The Name in the Water: Baptism as the Apostles Practiced It

Have you got it like the Bible says? That is a fair question to put to any believer, and it is not a trick. It does not ask whether you love God, whether you trust Christ, or whether you go to church. It asks whether what happened to you matches what the apostles preached and what they did. To answer it honestly, we have to start where the New Testament starts: with grace.

Saved by grace, through faith

Salvation is a gift. We do not earn it, we cannot add to its worth, and no one will stand before God and boast of it. “The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:23). “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). And there is no other way to receive it: “there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). Nothing in this essay takes back a word of that.

When the Philippian jailer asked Paul and Silas what he must do, they told him to believe. Then Luke shows us what believing looked like that night. “They spake unto him the word of the Lord,” and in the same hour the jailer “was baptized, he and all his, straightway” (Acts 16:32–33). The apostles’ “believe” did not leave baptism for another day. It led straight to the water.

That is not the end of the story

The same New Testament that says “by grace are ye saved through faith” also records what the apostles told believing people to do. On the day of Pentecost the crowd heard Peter preach Christ crucified and risen, and they were “pricked in their heart.” They believed what they heard, and they asked, “Men and brethren, what shall we do?” (Acts 2:37). Peter did not tell them there was nothing to do.

Repentance, baptism in the name of Jesus Christ, and the gift of the Holy Ghost stand in one sentence, and the promise that follows is “unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off” (Acts 2:39). The rest of the New Testament speaks of baptism in the same weighty terms.

• Mark 16:16: “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved.” Believing and being baptized are joined by one and.
• Acts 22:16: Ananias to Saul, who had already met the risen Lord on the road: “arise, and be baptized, and wash away thy sins, calling on the name of the Lord.”
• Galatians 3:27 and Romans 6:3–4: believers are “baptized into Christ,” “buried with him by baptism into death,” so that they “should walk in newness of life.”
• Colossians 2:12: “buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God.”
• Titus 3:5: God “saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost.”
• 1 Peter 3:21: “baptism doth also now save us.”

Peter’s sentence deserves a closer look, because he guards it himself. Baptism does not save as “the putting away of the filth of the flesh,” as if the water had power of its own. It saves as “the answer of a good conscience toward God,” and it does so “by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” The power is Christ’s. The water is where a believing heart answers Him. Peter even names the picture: Noah’s household was “saved by water” (1 Peter 3:20), and baptism is “the like figure.”

Faith that obeys is not a work of merit

This is where critics set one half of the New Testament against the other, so it is worth being exact. When Paul says “not of works, lest any man should boast,” he means works that earn, the kind that would make salvation “not reckoned of grace, but of debt” (Romans 4:4). Baptism is nothing of the kind. No one baptizes himself; he is buried and raised “through the faith of the operation of God” (Colossians 2:12), and God does the work. That is why Paul can write in one sentence that God saved us “not by works of righteousness which we have done” and “by the washing of regeneration” (Titus 3:5): the washing is His mercy applied, not our righteousness offered. Paul’s own mission was to bring about “obedience to the faith among all nations” (Romans 1:5; 16:26), and James says the same thing from the other side: Abraham’s “faith wrought with his works,” because “faith without works is dead” (James 2:20–22). Noah “by faith” prepared an ark (Hebrews 11:7), and no one says he earned his deliverance by carpentry. Grace is the source, faith is the hand that receives, and obedience is what that faith does. Christ “became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him” (Hebrews 5:9). To obey the gospel is not to pay for the gift. It is to take the gift the way the Giver offered it.

Born of water and of the Spirit

Jesus told Nicodemus that a man must be “born again” to see the kingdom of God (John 3:3), then explained what that birth is: “born of water and of the Spirit.” Christians read the water in more than one way; some take it as natural birth, others as the cleansing of the word. But Jesus speaks of one birth with two elements, and the apostles’ preaching joins the same two elements in one experience: baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost (Acts 2:38), “the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost” (Titus 3:5). Repentance turns a person toward God; the water and the Spirit bring the new birth to completion.

The pattern in Acts

Luke gives four accounts of baptism that tell us what name was invoked. Set side by side, they show a pattern, and one detail that never changes.

The order of water and Spirit varies. The Samaritans and the Ephesians received the Holy Ghost after baptism; Cornelius’ household received the Spirit first, and Peter still “commanded them to be baptized” (Acts 10:47–48). In Acts 10:48 the KJV reads “in the name of the Lord”; the Greek text behind most modern versions reads “in the name of Jesus Christ.”¹ Either way, the Lord in view is Jesus, whose name Peter had just preached: “through his name whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins” (Acts 10:43).

What never varies is the name. In Samaria, Philip preached “the things concerning the kingdom of God, and the name of Jesus Christ,” and those who believed were baptized (Acts 8:12). At Ephesus, men who had already been baptized under John were baptized again “in the name of the Lord Jesus” (Acts 19:5). The name mattered enough to repeat the act. Nowhere does Acts record the words “Father, Son and Holy Ghost” spoken at a baptism. Paul told the church to do “all in the name of the Lord Jesus” (Colossians 3:17), and he reminded the Corinthians that they were washed, sanctified and justified “in the name of the Lord Jesus” (1 Corinthians 6:11).

Why the name belongs in the water

God is not a God “that hath pleasure in wickedness: neither shall evil dwell with thee” (Psalm 5:4). Sin has to be dealt with before anyone can stand in His presence, and Scripture says how it is dealt with: “repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem” (Luke 24:47). Remission comes through the name of Jesus, because He alone paid for sin. Baptism is where the New Testament puts the two together: the remission of sins, and the name called over the one who believes (Acts 2:38; 22:16).

Matthew 28:19 and the one name

Oneness believers take Matthew 28:19 as seriously as anyone. The question is not whether to obey it, but what it commands. Jesus did not say “in the names.” He said “in the name,” singular.

Father, Son and Holy Ghost are not names in the way Peter, James and John are names. They are titles, each describing how the one God has made Himself known. The New Testament tells us what name belongs to them. The Son was to be called JESUS (Matthew 1:21). Jesus said, “I am come in my Father’s name” (John 5:43). He said the Comforter, “which is the Holy Ghost,” would be sent “in my name” (John 14:26). And God has given Him “a name which is above every name” (Philippians 2:9).

Then look at what the men who heard the commission did. Luke’s account of the same commission says “that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem” (Luke 24:47). At Pentecost, in Jerusalem, Peter preached repentance and baptism “in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins.” The apostles who received Matthew 28:19 did not disobey it on the first day they had the chance to keep it. Their practice shows what they understood the name to be.

The Didache is an early and valuable witness, but it is not Scripture, and scholars still debate its date and how it was put together. Nor is it as uniform as the objection suggests: the same document restricts the Lord’s table to those “baptized into the name of the Lord.”² Justin wrote more than a century after Pentecost.³ Where later practice and the book of Acts differ, Acts is the earlier witness and the inspired one.

The question is not only an Apostolic one. Scholars who do not share Oneness theology have studied the Jesus-name phrases closely.⁴⁵ Some have concluded that baptism in the name of Jesus was the church’s earliest practice and that the threefold wording became standard later; others read Luke’s phrases as a statement of authority rather than words spoken over the candidate. We do not rest the case on any scholar. We rest it on what the apostles did, which Luke recorded plainly.

Have you got it like the Bible says?

This is not a question meant to frighten anyone. It is an invitation. If you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, you have begun where the apostles’ hearers began. The next step is the one the apostles gave to everyone who asked: repent, be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. Grace offers it; faith receives it; obedience is how faith says yes. The promise is still “unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off.” And the question Ananias put to Saul is still the right one: “And now why tarriest thou?” (Acts 22:16).