844.- BAPTISM | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 26, 1901

844.— BAPTISM.

When an infant, I was baptized by the Lutherans, but have been persuaded to be baptized by immersion. My friends tell me this is wrong, and I am in trouble about it.

Mrs. A. B., Greytown, Dunn Co., Wis.

ANS.— I do not think you need to give yourself any uneasiness about your baptism. As for your having been baptized in infancy by the Lutheran Church, that does not count anything in the Scriptures; for an accepted professor of religion has to first believe before he can properly be baptized. “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved.” Mark 16: 16. But infants cannot believe.

And as for your being baptized the second time, we have the warrant of the Scriptures for that, in Acts 19: 3, 5. The believers had received first John’s baptism; and when they were instructed in the new truth concerning Christ, they were baptized again, in the name of the Lord Jesus. There is nothing in the ordinance, nor in the instruction concerning it, which would prevent the repetition of the act, or make it blasphemy against the Holy Ghost to perform that rite a second time.

The prerequisite of baptism is death to sin; and the natural act to be performed in reference to a dead man is to bury him. This is why baptism is illustrated by the figure of a burial. And when a man backslides and becomes alive in sin, and afterward again dies to sin, as at his first conversion, there would seem to be nothing inappropriate in repeating the act of burial.

The doctrine and the teaching of the Scriptures on the subject of baptism are very clear and very simple. And if you will study the subject in the light of these suggestions, I think you will have your mind fully settled upon that point.