Hebrews Lesson 88 May
17, 2007
NKJ Psalm 119:9 How can a young man cleanse his way?
By taking heed according to Your word.
We got started in this
subject about 6 weeks ago – had a couple of breaks when I went out of town and
due to weather and some other things. We
are basically coming out of a controversial passage in Hebrews 7:9-10. There we read…
NKJ Hebrews 7:9 Even Levi, who receives tithes, paid
tithes through Abraham, so to speak,
Or literally “in a manner of speaking” indicating that
the writer of Hebrews is writing in figurative language.
This thing about figurative language is really
important because as I have gone through a number of things trying to handle
some of the more difficult phrases and passages related to this whole issue of
when does life begin, the origin of the soul, the transmission of the soul - one
of the things that come up is this idea of idioms and figures of speech. It’s tough to try to understand some of those
concepts because we are so far removed from the spoken language. It is difficult sometimes to figure out when
things are idiomatic because once a phrase becomes idiomatic, then breaking it
down syntactically can really lead you in a wrong direction. If someone were to tell you to go jump in the
lake, if you were to take that and break that down in terms of a wooden literal
interpretation and break it down in terms of its grammar and syntax; it
wouldn’t lead you to a correct understanding of the meaning of the phrase. The same thing is true with other clauses.
This is one of the things that is developed in Bible
study since the advent of computers especially in the last twenty years. That is not just studying words and terms which
has always been a part of word studies, but to recognize that in many instances
clauses or phrases or idiomatic phrases become greater than the sum of the
parts. So you can spend all the time in
the world exegeting two words in a clause or a phrase but recognize that a
phrase takes on the meaning of its own that is different from just a breakdown
of the individual terms that are in there.
That can lead you to some misapplication and misunderstanding of some
passages. So that is all part of this.
I keep going back and reading more and more things and
trying to work through different aspects of this to kind of flesh out some of
the problems because there are a lot of problems in understanding these
passages. There have been a lot of steps
and missteps. I think there have been
people – it is a very emotional subject as to when full life actually
begins. Is it at conception? It is at birth? Is it transmitted physically? Just how does this all work? I think there are passages that have not been
dealt with honestly and openly on both sides of this particular controversy.
Last time (in case you
weren’t here) we started off going back to Genesis 2:7 and focusing on a few
key ideas related to the fact that God formed man and that verb yatsar indicates the fashioning, the forming
the shaping of the external part of man.
Now if I can remember this
because I was doing a lot of tangential reading right before I came to class
tonight which did not necessarily make into my notes but hopefully somehow it got
engraved for at least 30 minutes on my mental hard drive.
I want you to turn to Job
1. No, it’s not there. Okay, we will pick it up and grab it at some
other point as we go through the night I am sure.
Just another statement of where
Job is talking about how God formed his body and then dressed the muscles and
the bones and the sinews. I was going
there for an example of how God shapes the physical body. But in that passage it speaks as if God is
directly involved much like the passage we looked at in Psalm 139. See we come in and we talk about how God is
directly involved in the creation and impartation of the soul, but that He
indirectly or mediately generates the physical body because humans are involved
in the act of procreation. But even
though God is mediately involved in something the Scriptures still speak as if
God is directly doing it because God is the author of both the soul life and
the physical life – the development of the body within the womb. That is what yatsar
focuses on.
God formed man of the dust of
the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. I just pointed out last time that God’s
breathing is anthropomorphic because God doesn’t breathe. He doesn’t have lungs. But the breath of life in relationship to man
is to be understood literally. There
have been those who want to claim that this breathing of life (the word neshamah that is used here) is sort of a one time
pattern – the initial creation of life in the garden. Certainly this is distinctive. Adam doesn’t have a circulatory system. He doesn’t have any sort of neurological
system. He doesn’t have any development of
musculature going at all on prior to the breathing of God and the impartation
of the soul which is what happens with the development of biological life - the
development of the body in the womb. It
is a progressive thing. It develops. There
is not a one-to-one correspondence there.
We acknowledge that. That’s true.
But, this phrase “breath of
life” (and neshamah)
is used again and again throughout Scripture as being indicative of when life
is present. We talked about Genesis 2:7
and Deuteronomy 22:16 and Joshua 10:40 and
Then we have the phrase nephesh hajah which
is one of those clauses that it is not just nephesh
which is sometimes translated soul. It
is not that it becomes a living soul. It
is not just hajah; but it is the phrase nehpesh hajah. Nehpesh hajah is used in Genesis 1:20 for birds, in Genesis 1:21
for sea creatures and in Genesis 1:24 for animals. So this is not a term or a phrase that is
distinctive to a human soul. And so it is more correct to say that this simply
means he becomes a living entity. He is
alive. He wasn’t alive before. There is life.
So that is another difference
between the progress of a biological development, development of the body in
the womb because it is alive as biological life. It is living.
There is circulation. There is
the development of neurological pathways.
There is response to external stimuli.
If you had given any kind of external stimuli to the body of Adam lying there
on the ground before God breathed into him, there wouldn’t have been any response. It was completely inanimate and
lifeless. So these are aspects of this
that we must take into account.
I pointed out again in terms
of review is that the key issues become determining how the Bible expresses the
parameters of life. I had concluded in
the lesson before that that the position that I am articulating is that you don’t
have full life – you have a progressive development – the progressive
development of the body in the womb prior to birth. But it is at birth when the soul is given. That is when you have full human life – only
at birth. The parameters in the
Scripture are birth and death as I pointed out.
So to illustrate that and to
show that I am not making this stuff up out of thin air - see there are a number
of evangelicals who really react to this.
But if you go Judaism and you go back to the Talmud, you go back to the
Mishnah and I quoted from the Encyclopedia of Judaism that they
articulate this same position. It is not
full life, human life until it is nephesh at
birth. I am not going to quote the whole
article like I did last week. Just in
review in that article it states…
The
commentators explain that the fetus is not considered to be a nephesh or person until it has left the womb and
entered the air of the world; one is therefore permitted to destroy it to save
the mother’s life.
That is the only exception
because in Judaism and the Talmud and the Mishnah, they understand that what is
going on in the womb is human. It is not
just a mass of cells that is non-human.
God is involved in that process and that you don’t interfere with it and
stop it at all. It may not be murder;
but it is just short of murder. Unless
you have to make a decision between the life of the mother and the life of the
infant in the womb, there is no interference whatsoever – no abortion. This has been the traditional view in Judaism
and it was the view of the early church.
In fact there were some early church fathers that even went so far as to
say it was murder. Now they hadn’t
refined at that point (That is the early second century.) of distinction
between traducianism and creationism.
None of those things had been developed.
Then I went to a modern anti-
abortionist Harold O. J. Brown who is a well-known evangelical scholar who is really
at the forefront of the whole right to life, the protestant right to life anti-abortion
crusade. He wrote an article that came
out in the early 90’s in the Trinity Theological Journal out of Trinity
Seminary. He makes some astounding statements
in this particular article. One of the
statements he made is that the discussion of ensoulment for all practical
purposes is necessarily confined to those religious circles especially but not
only Christian ones who do believe that man has a soul. He
goes on to say that the question of ensoulment cannot be answered
scripturally.
Now I think it can be
answered scripturally.
But he is claiming from his
position as an anti-abortionist, as a right-to-lifer he is claiming, “Well, we
don’t know.”
Well, if you don’t know from
your study of Scripture and I went through all of his academic last time - he
is an extremely well-educated, biblically educated individual.
He is saying, “We can’t know.”
Well, if you don’t know how
can you base law on something you can’t know as a Christian? When you have access by the Holy Spirit to
the completed canon of Scripture and if you say you can’t know, how can you go
out and insist that abortion is murder?
The presupposition of that is that a soul is there.
He does make a point in
discussing this whole issue that he can’t imagine – he doesn’t give one shred
of support for the statement – he can’t imagine how any Christian could ever think
that the fetus could go a full 9 months without ever having a soul. He presuppositionally
rejects the creationists’ at birth position because he doesn’t think it makes
any sense whatsoever.
So I concluded with him last
time by making three points of what he is saying.
So I made a three point
conclusion. I think this is the core of
my presentation on this issue. Number
one, only Christians have access and can understand the things of the Spirit of
God – i.e. revelation. I Corinthians 2:14. If you can only know when the soul is
imparted (no matter when it is) through revelation and unbelievers cannot know
it because it is revelation (they can’t understand the things of the Spirit of
God) then you can’t base law code on information that is not accessible to the
unsaved mind.
You can build all kinds of
ethical systems developed totally apart from Scripture that recognize that
murder is wrong, that recognize the right of private property, that recognize
that thievery is wrong - all kinds of moral standards. Don’t fall into a distorted evangelical
distortion that says that only Christians can come up with ethics. Only
Christians have a consistent basis for coming up with the ethics that they
do. But there are a lot of non-biblical systems
that come up with high moral standards.
They are robbing. They are not
consistent. We can point that out, but
it doesn’t mean that they don’t. That doesn’t mean that on the basis of reason
on the basis of empiricism - you can’t decide willy-nilly murder isn’t a good
thing. That doesn’t promote stability
in society. You can come to certain
conclusions about ethics just on the basis of empiricism and rationalism, but
you can’t determine when the soul enters the body on the basis of anything
other than revelation. So you don’t base law that is for believer and
unbeliever on something that is knowable only to the believer. And by the way believers don’t agree at all
and have argued this for centuries. So
why would you want to base a universal standard on disputed understanding of
revelation.
As we go through this whole
issue there are three passages that continuously come up in terms of the
question - how can you claim whatever side you are on in light of this particular
passage.
The most difficult, the one
that gives trouble to both sides and both have to be honest with that has to do
with John the Baptist. Let’s face it -
there are things about the ministry of John the Baptist that are a little bit
strange. John is a cousin of Jesus. He has probably heard the story of what
happens in Luke 1, the story of his miraculous birth, announcement of his
birth, the announcement of the birth of his cousin Jesus and the virgin birth
and virgin conception of Jesus all of his life.
Yet when he gets thrown in
jail he sends a message to Jesus and says, “Are you really the Messiah?”
There are other things about
John the Baptist that are a bit unusual to understand because we don’t always
understand the dynamic that is going on in terms of Old Testament
theology. If you don’t understand Old
Testament theology and the whole issue related to the kingdom, you are going to
fall flat on your face with John the Baptist.
So, let’s go to Luke 1. This is the first passage people will go
to. Of course first of all we have to
properly translate it. Now his father is
Zacharias. His mother is
NKJ Luke
NKJ Luke
We will come back to this
verse in just a minute.
You have a couple of key
words there in the Greek that are very important, but the most important is the
one translated “gladness”. This is a
word that from its Old Testament background was always associated with the joy
that would come from the presence of the Messiah. When Messiah would appear and bring the
kingdom there would be great exuberant joy and excitement. That is what this word
has. The emphasis is it is not the mental
attitude stability of the first word “joy” which is chara. It is a different word that has a very strong
emphasis from the Old Testament. It is
the Greek word agalliasis. So it
has this nuance. When you see that word
immediately you should be thinking in terms of the coming of the Messiah – eschatological
joy.
Remember we think of
eschatology as what is happening in the future at the rapture and at the Second
Coming. But, if you were at the time of
John the Baptist and the Messiah hadn’t shown up for the First Advent yet, when
you are thinking eschatology you are thinking about the Messiah coming and bringing
the kingdom. Remember the message of
John the Baptist was going to be – prepare the way of the Lord for the kingdom
of heaven is at hand and repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Then Jesus shows up and the message He starts
off with is – repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Then He
sends out the disciples and their message is repent for the kingdom of heaven
is at hand. It was all eschatological.
So this word is very
important because the angel is telling him that he and Elizabeth are going to
have this particular kind of eschatological exuberance. It is going to characterize him and
Elizabeth. We will come back to that in
a minute.
In verse 15 he says…
NKJ Luke
Now wine is what we think of
as wine. It is the fruit of grapes. Strong drink is beer. I know some of you are already thinking it is
scotch or bourbon. But, they hadn’t
developed the process and abilities to distill beverages yet. That didn’t come along until about the 8th
or 9th century AD. So, strong
drink from the Old Testament word referred to barley beer. So he is saying that he…
and shall drink neither wine nor
strong drink. He will also be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his
mother's womb.
Now before we look at this issue
of “filled with the Holy Spirit”, let’s stop a minute and look at the initial
announcement about his not having wine or strong drink. Who does that remind you of? Somebody who we have studied recently - who
does that remind you of? Sampson. So let’s go look at Sampson for a
minute. Now this is going to be a tough
passage for some of you.
In Judges 13 we have a
parallel situation. We have a mother who
is barren. We have an announcement of a
supernatural conception by the angel of the Lord.
NKJ Judges 13:3 And the Angel of the LORD appeared
to the woman and said to her, "Indeed now, you are barren and have borne
no children, but you shall conceive and bear a son.
I made a point out of this
that these are two separate words, two separate actions. Conception is the start of the process, when
fertilization occurs. Giving birth is
what happens at the end of the process when the child comes out of the womb.
NKJ Judges 13:4 "Now therefore, please be
careful not to drink wine or similar drink, and not to eat anything
unclean.
That is to the mother. Now the angel of the Lord is not concerned
with pre-natal health here. This has to
do with the Nazirite vow that Sampson is going to be under. But from the moment
of the announcement, (the conception is going to occur momentarily - in the
next day or two) the mother is not supposed to drink wine or strong drink or to
eat anything unclean. Why?
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
What we would think is that
if that is just biological protoplasm in the womb and it really doesn’t have
great significance until there is ensoulment, then why does it matter what she
does? It matters because as I have
pointed out we shouldn’t create this dichotomy between the body and soul,
between the material and the immaterial.
They are both part of the image of God.
They develop separately so that this passage is showing that God is very
much concerned about what happens to that which is in the womb. So for the period of her pregnancy because of
who she is going to give birth to because of Sampson’s future purpose she has
to indicate the distinctiveness and uniqueness of his future ministry. So she too is not supposed to drink wine or
beer or eat anything unclean. Verse 5
explains.
for the
child shall be a Nazirite to God from the womb;
This is iterated there. The point that I want to make is that it
shows again that we have to take into account the importance of the development
of what is going on in the womb.
There is this myth that it is
part of the mother’s body. It is not
part of the mother’s body. That is why it
has in many cases the baby in the womb has a different blood type. You can fertilize an egg in a Petri dish and
implant it in any womb in any female on the planet and if they are biological white
parents, you can plant that in a womb of a black woman and that baby is gong to
be white. That baby will have the genetic
tendencies of the parents. It is going
to look like the biological father and the biological mother because that
entity is a distinct entity.
It’s mother dependent in the sense
that for life it must get its nourishment through the placenta. But the interesting thing in God’s creation is
that the placenta will allow a mother with one blood type to mix her blood in
with the fetus who has a different blood type.
The mixing of blood types doesn’t occur naturally. That is a provision of God that shows that
what is in the womb is not just a tumor or hangnail or just a mass of cells. It is something that is going to be a full
human being and must be treated as sacred life.
That is the Jewish position. Life
is sacred. Even if it doesn’t have the
soul yet, it is sacred life. God treats
that which is in the womb as that which is very valuable.
So let’s go back to Luke 1:15
NKJ Luke
That is the New King James
translation. He would be filled with the
Holy Spirit. That word for filling is
this word which also shows up in Luke 1:41 pempleme
which means to cause to be full. It is
related to but is a distinct word from plerao.
It is not the same word that is used in
Ephesians 5:18 for the filling of the Spirit.
It is a different word. It is pempleme plus a genitive. See in Ephesians 5:18 when you have the
command “be filled by means of the Spirit” that is a command using the verb plerao (a different verb) plus a dative which is an
instrumental dative. It should be
translated “filled by means of the Spirit”. That is a different operation of the Spirit
than what we have going on here. This is
pemepleme plus the genitive - “be filled of or
from” literally – of or from the Holy Spirit.
This kind of genitive can often be used for means.
It is the same kind of
ministry of the Holy Spirit that you have in the Old Testament with
enduement. It is the ministry of God the
Holy Spirit just as you had (but to a greater degree) because you remember John
the Baptist was greater than all the Old Testament prophets. He has a greater
measure and influence of the Holy Spirit than any of the Old Testament prophets;
but it is the same kind of ministry to the leaders to Bezalel
and Aholiab who crafted the tabernacle, to the judges,
to Sampson. It is related to his role
within the theocratic
A precondition for having
this operation of the Holy Spirit is that you have to be regenerate. The way some people want to handle this and I
think they are some translations that will translate this next phrase “He will
be filled with the Spirit even within his mother’s womb” and that’s not a good
translation. The New King James
translates it “even from his mother’s womb” which is more literal – ek koilia. But the NIV catches the sense of this idiom
in that it is from birth.
The reason I keep belaboring
this is because this is really where I think a lot of the discussion needs to
be today. The Old Testament phrase was mibeten and the New Testament phrase is ek koilia.
One of the things I was doing
this afternoon is consulting some more technical word study dictionaries on
Hebrew that are out and came up with these two statements.
The first statement is from The
New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis – long
title and long abbreviation. It is evangelical
in its orientation by evangelical scholars.
It is edited by William Van Gemeren who is
evangelical. This is not one of the more liberal based dictionaries like the
second one is. It came out in the late
90’s published by Zondervan. In that article under the heading of “beten” it says as the discussion of the concept from
the womb…
The writer states…
The
beginning of one’s life on earth is sometimes viewed as “when he comes out of
his mother’s womb”.
See, that is what I have been
saying. It is birth that is the
beginning of life. Here is an
evangelical scholar in a technical Hebrew dictionary admitting that this is the
thrust of this particular phrase. It is
from birth. Birth is the time of the
beginning of life.
Then the second quote – see
he references tediote which is the Botterweck and Ringgren who were the
two editors. It is a European production
of the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament. They are still translating. I bought the first four volumes when I was in
seminary and that was – John the Baptist was a private back then. They are still translating. I think they came
out with volume XIV finally this year and they have two more to go. I might get the last two before I die. But in the Theological Dictionary of the
Old Testament in volume II, page 97 the writer states…
Birth,
then, being the terminus a quo (that is Latin for the beginning) birth then
being the beginning in life,
Here you have two different
highly respected Hebrew theological dictionaries both of which affirm what I
have been saying for the last several lesson is that this phrase mibeten and ek koilia is an idiom for “from birth”.
Now the reason I make this
point is that there have been those who have tried to make an issue out of the
use of those prepositions - the use of the min and the use of the ek. Some of you
have heard that – the emphasis on the partitive use of the min and the
partitive use of the ek. What I am saying here and by taking this back
to my introduction is that this is an idiomatic statement. It’s not based on how the preposition is
used. In fact I read one critique of
that position last week and he went so far in one direction in trying to
explain the fact that min and ek never
can have this partitive idea that he completely eviscerated his own
understanding of Revelation 3:10 when Jesus says to the
NKJ Revelation
We went through that. That is an indication of the rapture. You see ek
and min can have several different meanings. In some contexts they clearly mean “keeping
you from something never having entered into it”. And in other passages it indicates
source. It says you came from
Luke
NKJ Luke
The NIV translates it that
way as it does both of these phrases ek koilia and mibeten
numerous times. So that is legitimate. It is from birth.
Now I am going to go off the
reservation here. I would love to be
able to say that I have been able to demonstrate that “from birth” doesn’t mean
from the instant of birth. My gut
feeling is that it is just a general idiom for from an early age. But, I can’t document that anywhere. The closest I have been able to come is that
passage over in Acts that we looked at a couple of weeks ago when it talked
about the man who was born cripple and that he was crippled from birth. That is how the phrase is.
When would you know that he
was crippled? Was he going to get up and
walk the first day after he was born?
Unless there is a physical deformity, you wouldn’t know that he wasn’t
going to be able to walk maybe for weeks or months. That is different from the blind man in John
9:1 who is blind from birth. You could
figure out that a baby was blind pretty quickly, but not with the crippled man.
So that may take some time. I would love
to be able to demonstrate this because I have a sense that it has got to be
early because my big problem is and the problem you don’t find anybody
wrestling with on the other side of the question here is how can you have John
the Baptist having a relationship with God the Holy Spirit before he is regenerate? How exactly does that work since you don’t
have that pattern anywhere else in Scripture?
That is a serious problem with anybody (especially) claiming that this
filling takes place in the womb. As I am
going to point out when you have this word pempleme,
it is almost always followed by some sort of a verbal articulation. For example we will get into the next passage
in Luke 1:41
NKJ Luke
What is the next thing that
happened in verse 42?
NKJ Luke
You can go through every use
of pempleme in the New Testament and every
tine the writer says that so-and-so was filled with the Holy Spirit, the next thing
is they say something. See this is
different from the sanctification ministry of the filling of the Holy Spirit of
Ephesians 5:18. This has to do with
revelatory information and direct guidance by God the Holy Spirit. So just exactly how is John the Baptist going
to be speaking either in the womb or in the first 6 or 8 or 10 months of his
life? I am not sure. I just have a lot of questions on this and nobody
is addressing them. I don’t think we
have enough information to address them.
The next thing we need to do
is go to Luke 1:41
NKJ Luke
These are three events that
are stated - she hears the greeting, the baby leaps in her womb, her
explanation in verse 44 indicates that there is a relationship between the
two. Then subsequently or unrelatedly
There are some important
observations here.
If you go through Luke 1 you
have the initial episode with the announcement to Zacharias about the birth of
John the Baptist and then the conception of
NKJ Luke
NKJ Luke
NKJ Luke
NKJ Luke
She gets up the next morning
to go see
Now let’s talk about this
activity just a little bit. The same
word is used in verse 44. It is skirtao which means to leap, to spring especially of
animals, to leap for joy or to exalt. Now
this is a really interesting word. It is
used in the Septuagint for movement in the womb. Can you think of where that might be? Jacob and Esau – movement in the womb - skirtao. Okay! It is also used to refer to physical exuberance
because you are excited about something.
Now as a result of that it became an anthropopathized
in Classical Greek (if there is such a word) … It became an anthropopathic statement
that was frequently ascribed to animals.
For example in a writing of Longus who actually writes in 2nd century AD
which is very close to New Testament times, he says…
The word is used of a dog leaping for joy after getting
the scent of a hare.
Now this is really good….
The
dog leaps for joy…
Does a dog leap for joy because
he has emotions like a human and volition or is this because this is the
instinct that is bred into him and we are anthropopathically
imputing human emotions to this exuberant leaping about? The word is frequently used of the activity
of sheep and rams gambling about on the hillside or young calves leaping about
in the fields.
So it has this figure of
speech idea along with it. So it comes
to be an idiom again that is associated with humans leaping for joy. So the
babe is leaping in the womb. Now that is
that word. We have got to deal with each
of these words and then we have got to deal with whether or not we have a figure
of speech going on here. The babe leaps.
Then we have that next phrase
for joy. The way that is translated in
most English translations makes it look as if - I would expect some different
words in the Greek actually – some different prepositions. But what we have is an “en”
clause. En always indicates
means, usually. En is the
preposition. We don’t have a “hoti” clause which would be causal. It doesn’t say he leaped in the womb because of
joy. It is the preposition en
which one use could be giving a reason for something. En plus the dative
can do that.
But according to Art and
Gingrich, it also has a sense of explaining the surrounding circumstances. What are the circumstances that are going on
around a certain activity? So you have
this movement of John in the womb.
Now are we going to say on
the one hand that at six months you have fetal activity and development to the
degree that this fetus hears the sound of another person outside of his mother and
knows (cognitive activity) that that is Mary and that she is pregnant (she is
not even showing yet, she has barely conceived) with the Messiah. Is that what we are saying? That is really what the one position is
arguing - that John knows that that is Jesus’ mommy there and that Jesus is in
her womb.
Now I find that to be difficult
from our understanding. Now you can’t
hang anything on science because we are always learning new things. But at this stage we are not sure how much cognitive
activity is going on in the brain in the womb.
Now there is certainly development of the brain.
I remember and you do to,
back in the 80’s and 90’s that it was real popular for mothers to try to develop
the brain activity of the fetus by playing classical music, other kinds of
music. Mothers would do that. Studies
came out in the late 90’s showing that the connections aren’t there for that to
have any impact. There is no memory -
nothing. It doesn’t do a cotton picking
thing because the synapses aren’t connecting yet and all of this isn’t happening. It doesn’t really happen until 5 or 6 weeks
after birth. Hum….
So if that is not there until
after birth then how can we be arguing that what John the Baptist is engaged in
is a lot of cognitive activity from deep inside his mother’s womb? I am having trouble with this. So, maybe there are some other things going
on here and this isn’t a passage anybody ought to be going to trying to decide
whether or not there is a soul in the womb.
What happens is there is a viable
explanation for this. It seems to fit the text.
The text is saying that both in both verse 41 and 44 there is the
connection with what happens to the mother.
In verse 41 it happened when
Here is another interesting thing
– the word breathos is used for infant
here. You have a number of different
words used for infants and babies and children in Greek.
Some people come along and
they will say, “See in Greek breathos is used
of what is in the womb and breathos is used of
a baby; so there is no distinction in the New Testament between what is in the
womb and what is out of the womb.”
That was a Greek word folks! That didn’t come out of a biblical
context. That was the Greeks’ idea. They didn’t believe that you had full human
life inside the womb at all. They were
pagan. Let’s not go there. That argument isn’t going to work at
all. So we have to be careful.
That is one thing that I have
discovered in reading this - on both sides there are a lot of unguarded statements. There are a lot of hyperbolic statements and
there are a lot of statements made that just aren’t in evidence. As I pointed out last time in Job 3:3, just
because it says…
NKJ Job 3:3 "May the day perish on which I
was born, And the night in which it was said, 'A male child is
conceived.'
People say, “See, life begins
at conception.”
No, that just says that at
conception you can tell the difference between whether it is a girl and a
boy. That’s physical. That doesn’t tell you that there is a soul
there. It doesn’t tell you that life
begins there. We read into these verses too often what we want to see in the
verse.
So you have skirtao - leaping in relation to joy. Whose joy?
I think it is the mother’s joy because we have already been told back in
Luke 1:14 that she is going to have this kind of joy. It is related to the eschatological joy of
the Messiah. So her joy, her excitement
at hearing Mary come even though she doesn’t know anything about Mary being
pregnant or the Messiah, she is just excited and that creates an environment
that causes fetal stimulation.
Now we can document this
possibly. I am not going to say that
this is the only explanation for fetal movement. There are all kinds of reasons that babies
are going to move. But, it has been
demonstrated that there is one kind of reflex called the startle reflex or
moral reflex that is one of many biological and neuromuscular responses in a
fetus. There was a study done at USC a
number of years ago where they took an artificial larynx and put it up next to
the mother’s abdomen to create a three second sound and in every case there was
a physical reaction by the fetus. That
doesn’t mean there is a soul there. That
doesn’t mean it is volitional. It is
like hitting your leg just below the knee with a hammer. You leg is going to jerk. It is a reflex
action. It doesn’t indicate
volition. It doesn’t indicate anything
other than a response to sound. This is
a possible explanation of what is going on here.
The timing of course is
supernatural because what God is indicating is this movement to gain
Now that deals with Luke 1 in
both of those instances. There is a lot that
is going on in that particular passage and I am not sure that we understand all
of it. I think it is a very weak passage
to go to because if you have got John the Baptist engaged in all of this cognitive
activity inside the womb then you have got some other problems with him being
filled with the Spirit and not being regenerate. So there are some various problems
there.
One last statement, I
mentioned breathos. The term breathos
is used to refer to Jesus and John until they are taken to the temple on the 8th
day and dedicated. Then he is called
John. He is not called John…
In the start of this the
angel tells Zacharias, “You are going to call him John.”
He doesn’t start calling him
John until he is dedicated on the 8th day. He is still referred to as a breathos.
That is significant. He is not
personalized with a personal name until he gets presented to the Lord on the 8th
day of dedication which is when he is no longer referred to as a breathos. So
that would indicate under a Jewish concept that he is fully recognized as a
person within the context of the covenant at the time of his circumcision on
the 8th day and not before. So
there is another indication that there’s a distinction there.
Well, that ought to cover
most of what we have gone into in Luke 1.
The other passage that is a difficult passage that people get into is
Exodus 21:22 which we will come back to next time. This is the episode within
the law when men are fighting and there is a pregnant woman nearby and she gets
inadvertently hit and gives birth prematurely.
So we have to look at that in some detail. Then when we finish that we will start wrapping
this up and go to another level of the discussion. You see the next level of discussion is once
you decide when the soul enters into the body, and then you have to figure out
the transmission of sin and what our relationship with Adam is. Is it seminal or is it federal? This brings in a whole other ... and these
two issues of whether the soul is created at birth or passed on through
procreation or directly related to how theologians understand our relationship
to Adam in terms of federal headship or seminalism. Once again one of the key passages in our
passage in Hebrews 7:8-9. So we have to
understand this crucial to understand our whole relationship to Adam and the
transmission of sin.
So we will get to that and probably
not get it all of that done before I head off to