"BAPTIST"

TRADITION: Baptism Will Save the Soul

TRUTH: Baptism Does Not Save the Soul

Many false religions including Catholicism teach that baptism will save the soul. Therefore, infants, children and even adults are baptised in order to guarantee their spiritual security. I can remember having my own children baptized as infants before I was born again and came to the knowledge of the truth. My wife and I mistakenly accepted the traditional teaching of the necessity to have infants baptized so that if they died they would go to heaven.

The Bible doesn't teach the necessity of baptism in order for the soul to be saved and go to heaven, although that is the traditional thinking of most of the people that have not been born again. Oftentimes when witnessing to someone they will tell me of when they were baptized thinking that they have done what is required of God. And, bless their hearts, for the most part that is all they know at the time, until someone tells them the truth of the Word of God!

If baptism was necessary to go to Heaven, then the thief on the Cross would not have been with Jesus in Heaven/Paradise that day when he died! But, Jesus was right of course, the thief did go to be with the Lord in Paradise even though he was never baptized. No, he never joined the church, and he never 'walked the aisle' but he surely went to be with the Lord Jesus Christ the moment he passed from this life into the next! Absent from the body and present with the Lord, Amen!

In every instance in the New Testament, baptism always took place after the person believed. Believer's baptism is the Biblical teaching: 'Then they that gladly received his word were baptized...' (Acts 2:41); 'What doth hinder me to be baptized? And Philip said, If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest...(Acts 8:36,37); 'Many of the Corinthians hearing believed, and were baptized' (Acts 18:8). These are just a few examples of the Bible's teaching on baptism.