Careless ninks you make a Bible podcast.

Welcome back to the Naked Bible podcast. In this episode we want to continue with our

series on problem passages related to baptism. Today we'll be talking about Acts 2

38. This verse appears after Peter's sermon on the day of Pentecost. Right after

he's just charged the Jews listening with putting Jesus the Messiah to death. The audience is

understandably grief-stricken over what they've done and so we read beginning in verse 37.

Now when they had heard this they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the

apostles, brothers what shall we do? And Peter said to them, repent and be baptized every one of you

in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins and you will receive the gift of

the Holy Spirit. Now the controversial part is verse 38, repent and be baptized every one of you

in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. Are we to take that wording as

indicating that baptism confers the forgiveness of sins? There are a few things to consider before

drawing that conclusion. Features of the text and the wider context of the book of Acts that are

too frequently ignored with respect to this verse. First, the verse is really only controversial if

one commits the blunder of divorcing the command to be baptized from the prior command to repent.

Infants cannot repent and as we've seen in earlier podcasts, there's no precedent for the idea

that parents can believe for children or that anyone can believe for anyone else so that the

result is salvation for that person who didn't believe in their own heart. So that much is transparent

and this verse, whatever it might mean, therefore offers no support for the idea of baptismal

regeneration of infants. We need only ask the question if that's what circumcision accomplished

for infants to demolish the whole idea, observing the analogous connection that Paul draws between

circumcision and baptism in Colossians 2, 11 and 12, that we've spent so much time on in earlier

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