Jeremy approaches Bible teaching with a passion for getting the basic doctrines explained so that the individual can understand them and then apply them to circumstances in their life. These basic and important lessons are nestled in a framework of history and progression of revelation from the Bible so the whole of Scripture can be applied to your physical and spiritual life.
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We get so hung up on this word! And so have so many throughout church history. So what is it really and is water baptism after salvation the one and only real deal?
Jeremy Thomas is the pastor at Spokane Bible Church in Spokane, Washington and a professor at Chafer Theological Seminary. He has been teaching the Bible for over 20 years, always seeking to present its truths in a clear and understandable manner.
Welcome to Beyond the Walls with Jeremy Thomas and our series on the New Testament framework. Today, a smaller, bite-sized piece from the larger lesson. We hope you enjoy it.
Start with the imagery of identification and always judgment salvation. I should have added that there. The imagery of identification, but it comes through means of a judgment salvation. There's always a judgment
salvation. Let's talk about the word baptism because anytime you mention the word baptism, the first thing that comes to mind is probably a creek or a baptismal. But water is usually involved in some form. And this is not necessarily correct. This can be a confusion about baptism.
The word baptism, of course, is just a Greek word. When we had people in Christianity at the time of the Reformation, and even before, you know, you had that the Jan Huss, John Husses, you know, Jan Huss, the Hussites, you had the Wycliffe and the Wycliffites, those who followed Wycliffe. We know still of Wycliffe today because of Wycliffe Bible translators, right? They like to translate the Bible into various languages and tribes of people around the world, so everybody can have the Bible in their own language. And then you have the Reformers in the early 1500s, people like Martin Luther's, Melanchthon, Savonarola's, you know, and others. Um and these men wanted to translate the Bible into their native tongues so that people could read the Bible for themselves and hear God's voice themselves. And before that, most of the Bible was just in Latin. And the educated in the Roman Catholic Church would have access to this and they would use this language even in much of the service. And the common person did not really know what they were talking about because Latin by that time was a scholastic language, only known among scholars. So uh, how did you know if what the person was teaching was accurate if you really don't even really know the language? So these reformers wanted to translate the Bible into their native tongues. The problem with this word baptism was that nobody wanted to translate it because there was a disagreement about the mode of baptism. In other words, how was baptism to be carried out? Are you supposed to uh sprinkle water on them? Are you supposed to pour water on them, or are you supposed to immerse them? You know, let's just say dunk them. Right? Um there have actually been groups in church history that their names stemmed from dunk dunking. But anyway, so very interesting. Church history is always a playground for a lot of wonderful and interesting ideas, some not so wonderful. But they decided to not translate this word, and they decided to just put it in the English Bible, direct transliteration from the Greek word.
So a transliteration is when you have a word in your language that's actually from another language. I'm gonna give you another one after we say the prayer. When we get to the end, we say in Jesus' name. Amen. Is Amen an English word? No. Is it a Greek word? No. It's a Hebrew word. It's a Hebrew word. And uh the base of this word is actually from the Hebrew concept of the mother. The concept of the mother was from a root word that meant true. Why? Because your mom will always tell you the truth is the truth. And when we say amen, we're saying a Greek word, we're saying a Hebrew word, and that word is the word true or truly. So when you have agreement with the prayer that someone has offered, and you say amen, you're saying I agree with that. It's true. True what they said. And so here's another word that's not an English word, but we use
it. It's a Greek word, baptize, baptism, and this word means to dip, to plunge, to cleanse. Uh, it refers in the lexicon to a ceremonial ritual that signifies a change in identification of an object that is baptized. So here's an example from practical world. Lydia in Acts chapter 16 was a seller of purple fabrics. We could go into the whole story of where she got the dye from the mollusk in the Mediterranean and all of that. But the important thing is that she sold these purple fabrics, which were associated obviously with royalty with the elite, the high status people in the Roman Empire. If she actually was the one who prepared the wool fabric, then she would have been the one who dipped the wool from the sheep into a dye that changed the identity of the wool. That was the whole idea. You have this wool, it's white or grayish, and then you dip it in this dye and it comes out and it's it's purple now. It has the signification of royalty, and it's so different from what was before that one could say that its identity was now changed. And this becomes the heart and substance of baptism. This work of the Holy Spirit is the most difficult for Christians to grasp. So we're spending a little time on the word. Okay. But its fundamental idea is that there's been a change in identity through the dipping or plunging of one thing into another.
Now, there are going to be eight baptisms in the Bible. Uh, some of you know this because you've spent your life studying these things. Others of you, you've never heard this. And that's okay. We all are in process, right? There are still things I, of course, I've never heard or don't know yet that I have to learn to understand. But there are five of these eight baptisms that are what we call real baptisms, meaning something really happens that's spiritually significant, and they are dry baptisms, meaning the person that or persons that are baptized don't get wet, but they stay dry. And all of these five dry, real baptisms are administered by God. That's what makes them real. Any baptism that is administered by man is a ritual only, it doesn't accomplish any spiritual reality because we can't do those things. Only God can do those things. So the five real dry baptisms are all administered by God. The first one is the most difficult one teacher.
