What Happens When We Meditate On The Abrahamic Promise

by R. Scott Clark on June 15, 2018 | 13 Comments

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13 comments

  2. Also for the record, I am gratefully among those who finally understand baptism and the covenants because of, I will be a God to you and to your children.

  4. This is why i have difficulty with communing baptists. I understand Christians need to be nourished by the sacrament but I don’t think it proper to confirm them in their sin. Either baptism of our children is necessary and vital or it is not. The table is where this belief is demonstrated. I can reach no other logical conclusion.

    • I think you raise an excellent point. In the baptist church, where I once was a member, only those who who had voluntarily submitted to baptism on a profession of faith, were allowed to commune. Baptism was viewed as something you do, not as something God graciously gives you in your helplessness. How does that agree with the Reformed understanding with baptism as a means of grace? Yet the proper understanding of the sacraments as means of grace is one of the marks of the true church. While Baptists insist that we must submit to their understanding and practice of baptism, before being allowed to commune, some Reformed would allow Baptists to commune, even though they have a completely different understanding of something so vital to the Church as God’s covenant sign and what it means? If the proper understanding and administration of the sacraments is one of the signs of the true church, how can you commune those who have a fundamental difference of understanding and administering baptism?

    • Angela, in addition, and mostly overlooked, are the curses associated with failing to give the sacrament to our children. They are to be cut off who fail to do so. Moses was going to be killed by God for failing to circumcise his sons. God’s view is much different from ours. We fail to help our brothers by confirming them in their sin, a sin God abhors.

    • I totally agree. Personally, when I was a Baptist, it was tremendously convicting for me to reflect on God’s offense with Moses for neglecting to apply the covenant sign to his son, and as I realized that the administration of the covenant sign has never been revoked, I came to the undeniable conclusion that to fail to give the new covenant sign to children was just as much an offense to God, because it represents God’s promise, that when they believe, they are the true spiritual children of Abraham. Baptism represents God’s gracious promise in our helplessness, it Is not something that we do, in obedience, after we believe. As my pastor has said, that comes dangerously close to making baptism a necessary work for a right standing before God! We should explain this as the reason, and withhold communion from Baptists until they see their error, and repent. To fail to do so is to confirm them in their error, and it is an offense to God just as much as Moses’s neglect of the sign was. If God was willing to kill Moses for this offense, should we not also fear that we are calling down judgment on our church, if we allow those who withhold the covenant sign from children of believers to commune with us, as though we have a common understanding, or that the sign and its significance is of no importance?

  5. RSC, baptists argue the promises of heart circumcision in the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants (i. e. Deuteronomy 30:6) promised the covenant of grace in the future, and these covenants in and of themselves were not the covenants of grace. What is your response?

  6. Thank you. One more question: is Acts 2:39 a valid passage for paedobaptists? As someone who is from a baptist background (Presbyterian churches are scarce in England), I’ve seen Baptist preachers say this passage is referring solely to believers, as seen by ‘as many as the Lord our God should call’.

  7. In an discussion of doctrinal issues keeping the discussion on a reasonable, even emotional level is important to continue the interchange. But i think important that these issues also carry a moral component. Someone, if not all, would be in error. However, to posit something true is the same as holding to sin. I think we have to remember the goal is a fuller understanding of the Scriptures so as to purify our minds and hearts from carnal sinful understandings. Its this moral component that often is missing. Which i think flows from our cultural myopia. And leads to, when mothers see their error they repent and baptise their children

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