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.”
This verse is simply saying that
before Jeremiah was alive, before his parents were alive before any of this
ever happened, God in His omniscience had a plan for Jeremiah’s life and knew
he would be born.
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.