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Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Baptism

John 3:5 Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.

The above words were not, at first, understood by Nicodemus and they are almost never understood by the world today. Jesus was teaching a Religious Leader of the Jews of His time here on Earth. Nicodemus understood the concept of Birth by the Water and most men and all women should easily relate to that breaking of the water as the natural birth. What Nick missed was the Spiritual Birth and he wanted to know how could it be that a man should come forth from his mother the second time.

The young men of today, having received an inferior Education to those of us taught in the past are not able to grasp the context of a paragraph or a chapter today because there is this Fool´s Education built on Rote Memory instead of teaching them to learn how to learn, allowing them the ability to think intelligently. In the case of this passage there is a scholar from the past that wrote Matthew Henry´s Concise Commentary on the Bible and when we look at his work on the third chapter of John, the flow of the text becomes very clear.

If we pay strict attention to the text we see right away that Nick understood that Jesus was talking about being born a second time and when He used the water and compared it to the Spirit, that is exactly what He spoke of. The water birth occurs when the mother´s water breaks and has nothing to do with Salvation. That must come later in life after one realizes their sinful condition and can repent of it.

Folks that are not to sharp on contextual flow, often, make the mistake of concluding that Jesus meant that a man must be baptized for the remission of sins but it is the turning away from one´s sin to follow God (Acts 3:19) that brings about God´s forgiveness, resulting in our Salvation. If a man or a woman will spend about $25 for a hardbound copy of the Nave´s Topical and do the study on Baptism they will clearly see that those teaching Baptismal Remission of sin are wrong, the Bible says so!

I do not hope to ruffle feathers but I do hope to cause study here. God bless!

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