Hebrews Lesson 57
June 8, 2006
NKJ Isaiah 40:31 But those who wait on the LORD Shall renew their strength; They shall mount up with
wings like eagles, They shall run and not be weary, They shall walk and not
faint.
Hebrews 6
This is the beginning of one of those
passages that people debate. They get all upset every now and then because
they think this means they can lose their salvation. Actually the real
tough section doesn’t come until verses 4 through 6 and we are probably not
going to make it out of the first 3 verses this evening. So we will have
to wait until I get back from the trip to Israel before we get into the hard
stuff. So I get to teach the hard stuff when I get back and have jet
lag. I just love the way things work out sometimes.
NKJ Hebrews 6:1 Therefore, leaving the discussion of the elementary principles of Christ, let us go on to
perfection, not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works and
of faith toward God,
Here is what we need to recognize at
the very beginning. This word “therefore” can translate any number of
Greek words that we find at the beginning of a verse or section where there a
conclusion is being drawn or an inference is being made. The Greek word
that is used here is dio. It has a little stronger
sense than the standard word that we would expect to find here which is oun. It throws our attention right
back to what has been said. It tells you that the writer has made several
points in the previous verses and on the basis of what has been said. You
can almost say “because of what I just said” or “on account of what I just
said” or “for the reasons just stated.” Now we move on to this conclusion and
this point of application. So what precedes this verse is encapsulated in
“therefore.”
Just for review this section begins
back in verse 11. This is one of those challenge sections in
Hebrews. Remember that I pointed out that there is a didactic or teaching
section, and that is followed by an application or challenge—an
exhortation section. Within that exhortation there is a warning in each of
these sections. In the first two sections the warning and the exhortation
are identical. But in this section the exhortation or challenge or
application began in 5:11 and extend down through the end of chapter 6. But
the warning section itself is primarily encapsulated in verses 1-8. So
this is the warning section 1-8 or more specifically 4-8. So the “therefore”
draws from what he just said. And what he just said is to really reprimand
them for their spiritual condition. They have become dull of
hearing. The word “therefore” that we saw indicates that they have become
lazy, complacent about their spiritual life. In fact they have gone into a
reversal. They have regressed in their spiritual growth and their
spiritual lives such that they have become dull of hearing. Rather than
being at a stage of maturity where they could explain and teach the word in
verse 12 he says…
NKJ Hebrews 5:12 For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you
need someone to teach you again the
first principles of the oracles of God; and you have come to need milk and not
solid food.
That word “first principles” that
you have in the Greek is stoicheion. It has to do with the building
blocks of anything. In philosophy they had a certain set of first
principles. In some of the philosophical thought in early Greek it was the
first principles, the basic elements of the matter of the universe. They
were earth and water and fire and air. Stoicheion was a word that was used to describe
those first principles. Here we are talking about those first principles
related to Christianity or the ABC’s of Christianity or foundational doctrines to
Christianity. So he says because they regressed they had to go back to
first grade and second grade, the basics. And he goes on to describe this
as milk in verse 13.
He says, “You have to take in milk
because you are unskilled. You are not practicing the message of
righteousness. You are not putting that into application in your life for
you are a babe.”
The word that we saw for babe is the
Greek word nepios. Although
in a few places it is used to refer
to an infant, it is primarily a word that is used in a very negative sense to
describe someone who is much older that is acting like a baby. It has a
negative sense. It is not like brephos or teknion that refer to a spiritually new
recently converted believer who is a spiritual infant; but someone who should
be older, should be acting more mature has had the time and the opportunity to
act mature but instead they are acting like a spiritual baby. Then he
concludes by saying…
NKJ Hebrews 5:14 But solid food belongs to those who are of full age, that is, those who by reason of use have
their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.
That is those who are mature, those
who by practice. That is where we fail. People come. They listen
to the Word of God. They keep their doctrinal notebooks together. They
learn a lot, but they don’t go home and practice it.
They don’t make it a priority to
think about the issues of life and say, “Okay, I need to face every decision as
if it is a crisis doctrinal issue and I need put into practice those spiritual
skills – those problem solving devices that we all know.”
So because they don’t exercise or
discipline themselves in the application of doctrine, they have lost the ability
to discern good and evil. So we had several extended lessons on practicing
the doctrine of discernment. Discernment only comes from a reservoir of
doctrine in your soul. It is not something you can accumulate or pull
together in just a week or two or even a year or two.
So when we read verse 1 he is
saying, “therefore because you have become lazy.”
You have become backward in your spiritual
growth because you are spiritual sluggards. Therefore let’s go
forward. Let’s advance. That is the challenge and mandate that we find in
verse 1.
Then there is a participial phrase
“leaving the discussion of the elementary principles of Christ.” That word
for elementary is the same word we had back there in verse 12 translated “first
principles.” It is the Greek word stoicheion. It is the ABC’s related to Christ. The ABC’s
related to the basics of Christology.
There are a lot of folks who sit back
and say right now and say, “I have gone through some of those lessons on
Christology and they are not exactly basics.”
I have had people who should have
known better tell me that. They are basics. If you listen to what the
writer of Hebrews is saying, he is saying that they are basics. Salvation,
redemption, reconciliation, atonement, propitiation - all of these are
basic. Let’s get beyond these. Let’s not be like some churches where
pastors have 2,000 different sermons all on salvation. They never get
beyond that. Whatever they are talking about it comes back to the same
verse the 502nd time or the 831st time but it is always
the same thing. You never get beyond the basics. So we start off with
this statement to leave, but it is tied to the main verb.
“Let us go on to perfection.”
That is the challenge in verse
1. That is the main verb. It is present passive subjunctive. It
has the sense of something that is to be a predominant characteristic. That
present tense indicates something that is ongoing, something that is habitual,
and something that is characteristic.
Now when we look at it in the
English we say, “Let us go on.”
That seems to be a command. Why isn’t
that in the imperative? That is just a function of Greek grammar. It
is a subjunctive mood, but it is called a hortatory subjunctive. That
means that the writer is giving a command to his readers, but he is going to include
himself in the command. So it is “let us” rather than “you go do”. He is
saying “let us.” Just as I am pressing on or advancing to maturity, I am
challenging you to join me in that same challenge, to press on, to go forward,
and to advance to spiritual maturity. So that is the essence of this
verse.
He says, “Therefore let us
advance to perfection.”
The word perfection is the form of a
word that we have seen many times. It is teleiotes which means maturity, not perfection in the sense of
flawlessness. That is what everybody thinks of in terms of perfection and
then there are always a few people in denominations that down through the years
that think that you can have sinless perfection. That is only because they
have a very diluted watered down narrow sense of sin. Sin only consists of the
terrible two or the fearsome five or the nasty nine. It is easy not to commit
those two, five or nine sins.
If you start thinking about
arrogance and you go home tonight and you get by yourself for a little while
and before you go to sleep you start thinking about all of the ways that
arrogance manifests itself in your life, we suddenly realize that everything we
do is permeated by self- absorption at times. Sin is much deeper and much
more profound than we want it to be. It is not just overt sins. It is
not just certain things that we find offensive. It is something that is
deeply embedded in our constitutional make up as fallen creatures. That is
what happened to Adam when he ate from the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge
of Good and Evil. He was changed profoundly, internally and
constitutionally. He is not sick. He is dead – spiritually
dead. That affects being is affected. Every aspect of his being is
affected by his fallen nature.
Now if you are trying to witness to
a Muslim or if you are trying to witness to a lot of secular Americans, they
don’t believe that they are sinners. They don’t understand what that
means. They restrict the meaning of sin in a lot of ways. Muslims
think of sin only in terms of something that is blasphemous to Allah. So
murder, adultery, mass murder, genocide and terrorism aren’t sinful. It is
only sinful if it is a direct affront to Allah. Muslims believe that men
are born basically good. The Bible says that that is not right. We
are all born basically evil. It’s not the book “I Am Okay, You Are
Okay”. The Bible says that I am not okay and neither are you. We were
born that way and we are going to stay that way apart from the grace of
God. So we start from the position that man is inherently evil. When
you look at those sweet little babies or you have a sweet little baby and you
look at that cute little baby, it is just a sin nature wrapped up in
flesh. That is why the Bible calls the sin nature flesh. It is a
bundle of sin right there. As cute as it is, as sweet as it is; it is
sinful. It is fallen. It is totally depraved. Every aspect of its
being is depraved. That is what total depravity means. Total depravity
doesn’t mean it is as bad as it can be. It just means in the totality of
its being every dimension of its soul is affected by sin and is fallen and is
under the condemnation of God.
This is one of the great watershed
doctrines and beliefs in history – whether or not man is basically good
or basically evil. For those of you who are more politically inclined I
would encourage you to read a book by Thomas Soul called Conflict of Vision. Thomas Soul is one of the most profound political
thinkers around today. He has done an excellent study of understanding why
there is a conflict in the basic worldviews of people. I have never
forgotten the introduction, the prologue, to his book. He talks about the
fact, he raises the issue – why is it that when you talk about different
political, social issues whether you are justifying sex between a couple
of homosexuals and legitimizing their sinfulness or whether you are talking
about how you are going to deal with the illegal immigration issue; whether you
are dealing with economic issues such as taxation, issues related to Marxism,
socialism, capitalism, no matter what these issue are- isn’t it interesting
that no matter what the issue is or and how the issue may be, for example,
immigration being related to capital punishment that if you believe one
way on immigration you probably believe a certain way on capital punishment. You
probably think a certain way on legalization of homosexual marriage. And
all of those people will always tend to think the same way about these
disparate different issues. They will all line up over here and the people
who line up in the other view line up over here. Why is it that you always
find people on this side of the political or economic or social issue and you
always seem to find the same people lining up on the other side of the
economic, social or political issue even though those economic, social and
political issues don’t seem to relate to each other? What is the
underground, presupposition that is really determining this? Soul does a
magnificent job of showing that people who end up on the conservative side are
people who down through history believed that mankind is basically
evil. Man is basically fallen. People who end up on the liberal side
socially or economically or politically all believe that man is basically
good.
So what this shows you is that what
the Bible says about the nature or condition of man is going to have a major
impact on the things that you think about in life – how you view your
role as a parent. If you think babies are basically good, that is going to
influence your view of your role as a parent. If they are basically good,
you don’t need to paddle their little behinds. You don’t need to teach
them to control that little sin nature because they don’t have one. You
just let them run free and let them make their own decisions and discover life
and let them make their own mind. But if you believe that it is a little
sin nature wrapped up in a bag of flesh, then what you have to do is teach them
self discipline and control. You have to realize that it is your job as a
parent to give them that sense of right and wrong and self-mastery. If you
don’t do it, no one else will. It is not the school’s job. It’s not
the Sunday school’s job. It is not the job of the church. Those
things are the job of the parent. If you believe those things are the job
of the parent then you are not going to be on the other side because the other
side based on the assumption that the child is basically good, thinks that the
government can handle their training and the public schools can do all of those
things and the parents don’t think they need to be that involved. It will
just come naturally.
So all of these things boil down to
whether we think man is basically good or basically sinful. The Bible
makes it clear that we are not perfectible. There is no such thing as perfection
in the Christian life. It is maturity. That is the idea here. We
are to press on to maturity. Even as mature believers we will still sin
because we have a sin nature within us that is capable of committing heinous
horrible shocking sins. It is just as capable as it was before we were
saved. There may be some times that you commit some sins that shock you,
shock your friends, shock your family, but you are still saved.
That is what we are going to get
into when we get to the second part. You don’t lose your salvation, but if
you continue in that state there may be dire consequences, irreversible
consequences on your spiritual life if you continue in your carnality beyond a
certain point. So the challenge here is to press on to maturity.
Now to press on to maturity automatically
implies the opposite. There are some things that you are not going to
do. What the text says that we are not going to do is to lay again the
foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God. Now
before I get to that last phrase I want to go back and clarify that participial
phrase at the beginning that I skipped over.
That participle is probably a
participle of manner. They are not defined in the Scripture. “In this
manner we are going to press on”; “in this manner we are going to press on in
this way by leaving behind these elementary principles” The idea of leaving
behind is the Greek word aphiemi which is the same word that is used
for forgiveness over in I John 1:9. It means to leave or to forgive or let
go and in some cases to desert or to quit. That is the literal meaning,
but it is used in a metaphorical meaning in the sense of leaving something
behind moving on to the next stage. So we have the idea here of “in this
manner we are going to press on to maturity”. We are going to leave behind
the discussion of basic ABC’s of Christianity. In other words if you want to
press on to maturity you have got to grow up. You have got to get off of
the milk of the word of God and onto the meat of the Word of God.
There was a cover story article for
Moody Monthly Moody Bible Institute, which is Jim’s old alma mater. He
went to school up in Chicago. It is named after Dwight Moody. I
remember this article stood out in my mind. I read this 35 years
ago. The title of the article was “Grow Up Baby Brother”. Of course
it dealt with the weaker brother issue but that was the title of the article
– grow up. Yet nobody today wants to grow up. Nobody today has
a vision for producing maturity. To produce maturity you have to have in
depth Bible study.
I had a conversation this morning
with the young man who is driving this RV around the country for Logos. The
company decided on this marketing tool to try to make the person in the pew
aware of the fact that they have got these great Bible study programs that
aren’t just for pastors and men who know Greek and Hebrew and the languages and
all of that. It is something that is very easy to use for the average
person in the pew. So they decided that they would take this RV and go
around the country and get different churches to host them. They would
come in and put on their demo to acquaint people with what is available. It
is a great product and I think it has tremendous benefits not just for pastors
but for anybody. I am not sure that it is for everybody; I am not selling
it or encouraging it other than for pastors to buy it. It is a good tool
for them to have. They have been very disappointed in this
marketing. They have had big churches that have volunteered to host them –
big churches that don’t teach the
Bible. They get 30-40 people show up in a church of 4,000-5,000 and wonder
what is wrong. It is because they are going to churches that don’t
emphasize Bible teaching. If you don’t emphasize Bible teaching no one has
a value for the study of the Word of God. So they would rather than go and
spend $500 or $1000 on a computer program on the Bible, they would rather go on
vacation for the weekend. So again and again and again city after city
after city they have had a problem. They came to Houston and we have over
100 to 120 people that are supposed to show up which is pretty good compared to
13 that showed up two nights ago in San Antonio. It is a matter of do
people want the tools to study the Bible. Are they really interested in
Bible study? But we live in a world that is characterized by these Hebrew
sluggards today and not a world that is characterized by Christians who want to
seriously pursue spiritual growth and spiritual maturity and the Word of
God.
Part of it is that they don’t
realize that there are negative consequences for failure. Negative
consequences aren’t that you will lose your salvation in the sense that you
will lose your eternal destiny in heaven, but as this writer points out you
will lose rewards. You will lose rewards and blessings both in time and
eternity and you may also reach a point in your spiritual regression that is a
point of no return and you can’t recover and you are going to go through the
rest of your life an example of divine discipline and you will live your life
as a test, an object of testing for everybody around you. How many people
want to be that way - the reason that God has left you alive to be a real pain
in the rear to everybody around you and let them grow to spiritual
maturity. That is basically what he is saying here in Hebrews 6.
So he says, “Let us press on.”
This is a command. This is a
mandate for all of us. Let’s not relax and regress. Let us press on
to maturity.
Now one of the interesting things
about this last phrase is that it clearly shows that these are saved
people. They are regenerate. His readers are regenerate. They
are not unregenerate. They are regenerate because of the word ‘”again”. That
implies that they have already laid the foundation.
Now the word that is foundation here
is a word that is picked up and used in a couple of other key passages. What
is the foundation?
NKJ 1 Corinthians
3:11 For no other foundation can anyone
lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.
He is the foundation. It has to do
with the person and work of Christ. All of that is tied together. We
get it in an encapsulated form at the Lord’s Table. The foundation is
Jesus Christ. Who is Jesus Christ and what did He do? If you
understand that and believe it then you are going to have an eternal destiny in
heaven.
Who is Jesus Christ? Jesus
Christ is not just a man. He wasn’t just a great prophet. He wasn’t just a
great teacher. He wasn’t just a religious innovator which is a lie that
has been promoted for 200 -300 years of the Enlightenment ever since the
1700’s. Jesus Christ is as the Bible claims, the eternal Second Person of
the Trinity who has become flesh. He is eternal in His deity. He is only
finite in terms of the beginning of His humanity. He is fully God and He is fully
man. He is the foundation. Who He is is crucial to what He did because He is who He is and He is absolute
perfection, sinless, born of a virgin. Therefore He didn’t inherit a sin
nature. He is without sin and lived His life without sin. He didn’t
inherit a sin nature. He didn’t receive the imputation of Adam’s original
sin. He did not commit any individual sins which we studied already going
back to our study in Hebrews 4:14-6.
NKJ Hebrews 4:14 Seeing then that we have a great High Priest who has
passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession.
NKJ Hebrews 4:15 For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize
with our weaknesses, but was in all points
tempted as we are, yet without
sin.
NKJ Hebrews 4:16 Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace,
that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
He was impeccable. Because of that
impeccability He is qualified to go to the cross. So who He is can’t be
separated from what He did. What He did was to die on the cross as our
substitute. In His own body He bore our sins on the cross. He was in
our place. He was our substitute. He paid the sin penalty so that it
was taken upon Himself. He couldn’t do that if He wasn’t who He was. If
He wasn’t eternal God and true humanity in one person, He couldn’t do what He
did. You can’t separate “the who” from “the what” and you can’t separate
“the what” from “the who”. You can’t have “I believe Jesus and I will go
to heaven” and not believe in who He is. Once you understand those basics
then you can go forward in your Christian life. That involves a lot of
different doctrines as you develop that.
Another passage is Ephesians 2:20.
NKJ Ephesians 2:20 having been built on the foundation of the apostles
and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone,
Here the Apostle Paul is using the
metaphor of a building to picture the church. This is the invisible
organization that is made up of all those in the Church Age who believe in
Jesus Christ as there savior. Here He pictures the apostles as the
foundation, the cornerstone that holds things together is Jesus Christ.
So when we come to Hebrews 6:1 this
is a metaphor that has been used again and again in the Scripture that this
foundation relates to the person and work of the Jesus Christ. So we are
not going to lay it again. This is a present middle participle. The
middle voice means to lay something down. The active voice means to go
down or to cast down. But the middle voice means to lay something down;
thus it is used with themelios to lay down a foundation.
So this is the foundation of
Christianity. It relates to two things.
These are two sides of the same coin
– repentance from dead works and faith toward God. Now before we
interpret this last phrase, we need to remind ourselves - who is he addressing
here? To whom is he speaking? He is talking if you remember to
believers who are Jewish, probably Jewish priests well-schooled in the Old
Testament in the sacrifices and the offerings. They came out of the
Levitical priesthood for the most part. He is talking to them in terms of
their religious background.
Now repentance is one of those words
that everybody gets all confused about. This morning when I was teaching
my class over at the college I asked a rhetorical question and a couple of the
students haven’t figured out that I ask a lot of rhetorical questions and so
they answered.
I said, “What is necessary to be
saved?”
I heard three people say,
“Repentance.”
What is the first thing you have to
do to be saved?
“Repentance.”
Now that is not what the Bible
says.
What is the one book in the New
Testament that you would want someone to read if you wanted them to understand
the gospel and go to heaven? What book would that be? Not
Romans. Not Song of Solomon either. It would be John. John 3 is
a good chapter.
NKJ John 20:31 but these are written that you may believe that Jesus
is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His
name.
The Gospel of John is written
primarily (everybody agrees with this – liberals and conservatives)
written to tell people how to get saved. How many times do you have the
noun for repentance or the verb for repentance in the Gospel of
John? None! You find the word faith 93 times in the Gospel of
John.
NKJ John 3:18 "He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he
who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the
name of the only begotten Son of God.
It doesn’t say anything about repentance.
NKJ John 3:16 "For God so loved the world that He gave His only
begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have
everlasting life.
Where do you hear repentance in
there?
Earlier in the chapter Nicodemus
says, “We know you are a great Bible teacher.”
He is kind of beating around the
bush.
Jesus says, “You are not going to
see the kingdom of Heaven unless you are born again.”
Did He say repent? No, he
didn’t say repent. Nowhere in the Gospel of John do you have the word
repent. So if repent is a necessary step in the personal order of
salvation then you can’t get saved reading the gospel of John because he never
tells you to repent.
So let’s go back to the drawing
board on repentance. Now there are some people in the GES that
believe that every passage of repentance – that mentions repentance in
the New Testament – is really addressed to believers in their post
salvation experience. I am just not quite ready to go there. There
are a couple of passages where I am not convinced that it is addressing
unbelievers. But it is a good point. For the most part the noun and
the verb for repentance focus on something that takes place in a believer’s
life, not an unbelievers’ life. But I think there is a place here where
repentance may be addressed to what happens at that beginning stage.
Now the word “repent” here is the
noun metanoia. It means a change of mind or a change of thinking. It is not
an emotional term. One of the things that I found early on when I started dong
a little cross cultural work in Kiev and M… (Jim is here so he is very
familiar with this) is that the Russian word for confess in I John 1:9 is
remorse. Have remorse. That changes your whole meaning. The
emphasis is on feeling guilty, having remorse for your sins, trying to impress
God with how sorry you are that you committed some sin. So if the
translation that you use has a word that indicates remorse or emotion or guilt
(which is true in many languages) then you really have to do some work at
correcting that impression. It is even true in English. If you look up
repent in Webster’s Dictionary, remorse is one of the definitions of
repent. But that is not what the Greek word means. Metanoia - meta is a preposition
meaning after and noia is from the noun for thought. It is a change of thinking and not a
change of emotion.
There is a word for that. It is
metamelomai and it means remorse or to feel sorry for something. Sometimes
they are connected. Sometimes we have remorse that leads to
repentance. We feel sorry for things. We realize that we really blew
it. So we have sorrow. We feel sorry about things. It leads to a
change of mind. But, it is not the emotion that is important. It is
the change of mind. It is the change of thinking. It is the repentance
that takes place. So what they are changing their thinking about in this phrase
is not particularly related to Christ but it is repentance from dead
works. That is the focus of their change of thinking. As Jewish
believers in Judaism in Pharisaical first century Judaism, they thought that it
was their good deed – their religious observance – that impressed
God. It was by praying seven times a day and by going to the temple and by
making sure (especially if they were influence by the Pharisees) that they
didn’t violate not only any of the 613 commandments in the Mosaic Law but they
didn’t want to violate any of the oral tradition as well which was built up
like a fence around the Mosaic Law to make sure they wouldn’t violate that -
all of the traditions of the Pharisees. That was their idea that if they
if they avoided the violation of any of those commands then could impress God and
God would approve of them. So there had to be a foundation laid there
where they realized that none of that counted for anything.
All of their good works – all
of their righteousnesses – were as filthy rags the Scripture says. It
doesn’t say that all of your unrighteousnesses are as filthy rages, you already
know that. It says all of your righteousnesses that are filthy rags. All
the good deeds that you think impress God – getting up early in the
morning reading your Bible, praying, going to church, witnessing and all the
things we do. We think it impresses God. It is the right thing to do,
but we don’t do it to impress God. We don’t get any brownie points for
it. If we do it in the Holy Spirit, then it is part of our spiritual life
and our responsibility. We are fulfilling our responsibilities as
believers, but we don’t do it to get God’s grace and to get His approval.
So at the beginning of their
spiritual lives they had to recognize that dead works didn’t get them anywhere
so there had to be a change of thinking there. They had to reject the legalistic
thought of Judaism. The opposite of that was that instead of trusting in
repentance and good works they would have faith toward God. The object of
their faith would be toward God – not just a generic faith toward
God. If you took this verse out of context in isolation then you might
think that “all I have to do is believe in God and I am saved.” But you
see that is why you have to compare Scripture with Scripture and compare the
total context and realize that it isn’t simply believing in God that gets you
saved. You have more specific passages in the Scripture that tell you that
the focus of your faith is the work of Jesus Christ on the cross. When you
believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sins, then at that instant
God the Father imputes to you the perfect righteousness of Christ. He sees
that and declares you to be righteous. It is all done
simultaneously. But there is a logical progression. There is
imputation, justification, and regeneration where you are born again. You
receive a new human spirit, a new spiritual life. So this happens at the
very foundation and is the beginning of that new spiritual life. So the
first thing he mentions is that in order to go on to maturity we have to set
aside the teaching on these basic doctrines. Basic doctrines begin with
salvation by grace. That is foundational.
Then we come to the next
phrase.
NKJ Hebrews 6:2 of the doctrine of baptisms, of laying on of hands, of
resurrection of the dead, and of eternal judgment.
“Of the doctrine of baptisms.” That
is the second thing that is considered basic. It is interesting because
most people don’t understand the doctrine of baptism. If there is any
doctrine other than salvation that has been argued and fought over as much as
anything else down through the history of the church, it is over baptism. Then
he goes on to say...
“the laying on of hands, of
resurrection of the dead, eternal judgment”
What does that signify?
All of that is considered basic
doctrine and going beyond that is what is important for the spiritual
life. So we are going to spend some time understanding the doctrine of
baptisms.
This is the plural of the
noun. It is the genitive of the noun baptizmos. It is the teaching related to baptisms.
I have noticed that there is a lack
of courage among most Bible translators. The New American Standard translates
baptizmos washings, instruction or teaching about washings. The New King James
Version transliterates the word baptism. But if you look at the ESV which
is a new translation that has just come out and the Holeman which is also a recent translation translate it washings. So you
avoid the whole debate about baptism if you translate baptizmos washings. Now you are somewhere else. Everybody is a coward
when it comes to this word.
The reason we even have the English
word baptism is because theological cowardice. Back in the early church,
back around the 3rd of 4th century, somewhere early on
they started sprinkling instead of immersing which is the main idea in the verb
baptizma. Then after Constantine got saved and made Christianity the
official religion of the Roman Empire and started merging church and state
eventually, it got to the point in many European countries that in order to be
a good citizen of the state you had to be a good member of the Roman Catholic
Church. Entry into the Roman Catholic Church was through baptism - infant
baptism. You were sprinkled as a child so it enters you not only into the
church but also the state. So you join the church and the state and you
have this church-state confusion so that your citizenship in the political
state is identified with your membership in the Roman Catholic Church.
If you come along and challenge the
Roman Catholic doctrine of baptism, it is a political statement as well. You
are committing an act of treason and tyranny. So it is the death penalty. This
is what happened. Later on for example in Zurich which was the
headquarters for one of the great reformers, Zwingli, when some of his students
came to the Baptist understanding that you don’t get baptized when you are an
infant because you haven’t made a decision to trust Christ and that it is only
valid if it is after you are saved, it was treated as political treason so the
death penalty was imposed, which ironically was drowning. So they took
them down into the lake there in Zurich and drowned them. So you have all
of these wonderful things that go on.
So when they started translating the
Bible from Latin into English you have this political-theological football of
baptism. If you translate it dipping or immersing you have taken sides in
the theological debate and you might be considered a traitor politically so
let’s avoid the whole thing and transliterate it. Instead of translating
it from baptism into immersion we are going to create a new English word,
baptism. It is just as ambiguous and nebulous as the original. Everybody
will be confused and we will avoid the whole issue. So historically
translators have taken cowardly positions like this a number of times to avoid
the issue. That is what they have done here in many of the translations,
translating it washings.
So we are going to look at the
introduction to baptism here and we won’t get through everything. We will
cover it more when I get back.
The Greek word is baptizo. The noun is baptizmos. It means to dip, to plunge or
immerse. That is its core meaning. But it has a significance that is
different from that. The significance is that of change. It indicated
that. You can go back and trace this through classical literature and many
different examples. It is used through Classical Greek. All kinds of
different people were baptized. Socrates was baptized. Plato was
baptized. Aristotle was baptized. Alexander the Great was
baptized. Everybody was baptized but it doesn’t always mean that they were
immersed in water. It is some sort of initiation or change is taking place
such as hot metal is baptized and becomes cold metal. Or, a young soldier
a Greek Hoplite in the Greek army after he finished training would take his
spear and dip it into a bucket of pig’s blood and that would identify it with
the blood indicating that there was a change. Now he was entering into the
warrior class. He was a blooded soldier. He had finished his basic
training.
This is the idea of baptism. The
dictionary meaning is to dip, plunge or immerse. Its significance is
usually that of identification of a change or an initiation, the beginning of a
new phase. A change has taken place with the object or the person or
event. So they are moving from one thing to another. So that is the
main idea of baptism. So in the Bible there are various different
baptisms. In fact there are 8 different baptisms in the Scripture. They
are all representative identifications. Three of them are ritual
baptisms. That means if you do the math that five of them are real
baptisms.
The three ritual baptisms all
involve water. A couple of the other ones involve water also but in a
different sense.
A lot of people don’t realize it, but a lot of
the faculty at Dallas Theological Seminary in the early years and even up into
the 70’s were ordained Presbyterians. I had Dr. Ed XXX for
history. He baptized (sprinkled) all of his children. Ed Bloom who
was one time the pastor of here also sprinkled. Dr. Walvoord sprinkled his
children. Back in the 40’s he was the pastor of a Northwest Presbyterian
Church in Fort Worth. There were a lot of Presbyterian influences
there. He was wrong about that. You can’t get sprinkling out of
baptism. This was John’s baptism.
That is done immediately. Water baptism
for the believer was a visual representation of what took place in terms of the
baptism of the Holy Spirit. Baptism of the Holy Spirit and positional
truth (just the name positional truth) are such abstract terms that some people
don’t understand them. Just as communion gives us these two elements, the
unleavened bread and grape juice or wine to picture the person and the work of
the Lord Jesus Christ, so we have a real simple training aid for sheep. Remember
that sheep are sheep not because they are warm and cute and cuddly. They
are dumb and stupid. Being a sheep is not a compliment. We have this
simple little training aids so that we can come to understand these important
complex things. So believer’s baptism was pictured in water baptism.
It is a picture of what happens to every
believer at the instant of salvation that they are identified with Christ in
His death, burial, and resurrection so that we are cleansed from sin
positionally and enter into a newness of life. Romans 6:3
Those are the three ritual
baptisms.
There are 4 dry baptisms.
NKJ 1 Peter 3:20 who formerly were disobedient, when once the Divine
longsuffering waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight souls,
were saved through water.
NKJ 1 Peter 3:21 There is also an antitype which now saves us --
baptism (not the removal of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good
conscience toward God), through the resurrection of Jesus Christ,
The eight folks on the ark didn’t
get wet; but they got saved. Everybody else got wet.
We will have to spend a little time
on this verse. It is not saying that you are saved by water baptism. Remember
the people who got wet with Noah died. They all drown. But it is a type.
The word that is used there is antitupos. What happens with Noah is the anti-type. It
is the type and baptism is the anti-type. So it is a picture once again of
the baptism of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament. We will tear that
apart and look at it because it is one of those things that everybody always
wonders about.
Peter makes it clear right there in
the appositional phrase “not the removal of dirt from the flesh”. It is not
water baptism that saves you which is what Church of Christ teaches you and a
number of others.
So we will go through these passages
on baptism and take a look at baptism and the significance and importance of
baptism in the Church Age when I get back from Israel in about 3 weeks.
Let us bow our heads in closing prayer.