Leviticus 19:27 reads, “Ye shall not round the corners of
your heads, neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard.” Similarly, Lev. 21:5 instructs, “They shall
not make baldness upon their head, neither shall they shave off the corner of
their beard, nor make any cuttings in their flesh.”
The chapter begins with, [1] And the LORD said unto
Moses, Speak unto the priests the sons of Aaron, and say unto them, There shall
none be defiled for the dead among his people:[2] But for his kin, that is near unto him, that is, for his mother, and for his father, and for his son, and for his daughter, and for his brother,
[3] And for his sister a virgin, that is nigh unto him, which hath had no husband; for her may he be defiled.
[4] But he shall not defile himself, being a chief man among his people, to profane himself.
*****
Just this past Wednesday night, Jordan talked about how in
Israel, if you came in contact with a dead person, you were “polluted,” meaning
you became unclean.
Specifically, Hosea 9:4 says, “They shall not offer wine offerings to the LORD, neither
shall they be pleasing unto him: their sacrifices shall be unto them as the
bread of mourners; all that eat thereof shall be polluted: for their
bread for their soul shall not come into the house of the LORD.”
Jordan
explained, “When they go out and try to offer sacrifices, it’s going to
be like the bread of mourners. A mourner is somebody mourning a dead person.
He’s saying they’re polluted."
******
For those who don’t know (an expose entitled “Duck called
out” can be found here by clicking back to Dec. 21, 2013), the Duck Dynasty men
preach at the Campbellite White’s Ferry Road Church of Christ in Louisiana.
They believe a person cannot be saved without water baptism, among lots of
other heretical stuff.
Here’s an outtake from a profile article that appeared in “The
Christian Chronicle”:
“For
the Robertsons’ four sons — Alan, Jase, Willie and Jephtha — going to bed at
night with people still in their home studying Scripture was normal.
“ ‘I
would get up for school, and there would be two to three people asleep on the
couch, their wet clothes over a chair,’ Alan said. ‘At some point Dad had
baptized them in the river near our house.’
“Friends
and relatives estimate that the Duck Commander has baptized more than 300 in
the nearby Ouachita River.’ ”
*****
If Robertson approached Bible study with any kind of
honesty, he would know water baptism has no part in God's plan of salvation today. There’s
no ceremony whatsoever involved. Instead, it's purely a faith commitment made
in a person's "inner man."
"It's teaching heresy beyond heresy to say some water
ceremony performed by some sinner could put you into Jesus Christ,” says Jordan.
“No Catholic pope ever taught anything more blasphemous than that and that's
exactly what they teach."
Being baptized into Jesus Christ HAS to be simply a
spiritual, supernatural transaction, and Paul even says as much when he writes
in I Cor. 12:13, "For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body,
whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all
made to drink into one Spirit."
*****
In the Bible, there are actually 12 different kinds of
baptism. They include baptism by fire and a "dry" baptism into death.
Paul writes in I Cor. 10:1-2, "Moreover, brethren, I
would not that ye should be ignorant, how that all our fathers were under the
cloud, and all passed through the sea; And were all baptized unto Moses in the
cloud and in the sea."
When the children of Israel escaped across the Red Sea, they
came out the other side baptized "in the cloud and in the sea," under
Moses' leadership, and it was only the bad guys who got hit with water.
"Israel went across on dry land, so there's a dry
baptism," says Jordan. "And they weren't dipped or immersed in
anything. They were identified under the leadership of Moses. In the Bible, the
term 'baptism' carries the idea of being identified. It doesn't carry the idea
of dipping, immersing or aspersing."
(Jordan gave an interesting aside to this matter when he
recalled a meeting with a professor from the world's largest evangelical
seminary, located outside Chicago, who wanted to sit down with Jordan after
hearing his weekly radio program. "He didn't like what he was hearing and
he wanted to talk me out of it," Jordan recalled. "When I showed him
Hebrews 9:17, he looked at it like he'd never seen it before! The man's got a
doctorate degree from Princeton University. He tried to tell me baptism was a
New Testament ordinance that's not found in the Old Testament because the Greek
word ‘baptiso’ doesn't occur in the Hebrew language. I said, 'But brother,
don't you know that there's more to the old testament than just Genesis through
Malachi?' He said, 'You're nuts.' ")
*****
The Old Testament word for baptism is "wash,"
which the word "baptiso" is sometimes translated as in the New
Testament.
John the Baptist came along and taught the ceremony of
cleansing, or purification, through washing. In John 1:19, the Pharisees ask
him, "Why baptizest thou then, if thou be not that Christ, nor Elias,
neither that prophet?"
They asked this precisely because they had expected the
Messiah, along with the witnesses announcing His presence, to be doing just the
things John the Baptist was doing, including the washing ceremony.
Baptism was the means for identifying together the people in
Israel who wanted to set themselves apart from the apostasy and make themselves
a holy nation.
*****In Acts 10, a man named Cornelius, who hadn't been baptized, received the Holy Spirit, prompting Peter to go, "Now, I got no idea what's going on here. Things are changing."
"You know the first person in your Bible who ever thought about water baptism not having ANY part in the program of God was Peter—it's right there in that passage," says Jordan. "Because they couldn't think of any reason not to baptize him, they went ahead and baptized him, but obviously a change in the importance of water baptism occurred because now some people got the Holy Ghost without being baptized. Things are different because of the change in program with the Apostle Paul."
*****
In all of Paul's epistles, there is only one reference to
water baptism (I Cor. 1:14) and what he says is, "I thank God that I
baptized none of you, but Crispus and Gaius."
If you followed “the commission” given in the Four Gospels and
Acts, there'd be no way a godly man could say such a thing. Paul couldn't have
said, "I thank God I DIDN’T do what God told me to do."
The few times Paul baptized it was as part of his early
ministry aimed at "provoking Israel to jealousy," using things from
the former program to show God was now behind Paul's ministry.
Other "signs" designed to accomplish this purpose
during the time the nation Israel was "diminishing away," included
tongue-talking (demonstrating possession of the Holy Spirit), circumcision and
the keeping of some of the Jewish feast days.
In Romans 11, Paul writes of this early period in his
ministry, "I say then, Have they stumbled that they should fall? God
forbid: but rather through their fall salvation is come unto the Gentiles, for to provoke them to jealousy. . . I
magnify mine office: If by any means I may provoke
to emulation them which are my flesh, and might save some of them."As Jordan says, "God held forth a longsuffering hand to a wicked, despised people who didn't love Him or trust Him, and He gave them one last opportunity to get into the new program, having despised the old program."
Whereas in the Old Testament economy the cut-off Gentiles
were to emulate Israel, now Israel's been cut off and must emulate the
Gentiles.
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