Baptism: an Overview

Doctrine, Salvation / By / December 20, 2022

Years ago when I had learned that baptism by immersion symbolizes the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ, I tried to understand why baptism is in water. Scripture and common sense both clearly indicate that a simple immersion in water does not cleanse externally or internally. It cannot even be symbolic of cleansing.  Cleansing from sin is by the blood of Jesus Christ, and that is surely not applied while one is in the grave. When I saw a clear argument from Scripture concerning the meaning of the water just last summer, I decided to document it in a set of PowerPoint slides.

While I was well into that, I saw an internet blog speculating on where the water baptism used by John the Baptist came from. I thought surely the Scripture would give some clarification on that. And it surely does. So I added more slides about that.

My pastor then suggested I add in some slides about transliteration of the Greek words for baptize and baptism. Then if I would also talk about “saved by water”, I could teach an adult Sunday School class about baptism. By the time I had added discussions about John the Baptist, about Jesus’ baptism, about Holy Ghost baptism and baptism by fire, there was material for several lessons. And even as I was trying to organize all that material into a single set of slides for this website, I was presented with arguments for trine and face-forward immersions. To organize my thoughts about that I wrote more slides. And since they contributed to my understanding about baptism, I decided to add them as well.

So these Baptism slides are extensive. I would not have expected that there would be so much to say, when I started. And there is surely more that could be said. In fact, even as you consider this discussion, you may wonder why I did not comment on other things that may come to mind. My philosophy here has been not to examine the many false doctrines about baptism (except where doing so is clarifying), but to systematically establish Scriptural doctrine.

The New Testament Is Not the New Covenant

Doctrine / By / November 15, 2022

The New Testament is not the New Covenant. To make the New Testament equal to the New Covenant is to deny God’s promises to Israel. When Balaam, with Balak’s encouragement, attempted to undermine God’s promises to Israel, God told him, “God is not man that he should lie; neither the son of man that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?”  Any hermeneutic that argues that God will go back on His literal promises to Israel is a hermeneutic that starts by calling God a liar. Rather, “…let God be true and every man a liar.”

None of the New Testament Scriptures indicate that God will fail to fulfill His promises in the Old Testament covenants. In fact the New Testament writers quote the Old Testament Scriptures as words of God not to be questioned. What God has promised He will do. And He will do it exactly as He has promised it.

God has said specifically that He will establish the new covenant with Israel. Paul says He will do that when the Deliverer will return to Israel. That obviously has not happened yet. Jesus instituted the new testament in His blood at His crucifixion. That has happened. The new testament and the new covenant are quite different. It is confusing that Greek New Testament Scriptures cannot distinguish these two concepts by different Greek words. But God has refined His words according to Psalm 12:6. Those refined words preserved for us in the King James Version have sorted out these concepts for us, so we can easily see how all of God’s promises to Israel will be fulfilled without modification.

Tribulation saints will be on earth after the Church has gone to heaven and before the new covenant is instituted at the start of the Kingdom. The discussion of the already established new testament and the coming new covenant in the Epistle to the Hebrews will be especially useful to them. They will need the information there about salvation and covenants to know how to live for God at that time.

See slides: The New Testament is not the New Covenant for a Scriptural explanation of these things.

The Love of God

Doctrine / By / October 28, 2022

The Love of God is badly misunderstood by many. God is love. God does not need created beings to manifest love. So love is an independent attribute of God. Since God is a trinity, He manifests love between persons of the trinity. God’s independent love is as eternal as God Himself.

God’s love for His creation is a dependent love. It depends upon there being created beings. Dependent love is necessarily a lesser love. God manifests his love for fallen humanity through the sacrificial death of His son. Each person in this Church Age who accepts that death for himself is placed by the Holy Spirit into Jesus Christ. In this way he enters into the eternal love of God. Those who reject the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ for them, reject God’s love, and remain under God’s eternal wrath. God’s love for sinners, as great and as deep as it is for living sinners, is no longer extended to those who die before accepting it. That love is necessarily temporary.

If there were not two levels of love, then God’s love for sinners would be equivalent to God’s eternal love. And that would lead to one of two heresies. (1) If God will love forever every person to whom He extends love (everyone), then there would be universal salvation. (2) If God does eternally love some and not others, then He must never love some. That would be limited atonement. The slides, The Love of God slides document the differences in the two levels of love through New Testament Scriptures.

The Lake of Fire and Brimstone

Doctrine / By / October 18, 2022

I am sorry to say the Lake of Fire and Brimstone will be the future for multitudes –past, present and future– living on this earth.  It is prophesied by God though His prophets and apostles. There is sufficient Scripture about the Lake of Fire and Brimstone to tell us a lot about it.

photo of brown owl
Screech Owl

We are aware that God rained fire and brimstone upon the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to completely destroy them, even though we do not see clear evidence of fire and brimstone there today. According to Scripture God will again rain fire and brimstone onto this earth in judgment. That will produce a lake of fire and brimstone that will be evident to earth’s inhabitants for the full one thousand years of the coming Millennium. And it will continue onto the new earth even after this present earth has been burned up.

The Lake of Fire and Brimstone will be on the earth where earth’s residents will be able to go and view both it and those in it. In these slides, Lake of Fire and Brimstone, we will explore where it will be, how it will get there, what it will look like to observers, and who will be in it.

Satan: His Beginning and End

Doctrine / By / September 28, 2022
volcano, lava, iceland-7396466.jpg

That Satan was an archangel or the highest ranking angel is a common misconception. It is often stated just this way in church doctrinal statements. But in the KJV the beast called Satan is said to have been a cherub above the throne of God. He was a fifth cherub, the one representing before God the class of reptiles. As such he was the serpent, the most subtle of all the beasts of the field.

In the very chapter where Paul tells us the serpent deceived the woman, he tells us Satan deceives by transforming himself into an angel of light. Theses slides, Satan: His Beginning and End, deal with where he came from and where he will end up. They are not a study of his methods and practices.

Salvation is different in different dispensations

1 Comment / Salvation / By / September 23, 2022

That salvation is different in different dispensations is a challenging topic. It stirs up considerable controversy. I have heard fundamental Baptist pastors declare that whoever says anyone ever got saved in any other way than by grace through faith apart from works is a heretic. They have learned to twist any Scripture to agree with that. Once a seminary dean told me that he did not need Scripture to support this view, because it would impugn the very character of God to suggest He would save different people in different ways.

I have placed extensive Scriptural evidence for God’s different methods of salvation in different dispensations in the PowerPoint slides Dispensational Salvation, so I will not attempt to place those arguments here. But within the first few chapters of God’s words to us, it is evident that Adam and Eve had unique choices to make concerning right and wrong. Likewise, no other person on earth has had the promises and opportunities that God offered to Abraham and his descendants. God most certainly does deal with different people in different ways.

Accept God’s Justice

In every case where God has dealt with man there are inevitable similarities. God in every situation has the same character and attributes. Man in every case has human nature. But within those parameters, humans can be marvelously different from each other, live under vastly different conditions and face staggeringly different situations. God deals with each person individually. And he deals with people in ways we may not count as fair. For when we question His fairness, He asks, “O man, who art thou that repliest against God?”

God has, indeed, placed within us a sense of what is just and what is not. But we attempt to apply that sense of justice with limited information and limited understanding. In Scripture God has also given us details of His interactions with various people in various circumstances. It is these details that help us to understand God in His dealings with men.  It is entirely inappropriate for us to undermine what God has written with our own limited sense of justice.

Understand Dispensations

Our limited sense of justice probably sustains our strongest resistance to accepting that God has dealt with mankind differently through different dispensations. But one will have very limited understanding of the Bible without recognizing such dispensations. But even dispensationalists have resisted the truth that God’s method and nature of salvation is different in different dispensations. This resistance to truth greatly confuses our understanding of Scripture even when we accept that there have been dispensations.

To assign God’s present method of salvation to all dispensations, does not directly hinder evangelism in this Church Age. But it does greatly hinder our understanding of the Bible in other dispensations. To fully understand Scripture we must accept that God has said what He meant to say; and that He means what He said. The slides Dispensational Salvation present a full step in that direction.

One Day is with the Lord as a Thousand Years

Eschatology / By / November 14, 2022

Peter told believers in 2 Peter 3: “…be not ignorant of this one thing…” That one thing sounds like something we should take very seriously. What one thing is it?  Verse 8 reads: “But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” I have been taught that one day is with the Lord as a very long time—at least hundreds of years, maybe even thousands of years—and a very long time—at least hundreds of years, maybe even thousands of years—is as one day. But that is not what the Scripture says.

I have found that when I believe what the Scripture says instead of what I think it should say, God reveals truth that He otherwise keeps hidden. If God gave us words to believe, and He surely did, then He surely said what He meant to say and means what He did say. If He said something other than what He meant, how would we know what He meant? To assign meaning to God’s words that undermines what He said is a form of unbelief. So we will assign one thousand years for man is as one day with the Lord.

The Kingdom Age according to Revelation 20 will be one thousand years. In the Old Testament that time is also called one day and the time when both Israel and the whole earth will be at rest. So that means the Kingdom Age will match the seventh day promises to Israel. Since the Kingdom Age is the last one thousand years before this earth will be burned up to make way for a new earth, it all fits together to strongly suggest that God has planned a seven-thousand-year timeline for this present earth. Further Scriptural evidence presented in these slides, Seven Thousand Years, establish that such a timeline is more than a suggestion.  The slides will also consider some of the objections to this view.

The Old Heavens Perished

Creation / By / September 26, 2022

Scientists are confident that this earth is billions of years old. Many Bible scholars assure us that Scriptures indicate earth and heaven and all that is in them were created by God only a few thousand years ago.  If God’s word is incorrect regarding this, it is incorrect from the very first verses of the Bible. The words of God tell us: “Thy word true from the beginning: and every one of thy righteous judgments endureth for ever.” It would be totally unacceptable that the words of God could be  incorrect about the age of the earth.

So how do we explain this apparent discrepancy? Bible scholars argue in several ways. (1) Scientists are dishonest, they are clearly not to be trusted if they contradict the true and righteous God. (2) Scientists are basing their arguments upon scientific evidence that cannot mean what they think it means. For example, dating methods they use to measure the time of events in the past are unreliable because of the necessarily unproven assumption that clocks we use to date recent events ran at unchanged rates in the far past.  (3) Some scholars argue that since God specifically told us the date of the universe, He was free to make the universe with an apparent age older than its actual age as a way to test who would believe Him and who will not.

But Scripture also tells us: “For the word of the LORD is right; and all his works are done in truth.” The works of the Lord surely include creation. So creation must manifest the truth of God. Scripture claims that “The heavens declare the glory of God….” It is hardly possible that God purposefully created the heavens deceptively. Furthermore, God declares that the heavens themselves manifest enough truth about God that men who do not believe in Him are without excuse. They would hardly be without excuse if the heavens are deceptive in what they say about God.

Scientific evidence of an old earth does not depend only upon dating methods and incorrect assumptions about the past. There is evidence that is very hard to refute that the earth is older than a few thousand years. With a little study we can see that the words of God are entirely consistent with His works as they should be. Whereas the Noahic flood neither made new heavens nor new earth, an old earth destroyed by water allows us to explain the physical evidences on earth without denying the words of God. The PowerPoint Slides The Old Heavens Perished is a study to establish consistency between the evident works of God and the available words of God.

Salvation in the Church Age

Salvation / By / September 26, 2022

Salvation is a highly important doctrine. According to God’s words, each person will go on to the next life to one of two places: to heaven with God or to the lake of fire and brimstone with the devil and his angels. By one man, Adam, sin came into the world and death passed upon all men. So every man has sin as defined by God. A man with any amount of sin will not get into heaven with God. God cleanses a person from sin only through Jesus Christ in His death on the cross whereby Jesus accepted the judgment of God against sin for all men.  Through His resurrection Jesus Christ provides life free from sin for any person.

Thus apart from Jesus Christ there is no salvation. Since there are a multitude of people on this planet who are not trusting Jesus Christ for salvation, there are a multitude of people who need salvation. Furthermore, God’s word declares that most people who think they have salvation in Jesus Christ are not saved. God Himself, in the words He has written to us, is the only one to trust about how to be saved. The Theology Slides, Salvation in the Church Age, carefully explore the what God says about salvation and how every person in this age can get the life God intended for them.

Because God wants each person to know how they stand with Him, He deals with each person individually concerning how sincere they are about seeking truth about Him. Depending upon that sincerity, God will show anyone and everyone the truth. Ultimately knowledge of that truth is only to be found in God’s words to us. Salvation can only come through believing those words — words quoted in these slides.

Show us a Sign from Heaven

Doctrine / By / September 26, 2022

When Pharisees and Sadducees asked Jesus to show them a sign from heaven, He mentioned signs that He had already put in the heavens. But he accused them of being too hypocritical to recognize those signs already given as signs from God.

It is evident from Scripture that God put the red sunset and red sunrise as signs in the heavens pointing to Jesus Christ. Physically we see these as signs for the weather. We say: Red at night, sailors delight; red in the morning, sailors take warning. If we would see them as signs from God, we would say: Red at night, sinners delight; red in the morning, sinners take warning. The slides, Signs in the Sky, document this from verses throughout the Bible and establish how the Pharisees and Sadducees should have been able to recognize this.