O.k. according to Paul 965 and Mark 1616 every man woman and child that repented accepted Christ on their death beds whether it be at home in a hospital bed a prison camp a prisoner on death row are now in the belly of hell because they weren't baptized..
tob
or did i miss something..
Turnorburn, I used to raise this exact same point myself. Now, I used to bring this up in order to make a "God wouldn't do that" argument. In this argument, a person believes and repents, but dies before getting baptized, and my argument was that God wouldn't send the person to Hell, simply because he didn't get the chance to be baptized. The problem with this argument is that it can then be applied to ANY of God's instructions. Think about it.....suppose you're sharing the Gospel with an old man on his death bed. Halfway through your story, he dies. Using my "God wouldn't do that" argument means that God would not send the man to Hell, because he didn't get the CHANCE to believe. But.....everyone knows that you have to BELIEVE in Jesus to be saved. John 8:24 says: "Therefore I said to you that you will die in your sins; for unless you believe that I am He, you will die in your sins.” So God would absolutely send the man to Hell if he didn't believe.
But....but....but.....he didn't get the CHANCE to believe! My "God wouldn't do that" argument demanded that God allow the man into Heaven because he didn't get the CHANCE to believe, just as it demanded that God allow him into Heaven because he didn't get the CHANCE to be baptized. Not getting the chance to be baptized is just like not getting the chance to believe. Both hypotheticals describe a man on his death bed. In both case the man dies before an opportunity. Before the opportunity to be baptized in one case, and before the opportunity to believe in the other case. According to my "God wouldn't do that" argument, this guy gets a free pass; he doesn't have to obey the command of baptism. But to be consistent, we must also be prepared to say that he doesn't have to obey the command to believe either.
Now, like I said yesterday, this is a very personal and emotional subject for me. My uncle David passed away in August of 2012, at the age of 49. He loved vodka, and he basically drank himself to death. He was in the hospital for a couple weeks, and they did everything they could, but his liver was too far gone and his system was beyond the point of no return. One week before he died, his parents (my grandparents) prayed a "sinner's prayer" with him in his hospital bed, and told him he was saved. If I had only KNOWN at that time how un-biblical this was, I would have immediately flown out to California, told him how to be saved BIBLICALLY, helped him out of that bed, found some water (even a bathtub would have sufficed), and baptized him myself! But I didn't. Because I was still wasting away in Denomination-ville, I thought he was saved too!
Now, I'm not the judge of anyone's soul. I'm not qualified give a final "yes" or "no" to the question of whether my uncle is in Heaven. That's between him and God. I just know what the Bible says, and all I can do is speak where it speaks. As much as I love and miss my uncle, and as much as I would give anything to be able to say with confidence that he is waiting for me in Heaven.......I can't. He didn't obey the Gospel. Now, I could declare, "that's not fair! He believed and repented, but he was on his death bed, and didn't get the CHANCE to be baptized!" Well, as much as this upsets me to say, I have to put my emotions aside, and be honest and objective here. My uncle DID have the chance to be baptized. He had 49 years on this earth. That's 31 years of adulthood that God gave him; he had AMPLE time to put down the vodka bottle, pick up a Bible, and start digging through it.
If he had taken just a few MINUTES per day out of his life, to read through that New Testament (instead of just blindly trusting what his parents told him about what was in it), he would have easily read the whole thing. Multiple times, even! And he would not have been able to miss verses such as Matthew 28:19, Mark 16:16, Acts 2:38, Acts 22:16, 1 Peter 3:21, etc, etc, etc. In those 31 years of digging, he could very well have noticed that people in the NT kept saying things like "believe", "repent", "confess", and "be baptized", and also have noticed that this "sinner's prayer" that his parents were pushing for salvation.......was nowhere to be found in the NT. He was smart enough to have figured all this out, if he cared enough to even try. Again, I love my uncle with all my heart, and I miss him greatly. My emotional side cries out: "No fair! God wouldn't do that! He didn't get the chance! He was on his death bed!"
But my dispassionate, objective, and (brutally) honest side has no choice but to admit that my uncle lived for himself for 49 years, and couldn't be bothered to think about the things of God, or which way he was headed after death. For 49 years, he "did it his own way". He did what he wanted, whenever he wanted, and how much he wanted. It was David's life, and God never had any place in it. But then, in the hospital, on his death bed, with a week to live.......all of a sudden he cares about God? After 49 years of ignoring God, NOW he wants to squeak into Heaven at the last minute with a convenient little 30-second "sinner's prayer"?
Again, this is just my intellectual honesty talking here. It really hurts me to be saying these things, because I would absolutely LOVE to be wrong about this, and be able to see my uncle again when I get to Heaven.