Hebrews Lesson 86
NKJ Hebrews
We are in Hebrews 7. We started this two or
three weeks ago. Then I was gone last Thursday night when I went up to
Just to give you a framework or reminder rather of
where we are, we are in Hebrews 7 at a very important passage that is
frequently misapplied and misunderstood. It has to do with the context of
the paying of tithes from Abraham to Melchizedek. There is a statement
made in Hebrews 7:9-10 that is somewhat cryptic.
NKJ Hebrews 7:9 Even Levi, who receives tithes, paid tithes through Abraham, so to speak,
Even Levi (of course he was many generations after
Abraham - 3 generations after Abraham) who receives tithes paid tithes through
Abraham, so to speak. The key word there is that phrase “so to
speak.” “In a manner of speaking” indicates clearly the author is
talking about a figure of speech here. He is not talking
literally.
It is so important to come back and to take the time
to investigate details when we are applying a literal principle of
hermeneutic. It can get confusing in places. We will see that when
we get into some passages later on in our study of Revelation. But
here the author is simply using this to reinforce a point within the structure
of his whole argument that Levi being a great-grandson of Abraham (since
Abraham was inferior to Melchizedek) that Levi, the head of the tribe for the
Levitical priesthood, would also be inferior to Melchizedek; and therefore the
Levitical priesthood is inferior to the Melchizedekean priesthood. But there
have been those in the history of Christianity who have taken this in a more
literal manner. They have developed a view that would suggest that Levi
was in some sense actually there paying tithes to Abraham. That would
mean that for parents whether we are talking about ancient history with Adam or
Noah or Abraham or modern times that subsequent generations are in some sense
fully present in the activities of the previous generations.
This brings up a topic that is very important for
contemporary issues on the origin and
transmission of human life. As we have studied this I have pointed
out that there are two positions historically. The position to which I
just referred - that there is some level of physical presence of one generation
in previous generations - is known as traducianism. This is the idea that
both the material body and the immaterial soul are transmitted through physical
procreation. Now what I think is interesting and problematic for
this view is - how can the material produce the immaterial. I think it is
a problem for many Christians because they want to hold to an immaterial
soul. What is interesting is that Tertullian who developed this
position did not hold to an immaterial soul but held that the soul was
material. I find that certain objections that traducianists have to the
other position still work only if you presuppose a certain amount of
materiality to the soul. We are going to have to examine that as we go
through some of the details. I just want to do a little review to get you
up-to-date and up-to-speed with where we have been already.
The other position is the creationist position.
Now in the last 40 years or so, since the abortion debate has come along and
with the decision Roe vs. Wade back in 1973, this position has fallen on hard
times. That is because many people today automatically assume that a
creationist position is somehow pro-abortion. Historically it is not a
position that has been pro-abortion. I think that is the fault of
theologians, and it is also the fault of liberal Christians that have taken
this position. It is the fault of people who have politicized theological
positions. Creationism teaches that only the body is generated through
physical creation and that the soul is directly created by God. Hence for
creationists God indirectly creates the body by intermediate means and the soul
is created directly by God. The body is created indirectly through normal
means of procreation. The soul though is created directly by God through
immediate means.
Now here is a key verse. The issue here (Bear
with me. We are going to cover new ground. Each time we sort of
peel back this onion, we are going a little deeper into it.) is whether or not
this describes the original creation or whether this describes a pattern that
is true for every human being in every generation. Traducianists will say
(I alluded to an article in the recent “Israel My Glory” magazine by Reynold
Showers who did a very superficial job of interacting with the creationists
position.) this is a one time event. Well, it doesn’t do justice to many
other passages as I will show you.
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.
Now last time I focused on the key noun which is neshamah
for breath of life. Let’s look at some other key vocabulary in this
particular verse because it comes up in other subsequent passages in Isaiah and
Job and places like that are important. They get their terminology from
this passage.
This is a word used for how a potter would shape
clay. It is the Hebrew verb yatsar. It is one of the three
or four different verbs used for creation. You have bara which
only God does. You have asah which is a general term for making or
doing something. You have yatsar which is the idea of physically
shaping or fashioning something - forming or molding it. You also have
the verb banah which means to build. Yatsar here refers to
God forming man of the dust of the ground. This is the formation, the
structuring of the physical body of man and it’s separate from that which
energizes man which is clearly immaterial at this point.
He breathes into man’s nostrils. This is the
Hebrew verb naphah. What is interesting is that I looked this up
somewhere today as I was studying and doing additional reading on this
subject. They said that this is a metaphor. This is just a figure
of speech. God didn’t actually breathe into the body. The more we
get into this, the more we battle this whole thing of literal
interpretation. What in the text tells us that this would just be an
image and not literal activity? Where do we go? If God didn’t
literally breathe into the dust of the ground, did God even use the dust of the
ground? Did God even form it? How do we know He did anything when
we start saying everything is just a figure of speech? You have to be
able to demonstrate from the context and from usage that something is a figure of
speech.
Neshama is
the breath of life here.
So “breathing” and “breath” are terms used to refer to
that which is immaterial and is related to the concept of wind as it
were. So man is described as a living being. We have two words
here. We have a verb hajah which is a noun that means a living
thing, an animal, a beast. The basic meaning of this is usually related
to animals or beasts. Then you have the noun nephesh which is the
word that is normally translated soul. But it also has a broad range of
meanings. Just because you see the word nephesh there, people
automatically jump to soul and the concept that it’s later developed when we
get to the New Testament. Here it just refers to the immaterial part of
man. It includes both what we later call the human soul and the spirit. Nephesh
can mean wind, breath, soul, the animating principle of life, emotion. It
can be a term for a person – like how many souls went down when the Titanic
sunk? That is the idea - a passion or desire. It has a broad range
of meanings. Sometimes it really overlaps with the word ruach
which is the word for spirit, normally referring to the Holy Spirit in the Old
Testament. But ruach also means wind or breath. It is
important to pay attention to these ideas because they emphasize the immaterial
basis for what animates the physical body. It is the coming together of
the material body and the immaterial soul that produces full human life here.
What is important as I pointed out last time is that
we can’t minimize the importance of the physical body here at all. I
pointed out going to Luke 16 that even in the intermediate stage there is an
intermediate body. The soul can’t exist without a body. The body
issue has been a problem for Christians for centuries, since the influence of
neo-Platonism in the early church. We have to recognize that the
Scripture puts a high value on the body.
You see in Platonism (We go back to a chart I used
when we talked about history of music and art.) it is the house. The
house represents the totality of creation. What happens in Greek thought
is the introduction of a dichotomy – a separation as it were of two different
levels of existence or knowledge. This goes back to Plato. Plato
used a very famous image in his book The Republic where he talks about
being in a cave. All people are in a cave. All they see is shadows
on the wall. When you see anything in this life, anything that is in the
material world, that is just a shadow of ultimate reality. So when you
see a chair that is a pale imitation and reflection of some ideal chair that
exists in some ideal realm. So ultimate reality (We might call it “real”
reality without being redundant.) is this upper story which he called the realm
of forms or ideas. It has to do with the essences of things.
It is interesting just as a little side note that the
Greek word for form is morphe. It had to do with the essence of
things. See it talks about how the Second Person of the Trinity in
Philippians 2 is the morphe of God – the form of God. He didn’t
think being in the form of God was something to be held after. That is
what he is talking about there - He didn’t think being in the essence of
God. So that word carries that connotation.
You have this ultimate realm out there where reality
is. That is where there is some sort of eternal reason, rationality,
order, truth, and beauty. All exists at this upper story level. But
what happens in reality - matter is basically evil. It is not really important.
It is just a place where our souls get imprisoned for awhile. Remember
for Plato, souls preexisted physical life. They exist and then the body
is created and then they are put there and sort of isolated, imprisoned in
matter. Later on the Gnostics are going to take that - where you have to
learn through knowledge - to be released from this matter or prison. You
do that through knowledge and esoteric knowledge and mysticism to approach the
upper story.
What matters are chaos and irrationality and
evil. A physical body that houses the soul is basically a trap. It
is a prison. It is bad. When this came over into Christianity
-because of Genesis 1 when God says that all of this is good, they can’t say
that matter is bad. It just isn’t going to be very important. So
the early church always had trouble dealing with the flesh. Not just in
terms of sin, but in terms of the importance of the body. Yet when Christ
was resurrected what happened there in the grave? Did He just get a new
body outside the grave and the old body just stayed there? No. That
body that He had from birth is transformed in some way and mortality puts on
immortality. That is a terminology that Paul uses in I Corinthians
15. That physical body that was subject to death is transformed to a body
that is not going to be subject to death.
When we get raptured and we are given a resurrection
body (that we are physically raptured and) there is a transformation that goes
up in the process. When you get raptured, your soul is not going zip up
to heaven and leave your earthly body behind. Your body goes with you and
gets transformed in the resurrection body on the way up so that the present
physical body that we have is not insignificant and unimportant.
You may not like it. It gets old and is subject
to the ravages of time and disease and everything else that we have to put up
with, but what I am emphasizing here is in biblical Christianity the physical
body is important. We don’t have the soul as the main thing and the
physical body is just - well we have to put up with it. It is
important.
You can’t go back to Genesis 2:7 and say that what is
going on here shows the importance of the soul which is the real you and the
body is just a bunch of cells and interaction between muscles and air and a lot
of neurons and electrical circuits and a heart beating and all that.
“There is nothing to it.”
That is not right.
When you come into Hebrews as we have seen, Jesus
says, “A body You have prepared for Me” so that when God is shaping that body
for Adam in Genesis 2:7 this is a body that is going to be the best conceivable
physical finite home for the incarnation of the eternal Second Person of the
Trinity to give Him the best and the greatest possible way in which He could
express all that God is and reveal all that God is. Now that is a pretty
developed understanding of the importance of the physical body.
So we can’t just come along and say that whatever this
thing is that houses the soul is some sort of afterthought or secondary
thing. That idea comes right out of Platonism and neo-Platonism. It
is just as much a worldly idea. So we saw that since the original
creation God uses indirect means to create physical life through the process of
procreation. But since ultimately everything comes from God, the
Scripture speaks of immediate creation and mediate involvement of God in the
same way. God makes your body. We see that terminology in Psalm
139. We see how David talks about how God is intimately involved in the
making of the physical body. That is talking about a more mediate
involvement. It is not a direct involvement. It is indirect
involvement because he is using the natural processes of procreation. Yet
when it comes to the soul there is more of an immediate creation and
impartation there.
Now last time I talked about some passages that show
that God uses various indirect means to create physical life talking about the
physical processes of birth. Job 1:21, 33:4.
Ecclesiastes 12:7 is a key verse.
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.
There is the word ruach. The spirit will
return to the God who what? Gave it. It directly relates God to the
giving of the spirit in that particular passage - making a distinction between
the physical, material dust that will return to earth as it was and the spirit
that goes to God.
NKJ Isaiah
We have the phrase “sever yourselves from such a man
whose breath is in his nostrils” talking about life as related to neshamah.
The simple point that I am making there is that if the claim is that God’s breathing
of neshamah in Genesis 2:7 was a one time event, then you wouldn’t find
that terminology used successively down through the generations. But you
do- which shows that it is not a one time event!
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:
Neshamah -
God is still giving breath to the people on the earth in spirit - ruach.
It is used in parallelism there to neshamah.
We also looked at Isaiah 57:16.
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.
Then we came to a fourth point dealing with when does
God impart the soul? In other words, does this happen at
conception? Does it happen at birth? Is it carried through somehow in the
process of procreation? Think about it. Does it come from the egg
or the sperm? Which one? Do you get half a soul from one and half
from the other? Where does the soul come from? It is
interesting. We get into a lot of interesting questions here.
Philosophy has always wondered and struggled with trying to explain how an
immaterial substance can control a material substance. How can an
immaterial thing like the soul control or interact? What is the exact
connection between the immaterial soul and the material brain? We have
all kinds of questions I can’t answer. I can raise them.
What happens when you have somebody who has a major
stroke? What happens if – a case happened several years ago in
We looked at various terms that were used as we went
down through the passage. We looked at terms for birth and we looked at
Psalm 22, Psalm 58.
The key passage that we looked at was Isaiah
46:3. God says…
NKJ Isaiah 46:3 " Listen to Me, O house of
Jacob, And all the remnant of the house of
Mirechem.
I said that rechem was a term that referred to the bowels. It is
used in synonymous parallelism with the Hebrew word beten which is the
womb. The mi is the Hebrew preposition min means out from
or from indicating source or origin.
We see that this phrase from the womb is used in
synonymous parallelism with the phrase “from birth”. The point that I am going
to make and continue through tonight because it is so important is that the
Bible never, ever, not once makes the parameters of life conception and
death. Not once. The vocabulary is there. I just want to make
sure you understand that. The vocabulary is there, but it never uses that
vocabulary. It always uses the imagery of mibeten. From the womb
doesn’t mean in the womb. I am going to show you that tonight as we look
at various passages. It doesn’t mean “in the womb”. It means from
the time of birth. It means “from the time the baby comes out of the
womb”. That is the starting point. So when God uses a comparison with
Israel He doesn’t say from conception. He says from birth. That is
the starting point - birth.
Job says…
NKJ Job
He could have made a better point if he had said, “You
know I was conceived and I shouldn’t have even been conceived. My mother
should have just had a miscarriage.”
But you see he doesn’t say that.
NKJ Job
Mirechem.
Rechem is
sometimes used for the womb.
This phrase “from the womb” is consistently understood
by translators as being identical with the concept of “at birth”.
So he doesn’t say, “Why didn’t my mother just miscarry?”
He says, “Why didn’t I die after I was born?”
The assumption is that he is not a full “I” until
birth because it is at birth when that baby takes that first breath –
neshamah- and receives a soul from God.
NKJ Job
Carried from womb – mibeten – to tomb.
From womb to tomb - those are the parameters of life.
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.
That means from birth. We will see later on in
my notes - I did some research today and searched the phrase “from birth”
in about 5 different English translations. It is interesting. All the
different English translations translate mibeten as “from birth” at
different points – not always at the same point. In the Old Testament
they will usually have 8-10 verses that will translate it “from birth”.
But, they don’t do it consistently in the same places. So if you
looked at the totality of those you would probably have 16-18 verses in the Old
Testament that by one translation or another mibeten is translated “from
birth”. So the translators clearly understand that this phrase means “from
birth”. It is not talking about activity inside the womb prior to birth.
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;
It is not talking about action in the womb
again. It is very important to pay attention to those prepositions.
They are very, very important. God is talking about God working on
So you have two different verbs here. We went
over this last time - the verb yalad which is the verb for birth.
Now when you take a prepositional statement like “from birth”
(preposition from, noun (object of the preposition) birth) that is how you form
the prepositional phrase. There is no noun in Hebrew for “birth”.
All you have is the verb. Yalad means to give birth, to
begat. It is used 388 times for giving birth.
You do have a verb and a noun for conception.
They are used a number of times. The verb “conceive” is used 52
times. There is a noun for conception used many times so you do have the
linguistic tools to say “from conception”. But, they don’t do it.
They use a circumlocution mibeten “from the womb” because that is how
they say “from birth”. They can’t say “from birth” because there is no
noun for birth. So, they have to use an idiom.
Look at how this is used.
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 our first verb harah.
So it is talking about two different periods.
Conception is when she became – in fact some dictionaries will define harah
as “to become pregnant”.
Nine months later she gave birth to Cain. So
these are two different words – two different events.
NKJ Genesis
These are two different words describing two different
events. So we have various biblical verses that give us those parameters
for life.
Ecclesiastes 3:2 doesn’t say “a time to conceive and a
time to die”. It says a time to give birth and a time to die.
NKJ Isaiah 9:6 For unto us a Child is born, Unto us
a Son is given; And the government will be upon His shoulder. And His name will
be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
For unto us a Child will be conceived? Is that what it says? The language is there. We have already seen that they had the verb for it. No, it says for a Child is born to us.
NKJ Matthew 11:11 "Assuredly, I say to you, among
those born of women there has not risen one greater than John the Baptist; but
he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.
It doesn’t talk about the unborn.
NKJ Job 14:1 "Man who is born of woman Is of few days and full of trouble.
NKJ Job
They have the language to say “who is conceived of a
woman”, but they never, ever use that verbiage - never, not one time.
Now what happens in the abortion debate is people
constantly come out and say that life begins at conception. If life
begins at conception, you have to find passages in Scripture where the
parameters of life are given from conception to death and you don’t have
it.
I have challenged people with this and they say, “I
have never thought about that.”
I have never had anybody come back to me with an
answer on this particular point.
NKJ Job 38:21 Do you know it, because you were born then, Or because the number of your days is great?
Not that you were conceived then.
NKJ Job
Womb to tomb.
NKJ Job
NKJ Job
Okay now, what does the Scripture say about the
development of the immaterial part of man? This is very important because
I said earlier we have the original model in Genesis 2:7 where it talks about
God breathing into man. The passages I have shown you already from Isaiah that
talked about breath of life. We will review those again.
NKJ Isaiah
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.
You have a parallelism between ruah and nesamah
in these two verses. The point is the breathing is the sign of
life. That’s what is indicative of life being present - breath. Without
oxygen there is no life. There is no soul. There is no animating
spirit. So that would argue against the idea that Genesis 2:7 was just a
one time event when God got the engine of human life started. After that,
everything transmitted differently. Well, after that the physical process
was different, but the immaterial process is still immaterial and we still have
the breath of God keeping man alive.
Now the next thing we have to look at – we have spent
a lot of time in the Old Testament – we have to jump ahead into the New Testament
and look at some New Testament passages. Now in the New Testament we have the
Greek phrase ek koilia. Now ek is the Greek preposition
that is parallel to the Hebrew preposition min. Ek means
out of, away from indicating origin. So this phrase ek koilia is
used to indicate birth. It is picked up from the Old Testament. It
is the same imagery meaning from birth. However there is a Greek noun
“for birth” that is used one time in the Greek New Testament. You have ek
koilia used a number of times, but you see in Greek they did have the
verbiage to talk about “from birth”. They did have a noun for birth and
it is used one time in the New Testament. That’s in John 9:1.
NKJ John 9:1 Now as Jesus passed by, He saw a man who was blind from birth.
It is from the verb genaoo. It is the
noun form. That’s the only time. There are 7 other uses in the New
Testament where you have the phrase ek kolia. They are very
informative.
NKJ Acts 14:8 And in Lystra a certain man without
strength in his feet was sitting, a cripple from his mother's womb, who had
never walked.
Now New American Standard and New King James translate
it literally – a cripple from his mother’s womb. But the ESV translates
it “from birth” understanding that that is the sense of that particular
passage. That is the meaning of that particular passage.
Now think about it a minute. Would it make sense
to be talking about what was going on inside the womb and be making a point
about the fact that he never walked? Nobody walks in the womb.
Nobody walks until they get out of the womb. What I find interesting here
is when did they discover that his feet were weak and he couldn’t walk?
The day he was born? A week later? Two weeks later? When do
kids start walking? How old are kids when they start trying to get up and
walk? Nine months, a year, a year and a half? Something like
that. At least a year. My point is - when did they discover that he
couldn’t walk. They say he is a cripple from his mother’s womb, but they
don’t really realize that he doesn’t have strength in his feet until sometime
after he is born. I want to show you why I am making that point
later. I would love to prove it, but I can’t do it. I have never
found documentation to prove that the phrase “from birth” isn’t a literal term
for maybe exactly birth, but it might be a term from anywhere from birth to
early life – something like that. I will show why I wonder about
that. It is because of things with John the Baptist.
Okay, another passage, another lame man.
NKJ Acts 3:2 And a certain man lame from his mother's womb was carried, whom they laid daily at the gate of the temple which is called Beautiful, to ask alms from those who entered the temple;
Now there are several translations again who translate
that “from birth”. Now the NIV translates the phrase mibeten in
the Old Testament 8 times as “from birth”. It translates the phrase ek
kolia in the Greek 5 times as “from birth”. I am just saying that
when I come along and I say this idiom means “from birth” I am not arguing
outside the context of accepted normative scholarship. All of these
translations do it; they just don’t do it consistently. But, they do it.
The NET has the same number total. It still has 13 verses. But,
they are different verses. So if we add them all up as I said earlier you
have 18, 19 maybe verses where you translate ek kolia and mibeten
as “from birth’.
Let’s go to one New Testament passage. Then we
will go to the Old Testament.
I am not going to deal with the whole verse here. That is a whole other subject. I just want to point out the illustration that Jesus is using in the first phrase.
NKJ Matthew
The word born is gennao which is the verb
meaning to give birth to, to beget through procreation.
There is no word for conception there. It wasn’t
that they were conceived that way. He is saying that they were born that
way. Birth is when the process begins. They are born that way from
their mother’s womb. So the phrase ek koilia is used from their
mother’s womb indicating that ek koilia is a synonymous concept to being
born. I am not making this up. Ek kolia doesn’t mean in the
womb. It talks about what happens after the baby exits the womb – comes
out from the womb.
We can go back to a passage we touched on a little bit
on Tuesday night in Judges 13:5 related to Sampson. The angel of the Lord
appears to his mother and says…
NKJ Judges 13:5 "For behold, you shall conceive
and bear a son. And no razor shall come upon his head, for the child shall be a
Nazirite to God from the womb; and he shall begin to deliver
We have the same thing that we saw earlier when I was
talking in Genesis 4 passages conceive is harah and to bear is yalad.
But what is interesting here is when you look at the Septuagint (The Septuagint
was the third century, second century BC translation by rabbis of the Hebrew
Old Testament into Greek.) conception is translated with the phrase en
gastri - en gastri , not ek, but en. Conception
is what happens in the womb. Okay? Consistently conception is
translated with the preposition en. But birth is translated with
the preposition ek. Very important. That is why Jesus says
no jot or tittle, no letter no yodh no tittle or part of a letter will pass
away until all of the Law has been fulfilled. We have to pay
attention to these things. So the Greek clearly recognizes differences in
these prepositions. So what this is literally saying is “you will
have.” It has the verb “to have” there.
The verb for birth is the verb yalad.
Here we go...
The Greek for conceive is tikto from Classical
Greek or Septuagint Greek.
Yalad is to
bear or beget,
Now let’s start looking at some of the problems and
questions that people raise. One of them is in Psalm 139. So let’s
turn in our Bibles to Psalm 139. This is a fabulous psalm because it is talking
about God’s knowledge of each of us and the fact that we are not
accidents.
You might look at yourself in the mirror and think, “I
am not sure why I am made the way I am made.”
But this passage is talking about the fact that even
though the process of the production of your physical body is done through intermediate
means, God is not disengaged from that process.
You may get up in the morning, look in the mirror, and
say, “Ah, it is scary. I look so much like my dad (or my mother).
The genetics are terrible things.”
We all do that. Every year I look in the mirror
a little more and that scary image looks back. I realize more and more
how much I look like my dad. That has been a good thing most of my
life. But we have genetics. That isn’t an accident. There are
no accidents in the plan of God. Right? God is involved.
That is what Psalm 139 is talking about. Look down to verse
13.
NKJ Psalm 139:13 For You formed my inward parts; You
covered me in my mother's womb.
There is a preposition be in the Hebrew which is the preposition for “in”. So it is talking about even though it is through intermediate means - God uses intermediate means all kinds of times in our lives but that doesn’t mean just because it is intermediate that He is less involved and that it is less significant.
NKJ Psalm 139:14 I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Marvelous are Your works, And that my soul knows very well.
In this psalm David isn’t praising God because David
was a handsome man. David isn’t praising God because every human being is
born beautiful and strong and healthy. He is not saying that. He is
talking about the fact that the ideal human being as originally designed by God
is intricately made and designed by God and is thus important.
It is the idea that there was care. The idea of
fearfully there is a Hebrew verb which means fear but also has the idea of
reverence and awe. When God is looking at that clay that He is making
Adam’s body with, He knows that the Second Person of the Trinity is going to be
housing that. So there is a sense of destiny there in His mind.
There is the sense that this is not some casual – well this looks like a good
design plan, we will go with that. No, it is not some after
thought. To say it somewhat anthropomorphically, God put a lot of thought
into it. He carefully designed our physical bodies the way they are – all
of the electrical connections, the DNA, the cell structure, all of the things
that go into making us work the way we work.
It goes on to say…
NKJ Psalm 139:15 My frame was not hidden from You, When I was made in secret, And skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.
This is talking about what is going on through the
process of development inside the womb.
NKJ Psalm 139:16 Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book they all were written, The days fashioned for me, When as yet there were none of them.
What does that mean – unformed? That is the
opposite of jatsar, being formed. So, it is talking about the process
of development inside of the womb. Now whatever else we can say about
this particular passage, the one thing we have to say is that this passage is
putting a lot of positive emphasis on the development of the physical body in
the natural process of procreation. What is going on inside the womb is
not the growth of a tumor. This is what you often hear from the
pro-abortionists.
“Well, it is like a tumor. You can cut it
out. You may get a hangnail. It is just a mass of cells.”
No. You may get a mass of cells that develop
into a tumor. That is what it is going to end up being - a tumor.
You may get a hangnail. Guess what it is going to end up being –a
hangnail. What is happening inside the womb of a woman is destined to
gain a soul and unless something interrupts it, it is going to be in the image
of God. It is going to be fully formed in the image of God and souled by
God. Therefore what is going inside the womb needs to be taken very, very
seriously.
In the early church this view has been called the
nascent life view. It is not the view of the traducianists that what you
have in the womb is full human life. It is not saying that. It is
not saying that it is nothing either. It is saying that a process has
begun at conception that is a very important and significant and serious
process. That unless it is interrupted it is going to culminate not in a
tumor, not in a hangnail, not in just a bunch of biological cells but in
someone who is in the image and likeness of God. Therefore you can’t
treat this lightly. You can’t treat this casually. When someone
becomes pregnant this is a serious matter that is not to be taken
lightly.
Now the question then becomes, does this become
murder? Well, if the soul is not there it is not murder. It may be
immoral; it may be sinful; it may be carnal. But, it is not murder.
Now we are going to deal with a couple of passages
that are usually cited for that case. I am going to have to properly exegete
them in Exodus in order to make sure that we understand that it is not talking
about that. It is not talking about the stillborn birth of a child.
So what we have here in Psalm 139:13-16 is a passage
talking about God’s involvement even though it is mediate, even though it is
indirect that it is nevertheless involved in that process and it is a
process that is going to culminate in something that is going to very
important, very precious.
Jeremiah 1:5 is another verse that is often alluded to
or gone to in this debate. Here God says to Jeremiah…
NKJ Jeremiah 1:5 "Before I formed you in the
womb I knew you; Before you were born I sanctified you; I ordained you a
prophet to the nations."
Guess what word we have there. Yatsar.
That is the same word used for the formation of the physical, material body in
Adam before He breathed life into him.
That is talking about the foreknowledge of God, the
omniscience of God that billions of years ago He knew who was going to be
born. He knew that Jeremiah would be born.
Notice he doesn’t say “before you were
conceived.”
Then we get into a couple of other passages. I think that I am going to save this for next time because once we get into dealing with John the Baptist we have to deal with both Luke 1 and Luke 2. Then we have to go back and deal with the Exodus passage where you have two men fighting and they get involved with a third person a pregnant woman who gives birth. We have good clear terminology there so we need to deal with all of those together. I will wait and come back. We will go into those and then address several of the objections that are typically raised from the traducianist side of the house on how do genetic traits get passed on, how come your soul seems to have certain similarities to your parents soul and things of that nature. So we will come back and address those questions next time.