We praise God for ordaining government and for providentially establishing the government of the United States as a constitutional republic. We further praise Him that the highest court in the judicial branch of our government properly exercised their authority in making a righteous ruling by overturning the wicked ruling of Roe v. Wade. While this does not mean that unborn babies will now be afforded equal protection under the law, it is a step in the right direction.

In the providence of God, the Supreme Court’s decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was handed down five days after I began an exposition of Romans 13:1-7. My first sermon on that passage (which came during an ongoing study of the whole letter) involved an overview of it, outlining the argument that Paul makes and the way that he makes it. I also explained the nature of authority and the jurisdictional realms in which God has delegated His authority in His world, namely the home, the church, and the state.
My sermon after that decision focused on verse 1, which states the thesis for the whole paragraph: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.” Because God has instituted civil governments, everyone is obligated to be submissive to them. The idea of government and governmental authorities comes from God. This is a fundamental truth that all Christians must remember as we work out our public, and especially our political, theology. We are submissive to governmental authorities because we are subject to Jesus Christ, who possesses “all authority” (Matthew 28:18).
We must remember this as we think about the Supreme Court’s recent decision (in Dobbs) to overturn the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion in the United States. Because God has even the heart of kings in His hands (Proverbs 21:1) we know that, ultimately, that decision is His work. Since it is a work that offers some legal protection to unborn children, everyone who loves mercy and justice should unashamedly rejoice. By its ruling the current justices determined that Roe v. Wade was an unjust decision—a mistake made by an earlier iteration of the court.
No one can legitimately doubt the accuracy of this ruling. In 1973 the right to abortion was invented out of thin air and attributed to the fourteenth amendment. But any honest reader will study in vain to find the right to kill unborn babies in that amendment. Certainly, those who adopted the amendment in 1868 had no thought of it being used to justify abortion.
So, praise God that on June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States reversed an unrighteous decision by overturning Roe v. Wade.
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Written by Rev. Dr. Andrew W.G. Matthews |
Tuesday, March 29, 2022
It is time for Presbyterian ministers, along with elders, to affirm their ordination vows by using the right and biblical administration of baptism. As for me I am done with dunking, and I will boldly proclaim that “baptism is rightly administered with pouring, or sprinkling water upon the person.”

The dipping of the person into the water is not necessary; but baptism is rightly administered by pouring, or sprinkling water upon the person.—Westminster Confession of Faith, Ch. 28:3
I’m done with dunking. I will never again perform an immersion baptism for a Christian, but will henceforth be true to the biblical and confessional standards of my Presbyterian faith. To say this is the final step on my long sacramental journey from being a credo-baptist to being fully Reformed. I myself experienced an immersion baptism in a charismatic Methodist church a year after my conversion and spent the first decade of my Christian life in churches that only did immersion baptism.
As a Presbyterian minister, I once borrowed the baptismal facilities of a Baptist church in order to immerse a family of teenagers who attended my church. In my last Presbyterian parish in the country, I was willing to accommodate the preferences of Baptists in my church and go down to the local lake to immerse their believing children. I’m done with that now.
The Baptist belief is that immersion (the total submerging of the person underwater) and emersion (the coming up out of the water) is necessary in order to have a true baptism. Presbyterians hold an immersion baptism is valid before God when it meets the essential criteria of water applied by a minister in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but that it is unnecessary. The correct administration of baptism actually is “by pouring, or sprinkling water upon the person.” For me, to practice immersion baptism is to replace a superior mode with an inferior one and to endorse error.
The Baptist contention that the only valid mode of baptism is by immersion rests upon three flawed lines of argumentation: the meaning of the word “baptism” itself, New Testament accounts of baptisms, and the imagery of death, burial, and resurrection.
First, Baptists hold that the Greek word baptizo, “to baptise,” exclusively means “to dip” or “to immerse,” thus all baptisms must be by immersion. As with most words, baptizo has a range of senses, one of which is “to dip.” Baptists argue that “to dip” is the core meaning of the word which controls every use. I will spare you an exhaustive exposition on semantic theory, etymology, and every example of baptizo in the Bible and ancient literature and simply state, in contradiction, that baptizo primarily conveys the senses of wash, cleanse, or unite which can take place through dipping, pouring, sprinkling, or wiping.
The main point is to apply water to something or someone to cleanse it. The Baptist might say then that only bathing or immersion truly conveys the cleansing of a person, and that sprinkling or pouring water over the head does not cleanse the body. Really? In that case, we should get rid of all our bathroom showers and commit to taking baths every day. Using showers, faucets, basins and towels, as well as bathing in rivers and lakes, has been used to wash bodies for millennia. Jesus seemed quite satisfied with a few wet teardrops and some long hair when his feet were cleansed (Luke 7:44).
Secondly, the supposed New Testament accounts of immersion baptism in the Gospels and Acts are examples of the use of sloppy eisegesis. When Jesus came “up from the water” (Matt. 3:16) or “up out of the water” (Mark 1:10) he was not necessarily emerging from beneath the water but walking out of the water or up from the river bed. The same action is enacted with Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch who saw water and stop the chariot. The text says “they both went down into the water” and then “they came out of the water.” (Acts 8:38-39). Did Philip perform a tandem baptism by both going beneath the water?  Obviously not, they both walked down into the pool of water and then both walked out.
In both the cases of Jesus and the eunuch they could have stood or kneeled in the water while water was poured over them. It is supposed that John the Baptist chose the desert of Aenon near Salim because the “much water” or “plentiful water” provided deep water for immersion (John 3:23). A better reading is that these many springs of waters were where people gathered to retrieve water—and were usually quite shallow—but the springs also served John’s purpose for baptizing.
Other baptisms in the book of Acts were more likely accomplished by applying water than by immersing people. The three thousand at the feast of Pentecost could have been baptised using the lavers of water used in Old Testament ceremonial cleaning. Paul and Cornelius and his Gentile guests were baptised inside houses where it was uncommon to have a deep bathtub.
Within the house of Cornelius the question, “Can anyone withhold water for baptising these people?” (Acts 10:47) implies that water would be brought to the new converts. Lydia’s baptism does allow for an immersion baptism in a river (Acts 16:13-15), but the Philippian jailor was present in his house, not the river when he and all his household heard the word of God and were baptised (Acts 16:32-33). The New Testament Christian baptisms simply do not prove a case for exclusive, immersion-only baptism, but instead, demonstrate the probability of a pouring or sprinkling mode.
Thirdly, and most importantly within the Baptist perspective, the act of baptism supposedly depicts the imagery of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. The go-to verse for Baptists to prove that baptism is essentially an immersion and emersion act is Romans 6:3, “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” When the convert goes down into the water his old man dies with the crucified Christ, but then he rises up out of the water as a new man with the resurrected Christ.
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As Americans raised in a democratic republic, we cling tenaciously to the principle “one person, one vote.” It is very easy (and almost natural) to carry over this principle to our understanding of redemption from the guilt of our sin. We mistakenly assume that God should give everyone a chance to go to heaven, and if people refuse God’s gracious offer, then people, in effect, send themselves to hell by refusing God’s gracious gift. This makes perfect sense on democratic presuppositions because in the civil kingdom (the political sphere) each individual is assumed to be entitled and empowered to determine their own course in life. And if this is true in American political life, then it should be true when it comes to the salvation of sinners. Right? Well, no. The Bible does not allow us to understand humanity’s redemption from sin in such rosy terms.
Because of Adam’s sin, we are all sinners by nature and by choice. As his biological children and heirs, we are born guilty for Adam’s act of rebellion in Eden. The Bible speaks of this as being dead in sin (Ephesians 2:1). This simply means that we are unwilling and unable to do anything to save ourselves. Because we are dead in sin, we cannot even take those first steps toward God that some Christians mistakenly think we should be able to make (cf. John 6:44, which tells us that on one can come to Jesus unless drawn by the Father). It is common to hear Christians describe God’s grace in generic, medicinal terms, or as a rescue from peril such as, “grace is like a medicine which, if we are willing to take it, enables us to come to Christ,” or that “grace is a life-ring which we must grab and cling to, or we will drown in our sins.”
Our problem is not that we are spiritually sick, weakened and impaired by our sin, or that we are morally corrupt. It is much worse than that. The Bible says we are dead in sin. Dead people do not, and indeed cannot, come to God. God must act upon us while we are dead in sin or else we stay dead! He alone can make us alive with Christ (cf. Ephesians 2:1-10). As Paul recounts here, God does everything necessary to save us from our sins when we are unworthy of such salvation, and unable to do anything about our predicament. Democratic presuppositions simply don’t apply to matters of sin and grace. Humanity’s plight (the curse and death) and God’s sovereign grace are the proper categories here. From beginning to end God must save us because we are unable to do anything to save ourselves. This is where we find the very heart of God’s saving grace—the doctrine of election.
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