Hebrews
Lesson 85 April
12, 2007
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 7:10 for he was still in the loins of his
father when Melchizedek met him.
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.