Original Sin: Originality of Deception
In making the preparations for the writting on "What Makes A Person Christian (or A Christian)" and having written about redemption by the blood of Jesus Christ, redemption from all sins, it became obvious that first we must deal with the so called original sin as being a sin or a spiritual impurity with which we all are born. This is a clever and very original deception fully unbiblical and heretical which had a specific purpose for being invented that will be covered to follow, later on. But in researching what had already been written in the web pages, some solid teachings have been penned before mine that I would like to recognize and recommend.
First thing that must be noticed is the different connotations derived from the way different versions of the Bible were translated from the manuscripts. The Bible for this site is the King James Bible (a literal translation from the BC Masoretic Text) and the verse in question is Psalm 51:5 that reads: Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me. However the NIV or New International Version, a translation that uses dynamic equivalence (not literal but a thought for thought translation) reads like this in the same verse: Surely I was sinful from the time my mother conceived me (Ps. 51:5). By doing a word bible search on "shapen" it was found to appear only in this verse in the KJV and the word "shape" another three times (Luke 3:22, John 5:37 and Rev. 9:7) and are references to the external, visible, physical shape of the Holy Spirit as a dove, of the Father as not having been seen by humans and of the locusts' external appearance, respectively. In neither case does the verse say that there is a sin that is imputed or allocated to our record, and it very well can be properly exegeted as being born sinful in our nature. I found at that a good article by Wayne Jackson at https://www.christiancourier.com/articles/276-original-sin-and-a-misapplied-passage. As the author has in his title kindly written 'a misapplied-passage', this passage has been used for centuries to prop up a false doctrine of original sin.
This is the problem, that in the practice of baptizing the new converts that were entering Christianity in th middle of the persecution of the early church, the practice to water baptize those who had called on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation, they started baptizing their children as well. So by the time of the 3rd/4th century the ritual was converted into doctrine by the support of Augustine of Hippo of North Africa and the intent was to pile on the western church more authority and power, for now an ordained priest by the means of a certain ceremony and ritualistic pronouncements could actually remove a spiritual stain that would take the non-baptized by water to a certain Hell. This empowerment over the centuries proved to be enormous and terribly deceptive for people came to believe that by subjecting themselves to such a ritual by an authorized clergyman, they or their children were turned into Christians, avoiding hell from the inherited sin of Adam. Still today priests/deacons baptize newborns with the belief that the ceremony as carried out has the spiritual power to transform the baptized into a Christian and this can not be further from the truth. No wonder so many of these young people when the reach college age are disuaded in their freshman year by the university's secular professors that to believe in the existence of a Creator God is non-sensical ignorance, so that they fall easy into atheism or agnosticism. These young people have never known what is to be a Christian while they believed they were one all along and were taught that for them to be saved they had to cooperate by adding their works to the sacrifice of Christ for their sins.
In addition to water baptism for the removal of original sin and the return to a righteous state afterthat (yet another error!), Augustine promoted amillennialism and salvation only in the RCC. So much for the theology of someone called a 'doctor of the church', really more a patient sick with the human disease of fallibility. And there is something else for the Scriptures, whether we mean the Old Testament or the New Testament, were all given to the Jews (Rom. 3:2), but there is no doctrine of original sin anywhere in their belief system and it was of Moses (from God) where Genesis came. So why add a new understanding of Genesis that the people of the Book never had and was not there?
But the Bible clearly states the the sins of the father are not brought onto their children but each individual alone bear their own guilt: "The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him" (Ez.18:20). While children do bear the brunt of the temporal consequences of the decisions and falls of their parents, they do not bear their sins upon themselves, not the guilt nor a deserved penalty. Let us capture the actual meaning of an important verse so that we can distinguish the only cause in which the spiritual misadventure of a father affects the child, and that is found in Exodus 20:3-6, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me. 4 Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. 5 Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; 6 And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments".
In these the ten commandments, the theme in verse three is that of an idolatrous practice of worshipping false gods, making graven images of them and the commandment is accompanied by a warning that this practice inherently dealing with the spiritual demonic/satanic world is so corrosive and contagious that the demonic will affect to the third and even fourth generation of those who practice this. Children of those in the occult so often fall into the same pattern as their fathers, and as Kurt Koch (Occult ABC) has written about in his experiences, the children are mediumistic from an early age and are engendered with demonic powers. The warning is that occultism is an open door to demonization, not that God punishes the children for the doings of the parents for 3 to four generations. (also visit CARM on original sin and Got Questions? on
Psalm 51:5, for these are edifying even though I will write additional details for the finer points on these matters).
We do have to go back to Adam/Eve to resolve the matter. Their sin was disobedience, of the woman for she was tempted by lust, and of the man for he wilfully disobeyed God. The angels were direct creations of God and so were Adam and Eve (he of the soil, she from his rib but God did the creation feat). They disobeyed by transgressing the only prohibition given or recorded then in the Bible (for angels and for Adam/Eve) and that was not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The angels that did not transgress were sealed in the righteousness of God (angels are not said anywhere to have been created righteous nor is that written of Adam/Even who all were created innocent. The angels that disobeyed were sealed in unrighteousness and can never be saved. Adam/Eve had been warned that in the day that they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil they would die. Did that happen? Absolutely yes! The "day" referred to here is a day of God (1000 years of man is a day of God). No one lived to a thousand years, only Mathuselah lived to the age of 969 years. They died physically in the sense that corruption (aging, diseases, return to dust) and mortality entered in; they died spiritually in that the spirit of man (the spiritual part of man) became disconected (separated) from God, man is said to be born spiritually dead.
As the federal head of the human race the consequences fall on the entire HUMAN RACE! The curse fell on the race of humanity and is not an individual burdensome weight called original sin! The original sin for the angelic realm was the rebellion of Lucifer and the original sin for humanity was that of Adam/Eve. But as we saw in Ezekiel 18:20 we do not inherit the sins of the federal head of the human race even though we suffer the consequences (death: physical and spiritual). For in Adam all sin.... Death did enter into the world by sin, Adam's sin, the consequences of which are visited upon the Human Race. But a child that dies when he is 3 months old suffers death not because he is guilty and bears the penalty of an inherited original sin, for he is innocent, having not broken himself the commandments of God. He dies and death afflicts him because of the curse of sin on the human race, and the child as a human can die! A child that dies goes immediately into the presence of God, into Paradise, not earned but bestowed of the gifted righteousness of God from Jesus Christ. Jesus himself said that to enter heaven we must be as/ like little children and that means that little children trust others so that they too trust God. Again a little child that dies is not guilty of anything so do not try to pin a sin on him that he does not deserve. He dies because as a human he inherits the consequences on the race that resulted because of Adam's sin.
The rest of the story is that God did cover their sin by the blood of innocent animals for with their skins he covered Adam/Eve and had all along planned from before the creation of the world to personally come to suffer for the consequences of all the sins of the world so that the debt of our iniquities could be paid in full and humanity saved. It is hard to find a verse more beautiful than Genesis 22:8 "And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together." He promised us back in Genesis that he Himself, would provide a lamb for a burnt offering, a sin offering, in the person of God the Son, Jesus the Lord, the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world. And man was never said to have been created righteous even though he, Adam had his human righteousness till he sinned, and not being able to cleanse himself to recover his righteouness, he too had to wait till the Son of Man came to have Adam's sins washed away by the blood of the Lamb in order to receive the gift of righteousness by the faith of Jesus Christ (Rom. 5:17, Phil 3:9).
Now the real problem, that beyond the faulty exegesis of Psalm 51:5 is that of the misinterpretation of Acts 2:37-41, of picking and choosing verses out of their contexts to prove man made 'sacred traditions' that overthrow the word of God. Know ahead of time that the Holy Spirit has multiple offices or ministries that He as God carries out and we need to know doctrine rightly so that we can discern the Scriptures correctly. For example, the ministry of witholding or holding down iniquity will come to an end when he is taken out of the way (2 Thess 2:3-7) at the rapture of the church when the antichrist (Satan's christ) will be loosed toghether with all the non-incarcerated demonic entities. Another ministry is that of the Annointing of the Holy Spirit as described in John 20:22 when Jesus sends his disciples to proclaim the gospel and annointed them for service with the power of the HS. Jesus promised his disciples that he would go away (after his death and resurrection) to the Fathers' house to make a place for us (John 14:1-3) and in his absence he would send us another conforter, the Spirit of truth (John 14:16,17) that was with them but that would subsequently be inside of them so that he and the Father would too be in them (believers) John 14:23 [the Indwelling of the Holy Spirit when Jesus baptizes them with the Holy Spirit]. The Holy Spirit would proceed from the Father, be given to Jesus to pour on his church (John 15:26, the Baptism of the Spirit of Acts 1:5,8). It is Jesus Christ that baptizes believers with the Holy Spirit and it is the Spirit that places a person into the body of Christ (1 Cor 12:13).
At the Feast of Pentecost, exactly 10 days after the Ascension of Christ to heaven in the clouds, the Holy Spirit was poured by Christ onto the believers, and the Spirit of God came down upon them with the sound as of a rushing mighty wind (Act 2:1-2). In addition the Spirit's ministry of Filling of believers and of gifting them was also concomitant with the Baptism. Read Acts 2 to follow along. As other faithful/devout Jews from the Diaspora (Dispersion) were present in Jerusalem for the feast of Pentecost, and these saw what had happened to those in the upper room that were filled with the Spirit and each heard them speak in their own language, they marvelled and were convicted (2:37) and asked what they should do. Let us take the next verse one part at a time. Peter said unto them:
Repent: this means to turn from that upon what they depend on; it means to turn away from that which one is trusting in for salvation. This is not talking about godly sorrow (2 Cor 7:9,10) or sorrowing for sin.
and be baptized everyone of you in the name of Jesus Christ and this is alluding to the receiving of the Spirit/be baptized with the Spirit when they call upon the name of the Lord, at conversion to Christ (Romans 10:10, 13). This is not water baptism that is done in the name of the Trinity (Matthew 28:19) and is done by a baptizer. The Baptism with the Holy Spirit is done by Jesus Christ and is strictly spiritual (Mark 1:8)!!!
for the remission of sins and this part is what occurs when they call upon the name of the Lord
and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost and this is what follows repentance and conversion (conversion is of faith), one is gifted by Jesus Christ with the Indwelling Holy Spirit and in turn into the body of Christ, his church.
The next verse 39 tells us that the Holy Spirit is the gift promised. But then we get to verse 41 which breaks the back of the misappliers of these verses and it read:
THEN they that gladly received his words were baptized...... this is now water baptism, the sign of the faith in Jesus Christ, the public declaration that we are his and that in Him we have left the old man behind and now cling or dress with the new man Jesus Christ. And this pattern repeats itself over and over in the Acts of the apostles: first one is made a Christian by the Lord Jesus Christ and then one gets baptized by immersion to fully symbolize that the man that one used to be drowned and the one coming out from the water is the cleansed new man, the one saved and a member of the body of Christ. This is the proper exegesis of this verse in the context and following the doctrinal principles of the scriptures.
Thus as far as original sin is concerned we have seen that:
The consequences fall on the Human Race
Anyone human suffers the temporal consequences of the Fall of Adam but not his guilt
The Psalm 51:5 interpretation of this referring to an original sin is an error
The Psalm 51:5 is a reference to a fallen sinful nature, not original sin
Ezekiel 18:20 can not be overthrown and God is clear that the son does not bear the iniquity of the father nor the reverse
Acts 2:37-41 is taken out of its immediate and distant contexts for water baptism can not remove or wash any sins away given that only the blood of Jesus Christ can redeem
Water baptism is always taught in the Acts as a ritual to follow conversion and cannot save a gnat nor make a Christian out of anyone
Only Jesus Christ can make a person a Christian as he baptizes them himself with the HS
Just as one follows the money trail to see where it leads to get to the bottom of the story, likewise here follow the trail of who benefits by power and authority to find out the motives of the altering of the meaning of the passages in Acts 2:37-41.
First thing that must be noticed is the different connotations derived from the way different versions of the Bible were translated from the manuscripts. The Bible for this site is the King James Bible (a literal translation from the BC Masoretic Text) and the verse in question is Psalm 51:5 that reads: Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me. However the NIV or New International Version, a translation that uses dynamic equivalence (not literal but a thought for thought translation) reads like this in the same verse: Surely I was sinful from the time my mother conceived me (Ps. 51:5). By doing a word bible search on "shapen" it was found to appear only in this verse in the KJV and the word "shape" another three times (Luke 3:22, John 5:37 and Rev. 9:7) and are references to the external, visible, physical shape of the Holy Spirit as a dove, of the Father as not having been seen by humans and of the locusts' external appearance, respectively. In neither case does the verse say that there is a sin that is imputed or allocated to our record, and it very well can be properly exegeted as being born sinful in our nature. I found at that a good article by Wayne Jackson at https://www.christiancourier.com/articles/276-original-sin-and-a-misapplied-passage. As the author has in his title kindly written 'a misapplied-passage', this passage has been used for centuries to prop up a false doctrine of original sin.
This is the problem, that in the practice of baptizing the new converts that were entering Christianity in th middle of the persecution of the early church, the practice to water baptize those who had called on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation, they started baptizing their children as well. So by the time of the 3rd/4th century the ritual was converted into doctrine by the support of Augustine of Hippo of North Africa and the intent was to pile on the western church more authority and power, for now an ordained priest by the means of a certain ceremony and ritualistic pronouncements could actually remove a spiritual stain that would take the non-baptized by water to a certain Hell. This empowerment over the centuries proved to be enormous and terribly deceptive for people came to believe that by subjecting themselves to such a ritual by an authorized clergyman, they or their children were turned into Christians, avoiding hell from the inherited sin of Adam. Still today priests/deacons baptize newborns with the belief that the ceremony as carried out has the spiritual power to transform the baptized into a Christian and this can not be further from the truth. No wonder so many of these young people when the reach college age are disuaded in their freshman year by the university's secular professors that to believe in the existence of a Creator God is non-sensical ignorance, so that they fall easy into atheism or agnosticism. These young people have never known what is to be a Christian while they believed they were one all along and were taught that for them to be saved they had to cooperate by adding their works to the sacrifice of Christ for their sins.
In addition to water baptism for the removal of original sin and the return to a righteous state afterthat (yet another error!), Augustine promoted amillennialism and salvation only in the RCC. So much for the theology of someone called a 'doctor of the church', really more a patient sick with the human disease of fallibility. And there is something else for the Scriptures, whether we mean the Old Testament or the New Testament, were all given to the Jews (Rom. 3:2), but there is no doctrine of original sin anywhere in their belief system and it was of Moses (from God) where Genesis came. So why add a new understanding of Genesis that the people of the Book never had and was not there?
But the Bible clearly states the the sins of the father are not brought onto their children but each individual alone bear their own guilt: "The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him" (Ez.18:20). While children do bear the brunt of the temporal consequences of the decisions and falls of their parents, they do not bear their sins upon themselves, not the guilt nor a deserved penalty. Let us capture the actual meaning of an important verse so that we can distinguish the only cause in which the spiritual misadventure of a father affects the child, and that is found in Exodus 20:3-6, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me. 4 Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. 5 Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; 6 And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments".
In these the ten commandments, the theme in verse three is that of an idolatrous practice of worshipping false gods, making graven images of them and the commandment is accompanied by a warning that this practice inherently dealing with the spiritual demonic/satanic world is so corrosive and contagious that the demonic will affect to the third and even fourth generation of those who practice this. Children of those in the occult so often fall into the same pattern as their fathers, and as Kurt Koch (Occult ABC) has written about in his experiences, the children are mediumistic from an early age and are engendered with demonic powers. The warning is that occultism is an open door to demonization, not that God punishes the children for the doings of the parents for 3 to four generations. (also visit CARM on original sin and Got Questions? on
Psalm 51:5, for these are edifying even though I will write additional details for the finer points on these matters).
We do have to go back to Adam/Eve to resolve the matter. Their sin was disobedience, of the woman for she was tempted by lust, and of the man for he wilfully disobeyed God. The angels were direct creations of God and so were Adam and Eve (he of the soil, she from his rib but God did the creation feat). They disobeyed by transgressing the only prohibition given or recorded then in the Bible (for angels and for Adam/Eve) and that was not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The angels that did not transgress were sealed in the righteousness of God (angels are not said anywhere to have been created righteous nor is that written of Adam/Even who all were created innocent. The angels that disobeyed were sealed in unrighteousness and can never be saved. Adam/Eve had been warned that in the day that they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil they would die. Did that happen? Absolutely yes! The "day" referred to here is a day of God (1000 years of man is a day of God). No one lived to a thousand years, only Mathuselah lived to the age of 969 years. They died physically in the sense that corruption (aging, diseases, return to dust) and mortality entered in; they died spiritually in that the spirit of man (the spiritual part of man) became disconected (separated) from God, man is said to be born spiritually dead.
As the federal head of the human race the consequences fall on the entire HUMAN RACE! The curse fell on the race of humanity and is not an individual burdensome weight called original sin! The original sin for the angelic realm was the rebellion of Lucifer and the original sin for humanity was that of Adam/Eve. But as we saw in Ezekiel 18:20 we do not inherit the sins of the federal head of the human race even though we suffer the consequences (death: physical and spiritual). For in Adam all sin.... Death did enter into the world by sin, Adam's sin, the consequences of which are visited upon the Human Race. But a child that dies when he is 3 months old suffers death not because he is guilty and bears the penalty of an inherited original sin, for he is innocent, having not broken himself the commandments of God. He dies and death afflicts him because of the curse of sin on the human race, and the child as a human can die! A child that dies goes immediately into the presence of God, into Paradise, not earned but bestowed of the gifted righteousness of God from Jesus Christ. Jesus himself said that to enter heaven we must be as/ like little children and that means that little children trust others so that they too trust God. Again a little child that dies is not guilty of anything so do not try to pin a sin on him that he does not deserve. He dies because as a human he inherits the consequences on the race that resulted because of Adam's sin.
The rest of the story is that God did cover their sin by the blood of innocent animals for with their skins he covered Adam/Eve and had all along planned from before the creation of the world to personally come to suffer for the consequences of all the sins of the world so that the debt of our iniquities could be paid in full and humanity saved. It is hard to find a verse more beautiful than Genesis 22:8 "And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together." He promised us back in Genesis that he Himself, would provide a lamb for a burnt offering, a sin offering, in the person of God the Son, Jesus the Lord, the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world. And man was never said to have been created righteous even though he, Adam had his human righteousness till he sinned, and not being able to cleanse himself to recover his righteouness, he too had to wait till the Son of Man came to have Adam's sins washed away by the blood of the Lamb in order to receive the gift of righteousness by the faith of Jesus Christ (Rom. 5:17, Phil 3:9).
Now the real problem, that beyond the faulty exegesis of Psalm 51:5 is that of the misinterpretation of Acts 2:37-41, of picking and choosing verses out of their contexts to prove man made 'sacred traditions' that overthrow the word of God. Know ahead of time that the Holy Spirit has multiple offices or ministries that He as God carries out and we need to know doctrine rightly so that we can discern the Scriptures correctly. For example, the ministry of witholding or holding down iniquity will come to an end when he is taken out of the way (2 Thess 2:3-7) at the rapture of the church when the antichrist (Satan's christ) will be loosed toghether with all the non-incarcerated demonic entities. Another ministry is that of the Annointing of the Holy Spirit as described in John 20:22 when Jesus sends his disciples to proclaim the gospel and annointed them for service with the power of the HS. Jesus promised his disciples that he would go away (after his death and resurrection) to the Fathers' house to make a place for us (John 14:1-3) and in his absence he would send us another conforter, the Spirit of truth (John 14:16,17) that was with them but that would subsequently be inside of them so that he and the Father would too be in them (believers) John 14:23 [the Indwelling of the Holy Spirit when Jesus baptizes them with the Holy Spirit]. The Holy Spirit would proceed from the Father, be given to Jesus to pour on his church (John 15:26, the Baptism of the Spirit of Acts 1:5,8). It is Jesus Christ that baptizes believers with the Holy Spirit and it is the Spirit that places a person into the body of Christ (1 Cor 12:13).
At the Feast of Pentecost, exactly 10 days after the Ascension of Christ to heaven in the clouds, the Holy Spirit was poured by Christ onto the believers, and the Spirit of God came down upon them with the sound as of a rushing mighty wind (Act 2:1-2). In addition the Spirit's ministry of Filling of believers and of gifting them was also concomitant with the Baptism. Read Acts 2 to follow along. As other faithful/devout Jews from the Diaspora (Dispersion) were present in Jerusalem for the feast of Pentecost, and these saw what had happened to those in the upper room that were filled with the Spirit and each heard them speak in their own language, they marvelled and were convicted (2:37) and asked what they should do. Let us take the next verse one part at a time. Peter said unto them:
Repent: this means to turn from that upon what they depend on; it means to turn away from that which one is trusting in for salvation. This is not talking about godly sorrow (2 Cor 7:9,10) or sorrowing for sin.
and be baptized everyone of you in the name of Jesus Christ and this is alluding to the receiving of the Spirit/be baptized with the Spirit when they call upon the name of the Lord, at conversion to Christ (Romans 10:10, 13). This is not water baptism that is done in the name of the Trinity (Matthew 28:19) and is done by a baptizer. The Baptism with the Holy Spirit is done by Jesus Christ and is strictly spiritual (Mark 1:8)!!!
for the remission of sins and this part is what occurs when they call upon the name of the Lord
and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost and this is what follows repentance and conversion (conversion is of faith), one is gifted by Jesus Christ with the Indwelling Holy Spirit and in turn into the body of Christ, his church.
The next verse 39 tells us that the Holy Spirit is the gift promised. But then we get to verse 41 which breaks the back of the misappliers of these verses and it read:
THEN they that gladly received his words were baptized...... this is now water baptism, the sign of the faith in Jesus Christ, the public declaration that we are his and that in Him we have left the old man behind and now cling or dress with the new man Jesus Christ. And this pattern repeats itself over and over in the Acts of the apostles: first one is made a Christian by the Lord Jesus Christ and then one gets baptized by immersion to fully symbolize that the man that one used to be drowned and the one coming out from the water is the cleansed new man, the one saved and a member of the body of Christ. This is the proper exegesis of this verse in the context and following the doctrinal principles of the scriptures.
Thus as far as original sin is concerned we have seen that:
The consequences fall on the Human Race
Anyone human suffers the temporal consequences of the Fall of Adam but not his guilt
The Psalm 51:5 interpretation of this referring to an original sin is an error
The Psalm 51:5 is a reference to a fallen sinful nature, not original sin
Ezekiel 18:20 can not be overthrown and God is clear that the son does not bear the iniquity of the father nor the reverse
Acts 2:37-41 is taken out of its immediate and distant contexts for water baptism can not remove or wash any sins away given that only the blood of Jesus Christ can redeem
Water baptism is always taught in the Acts as a ritual to follow conversion and cannot save a gnat nor make a Christian out of anyone
Only Jesus Christ can make a person a Christian as he baptizes them himself with the HS
Just as one follows the money trail to see where it leads to get to the bottom of the story, likewise here follow the trail of who benefits by power and authority to find out the motives of the altering of the meaning of the passages in Acts 2:37-41.