The Great Commission

The Great Commission
by Sylvester Hassell

THE GOSPEL MESSENGER
Devoted to the Primitive Baptist Cause
Sylvester Hassell, Editor ---- W. M. Mitchell, Associate Editor


Williamston, N.C., July 1896

Eld. E. S. Counts of VA., requests my views on Mark xvi. 15, 16: and brother E. J. O"Neal asks me to write an article on Baptism, for the GOSPEL MESSENGER. As baptism is embraced in the text in Mark, I will endeavor to comply with both these requests in the same article, with such ability as the Lord may grant me. All our attempts at expounding or understanding His Written Word are in vain without the enlightenment of His Hold Spirit, which He has promised to give for the sake of His Son, to those of His children who ask Him.
The text reads:--'and He said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature. He that believeth, and is baptized, shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.'
PREACHING
As I have tried to show, in the GOSPEL MESSENGER for Dec. 1892, the FINAL COMMISSION of Christ to His Disciples seems to have been given, in words somewhat different but having substantially the same meaning, on four different occasions after His resurrection from the dead---1 st , on the night of the first day, when He rose from the grave (Mark xvi. 14, Luke xxiv. 33-48, John xx. 19-23): 2d, at His appearance to seven of His Disciples by the sea of Galilee (John xxi. 15-17); 3d, at His appearance to eleven of His Disciples, and probably to five hundred brethren also, on a mountain in Galilee (Matt. xxviii 16-20, 1 Cor. xv. 6); and 4 th , when He met the eleven apostles for the last time in Jerusalem, and led them out to Bethany, and ascended in their sight to heaven (Mark xvi. 15-19; Luke xxiv. 49-53, Acts i. 1-12).
Just as the direction which Christ gave to Peter, in John xxi 15-17, to feed His sheep and lambs undoubtedly applied also to all the apostles, and is applied by Peter to all elders--- 1 Pet. V. 1-4, so I feel sure that (as plainly intimated in His words in Matt. xxviii, 20, 'Lo, I am with you always,' not to the end of each one of your personal earthly lives, but 'even unto the end of the world .') Christ in His words in the Final Commission, commands His true ministers, to the end of time, to go unto all the world, as they may be impressed and directed by His Spirit, and as the way may be opened to them by His providence, and to teach the nations, whether Jew or Gentile; to tell them of the infinite holiness of God and of their just condemnation by His righteous law, and of their sinful, lost, and ruined condition, and of their indispensable need of being regenerated by His Spirit, and of Repentance, and turning from their sins; and to point every creature; every human being burdened by a sense of sin; to the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world, to the dying and risen Savior of sinners, who calls every laboring and heavy laden soul to Himself for rest; and to exhort all those who heartily receive their message to follow Jesus into the liquid grave, and to thus unite with His visible Church, and to yield humble and loving obedience; to all His commandments all their lives, and in this manner to benefit their fellow creatures and glorify God (in addition to the already cited, see Acts xxvi. 15-20; xx. 21; xvii. 30,31; John iii. 1-17, i. 29; Matt. xi. 28-30, Acts ii. 38-42, John xiv. 15; Matt. xxii. 37-40.)
As I have said in the ninth chapter in the Church History, 'the qualifications laid down in the New Testament for a gospel minister are that he must be a regenerated, Christ-loving, God-called, and God-qualified man---kind, gentle, humble, quiet, firm, virtuous, upright, just, sober, temperate, unselfish, not covetous, well-proved, exemplary, of good repute, sound in doctrine, able and apt to teach, and divinely impressed with the work of the ministry, not for ambitious or sordid ends, but for the good of men and the glory of God.' He is not to resort, for preparation to preach the gospel, to Theological Seminaries, the chief hot-beds of infidelity; but he is to read, search, and meditate upon his one great infallible text-book; the Hole Scriptures, and to beseech the Lord Jesus for His indispensable Spirit to enable to understand His written word aright, and not to despise true light given to the meaning on the word from any source opened to him by the providence of God, but to test such instructions by the Scriptures and his own experience, and himself to be a personal witness od the living and eternal truths of the gospel, and he is to preach those truths fully" faithfully, fearlessly, and tenderly, to all to whom he has opportunity both at home and abroad, both publicly and privately, and he is to proclaim, not the power of dead sinners or of human appliances of any kind, but the power of a Divine and Almighty Savior not to save every sin-laden soul but also to quicken into eternal life those who are spiritually dead. Thus he is to find and teach and guide and tend and feed (not goats and dogs and swine but) with the sincere milk of the word, and the strong meat of the divine, sovereign, and all-sufficient grace, and the sound doctrine of the apostles and prophets, including faithful and continual exhortations to hearty obedience to all the commandments of Christ. Having freely received of God, he is to freely give of his spiritual service to the saints; and they are" with equal freeness and faithfulness, to give to him of their substance for the temporal support of him, and his family. The Lord only knows where are His people who need teaching, guiding, tending and feeding, and, as He did in person in the days of His earthly ministry, He only, by His spirit now can direct His servants where to find His people; and the history of Modern Men Made Missions demonstrates that He has not delegated this directing power to Missionary Societies or Boards. If a true minister of Christ is divinely impressed to visit and preach to people at a distance from his home, in this country or any other country, the true children of God should as in the apostolic age, help him on his way after a godly sort (Acts xv. 3; Rom. xv. 24; 1 Cor. xvi. 6; 3 John 6.)
BAPTISM
'He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned' ---Mark xvi. 16.
This language of Christ proves that none but believers shall be baptized; and that want of belief, and not want of water baptism, is followed by damnation. The most eminent scholars and preachers, in modern times, in all enlightened nations, both Catholic and Protestant, frankly admit that there is not the slightest New Testament authority either for the baptism of unbelievers , whether infant or adults, or for and so-called 'form of baptism' than immersion; and yet the Strict Baptists of England and the Old School Primitive Baptists of the United States, who are one in doctrine and practice, are the only church that stands fully and firmly upon the fundamental New Testament principle of a regenerated church membership, baptized, first with the Spirit of God inwardly and then in water outwardly, as an external sigh of the inward renewal of the Holy Ghost, quickening and convincing the sinner of his sins, and then leading him to Jesus and giving him to realize his sympathetic union with the blessed Son of God in His sufferings, death, burial, and resurrection.
As I have said in the Church History, 'the practice of infant baptism is a weak thoroughly unscriptural, idolatrous superstition, and probably arose in North Africa in the third century (the first recorded instance being in A. D. 256) from the false idea of the magical, regenerating, saving power of water, and which did not become general until the fifth century, thus securing its triumph in the Dark Ages about the same time with the establishment of the papacy; and it is worth only of the Dark Continent and the Dark Ages. It is a vain human tradition which utterly make void the commandments of God----those commandments requiring baptism after repentance and faith, as fitley symbolical of those internal graces; while the human tradition requires the baptism of unconscious, impenitent, and unbelieving infancy. It is a solemn mockery, substituting for the indispensable faith of the recipient the unscriptural proxy-faith of humanly invented sponsors, god parents, and sureties. It is a cruel falsehood and deception, pretending that the unconscious infant is regenerated and grafted into the body of Christ"s church, and depriving him the comforts of believers" baptism if he should even believe. The Catholics, who invented it, deny its Biblical authority, and rest its validity on the authority of the church, and they justly insist, therefore, that Protestants who practice the rite abandon the great Protestant principle that the Bible is the only rule of faith, and revert to the authority of tradition. A most terrible and all sufficient argument against infant baptism, is the implementation of the diabolical doctrine, that all infants who die unbaptized, even though they die unborn, and even though they be elected, redeemed, and regenerated by the Triune God, are for the want of a drop or two of natural water applied to them, consigned to everlasting torment or privation of happiness.
There are few stronger proofs of the total depravity of the human heart than the willful and deliberate perversion, not by the Catholic, but by the Protestant world, of the meaning of Greek word Baptizo, from which comes the English word Baptize. There is not a Greek Lexicon received as an authority by any University in Europe or America that dares to define Baptizo by the English words sprinkle or pour; Mr. T. J. Covant, of New York, has proved that such a meaning of that word is not found in the whole range of Greek literature; and yet nearly all Protestant churches pretend that the word is susceptible of this meaning. The Roman Catholic apostasy bases the charge from baptism to sprinkling on the authority of the 'church' to change rites and ceremonies; (for which, however, there is not the slightest authority in the Scriptures) and their scholars do not, like the Protestants, falsify the meaning of the original word Baptizo. The Creek Catholic Church, which certainly ought to understand the Greek word Baptizo, has always immersed and still immerses, even in the severe climates of Russian and Siberia, all its members, both infants and adults, and uncompromisingly declares that every other form of the rite is essentially invalid. The Roman Catholic Council of Ravenna, in A.D. 1311, was the first council of that 'church' which legalized baptism by sprinkling, by leaving it to the choice of the officiating minister. John Calvin, the founder of Presbyterianism, and John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, admit that immersion was the practice of the Apostolic Church. 'There can be no question,' says Dean Stanley, of Westminster Abbey, 'that the original form of baptism, the very meaning of the word was either unknown or regarded, unless in the case of dangerous illness, as an exceptional, almost a monstrous case. In the early centuries baptism was an entire submersion in the deep water, a leap as into the rolling sea or the rushing river, where for the moment the waves close over the bather"s head, and he emerges again as from a momentary grave. This was the part of the ceremony on which the Apostles laid so much stress. It seemed to them like a burial of the old former self and the rising up again of the new self.
The change from immersion to sprinkling has set aside the most of the apostolic expressions regarding baptism, and has altered the very meaning of the word.'
How any child of God, who is acquainted with the above indisputable truths on the subject of baptism, can remain satisfied with any pretended form of baptism administered to him in his unconscious infancy, or with sprinkling or pouring administered to him for baptism after he believed in Christ, is beyond my ability to understand. O for light from Heaven to dissipate the ignorance, superstition, and perverseness in which the religious world is enveloped!
S. Hassell

"