Summary
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Content
Salvation is a truly free gift, brought about solely by the blood of Christ
Salvation is God’s free gift to humanity, purchased by the blood of Christ alone. Christ’s spiritual death on the cross, not His physical blood, is what satisfied both God’s justice and God’s love and opened the way for our reconciliation to God. Humans cannot earn salvation. We are not worthy to pay for a single one of our sins. To be saved, all that God requires is our simple faith in Christ. Relying on anything other than faith in Jesus is saying that the cross was not enough, and turns Christianity a religion of works, rather than what it truly is—undeserved grace offered by a loving God.
Ichthys (my mentor’s website) has a short page up going over the basics of salvation:
That page is an excellent introduction to the fact that salvation requires one and only one thing of us: faith = believing in Jesus Christ.
Two of the Bible passages that most clearly teach this:
31 They replied, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved—you and your household.”
16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
Further, the Bible is clear that the ability we have to do this (that is, to non-meritoriously put our faith in Christ unto salvation) is a gift from God, not something that has anything to do with our own efforts:
8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9 not by works, so that no one can boast.
And that the coin with which the gift was purchased (so to speak) was the blood of Christ:
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
7 In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace
13 But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ.
What all of this means is that salvation 1) comes through simple faith, 2) not as a result of anything we do, and 3) was paid for solely by the blood of Christ.
To say that anything else is necessary for salvation is to say that the blood of Christ alone is not enough. And that, to my mind, is completely blasphemous. As I see things, we should in fact be that black and white about it, and not be particularly polite about this point. That is, if anyone insists that anything else is necessary for salvation, we should be outspoken and bold in proclaiming that taking such a position is logically equivalent to spitting upon the cross.
Despite being just about as core a teaching as any in Christianity, God’s truly free gift of salvation comes under near-constant attack, even in the modern Church. This is because people try to add to what we have gone over here in one way or another. All such additions are problematic, and turn Christianity into a religion of works, not one of undeserved grace.
Group discussion: Assurance of salvation
How do we know if we are saved? Does sin affect our salvation? Here we discuss assurance of salvation. Assurance should not be based upon our own human efforts, for human beings are incapable of saving ourselves, and it must not be based on feeling, because human emotions do not decide the truth. Rather, we must base our assurance of salvation on the truth of God’s Word, knowing that regardless of how we feel, if we are trusting in Christ to deliver us from death and condemnation, then we are saved. While sin is not something we should treat lightly or ignore, God does not disown us when we make mistakes. Salvation is therefore not based on a lack of sin in our lives, but on the presence of belief that that Christ has already paid the price for all our sins with His perfect sacrifice. No matter how scarlet our sins, God will always receive us back as His children, if only we are willing to come to Him in faith.
Is water baptism necessary for salvation?
Here we examine some of the common Bible passages that people cite to say that water baptism is necessary for salvation. When these passages are properly translated and explained, it is clear that the Bible does not support this position. The blood of Christ is what purchased our salvation, and faith in Him alone is what saves us. Water baptism is a physical work, and has no power to save.
Other people hold that water baptism is not necessary for salvation, but still something that God desires us to do. Water baptism was John’s baptism, commanded for the Early Church, which was comprised mostly of Jewish people. In our dispensation of the Church, water baptism is not authorized. When a person believes in Christ, they are immediately baptized into the body of Christ through the Holy Spirit. Salvation is by faith in Christ alone, meaning that absolutely nothing else can be inserted into the process without contradicting that statement.
Those of us in the Ichthys orbit do not actually hold that water baptism is even something generally authorized in the Church Age (apart from the transitional period in the early church when believers were overwhelming Jewish, and therefore conversant with John’s baptism). We won’t fully get into it here since dealing with all the implications of spirit baptism vs. water baptism is a study all on its own (if you are curious, I might suggest you start with Jordan Bomberger’s take on some of the relevant passages, on BibleDriven.org), however, we will briefly address certain passages sometimes brought in by people that do formally argue that water baptism is necessary for salvation.
I should actually further clarify that many Christians who do prescribe water baptism do not make it a prerequisite for salvation. The common way of phrasing things is that faith alone saves us, but water baptism is “an outward sign of an inward change that God nonetheless wants us to do” or something along those lines. This is probably the most common position held by Evangelicals, and even Protestants more generally. I still disagree with even this, but at least it doesn’t butcher soteriology quite so bad.
At any rate, some of those proof-text passages that are trotted out by some to argue that water baptism is strictly necessary for salvation:
Mark 16:16
1 Peter 3:18-22
John 3:5
Mark 16:16 is probably the easiest passage to handle. This is part of the so-called “long ending of Mark”, and is not even part of scripture, because it is a textual interpolation. So that is that.
As to 1 Peter 3:18-22, this passage is quite difficult to interpret, partially because often translators fundamentally misunderstand Peter’s point, and therefore translate in such a way that it more completely obfuscates the meaning in English. It’s not that this passage about “baptism” in 1 Peter 3 is particularly easy to interpret even in the Greek, but the point is that most English translations really make it hard to interpret it correctly, and this leads to most people thinking that this passage is talking about water baptism, when really, it isn’t. For a detailed explanation of this, see here. Dr. Luginbill’s translation of verse 21:
And analogously it is [this true] baptism [of the Spirit] which now saves you: [you are saved] not through any [literal] washing away of filth from your flesh, but [through] an appeal to God for a clean conscience through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Finally, as to John 3:5, some people take the “water” here to be a reference to baptism. It is not; it is a reference to the truth of the Word of God. See:
- Email: John’s Water-Baptism versus the Baptism of the Holy Spirit, §Q/A #1
- BB6A: Peripateology: The Study of the Christian Walk, §The Water of the Word
We might go on and knock down additional passages, but hopefully this brief sampling is sufficient to show that the position that water baptism is necessary for salvation is clearly false, and not supported by the Bible.
Moreover, there is also the wider point that if salvation is by faith alone, then even if you wanted to somehow insert water baptism into soteriology, logic forbids it. (We will continue to make this general argument as we knock down other false works-based requirements for salvation too). I have had some Eastern Orthodox friends tell me with a straight face that in their opinion, getting water baptized is faith (not works), and that is how they have somehow convinced themselves that the propositions “you must be water baptized to be saved” and “we are saved by faith alone” do not contradict each other. Personally, I find this unconvincing in the extreme.
Finally, as a parting reductio ad arbsurdum argument, every single person who argues that you must be water baptized in order to be saved necessarily teaches that it is possible for someone to believe in their heart that Jesus is Lord and savior, but get hit by a bus on their way to get water baptized, and subsequently end up in hell.
If they try to say that this hypothetical person would actually be saved because they have the intention to be water baptized, it still logically proves that water baptism itself is not necessary for salvation, QED.
Group discussion: Baptism and the Great Commission
Matthew 28:19, the Great Commission passage, is often used as a proof text to support water baptism. However, English versions often mistranslate the Greek text. In the phrase, “baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”, the word “in” is actually “into” in the Greek. The Holy Spirit baptizes us into Christ, and we become spiritually united with God. In other words, this verse is referring to Spirit baptism, rather than water baptism.
For a short time in the early Church, the Holy Spirit was physically transferred by the laying on of hands, at times mediated through water baptism.
However, this physical transferring stopped not long after the Church age began, because by the time Romans was written, Paul says that anyone without the Holy Spirit is not a believer (Romans 8:9). To make Paul’s statement there logically compute, the Holy Spirit must now indwell a person immediately upon their faith in Christ, and not a second later.