How about I send you the book of Acts as an e-book? It is probably missing from your Bible.
Hello
@Enoch111,
Forgive this intervention between you and GerhardEbersoehn: but during the Acts period the call of Peter, made in Acts 3:19-20 to his countrymen was still being heard; and the door was still open for them to repent. So, yes, I believe that water baptism was still in place during that period. This is where
@GerhardEbersoehn will disagree with me I believe.
* During the gospels the Holy Spirit had not been given (John 7:37-39). Following the giving of the Holy Spirit in Acts 2 water baptism remained a baptism of repentance, but it was coupled with the receipt of the gift of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:38).
* Also when Peter saw that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been given to the gentiles in Acts 10, he said:-
'Can any man forbid water, that these should not be baptized,
which have received the Holy Ghost as well as we?
And he commanded them to be baptized in the name of the Lord.
Then prayed they him to tarry certain days.'
(Acts 10:47-48)
* This baptism identified the gentile believer with the Lord, and the word concerning Him that they had heard from the lips of Peter and had believed. It is worth noticing that this act of believing was followed by the receipt of the gift of the Holy Spirit:
prior to their baptism with water and not after it. They were baptised into the Olive Tree of Israel, and partook of the millennial blessings of Israel of which the gifts of the Holy Spirit were a foretaste.
* However, following the revelation given to Paul while in prison in Rome, after Israel's fall into the blindness of unbelief at the end of the Acts period, in the epistles written to the Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 & 2 Timothy, Titus and Philemon, water baptism is notable by it's absence.
* It is then that we are given notification of the seven-fold unity of the Spirit in Ephesians 4, in which one baptism is the requirement: and that has to be baptism by the Holy Spirit, for the door to Israel to repent had been closed, and salvation had been sent to the Gentiles (Acts 28), therefore water baptism was no longer a requirement. They were no longer baptised into the Olive Tree of Israel, for it was no longer there to be baptised into, for it had gone away into unbelief, the temple was destroyed in AD70, and the people of Israel scattered throughout the nations.
* I realise that many will not agree with what I have said here, but I would ask that you at least give it some thought.
Thank you. :)
In Christ Jesus
Chris