Do I Have To Be Baptised To Go To Heaven?

 

This is an extremely important question and one that you cannot afford to get wrong if you aim to get into heaven.

You only have to type this question into google and you will see that there are a lot of people aiming to convince readers that you don’t need baptism.

 

I have did just that and have seen an article that used the story of “the rich man and the beggar” from the book of Luke 16:22 to prove that baptism is not necessary; the problem that I have with this article is that firstly the writer is assuming that the beggar was not baptised before going to Abraham’s bosom, even though pointing out that baptism was practiced by the Jews long before Jesus’ was born.

 

So my question would be how do we know that he wasn’t baptized? Not that I’m saying he would have needed to be baptized to go to Abraham’s bosom because Abraham’s Bosom was not “heaven”.

 

This parable told by Jesus in the book of Luke does not teach us anything about baptism in fact when a person died in Old Testament days they were said to “be with their father” this can be read in several scriptures; Gen 15:15, Gen 47:30, Deu 31:16 and Judges 2:10.

 

Abraham was seen as the father of the nation and quite rightly referred to as “father Abraham” by the rich man in this story, but getting back to the article the writer states that “if it was necessary to get baptized to get to heaven then Jesus would have mentioned it in the story” well that of cause is the writers opinion but what I would say is what about the scripture where Jesus says if you are not born of water you will not enter into the Kingdom of God? Here read it for yourself.

 

Joh 3:5 Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. 

 

Pretty self-explanatory right? But yet you will still find people who will read this and say “no Jesus wasn’t talking about literally being baptized, he meant something else” but there are other scriptures where Jesus says it and the fact that he got baptised and baptized others (with the help of His disciples)proves how important He thought it was.

 

Getting back to the article, the writer also writes about the thief on the cross and the fact that Jesus says to him “today you will be with me in paradise” making the point that Jesus didn’t tell him to get himself off the cross, find some water and get someone to baptize him and then come back.

 

This shows that anyone can and does write articles without researching first what they are going to write, or maybe the point is to mislead readers into believing a lie, who knows?

 

So firstly Jesus is God manifested in the flesh (John 1:14) and as such will grant grace unto whoever He chooses (Romans 9:15) so the fact that the thief acquired such a special privilege because of his show of faith just before his death does not teach us that we should not be baptised.

 

Someone please help me to understand why that tells us to ignore what Jesus said we should do, what he told his Disciples to do and the fact that He said if we do not do it we won’t get into heaven?

 

Ok so I can hear you naysayers screaming at me at this point saying well what about Pauls letter to the Romans, he says that we are saved by faith alone and not by works, so if you have to be baptised then you’re applying works?

 

Hmmm, so what was the works that Paul was referring to? What did he mean?

Let’s have a closer look at Romans Chapter three. Firstly let’s make it clear that Paul is talking about the Law of Moses and the thing is, if the Law was to remain as an essential part of salvation it would only be the Jews who practiced it that could be saved, and as we have already been told that salvation wasn’t only for the Jews in (Romans 1:16), that wouldn’t make any sense.

 

Rom 1:16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.

 

So for those then that say if you are going have to be baptised to obtain salvation, you would be applying works so it goes against what Paul was saying. I would say that if I stood in a pool of water and allowed someone to dip me in and raise me back up again; I’m not sure how hard I would have to work to achieve this.

 

I suppose it could be said that if a large person is being baptised then the person whom is performing the baptism may have to work a little bit and if the baptismal candidate was really big they may need an extra hand or two.

 

But still, I see this as an act of obedience, as the instruction from the Lord Jesus Christ said that is what we should do. It could be said if you say you are a Christian and you don’t do it then you are being disobedient to the instruction that Jesus left us with.

 

The other thing that I would say about the book of Romans is that you must remember that it is a letter and I’m sure that when you get a letter from someone you don’t just read one line or paragraph and think that you’ve understood the whole letter. You would read the whole thing and have an understanding in what context it was written. Many people read the bible like this, picking little bits from here and there and then give a picture that resembles nothing like what was intended.

 

So for those that say Paul, who was the author of Romans, is telling us not to be baptised I would say read chapter six of Romans and keep in mind that he wrote a letter to a predominately Gentile church, and he didn’t write this letter in chapters and verses as you have it displayed in your bible today.

 

In chapter six Paul describes for us what baptism is all about and this is not the only time we read about Paul teaching churches about baptism in the bible, a large part of the New Testament was written by Paul whom himself was baptised and taught about baptism.

 

So that being the case, why would Paul in the same letter be telling the Romans that they don’t need baptism and then a little further down in the letter be telling them all about it, not to mention all the other scriptures in the bible where he taught baptism and got baptised himself.

 

Written By

Donovan Benjamin