BAPTISM KILLS

BAPTISM KILLS

Hugh Fogelman

Christians cannot say one thing and mean something else and get away with it. Or can they? Paul wrote:

“Moreover, brethren, I would not that ye should be ignorant, how that all our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea; And were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea;” 1 Corinthians 10:1-2

This verse claims that all Jews were baptized. According to the Christian Bible the very thing Jews have been avoiding for centuries happened when they left Egypt! If only Paul had known his Torah, or if only the compilers who had put together the "divinely inspired" NewTESTament had had a proofreader, they would have read in Exodus 13:21-22 that the cloud went “before” the people, and as for the sea, Exodus 14:22 tells us that they passed through the sea on dry ground!

Only the Egyptians were baptized, when the waters returned and covered them, as we see in, verse 28 (Ex 13).

The Christian New International Version (NIV) Study Bible, realizing the error had to put an “off the wall spin” on what Paul really meant; “As a people, they were united under God’s redemptive program, and they summated to Moses, God’s appointed leader (see Ex 14:31), baptized. A figure used to depict their submission to Moses as their deliverer and leader, just as Christian baptism depicts the believer’s submission to Christ as Savior and Lord”.

Then we have another example on how Baptism kills.

”Which sometime were disobedient, when once the long suffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water. The like figure whereunto even baptism doth also now save us (not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God by the resurrection of JC. (1 Peter 3:20-21)

Again we find that Noah and his family didn't pass through the water, but went into the ark and were saved “from” the waters. It was only the unrighteous of that generation that perished in the waters; they were the only ones who got baptized, so to speak!

The NIV acknowledges that it has a hard time explaining Peter by saying, “Three main interpretations of this passage have been suggested…..The weakness of the first view is that…..The main problem with the second view is …..A major difficulty with the third view is that, etc.

The NIV explains that water symbolizes baptism and there is a double figure here. The flood symbolizes baptism, and baptism symbolizes salvation. The flood was a figure of baptism in that in both instances the water that spoke of judgment (in the flood the death of the wicked, in baptism the death of Christ and the believer) is the water that saves. Is the NIV is saying that Christ and his believers are wicked? What does the words inside of the parenthesis mean?

The Christian spin on this is that baptism by water saves, but we just saw that the water kills. Oh, the water only killed the wicked – but the GOOD people in both examples NEVER touched any water. Yet, “water” saves?????????

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