THE VEXED QUESTION OF BAPTISM SERIES: (9 of 9)

PHILIP’S USE OF BAPTISM AT SAMARIA.

Acts 8.12:17
But when they believed Philip preaching the things concerning the kingdom of God, and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women. … Now when the apostles who were at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent unto them Peter and John: Who, when they were come down, prayed for them, that they might receive the Holy Ghost: For as yet he was fallen upon none of them. Then laid they their hands on them, and they received the Holy Ghost. (Acts 8:12; 14-17.)

Philip’s water rite did not regenerate the baptized. Water was not the agent of rebirth, though Philip was an authorized emissary of the apostles, and filled with the Spirit. Peter and John did not re-baptize them. The Samaritans were converted by the righteousness-of-faith, endowed by the Spirit of Christ, which both regenerated them within, and baptized fire upon them. Their own faith and water baptism was inadequate. They, and the generations which followed, needed to realize man’s inability and incapability to access grace. In the presence of three men of God: Philip, Peter and John, came the final enlightening illumination of the waiting penitents.
http://bonitabiblemission.worthyofpraise.org/?p=76

THE VEXED QUESTION OF BAPTISM SERIES: (8 of 9)

PAUL’S METAPHORICAL USE OF BAPTISM AFTER CORINTH.

Paul writing in Galatians could not endorse Ananias’ words, though he accepted his healing touch. His sins has been buried in the cleansing sea of God’s forgetfulness when he was converted in the roadside to Damascus. Paul believed sin’s cleansing was through the atoning blood of Christ: Romans 4.
Paul viewed baptism differently from Peter after Corinth (1 Corinthians 1:17).

PAUL’S UNIQUELY SINGULAR VIEW OF BAPTISM

1 Corinthians 12:13; Ephesians 4:5; and 1 Corinthians 10; etc. To the apostle there was only one baptism: Christ’s promised baptism of fire and the Holy Ghost, beginning at Jerusalem, ten days after he ascended. Paul in his epistles to the Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians and Colossians constantly alludes to baptism as that of fire not water. He followed Jesus concept and example given to the Eleven at his ascension on the Mount of Olives (Acts 1).He also links Christ’s passion and rising to the believer’s death (of self), burial (of self) and rising (of the new self) as in Romans 6 etc. Paul does not even hint at the merit of water or its ritual to be any part of repentance, remission, regeneration, or inundation of the Spirit’s fulness.
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Paul’s changed baptismal views were in marked contrast to his early practice at Philippi, Corinth, and Ephesus etc. recorded by Dr. Luke in Acts of the Apostles. His views were affected by his disagreements with Peter and the Jerusalem assembly (Acts 15 & Galatians 2). Unlike Peter (Acts 2:38) he could not endorse either compulsory baptism, or Peter’s link of repentance to water, much less Ananias linking water to remission. The apostle to the Gentiles thus wrote the fourth chapter of Romans to set the record straight.
http://bonitabiblemission.worthyofpraise.org/?p=70

THE VEXED QUESTION OF BAPTISM SERIES: (7 of 9)

DOES SALVATION DEPEND ON BAPTISM?

REVIEW OF THE FACTS:
There are three separate apostolic commissions.
1. On unnamed mountain in Galilee: Matthew 28:19 baptism invoking trinity.
2. On unnamed mountain in Galilee: Mark 16:16: compulsory baptism under threat of damnation
3. On Mount of Olives at Jerusalem: Luke 24; John 20; Acts 1: no water baptism required.
Mark 16:16: Mark is the only place in the Gospels that Jesus made baptism a compulsory prerequisite to gain salvation, notwithstanding the old water of separation invoked by Ananias upon Saul of Tarsus at Damascus after his conversion and regeneration by the blood of Christ. (Acts 22:16)

CREDIBILITY OF MARK 16: 16.
This enforced link between water and sin’s remission, under threat of damnation for non-compliance, is unique to the whole New Testament. This was not even hinted by John the Baptist or Jesus.
A cross section of Bible literati and academia with the best scholars versed in original languages agree that this last half of the chapter was lost and replaced during or after the 4th century A.D. This was about the same period in which the first Latin Bible was scribed by Constantine’s scholars.

The most ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament originated at this time. They are the Codex Vaticanus now in Rome and the Codex Sinaiticus in the British Library, the only entire copy of the original Greek New Testament in existence.
http://bonitabiblemission.worthyofpraise.org/?p=66

THE VEXED QUESTION ON BAPTISM SERIES: (5 of 9

Does water wash away sins?

Mark 16:16 & Acts 22:16. This enforced link between water and sin’s remission, under threat of damnation for non-compliance, is unique to the whole New Testament. This was not even hinted by John the Baptist or Jesus. In Peter’s first sermon, he nearly links repentance with water, but not remission. His second sermon disavows even the link between water and repentance. Neither he nor any apostle linked sins’ remission with water.

Nevertheless, Ananias, a devout Jew, is obviously harking back to the Levitical priest’s water of separation that cleansed away ceremonial sin. For whatever reason he quoted Ananias’ strange words neither Paul nor the rest of the apostles ever endorsed them. This second version of Ananias healing and baptizing Saul of Tarsus in the city of Damascus conflicts with:-

(1) Luke’s first version in Acts 9.18;
(2) Paul’s own doctrinal position in his epistles on faith alone by grace alone;
(3) Paul’s progressive de-emphasis of the water rite until his final downgrade of its necessity (1 Corinthians 1:17);

(4) Paul constantly alludes to the essential baptism of the Spirit each time he uses the words baptized or baptism in his epistles of Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians and Colossians. Indeed, he finally declares that there is only one baptism that matters for the child of God, which is obviously not baptism in water, but the fire of the Spirit (Ephesians 4:5);

(5) Both Mark 16:16 and Acts 22:16 directly echo the Old Testament’s compulsory ceremonial ritual (Numbers 19.9) of the priest’s water of separation washing away sin of the offender (“sin,” in 24 English versions).

(6) While Mark 16:9-20 is the replacement of the lost original, the reader should also note that the Trinitarian baptismal invocation of Matthew 28:19 was unknown to the apostles because Peter, Philip and Paul continued John’s water rite, but in the name of Jesus Christ.

Did the 4th C founding of the Church of Rome unjustly promote the Galilean baptismal commission to establish its own water-of-rebirth sacrament? Did the ensuing churches merely perpetuate Constantine’s precedent?

Is the Judean waterless apostolic commission by our ascending Lord on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives inferior or not? According to the physician Luke and John the most reliable of the Twelve, everything in Christ’s passion, resurrection and ascension occurs at Jerusalem and its nearby Judean villages, not an unnamed remote mountain 60 miles to the north.
http://bonitabiblemission.worthyofpraise.org/?p=61

THE VEXED QUESTION OF BAPTISM SERIES: (2 of 9)

    Roman water of rebirth.

IS BAPTISM THE WATER OF REBIRTH?

To accept the Scriptures, the traditions of churches and clergy must often be rejected. Paul showed no awareness of the Galilean apostolic commission’s command to baptize in the name of the ‘Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost’. He simply followed Peter’s precedent of using John the Baptist’s rite, even though Jesus had never used it on believers. Later Paul regrets that water baptism had become a distraction, indicating that he would abandon it. The official Jerusalem ascension commission did not command water baptism.

Examine the two Apostolic Commissions: one speaks of water baptism, but the other speaks of Christ’s baptism of fire for believers. Do you have a choice? One is the official ascension commission, the other stands in stark contrast in its disparity between location and content.
Check your Bible yourself.

(1)Mt. Olivet close to Jerusalem: Acts 1; Luke 24, John 20.
(2) An nameless mountain in Galilee 60 miles north. Matthew 28:19; Mark 16:16.
http://bonitabiblemission.worthyofpraise.org/?p=54

THE VEXED QUESTION OF BAPTISM SERIES: (1 of 9)

THE VEXED QUESTION OF BAPTISM SERIES: (1)

    Mt. Olivet’s waterless apostolic commission

THE GALILEAN COMMISSION Matthew 28:20.
“…baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost…”. Though practised since the first Church of Rome in the early 4th century there is no evidence from the baptisms in the book of Acts that this triune commission was ever known to the eleven apostles. Peter, Philip, and Paul baptized merely in the name of the Lord Jesus.

Matthew records this apostolic commission and ascension taking place on an unnamed mountain in Galilee. Yet Luke and John list the events and a separate non-baptismal apostolic commission at Mount Olivet, adjacent to Jerusalem, some sixty miles to the south of Galilee. The church accepts the ascension mount to be the Mount of Olives (Olivet), but there is a choice here between the two mounts and two baptisms: one in water, or the other in fire. The latter, predicted by the prophet John (Matthew 3), was integral to Jerusalem’s ascension commission.

Old Testament prophecy only alluded to Mt. Olivet. In three and a half years of ministry Jesus had not baptized a single person. He even refused John the Baptist’s request for baptism. The contradictory rumour (John 3) was dispelled in John 4. Neither did Jesus, nor any apostle baptize any believer in the three Synoptic Gospels or the rest of St. John. The rumour of baptisms by the Lord, then the apostles, is more likely associated with two of John’s former disciples helping the prophet again, while Jesus was nearby on the banks of the Jordan River.
http://bonitabiblemission.worthyofpraise.org/?p=39

Which Clinton Will Be President?

MORE OF CLINTON DYNASTY IN 2017??
When Hillary Clinton enters the Oval Office at the White House so will her husband ex President William Clinton return to have a massive influence on executive orders, and military policy.

Do Americans understand the well kept secret of Clinton embezzling UN’s 2 billion dollars in 1995? Tragically that money was given the Yasser Arafat the most cunning global terrorist mastermind, in the name of the Palestinian cause.

Does the public dare know the truth? The press and the politicians will not disclose it in an age of political correctness, but the fact is that vast sum was used by Arafat to prepare the Arab Spring of 2011, he personally inaugurated in Tunis, capital of Tunisia. This Arab Spring spread from North Africa to the Middle East, the Far East, the Arabian Gulf states, where it rages overtly in civil war or overtly under the surface after restoring some rule of law, as in Egypt after the downfall of Morsi. Yet it is not politically correct to admit the Arab Spring is alive and well. Just call them fracas by rogue jihadists and nobody gets upset, least of all Saudi Arabia or Iran.

The 2 billion dollars from US Treasury was budgeted for the annual subscription to the United Nations. The 2 thousand million dollars significantly financed Shiite and Sunni terrorism. Riyadh and Tehran are the main state sponsors of exported terror brigades, but Arafat’s gift from Clinton then in 1995 injected well needed liquidity into the worst group of all: the Palestinian PLO and allied jihadists.

Clinton persuaded Washington’s Congress to permanently short change the UN and drastically reduce its annual support and divert the balance of the 2 billion dollars (due) to the Arab Palestinian cause.

Look at the last twenty years, since Clinton especially to the wars of 1990; 2001; and 2003 declared by the President, let alone the more recent wars of attrition, retreat, and resurgence that have cost so many more lives and dismemberment.

The legacy of that gift and the continuing gifts of U.S. Congressmen is now seen in the unending debacles of Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Egypt, and Afghanistan. As with Vietnam, no President had the tenacity and courage to withstand the Pentagon hegemony, or its Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Of the vastly improved resources and coffers of the late Yasser Arafat that same terrorism indirectly besets the USA and the West with its so called war refugees, who are anything less than Allah’s emissaries and sleeper cells which will after being nurtured by the West, be on call to harbour, feed and protect any brave young jihadists that emerge.

The US State Department will publicly lie through its teeth that it still pays its UN dues, but a quick search of online documents will show the truth on www.wikipedia.com and other reliable sites.

17 trillion dollars debt and rising quickly with each new executive order of Obama?
Is the Pentagon quietly bankrupting the Treasury coffers with its 2+ trillion budget per year? What of the fragile US Credit Rating; and the decaying national power grid, dams, roads, bridges and infrastructure? What of U.S. current generation and the next?

The American Air Force is presently bombing on behalf of the armed forces of Turkey, Iraq and Libya which are all Islamic. It is also helping devastate what little is left of Syria trying to remove the sovereign leader and duly elected government. Lately the U.S. is even bombing its own Kurdish ally for Turkey’s President Erdogan in the last week. In the last year U.S. troops have been allied with and fought with Iran’s terrorist militias in Syria and Iraq. This was hitherto unthinkable for a Western democracy. May we ask where the country is headed? Does it want another world war??

Why is it so consumed with fighting for one group of Muslims against another? Has it not compromised its credibility, its own limited ethics, and its own strength by spreading itself too thinly? One would have thought that it learned a lesson with the loss of 60, 000 servicemen in the Vietnam debacle caused by three embattled and beleaguered presidents who were manipulated by the warmongering Pentagon.

Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, have been ruined by its actions over the last 26 years. Twenty years ago Clinton donated that large sum of 2 billion to the world’s worst terrorist, who started the Arab Spring, now still raging. It created the mass migration of displaced Islamists. Apart from the casualties of thousands of Uncle Sam’s own cannon fodder, millions of ordinary citizens have died and millions more displaced by the endless destructive air power in use.

The U.S. invasions illegally removed the sovereign government leaders and infrastructure and did so with impunity because of its military might as the remaining superpower after 1990. But, it then retreated to leave a ghastly vacuum for civil war and anarchy.

It is time for a strong new leader to control ‘Big Brother’ and the Pentagon before it is too late and the USA passes the point of no return. Remember the might of Rome and its gradual decline through similar reasons?
http://bonitabiblemission.worthyofpraise.org/?p=33

VEXED QUESTION ON BAPTISM SERIES: (3 of 9)

John the Baptist’s baptism:(3 of 9)
Mark 1:4-5.

“John did baptize in the wilderness, and preach the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins. (5) And there went out unto him all the land of Judaea, and they of Jerusalem, and were all baptized of him in the river of Jordan, confessing their sins.”

John’s Disciples.
The link between remission and baptism was initiated under the closing era of the Law before the Kingdom age began. It had been pre-empted in the water of separation that cleansed ceremonial sin. (KJV & 23 other versions)

The rite of confession accompanied John’s water baptism, but affirmation and formal confession in old covenant repentance had no bearing on the kingdom gifts of repentance and the righteousness of faith.

Jesus’ Disciples.
The apostle trainees failed to experience repentance or the righteousness of faith until the resurrection. In spite of their forty months of avowed affirmations, Jesus knew that ten of them would either deny him or forsake him, and another would betray him as the child of perdition.
He knew that their own double- minded faith would fail. When however, they did discover their failure, and went into morbid remorse, they received the enlightening gifts of repentance and saving-faith from Christ on the first day of the resurrection.

Strangely, according to the three Synoptic Gospels, neither John the Baptist, nor the apostles were baptized by Jesus. While Christ submitted to John’s water rite himself, he never thereafter advocated, or used the water rite during the three and a half years before his death. The fourth gospel has one isolated, but confusing incident, however, where the Jews accused Jesus and his disciples of baptizing believers in water. Probably Andrew and John the apostle reverted to helping their old master, John the Baptist, for the short time Jesus was adjacent to his cousin the prophet on the banks of River Jordan.
http://bonitabiblemission.worthyofpraise.org/?p=29

VEXED QUESTIONS ON BAPTISM SERIES: (4 of 9)

THE DILEMMA OF THE BELIEVER.
PROBLEM ONE
Throughout St. Matthew and St. Mark Jesus or the Twelve failed to baptize believers in Christ’s lifetime. Yet at the very end in the last few verses of each there is a posthumous command from an unnamed mountain in Galilee for the Eleven to baptize believers in water thereafter. This Galilean commission of the first two gospels conflict with St. Luke; St. John; and Acts of the Apostles, wherein no order was given to baptize believers in water at all. The evidence is to the contrary, namely that the ascended Christ’s baptism of Holy Ghost fire would replace the water baptismal rite.

PROBLEM TWO
Jesus’ apostolic command in St. Matthew ordered the threefold baptismal invocation of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless, in Acts of the Apostles after Peter reinstituted John’s water rite Peter, Philip and Paul only baptize in Jesus Christ’s name. Did the apostles who received the alternate apostolic commission on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives as Christ ascended know of the Galilean command?

PROBLEM THREE
Jesus’ apostolic command in St. Mark not only differs with the waterless ascension commission at Jerusalem, but it is at odds with St. Matthew also. The baptismal command is to be implemented compulsorily at threat of eternal damnation.

REVIEW OF BASICS:
Mark 16:7. Galilee: was the unofficial alternative ascension commission sixty miles north of Mt. Olivet where Christ ascended. Before ascending to heaven Jesus omitted any command to baptize. See footnote: Matt.28:20

Mark 16:9-20. This is the only place in the New Testament that any Bible book’s author claimed Jesus had made baptism a compulsory condition of redemption.
However, a cross section of eminent Bible scholars think this last half of Mark 16 had been lost and replaced during the 4th century AD. This was the same period in which the first Latin Bible was scribed by Constantine’s scholars. The most complete ancient Greek Bible manuscripts today originated in the 4th century. There are only two: the near complete Codex Vaticanus, is now in the Vatican at Rome. The other is the Codex Sinaiticus in the British Library, which is the only complete copy of the New Testament in existence.
http://bonitabiblemission.worthyofpraise.org/?p=26

THE VEXED QUESTION OF BAPTISM SERIES: (6 of 9).

Did Paul cease baptizing after Corinth?

Romans 6:4-6. Paul takes Christ’s death, burial and resurrection and makes it analogous to the new birth of the believer. Crucifying and dying to the old-self; burying the old-self in the tomb with Christ; and finally the regenerated new-self, rising into a newness of life by the quickening of the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the grave.

The double-minded faith of the old-self is crucified as vain religious effort, when the righteousness-of-faith is given by grace in the miracle of repentance which changes remorse into godly sorrow: 2 Corinthians 7:10.

In Romans 6:3 Paul uses the word baptism figuratively, as also in First Corinthians 10:2, and Colossians 2:12. Though Christ did not baptize in water he nevertheless, used baptism figuratively in Matthew 20:22-23; Mark 10:38-39; and Luke 12:50.

Furthermore, Peter spoke of baptism figuratively in First Peter 3:20-22, a significant change from his previously borrowed the Old Testament’s priestly water of separation.

Though John the Baptist, (whom Peter quoted at Pentecost) belonged to the era of the Law, John the Prophet did not apply water as remission to those he baptized, it was the confession of sins evidencing heartfelt repentance. Albeit, those sins were to be re-confessed by the High Priest on the Day of Atonement each year until the blood of the new testament was shed on Calvary by Christ, the paschal lamb. Peter suddenly without warning reinstituted John’s water rite (Acts 2:38) and with it the same call to be baptized for repentance, but not remission, for in his second sermon (Acts 3) he makes quite clear that the blood alone cleanses sin. Neither he, nor Paul propounded the old covenant’s water rite as sin’s cleansing.

In a Roman trial (Acts 22:16) Paul told the Jews that Ananias of Damascus had uniquely used the unmodified old water rite, which ceremonially cleansed sin’s contamination: Deuteronomy 19:9.
Water washing away sin is found in the KJ Version & twenty three other English Old Testament versions.

KEY SCRIPTURES: biblegateway.com
Ephesians 4:5. One Lord, one faith, one baptism,
1 Corinthians 12:13.

For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit.

Galatians 3:27.

For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.

Further study on the new birth
Titus 3:5; 2 Corinthians 5:17; John 3:3; Ephesians 2:8.

http://bonitabiblemission.worthyofpraise.org/?p=22