Welcome back to Seamus Popery. I'm Joe Heschmire, and I want to try to convince you today of something,

namely that baptism does something, maybe more than you realize it does, and that this is very clear

from Scripture. And it's clear from the Old Testament, it's clear from the New Testament,

and as we're going to see at the very end, it's also clear from the universal witness of the earliest Christians.

In answering this, I want to respond to a question I was asked recently over on Patreon.

A guy actually wrote on behalf of his wife, who asked the following,

If baptism is part of salvation, please explain the specific role that baptism plays in salvation.

I believe that because my faith has saved me, I submit to baptism.

This, by the way, is a very common view that we get baptized because we are saved.

Baptism doesn't save us in any way.

But then she explains.

To say that baptism saves me is saying, I play a part in my own

salvation. I believe Jesus did it wholly. He said, it is finished. He said, if there be any

other way, let this cup pass from me. So again, I think this is a pretty standard view, and I think it makes a lot of sense. If you say,

look, salvation is by faith alone,

not by any works, and you'd say baptism looks like a work, then it doesn't seem like

baptism can have any role to play in the salvation process. But I want to throw two flags on the

play. I want to just sound two warning signs or alarms, right? The first one is the word baptism and the noun form of baptism or in the verb form to baptize appears something like 98 times in the New Testament. I may have missed some. I'm going off of concordances there. So it's mentioned a lot. And yet,

when people argue that baptism doesn't do anything, almost invariably, they point to text

that don't mention baptism at all. Christ in the garden saying, this cup can pass from me,

or Christ on the cross saying it is finished.

And so if you've got something like 98 different verses explicitly about baptism and you want to understand baptism and you're going to the verses that don't mention baptism, that's weird, right?

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