Do you have to believe before you are baptized?

Some say, "No, let's quickly baptize babies into the church. No need for faith before baptism." Others say, "Wait a minute. You first need to have faith in Christ to be born again and then be baptized."

What does the Bible say? One pastor recently tried to provide a scriptural answer and got a surprise. He remembered that when the eunuch believed on Christ and said to Philip, "See, here is water; what doth hinder me to be baptized?" Philip replied: "If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest."

Thinking he would help his people he grabbed his nice, new NIV and opened to the passage and prepared to read Acts 8:37. But wait. It was missing. There was verse 36 and immediately after it verse 38.. Verse 37 was missing. The pastor's reaction..... "Humph, that Bible is no good." So he went back to the one Bible that God has preserved, his King James Version.

The removal of that verse is just one example of how the mutilated NIV weakens a basic doctrine essential to Bible believers. If that pastor had been raised on the NIV, he would not have known that that verse should even be there.

As new generations grow up without the sure word of the KJV, the clear teachings of these essential doctrines will gradually be weakened. As this happens, pagan teachings such as infant baptism will come to be accepted as biblical because the verses which contradict them will no longer be there.

As we trace the two manuscript streams, the Textus Receptus, which God has protected, and the perverted and mutilated Alexandrian/Roman Catholic Westcott and Hort-based texts, it becomes increasingly clear that the only Bible that we can completely trust is the TR-based King James Version.


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