Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Baptism as identification also has a future application: the so-called “great commission.”[1] In the KJV of Matthew 28:19 Jesus’ command is rendered this way:
Go (πορευθέντες, poreutentes) ye therefore, and teach (μαθητεύσατε, mathēteusate) all nations, baptizing (βαπτίζοντες, baptizontes) them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
Sellers notes three things. The first is that Jesus was speaking to the eleven apostles: this is the apostles’ commission under the conditions of the future manifest Kingdom of God, not ours in the dispensation of grace. The second is that those to be identified are nations, not individuals. The third is that imperative mood in the Greek qualifies the verb “to teach,” not “to go.” Let’s take the last point first.
Jesus doesn’t direct His apostles to go anywhere: poreutentes is a participle form of πορεύω; if Jesus wanted to command them to go, the inspired writer could have written πορεύου (poreuou), the imperative form, but he didn’t. He wrote πορευθέντες (poreuthentes):
It was to these men just before His arrest that the Lord Jesus said, “You have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you, and appoint you that you should go and bring forth fruit” (John 15:16). He did not tell them when or where they should go, but they knew from His words that in due time they would be going. After His death, burial and resurrection, He took up the same theme again by saying “having gone” or “going then.” This is one word in the Greek (poreuthentes). It is a participle which is an auxiliary to the main verb which is matheteusate (disciple). He did not say “Go” or “Go ye,” as many wish that He had and finish up putting these words into His mouth.
The rulers in Israel, Sellers wrote, “showed great zeal for the commandments and traditions of men such as the washing (νίψωνται, nipsontai; see Mark 7:3-4) of pots, cups, copper vessels, and couches.
In 1932 Otis Q. Sellers, an ordained Baptist minister, a pastor, walked away from the churches over “baptism.” What idea of baptism replaced what he inherited from the fundamentalists who trained him? Fifty years after the event he set down the results of his studies, “epitomized” he said, in ten four-page leaflets, whose contents we will now summarize in a series of posts.
I recently acquired the new edition of Otis Q. Sellers’s 1961 booklet Christian Individualism: A Way of Life for the Active Believer in Jesus Christ (CI) which, to my surprise, I did not already own. [Learning of this gap in my collection, 
1961 she was probably best known for The Fountainhead, a 1943 novel that was made into a movie starring Gary Cooper six years later. In the year that novel came out, Rand began working on 
On my 
“All Scripture is given by inspiration of God. The story of the rich man and Lazarus is a divinely inspired satire …. It is as much the Word of God as any other portion of Scripture. It was not given for the purpose of teaching men about the ways and works of God. Its purpose was to turn the light upon the Pharisees. It is not the place to go to find what our Lord taught about death, the state of the dead, future punishment, or future bliss.”
reconsidered and rewritten.” Much church doctrine hangs on this passage: “Many preachers are no longer able to distinguish between their sermons … and the record written in the Word of God ….”