Sermon Notes: What about infant baptism? – Acts 2:36-41
NOTE: My references or quotations will be noted with “UB” and are from “Understanding Baptism” by Bobby Jamieson unless otherwise noted.
I want to affirm my great respect and admiration for the reformed tradition. Many denominations from the protestant reformed tradition baptize infants.
Those reformed protestants who baptize infants don’t believe in the Catholic teaching that the baptism of infants regenerates the child.
We share so much in common with the reformed tradition, and that is why we have taken the stance we have in accepting members from those traditions as we have. (See the first sermon in this series for that explanation.)
However, we need to address infant baptism. Even though we respect our family of the faith from those reformed protestant traditions, we disagree heartily with the practice of applying baptism to unsaved, unregenerate children.
Let’s begin the explanation by reading our text: Acts 2:36-41.
Peter has preached the gospel, and the gospel has done its miraculous work in wrecking dead hearts, and it has caused these new followers of Jesus to ask what their next step should be.
As we have noted the last two weeks, Peter repeats Jesus’ teaching on the order of operations: Repent, be baptized, and receive the Holy Spirit as you are taught all the commands of the Lord in and through the local church from the Bible.
Peter continues his preaching even after he makes this clear as verses 39-41 record. He extends the sermon; he’s doing what Jesus said. Peter is teaching these new disciples to obey all that Jesus has said. As Luke says, Peter “bore witness” with many other words, and he continued to exhort them to save themselves from their current crooked generation. Peter went from the gospel to getting into their business!
The result of this gospel sermon and discipleship preaching is they added 3,000 new disciples to the previous 120 disciples.
There are so many good things here, but we need to keep ourselves focused on our topic of baptism.
There are two very important statements in verses 39 and 41: “For the promise is for you and your children…” and “So those who received his word were baptized…”.
Some interpret these two statements as meaning since the gospel is for the children then the baptisms of verse 41 must have included the children of the new converts and thus included them in the new covenant by election and thus worthy of receiving baptism as a promise of their future salvation.
EXPOSITIONAL NOTE: “teknois” – is the word for “children” and it means – descendants not related to age. Also, make no mistake the gospel is for children, and as soon as a child can understand, repent/believe, and be discipled into the local church, baptism is a go.
That little summary requires someone who believes that to equate the Abrahamic covenant sign of circumcision to the New Covenant gospel sign of baptism.
That idea, however, is completely foreign to Peter’s explanation that is rooted in Jesus’ instructions, and the pattern worked out in Acts. It’s a theological system read back onto the text of Scripture from actions taken later in church history. It is simply not a biblical model.
Luke’s account of what the apostles and other disciples did in baptizing those who believed makes it hard to apply that interpretive framework of infant baptism to what the New Testament teaches about baptism.
We’ve already seen the clarity of the Bible regarding the order of operations when it comes to belief in the good news: Faith followed by baptism followed by a lifetime of discipleship.
It takes no expositional gymnastics to understand that reception of the good news requires the ability to understand and respond. That is not something an infant can do.
Now, for these Jewish folks to receive baptism, this was a wild experience. The reason it was a wild experience is that they understood “…baptism was a rite for Gentile converts that symbolized a break with one’s past and the washing away of all defilement.- Richard N. Longenecker, The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Volume 9, John-Acts (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1981), p. 286.
How did they come to understand this?
Baptism was not foreign to them. Ritual washing and purification with water in the Old Testament were part of their understanding and experience.
Remember the questions asked of John the Baptist by those who were sent by the Pharisees: John 1:25 (ESV) They asked him, “Then why are you baptizing, if you are neither the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?”
They did not ask, “What are you doing?”. They understood baptism and its implications.
The Lord placed those rituals of baptism there in Jewish religious practice as gospel preparations to point to the gospel and its work portrayed in baptism.
While the specific term baptism is not used, immersion in water for purification was required in Leviticus and Numbers for the sake of cleansing and purity.
Here are some examples for you:
Contact with a dead body (Numbers 19:11-13).
Leprosy (Leviticus 14:8-9).
Bodily discharges (Leviticus 15).
After childbirth (Leviticus 12:1-8).
Priests were required to wash before entering the Tabernacle to offer sacrifices (Exodus 30:17-21).
By the Second Temple period (roughly 516-70 BC), washing and/or immersion in water was required for Gentiles who converted to Judaism. This washing symbolized purification and entrance into the covenant community of Israel.
So, for these Jews from the dispersion in Acts at Pentecost to receive baptism was a confession that the good news really did birth them into something completely different in such a way that they were still ethnically Jewish, but their faith and practice framework changed radically.
They accepted a practice reserved for Gentile converts. That’s huge.
They did NOT equate their circumcision with baptism and refuse to be baptized.
Why would they? Jesus has been clear. Peter, preaching Jesus’ instructions, has been clear.
The good news and the process of making disciples have been made clear.
We should not assume they would follow any other pattern than the one set by Jesus’ example and his instruction in the great commission of making disciples and then baptizing.
Why would we assume that household conversion included the baptism of babies considering Jesus’ instructions?
So, where did infant baptism come from?
Church historical records indicate the origin of infant baptism did not occur until the practice of “emergency baptisms” began in the third century.
“The most plausible explanation for the origin of infant baptism is found in the emergency baptism of sick children expected to die soon so that they would be assured of entrance into the kingdom of heaven. There was a slow extension of the practice of baptizing babies as a precautionary measure. It was generally accepted, but questions continued to be raised about his propriety into the fifth century. It became the usual practice in the fifth and sixth centuries.” – Everett Ferguson, Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theology, and Liturgy in the First Five Centuries (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 857
The church began to develop a covenant theology rooted in an idea about covenants without a hardwiring back to the explicit instructions of the text. They rightly affirmed that God has one plan of salvation in all of history, and those who enter his kingdom by faith in the Lord are part of his universal church.
They focus on the relationship between God’s covenants and the covenant signs, all the covenants being covenants of God’s grace. So, in this thinking, the signs of the covenants align in equivalent ways. Thus, they would adopt the belief that circumcision and baptism are just different signs of the same covenant of salvation. Of course, baptism is the sign of the New Covenant, but they sought to apply it like circumcision to infants. Therefore, in that line of thinking, election by descent is a surety, so they would apply baptism like circumcision and be assured of their child’s salvation.
We don’t believe that.
Let’s give the objections to that line of thinking based on what we have learned so far from our various texts about baptism.
I’m going to use Bobby Jamieson’s arguments almost verbatim and offer my own commentary.
Infant baptism applies the sign of union with Christ to those who are not united to Christ. It divorces the sign from the reality. UB, p. 25
Psalm 51:5 (ESV) 5 Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.
Ephesians 2:1-3 (ESV) 1 And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2 in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— 3 among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
Because of the curse of sin, all mankind is conceived and born with a nature of sin. We inherit that nature from our father, Adam. That biblical teaching is called “original sin”.
Just because some folks were born into a Christian home and don’t remember ever not believing in Jesus does not mean they were regenerated at any point in those years where learning about Jesus was as natural as breathing.
One of the great advantages of raising a family under the banner of the kingdom of God with the local church is that teaching the faith and leading our children to believe the good news is much easier.
However, all human beings, whether born to Christian parents or not, must repent and believe to be born again. It is not automatic just because we have a robust belief in election. All those who enter the kingdom of God must believe the good news and repent/believe.
So, applying the sign of the New Covenant gospel to those who are under the curse of sin, although they will be raised to know and understand Jesus, proclaims something that is not a reality yet and is out of step with Jesus’ clear instructions.
Infant baptism confuses being born of Christian parents with being born again by the Spirit. UB, p. 26
I firmly believe there are no people in the leadership of reformed protestant traditions who believe infants are born again when they apply drops of water they call baptism to the forehead of a newborn when presented by their parents for baptism.
We are not saying they believe that. We are saying that their practice confuses being born to Christian parents with being born again.
The WCF is explicit about this, but their insistence on baptism applied to infants says something different, as we have been arguing for two weeks from the pages of the Bible.
Just because a child is born to or adopted by Christian parents does not in any way mean that infant or child has been John 3 born again. They have not.
So, we don’t apply the sign of new birth to ones who are not born into the kingdom of God.
Infant baptism mistakenly assumes that God is forming his new covenant people the same way he formed his old covenant people. UB, p. 27
The Lord formed his people through family descent, and along the way, Gentiles who heard the good news were included in the people of God by grace.
In the New Covenant, the family is determined by the Word of God and the Holy Spirit according to the promise of God not descent from Abraham or descent from Christian parents.
We could argue from history that family descent in the Christian faith is taken for granted. Flawed humans will, at some point, begin to take the faith for granted until it doesn’t exist.
We cannot nor should we depend on family descent for the propagation of the faith. It is only by the preached gospel wrecking our children’s hearts and giving them new hearts that faith in Jesus Christ will be passed on.
I would suggest a slow reading of Galatians 3-4 to gain an understanding of how the Lord operates in the New Covenant. It is by promise, not family descent.
Your name is no guarantee, and water applied to your forehead is not a guarantee that you will get it. If you are not transformed by the gospel, your name and legacy will be written out of the kingdom of God, and you will be separated from that family forever under the judgment of God for refusal to believe, and no amount of applied water will stop that.
You must believe, then we can apply the water, and then you will carry on a family legacy larger than your name.
Infant baptism undermines the church’s ministry of being salt and light. UB, p. 31
Make no mistake there are people in the local church who professed belief, were baptized, and who have evidenced that their belief was not valid by their actions, and they compromise the witness of the church.
That is what church discipline is for.
Jesus told us there would be weeds among the wheat, and that he would sort that out, and he would use his processes for doing that. (Keys of the kingdom given to the church for enacting church discipline to bind sin and loose righteousness – Matthew 18.)
But to apply the sign of the new covenant intentionally to humans who are not salt and light, and may not “confirm” their baptism, creates a population who will and have called themselves Christian and live any life they want divorced from accountability.
This practice can lead to what we know as “cultural Christianity”.
For us Baptists, we participate in the same thing when we don’t practice robust church membership and church discipline.
I love it when sister churches receive TRC members, and they write us a letter asking if those people are members in good standing, and we can either affirm that or deny that, so that we are not guilty of facilitating “cultural Christianity”.
Infant baptism makes God’s new covenant promise less than a promise. UB, p. 34
As we have noted already, the promise that is for the children of those who believed (Acts 2:38) was not in any way specific to an age. Rather the language indicates it is for descendants of those who believe as well as anyone who will call on the name of the Lord.
It simply means that the gospel is for all who will repent/believe: descendants of Christians and people who are descendants of pagans. There is no place where the gospel is incapable of wrecking a dead heart to give that person a new heart. The gospel is not confined to family descent.
As families, to assume election through a straight line between circumcision and baptism nullifies the hope of promise requiring our ongoing faith and obedient action to preach the gospel, train, hold lines, and grow through phases of parenting dictated by age and development, then rest in the sovereign grace of God to do what only he can do.
By drawing that straight line, we are getting rid of the demand for faith to obey and hope in the Lord to do what we can’t do.
Application: What do we do with this?
Do not assume anything with your children.
Baptism is reserved for those who repent/believe.
But it is for those who repent/believe, and you can’t make that happen. No matter how badly you want it, you are dependent on the sovereign grace of God in the preached gospel to awaken your children to life.
Therefore, don’t flag in zeal for dragging them to everything you can in your local church, involving them in everything local church, while you can.
Constantly expose them to the family of God so they can hear the same message in different voices.
Radical Kids is one of the most glorious opportunities to display our covenant membership by instructing one another’s littles while allowing your little one to hear the bible taught, and have the good news explained by a multitude of people who love them and care for them and will be integral parts of their coming to faith.
Pray and fast, believing in faith for that glorious day when your children repent/believe and begin the lifetime of discipleship with the local church
Keep the good news and God’s means of discipleship always on the forefront of your minds and the tip of your tongues.
Learn sound doctrine. Expand your understanding. Sound the depths of orthodox Christian theology.
But do not fail to master the metanarrative of the good news so that your worldview won’t stray, and you can tell it to all who will hear you.
Lean into God’s process, and don’t try to improve it. God does not need our re-tooling or marketing to disciple the nations: preach the gospel; call people to repent/believe; baptize them; and teach them everything Jesus gave us (Bible).
- Master the good news of the kingdom: Creation/Fall/Redemption/Restoration.
Call people to repent/believe – Repentance and faith are two sides of the same coin. Repentance is to turn from, and belief is it embrace with your whole being (Hebrews 11:1).
- Be baptized and become an accountable member of a local church.
- Learn to obey everything Jesus has taught from Genesis to Revelation as members of the local church.
It truly is this simple.
If you have heard and responded to the good news today, then let us know so we can help you get into the stream of the Lord’s process in our church.
Worship!!