Msg #2618 Biblical Baptism & Acts 8:37.

Msg #2618 Biblical Baptism & Acts 8:37.

What The Bible Says

Good Samaritan’s Penny Pulpit by Pastor Ed Rice

In the throes of introducing Paul, God’s chosen apostle to the Gentiles, God gives three revelations through the ministry of Philip. First Samaritans readily received the gospel, then they had to reject and forsake their sorcery, and finally a poignant lesson that baptism does not save us. Philip is told to leave the Church plant in the city of Samaria and go south, pass Jerusalem and out into the Gaza desert. He comes across an Ethiopian proselyte to Judaism, going home from worship at Jerusalem. The Ethiopian is confused, as is all of orthodox Judaism, about the scriptures which depict the death of their Messiah. That scripture, Isaiah 53, genders such confusion in Judaism that it is carefully avoided in the Jewish “missal” or daily reading as it were, to this day. But Philip in Acts 8, “opened his mouth, and began at the same scripture, and preached unto him Jesus” (8:35). Thank you, Deacon Philip! As God would have it, they, traveling in the Gaza Negev, “came upon a certain water, and the eunuch said, see, here is water. What does hinder me to be baptized?” (8:36). If you want to know what Phillip answered, you will have to lay down your modernist ecumenical bible and find an Authorized King James Bible to read verse 37! It seems Origin Adamantius (182-254 A.D.) a Father of Roman Catholicism, and The Father of Biblical Criticism, and The Father of the Allegorical Method, down in Egypt’s Alexandrian center of man’s intellectualism, rip-tore that whole verse out of his Alexandria manuscripts! Phillip’s answer dashes in the face of Roman and Protestant dogma concerning baptism, especially infant baptism and Pentecostal baptismal regeneration. No surprise it’s not in ecumenical bibles. The Bible teaches believer baptism only, as a symbolic picture of death burial and resurrection.

An Essay for week #18 May 3, 2026
Msg in audio at www.GSBaptistChurch.com/audio/gs260503.mp3
12 Systematic Theology Volumes www.GSBaptistChurch.com/theology
Read the Penny Pulpit in blog www.gsbcpastorrice.wordpress.com

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