Last week, we turned our attention to a book called The Case for the Resurrection, by Gary Habermas and Michael Licona.  This book undertakes to establish the resurrection as a historical fact by using only evidence accepted by a scholarly consensus to prove its point.  In particular, Habermas and Licona rely on five “minimal facts” to build their argument.  These five facts are that (1) Jesus died on the cross, (2) the early disciples believed they had seen the risen Jesus, (3) James the Lord’s brother believed that he had seen the risen Jesus, (4) Paul believed he had seen the risen Jesus, and (5) the tomb was empty.  Though none of these facts are persuasive on their own, together they support the conclusion that Jesus rose from the dead.

However, for centuries, scholars have been attempting to come up with a naturalistic, non-supernatural explanation for these facts.  I agree that if one of these explanations fits the facts as neatly as the resurrection does, we should accept it.  After all, we generally think that natural explanations are preferable to supernatural ones.  It’s important that we explore these alternatives in good faith, so this morning, let’s consider objections to the resurrection.

There simply isn’t time this morning to examine all the possible alternate theories, so we’re only going to hit the most common ones.  Of these, the first is that the resurrection account is A NON-HISTORICAL STORY of some kind:  a legend, a parable, or a myth.  Maybe all 1 Corinthians is saying is that the disciples thought Jesus was still alive in their hearts.

When we test this theory against our five minimal facts, though, it doesn’t score very well.  It’s consistent with Jesus’ death on the cross, but it isn’t consistent with any of the others.  To illustrate, let’s look again at 1 Corinthians 15:3-8.  This is not the language of a parable or a myth.  This is the language of a truth claim.  Paul is asserting that these people really saw Jesus after he rose from the dead. 

In particular, look at v. 6.  Here, Paul says that Jesus appeared to 500 people at one time, some of whom have died, but most of whom remain alive.  If this is only a parable, why would Paul bother saying that?  A parable is just as valuable whether it comes from the lips of its originator or not.  The fact that these people were still around only matters because Paul is offering them as living eyewitnesses of a historical resurrection.

Likewise, it is not at all clear that a legend or a parable can account for the dramatic life changes in James and Paul.  Both James and Saul of Tarsus were exposed to plenty of Christian teaching, but none of it converted them.  Why would one more story do the trick when so many hadn’t?

Finally, the argument that this is a non-historical story cannot account for the evidence of the very historical empty tomb.  If Jesus died and stayed dead, His body would have stayed there.  Generally, as explanations go, this one is extremely unsatisfying.

Next, let’s consider the argument that SOMEBODY STOLE THE BODY.  Maybe it was the disciples; maybe it was the gardener whom Mary Magdalene blames in John 20.  Regardless, somebody took it.  

This one scores a little bit better than the story hypothesis.  It satisfies two of our minimal facts:  that Jesus died and that the tomb was empty.  However, it founders on the sincere conviction of those who claimed to be eyewitnesses.  As we’ve learned, neither the early disciples, James, nor Paul sincerely believed only that the tomb was empty.  Instead, they were convinced that Jesus appeared to them after His death.  That’s a very different thing.

In fact, if we look only at the fact of the empty tomb itself, nobody in any of the accounts seems to think it’s very convincing.  Even among the disciples, the only one who believes because of the empty tomb is John.  For an example of a much more common reaction, let’s look at John 20:11-13.  Now, scholars are certainly skeptical about the historicity of this account.  Typically, the only thing they will use it for is to suggest the gardener as a potential body-snatcher. 

However, it certainly does represent the way that early Christians thought.  Here, Mary sees the empty tomb, sees angels sitting inside it, and still concludes that somebody has stolen the body!  Isn’t that what we would think if one of our loved ones died and the body vanished from the funeral home?  None of us would jump to the conclusion that the loved one had risen from the dead.  Generally, the disciples also found the empty tomb by itself unconvincing, to the point where it isn’t even mentioned in 1 Corinthians 15.

Third, let’s evaluate the APPARENT DEATH hypothesis, also called the swoon theory.  According to this way of thinking, Jesus only passed out on the cross, woke up three days later, rolled away the stone, and appeared to the disciples.

This one also doesn’t score real well.  It only explains the phenomenon of the empty tomb.  Obviously, if Jesus only fainted on the cross, He didn’t die on it.  However, the participants 2000 years ago:  the disciples, Jesus’ family, the Roman guard, the chief priests, and Pontius Pilate, believed that He did.  The Romans certainly knew how to crucify people and make sure they were dead!

Second, this explanation is implausible on its face.  It’s asking us to believe that Jesus, sleepless, brutally beaten, crucified, in such bad shape that He passes out, and left in a tomb for 36 hours without food or water, somehow wakes up, uses His crucified hands to roll away the heavy stone from inside the tomb, and limps to safety on His crucified feet.  Basically, in an attempt to deny a miracle, the proponents of this theory are asking us to believe in a different miracle!

Finally, why would the appearance of this wreck of a human being convince anyone that He had risen from the dead?  Even granting all of the above, if Jesus manages to stagger into the upper room, none of the eyewitnesses would think He had risen from the dead.  Instead, they would correctly conclude that He actually hadn’t died yet. 

Similarly, this does nothing to explain either James or Paul.  James wasn’t going to be convinced because his false-prophet brother survived an execution attempt.  Nor would Saul of Tarsus, upon encountering a healed-up Jesus two years later, conclude that this meant that Jesus rose from the dead.  This hypothesis simply isn’t useful in explaining the facts.

Our fourth alternate hypothesis is HALLUCINATION.  According to this argument, all of the post-resurrection appearances of the Lord were the result of the disciples seeing things that weren’t there, perhaps as a result of the strain of bereavement. 

In order to evaluate this argument, we first have to distinguish between an illusion and a hallucination.  An illusion is when the human senses misapprehend something that is actually there.  For instance, probably all of us have seen heat shimmer on a blacktop road in the summertime that looks like water.  Because the illusion is based on something physical, multiple people can see it at the same time.

However, that’s not true when it comes to hallucinations.  Hallucinations aren’t based on anything real; instead, they occur entirely within someone’s mind.  As a result, there is no such thing as a group hallucination.  There is no known mechanism for transmitting a hallucination from brain to brain.  Even if people in the same place are hallucinating at the same time, they will hallucinate different things. 

This is a big problem for the hallucination argument.  As we’ve discussed, many of the experiences of the risen Lord were group experiences.  Whatever the 500 saw, it certainly wasn’t a group hallucination. 

Second, most people who hallucinate subsequently recognize that what they saw wasn’t real.  Only people with a predisposition to believe in the hallucination will continue to believe.  However, none of the people on our minimal-fact list had this predisposition.  Skeptic James didn’t.  Persecutor Paul didn’t. 

Even the early disciples didn’t.  Look, for instance, at Luke 24:10-11.  Once again, the principle of embarrassment comes into play here.  Early Christians intent on convincing others to believe in Jesus aren’t going to say that even the founders of the movement were skeptical and believed reluctantly!  That is, unless it’s true.  The same men who dismissed the story of the women at the tomb would also have dismissed a hallucination—correctly—as “seeing things”.  Finally, of course, hallucination can’t explain the absence of Jesus’ body from the empty tomb.

Our final attempt to explain away the resurrection is A COMBINATION of theories.  This approach attempts to pair theories with each other in order to overcome the weaknesses of each.  Thus, persons unknown stole the body, the early disciples hallucinated that they had seen Jesus, and Paul became a Christian because he wanted to gain control of a new religious sect.  All the evidence is explained, and we don’t have to be Christians!  Hooray!

However, there are two serious problems with the combination approach.  The first of these is that in addition to inheriting the strength of its component parts, it also inherits their weaknesses.  If the evidence doesn’t support the contention that Paul converted because of his lust for power (and it doesn’t), then the whole theory fails.

Second, the whole exercise has the flavor of ad hoc hypothesizing about it.  This is what people do when a hypothesis they like is falsified by contrary evidence.  Rather than rejecting the falsified hypothesis, they add another hypothesis to it that addresses the contrary evidence.  No matter the amount of contradiction, this is a process that can go on indefinitely.

Let me give you an example.  Let’s say we’re in high school, and I have a crush on a cute girl.  I tell you, “I think she likes me.” 

You reply, “Actually, she just went out with George last weekend.” 

At this point, my hypothesis has been falsified, but I don’t want to accept that, so I say, “She just went out with him because of her friends.” 

You answer, “Actually, they can’t stand him.”  Falsification Number Two. 

I say, “Oh, they just pretend like that in front of you.”

You see how it works?  As long as I want to cling to my original belief, I will always be able to manufacture one more reason to do so.  Similarly, people who want to deny the resurrection will always be able to manufacture one more reason to do so (sometimes flatly goofy stuff like “Jesus had a twin brother!”), even though the resurrection has vastly more explanatory power than any alternative theory, and even though the resurrection has all kinds of evidence supporting it and the alternatives have none.

What’s really going on here is that the combination-theory folks are committed to a philosophical belief in naturalism, so they will deny supernatural events like the resurrection, regardless of the evidence.  Let’s not be like them, friends.  Let’s follow the evidence wherever it leads, and it leads to Jesus as Lord.

Ecclesiastes 6 begins with a comparison of two apparently pitiable people:  a man who is greatly blessed by God, yet does not enjoy his blessings, and a stillborn child.  According to Solomon, the second is better.  Next, he points out that both toil and wisdom are ultimately meaningless, and that what we can see is better than what we desire.  The chapter concludes with more observations about the difficulty we have in comprehending human existence.

Ecclesiastes 7 opens with several observations about the importance of learning from sorrow and death.  Solomon next endorses wisdom and patience.  Don’t try to figure everything out, enjoy blessing, and learn from adversity.  He next explores both the dangers of wickedness and of (human) righteousness.  He endorses a balanced, wise perspective on life.  However, he acknowledges that even his wisdom is not enough to seek out the deep meaning of life.  He wraps up the chapter with a warning about being entrapped by women.

Ecclesiastes 8 first praises wisdom and its advantages.  Then, it encourages obedience to the king and patience waiting on proper procedure.  After all, we are powerless in the face of many other things as well.  Solomon next considers the fate of the hypocrite.  He points out that it ultimately will be well with the righteous, but not with the wicked, regardless of how things look now.  Nonetheless, he observes that on earth, sometimes people get what they don’t deserve, both for good and evil.  The proper response to this is to enjoy the good things that we are given, while not wearying ourselves trying to figure out the ultimate purposes of God.

Ecclesiastes 9 points out that no matter who we are, no matter what we’ve done, the same thing happens to all of us:  we die.  There are two appropriate responses to this:  first, enjoy prosperity and your life with your spouse.  Second, do the best you can in the time you have been given, because the day is coming when you won’t be able to do anything.  Looming over all our efforts, though, is chance.  The best at anything still can be betrayed by bad luck.  In the final portion of the chapter, Solomon relates a story about a poor man who saved a city but was forgotten.  Nonetheless, it’s still better to be poor, wise, and forgotten than a ruler who is loud, obnoxious, and possibly even sinful.

Ecclesiastes 10 advocates wisdom and patience.  Those who are impulsive and foolish will be destroyed by it.  Sometimes, though, the undeserving are elevated and the deserving abased.  Trouble comes along with every work we do, but wisdom can alleviate (though not eliminate) the problem.  The fool makes his own life miserable in any number of ways.  Finally, a land benefits from wise rulers and is destroyed by foolish ones.  All the same, don’t curse the king, even in private.  You’ll get found out!

When it comes to our faith, there is no more important question than whether or not Jesus was raised from the dead.  If He was raised, everything else about our faith stands.  If He was not raised, everything else about it falls.  The resurrection is the cornerstone of Christianity.

However, this creates problems when we talk about our faith with unbelievers.  We accept the resurrection because we accept the Bible as inspired; they reject the resurrection because they don’t accept the inspiration of Scripture.  There, the matter tends to rest.

A few years ago, though, I encountered a book that offers a solution to this religious impasse.  It’s called The Case for the Resurrection, by Gary Habermas and Michael Licona.  Frankly, I think their method is brilliant.  Rather than considering the Scriptures from faith, they adopt the approach of scholarly skepticism.  They ask, “What are the things that nearly all scholars of the Bible, believers, agnostics, and atheists alike, agree are true?”  Then, using only this evidence accepted by the scholarly consensus, they are still able to establish as a historical fact that Jesus rose from the dead.  What I’d like to do this morning, then, is work through the argument of The Case for the Resurrection.

In building their argument, Habermas and Licona rely on five conclusions they call “minimal facts”.  The first of these is that JESUS DIED ON THE CROSS.  There are doubtless hundreds of passages I could cite here, but let’s look at 1 Corinthians 15:3-4.  Throughout my sermon this morning, I’m going to lean heavily on the opening context of 1 Corinthians 15, and this is because the text has particular importance to scholars.  Everybody agrees that Paul actually did write 1 Corinthians, which is not true with respect to many of the other epistles ascribed to him.  Second, due to historical evidence about the Roman proconsul Gallio, we’re able to date 1 Corinthians to around 55 AD, less than 30 years after the crucifixion of Jesus. 

All of 1 Corinthians is very early, very strong evidence for what early Christians believed, but it gets even better than that.  Notice that Paul says he delivered to the Corinthians what he himself had received.  In other words, Paul is repeating something that somebody else had told him, and that most likely happened during his first visit to the Jerusalem church as a disciple, when he talked to all of these various witnesses himself.  We can date that to sometime around five years after the crucifixion.  To scholars, then, this is the single earliest confirmed Christian teaching that we have, and it’s about the resurrection.

The first part of it is that Jesus died and was buried.  Every book of the New Testament supports this claim.  So does every one of the so-called Church Fathers, the Christian writers of the second through fourth centuries.  For that matter, it even appears in the writing of the Roman historian Tacitus, who said that Jesus was executed by Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius.  Basically, no serious scholar denies that Jesus was a real person who was crucified by the Romans.

Habermas and Licona’s second minimal fact is that THE EARLY DISCIPLES BELIEVED that Jesus rose from the dead.  Look at 1 Corinthians 15:5-6.  Let me pause here to highlight a key nuance.  We don’t want to use this passage at this point as proof that Jesus rose from the dead.  Instead, we want to use it to prove the much weaker claim that the early disciples believed He did.  Once again, the fact of this subjective belief is something that even atheist scholars will accept.  The earliest Christians taught the resurrection, and hundreds of them believed they personally had seen the risen Lord.

The primary proof of their sincerity is their steadfastness in the face of persecution.  Who would suffer and die for a story they made up?  And yet, suffer and die these early witnesses did.  All writers about early Christians, both inside and outside the church, agree that they were despised and treated like dirt.  If you’re a con man and that’s the reception you get, why wouldn’t you give up the con?

The same holds true for the deaths of several of the apostles.  Acts records the execution of James the brother of John.  Outside of the Bible, there’s strong evidence for the martyrdom of Peter and decent evidence for the martyrdom of Andrew and Thomas. 

To this, some might say, “The 9-11 hijackers died as martyrs, and they were wrong.”  The problem with the argument, though, is that the apostles and the hijackers aren’t logically equivalent.  The hijackers died for their belief in something they hadn’t seen, which proves nothing.  The apostles, on the other hand, died for their belief that they had seen something, which proves at least that they were sincere about it.

Our third minimal fact is that JAMES THE LORD’S BROTHER BELIEVED that Jesus had risen from the dead.  Paul makes this point in 1 Corinthians 15:7.  Even though James is only one man, in some ways, this evidence is even stronger than the last point.  Unlike the disciples, all the way through the ministry of Jesus, James was not a believer. 

As evidence for this consider John 7:3-5.  You may have noticed that I’m not spending a lot of time in the gospels in this sermon.  That’s because many scholars regard the gospels with extreme skepticism—after all, they’re filled with numerous accounts of supernatural events. 

However, there are parts of the gospels that nearly all scholars accept as genuine, and this is one of them.  This conclusion is based on the so-called principle of embarrassment.  The idea is that when somebody records something that makes their side look bad, it’s probably true.  In this case, the fact that Jesus’ own brothers didn’t accept Him makes Him look bad.  There’s no reason for early Christian writers to say this unless it’s true, so everybody agrees that James, along with all of Jesus’ other brothers, was not originally a disciple.

However, this changed in a big way.  Look at Galatians 1:18-19.  By this point, James is not only a believer.  He’s an apostle.  He remains committed to Jesus until death.  Multiple extrabiblical sources, particularly the Jewish historian Josephus, record that he was martyred for his faith.  Something had to happen to turn a man who was skeptical about his brother’s wild claims into a die-hard believer that He was the Son of God, and the only real candidate here is that he thought he had seen Jesus after Jesus rose from the dead.

Fourth, SAUL OF TARSUS BELIEVED that he had seen the risen Lord.  He says as much in 1 Corinthians 15:8-10.  In some ways, Paul’s testimony is the most powerful of all.  After all, he doesn’t begin as a disciple of Jesus.  He isn’t even a sarcastic skeptic like James.  Instead, he is a persecutor of the church, and not just any persecutor.  He is the persecutor, the one who is leading the charge against early Christianity. 

However, his course changes even more dramatically than James’ does.  Rather than being the feared enemy of a small and despised sect, he becomes its single most energetic promoter.  He used to be a prominent, respected leader in the Jewish nation; but he spends the last several decades of his life enduring untold suffering for the sake of the gospel he preaches.  As with James, Paul is not martyred during the narrative of the New Testament, but numerous patristic writings report that he was, and there’s even some archaeological evidence that points in that direction.

Once again, we’re not going to use Paul’s life story as evidence that he actually did see Jesus after He rose from the dead.  However, I think it’s safe to use it to establish that Paul sincerely believed that he had seen Jesus—so sincerely that he rearranged his entire life around his conviction.

The final minimal fact that Habermas and Licona introduce is that THE TOMB WAS EMPTY.  They themselves are quick to point out that this one doesn’t meet with the same universal acceptance from Biblical scholars that the first four do.  Instead, by Habermas’s count, only about 75 percent of scholars agree.  Interestingly, the remaining 25 percent disagree not because there is some piece of contrary evidence, but simply because the 1 Corinthians 15 account doesn’t mention the empty tomb.

However, there’s still plenty of evidence that, indeed, on that Sunday morning, Jesus’ body was nowhere to be found.  Habermas and Licona make several arguments to this effect, but my favorite is based on Matthew 28:11-15.  Matthew is subject to even more skepticism than the other gospels, but once again, this chunk is accepted as historically accurate.  Why would the presumably Christian writer of Matthew make up an alternate explanation for the resurrection only to discredit it?  That makes no sense.  What does make sense is that the early enemies of the gospel were insistent that the disciples stole the body.

Now, we come to the principle of embarrassment applied to the other side.  Why are the chief priests making this argument?  It implies that two things are true.  They must have known that Jesus was buried in a tomb, and they must have known that the tomb was found empty.  If either one of those things is not true, there is no need for them to say that the disciples stole the body out of the tomb. 

These, then, are our five minimal facts.  Notice that not a single one of them is supernatural.  Thousands of years ago, lots of people were crucified.  People sincerely believe all kinds of different things.  Tombs can be both filled and empty.  Not only are all of these things that scholars accept, they’re also things that Bible skeptics today can accept.  They seem very reasonable.

However, once you put them all together, a very different picture emerges.  Every one of these minimal facts is consistent with the conclusion that Jesus rose from the dead.  In fact, and I’ll spoil next Sunday’s sermon for you here, the conclusion that Jesus rose from the dead is the only conclusion that is consistent with these facts.  If you doubt that, see if you can come up with any alternate explanation that satisfies all of them.  Jesus was raised—that’s the conclusion that even a very skeptical reading of the Bible leads us into.

If there is anything I have learned in life, it is this:  When we are guided by our fears, we bring the thing we fear upon ourselves.  Like a girl in a horror movie, the harder we run from something, the more likely we are to find ourselves face-to-face with it.  This happens all the time, with the insecure boyfriend who drives his girlfriend off by being too clingy, with the secretary who lies because she’s afraid of losing her job but gets fired for lying, and with the older man who is worried about not having enough to retire on, puts his nest egg in a rash investment, and loses it all.  Love of money may be the root of all evil, but fear isn’t far behind.

Over and over again, the Bible bears witness to the destructive irony of fear.  One of the foremost examples of this is the first king of divided Israel, Jeroboam.  In 1 Kings 11:37-38, he receives a promise similar to the one that David received.  God would make Jeroboam king, and if he stayed faithful to God, his descendants would become an enduring line of kings after him.

In 1 Kings 12:20, the first part of the promise is fulfilled.  Jeroboam does indeed become king over Israel.  However, rather than being guided by faith, he chooses instead to be guided by fear. 

We see him make this fateful decision in 1 Kings 12:26-30.  Jeroboam starts worrying that if the people go to Jerusalem to worship, eventually they will go back to the Judahite king Rehoboam and kill Jeroboam.  As a result, Jeroboam sets up alternative worship centers in Dan and Bethel and gives the Israelites two golden calves to be their gods.

On one level, this works.  Jeroboam’s idolatry does ensnare the people.  They faithfully worship at Dan and Bethel until God destroys Israel for her unfaithfulness.  Other than a remnant, the Israelites never worship at Jerusalem again.

However, Jeroboam’s apostasy spells disaster for his house.  In 1 Kings 14:8-11, Ahijah the prophet predicts that because of his sin, his family will be destroyed. In 1 Kings 15:29, this dire prophecy is fulfilled.  If Jeroboam had been faithful, his house would have endured for centuries despite his concerns.  However, because he listened to his fears, his line was destroyed.

Today, the devil frequently attempts to use fear to keep us from serving God.  He wants to scare us into disobedience like he scared Jeroboam.  However, we must remember that God is faithful.  He will keep His promises to us, no matter how unlikely that seems.

Instead, true danger lies in the false security of following our fears.  Whatever it is that we think we have to protect by disobeying God will surely be lost to us.  Whatever sorrow we hope to avoid through sin, we will surely encounter.  When we fear, we shrink back to destruction.  Only by boldly entrusting ourselves to God will we be safe.

To say that there is confusion in the religious world about baptism would be an understatement!  Probably all of us have had friends who talked about how a new baby in their family got baptized.  There are churches not far from here that baptize people to admit them into church membership.  There are even those who believe that they still receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit today.

All of this confusion stands in direct contradiction to the teaching of the Bible.  In Ephesians 4:5, Paul tells us that there is one baptism.  Belief in and acceptance of that one baptism is one of the things that is supposed to unite all believers.  Unless the Holy Spirit is just messing with us, Ephesians 4:5 means that only one view on baptism is right and all the others are wrong.

What is that one baptism?  This is a question of eternal significance, and unless we can persuade others to choose the right baptism, there is no hope for them.  For our sixth half-hour study, then, let’s consider the definition of Bible baptism.

First, Bible baptism is IMMERSION IN WATER.  By no means is this universally accepted!  Though many churches teach baptism by immersion, many others insist that pouring or even sprinkling water over the baptizee is sufficient.  What can we say to people who believe this?

Many of you have probably heard before that the word “baptize” is a transliteration of the Greek word baptizō, which means “to immerse”, so that sprinkling and pouring are excluded by definition.  All that is certainly true, but when we’re studying with others, I don’t think that’s the best argument to use.

Here’s why.  In order for somebody to become a disciple, they have to hear the gospel and understand it for themselves.  Their faith has to be in the word, not in us.  However, almost nobody we study with will have any knowledge of Greek.  They don’t have the tools to evaluate the baptizō argument.  Either they take our word for it, or they don’t.  In either case, we’ve taken the focus off the word and put it on us, where it doesn’t belong.

Instead, I think it’s better to take people to Acts 8:38-39.  Here, we can see from the English what baptism is.  Philip and the eunuch go down into the water, and they come up out of the water.  That doesn’t happen when you sprinkle.  That doesn’t happen when you pour.  It only happens when you immerse. 

There are other places in Scripture that imply that baptism is immersion.  In John 3, when John is baptizing at Aenon near Salim, the text tells us that he’s doing it there because water is plentiful there.  You don’t need plentiful water to sprinkle or pour.  You only need plentiful water to immerse.

On the other hand, there is nothing in Scripture that says or even implies that God’s people sprinkled or poured as a method of baptism.  Indeed, neither one of those was developed until hundreds of years after the time of the Bible.  Those who sprinkle or pour are not following the New Testament pattern, so they can’t expect the New Testament blessing either.

Second, Bible baptism is the baptism OF A BELIEVER.  To us, this seems like a duh point.  Who else would you baptize, if not someone who believes in Jesus?  However, this point is disputed by everyone who accepts infant baptism as a valid form of baptism.  Clearly, the infant being baptized doesn’t know Jesus from a hole in the ground, yet they are being baptized anyway, even though generally they would prefer not to be.  I’ve never yet seen a picture of a “baptized” infant where the infant looks happy about getting water dumped on them!

Those who practice infant baptism say that it is necessary in order to cleanse the infant from the sin they inherited from Adam.  There are problems with that claim, and we’ll talk about them several weeks from now.  For now, though, it’s enough to point out that those who are baptized in the New Testament are always believers.  For evidence of this, let’s look at Colossians 2:11-12.

I like to use this verse when studying with people who believe in infant baptism because it is often a verse that they themselves will bring up if they know their Bibles.  Here’s why.  Notice that in v.11, Paul compares baptism to circumcision.  Of course under the law, infant boys were circumcised, so the infant-baptism people will take that and argue that infants should be baptized too.

Well, no.  The problem is that they pay so much attention to v. 11 that they don’t pay attention to the wording of v. 12.  Paul says there that the Colossians were buried with Christ in baptism—there’s another immersion passage if you need one—and then goes on to say that they were raised.  How?  They were raised through faith in the powerful working of God. 

You see it, brethren?  The essential element in the spiritual resurrection of baptism is faith.  If we do not believe that God raised Jesus from the dead and will raise us, our baptism is ineffective.  Rather than teaching that non-believers can be baptized, this passage teaches that only believers can be.

Finally, the purpose of Bible baptism is TO WASH AWAY SINS.  Look at Acts 22:16.  This is about as simple as it gets.  Ananias tells Saul to arise, be baptized, and wash away his sins.  Therefore, if you want to wash away your sins, you have to be baptized.  Plain as day, right?

Sadly, no.  There are all kinds of people who take the many passages that plainly state baptism is necessary for salvation, and they distort them around to say the opposite.  My personal favorite go-to site for false doctrine on baptism is gotquestions.org.  Here, among other things, is what it has to say about Acts 22:16:

“Concerning the words, ‘be baptized, and wash away your sins,’ because Paul was already cleansed spiritually at the time Christ appeared to him, these words must refer to the symbolism of baptism. Baptism is a picture of God’s inner work of washing away sin (1 Corinthians 6:11; 1 Peter 3:21).”

Many of you have heard me say, “Watch out for people who teach, ‘The text doesn’t say what it says,’” and this a prime example.  Ananias tells Paul that he needs to have his sins washed away.  Gotquestions.org tells us that Paul already has been cleansed.  Who are you going to believe, Ananias or gotquestions.org?

At the same time, though, not everything in this quotation is wrong.  Baptism is symbolic.  When we are baptized, the water does not literally wash the sin off our skin.  As Peter says, baptism is not the removal of dirt from the flesh.  It is the appeal to God for a good conscience. 

Nobody has their sins washed away by accident.  Baptism only saves those who come to the water in search of salvation.  Otherwise, we might as well set a trap on Nashville Highway and forcibly baptize everyone we catch!  People who are saved through baptism have to know they’re not right with God and want to get right with God.  However, everyone who is baptized with that mindset will find what they’re looking for.