Carl Wells Books

Last week I tried to show that the Bible teaches that children in believing Christian families should be baptized while very young, and also should be taking communion while very young. Most Christians, unfortunately, balk at one or the other (or both) of these positions. I have no illusions that my own brief blog post will end all discussion on these issues. I am simply reporting my thoughts prompted by my own reading of the Bible. Read the Bible for yourself, and see what you think.

For the sake of argument, however, assume that I might be correct. If I am correct, it is strongly likely that there are practical advantages to early baptism and to early communion. Let’s try to determine what some of those advantages might be.

1/Well, any time we do what the Bible says to do, surely that is a practical advantage to us. We are showing ourselves to be teachable. And that means to be teachable by the Bible. Being teachable by the Bible is a good starting point for our living. Who knows, maybe God does things the way He does them because He has good reasons to do so, and the good reasons even benefit us. It’s a theory, anyway.

2/That God would have us baptize our children immediately is a strong reminder of the generosity of God’s covenant of grace. Our children, if we are Christians, are immediately His children also. He loves the children born into His family, just as a normal Christian family loves the children God gives them. With the difference, of course, that God’s love is always wise, whereas we in our foolishness often “love” our children in foolish ways.

And just as Christian parents don’t wait until a child makes a credible profession of being hungry before they feed it, God doesn’t wait until a child makes a credible profession of faith before He feeds the child on the Savior Jesus Christ. He feeds that young child who is in His covenant family, right away.

The more understanding we have of the covenant of grace, the more we are humbled, and the more chance that we will begin to be grateful. When we are humbled and grateful, we are more likely to be put to doing the work that we should be doing. When we are slow to understand that we are saved by grace, it hampers our ability to think clearly about how we should live.

That God takes such early note and care of the children born to us, by instructing us to baptize them and feed them at the communion table, is worth pondering at considerable length. It reminds us that God is a loving God with a very generous spirit. Our children are His children, and He cares about all His children. A normal Christian father loves his child before the child makes a profession of faith in Jesus Christ. God also loves His children before they make a profession of faith in Jesus Christ.

So as we contemplate God’s loving character, and contemplate how the covenant of grace is constituted, we are beginning to think God’s thoughts after Him. Ours might be a feeble beginning, but it is a beginning. We have to start somewhere, and to have a small inkling of the personality of God is a decent start.

3/A biblical understanding about baptism and communion will help us immeasurably as we try to evangelize the entire earth.

4/As we baptize our children and feed them on Jesus Christ in the communion meal, we have a chance to begin to understand that for a professing Christian, behavior is crucial. The Bible shows us countless people who worked themselves out of the covenant of grace. We think of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram of Numbers 16. We think of the murderer Doeg (1 Samuel 22:18-19). Countless more names could be added. Some names no doubt we would be unsure about.

We can teach our children and ourselves about the fact that we can desert the covenant of grace. If we insist upon it, we can remove ourselves from the covenant of grace. Right now many of our young people seem to be thinking something like this: “I’ve chosen salvation, I’m now baptized” [finally!], “I’m taking communion” [finally!], “I’m good to go for the duration.” There is no understanding (often if not always) among our young people that their future behavior is crucial. “I’m one of the people of God.” They don’t read the Bible to learn more about God and about what God requires of them. They can’t even be bothered to sing along when the hymns or psalms are sung.

Of course a biblical understanding of baptism and communion does not mean that we are going to be automatically alert to the fact that we can work ourselves out of the covenant of grace, or that we will be objective about the character of our children and grandchildren. Watch for a few years, or better yet for a few decades, and pretty soon it becomes clear that most parents and grandparents are self-deceived about the spiritual standing of the young people in their families. That is not going to change quickly or easily. Self-deception is the most powerful and most commonplace form of deception in the world.

Still, once we understand that children in the covenant can work themselves out of the covenant–at least we theoretically understand even if we don’t yet apply that to our own children and grandchildren–maybe we will have a chance to be slightly warned that behavior is crucial.

In fact, our children–leaving ourselves aside for the moment!–often work themselves out of the covenant of grace. This is a frightening fact, but it is a fact. The Bible shows it happening often. We can begin to be warned–if we put aside our self-deception. That is a big if, admittedly.

When we see young people working themselves out of the kingdom of God, we naturally ask ourselves why it happens. Here are three possible answers. A/Bad parenting. This is what happens quite often. Christian parents do a rotten job of raising their children. B/A child goes awry despite good parenting. This happens some of the time, if not often. C/A mixture of mediocre parenting and a child insisting upon leaving the covenant of grace. This may be the most frequent reason our children leave the kingdom of God. We Christians are often mediocre parents, and the Christianity in the family is not real enough to give the child something he wants for himself.

As stated above, even a biblical teaching about how the covenant of grace operates will not be easily accepted by us. It is too hard a teaching. We prefer self-deception–about our own behavior and about the behavior of our children. Still, let’s take the biblical teaching, believe it to the extent that we can believe a hard truth, and begin to apply it in the way we live. A beginning is a beginning. Don’t despise the day of small beginnings (Zechariah 4:10).

There is a famous phrase which says, “It is what it is.” Some people may not consider it very helpful in explaining life. After all, the phrase might be accused of stating only the obvious. Personally, I consider the phrase profound. Most of mankind spends a lifetime denying that “It is what it is.” Most of mankind live in self-deception so profound that they constantly deny that what is, is. So for someone to say, “It is what it is” seems to me to be a willingness to face reality. Perhaps Groucho Marx said it best: “I’m not crazy about reality, but it’s still the only place to get a decent meal.”

Reality is that God’s covenant of grace impels us to baptize children born into the kingdom of God, and impels us humbly and gratefully to feed on Jesus Christ at the communion table with those children. After all, where better to get a decent meal than in the reality God has given us?

Today we will solve two questions for the Christian community. 1/When should people be baptized? 2/At what age should young people in the church be permitted to take communion?

I’m just kidding about solving these problems, of course. Countless books have been written on these topics, and many more will be written. It is pretty unlikely that my 1,300 words or so will cause any Christian to change his mind on what he thinks should be done. I’ll simply give my two cents’ worth, while encouraging everyone to think through these things with Bible in hand.

One of my presuppositions is that the way things were done in the Old Testament should continue unless there was a specific change enjoined in the New Testament.

Another of my presuppositions is that salvation is a gift of God. We are saved by grace, not by being wise or good.

A third presupposition is that we are saved by the blood of the Savior Jesus Christ.

A fourth presupposition is that being one of the people of Jesus Christ means that we are seeking to obey and to please Him in the way we live our lives.

With that foundation, we see that children born into a believing household should be baptized shortly after birth. In the Old Testament male children were circumcised shortly after birth. All the children, male and female, were considered part of God’s family if they were born into the people of God.

So, unsurprisingly, we should be baptizing children, male and female, shortly after birth into the people of God. Baptism, we learn from the New Testament, has replaced circumcision as the sign of being in the covenant of God, and baptism works equally well for males and females.

Should these young children be taking communion with the adult members of Christian churches? Well, the Old Testament instruction was clear. The meal of the Passover was eaten not just by the adults. It was eaten by the adults and the children of the people of God (Chapter 12 of Exodus). Jesus Christ is our Passover (1 Corinthians 5:7).

So, unsurprisingly, children should be eating the communion meal with the rest of the people of God.

Why do most Christian denominations get one or the other of these points wrong? (Usually they get both wrong.) Well, we have a really hard time dealing with the concept of grace. Salvation comes by grace. But all of us by nature want to be people who earn our salvation by our works. (There is a place for works in how we live, but works come after grace has been given to us. More about this near the end.) Instinctively, we revolt against the idea that babies and young people should come into the God’s covenant. It has to be different than that! We have to make a profession of faith! We have to keep baptism and communion for people who have made a credible profession of faith!

This is not, however, how God saves us. He saves us by grace through Jesus Christ; salvation is something we don’t earn. And He tells us that our children are immediately in His family as well, as soon as we become His people. This is logical given the loving nature of God, and moreover proof is the way He dealt with His people in the Old Testament. Born into the family of God in OT times? Circumcised and eating the Passover.

Born into the family of God in NT times? Baptized and eating the communion meal.

Actually I would be shocked at any other way of behavior on God’s part. We should be shocked and disappointed that Christians manage things in a different way in these New Testament times. But the church is in its early days. We’ve only been here about 2,000 years since Christ, and we may have countless thousand more years to go, before we come close to getting everything right.

When some of the Jewish people began to realize the wrong they had done in putting Jesus Christ to death, they were pierced to the heart and asked what they should do (Acts 2:37). Peter told them.

‘And Peter said to them, “Repent, and let each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and your children, and for all who are far off, as many as the Lord our God shall call to Himself.”‘ (Acts 2:38-39)

Peter instructed, but at the same time he consoled. Yes, repentance was necessary. But the promise was still for the children of believers, just as in OT times. And the generous promise included ‘”all who are far off”‘ whom God called to Himself by grace–which surely includes any Christian (or prospective Christian) likely to read this. We are a long way and a long time from Jerusalem and from the Jewish people of Peter’s day. The promise is for us–and for our children.

Grace does not mean that once you are baptized and taking the communion meal, that you are one of God’s people automatically forever and ever without any chance of leaving God’s family. We know that plenty of Jewish people turned their back on God, despite the fact that they were circumcised and had been eating the Passover meal. Many could and did work their way out of God’s covenant.

The same is true in our day. Plenty of Christians who made a supposedly credible profession of faith before they were baptized and before they took communion, have worked their way out of God’s covenant. If/when we get to a time in which infants are baptized and children are taking communion, we can be pretty sure that there will still be plenty of such people who insist upon turning their backs on the grace of God. They will behave in such a manner that the proper thing to do will be to excommunicate them. We have lots of people right now who should be excommunicated, but we usually don’t do that. We like our way of doing things better than God’s way.

Now a brief return to the topic of works. We can never earn our salvation, but that does not mean that works are unimportant. Paul explained that so perfectly that we have to strain not to understand what he is saying.

“For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, that no one should boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” (Ephesians 2:8-10)

Even grace itself is a gift of God. But once we have received that grace, we are to do good works which God prepared beforehand so that we should walk in those good works. This is amazing stuff, but still it seems quite logical and really what we would expect. The good God does not give us grace so that we can do bad stuff. He gives us grace so that we would begin to act in a manner that pleases Him. Good works are a consequence of us receiving grace–that is, they should be. We fall far short of doing the works He wants, but we can make a start.

How important are the topics of baptism and communion? They seem important to me. The church seems for the most part to have gotten both wrong. But we get a lot wrong. We in the American Christian church are idolaters of the American military and of the United States. We Christians are mostly warmongers. We Christians steal most of God’s tithe. We Christians shrug at abortion and vote for pro-abortion candidates. We got all that wrong too. It is probably more important that we stop being idolaters and warmongers and thieves and baby killers, before we worry overmuch about baptism and communion. Still, they are topics worthy of our pondering. If we begin to want to think God’s thoughts after Him in one or two new ways, maybe we will do the same on the topics of baptism and communion.

I will let Malcolm Muggeridge do most of the work this morning. Recently I finished his Winter In Moscow. He had gone to Moscow, in 1932, convinced that the Soviet Union was the beginning of a brave new world. He had been raised in an English home where his father was a moderate but convinced socialist, and Muggeridge had taken on the intellectual worldview of his much loved father. Muggeridge and his wife were leaving the dead old world behind, and would be among the people who built up the Soviet Union to greatness.

But Muggeridge had a core of honesty to him, and he soon realized that the Soviet Union was the reverse of good. When, more than a year later, he took the train out of the Soviet Union, he joined the other passengers in . . . well, let him tell us:

“Then, when we were safely in Latvian territory, we all began spontaneously to laugh and shout and shake our fists at the sentries. We were out, we were free. It was one of the strangest demonstrations of the kind I have ever been involved in.” (The Green Stick, p. 267)

Safely back in England, Muggeridge did what he could to alert people to the reality of the Soviet Union’s evil. Among other things, he wrote Winter In Moscow, which was duly published in 1934. Needless to say, this earned him accusations of being a liar, by all the left-leaning intellectuals.

He wrote, he recalled, in anger. Well might he have done so. The Soviet Union had engineered a famine which killed countless people. In the middle of the novel, Winter In Moscow, we read the following.

“Famine is something quite peculiar. It concentrates all effort and thought and feeling on one thing. It makes everyone a frustrated glutton. In a famished town, as in a cheap restaurant, there is always a flavour of food in the air. Everyone brooding on food makes a smell which hangs about them like the smell of gravy and cabbage about a dirty table-cloth. Somehow famine goes beyond hunger, and puts in each face a kind of lewdness; a kind of grey unwholesome longing. People’s white gums and mouldering flesh suggest rather a consuming disease like leprosy than appetite. They seem diseased, even evil, rather than pathetic. Their eyes are greedy and restless, and linger greedily, it sometimes seems, on one another’s bodies. Their skin gets unnaturally dry and their breath parched and stale like air in a cellar.

“In the country famine is more listless. A slowing down of activity. At last a stoppage or blight. Starving peasants are dazed and resigned. They accept famine as a natural calamity, and, up to a point, suffer it patiently. Many die of starvation; but in their eyes such deaths are impersonal like a failure of the crops. They bury their dead in the same spirit and with the same emotions that they clear the fields of spoilt grain, and wait for the next harvest, hoping that they will be able to resist the temptation to gorge themselves on green unripened stalks which, eaten after a famished winter, swell up their bodies and engender a fatal disease.

“The famine now raging in Russia is different from any that has hitherto happened because it is organised from within. No external cause like bad weather or a blockade can be blamed for it. People feel it to be a consequence of inward corruption. It seems to them to be innate in Bolshevism and a fruit of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. This makes their despair the more hopeless. They see the Dictatorship of the Proletariat going over the country like a flight of locusts, taking away or destroying everything edible and leaving behind a barren wilderness. They hear the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, with fatuous statistical complacency, hail the locust flight as a great achievement, a sublime victory. They feel in themselves the aptness of the famine; its inevitability, and see in the future only an intensification of their present misery.

“Marxism, the Dictatorship of the Proletariats’s religion, is the most urban religion that has ever existed. It was born in underground printing presses, in dingy lodgings and cafes and hotels. Its prophets were wanderers from one European capital to another whose dreams, like themselves, were rootless. The embodiment of their dreams in Ouspenski’s promised land is nothing. As transitory and unreal as American prosperity, or yo-yo, or the Brain Trust. Their real significance is the struggle with earth; with the nature of things and people; with life itself, that their embodiment involves. It alone reveals their real character, their real horror.

“This struggle has gone on for fifteen years; sometimes intensifying and sometimes dying down; but steadily, drearily, turning Russian into a battlefield. A people, as it were, self-blockaded. War by the proletariat for the proletariat on the proletariat. A class war. Lenin called it a struggle for bread. In fact, it is rather a struggle against than for bread.

“The Dictatorship of the Proletariat sent an army to conquer bread, and it destroyed bread. It went to make the fields yield more abundantly, and it trampled the fields into barrenness. Its banners shut out the sun and prevented crops from ripening. Its slogans rolled over the land like a destroying wind. Its gloomy Marxist thoughts were a heavy mist choking life out of peasants and animals and soil. It spread death, famine and destruction everywhere.” (Winter in Moscow, pp. 137-139)

A crucial focus of Winter in Moscow is to show the self-deception of the western journalists and intellectuals who convinced themselves that lies were true, and reported lies to their readers back home. These lies were largely accepted, and often by the supposed intellectual leaders of our civilization. “The New York Times,” for example cheerfully printed the lies of correspondent Walter Duranty–who won a Pulitzer Prize for his perfidy. Looking for an apology from the Timesters? Take a seat; you may have a long wait.

Winter In Moscow is a short and passionate novelistic report on the Soviet Union of 1932-33. I am glad I read it. The book came out in an excellent paperback reprint edition in 1987, with a helpful introduction from Michael D. Aeschliman, but unfortunately used copies are expensive to obtain. The best price I could find today was a whopping $48.86 at Amazon (shipping included, but sales tax may add more cost). I was able to obtain the book through inter-library loan. That was free, but forced me to tie my hands behind my back to keep from marking passages with ink.

If you decide to read Malcolm Muggeridge, consider beginning with The Green Stick first. (Still reasonably priced at AbeBooks at $5.15 total, sales tax extra.) Winter In Moscow is a useful supplement.

In reading In the First Circle, certain points slap us up the side of the head. Some of those points are recurring themes of the novel, others maybe just are conclusions we can draw from having read what we read. Don’t blame Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for all the notions I gained from reading his book. A great book is going to spark responses from its readers, and In the First Circle certainly did that for me. I’ll number a few of the thoughts that came to me.

1/When a worldview gains control in a country, that worldview is difficult to fight against. Marxism-Leninism was the worldview of the Soviet Union. One might have thought that the prisoners in the sharashka, mostly educated and highly intelligent men and moreover the victims of Soviet injustice, would have readily rejected Marxism-Leninism somewhere along the way. But it seems not to be so. Many of them still thought in communist terms. One man, the very intelligent Lev Rubin–moreover a man of some sweetness of character–is so completely committed to Marxism-Leninism that he defends the system vigorously. But even most of the other prisoners are far from committed enemies of the Soviet regime. They know they have been treated abominably, but they still seem to think in communist terms.

This prompts me to compare our own country. We are exactly the same. We believe the stuff which we have been taught as we grow up. We think democracy is automatically the way life should be organized. Which is really nonsense. One would think that Christian people–of whom there are millions in the U.S.–would have been able to construct a more realistic view of how the world has been put together. But for the most part we have not. Those who believe God’s instructions about how life should be organized are considered fascist enemies of goodness. We Christians need to start trying harder to think God’s thoughts after Him. If we won’t do that, how can we expect non-Christians–raised in the same democracy-is-everything soup most of us have swallowed from grade one onward–to do the work we won’t do? In our own way, we have been as thoughtless as were the Soviet people with their ridiculous Marxism-Leninism.

2/People can always be found to do evil. Our instinct–barring the development of great character, which is extremely rare among any group of people–is to fit in, to go along. We find a way to fit into the system. Some of us will be worse than average. We have people like Antifa in our country. They are the raw material from which torturers can be drawn. There are enough of such types of people to run any totalitarian system in the U.S. History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. We are not exempt from doing great horrors in this country. Examples abound. We have killed 61,000,000 unborn children, and those who don’t cheer, instead just shrug. Who would have thought that we would find enough doctors and nurses to kill 61,000,000 children? We did it standing on our head, easily. Another example, who knew that the American people would shrug at the murder of countless innocent foreigners in our wars of aggression against powerless small countries? Who knew that many, perhaps most, Christians would cheer, and the rest shrug? Yet it has happened, and it goes on happening. Wait, you mean “our democracy” can do wrong? See point 1 above. And the evil that we do may just be beginning. In the First Circle is warning us.

3/The West is intellectually and morally dim. Innokenty Volodin, a key character in the book, risks his freedom and perhaps his life, to warn the U.S. that the Soviet Union is close to being able to steal information which will lead to the Soviets being able to produce the atomic bomb. His attempt falls on intellectually deaf ears. We were dim then, and we’re dim now. Who could have guessed, for one example, that the West would attempt to commit suicide by permitting the entrance of millions of Muslims to our western countries? Again, we have done it readily, happily, nuttily, and to this day only a tiny percentage of our people even acknowledge the danger. We are dim. With Alfred E. Neuman, our motto is, “What, me worry?”

4/A theme of the book is that we can only be free people if we live honestly. We must speak and live the truth. This is difficult to do. It takes character. Intelligence is not the key to life. The key to life is living as we should. Sometimes that is going to involve us doing the right thing and accepting consequences which are unpleasant. But that is the only way to become morally free. Which leads on to point 5.

5/This is not necessarily a theme of the book. It is a conclusion I have drawn from reading about the characters, and from having lived a long time. That is, each Christian person needs to develop a committed brand of Christianity which applies to all of life. Quasi-Christianity doesn’t really accomplish much good. Only one of the characters in the book has reached that brand of commitment. Dmitri Sologdin has freed himself from Marxist-Leninist nonsense. He is moving forward with different principles. His friend Gleb Nerzhin (probably Solzhenitsyn’s picture of himself at that time of life) is not up with Sologdin yet, but he seems to be moving in that direction. If you and I want to be a force for good in the world, we need to take our Christianity seriously, and need to keep making our beliefs and actions closer and closer to what God wants from us. This doesn’t come automatically. We need to be intentional.

6/Maybe this fits under point 3 concerning our dimness. But I think it deserves a point to itself. It is absolutely terrifying how many intelligent, educated Christian people have not read a word of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I could give names by the score, even in my relatively small circle of friends, family, and acquaintances. The word terrifying is not too strong. Satan is laughing at us, and celebrating. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is a great gift from God, and for us to be too intellectually lazy and too self-absorbed to pick up that gift and read, is a disgrace. We have no realistic excuse. Terrifying. He is trying to warn us. We smile a patronizing smile, and ignore him. I hope God will have mercy on us, and wake us up.

7/Solzhenitsyn is a miracle. Here’s what Malcolm Muggeridge said/wrote in 1978-80:

‘If when I was a young correspondent in Moscow in the early thirties you had said to me that it would be possible for the Soviet regime to continue for sixty years with its policy of doing everything possible to extirpate the Christian faith, to discredit its record and its originator, and that after this there would emerge figures like Solzhenitsyn speaking the authentic language of the Christian, grasping such great Christian truths as the cross in a way that few people do in our time, I would have said, “No, it’s impossible, it can’t be.” But I would have been wrong.’ (The End of Christendom, p 39)

When God gives us a special blessing, we need to say “Thank you!” and to take advantage of the blessing. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is a miracle, and a great blessing. One need not begin reading him with In the First Circle, although that is a fine place to start. As one pastor/precentor said to us concerning the psalm we were getting ready to sing, “Grab a verse and hang on!” Grab something by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and hang on.