Baptismal Regeneration?

[Sam]

Originally Posted by bkstokes

The question that I am about to post is not to provoke strife and I would really prefer a 1 stepper to answer it so that there would be no contention in the matter. I joined the forum in Feb., so I have not discussed a lot of these issues with people here. This being said the question is:

How do 3 steppers deal with the passage of the Ethiopian Eunich? Phillip the Evangelist was taken from the Eunich and he was still not filled with the Holy Ghost.

In the first part you said you would prefer a one stepper to answer, then in the latter part you asked for a three stepper explanation.

As a one stepper, my explanation is as follows. Philip is called an evangelist, actually the only person called an evangelist in our New Testament. Philip had a way of preaching that got folks saved. He also had a ministry of healing and miracles. But, did not seem to have a ministry of ministering the HGB (Holy Ghost Baptism). In Acts 8 it speaks of all the folks who were saved, healed, delivered, and baptized in water but they had not received the HGB. Peter and John were sent down from the Jerusalem assembly to minister the HGB to those folks. Later in the chapter Philip was sent into the desert. He obediently went. Someone has dubbed this "from Samaria to the Sahara." When he came upon an Ethiopian Eunuch the Spirit told him to "go near and join (stick to, adhere) to his chariot. He accepted the invitation to come up into the chariot and began to explain the portion of Scripture (Isaiah chapter 53) the Ethiopian was reading and "preached unto him Jesus" (Acts 8:35). They came to some water, probably the Wadi el-Hesi north of Gaza and the eunuch requested baptism. Philip did not want to baptize someone who was not converted so he stated, "If you believe with all your heart, you may be baptized." The eunuch made a profession of faith, "I believe that Jesus is the Messiah and is the Son of God." Based on this confession of faith, the chariot was stopped, and they both went down into the water, and he (Philip) baptized him (the eunuch). Then, according to some old manuscripts, the story continues. "And when they were come up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord fell upon the eunuch, and the angel of the Lord snatched Philip away..." So, it seems that the eunuch received the HGB in the water without the customary laying on of hands.