Peter Said, Paul Said

I wonder if Peter and Paul were friends. They had a lot in common. Both were passionate about their faith, living it out in impressive, larger-than-life fashion. Each had plenty of baggage from his background to remind him of past failures. Paul surely had those pesky memories of hunting down families and persecuting them. Peter must have had haunting recollections of telling Jesus he would never forsake him one moment only to forsake him three times that very same day. Also, both these men offer seemingly different presentations of the gospel message in the book of Acts.

Peter, a man of action, stresses action in his Acts chapter two sermon. "Repent and be baptized," he says. When Paul recounts his story of how he experienced salvation in Acts 22:16, he tells of meeting Jesus and Jesus instructing him to go see Ananias who says, "What are you waiting for? Go be baptized!" Ananias (as Paul retells it) feels a certain amount of urgency in this. In fact, it seems like a directive and not a mere suggestion.

However, equally plentiful are the messages from the two of these men that emphasize not OUR action but God's action in the salvation process. Referring to the conversion of Cornelius in Acts 15, Peter declared, "Men and brethren, you know that a good while ago God chose among us, that by my mouth the Gentiles should hear the word of the gospel and believe. So God, who knows the heart, acknowledged them by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as He did to us" (7-8). He continued by affirming that God "made no distinction between us and them, purifying their hearts by faith" (9). Cornelius had received the Holy Spirit when he believed the Gospel. He was saved by faith-plus-nothing. Peter makes no mention of turning from sins, of baptism, of circumcision, or anything else. What's more, Peter specifically ruled out any role for works in our salvation, adding the powerful words, "Now therefore, why do you test God by putting a yoke on the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear? But we believe that through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ we shall be saved in the same manner as they" (10-11).

Similarly, in the conversion of the Philippian jailer in Acts 16, the jailer asks the question, "…what must I do to be saved?" (30). Paul's answer is unequivocal: "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved…" (31). (Yet even in this instance we see the jailer and his family urgently baptized in the middle of the night.)

So what do we do? Do we ignore baptism as so many of our evangelical brothers and sisters seem to do? Or do we speak only of baptism and refuse to call others “brothers and sisters” unless they agree with us? Today we look at what Peter and Paul said about it in the book of Acts.
Mark