40 Bicycles

Further to Mark Horne's comments on Acts 8, I think that it is worth commenting that Acts 8:36-37 was not given to us as a proof text for believer's baptism. The Ethiopian eunuch, as a eunuch, was separated from the people of God (Deuteronomy 23:1). However, the part of Scripture that he was reading would have given him great hope (e.g. Isaiah 56:3-5). Luke's message in Acts is all about God bringing in the outcasts, not about why only mature confessing believers can be baptized. Now that the Messiah had come, nothing prevented people such as the Ethiopian eunuch from becoming members of the people of God. The story of the eunuch comes at the start of a series of three stories focusing upon three individuals (the Ethiopian eunuch, Saul and Cornelius). As Warren Gage points out in a very thought-provoking message, these three people were sons of Ham, Shem and Japheth and serve as a picture of God bringing together the nations in Christ. Nothing prevented the eunuch from being baptized. I am sure that Philip explained the gospel to the eunuch in terms that would have been deeply relevant to his situation. He probably played on the themes of circumcision and emasculation, demonstrating that Christ's death is the true circumcision as He is cut off from the people (Isaiah 53:8; Daniel 9:26; cf. Colossians 2:11). Christ is left without a generation to declare so that the eunuch might gain an everlasting name that would not be cut off (Isaiah 56:5). Christ suffers the curse of those without circumcision (Genesis 17:14) so that the uncircumcised might be brought in.