BAPTISM NO. 2

^[p. 54] BAPTISM NO. 2

First let me tell you that if you are looking for authority or ground for faith in the faith of another you will surely miss it, though you may find, and you will find, confirmation for your faith in the way the one who has like faith has acted, and has learned of God. You (every one) ought to see the divine mind first about any point, and that is faith, derived from no circumstances or example though afterwards it is often corroborated by both. Baptism is the expression of the end of the first Adam in the death of Christ. A believing parent holds this truth without limitation or qualification, and the one who enters by faith into this great fact would shrink from being the parent of the first-Adam-being, if he could not avow before God that he does not recognise its existence (morally) in Adam, but that he can place it before God as an existence gone in the death of Christ, even as through grace he has found himself to be gone there. Dreadful if a Christian should be the reviver and author of an existence judged in the cross of Christ, unless he were permitted to place it in the same standing before God and man, as he had through God’s grace been placed himself. If it were not so, it would be better never to have a child to perpetuate the race which was judicially ended in the cross of Christ, and if there were no liberty or privilege granted to me — a Christian parent — to place my children there and to avow them as unto Christ, apart from the race judicially terminated in His death. Here then I state that no careful reader of the example of faith in the Philippian jailor can fail to see that all rests on his faith. In the latest and most correct editions it reads (as J.N.D.):—’with (it is’ with ‘not’ and ‘) all his house’ — or rather literally, ‘they spake the word to him with all in the house’, and ‘was baptised himself and all his straightway’; and he having believed in God, rejoiced householdly; (an adverb); it is simply an expression of how joy filled the house! for certainly it refers to the joy, not to the believing, nothing can be plainer. But I rest nothing for a soul without faith, nor do I indeed press this truth, because I believe daily that it involves a home faithfulness that I. for one, feel little experienced in. I ^[p. 55] believe it is a truth which touches on the first Adam in a fatal way. If man is buried, where should he be? But adult Baptists, unintentionally I believe, go through baptism as Noah through the deluge, and rise up out of it to take a fresh start in the old Adam. If their baptism were true they ought to be buried; we do not like to see buried people; and if it be, as they say, in the baptism they are risen by faith in the operation of God, then they are not risen before baptism, which proves too much!