Expert: Ernie Laurence, Jr. - 1/8/2010

Question
Dear Brother in christ,
I came to know that there are seven kinds of baptism while I was able to figureout five of them and I did not know the other two.

My question is what is the difference in the baptism which John the baptist gave and the apostels gave. As mentioned in Acts19:5 why those who are baptised by John are rebaptised.

Answer
John's immersion (baptism) was under the Mosaical Law and was an immersion of repentance for Jews to return to obeying God by upholding that law in letter and spirit to prepare them for the coming of the Christ and His kingdom, the church, which did not exist in John's lifetime.

New Testament immersion is for all humans, both Jew and non-Jew, it is for full forgiveness of sins, and it is the point where we are added to the Lord's church, the kingdom of Christ.

Those who were immersed according to John's immersion were done so for specific reasons that had nothing to do with the full salvation offered in Christ and it did not put them into the body of Christ where that is found, therefore they needed to be immersed into Christ.  It isn't truly a REimmersion except for the water part because NT immersion is not the same as John's.  The "re-" part of "rebaptism" really gets a lot of people confused, but the text of Acts 19 does not use the word "rebaptize" or "reimmerse".

In Truth and Love,

Ernie