If you don’t like the only God there is, you can always make up your own and believe in him or her. What do you think?  I mean, you can do that, just like you can wait in line for an invisible ride at the amusement park, hoping to ride it.   You say, “No one does that.”  Most people do that with God. They shape a god in their minds to fit their desires.  Religions or churches encourage this too.  People fill up buildings to and for a god that doesn’t exist.  There is a point when actual God dips below His actual identity in people’s imagination, so that He isn’t God anymore.

Let’s say a very strong, large, tough man in an official uniform, because he’s in authority, tells you that you’ve got to eat two fried eggs and two slices of whole wheat, buttered toast every morning, or he’ll plaster you in the nose with his fist.  In your mind, he doesn’t exist, so you eat oatmeal instead.  I guess he was real, as seen in your broken, bleeding nose.  The next morning you try two pieces of fruit and then welcome his fist again.  It doesn’t seem you can just wish him away.  He’s real.  The next morning it is two fried eggs and two slices of whole wheat, buttered toast, no fist in your nose either.

Your thoughts and the acknowledgement and belief about God must portend with reality.  You can’t imagine Him to be who you want Him to be and then count a response to Him as God to count as one.  God has to be God.

People worship the God of their imagination.  For Him to be God, the imagination must be shaped by and then conform to the truth.  If not, He isn’t Him.  You can say you are worshiping Him, but you are not.  You can say He will save you, and He won’t.  You can say that you are safe from God’s judgment, but you are not.  You can say that you are waiting for a ride at the amusement park, but it must exist for you to do that.

The nation Israel started off with God, or what we could call the One, True God.  There is only One, so someone can just call Him God.  God revealed Himself. After awhile, in general Israel didn’t like their God, Who was the only God.  Even though there isn’t another one, they wanted another one, or at least the One they had, the true One, to be different than Who He actually was.  They began worshiping their God like one of the other ones, which were gods of their roundabout neighbors.

By the time we get to Jesus in the gospels, the Samaritans, who were partly Jewish, were worshiping a god about which Jesus said in John 4:22, “Ye worship ye know not what.”  Later, when the Apostle Paul wrote to the Romans, you could say that they were in a similar circumstance, when he told the Jews there in the audience in Romans 10:2, “For I bear them record that they have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge.”  At Corinth, the imagination of Jesus had been so distorted, that Paul wrote professing believers there in 1 Corinthians 12:3, claiming to be “speaking by the Spirit of God,” “calleth Jesus accursed.”  In their ecstatic state, they thought that true about Jesus, and accused the Holy Spirit of revealing that lie to them about Jesus as well.

The nation Israel started with the right knowledge, but that knowledge became distorted as Israelites, Jews, began to conform God in their minds to their own desires.  They would match up to God in their own righteousness, so His righteousness must be something where theirs could do that.  They diminished God’s righteousness with the thought that He would see theirs as acceptable.  They wouldn’t have to submit to the righteousness of the new god of their imagination.  They could establish their own righteousness as good enough and be saved by works.  God wasn’t God anymore in their imagination.  The god that replaces God is an idol.  They are worshiping an idol, an idol that accepts their behavior, which is less than what actual God accepts.

Most people have a different god today with whom they are satisfied with.  They serve him in their own way.  They obey him like they like to obey.  He saves them like they want to be saved.  He’s not real.  In the end, the one, only True God will give them the equivalent of the metaphorical fist in the nose of the above illustration in paragraph two.  They’ll know Who He is right at that moment, but it will be too late.

If we can’t take the only God at His Word, we won’t believe in Him.  When we won’t or can’t believe, we won’t or can’t be saved.  God has to be God.

Part One (I and I’m sure many others are hopeful that Douglas Wilson’s son, Nate, a many published author and married father of a few children, will recover well from the removal of a brain tumor this week.)

The point of my first post was not to isolate the single issue of optic hair coloring, whether men or women.  It is that scripture doesn’t say, “Thou shalt not dye thy hair with iridescent hues.”  There are great number of prohibitive activities the Bible doesn’t prohibit.  God’s Word is intended to be applied.  Men are supposed to live it, because it can be lived.  Being lived requires application.

Separatists for awhile have been applying scripture to such things as dress.  The Bible teaches on dress.  Scripture is sufficient for every area of life.  On many areas that Christians applied scripture through history, evangelicals stopped applying, especially in areas of what has been called personal separation, which relate to worldliness.  For believers to worship God, that is, “present [their] bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God (Rom 12:1), they must obey two imperatives, commands, in Romans 12:2, “be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

“Conformed” is external and “transformed” is external.  Both look like something that has to be judged, and the assumption is that believers can judge and should judge.  “Conformed” (suschematizo) comes from a word of which BDAG says, “to conform to a pattern or mold,” and this is how the English word “schematic” functions.  “World” is not kosmos, but aion, which here has the understanding of “the spirit of this age,” parallel with the German and colloquial, zeitgeist, meaning, “the dominant set of ideals and beliefs that motivate the actions of the members of a society in a particular period in time.”

The word “transformed” (metamorphao) comes from a Greek word that is the basis for the English word, metamorphosis.  Metamorphosis is external, like what we see when a caterpillar turns into a butterfly, which is radical difference.  You can really, really tell a difference when something is transformed, and it affects what you see.

In the last part of Romans 12:2, Paul writes, “that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”  “Prove” is the Greek word, dokimazo, which is the word used for testing metals.  Everything in this present world, this system, needs to be tested as a Christian according to scripture.  The “renewing of the mind” that transforms the believer on the outside comes from hearing, understanding, and meditating upon the Word of God.

God expects us to test things in the world according to scriptural thinking.  The standard is the good, acceptable, and perfect will of God.  The world shouldn’t be setting the pace for believers, even if they insist that it’s innocent.  Believers of the past could easily judge pink hair on men or whatever number of unnatural technicolor hair pigmentation on women.  It wouldn’t have even happened.  If it did, it would have been an easy call for people of most ages.  This present age is different. Why?

The abandonment of discernment, the unwillingness to judge itself, for evangelicals has followed the spirit of the age, which is one of toleration.  People don’t want to be judged.  They want to fit in with the world.  They don’t like sticking out.  I understand the pink hair sticks out anywhere, but not really in the world anymore.  Evangelicals have amped up, brought the juice, to professing Christians conforming to the world, but it isn’t new.  The prophet Zephaniah in the Old Testament book by its name writes in 1:8:

And it shall come to pass in the day of the LORD’S sacrifice, that I will punish the princes, and the king’s children, and all such as are clothed with strange apparel.

Vincent Alsop was an English nonconformist preacher, who preached and wrote, The Sinfulness of Strange Apparel.  I recognize that pink hair is strange from a certain meaning of strange, or maybe we should say that it should be strange everywhere.  However, strange would go right along with worldly.  It is technically “foreign,” but strange apparel was to dress like ungodly pagans.  You can see in the verse that was very serious to God.  He would punish His people for clothing with strange apparel.  Romans 12:2 is akin to that — I don’t think they are different.  If God is going to punish people for their dress (not just their attitude about clothing), then leaders should be warning them about it too, out of love.

God wants application of scripture to such things as dress.  He wants pastors, church leaders, to say certain dress is wrong.  There doesn’t have to be a verse about an unusual earlobe piercing that stretches the cartilage beyond comprehension.  You know it’s wrong and you should say something about it, because God doesn’t want it.  The pastoral epistles talk about dress.  Pastors are supposed to teach on it, exhort, rebuke, and discipline people.  It matters.

If someone who calls himself a Christian wears a type of very bright pink hair, he’s not representing Jesus Christ.  Like Paul mentions in Titus 2:10, “adorn[ing] the doctrine of God our Saviour in all things.”  The word “adorn” isn’t intended as a dress word, but it doesn’t exclude it either.  The Greek word is kosmeo, like cosmetics, which is about appearance.  Our appearance should fit scripture, not the world.  It reminds me of the part of 1 Corinthians 13 in a description of love, that love “doth not behave itself unseemly.”  That English translates a Greek word has the same root as “conformed” in Romans 12:2. BDAG says concerning this form of the word:

[R]efers to something that has a pattern or form, frequently of a type that the public considers standard or laudable; to act contary to the standard.

Love doesn’t act contrary to a pattern or form that the public considers standard or laudable.  The world might wear pink hair, but it isn’t standard or laudable.

The person wearing the optic pink hair is drawing the wrong kind of attention to himself, male or female.  His thinking is wrong.  It isn’t scripture.  There is something wrong with this person that is manifesting itself with the hair coloration.

If someone confronts the pink haired person, and he isn’t interested in listening to the counsel, this wouldn’t surprise me.  This is a person who is contrary to a standard.  Like the apostate of 2 Peter 2, Peter describes in v. 10:

But chiefly them that walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness, and despise government. Presumptuous are they, selfwilled, they are not afraid to speak evil of dignities.

If someone won’t take counsel to change his hair color from the oddity that it is, he also has a problem with authority.  The church should do something about this kind of violation of the application of scripture.  It is factious behavior, the kind that Titus 3:10-11 talks about that is to be warned and then separated from.

To Be Continued

1 John 2:19 reads:

They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us.

Jesus and the Apostles, the New Testament authors, treat the Old Testament with authority and as having one meaning.  They do not treat scripture with any degree of interpretative latitude.  They also make certain application, applying the Bible with complete certitude.  God means one thing.  Then He doesn’t deny Himself.

The interpretation and application of scripture fits the reality of the world.  There is only one version of what has occurred from the beginning of creation until now, not two.  You don’t get to have reality be whatever you want it.  It really is what it is.  Only what it is.

People can have their own reality, their own interpretation, and their own application.  It’s all very flexible.  What’s certain is that people don’t want to be certain.  Uncertainty is the enemy of authority.  “I’m not sure” is a convenient excuse.

From the date of the founding of the Jamestown colony until now, there was a point in at least United States history where philosophy or belief and practice took a turn toward diminished confidence in applying the Bible to life and culture.  I’m not saying that nothing was unsettled in people’s minds.  That characterizes a sin-cursed world.  There will be doubt in a sin-cursed world.

Premodern thinking, however, saw truth, goodness, and beauty as certain.  The standard was an unwavering, single-minded, solid, stable vision.  God created a world, breathed a Word for that world, and fashioned a man to live in it.  Man could understand the world through the Word which He inspired for faith and practice.  It could be understood, known, believed, applied, lived, and practiced by faith.

Fear and repulsion of applying scripture always existed, but greatly multiplied with modernism.  The world opposes God’s Word.  With application comes scorn and persecution.  The nature of the flesh is to do what it wants to do.

We arrive today at music, dress, entertainment, and recreation, and believers can’t or better won’t apply the Bible like days past.  They don’t have the confidence, which starts with their uneasiness with scripture itself.  Rock music, as an example, could never have been contemplated for worship.  Now the Bible can’t be applied there.  If you do, you’re now considered adding to scripture or reading into it something it doesn’t say.  You can’t apply the Bible to music.  You can’t give any objective standard for dress.

God is not being honored because scripture is not being applied.  It isn’t being lived.  When it isn’t applied, it is being disobeyed.  God isn’t being loved.

Part One   Part Two   Part Three   Part Four   Part Five

Kevin Bauder begins the next section, entitled, “Alien Immersion and Rebaptism,” with the sentence, “Landmark Baptists insist that a proper administrator is essential for valid baptism.”  He sets up a strawman by saying that proper administrator means “the succession of baptisms that leads back to John the Baptist.”  Graves himself denies that definition.  Maybe there are churches and pastors today who say that’s a requirement.  I’m still saying I’ve never met one.  If they do believe that, they didn’t get it from Graves, because he wasn’t saying that.

What I say, which is essentially what Graves said, and what I know other men say, who are local only in their ecclesiology, is that proper authority or a proper administrator is needed to be valid baptism. Bauder starts the next paragraph with the statement, “All Baptists agree that invalid baptism is not genuine baptism at all.”  Bauder himself writes that baptism must be valid.  However, when he discusses valid baptism, he does not include proper authority.

Bauder doesn’t write this, but his universal church theory has a lot to do with acceptance of a baptism regardless of authority.  If the true church is the universal church, then someone out there can operate as a free agent without submitting to any church.  Someone could just starting baptizing people without any authorization, because he could claim that he was getting it directly from Jesus in a spiritual way.  This is not modeled in the New Testament.

Let’s for a moment for the sake of this discussion argue from the standpoint that authority or proper administrator don’t mean the ability to trace church succession back to the Jerusalem church.  On many occasions here I’ve written about proper authority.  It’s obvious that authority matters in the New Testament.  Jesus gave keys to Peter in Matthew 16.  Each of the seven messengers, what are pastors, in Revelation 2 and 3, are in Jesus’ right hand of authority.  Churches can bind and loose on earth and, therefore, in heaven.  Jesus speaks about possessing all authority when He mandates the Great Commission.

There is authority.  What is disobedience?  It is not obeying authority.  When John baptized, he baptized with authority.  The gospels make a big deal about his getting his authority to baptize from heaven.  Jesus traveled 75 miles or so to go to John to be baptized by someone who had authority.

Some of what I’m writing about here relates to the authority of scripture.  Are we regulated by scripture?  Are we regulated by biblical example?  If the New Testament speaks about how things are done, then we should assume that is how things are to be done.  When worship was and has been violated, men laid out the regulative principle of worship.  We know that methods should be regulated by scripture too.  Paul said that preaching was God’s ordained method for the gospel or salvation. Other means are not to be used.

The ordinance of baptism was given to the church.  The church has the authority to baptize.  It must be a church.  What is often called a church can dip below the standard of being a church.  When a church becomes apostate, it loses its authority.  Jesus isn’t welcome there any more.  The candlestick has gone out, the glory is departed.

Baptist churches have believed and believe that only Baptist churches today have divine authority.  I often call this “horizontal authority.”  The Bible remains an authority always in this world, what I call “vertical authority.”  A pastor, for instance, we see in a church has authority.  He can rebuke, like Paul told Titus, “with all authority” (Titus 2:15).  Hebrews 13:17 says, “obey them that have the rule over you.”  Pastors have rule.  That is horizontal authority.

It is not a matter of checking out to see if the baptisms are chain link.  It’s looking to see if someone has been baptized by a church.  The church must have authority.  Roman Catholicism has no authority.  It is apostate.  Protestant churches came out of Roman Catholicism, so they don’t have authority either.  What does that leave you with?  Baptisms must come from Baptist churches.  I look to see if a church was started by another church.  I’m suspect if it isn’t a Baptist church.  This is just following the example of scripture, being regulated by scripture, understanding how authority operates.  Scripture says authority is necessary.

When you read Graves, his concern was that Baptist churches had accepted Presbyterian baptism and Campbellite baptism.  A man sprinkled as an infant baptized someone, so the man baptizing wasn’t baptized.  He doesn’t have authority to baptize if he isn’t baptized.  I’m not going to explain the Campbellite, because that should be obvious.

Bauder spends an entire paragraph explaining how that baptizing someone a “second time,” rebaptism, confuses the gospel, like portraying a picture that someone lost his salvation.  He says it is heresy and sin to rebaptize, just because of alien immersion. The paragraph is an ignorant one.  It’s hard to see how that he could have been serious.  I believe he was, but it’s difficult.  It is rather simple if he spent a few moments, it would seem.  See, Bauder himself thinks that some baptisms are not valid.

To Bauder, baptisms are not valid if they are the wrong mode, recipient, or meaning.  So what would he do with those invalid baptisms?  Would he rebaptize?  Yes, he would.  Or else, he would say, like I would, a person wasn’t baptized in the first place.  It isn’t baptism if it is sprinkling.  It isn’t baptism if a person wasn’t saved.  Someone makes a profession as a small child, is baptized, later understands it was not a true profession, so this person is truly converted, and then is baptized.  He was never baptized in the first place.  It isn’t a “second baptism” to Bauder because the first one wasn’t valid.

Like Bauder believes baptisms are not valid, we believe that authority is another scriptural qualification for baptism.  The Bible teaches this.  Bauder leaves it out.  He doesn’t give good reason for leaving it out, because he doesn’t deal with the scriptural basis of authority, debunking that at all. He doesn’t get into the history either.  He relies pretty much on conventional wisdom and his own opinion, what I call, seat of the pants.  I could say that he is sinning by leaving it out.  He should stop sinning.  He is disobedient to the example of scripture.  Jesus went to authority.  Jesus gave authority to the church to baptize.

Bauder is selective or just loose about authority.  This is being disrespectful to God, to the Bible, and to the church.  It is careless with something really important.  I get why people don’t like authority. They like to free float and do their own thing without accountability. I get it.  Someone can behave in a more ecumenical fashion, to make people who teach and practice false doctrine to feel accepted, because he accepts their baptism.  It’s just sentimentalism.  It isn’t loving.  It’s also very confusing, because it devalues actual baptism.  Yes, I’m telling you what I really think (except it’s actually a little more harsh than this).

A person not baptized with proper authority is not baptized.  This was around before Graves and the 19th century.  Consider the 1689 London Baptist Confession:

Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are ordinances of positive and sovereign institution, appointed by the Lord Jesus, the only lawgiver, to be continued in his church to the end of the world. These holy appointments are to be administered by those only who are qualified and thereunto called, according to the commission of Christ.

Then consider the first Baptist confession in the American colonies, the Philadelphia Baptist Confession in 1742:

1. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are ordinances of positive and sovereign institution, appointed by the Lord Jesus, the only lawgiver, to be continued in his church to the end of the world.  (Matt. 28:19, 20; 1 Cor. 11;26)  2. These holy appointments are to be administered by those only who are qualified and thereunto called, according to the commission of Christ.  (Matt. 28:19; 1 Cor. 4:1)

I can give a lot more historical evidence.  It’s all over the place.  When Bauder says that Baptists accept irregular baptism, that’s a newer concept, that comes after modernism began really taking its way in the world.  His position is not the historical position.  It’s the new one, the one that fits well with a universal church belief that is more concerned with getting along with more people, even with doctrinal and practical differences.

More to Come

When I talk to most others about our church, I characterize it with the Lord Jesus Christ, His identity. We deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow Jesus.  I might explain the Trinity.  I could talk about a Christian worldview, where God is separate from and not part of His creation.  The world has been ruined by sin, but redemption is found in Jesus Christ and our lives and future are wrapped up in Him.  God is loving, but He is also holy and just, and sin must be punished.  Jesus died for us.  We can’t be saved by works, but through faith in Christ.

Our church has unity around the truth.  We love God and we love our neighbor.  We want to obey the Great Commission, making disciples, true worshipers of God.  We are a congregational form of church government with authoritative, not authoritarian leadership, building up the people in the faith through careful exposition of scripture.  The pastor leads, feeds, and protects.  We are historic Baptists.  We believe in the sufficiency of the Word of God. Those are what characterize our church, how our church could be described.