Devotional 153: The Efficacy of Baptism: Grace Conferred to the Elect

The Confession Read

The sacrament of baptism is but once to be administered unto any person.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 28, Section 7

Introduction

A young man came to faith in his twenty-sixth year. He had been carried to the font as an infant in the church of his parents, washed with water in the triune name, and never thought of the matter again for a quarter of a century. Then the Lord opened his heart, and he began to read his Bible with the hunger of the newly quickened, and he fell in with a company of earnest believers who loved him well. And one of them, with all the affection in the world and not a grain of malice, took him aside and said: your infant baptism was no baptism at all. You must be baptized again, now that you actually believe. He came to his pastor troubled to the very bone. He did not want to grieve the friends who had shown him Christ. But something in him recoiled, and he could not say why, and he could not shake the sense that to be baptized a second time would be, not to honor the Lord who saved him, but to doubt Him. That young man stands at the very center of the section before us, and his trouble is no small one. It is one of the shortest sentences in the entire Confession, thirteen words that a child could repeat, yet it settles a quarrel that has torn the church in two, and in three, and in ten, from the third century to the present hour: The sacrament of baptism is but once to be administered unto any person. Two opposite errors have always crowded around this sentence, and both of them wound souls. On the one side stands the man who treats baptism as a repeatable thing, to be done again whenever conviction deepens or a congregation changes, as though the ordinance were a pledge that must be renewed each time the heart grows warmer. On the other stands the man who cannot see why this should matter at all, why thirteen words about the number of times a thing is done should detain the church for a single morning. And the Confession answers both with a truth that is simple and profound: baptism is once, because the thing it signs is once, because the God whose name it bears is one, and because the sacrifice it seals was offered once for all. Let us set that truth before us, and let it do its steadying work upon our hearts.

Scripture Foundation

The first and controlling text stands in the fourth chapter of Ephesians, where Paul is pleading with the church to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. His argument is that the church has a single foundation, and he sets out that foundation in a series of "ones": one body, one Spirit, one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all. Ephesians 4:5 "One Lord, one faith, one baptism." Mark the force of that little word one, which in the Greek is the emphatic hen. Paul does not say that baptism is a good thing, nor that it is a helpful thing, nor that it may be administered as often as seems fitting. He says there is one baptism, in exactly the sense and with exactly the weight with which there is one Lord and one God. The oneness of baptism is of a piece with the oneness of God Himself. And observe the word Paul chooses. It is baptisma, the noun that the New Testament reserves for the Christian rite, not baptismos, which is the general word for the washings and purifications of the old law. There is one baptisma because there is one covenant of grace, one ingrafting into the one Christ, one admission into the one body. A man cannot possess two baptisms any more than he can possess two Lords. To be baptized again would be to confess, in the very act, that the first baptism had failed: that the God whose triune name was called over him did not keep faith, or that the covenant it sealed was not ratified after all. But God cannot fail, and His covenant, once sealed, is never broken on His side. And so the church has always sung, as a matter of doctrine and not merely of custom, that there is one baptism for the remission of sins. A second foundation meets us in the letter to the Hebrews, and it shows us why the sign is never repeated. The author is contrasting the priests of the old covenant, who stood daily ministering and offering the same sacrifices which could never take away sins, with the great High Priest of the new. Hebrews 10:10 "By the which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all." The phrase once for all is a single Greek adverb, ephapax, and it is the hinge of the whole epistle. The old priests could never sit down, because their work was never finished; the morning sacrifice only made way for the evening sacrifice, and the evening for the morning, an unbroken treadmill of blood that could never reach the end of sin. But this man, Hebrews 10:12 "after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God." Christ sat down. That single posture is the whole gospel in miniature. His work was finished, done, complete, never to be offered again; and because His sacrifice is once for all, every thing that seals and applies that sacrifice partakes of its finality. Here is the deepest reason baptism is not repeated. Baptism does not seal a grace that must be replenished, as though the cleansing of the soul could wear thin and require a fresh washing. It seals our union with a sacrifice that was offered once and sits enthroned in heaven as finished. The Supper is repeated because it is a meal, and the body needs food every day; but baptism is the once-for-all sign of the once-for-all washing, and it cannot be done again because what it signifies cannot be done again. To rebaptize a man is to imply that the death of Christ must be reoffered, and that is the very heresy the epistle to the Hebrews was written to burn out of the church. A third foundation appears in the upper room, in a passage we do not often connect with baptism, and it rewards the closest attention. When Christ rose from supper and girded Himself to wash the disciples' feet, Peter first refused and then, with his usual vehemence, demanded too much: John 13:9 "Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head." And Jesus answered him with a distinction that has governed the church's understanding of baptism ever since: John 13:10 "He that is washed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit." Our Lord here draws a line between two washings. The first is the full washing of the whole man, the once-for-all cleansing of regeneration, by which a sinner is made clean entirely and forever. The second is the daily washing of the feet, the continual cleansing of the dust of the road, the repeated washing of repentance and of that refreshment which the Supper brings. The full bath is not repeated, because it does not need to be; the man is clean every whit. But the feet must be washed again and again, because the road is dirty and the believer is still a traveler. Baptism is the full bath, once for all. The Supper and the daily washing of repentance are the cleansing of the feet, repeated as often as the dust gathers. A man who insists on being baptized again is, in the language of our Lord, demanding to be bathed head to toe when his feet alone need washing, and he does not see that the first bath was complete. A fourth foundation meets us at Ephesus, in a passage that seems at first to point the other way. When Paul came to that city he found certain disciples, and he asked them a searching question: Acts 19:2 "Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?" And they answered, "We have not so much as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost." Paul then asked unto what they were baptized, and they said, Acts 19:3 "Unto John's baptism." Here, and here alone in the New Testament, we read of men being baptized a second time. Acts 19:5 "When they heard this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus." But let us read the passage with care, for it does not weaken our doctrine; it establishes it. These men had received only the baptism of John, which was a preparatory baptism, a baptism of repentance that pointed forward to the Coming One, but not the Christian baptism that seals union with the Christ who has come, died, and risen. It lacked the very thing that makes baptism what it is, the ingrafting into the finished work of the Crucified. So when Paul baptized them in the name of the Lord Jesus, he was not repeating a baptism; he was administering the first true Christian baptism to men who had only ever known the shadow of it. The passage proves the rule by the very exception it seems to record: the moment a true baptism has been received, it is never repeated. There is no example in all the New Testament of a believer being baptized twice with the same baptism. Taken together, these passages give us the full shape of the doctrine. One Lord, one faith, one baptism. A sacrifice offered once for all, by a priest who sat down when He was finished. A washing of the whole man that need never be done again, though the feet must be washed daily. And a baptism of John that was not yet the baptism of Christ, so that the one apparent second baptism in Scripture turns out to be no second baptism at all. The sign is once, because the grace it signs is once, because the blood it seals was shed once, because the God whose name it bears is one.

What the Divines Meant

The Westminster divines wrote this single sentence to cut away a very old error, and to guard a very precious truth. The error had a name, and the name was on everyone's lips in their day: Anabaptist. The word is Greek in its bones, built of the prefix ana, again, and the verb to baptize, and it means one who baptizes again. The Anabaptists of the sixteenth century held that the baptism administered to infants was no baptism at all, that only the baptism of an adult believer upon a profession of faith could be valid, and that therefore every man and woman who had been baptized in infancy must be baptized again upon coming to faith. Against this the divines set thirteen words: the sacrament of baptism is but once to be administered unto any person. But the divines were not inventing something new. They were recovering the mind of the ancient church, and the quarrel they were settling was older than the Reformation by more than a thousand years. In the fourth century the church had been rent by the Donatists, who held that a baptism administered by a minister who had lapsed under persecution, or who was otherwise unworthy, was void, and that those whom such ministers had baptized must be baptized again. Augustine spent the better part of his life answering them, and the answer he gave has echoed through every century since. The sacrament, he insisted, does not belong to the man who administers it, but to Christ, and therefore its validity rests not on the worthiness of the minister but on the faithfulness of the Master. To this he added the decisive word: baptism is a spiritual birth, and a man is born but once. A man may be born again, but he cannot be born again and again; the new birth is as singular an event as the old, and its sign shares that singularity. The divines knew all this, and they compressed it into a single sentence that says far more than it seems to say. Notice, first, the quiet word but: baptism is but once to be administered. The word carries the whole weight of exclusion. It is not merely that baptism need not be repeated; it is that it must not be. The divines are not leaving the matter to the discretion of the pastor or the preference of the congregation. They are laying down a law of the church's practice, and the law is negative: no second baptism, ever, for any person, under any circumstance whatsoever. Notice, second, the reasoning that stands behind the sentence, even though the divines do not spell it out. They had already told us, in the first section of this chapter, what baptism is: the sign and seal of our ingrafting into Christ, of regeneration, of remission of sins, and of our giving up unto God to walk in newness of life. Each of these things is a once-for-all reality. A man is ingrafted into Christ once; he is regenerated once; his sins are remitted once for all by the blood of the covenant; he is given up to God once, in that decisive surrender that is his conversion. And because the thing signified is once, the sign is once. A seal is affixed to a document once, not each time the document is read. The Supper, by contrast, is the sacrament of nourishment and growth, and nourishment is a continuing thing; the body must be fed every day, and so the Supper is celebrated again and again. The divines drew the distinction with perfect clarity, even where they left it implicit: initiation is once, because birth is once; nourishment is repeated, because eating is repeated. Notice, third, what the divines were quietly protecting. The man who is baptized a second time confesses, whether he means to or not, that the first baptism was either no baptism at all or a failed baptism, and that is a confession the believer must never make. Either the first washing was a true baptism, and then it cannot be repeated; or it was no baptism, and then what is administered later is not a repetition but a first baptism, as with the disciples of John at Ephesus. There is no third possibility. The Confession's sentence holds the believer in that fork and will not let him escape into a false comfort. If your baptism was administered with water, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, by a minister lawfully called, then you have received the one baptism of Ephesians, and it is finished, and no man may add a second to it.

Theological Depth

Calvin treats the question with his usual rigor and pastoral tenderness. In the Institutes he insists that at whatever time we are baptized, we are washed and purified once for the whole of life, and therefore whenever we have fallen, we ought to recall the remembrance of our baptism and arm ourselves with it, rather than seek a new washing. He sees in rebaptism a subtle slight against the ordinance itself, as though the grace of baptism had a term of expiry and must be renewed. Against this he sets the finality of the one washing: the promise of which baptism is the seal abides through the whole course of life, and a man returns to it, as to a fountain that never runs dry, but he does not dig a second fountain. Calvin is equally clear that this is no comfort to the presumptuous; the man who recalls his baptism only to sin more freely has never understood what the ordinance means. Augustine, the bishop of Hippo, gives the doctrine its oldest and deepest roots. He fought the Donatists for decades, and his argument has never been improved upon. Baptism, he taught, is not the property of the minister who administers it but of Christ, and so its validity is no more shaken by an unworthy minister than the faithfulness of God is shaken by an unfaithful servant. But his most penetrating word was reserved for the question of repetition. Baptism is a birth, and a birth happens once. The first birth is not repeated when a man grows, and the second birth is not repeated when a man is sanctified; growth is nourished, not rebegun. Augustine saw, with the eye of a pastor who had watched the Donatist quarrel tear families apart, that the logic of rebaptism has no stopping place. If baptism must be repeated because the first minister was unworthy, then it must be repeated again because the second was unworthy too, and the third, and the fourth, and the chain never ends, for no minister is perfectly holy and no recipient perfectly worthy. The man who begins to be rebaptized has entered upon a treadmill from which there is no exit except the return to the truth: the sacrament is Christ's, and Christ's work is once. Turretin takes up the question in the form the schools loved, and answers it with the precision of a man settling a disputed point of law. Whether baptism may be repeated, he asks, and he answers with an unhesitating negative. The reason, he argues, lies in the nature of the thing signified. Baptism is the sacrament of regeneration and of initiation into the covenant, and both are single, unrepeatable events. The covenant is entered once; the man is born again once; the sign that seals the one and figures the other is therefore administered once. Turretin presses the parallel with circumcision, the old covenant's sign of initiation, which was performed once and never repeated, however far the man wandered afterward. And he notes the difference from the Supper with the same precision: the Supper is the sacrament of our spiritual nourishment, and nourishment, unlike birth, is a continuing thing. The distinction between the two sacraments is not an accident of history; it is written into the very things they represent. A. A. Hodge, in his Commentary on the Confession, gathers the whole argument into a sentence of his own. Baptism, he says, is to be but once administered, because it is the sign and seal of a grace which is once conferred and never revoked, while the Supper is to be often received, because it represents a nourishment which must be continually repeated. He draws out the pastoral consequence gently: the man who has been truly baptized has no need of a second baptism, and ought not to seek one, for his one baptism has already sealed to him every grace of the covenant, and God has never yet required a sign to be renewed to assure a doubtful heart. The doubt is to be met, not by repeating the sign, but by believing the promise which the sign once sealed. Shaw, in his Exposition, sounds the same note and turns it into a word for the tempted. He observes that a man may be tempted, after a season of backsliding, to think his baptism was in vain, and to long for the ordinance again as though a second washing could repair what the first could not. Against this he sets the sentence before us: baptism is but once, not because God is sparing with His grace, but because He is abundant. The one washing was sufficient, because it sealed a sufficient sacrifice and a sufficient grace; to ask for a second is to accuse the first of insufficiency, and that is an accusation no believer may lay at the door of his God. Let the backslider return to his baptism, Shaw says, and there find, not an empty ceremony to be redone, but a finished seal to be believed. The agreement of these voices is the more striking for spanning a thousand years and a half dozen nations. Baptism is once because God is one, because the sacrifice is once for all, because the new birth is a birth, and because the covenant, once entered, is never re-entered. The man who grasps this will neither despise his baptism nor repeat it; he will believe it, and return to it, and rest in it, as the once-for-all seal of the once-for-all grace of the God who cannot lie.

Puritan Application

First, rest in your one baptism, and do not seek another. If you were baptized as an infant and came to faith only in later years, the tempter will whisper that your baptism was a mere form, a religious ceremony performed over a baby who knew nothing and believed nothing, and that you must now be baptized again as a believer. Meet that whisper with the truth before us. Your baptism did not rest upon your faith, for then no infant's baptism and no faint believer's baptism would ever be sure. It rested upon the command and promise of God, who was pleased to seal you with His covenant in your infancy, as He sealed the children of old with circumcision at eight days. The grace of it was not tied to the day it was administered, as we learned in the last section; it has followed you, a seal that never expires and a promise that never fails. Return to it. Claim it. Let the one washing of your infancy be to you what it truly is, the sign that God laid hold of you before ever you could lay hold of Him. To be baptized again would be to take down the sign God set over your life and raise another in its place, as though the first were a mistake. It was not a mistake; it was a mercy. Second, learn the difference between the two sacraments, and reverence each for what it is. The Supper is a meal, and you will come to it again and again until the Lord returns, for the soul must eat as long as it lives. But baptism is a birth, and a birth is not repeated. Do not let the frequency of the one blur the singularity of the other. There are souls who speak of the two as though they were two dishes at one table, interchangeable and repeatable, and they rob baptism of its dignity and the Supper of its meaning. Baptism says to you, once for all, that you are Christ's. The Supper says to you, again and again, that you are being fed by Christ. Both are true, both are tender, and both are ruined the moment they are confused. Third, draw your assurance from the once-for-all sacrifice that your baptism seals. Here is the deepest comfort this short sentence can give. Your sins were laid upon Christ and dealt with once, so completely and so finally that the Scripture says He sat down when He had offered the one sacrifice for sins for ever. The blood that cleansed you does not need to be shed again, and the washing that sealed that blood does not need to be repeated. When your conscience is heavy and your heart is cold, do not look for some new ceremony to quiet you. Look back to the one baptism that set you once and for all beneath the one sacrifice, and look up to the one High Priest who sits at the right hand of God, and rest in a work that is finished. The believer's peace does not lie in the number of his washings but in the finality of the one washing, and in the finished sacrifice that alone gives it power. Fourth, if doubt creeps in concerning whether your baptism was valid, let the doubt be settled by the right question. Men have tortured themselves asking whether the minister who baptized them was truly converted, or whether they were in a proper frame when they received the ordinance. Such questions are the doorway through which a thousand needless anxieties enter, and they are all answered by one truth: the sacrament is not the minister's, and it is not yours, but Christ's. The church has never held that baptism's validity hangs upon the secret state of the man who pours the water or the man upon whom it is poured; it hangs upon the institution of Christ, the use of water, and the calling upon the triune name. If those were present, you were truly baptized, and no man may add to what Christ has done. Settle the question where alone it can be settled, on the faithfulness of the God whose name was called over you, and let the matter rest there forever. Fifth, and last, let the once-ness of your baptism never become a pillow for presumption. It is one thing to rest in your baptism; it is another and a deadly thing to sin in it. The full bath was once for all, but our Lord Himself taught that the feet must still be washed, and the road is long and dusty and the flesh is not yet dead. The man who says, I was baptized once, and therefore I may live as I please, has understood nothing. The one baptism does not mean there is no daily washing; it means the daily washing is of a different kind, the washing of repentance and faith and the cleansing of the Supper, which you must practice until the day you die. Rest in the one baptism, but walk in the daily cleansing, and let the finished work of Christ produce in you, not a finished obedience, but a growing one, until the day when the washing is complete and you are clean every whit, and the feet that walked so long a dusty road are washed at last in the river that makes glad the city of God.

Prayer

O Lord our God, one God in three persons, we bless Thee that there is one Lord, and one faith, and one baptism, even as there is one God and Father of us all. We thank Thee for the once-for-all offering of the body of Jesus Christ, by which we are sanctified, and for the one washing which seals it to us, never to be repeated, because the work it seals is finished forever. Forgive us, we pray Thee, for the doubts with which we have dishonored Thy faithfulness: for the restlessness that would redo what Thou hast done, and for the presumption that would rest in the sign without walking in the cleansing. Teach us to return to our baptism as to a fountain that never fails, to believe the promise it sealed, and never to seek a second washing where Thou hast given one that suffices. For the man or woman who was carried to the font in infancy and has wandered far, have mercy, O God, and bring them home. Let them not be troubled into a second baptism, but let the one baptism they already bear cry out after them all their days, until they return and find it to be what it has always been, the seal of a God who laid hold of them before they could lay hold of Him. And for us all, grant that the finished sacrifice of Christ may be our only peace, that the one baptism may be our abiding comfort, and that the daily washing of repentance may be our lifelong practice, until the day when faith gives way to sight and the washing is complete, and we are clean every whit, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who sat down at Thy right hand because His work was finished, and who ever liveth to make intercession for us. Amen.