Lesson 2776

(Lesson 2776)(07-31-19) Acts 16:35-40
    “ And when it was day, the magistrates sent the serjeants, saying, Let those men go. And the keeper of the prison told this saying to Paul, The magistrates have sent to let you go: now therefore depart, and go in peace. But Paul said unto them, They have beaten us openly uncondemned, being Romans, and have cast us into prison; and now do they thrust us out privily? nay verily; but let them come themselves and fetch us out. And the serjeants told these words unto the magistrates: and they feared, when they heard that they were Romans. And they came and besought them, and brought them out, and desired them to depart out of the city. And they went out of the prison, and entered into the house of Lydia: and when they had seen the brethren, they comforted them, and departed.”

   Although the core of today’s lesson concerns how Paul and Silas, who were Romans themselves, stood up to their fellow Romans and made them come personally to release them from the prison.  Another, and more important part of the quote as it pertains to the teaching of Christianity today, is what the author notes in the very first part of the lesson. In the first part of the quote, he wrote, “And when it was day”, meaning that it was no longer night.
    To that point, one might reasonably ask, what has those five words to do with anything? The answer is that those five words established that what happened between Paul, Silas, the magistrate and his house, would have, in fact, occurred at night. That would mean that IF all those people were baptized in water, that baptism would have, of a necessity, been administered in the dark. With the knowledge that at that point in history outside lighting was almost non-existent, to imagine that a group of people would have lit torches and gone out to find enough “living” water to hold a massive water baptism in the dark, borders the ridiculous. This part of the lesson helps confirm to me that the baptism that the magistrate and “his house” were exposed to was the baptism of the Holy Ghost and NOT a water baptism.~