HAVE YOU TRULY BEEN BORN AGAIN OF WATER AND THE SPIRIT? The Water, Which Means the Baptism of Jesus, Is the Antitype of Salvation Therefore, without having ‘the faith in the baptism of Jesus,’ we cannot be saved. That is why the Apostle Peter declared the water, which means the baptism of Jesus, to be “an antitype which now saves us” (1 Peter 3:21). Today, most people who believe in Jesus do not believe in the baptism of Jesus, the ‘water,’ but only believe in His death on the Cross. But will this kind of faith save sinners? Can we be redeemed from all our sins by believing only in the blood of Jesus? Can it give us salvation? No. We cannot be redeemed before God just by believing in Jesus’ death on the Cross. When the people of Israel offered the sacrifice of atonement at the time of the Old Testament, it would not have been correct to kill the sacrificial animal without first laying hands on the head of the animal and passing their sins onto it. Thus, it would be wrong and lawless to believe only in the Cross of Jesus without believing in His baptism. Therefore, the Apostle Peter said, “There is an antitype which now saves us, namely baptism, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 3:21). Just as the people who didn’t believe in the great ‘water’ (the flood) during the time of Noah were destroyed, those who do not believe in the ‘water,’ the ‘baptism of Jesus’ now will surely be ruined. The complete faith that leads us to true salvation is the faith in Jesus Christ, “who came by water and blood—Jesus Christ” (1 John 5:6). We ought to believe in both the baptism and the Cross of Jesus Christ. The Apostle John said that the correct faith is to believe in “the witness of the Spirit, the water, and the blood” (1 John 5:8). What constitutes true faith is to believe like this. “Jesus is God Himself and He came in the flesh of a man by the Spirit through the body of the Virgin Mary, and He took away all the sins of the world by being baptized at the Jordan by John the Baptist, the representative of all humankind. And Jesus went to the Cross bearing all the sins of the world, and received the vicarious judgment for all of us.” Therefore, the gospel cannot be complete without ‘the baptism of Jesus,’ the ‘water,’ and no matter how well we believe in Jesus, we can never reach eternal salvation without believing in it.
Posted on: Sat, 09 Aug 2014 04:03:59 +0000
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