Hebrews Lesson 85
NKJ 1
Corinthians 10:13 No temptation has overtaken you
except such as is common to man; but God is faithful, who will not allow
you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also
make the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it.
In our study of Hebrews 7 we have come down to the last three verses in
the chapter which brings up a very interesting theological debate that has gone
on down through the centuries. Primarily
we ought to just look at 8, 9, and 10.
In this case…
NKJ Hebrews 7:8 Here
mortal men receive tithes, but there he receives them, of whom it is
witnessed that he lives.
Here is the key verse…
NKJ
Hebrews 7:9 Even Levi,
who receives tithes, paid tithes through Abraham, so to speak,
NKJ
Hebrews
That (father) would be Abraham.
Now the issue here is how we understand this phrase, “He was still in the loins of his father Abraham.” In
one sense this is taken by a lot of people rather literally that through the
progenitor all the descendents are literally, fully, actually within them
seminally. That is the position that is
taught. That is the correct term for it
- seminalism. There are two views that
theologians have developed for understanding the relationship of the members of
the human race to Abraham. One is a
seminal relationship which is purely physical.
The other is federal – that Adam is our federal head. Those two positions we are not getting into
yet because they are also related to two other positions. One is called creationism and the other
traducianism. That has to do with the
origin of the soul.
These two issues and 4 positions are all related. Now down through the ages theologians have
tended to chose sides – one or the other.
I am of the opinion (because there is a lot of Scripture you can go to
to support both) that in some senses they are all true. We are going to work through that in the next
few weeks as we go through this to try understand the ways in which the seminal
position is true and the ways in which the federal position are true and the
ways in which the creationist view is true and the way the traducianist
position is true. The bottom line is
that you have certain aspects of the human being that are passed down
physically through procreation. And you
have other aspects which are immaterial.
The soul is immaterial. It is
important to understand the distinction here as well as the influence of
external philosophy on this whole debate because that does have a particular
and significant role. We’ll get into
that maybe a little bit tonight.
So let’s start off where we were last time to pick up the definitions.
There are two views on the origin of the soul.
As a matter of fact, I brought with me tonight the January-February 2007
issue of Israel My Glory. In the
January-February issue and then again in the March-April issue there are two
parts actually of a series on the morality of God under the heading “The
Foundations of Faith” by Dr. Reynold Showers.
Dr. Showers has his doctorate from Dallas Seminary. I have read a number of his books over the
years and they are very well done. He is
a very meticulous researcher- thinker.
His theology is very sound in most areas. He began in the
January-February edition in part 9 of this series on this great controversy on
the origin of the soul. It is a two page
article on pages 36 and 37. He gives an
introduction as I did last time. I
talked about how this debate as to the origin of the soul relates to and is
usually correlated to the abortion controversy.
He takes the first page to deal with that. Then he takes (and each page has three
columns as you can maybe see) 1 2/3 columns to introduce the issue of the
origin of the soul and that first theory that I dealt with last week briefly on
the preexistence theory of the soul which comes out of a Greek philosophical
background - mostly a platonic background.
The view is consistent with reincarnation. It did have a slight acceptance among some in
the early church, but it was negligible.
Then he gave basically one column (because it is about 70% of one column
and 40% of another column) to the creationist view. I felt when I read that that he just didn’t
understand the theory in the best articulation and he didn’t present it
honestly and accurately. He ignored a tremendous amount of data that has been
utilized over the centuries.
I find this to be typical of conservative evangelicals ever since Roe v.
Wade in 1973. There were at the time of
Roe v. Wade (I know that Bruce Walkie who was the chairman of the Old Testament
Department of Dallas Seminary did a flip-flop.
Bruce has done flip-flops on I don’t know how many of his theologies
over the years, but he was dispensational back then. He is covenant reformed now. He changed a lot of positions. He is a great grammarian, but he is not the
best theologian.) a lot of theologians
who did that. There were a lot of people
who did that between the 60’s and the 70’s because they assumed that a
creationist position on the origin of the soul – that is that God directly
creates and simultaneously imparts the soul to each baby at birth and that it
comes through that initial breathe. A
lot of people took that and thought it automatically meant that abortion was
legitimate. They knew that historically
the church had always been against abortion despite the position. But, they just automatically assumed that. Still today you will run into many people who
think that it is an automatic, necessary conclusion from a creationist
position. It is not an automatic,
necessary conclusion. In fact I think it
is an inconsistent conclusion from a creationist position. A creationist position I think is what the
Scriptures clearly teach. But to go to
the next step to say that it means that all abortion is okay is a total leap
because of the fact that other aspects of Scripture. We will get into that as we go through this. I just want to point that out.
He does a good job of pointing out the 3 basic questions that have to be
addressed if you are going to handle or present a consistent view of the
creationist position.
He writes…
First, it does not explain the
biblical teaching that all human beings sinned in Adam. Second (he says, and we will deal with each
of these.) the creation theory there is no explanation of the sinful nature of
all human beings from the time of their conception. (It does.
That has been clearly articulated by numerous theologians. He doesn’t like it.) Third the creation theory finds it difficult
to explain the fact that children often inherit the intellect and character of
their parents.
That is explained also. We will
deal with each one of those. I just
found it odd that when you get into the next issue he uses all 6 columns and
three pages to present the traducianist view.
He only presents a column to present the creationist view - 90% of that
is the flaws that he sees with the creation view. So, he doesn’t do an adequate job of
presenting it.
Well, we have used the two key terms – traducianism and
creationism. We will review them again
for you.
Traducianism is from the Latin word traducere which means to
transfer. It is the view in theology
that teaches that both the material body and the immaterial soul are
transmitted through physical procreation.
Actually I shouldn’t have immaterial soul there even though later
theologians up into the Reformation period up into the present would try to
treat the soul immaterially. The reality is that this view was originated by
Tertullian in the second to third century (AD).
Tertullian understood the soul to be material. So one of the major weaknesses with the
traducianist view which has not been explained is how the immaterial get
transmitted by the material. That is not
particularly dealt with along with another number of important scriptural
exegetical issues which we will deal with.
The other view that goes back equally as far (in fact it is the view
that was there when Tertullian introduced the traducianist theory) and that was
the creationist view that taught that the body was generated physically through
the physical act of procreation but the soul of each person is created directly
by God and is imparted simultaneous at the birth of each baby as indicated by
taking a breath. This is held by
numerous people - Jerome who translated the Vulgate, Thomas Aquinas who is
considered the angelic doctor (He is the theologian for the Roman Catholic
Church coming out of the Middle Ages), John Calvin, Charles Hodge, contemporary
theologian was Louis Burkhoff all held to a creationist view. These are not intellectual lightweights by
the way or theological lightweights.
They are very adept in what they presented.
Aquinas in fact said, “Traducianism is heresy – to think that the soul
was transmitted through the semen.”
So how do we understand this? We
have to build our case slowly, gradually from Scripture and not jump to
conclusions that aren’t in evidence at the beginning. So let’s take it very cautiously and slowly
as we go through this.
First off we have to start with the creation of man in original
formation which takes place in Genesis 2:7.
There we read…
NKJ
Genesis 2:7 And the LORD
God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils
the breath of life; and man became a living being.
This would be the chemicals in the soil.
He takes the earth and he begins to form man from the earth.
That always reminds me of one of my favorite little stories about some
evolutionists who finally got to the point where they could create life in the
laboratory.
So they said, “Well, we don’t need God anymore. We have proof that God is unnecessary so we
are going to tell God that He is unnecessary and He is worthless. We can do it all ourselves and we don’t need
Him.”
So they challenged God and God came out and said, “Okay. I will take up your challenge. We will see what you can do. We will have a contest and you can go
first. I will be a gentleman and you can
go first. You create life.”
So the scientist said, “Okay.
That sounds fine. I appreciate
the opportunity.”
So he leaned over and picked up some dirt.
God said, “No, no, no. You have
to create your own dirt.”
God originally created the chemicals of the soil. Remember that? So it is from the chemicals of the soil now
that God is going to form the physical body of man. Now this is why this whole issue of Platonism
comes into play. The problem that you
have that comes out of the influence of Platonism is this issue between matter
and the immaterial or as Plato put it – between the ideas and the forms.
He had a great cave illustration that everybody is in a cave. You remember when you were kids and you would
have real bright light or somebody would hold up a flashlight and turn the
lights off in your bedroom and you would hold up your fingers and you would
make a shadow image of a dog or a rabbit or something like that. That would go up in the wall. Well, Plato’s view of knowledge was that all
you and I ever see are the shadows on the wall.
That’s it. We don’t see the thing
that actually makes the image. That is
what he would call the form – the form or the ideal. That’s not in the physical creation. Down here in a lower story - he has this
dichotomy in the way he views reality. Down
below what you have is matter. The form
or the ideal is pure and it is good, but matter is inherently evil. Everything that is of real value has to do
with the pure, the good, the form, the ideal. This is where you have the realm
of spirit. Down here of course is where
you have the realm of body.
Form/Ideal
Pure Good
Spirit
matter/nature
evil body
Only the philosophers ever got enough information to come up out of the
cave and see ultimate reality – the ideas, the forms.
This came over into the early church.
Up here, this was changed to grace.
This is the realm where God operates.
Down below it is matter or nature.
As Christians they knew that creation itself wasn’t evil. But, it wasn’t important. When you get into the affect of neo-Platonism
on Christianity, they dump the ideas that it is evil; but it is just not
important. What is really important is
what goes on up here in the realm of spirit and soul.
Now I am not going to embarrass anybody here because I think everybody
would answer the question the same way.
But, most of us have heard people teach about the soul and say, “The
soul is the real you.”
Right? The soul is the real
you. How platonic! The body isn’t important. Do you hear that? If the soul is the real you, the body is
irrelevant. It is just dirt, dust and
chemicals. It is not significant. That is purely a neo-platonic idea of
life.
Here is a principle- the body is just as important as the soul.
We studied this earlier in Hebrews when Jesus Christ says to the Father,
“A body you have prepared for Me.”
Now think about this a little bit.
God the Father is sitting there – let’s say a day or two before Genesis
2:7. He is sitting there up on His
throne and He has got His head down in His hand like The Thinker. I am being a little anthropocentric here (or
a little anthropomorphic). He is
thinking about this.
He says, “Hum. One day I am going
to have to take My essence (that is spirit in terms of the Second Person of the
Trinity) and I am going to have to get all scrunched down and put Myself into
this body, this creature I am about to create.
So I have to design a physical body that is the best expression possible
that I can have to express all that I am in My infinite being and as a spirit.”
So He doesn’t just come up with some idea and say, “Oh. Bipedal humanoid.
What a great idea. Let’s give that a
shot.”
This is well thought out.
God is saying, “Of all the possible ways in which we can create this
body.”
Just think about some of the different ideas that human have come up
with. Think about that famous bar scene
in the first Star Wars movie that had all those different creatures in
there or some of the Star Trek shows where they have all the different
Cleons, and Romulans and all these different creatures - trivets or whatever they were. You had all these different bodies, all these
different options and God in His infinite omniscience would know all of the
variables.
So He says, “I am going to pick a finite physical body that is going to
be the home for the Second Person of the Trinity whose job it is to reveal Me
and to display who I am within this physical body.”
So this physical body is not an afterthought. It is not something that is just a home for
the soul. It is as important and as
significant as the soul. There is no
time your soul doesn’t operate without a body.
You have got a physical body now.
Based on Luke 16 there is going to be some sort of interim body between
now and the future. Otherwise how is the
soul going to see? How is the soul going
to hear? At physical death when the soul
is separated from the physical body, how is the soul going to hear, see,
experience anything? The soul has to
have a physical body in order to receive any sensory data – seeing, hearing,
tasting, anything. It has to come
through a physical body. So a physical
body is just as important.
That is what was missing from a tremendous amount of theology in the
Middle Ages because they tended to denigrate the significance of anything
physical due to this influence of neo-platonic thought. It denigrated marriage. It denigrated sex. It denigrates food and pleasure and all of
these other things. That is why the
people who were the real spiritual people were the monks (the monastics) who
were operating up here where they are living off in their monastic community
where all the emphasis is on the spirit and soul development. We are not going to eat a whole lot. We are not going to drink a whole lot
although they did develop some very fine beers in the Middle Ages in the
monasteries. In fact the current issue
of Christian History is devoted to monastic spirituality which is
another whole rabbit trail that I could go down. It is coming in gang busters.
Let me just get off on this a minute.
If you haven’t noticed this, the trend for the last 20 years among
evangelicals has been to go back to a Middle Ages, Roman Catholic contemplative
form of spirituality. Asceticism,
monasticism, going back - in fact they don’t call them initiates because that
would have to be someone who was becoming a Benedictine monk. But they have according to this issue in Christian
History the lay people who can associate themselves with a monastery. A large number of people who are associating
(I don’t mean 1 or 2%, probably 10-15%) with monasteries today are protestants. We are on our way back to Rome folks. In fact this morning (I haven’t had time to
go back and investigate the whole thing) I got an email from Charlie Clough. It was a forward from an email from Tommie
Ice. We all spend a lot of time
together.
Tommie was writing this email to Charlie saying, “I know you like to
read Charles Colson.”
Many of you have heard Charlie reference Charles Colson. Chuck Colson was a lawyer. He was in the Nixon White House. He was
guilty of various crimes of Watergate.
He was sent to prison. He trusted
Christ as a Savior and since then developed this huge national prison ministry.
He has written a number of books and he has a number of valuable insights. It also has a number of flaws. It turns out that Chuck Colson has been
promoting the writings of a man named Henry Nouwen. He is one of these contemporary contemplative
mystic types. He (Henry Nouwen does)
also promotes the works of an earlier writer named Thomas Merton who was into
all this New Age type of mystical spirituality.
This is coming on big time today.
Now let me connect some of these dots for you. There is another big name today that is
promoting these same two people – Henry Nouwen and Thomas Merton. That’s Rick Warren of the Purpose Driven
Life and the Purpose Driven Church.
We are going to have a mystic driven spiritual life.
That connects to the core things we were studying the last several weeks
on Sunday morning on worship in evaluating the claims of contemporary Christian
music and contemporary Christian worship movement. Their core understanding of
worship is subjectivity. It is a certain
mindset. The music and the words are
designed to get you into a certain mindset.
So we have to have these little praise courses because that helps get
you into this particular mindset. That
mindset is one that has affinity with the kind of mindset that is defined as
worshipful and spiritual in this contemplative spirituality movement that goes
back to the medieval mystics and ascetics and the pillar saints and all these
other thingstuffs that went on in the Middle Ages. We are going back to Rome folks in a big
way. So you need to be aware of how
these things connect.
Worship is not defined by a subjective mental attitude or mental state
of some sort of ethereal lightweight happy mentality. When Jesus was angry at the moneychangers in
the temple and threw them out, He was worshipping God. When they can factor that into their
definition of Sunday morning worship, they might be getting somewhere
biblically. Most of them don’t do that
– that jars, that violates their whole concept of love and feel good, and let’s
just be all emotional here. All of this
goes back to these horrible ideas that came into the early church through
platonic thought. It deemphasizes the
physical, the material and nature. We
saw that all the way through the Middle Ages how it impacted their art and how
it impacted music. In art it was two
dimensional. It tended to present people
in an ideal manner. Pictures of people
didn’t look like people. You couldn’t
identify them as individuals. Once you
had a shift towards the later Middle Ages and that wasn’t due to getting back
to the Bible. It was due to getting back
to Aristotle. When they got back to
Aristotle, Aristotle emphasized the particulars. It was Plato that emphasized the universals
or the ideals.
How does this affect us? Well,
the way it affected the whole idea of the origin of the soul and our
understanding of the soul and the formation of the body is it puts the
formation of the body of man from the dust of the ground…
“Well, that is kind of secondary.
God is just doing that to get to the really important part of creating
the soul.”
What I am telling you is they are both important. You never have human souls function without
some kind of body.
Let’s go to Luke 16. What is
interesting is in almost all these passages there have been so many changes and
challenges and things in recent years that it boggles my mind compared to what
I was taught and what I have concluded down through the last 30 years or so
since I was in seminary.
NKJ
Luke 16:19 " There
was a certain rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen and fared
sumptuously every day.
He (the certain rich man) is unnamed.
NKJ
Luke 16:20 "But
there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, full of sores, who was laid at his
gate,
Now here is the first point. It
starts like it might be a parable. There
are a lot of people today who will tell you this as a parable. But, parables don’t name the individuals in
them. Once they start getting named,
they are talking about real people.
Remember the parable of the prodigal son. You had a certain man and he
had two sons. Nobody has got a
name. They are parables. This is not a
parable. This is treated as a real event
that is taking place outside the range of our empirical faculties.
NKJ
Luke 16:21 "desiring
to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man's table. Moreover the
dogs came and licked his sores.
This is a pathetic sight of this homeless guy outside of the rich man’s
house.
NKJ Luke 16:22 "So
it was that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels to Abraham's bosom.
The rich man also died and was buried.
Lazarus dies.
There is a doctrine there that the angels come and escort our souls into
the presence of God. Abraham’s bosom was
also paradise. This is the place where
believers before Christ died on the cross - where Old Testament saints went –
sort of a holding place until sin was actually paid for and the opening to
heaven was made by Christ’s death on the cross.
NKJ
Luke 16:23 "And
being in torments in Hades, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham afar off, and
Lazarus in his bosom.
Now throughout the Old Testament these are real places. So this isn’t
just parabolic.
“He” means the rich man.
You are not in torment if there is not some sort of nervous system that
can telegraph pain to the soul. He is in
torment and he saw. There has to be some
sort of faculty for seeing. He can’t be
some disembodied soul like Casper the Ghost floating through the air or some of
those whatever they were protoplasmic things in Ghostbusters. There is some sort of interim body
there. It might not be like our physical
material body that we have today, but it is some sort of body.
NKJ
Luke 16:24 "Then
he cried and said, 'Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus that he
may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am tormented
in this flame.'
He has to have a mouth and a tongue to cry out.
Dip what? The tip of his
finger. If he is just a disembodied
soul, there is no finger to dip.
That tells us that both the unbeliever (the rich guy) and Lazarus have
some sort of body. They are not just
disembodied souls. There is some area in
which they feel pleasure and pain. The
rich man is feeling tremendous amount of heat-type of pain. He desperately
wants to be cooled off. He wants water
dropped off on his tongue.
NKJ Luke 16:25 "But
Abraham said, 'Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good
things, and likewise Lazarus evil things; but now he is comforted and you are
tormented.
Abraham says that it isn’t going to work. The great point of this is that the rich man
wants Lazarus to go back to his brothers and tell them what is going to happen
to them. If he rose from the dead and
went back and told them about all that happened and gave them a message from
me, then they would believe. Abraham
says in verse 29…
NKJ
Luke 16:29 "Abraham
said to him, 'They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.'
They have Moses and the prophets.
If they don’t believe them, they won’t believe Lazarus. That is a fabulous passage because what that
is saying is that the testimony of the Word of God is equal to if not superior
to any empirical or rational data that you can come up with to try to convince
somebody of the truth of Scripture. The
Scripture is self-authenticating. It is
the final authority. If they won’t
believe the Scripture, they won’t believe anything else.
The point that we are getting out of all this is that there is no time
when there is not some sort of body to house the soul The idea that bodies are insignificant,
secondary, not important - real you is your soul comes out of the influence of
Platonism and neo-Platonism on Christianity.
Both are important. God spends a
tremendous amount of time talking about this.
Jesus says, “A body you have prepared for Me.”
So the body is important.
The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground. The word there for form is the Hebrew word jatsar
which means to shape or mold as a potter shapes clay into some sort of
instrument.
NKJ
Genesis 2:7 And the LORD
God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils
the breath of life; and man became a living being.
What is interesting here is that the word for breath is this word neshamah. God breathed into his nostrils the breath of
life and man became a living soul at that particular point.
Now I will come back and talk about some of those other terms later on,
but right now I want to talk about the importance of breath. It is when God breathes into the physical
body that the physical body comes alive.
That is when you have the soul (the immaterial part of man) introduced
into the physical body. It is at that
point that it becomes a genuine, living, fully human person. But, let’s just take an example here. If you were to come up before God breathe
into Adam’s body and you were to take a machete and chop off the head, would
you be guilty of murder? No, because the
soul is not there yet. Is that the right
thing to do? No, that is not the right
thing to do. The purpose of this is to
create a human being who is going to be in the image and likeness of God. The body is just as much a significant part
of what is being developed as the soul. They haven’t come together yet to be a full
human being, but they are both important.
It is vital for us to understand some things about just when the Bible
talks about life beginning.
I have entitled this lesson The Biblical Parameters of Life. In the process of doing some research on this
I’ve gone back through this whole topic numerous times over the last 20 years
and changed my views considerably over time.
There are some things that are not pointed out by just about
anybody. Not that I am patting myself on
the back, but it just seems like in so many areas we just jump to comfortable
conclusions without evaluating all the data.
In Job 1:21, Job says…
NKJ
Job 1:21 And he said: "Naked I
came from my mother's womb, And naked shall I return there. The LORD gave, and
the LORD has taken away; Blessed be the name of the LORD."
There is a lot about this verse that we could go into but the main thing
that we want to look at is that Job recognizes that the Lord is the one who
gives him life. That life includes his
physical life as well as his soul life - both the body and the soul.
When he says, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb,” there is a technical
phrase there in the Hebrew that we will look at in just a minute.
The emphasis is not on “naked I arrived in the womb”. I want you to pay attention to this because
it is one of the most important things that you will find and I don’t know that
it is in print anywhere. That is that
the Bible never ever puts the parameters of life at conception and death. I am going to document that later on. Watch this.
The Bible always puts the parameters between birth and death. It never ever (The vocabulary is there in the
Hebrew.) puts the parameters at conception - not once. This is just one place that you see
that.
He is talking about the beginning of life is at birth.
When he says, “The Lord gave,” that is in parallelism to what he has
just said in the previous phrase. So it
is the Lord that is behind and is the one who is indirectly involved in that
birth process and in the death process.
That is all we will say about Job 1:21 right now, but we will come back
to it a little later on. The important
phrase that we have here is one that shows up a little later on and I will talk
about a little later on.
The word for womb in the Hebrew is beten, the preposition is min.
When it comes before a consonant it drops the “n” so it would be mibeten. It means from the womb. Now we talked about this preposition. It works the same way in Hebrew.
Sometimes the word from is… for example I could say, “I moved back to
Houston from Connecticut.”
If I talk about it that way, then it clearly says that I was in
Connecticut. But when Jesus prays for
the disciples to be kept from the evil one, there is no indication that they
are ever in the evil one. Okay? So it
has these two different nuances. That
becomes important in a study we did not that long ago on Sunday morning in
another passage in Revelation 3:10.
So why don’t you turn over there.
I am not going to do a detailed exegesis of this verse. The causal clause at the beginning of verse
10 belongs to verse 9. There are
technical syntactical reasons for that.
Unfortunately the verse was divided here, but the standard practice in
Greek is not to begin a sentence with because.
If you want to get the details of that go back and listen to the tape
where I went through it in detail. So
the sentence actually begins, I will also in addition to other things…
NKJ
Revelation 3:10 "Because
you have kept My command to persevere, I also will keep you from the hour of
trial which shall come upon the whole world, to test those who dwell on the
earth.
The hour of testing is a technical for the tribulation. Keeping you from the hour of testing is the
Greek preposition ek which is parallel to the Greek preposition min. It is clear that it means that they are
never in the hour of testing. They are
kept from ever going into it. So if we
were to diagram this in a chart we would do it something like this…
Sometimes “from” is inside the circle as in the phrase “I moved here
from Connecticut.”
But in most cases - Jeff Townsend documents this in a totally unrelated
subject to the one we are studying when he wrote an article in Bibliotheca
Sacra back in the early 80’s on Revelation 3:10 that the vast majority of
uses in the New Testament - “from” is not ever entering into. It doesn’t involve being in this place. It is talking about exiting or being outside
of it. The starting point is outside of
the circle.
The reason this is important is this phrase that I am looking at mibeten
is a Hebrew idiom for birth. In fact, I
did a search through Logos on the English phrase “from birth” in the New
American Standard and came out with about 9 hits. In the Old Testament every time you have the
phrase that is translated in the English “from birth” it is always mibeten
or mirecham which is the parallel term.
It is a synonym for the womb as well.
We will get into that in a minute.
So this phrase “coming from my mother’s womb” is consistently treated by
translators as an idiom for “from birth”.
It doesn’t mean inside the womb.
It means from the time of birth.
So, Job is saying, “Naked I came from birth and naked I will
return”.
He is focusing on birth and death as the parameters of life.
In Job 33:4, Job says...
NKJ
Job 33:4 The Spirit of God has made
me, And the breath of the Almighty gives me life.
This is not the technical word bara. Now there is a lot of debate over the meaning
of these three different Hebrew words for create – bara, asah, and jatsar. I have already talked about jatsar. Bara is the word that is used in
Genesis 1:1.
NKJ
Genesis 1:1 In the
beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The unique thing about bara is the only person who baras
anything is God. God is the only subject
of that verb – anywhere in Scripture. So
only God can create, bara. Thus we see as a secondary meaning, not the
core meaning, ex nihilo creation in some places.
So here when Job says, “The spirit of God has made me”, this is a more
generic term and could imply some other things.
Then in parallelism it says…
The word for Spirit there is ruach. That is the word that we have
for breath back in Genesis.
“The breath of the Almighty gives me life.”
So what Job is saying here is that it is not just Adam. See that is what the traducianist will argue
– when you go to Genesis 2:7 that is just how it got started. That is the only time there is this breathing
of God that creates life or imparts the soul.
But Job says that too. Isaiah is
going to say that as well. There are numerous passages that say that.
Full life is related to breathing which begins at birth.
Ecclesiastes 12:7 is another crucial passage to look at here. The writer of Ecclesiastes says…
NKJ
Ecclesiastes 12:7 Then the
dust will return to the earth as it was, And the spirit will return to God who
gave it.
Then is the time of death.
That is the physical body decomposes.
The word for spirit in the Hebrew is ruach – for Holy Spirit, for
wind, for breath. It has a variety of
meanings just like pneuma in the New Testament. It can mean breath, but it also refers to in
this context it has to refer to the immaterial part of man. You have a material part that decomposes in
the grave. You have an immaterial part
and it goes to God. There is a
connection between the fact that the immaterial part is called ruach
meaning breath or wind and the fact that it is related to the neshamah,
the breath of God. They work together. They are parallel and correlated
concepts. So you have two processes - a
physical process which generates physical life and an immaterial process that
generates the soul life.
Now another thing just so we don’t get too confused here. Is anybody
confused? Okay. There are three parts to the human makeup we
say. We go to passages - I Thessalonians
3, Hebrews 4:12, where there is a distinction between body soul and
spirit. But these words for soul and for
spirit are not always used in that technical sense. Sometimes they are used interchangeably and
they both can refer, either one can refer to the immaterial part of man. We talk about the spirit of pharaoh (the ruach
of pharaoh) in the Old Testament. He is
not saved, but he has this immaterial part.
So the ruach of man is just a term, a generic term, non-
technical term - for the immaterial part of man. It doesn’t always refer to what we would
refer to in another context, to the human spirit meaning that part of man’s
immaterial nature that he receives at regeneration, the natural man (the
soulish man) of I Corinthians 2:14 and Jude 9 (something like that. I am not sure of the passage) do not have. So
the term spirit is also applied in a technical sense to that element that was
lost in spiritual death and gained in regeneration. Here it is a non-technical use of the
word. Context dictates.
Isaiah 2:22 is another passage that emphasizes the importance of breath.
NKJ Isaiah 2:22 Sever
yourselves from such a man, Whose breath is in his nostrils; For of what
account is he?
It is an emphasis on breathing as crucial to presence of soul life.
NKJ Isaiah 42:5 Thus
says God the LORD, Who created the heavens and stretched them out, Who spread
forth the earth and that which comes from it, Who gives breath to the people on
it, And spirit to those who walk on it:
Somebody was asking me a question about this the other day. When you have the LORD that indicates that
the Hebrew behind it is YHWH, the sacred Tetragrammaton. When you have lower case like God, it is
Elohim. Sometimes you will have GOD and
Lord. That will mean that God is a term
that they are using to translate YHWH and lower case Lord would be Adonai. So sometimes you have YHWH Adonai. So they would translate that Lord God. That is just a typical style feature of most
Bibles.
Who what? Who gives breath? You see this is ongoing action. It is not “who gave breath at the beginning
of the process going with Adam and it continues”. He gives breath to the people on it, not to
the singular person Adam, and the process got started which is what the
traducianists would want to argue. But
He continues to give breath to the people on it and spirit (ruach) to
those who walk on it.
You see where ruach is parallel to neshamah for
breath. God is the one here who is being
pictured as being directly or immediately involved in the process of bestowing
the soul.
NKJ Isaiah 57:16
For I will not contend forever, Nor will I always be
angry; For the spirit would fail before Me, And the souls which I have
made.
He is talking about ruach.
If He were really angry the spirit of man would fail.
It is a bad translation. It is
not soul there. It is neshamah,
the breaths which I have made. Again we
see this parallel between spirit and neshamah.
So I have just gone through these passages to show that there are
numerous passages after the creation that continue to talk about God imparting
the souls through His breath. Breath is
crucial to understanding the presence of life and the presence of soul
life.
The next thing I want to look at as we go through this has to do with
understanding when God imparts the soul and you have a complete full human
being. Once again we are going to deal
with the parameters of life. The Bible presents these parameters from birth to
death, not from conception to death. So
we are just going to ratchet our argument up a little step and get into a key
verse in Psalm 22:9-10.
He speaks to God.
NKJ
Psalm 22:9 But You are
He who took Me out of the womb; You made Me trust while on My
mother's breasts.
NKJ Psalm 22:10 I
was cast upon You from birth. From My mother's womb You have been My
God.
That is the word mirechem.
Rechem is a word for the inner parts. Sometimes rechem is the source of
compassion.
From my mother’s womb, mibeten.
Those are the two words. We are
going to see them in synonymous parallelism numerous times – rechem and beten -
the womb. You see mirechem – mi is that Hebrew preposition min
drops the “n” when it comes before a consonant.
You see how the New American Standard translates it from birth. You see they understand it. You are putting in a passage that is at the
core of the debate over this, they will translate it “from the womb”. But when you go to non-central passages all
of a sudden they recognize that it is “from birth”. I am arguing for
consistency here. So mirechem and
mibeten both have that idea of from birth. So from the womb doesn’t mean in the
womb. It means from the time the child
comes out of the womb. You see this also
in Psalm 58:3
NKJ
Psalm 58:3 The wicked
are estranged from the womb; They go astray as soon as they are born, speaking
lies.
That is they are fallen from the womb - mirechem.
“Those who speak lies” is in synonymous parallelism to the wicked. Go astray is synonymous parallelism to
estranged. Go astray from birth is mibeten. So you see mibeten and mirechem
are synonymous terms both indicating the concept from birth, not from conception.
Isaiah 46:3 is another key passage.
NKJ
Isaiah 46:3 "
Listen to Me, O house of Jacob, And all the remnant of the house of Israel, Who
have been upheld by Me from birth, Who have been carried from the womb:
Born meaning carried.
You see not from conception. It
is talking about the nation. When was
the nation conceived? It doesn’t fit a
parallel. You see it talks about birth,
when it began. That is the beginning of
the nation. It is not conception; it’s
birth.
So those terms are used synonymously there– mibeten first and
then mirechem in the second usage.
NKJ
Job 1:21 And he said: "Naked I
came from my mother's womb, And naked shall I return there. The LORD gave, and
the LORD has taken away; Blessed be the name of the LORD."
Mibeten – from my mother’s womb.
Job now begins to have a pity party after his suffering.
NKJ
Job 3:11 "Why did I not die at
birth? Why did I not perish when I came from the womb?
He says, “Why did I not die from birth.”
Not conception - birth.
It is post birth, the beginning of life.
He says in Job 10:19…
NKJ Job 10:19 I
would have been as though I had not been. I would have been carried from the
womb to the grave.
Mibeten.
So you see the argument here is that life begins at birth and ends with
death. Those are the parameters. You don’t have a single place...
NKJ
Isaiah 44:2 Thus says
the LORD who made you And formed you from the womb, who will help you:
'Fear not, O Jacob My servant; And you, Jeshurun, whom I have chosen.
NKJ
Isaiah 44:24 Thus says
the LORD, your Redeemer, And He who formed you from the womb: "I am the
LORD, who makes all things, Who stretches out the heavens all alone, Who
spreads abroad the earth by Myself;
You see in the phrase “from birth”, you have a preposition from which in
the Hebrew is min and the Greek is ek plus a noun. You have a noun. Here I have the verb jalad. You don’t have a noun related to it in
Hebrew. You don’t. There is no
noun. So you can’t say in Hebrew “from
birth” because you have to have a preposition and a noun. You can’t have a prepositional phrase from
birth because Hebrew has a verb for birth jalad but, it doesn’t have
noun for birth. So you have to use an
idiom or circumlocution to talk about from birth. This is why they use either the word mibeten
or mirechem – from the womb.
There was no possible way – no vocabulary, no tool to talk about from
birth using a noun. It didn’t exist.
But you do have a verb harah which is the verb which means to conceive. It is used 52 times in the Scripture. You also have noun form which is present in
numerous places in the Scripture. You
can talk about “from conception”. So, if
there is the vocabulary – there is the tool to talk about “from conception” -
why does the author always use the mibeten or mirechem? Because, he is not talking about from
conception. He has the vocabulary tools
to do it, but he never does. It is never
from conception to the tomb. It is
always from birth to the tomb. Those are
the parameters. So that helps us
understand I think something very important about the parameters of life.
I have brought this up in discussions and debates with other guys – guys
who don’t agree with this. They just sit
back and they are quiet. Usually we
don’t come back to this discussion. I am
not meaning that in the sense that… They
have never heard it before and they don’t have an answer. I don’t know of anybody that has heard this
that has had an answer. It surprises
them. I have never found this to be
developed in any literature in any pro or con either side of this
discussion. I have never seen anybody
either present it or adequately deal with it.
I think that was one example.
NKJ
Genesis 4:1 Now Adam
knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, and said, "I have
acquired a man from the LORD."
There is the verb – and gave birth to Cain. So you have both conception
and birth in that particular verse. So
see these words were all there. So if
the Old Testament is making a case that the parameters of life are from
conception to death which is what every body argues in the abortion discussion,
why is it that the Bible never ever ever sets conception as the parameter? It just isn’t there.
The big question is so what actual impact does this have on the abortion
debate? We will get there because there
is a lot more on both sides of this to cover than we can possibly cover
tonight. So we will come back the next
class. We will review this again.