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1. Matthew 19:4-6 (NIV)
   “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
   …
   I also struggled with Gavin Ortlund’s rebuttal but thought for a long time it was too pedestrian to overturn the evidence for covenant baptism and thus trivial. Culturally a family is part of a lineage going back several decades and centuries. But this verse indicates something else – that when every man “leaves and cleaves” a new “unit of household grace” is created. I think considering the formation of each such unit dispels Ortlund’s claims.
   Additionally, the Baptist neglect of nature/grace means they only see “and to your children” as meaning genetically so they do not account for “child” as a developmental fact worth considering as part of their exegetical processes. In other words, Proverbs 22:6 “train up a child in the ways they should go” meaning they are to be baptized while they are infants as it was when circumcision was administered before Christ’s incarnation.
   Baptist objections that pop up like Ortlund’s are concerned with hypothetical pastoral problems and not the Bible’s blueprint. It’s rationalism attempting to cross every “t” and dot every “i”

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