, okay, what am I talking about here? And I think that'll help a lot. Yeah.

Speaker 2

Because even in our conversation right here, you know, we just have been throwing around the word baptism to mean one thing, and we've been talking about water baptism a lot in that regard. So it can be very, very confusing.

Speaker 3

Can be absolutely, yeah, very much so.

Speaker 2

Well, thank you, Pastor Mike.

I trust this will be helpful for those who have come across this kind of aberrant thinking and hopefully will help them read their Bibles a little bit more closely and think about that word.

Definitely a little more closely.

Speaker 1

You're listening to a brand new edition of Ask Pastor Mike on Focal Point with Pastor Mike Fabarez. Our important topic today is, does baptism save you? You can hear it again at focalpointradio.org. Well, Pastor Mike has a few additional words to say today about how you can know you're truly saved. So keep listening.

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Maybe listening today, you're wrestling with the thought that you may have been baptized but have never personally made a confession of faith. Or maybe you know someone who's been brought up in another tradition, whose eyes have been opened to the need for personal repentance. Well, hey, maybe you were led to this very message to begin a fresh start. If you're feeling that tug, Pastor Mike's going to lead you in that very important step right now.

Speaker 3

Perhaps after today's message, you've gotten to the place where you recognize you need to be right with God. And if that's the case, I just need you to remember that that's something to take place right now, no matter where you're at.

Could be driving down the road, sitting in your home. Whatever the case, you need to go to God and affirm the basics. He is the creator. You're responsible to Him. He's holy. He's perfect. He's just. Our sins require a payment. And that Jesus Christ came, lived in the flesh for us. He did all the things right that we've done wrong, and then he went to the cross and took the wrong on himself that we deserve.

The response in the Bible is for you to right now repent of your sins. You're saying, "I'm done with a life lived for myself. I'm going to live for Christ. I'm going to put my trust in him right now." That response to the Gospel, if you've done that, means your life is going to change.

I want you to get involved in a good Bible teaching church. I want you to let us know here at Focal Point. I just want you to be the kind of person that makes this a vocal expression to people you talk to that you've become today a follower of Jesus Christ.

Speaker 1

And congratulations on taking this first step to a life of authentic faith. Now don't forget, we're here for you, too. You can trust the straightforward expository teaching, a focal point every day to answer the hard questions with biblical truth.

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Well, that's all our time for now. I'm Dave Drury wishing you a restorative weekend. Join us again when Pastor Mike Favares returns with more about working God's field. That's Monday on Focal Point.

Today's program was produced and sponsored by Focal Point Ministries, RA.