Saturday, March 16, 2024

Jack Cottrell on Water Baptism and How Baptismal Regeneration Provides True Assurance to Believers

  

The second reason why God has connected salvation with baptism in the NT age has to do with our need for a personal assurance that God has indeed saved us. Sometimes it is easy to be plagued by doubts and uncertainties as to whether we have truly met the God of our salvation and have truly received his gifts of saving grace. We know what God has promised, but has it really happened to us?

 

As a concession to our human frailty in this respect, God has tied his promises to baptism as a concrete, objective event that will always stand out in our memories. It is an unforgettable reference point to which we can always return when we begin to doubt that we have received God’s grace. It is the “stake” that God himself has provided for our comfort and assurance. We do not have to torture ourselves, wondering at what point our faith was strong enough or our repentance sincere enough to be saved. The sufficiency for our salvation lies in the power of God and the truth of his promises. He has promised to save us in baptism. Just as surely we can remember our baptism, so we can be sure that God has kept his promises to us.

 

This is the sense in which there is a psychological connection between baptism and salvation. Knowing that we have been baptized has a definite effect on our state of mind, in the sense that it undergirds our assurance of salvation. This psychological effect is possible, though, only because baptism is in itself the time when salvation is given. (Jack Cottrell, The Faith Once for All: Bible Doctrine for Today [College Press, 2002, 2023], 370-71)