Hebrews Lesson 89 May
24, 2007
NKJ Psalm 119:105 Your word is a lamp to my
feet And a light to my path.
Somebody sent me this in an
email the other day. I read it and was
somewhat shocked - although not really after what I said on Tuesday night talking
about how we no longer have freedom in this nation. It is just a sham. We live under tyranny. This came the next day and so I thought I
would read it to you.
The source of this is the
Illinois State Rifle Association. The
headline for the article is “Confiscation of Registered Guns Begins in
The
Chicago Police Department and the Illinois State Police have teamed up to make
good on Mayor Daley’s pledge that if it were up to him nobody would have a
gun. Daley and his elite CAGE (that is
an acronym) Unit are apparently taking advantage of gun privacy loopholes to
pinpoint certain individuals for inclusion in the confiscation program. The ISRA (that is the Illinois State Rifle
Association) is following up on leads in one case that has disturbing
implications. An elderly first
generation
After
asking to come inside the man’s home, the trooper asked if the man owned a gun
to which he replied, “Yes.”
The question then is, is
honesty the best policy?
The
trooper then directed the individual to surrender the firearm.
Remember, this man hasn’t
done anything wrong. He hasn’t violated
any law whatsoever.
The
man complied with the officer’s demand and the trooper left with the gun. The story gets better. The gun in question was purchased legally by
the man in the 1970’s shortly after he became a
I am not sure what that is -
probably some sort of firearms identification card.
So
what does this all mean? In the last
edition of the Illinois Shooter we reported on the activities of a shady task
force known as the Chicago Anti-Gun Enforcement Unit. That is CAGE.
This elite squad operated jointly by the Illinois State Police, the
Chicago Police Department and the Cook County State Attorney’s office
supposedly exists to identify illegal gun runners. However information gained by the ISRA makes
it clear that the CAGE Unit is targeting law abiding citizens, not criminal gun
runners. Thanks to a ruling by a liberal
federal judge, this CAGE Unit now has the name of every single person in the
In
essence the Chicago Police Department is now registering guns and gun owners
nationwide. The ISRA has also learned
that the CAGE unit has compiled a list of families where more than one person
in that family holds an FOID card.
Acting on that information the CAGE unit is now contacting gun shops
where those families have shopped and is illegally registering all guns
purchased by those families. Now it
appears that the CAGE unit is scrubbing
You see when law enforcement has
no respect for the Constitution because the judicial system has no respect for
the Constitution because nobody knows how to apply literal historical grammatical
interpretation to law anymore, law becomes a very fluid – whatever you think
and I may think what the law actually says is just up for grabs. It depends on how any liberal judge can come
along and redefine and reinterpret the law.
He can make black mean white and white mean black. The result is a continuation of judicial
tyranny brought about by liberals – not just democrats. There are some democrats – they may be
few.
You know there is an “n”
letter left out of that word – demoncrat.
There are some democrats who
might be conservative. And there are a
heck of a lot of republicans who are liberal.
They are not moderate; they’re liberal.
Most of these republicans that are running today (I know I am getting
awfully political) are to the left of John F. Kennedy in the early 60’s. We wonder why things are the way they
are. It is because everybody is affected
by some sort of non-literal subjective interpretation because they bought the
lie that the Constitution is a living document.
When you have Christians who
can’t interpret the Scripture literally think that they are voting for anybody
in the White House and that their Christianity influences their vote, they are
as self-deceived as any liberal because 95% of the subjective Christians that
are out there today have no idea how to literally, correctly interpret the
Bible. So, how can they interpret
anything when it comes to law? That is
why we have a President who continues to – he has one or two good points and
the rest are just as bad as any democrat because he doesn’t understand
absolutes. Unless we have any politician
in office who understands absolutes, we are in trouble.
But they are a
reflection. We get exactly what we
deserve. They are a reflection of the
culture and we are getting exactly what we deserve. We need to take warning as believers. This isn’t getting better and it’s not going
to get better. It may be much
worse. As I pointed out the other night,
who would have thought that the US Congress would even entertain some of the
hate speech legislation that they have voted in favor of to have the President
sign? I mean it is a direct violation of
the Bill of Rights. Yet again and again
and again we are going to see reverse reasoning take place as subjective emotional
post-modern liberal legislators call white black and black white. The enemy in all this is going to be anybody
who believes that there is anything that is absolute, especially if it has to
do with God or religion. You have that
evil religion gene in your system and you need to be taken out and put into
some kind of concentration camp. We were
wrong in doing that with the Japanese, but we will be justified in doing it
with the Christians. Trust me. It is coming!
We are in our study of
Hebrews. We ought to pause for about 10
seconds and have silent prayer again so everybody can get back in
fellowship. We are in our study of Hebrews in Hebrews 7:8-10. Don’t turn there yet because that is our
jumping off spot. We have been dealing
with the whole issue of the origin of life.
We have one more passage to cover before we go to the next issue that
comes out of these verses in Hebrews 7:8-10.
Open your Bibles to Exodus
21. We are in the midst in Exodus 21 of
the Mosaic Law which provides the law code, the civil ceremonial code for the
Jews in the land. It is an expression of
the righteousness and the justice of God.
It’s based on what is known as case law.
That means the Mosaic Law does not address every possible instance in
relation to specific situations of legal violation, illegality, or criminality. It addresses it in the sense of giving examples
within each category and then it would be up to the Jews as they develop their
code of law to operate within that framework.
That seems to be the policy that
God follows from the very inception in Genesis.
Genesis 1 - God initiates human vocabulary. He calls the light day and darkness night. He begins to identify certain creatures. He identifies the sun and the moon and other
things. He initiates human vocabulary,
but then it is up to Adam to carry on the process within the framework of what
God has revealed. The same is true in
the way that God has revealed doctrine. God
revealed doctrine in the framework of different kinds of literature. You have historical narrative. You have poetry. You have different types of epistles and the
gospels. All of these are different
types of literature.
God did not sit down and
reveal to us a systematic theology. You
don’t open the Bible to page one and get prolegomena. You do if you open up Chafer’s Systematic
Theology or Burkoff’s Systematic Theology
or any standard systematic theology. But
that is not how God did it. God did it
in such a way that He encapsulates all of the categories of doctrine within different
kinds of literature. You have historical
literature because it is a man’s purpose.
He is designed for the purpose of us to come along and to study and
analyze the text and then extrapolate from the text the categories and then to
build and develop our understanding of the categories down through the
years. In the same way Adam began to evaluate
all the animals in the garden. He began
to recognize that some were large and some were small. Some had long necks; some had short
necks. Some flew; some didn’t fly. What he had to do was to organize the data,
categorize it, classify it and then come up with nomenclature that was beyond
what God had already initiated in order to properly reflect the nature of all
these different creatures.
You see this same pattern all
the way through Scripture. God expects
man to use the intelligence, the brain that God has given him, within the
framework of divine revelation in order to develop his thinking.
The same way with the
believer - when you face problems in life, what the average believer wants to
do is pray to God and say, “Get me an answer.”
And we expect something in
the morning mail! What God expects for
us to do is go to the Scriptures and think deeply and profoundly about those
Scriptures and how they relate to what we are doing so that our minds are
engaged in what God has revealed and under the teaching ministry of God the
Holy Spirit, we begin to understand how to think and God’s thinking. That is how wisdom is developed. Well, all of that fits within the basic way in
which God revealed the Mosaic Law. I
talk about every kind of situation, but it gives the parameters so that on the
basis of case law, other laws can be developed facing similar type
circumstances. That is the kind of thing
that we have in Exodus 21. There are
different kinds of case laws set out here concerning violence. If you
look back in Exodus
NKJ Exodus
That is your basic principle
of capital punishment. Capital
punishment isn’t grounded in the Mosaic Law.
Capital punishment is grounded back in the Noahic Covenant because it is
God’s principle for the era between the Noahic Covenant and the return of
Christ. That is a standard procedure.
But there are exceptions to
this particular law.
NKJ Exodus
In other words if it is not
premeditated and it is accidental, then God sets up these cities of refuge
where the person who committed manslaughter can flee. He can live within the confines of one of
those cities of refuge, but if he ever comes out then he is subject to the law
of retaliation.
NKJ Exodus
In other words there is no sanctuary
for him because of the premeditation involved in that particular kind of
murder.
NKJ Exodus
If you have a parental abuse,
then that is punishable by capital punishment and the child’s life should be
taken in order to keep the cancer of lack of authority orientation and rebellion
- keep that cancer out of the culture.
It is interesting. I was talking to someone the other day. They
were commenting on the fact – they had been up to Dallas Seminary talking to one
of the counselors on staff up there about one of the major problems coming into
the seminary today. With the young
people coming right out of college, they don’t have authority orientation. Because of that they get into all kinds of
personal, moral problems and other problems that wouldn’t have been a part of
the package to the same degree 20 or 30 years ago. They have no concept of authority
orientation. That is a problem that has
to be dealt with, with students on campus.
This is why God addresses the problem of the rebellious child so much.
Verses 16 down through 20
give other aspects. It is
interesting. Look at verse 20.
NKJ Exodus
Something that would be
considered quite heinous in our society…
so that he dies under his hand, he
shall surely be punished.
NKJ Exodus
If you read that verse from
the framework of the kind of liberalism that has influenced American thinking
about slavery since the early 1800’s, then you are going to have problems
interpreting that verse. Again and again
in the Mosaic Law God does something really funny. If a man owns…. If I go out and kill a Jew
next door and it is premeditated, then I am supposed to come under capital
punishment. But if the guy who lives next door is a Moabite and he is not a Jew
or if he is a slave, then the punishment is different. He is still full human life, but see God is
not wrong in this.
We have to come to the
presupposition that as Paul says in Romans 7…
NKJ Romans
It’s not wrong. Well, maybe our modern thinking is influenced
by some false value system that is applying this to these different situations.
Slavery was authorized in the
Mosaic Law. God doesn’t authorize sin
folks. That is what your presupposition
needs to be. God doesn’t authorize and
validate sin. But the kind of slavery
that was practiced in
That is what you get from
people like Charles Grandison Finney who is the real
father of the abolitionist movement in
So we have to look at the
Scripture and say that the Scripture gives us the framework for how laws should
function.
We don’t start off with some abstract
idea developed from our culture and then come back and read that into the Bible
and say, “Oh look. The slave here is going to be treated as property.”
That is wrong.
“Well, this must be some
barbaric law code.”
That is what liberal
theologians do. That is how they read
this and that is why they come up with the idea that the Bible is just some
historically developed literature and religion just like every other
religion. So they are imposing Darwinistic evolution of religion viewpoint on the
Scripture.
So all that just by way of
introduction to get into our passage. In
Exodus 21:22 we have one of the few passages that people go to, to try to argue
that there is life in the womb and this is the best that you can come up with
scripturally in a case that involves abortion.
If you look at verse 22 it
reads….
NKJ Exodus 21:22 " If men fight, and hurt a
woman with child, so that she gives birth prematurely, yet no harm follows, he
shall surely be punished accordingly as the woman's husband imposes on him; and
he shall pay as the judges determine.
That is a translation from
the New King James Version and that is a superior translation to the one in the
New American Standard. The New American
Standard says…
NAS Exodus 21:22 "And if men struggle
with each other and strike a woman with child so that she has a miscarriage,
yet there is no further injury, he shall surely be fined as the woman's
husband may demand of him; and he shall pay as the judges decide.
See, there is the difference. If you see NASV says “miscarriage” but the
New King James says “give birth prematurely”.
That is the more accurate translation because as I have noted in this
particular slide the verb there is jatsa which
is the standard verb for giving birth.
It is the same verb that is used of the birth of Jacob in Genesis
25:26. It is a verb that always
indicates a live birth. Live birth means
that the baby comes out and takes a breath and at that point as we have studied
receives the impartation of the soul and at that point becomes fully alive - fully
ensouled.
The situation here is that
men struggle with each other and strike a woman with child so that she has a
miscarriage, yet there is no further – that word further isn’t in the Hebrew of
verse 22. It is not in the Hebrew of
verse 23. It needs to be read…
NKJ Exodus
The harm that comes to the
child is post-birth harm. It’s a result
of the situation. The child subsequent
to birth comes under some sort of injury.
That is what the law is addressing - not what happens in line with a
miscarriage – causing the miscarriage and not a live birth. We are talking about a live birth here. This doesn’t have anything to do therefore
with the subject of abortion. It has to
do though with the value of life. Now once the child is born, the child
receives neshamah – the breath of life from
God. And therefore the law related to
the precious value of human life comes into effect. Under the Mosaic Law you have the principle
that was known as lex talionis which is the law of retaliation of an eye for an
eye and so forth. This is what is
explained in verse 23 and following.
NKJ Exodus
NKJ Exodus
NKJ Exodus
Now that “under the law” is
really again a figure of speech. We have
been studying that on Sunday morning. We
studied figures of speech. It is the
idea that the penalty fits the crime.
The penalty fits the crimes - not that if I knock out your tooth you
have to in turn knock out my tooth. If
you look at the Scriptures, often there are financial penalties assessed for
certain kinds of damage. So it’s not
identical. It is not to be taken
literally, but the idea of retaliation in kind so that the punishment fits the
crime. This should be assessed if there
is subsequence damage. These two men are
fighting and they hurt a woman. So if
there is damage to the woman or there is injury to the child after birth, then
there should be the application of lex talionis.
That pretty much takes us
through and completes our study on the origin of life, so let’s have a review
here to go over some basic principles that we have gone through in our
study.
NKJ Hebrews 10:5 Therefore, when He came into the world, He said: "Sacrifice
and offering You did not desire, But a body You have prepared for Me.
I
made the point there that we have to come to grips with. When God is sitting there anthropomorphically
in Genesis 2:7 and He is playing with the clay that is going to be the body of
the man, He is thinking 4,000 years ahead to the fact that the Second Person of
the Trinity is going to be incarnating Himself into this body. So whatever the body looks like, however it is
shaped, whatever its capabilities are, it’s got to be the highest and best form
for the function of revealing eternal God to finite mankind.
God just
doesn’t pick this shape by tossing the dice and saying, “It seems like a good
idea. I think we can cause a few things
to happen.”
He
is intentionally choosing this form, this shape, this structure because the
infinite Second Person of the Trinity is going to incarnate Himself, going to
become finite and express and reveal the deity, the essence, the attributes of
God through this finite representation. That is the same thing that Adam
is. That is whole we are going to get into
with the first Adam and the Second Adam.
The first Adam is designed to represent God. He fails.
The Second Adam comes along and represents God not just in terms of His internal
attributes, but also in terms externally. He is a physical representation of
God. This idea that minimizes the body
comes out of Platonism. In Platonism as
we have studied you have this idea that matter is inherently evil. That which
is spiritual, the ideal – that is what’s best.
So in Platonism matter was evil.
Now
when Neo-Platonism came along and affected Christian thought they knew that
matter was good because at the end of Genesis 1 when God has created the
material world, the material universe He says, “It is all good.”
So
we can’t say that the material world is bad, but it is not that important. So neo-Platonism led them to stress the ideal
- stress the soul over the body, stress the spiritual over the physical. That led to all kinds of dichotomies in their
thinking and led to all kinds of problems. What we have to do is reign that back in and
recognize that throughout the Bible there is an emphasis on the physical, an
emphasis on the material body. This is why you have a physical bodily
resurrection of Jesus. It’s not this idealized
resurrection that occurs at the end of one of the movies – Zepharaelli’s
Jesus of Nazareth that came out in the late 80’s. They hear this disembodied spirit because
Jesus rose in your hearts. No, it is a
physical bodily resurrection that the same body that was lying in the tomb is somehow
changed to the resurrection body. That
is why when Mary Magdalene goes into the tomb, when Peter and John go into the
tomb, what do they see? They see that
the body that Jesus had in His incarnation is gone.
If
God were giving Him a new body He could have given Him a new body because the body
is irrelevant. But, body is not
irrelevant. What he had as a physical
body prior to the resurrection is the same body. When it comes out of the tomb the napkin that
covered His head, the clothes that covered His body – they are gone. I mean they are lying there in the same place
because the body is gone. The body is
important.
Christians
have done a terrible time through the centuries dealing with the importance of
the body. This is why Paul emphasizes this
in different places in I Corinthians.
The body is important. It’s not just the immaterial part, the immaterial
soul. So we have to surgically remove a
lot of this cosmic thinking that comes out of humanistic philosophy from our
thinking. It has impacted Christianity
way too much over the years. So we
recognize that there is an importance on both the physical home for the
soul. It is very important. God is directly involved in it even though He
does it through indirect processes as I pointed out as we went through all of
those studies. Many passages in
Scripture state or express God’s involvement of things with very direct
terminology even though God is using secondary means such as weather, such as He
prepared a great fish to take Jonah back to the direction he was supposed to
go. He uses intermediate means.
When
we talk about being saved we say, “God saved me.”
Yes,
but He used an intermediary to give me the gospel. He uses intermediate means but yet we still
speak as if God did it directly. So you
have passages in Job, you have passages in Psalm 39 that talk about God forming
the physical body. It stresses the importance of the physical body and its
preparation. You can’t dismiss it as just
a mass of cells and blood and muscle and tissue. It is that which is going to form the home
for the soul. It is an image bearer in
the making.
NKJ 1 Corinthians
If
you trace that Greek word there for “things” all the way through that passage from
about 2:8 all the way down to the end of the chapter, it refers to the things which
the eye has not seen, ears have not heard, neither has it entered into the heart
of man. In other words, it is talking
about knowledge - knowledge which is not based empiricism, that can’t be
derived from empiricism, knowledge that can’t be derived from rationalism can
only come from the Holy Spirit. Since
unbelievers have no access to data that comes only through the revelation of
the Holy Spirit (that is revelation of Scripture), then they are not held accountable. No one in the Old Testament is ever held
accountable for knowledge that is specific to revelation. Never! There is not one example of that.
Let me give you a basic
example of the kind of thinking that goes behind that. The Mosaic Law was given to the Jews. It wasn’t given to the Moabites. It wasn’t given to the Philistines. It wasn’t given to the Assyrians or the
Babylonians or the Romans or the Greeks.
Yet almost most all of these people come under divine judgment in the Major
Prophets. You go to Isaiah, Jeremiah, and
Ezekiel - there are burdens against the Moabites, against the Edomites. There are oracles of judgments against the
Philistines, against the Babylonians, against all of these different people
that surrounded
God lowers the boom on
But the Gentiles are
answerable to two things. They are
answerable to general revelation which according to Romans 1 is enough to hold
every human being accountable for the knowledge of God. And so
because every human being once they reach the age of accountability knows that
God exists, they are held accountable for that. So these nations are judged for
idolatry. It goes back to the creation
covenant. It goes back to the Noahic Covenant. They are also held accountable for their
attitude to
He said, “If anybody curses
you, I will curse them. If anyone treats you with disrespect (treats you
lightly), I will treat them harshly.”
There are two different words
for cursing in that anti-Semitic paragraph of the Abrahamic Covenant. I am saying that to make the point that God
never holds unbelievers accountable for that which they are unable to
understand and learn. I read to you a
section from an article from Harold O. J. Brown who is one of the foremost
evangelical theologians and anti-abortionists.
He basically throws up his
hands and says, “We can’t know when the soul gets there, but how could anybody
possibly believe that the fetus could last all the way to birth without having
a soul?’
What is his frame of
reference there? What is his ultimate
criterion? His own rationalism!
“It doesn’t make sense to me
that the fetus could go to birth without a soul. So therefore who would believe that? That is ridiculous.”
But, he has no foundation for
that. He has no empirical data for
that. He hasn’t even established a rational
syllogism to support that. He has just
argued it out of pure raw emotion. So the
only conclusion we can come to is that potential life means sacred life. The image and likeness of God is a term that incorporates
both the physical and the immaterial. It
includes the whole dynamic that is there.
It is used that way. In fact most
of the places where those two words are used in the Bible, without exception - about
98% of the places where those two words are used, they describe a physical
object. Once again I am not saying that God exists - we
are not Mormons – God doesn’t exist in a man-shaped body. He is spirit.
But we are saying that the physical part is very much important to the whole
image-ness of God.
Now that brings us to a
conclusion of that doctrine. Now we are
going to go into a new doctrine. We had
to go through all of that because that doctrine of the origin and the
transmission of the soul is fundamental to understanding the next doctrine
which comes out of our passage in Hebrews 7:9-10.
NKJ Hebrews 7:9 Even Levi, who receives tithes, paid
tithes through Abraham, so to speak,
NKJ Hebrews
I translated that. A better translation would be “in a manner of
speaking.” That is up front in the Greek
text. This is alerting you the reader to
the fact that what he is saying is not to be taken literally, but to be
understood in a somewhat figurative sense.
Levi himself never received
tithes. It is the tribe of Levi as the
priests that were the tithe collectors in the theocracy of
That is “met Abraham”, not “met
Levi”. You have to make sure you get the
right antecedent on that pronoun.
Now people (by people I mean
theologians) go to this verse and they use it to support a view related to the
origin and transmission (that key word is transmission) of sin what we would
refer to as the imputation of Adam’s original sin. They use that to support a view that is call
seminalism. Seminalism always goes
hand-in-hand with a traducianist view of the origin and transmission of the
soul. They connect because you have this
physical transmission of the soul through the semen and then it is that seed (seminalism)
that is the way in which the guilt of Adam’s sin is passed on down through the
generations.
On the other hand, you have a
view that we will get into in just a minute called federalism. Federalism is a view that it is not a physically
related thing. It is a federal
designation that Adam is designated as our representative. So Adam’s sin becomes our sin by
representation.
Now these are very important concepts. Over the next two or three weeks we are going
to try to break it down and help you understand this because this is crucial to
understanding Romans 5 and I Corinthians 15 and several other passages. So let’s get an opening introduction this
evening.
What is important here is to
try to come to grips with the whole issue of how the soul is corrupted. One of the questions that are raised is that if
God is going to create and impart the soul at birth, then how does it become
sinful? God can’t create a sinful soul. So how does that soul become corrupted and
become sinful and become totally depraved and come under condemnation?
And so the answer that is
proposed by traducianists is that, “Well, we will get God out of the
picture. God is only involved mediately
for the body and the soul and the sin nature is passed on physically,
biologically through procreation just as the soul is.”
That is their solution to the
problem. So we are going to get into
issues related to Adam’s original sin, related to the doctrine of imputation which
of course is going to deal with not only the imputation of sin but the
imputation of Adam’s guilt to each one of us, the imputation of our guilt to
Jesus Christ. All of this is related. You just thought the issue of the origin and
the transmission of the soul had to do with how people get souls. All of this is interconnected.
That is what is so fabulous about
studying theology. There is this whole web
of interconnectivity between different concepts and different verses. If you start changing one thing, it changes
everything else and you start having problems in different areas.
Usually the way these kinds
of things are set up in a typical seminary classroom or systematic theology
book is that you are either-or. You either
hold to creationism or traducianism. It
is either the body or the soul. Remember
that. You are in seminalism or
federalism. It is either the body or the soul, so you have this dichotomy. Both sides can marshal a number of Scriptures
in support of their position. So you
come out of a typical seminary class room scratching your head and thinking
thoughts similar to those expressed by Louis Sperry Chafer.
“Well, they could go either
way. I think I am going this way.”
That is how he handled the
problem of creationism versus traducianism.
He said, “Well, they are
pretty close. There are a lot of verses
on the side of traducianism and a lot of verses on the side of creationism. But I guess I am going to be a traducianist.”
It was 50.1% to 49.9%. What happens is you have a lot of men come
out of classrooms and they think, “Well...”
They start to become theological
agnostics at that point. It is a very
dangerous thing.
They begin to think, “Well, if
these double or triple PhD’s that are teaching me in class can’t understand
this issue; then it’s really not understandable. If they can’t unscrew the inscrutable the how
can I with nothing more than a master’s degree unscrew the inscrutable?”
Then what happens is the first
domino in theological agnosticism has developed and before long you become a
pan millennialist. You can’t decide whether
you are pre-millennial or post-millennial or a-millennial so you are just a pan-millennialist. It
will all pan out in the end…
And that is dangerous because
the next thing you know you are not clear on the gospel. As long as you do something with Jesus – and “we
don’t know which Jesus it is”. Maybe it
is Jesus the gardener or Jesus the ball player, but as long as you do something
with somebody named Jesus somehow that gets you in to heaven. So you can invite him into your heart or walk
the aisle or you can commit yourself.
It just leads to…
“The only thing that we can know
for sure is that we have had an experience and God has done something for us. So let’s all get together and put our arms
around each other and have an emergent church.
We will all feel good about God and God will be impressed that we feel
so good about him and about each other.
That’s got to get us some brownie points.”
Nobody knows anything any
more.
Our starting point on this is
trying to understand Adam’s original sin and how Adam’s original sin gets
transmitted to the entire human race so that all are guilty of Adam’s sin. So we have to define Adam’s original sin
first of all.
Adam’s original sin refers to
the first act of willful disobedience to God committed by the first man, Adam
in the Garden of Eden. It’s not Eve’s sin. If Adam had resisted the temptation and only
Eve had eaten of the fruit, then only Eve would have fallen. She would have gotten kicked out of the
garden and God would have gone to plan B for a helpmate for Adam. We would have had the first divorce. But that didn’t happen because Adam decided
that the woman was more attractive than God which has happened many times down
through history.
We are almost out of time so
I am going to tell you another story. We
will get into this next time. I will
tell you one more story. This is just appalling
to me.
Women have such power. You don’t understand that. Women have such power over men and over
theology. One of the ways I first
noticed this was in studying cults. It
is amazing how many cults were started by women. What is even more amazing is
how many husbands got screwed up theologically under the influence and pressure
of their wives.
Back in the 1980’s there was
a new ick-ack or spasm in the Church Age with the
rise with what became known as the Vineyard Movement, the Signs and Wonders
Movement. John Wimber
was a pastor out in southern
“Maybe it is related to the
baptism of the Holy Spirit, maybe not.
We just have to be open to the fact that God can still send people who
heal and speak in tongues and this kind of thing.”
In the mid 80’s three Dallas
Seminary professors who had been professors of mine and friends of mine in a
couple of cases went Vineyard. They got
fired from Dallas Seminary. All three of
these guys were influenced by their wives.
Read their testimonies.
My wife was feeling like, “Oh,
it’s not just doctrine. It is such a cold
intellectual thing this Christianity. I’ve
got to feel something. I have got to
have more emotion in my Christianity. I
feel so distant from God.” So the wives
get into this kind of subjectivity.
The same thing happened
recently. The news came out about this
at the end of April – that Francis Beckwith who was a professor of theology at
the seminary at
As a child he had been raised
Catholic and had gone through all the different hoops that you have to in order
to be a catholic. So they gave him
absolution and welcomed him back into the Roman Catholic Church.
One of the first questions my
wife asked me when she heard this was, “What does his wife think about this?”
You see a woman is going to
ask that kind of question.
His wife was leading the
way. She wasn’t raised a Catholic.
But she was out there 20
yards in front of him saying, “I think this is what we need to do.”
So he let her lead him right
along the chain of decision making and so now the Roman Catholic Church is
taking out full page ads in newspapers throughout Central and
There are a lot of people who
claim that they somehow understand doctrine and theology and it is
academic. Just because somebody can go
along and give some sort of verbal affirmation to a doctrinal statement doesn’t
mean they understand it, even if they have three PhD’s by their name. What a world we live in.
Let’s bow our heads in
closing prayer….