The Great Commission

                I suspect that most of us are at least aware of the Great Commission.  For those of you that aren’t, these were the last words of Jesus prior to His ascension (after His death, burial and resurrection).  What many people don’t seem to realize is that there are three accounts of the great Commission, and each one is different.

                In Matthew 28, Jesus commanded the apostles to go, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.  In Mark 16, He told them to go unto all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature, and then He said that he that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned.  He went on to talk about the signs that would follow them that believe:  They shall speak with new tongues, take up serpents, not be harmed by drinking deadly things, and they would heal the sick.  In Luke 24, He told the Apostles to tarry at Jerusalem until they be endued with power from on high, but also said that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name.  It seems pretty clear that He wanted them to go, either to all nations, or unto all the world, and teach (or preach) the Gospel.  Interesting that two of these three accounts all mention baptism, although in a different sense each time. 

                Now, in Luke 24, He specifically told them to tarry at Jerusalem until they received power.  Luke continued his account of the Great Commission in the first chapter of Acts, and tells us that Jesus told them not to depart from Jerusalem, and also that the apostles would receive power after that the Holy Ghost came upon them.  In Acts chapter 2, the apostles are still in Jerusalem, and the Holy Ghost fell on all those that believed.  Now, there were present men from every nation.  So, they haven’t even left Jerusalem yet, but they are witnessing to every nation.  Further on, after Peter had preached his first sermon, these men asked, “What shall we do?”  Peter replied that they should repent, and be baptized, every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins.  So, in Luke 24, when Jesus talked about repentance and remission of sins, He was talking about baptism then, too. 

                Now, some have looked at Mark 16:16 and said, well, Jesus didn’t say that if you weren’t baptized that you were damned…  and that’s true.  I don’t want to say that one is more important than the other, but if you don’t believe, then it really doesn’t matter if you are baptized or not.  Furthermore, if Jesus didn’t mean that baptism was essential to salvation, then why did He even bring it up?  If all He was really talking about was faith, then He could have simply said, “He that believeth shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned.”  I have to believe that He talked about believing and being baptized to be saved because He meant that one has to believe and be baptized to be saved.

                On a slightly different subject, some have looked at 1 Peter 3:21, and said that it refers to baptism as a figure, or a picture.  They go on to say that baptism is an outward sign of an inward change, but it isn’t necessary to perform the outward sign in order to have the inward change.  Once you accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior, then you certainly may get baptized if you want to; it’s a good thing to do, but you don’t have to.  If we look at that with a little bit of context, though, we see that just before that passage, Peter was talking about Noah and the flood.  He actually says something that may strike you as odd:  He says that in the days of Noah, eight souls were saved by water.  Didn’t the ark save Noah and his family from the water?  What did the water save them from?  Looking at verse 21 again, though, it says, “…not the putting away of the filth of the flesh…”  So, Noah, being a righteous man, but surrounded be people that grieved God, was, in his ark, buoyed up by the water that destroyed the people that vexed his soul.  By the same token, baptism separates us from the sins of our past lives.  In other words, the figure, or picture, that Peter was talking about was not an outward sign of an inward change, but simply a comparison between the water of baptism and the water of Noah’s flood.  If that picture is accurate, though, that makes the water pretty necessary; Noah and his family holed up in an ark waiting for a flood that never came would have been pretty silly.  Peter’s comparison of baptism to the flood underscores the importance of water baptism.