One meaning of the word “balk” is familiar in baseball, but that is not the only place where the word is used. When I was a small boy, we had a neighbor who had a mule that he used to pull a plow or cultivator between the rows to rid his garden of weeds. Sometimes the mule would balk in the middle of the garden, refusing to pull the plow any further. In some cases, additional “urging” would lead to the mule lying down in the harness and refusing to move until Carl, the owner, took the harness off the mule. I have heard a story about a farmer who had a balky mule which he hit over the head with a two-by-four “to get his attention.” I always thought the story apocryphal and a bit drastic, but perhaps it might get a really stubborn mule to work.
Most of us do not deal much with mules, but we do at times have to teach or work with stubborn people who will cooperate only up to a point, then balk at going further. This is often the case with baptism; many people will believe in God and that Christ is God’s Son, but they balk at baptism. One man simply clams up and refuses to talk any more about it when I urge him to be baptized. Another man I taught for years finally said he would be baptized if he could continue to be a Methodist, but he refused to be baptized into Christ and be only a Christian. A friend of mine thinks I should have “baptized” him anyway and let him continue to believe and practice as he wished, thus treating baptism as the magical way to assure the man of eternal salvation. However, he would just have gotten wet; he would not have been baptized. My friend seems to think that all one has to do is be baptized, and he will go to heaven regardless of where and how he worships or what he really believes, making it salvation by baptism alone.
Why do people balk at baptism? When we teach people about Christ and they say they believe in Him, then we teach them what Jesus and the apostles said about repentance, and they say they believe and will do that. Yet, when we review some conversions in Acts, and ask the question Ananias asked Saul, “And now why are you waiting? Arise and be baptized, and wash away your sins, calling on the name of the Lord,” they balk. Why? It must be that they do not understand what real commitment to Christ means. If they accept the Gospel as the Word of God, it must follow that they do what it asks of them. If they balk at baptism, they must not really believe that Christ means what He says. Jesus said, “He who believes and is baptized will be saved” (Mark 16:16). Either they believe that or they do not. It is one thing to believe that God exists and that Jesus is His Son; it is something else to believe that they mean exactly what they say, and that they intend to judge us by whether we have done what they tell us. Note John 12:48, which says we will be judged by the Word of Jesus.
Some may balk at baptism because they have been taught that we are not saved by works and that baptism is a work. Both faith and repentance actually take more effort than baptism, and surely no one who reads the Bible can really believe that we do not need to believe and repent. Besides that, the Bible does not call baptism a work. Baptism is simply a condition placed by the Lord on salvation; it is not the only condition, but it is one condition. To balk at it is to fail to go the whole way and get the job done, just like Carl’s mule that got the garden only partially cultivated. One who stops at third base and does not run on home no more contributes to the winning of the game than if he had struck out in the beginning. One who balks at baptism is in a similar position; he has gone only part of the way. Faith, repentance, and confession are not enough; the Lord has put baptism and a whole new life in the picture as well.
