“Is baptism essential for salvation?”

“Can one who is not baptized be saved; can one who is baptized be lost?”

“If I am a fairly good person, attend a Christian school, and go to church, and yet am not baptized, will I be lost?”

The answer to all these questions is subsumed under the question of faith. “What must I do to be saved,” asked the jailer, and Paul answered, “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved, you and hour household” (Acts 16:30-31). Christ is necessary for salvation (Acts 4:12), and faith is our access to Christ, the means by which we lay hold on Christ.

If one has genuine faith in Christ, trust in Christ, then it is absolutely inconceivable that he or she would reject the plain and simple command of Christ and His apostles to be baptized. Why? For the believer, baptism would be a great privilege, for it would mark identity with Christ ( Rom. 6:3-5).

If one takes all the passages in the New Testament that relate to baptism, all the passages dealing with what happens when one is baptized, then it should be obvious, as it has been through the Christian ages, that God communicates the benefits of salvation to us in a personal way in Christian baptism.

Faith points to the courtroom of heaven in which the Judge of all the world pronounces us acquitted. Our sins are pardoned for the sake of Christ who paid the price for them, and we are accounted as righteous in God’s sight, clothed with the perfect righteousness which Christ earned by his obedience.

One who receives Christ in faith does so because God has opened his heart. He would not close his heart now to what God requires him to do but gladly accept it. And what has been reckoned to him in justification by faith is now applied and communicated in a personal way in Christian baptism. Thus the whole question devolves to: “What do you think of Christ? Whose Son is He?” (Matt. 22:42).