Baptism HS & Tongues:  Selected Verses

When the apostle John is opening his introduction after finishing the first 18 verses he goes directly to the ministry of John the Baptist. Why do all of the Gospels start with the ministry of John the Baptist? We must understand the Old Testament. One of the tragedies of the day is that very, very few Christians understand the Old Testament very well. It provides the backdrop for understanding the New Testament. In the Old Testament the pattern was set. There was a prophet, for example, in the history of Israel. The nation decided it wanted a king so the prophet Samuel went to the Lord and said they wanted a king, they have rejected me. The Lord said no, they have rejected Me, but I have a man and you will go and anoint that man. The word in the Hebrew for anoint is mashiach, which where we get our English transliteration “Messiah.” The king was always anointed. The beginning of his reign was when he was anointed by a prophet; the prophet preceded the king. John the Baptist was the last in the line of Old Testament prophets and he precedes the King of kings and Lord of lords. So we start with John the Baptist because he fits the pattern that has been established by God throughout human history, that the prophet is the one who anoints the king. The act of setting apart Jesus Christ for His public ministry is done by John the Baptist in His baptism of Jesus at the river Jordan, and this is the backdrop of the next few verses.

John 1:29 ^NASB “The next day he saw Jesus coming to him and said, ‘Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!’”

John 1:30 ^NASB “This is He on behalf of whom I said, ‘After me comes a Man who has a higher rank than I, for He existed before me.” This is the third time that John the apostle has told us that John the Baptist said that Jesus had a higher rank than him. You’d think he was trying to make a point: that John the Baptist was simply the forerunner, he was not someone to be worshipped. [31] I did not recognize Him, but so that He might be manifested to Israel, I came baptizing in water’. [32] John testified saying, ‘I have seen the Spirit descending as a dove out of heaven, and He remained upon Him. [33] I did not recognize Him, but He who sent me to baptize in water said to me, ‘He upon whom you see the Spirit descending and remaining upon Him, this is the One who baptizes in the Holy Spirit. [34] I myself have seen, and have testified that this is the Son of God’.”

There are a number of things that we have to understand as backdrop to this passage. We must understand our chronology. We have noted four days in the life of John the Baptist. Then there are two days of travel, and if we look at chapter two verse 1 is says: “On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there.” This wedding was on a Wednesday, according the Mishnah. On this Friday Jesus comes along down to the Jordan where John is baptizing., and John says, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” Then John talks about how he beheld. Notice the verb, it is a past tense; it is not the episode of John’s baptizing Jesus, that has already occurred and is covered in detail in the synoptic Gospels. (The are called the synoptics because they are synonymous, the cover roughly the same thing and approach the life of Christ in approximately the same way.) What happens is that Jesus comes down and John is baptized in the river Jordan and then is immediately led away into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit where He goes through forty days and nights of fasting and then testing. When He returns He returns to John at the Jordan on this Friday from His wilderness testing. This also fits the Old Testament pattern. The king would be an objective test, verification and validation that God indeed had anointed and chosen this man as king. This was clear in the case of David. He was anointed by Samuel, nothing happened for a while and then he meets Goliath to exemplify his responsibility and to defeat the enemies of Israel.

The backdrop is a very important doctrine, and that is the doctrine of baptism. There are eight different baptisms in the Bible and only three of the baptisms involve water. So baptism doesn’t have to do necessarily with immersion. The English word “baptise” is a direct transliteration of the Greek word baptizo [baptizw]. It means to dip, plunge or immerse. By the time they began translating the Bible in the Middle Ages—Wicliffe, Tyndale and others, leading up to the King James Bible—they had been practicing infant baptism and sprinkling as a form of baptism for a thousand years or more. Because if the identification of church and state the church had become so closely connected with citizenship and the state that if you challenged the form of baptism you were also making a political statement, and so when the Anabaptists (meaning second baptizers; these were the first Baptists that came out of the Protestant Reformation) saw the fact that in the Bible it taught believer’s baptism, that you were not to be baptised until after you made a profession of faith. When you said you believed in Christ alone for salvation then you would be baptised. Some departed from Zwingli’s Bible classes and affirmed immersion. As a result they were all drowned because that was also viewed as a political statement. Nobody had the theological nerve to translate the word because if they did it would create a tremendous furore, so they just transliterated it and stuck with the word baptism. It meant to plunge or immerse. It has a significance, though, which goes beyond its basic meaning, and that is that it often signified identification. So there was usually some kind of immersion of one thing into another to symbolize the first thing’s identification with the second. The word has a rich history in Greek literature which goes back to the fifth century BC. Xenophon in the 4^th century described how new recruits in the Spartan army dipped their spears in the blood of pigs before going into battle. This identified the spear with the pig’s blood; it was inaugurating it into military action, changing it from just a spear to a warrior’s spear. Euripides in the 5^th century BC used the word to describe a sinking ship. As the ship sank the character or the nature of the ship was changed, it now to be identified with the water itself, it no longer floated above the water, it became one with the water. So its significance beyond its basic meaning of dipping, plunging or immersion was to connote identification.

There are two categories of baptism in Scripture. The first is ritual baptism, the second is real baptism. In ritual baptism the effect is symbolic and water is used. There are three ritual baptisms: a) the baptism of Jesus, a unique baptism. John the Baptist baptised Jesus in the river John, but remember John’s message was repent, change your mind. The Greek word “repent” is metanoeo [metanoew] which means simply to change your thinking, to think differently about things. What John was calling the Israelites to do was to change their minds, their thinking, about God and conform to His wishes and signify that by baptism. So they were confessing their sins and coming to the river Jordan, so sins were associated with John’s baptism. But Jesus was not a sinner. The baptism of Jesus was a unique baptism that established His ministry. It inaugurated His ministry and identified the incarnate Christ with God the Father’s plan for Him to go to the cross and to be judged as a substitute for the sins of the world, Matthew 3:13-17; b) The second baptism was the baptism of John the Baptist in which the individual placed in the water was identified with the coming kingdom of God. What was his message? “Repent, the kingdom of God is at hand.” This baptism was unique to John and to his ministry. This is found in Matthew 3:1-11; c) The third ritual baptism is the baptism of believer’s, where the new believer in affirmation of his faith in Jesus Christ alone is immersed in water. This is symbolic of the fact that the believer has been identified with Jesus Christ in His spiritual death on the cross, His burial and His resurrection. This is known as retroactive positional truth, going back into the past. We are identified in the past with what took place 2000 years ago when Christ died spiritually on the cross, died physically on the cross, was buried and rose again. So water baptism symbolizes what has taken place in the spiritual realm, which is the baptism of the Holy Spirit. These three ritual baptisms are all wet. They involve four factors: 1) the person who performs the baptism; 2) the element which provides the identification—water; 3) the person identified, the individual who is baptised; 4) there is a new status. He has been identified with something. With Jesus His status was His work as the Saviour inaugurating His ministry which led to the cross. For the recipients of John’s baptism the new status was the kingdom of God.

The first of the real baptism was Noah’s baptism. 1 Peter 3:20, 21 ^NASB “who once were disobedient, when the patience of God kept waiting in the days of Noah, during the construction of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through {the} water. Corresponding to that, baptism now saves you—not the removal of dirt from the flesh, but an appeal to God for a good conscience—through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” In interpreting Scripture we must always look at the context. “A text without a context is a pretext.” Many people teach wrong things because they just rip Scripture right out of its context. The context is talking about salvation, v. 18: “For Christ also died for sins once for all, {the} just for {the} unjust, so that He might bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit.” Then Peter is going to tell us a little bit about what has happened after the crucifixion and before the resurrection, v. 19: “in which [in the Spirit] also He went and made proclamation to the spirits {now} in prison.” These are angels in prison. Who are these angels in prison? These were “sons of God,” fallen angels, in Genesis chapter six who were punished by incarceration in Tartarus. Judgment always precedes grace, so the judgment here is going to be accomplished through water. Water is not the element of Noah’s baptism, it is the instrument of judgment, not the element of baptism. Who is saved? Eight people in a box (which is what ark literally means). They are the one who are identified with Noah, with the ark, and they are the ones who are saved, save in a new state which is the new world.

The translation of verse 21 starts of with the relative particle ho [o(], and it is a nominative neuter. Normally that goes back to the closest noun to it that is in the neuter case. A relative has to agree number, case and gender with its reference. The preceding neuter here is water, but water is not what they are identified with. This is why this passage gets so tough, you have to have some kind of theological grasp of what is happening here or you will totally misconstrue the whole passage. It starts off with this word “which,” and this cannot refer simply to water and there are a number of cases where you have to use a neuter because it refers to a whole episode, a whole clause. That is what it is doing, if refers to the whole eight people being brought safely through the water. Then the next word in the Greek is kai [kai] which is translated “also,” and then antitupon [a)ntitupon] made up of two words: anti, the prefix, and tupon—type and antitype. This a classic case of a type which is a foreshadowing, a model, an example. Noah’s ark is a model of our salvation. Just as the eight people in the ark were saved in the midst of judgment so every believer who is in Jesus Christ will be saved in judgment. The type is the example and the antitype is what it stands for. By translating this as in the NASB, “corresponding,” we lose the whole concept here of type and antitype which is Peter’s whole point. So we can’t understand this from the English at all.

Then the next word is baptism, also in the nominative case, and the phrase “now (in the church age) save.” We have to make sense of that in the English, and the best way to do that is to say: “Which also an antitype, baptism, now saves.” The subject of the word “save” is “antitype” of the baptism that now saves, the antitype of what took place in the ark. So the ark is the type, the example, of what saves, and what saves is called a baptism. So if what saves is a baptism then what happened with Noah must also be a baptism, an identification. So there is an identification that those who were placed in the ark are saved. The analogy is that those who are placed in Christ are the ones who are saved. This is referring to the baptism by means of the Holy Spirit, that every single believer at the moment he puts his faith in Jesus Christ is placed in union with Christ, identified with His death, burial and resurrection.

Peter wrote this at the very beginning of the church age in the apostolic age, so the “now” here must refer to the church age as opposed to any preceding age. Secondly, Peter had heard Jesus announce that the baptism of Spirit was future. Church age; very beginning: inauguration of Christ’s ministry, John the Baptist says there is one coming, future tense, who will baptise with the Holy Spirit. Jesus goes to the cross, and in His instructions to the disciples prior to His ascension into heaven He says the baptism of the Holy Spirit is yet future. Peter is talking sometime about 60 AD and he says it is a done deal; it has happened by now; we have received it. Peter declared that this prophecy, the prophecy of the coming of the Holy Spirit was fulfilled on the day of Pentecost. He does that in his Pentecost sermon in Acts chapter 2, and then 11:15-17.

The baptism of the Spirit had never occurred prior to the day of Pentecost, it is something unique to this age. Never before in human history had the Holy Spirit ever performed anything like this. So the baptism of the Holy Spirit and the role of the Holy Spirit in the church age is unique and demonstrates that the Holy Spirit has a unique and vital role in relationship to the life of a believer. Peter, then, puts together the type (Noah’s ark) and the antitype (Jesus Christ) and uses the ark as a demonstration, an example, of what takes place with the baptism of the Holy Spirit at salvation. So what we learn that is so important from this is that the baptism of the Holy Spirit relates to salvation; not the spiritual life but to salvation. Another thing we learn from this is found in the next phrase: “Which also an antitype, baptism, now saves, not the removal of dirt from the flesh.” He is using a statement here that has two meanings. The first meaning is that it is not water; he is not talking about water baptism and immersion. It is not the removal of physical dirt from the outer skin. There is another nuance here, the flesh is often used to refer to the sin nature so he is also signifying that this is not the removal of the sin nature. What does Titus 3:5 say? “…not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit.” How did He save us? By the washing of regeneration—Notice the connection here. We are going to see that all these doctrines of salvation interconnect and overlap. The washing of regeneration takes place in the spiritual realm—and the renewal of the Holy Spirit. So right here we see this connection, that there is something that the Holy Spirit was involved in at salvation that is related to the cleansing function of the believer from all sin.

The second real baptism we will look at is in 1 Corinthians 10:1ff, the baptism of Moses. ^NASB “For I do not want you to be unaware, brethren, that our fathers were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea; [2] and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.” Water with Noah was judgment, it didn’t save anybody, it killed them all. Water here kills all the Egyptians, it doesn’t save anybody. It is a dry baptism because the Jews went through and were dry. All were baptised into Moses. In the Greek is the phrase eis [e)ij]; this is the new status. All were baptised into Moses, that is the new status. In John’s baptism they were going to be baptised into the kingdom. That is also indicated by an eis clause. So it is this eis clause that indicates that new status. In the cloud and in the see is represented by the preposition EN [e)n], and en can be translated in, with or by. So that indicates the element. They walked through the sea to the other side and that is the element that they were identified with into the new status of being with Moses.

The third real baptism goes beyond that, it is the baptism of fire. When John the Baptist announced Jesus’ coming he said one would come after him who would baptise by means of the Spirit and by means of fire, and there he uses that phrase en. The baptism of fire identifies all unbelievers who survive the Tribulation with fire. This is covered in Matthew 3”11, 12; Matthew 25:31-46; 2 Thessalonians 1:7-9; Revelation 19:11.

The fourth is the baptism of the cross where Jesus Christ was identified with our personal sins when He was judged for them as our substitute. Mark 10:38, 39.

The fifth real baptism is the baptism of the Holy Spirit, 1 Corinthians 12:13. We need to look at Matthew 3:11 ^NASB “As for me, I baptise you with water for repentance, but He who is coming after me is mightier than I, and I am not fit to remove His sandals; He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” Who is the subject of the verb? “I,” John the Baptist. Notice how the translator translated that “with water.” That is not what is says in the Greek. In the Greek it is the preposition en [e)n] plus the dative of hudor [u(dor]. Many times and most often this signifies means or instrumentality. That is what this is” “by means of water for [e)ij] repentance.” So when John announces this, Jesus Christ is the baptizer. Note 1 Corinthians 12:13 ^NASB “For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free, and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.” Paul says “By one Spirit we were all baptized.” What did Matthew says? “With one Spirit.” We recognize that the baptism of the Holy Spirit takes place at salvation but the way it is normally taught is that the Holy Spirit is the one who places the believer into Christ. Well, if I say the Holy Spirit places you into Christ who performs the action? The Holy Spirit. What did John the Baptist say? There is one who will come after me, he will baptise you by means of the Spirit. Who is performing the action? Jesus Christ, not the Holy Spirit.

In early part of the 20^th century in the battles with liberalism one of the battles was in the whole realm of Trinitarian theology. In the liberal view the Holy Spirit is just a sort of the Spirit of God who is not really a person, and so what they tended to do was make a fundamental error in the Greek because e)n plus the dative in instrument, not personal. It is also called impersonal agency. And they said they can’t use that, this can’t be impersonal agency when we are talking about the Holy Spirit because He is a person. Well they made a mistake. Impersonal agency has nothing to do with whether or not the person talked about is a person or not, it is a grammatical term. It doesn’t mean that the object of that phrase is not a person. So the fact that this is impersonal agency doesn’t say anything about whether or not the Holy Spirit is a person. That is not the point. If we have the situation where we have the instrument, the Holy Spirit, and here is you the brand new believer. Jesus Christ as the subject of the verb baptise reaches down and takes you up at the moment of faith alone in Christ alone and by means of the Holy Spirit places you in union (which is identification, retroactive positional truth) with Christ, identifying you with His death, burial and resurrection. In the process you are cleansed, in the process a human spirit is created and imputed to you at that moment, and you are regenerated. This is how they all fit together. The Holy Spirit is involved in terms of the baptism as the means by which God cleanses you and puts you from a status of unregenerate carnality into the status of identification (positional truth) where you are positionally clean and without sin. That is the baptism by means of the Holy Spirit. And it occurs only once; there are not two baptisms. The Greek is clear. Every time it says by means of, it never says the Holy Spirit does it. The prophecy was that Jesus would do it. What signifies the baptism of the Holy Spirit? Nothing. How do you know it? It is not experiential. The only way you know it has happened is by studying the Word and the Bible tells you this is what happened. It is not signified by speaking in tongues or anything else.