Lesson 46
Bible doctrine of Sex I – 22:13-20
Beginning with chapter 22 of Deuteronomy we move into a new section of
this book. This particular section
extends from chapter 22-25 and deals with the basic topic of life, and it
grounds human rights, civil rights, sexual rights, any rights you can conceive
of it places these rights on a foundation of God’s structure in creation. Last time we went through verses 1-12 and we
discussed all the categories that we find there. We found, for example, that in verses 1-3
there was the right to private property that was to be respected, whether the
policeman was breathing your neck or not.
So if you found the property of some other person you were to respect
that person’s property rights, not because the government decreed it was true
and valid but because it was an inherent right.
So the Word of God says and recognizes that there are inherent rights
that God has placed into the structure of the very creation.
We are going to study some of those tonight. But remember the category of rights that we
studied last time had to do with illustrating the principle, that when you deal
with the concept of rights which is the basis of freedom, the so-called rights,
given to that entity or that person, not by a government, government law may
recognize rights, but government law does not convey or create the rights; the
rights are generated by God the way He designs things. That is the principle we learned from verses
1-12.
Now by way of summary of this we can draw certain conclusions about
creation and life and form and so on.
The first thing we can draw by way of conclusion in verses 1-12 is the
relationship between form and rights in creation. Basically this applies to all three of these
things I am giving you. The first item,
God has a form even though He is not material substance. John 4:24 says “God is a Spirit, they that
worship Him must worship Him in Spirit and truth,” but it says that God’s
essence is spiritual, not material, and yet if you look carefully in various
verses, one of which happens to be Num. 12:8 you will see that God has
form. In the Hebrew this is called temunah, and temunah means figure or
outline, and this means that form and definition is a property of spirit, not
matter; matter is purely random, purely chaotic, what gives structure to matter
is form, is the spirit behind it, and God has form, it’s inherent in spiritual
things because God is a spirit, God has form, therefore form is inherent in the
spiritual realm. John
Then we have a second evidence that this is true from the angels. Angels are said to be spirits, Heb. 1:7, and
yet angels have form. Angels are seen,
angels have form and definition and yet they are entirely spiritual creatures.
Therefore once again we see from the Bible that form, structure and definition
is a function of the spiritual realm, not the material realm.
Third, we find that in Genesis 1 God the Holy Spirit is the personality
of the Trinity that gives form to physical matter. So from these things we recognize a
principle, that was practically illustrated in concrete example through verses
1-12 that form, light and substance, characteristics and so on that exist in
the real world in which you and I live are there because they first existed in
the mind of God and they first existed in the spiritual realm.
Conclusion: the practical conclusions of verses 1-12 are very important.
The first one has to do with science.
The base or the reason why science can exist is because the universe has
form that has been give to it by God the Spirit. And what is studied in science is the
manifestation of form in matter. For
example, of a materialist who confines the entire realm of reality to sheer
matter, he is taking science to a very illogical conclusion. He is saying that since science studies only
by its own definition, studies only material substance, therefore there is only
material substance. And the fallacy of this is that there is no known reason
why matter should stay together, why matter should continue to have form. So then verses 1-12 are important because
they give us the base for modern science. Science would not exist if it was not
for Bible Christianity and don’t ever forget that. When someone comes up to you
and says I have problems with science and the Bible, science would have very
great problems if it were not for the structure of the universe given by the
Word of God. Science has to presume the
Word of God is right in order for it to exist.
Second application or second conclusion from verses 1-12, the principle
we’ve been studying, the basis of right is rooted in the design of God and not
in the decrees, laws and commandments of man.
So the ground of all true rights is in the design of God, not in the
decrees of man. Man may happen to
reflect the divinely given rights in his law but they were there before the law
was; the law is simply bringing attention to this.
Now verses 13-30 we deal with the second area in this section. This deals with sexual rights and we’ll spend
a long time on this section because I have discovered in order to explain why
there are certain commandments here, particularly to a generation to whom this
particular section of Scripture may seem prudish and these standards may seem
outmoded, I want to show you why these standards exist and in order to show you
why God decrees certain things, such as the bounds of sex, we have to study, to
back to the basics of all things, the structure of the universe and man’s
creation, to see why it is that God says there are certain boundaries not to be
crossed over, because a lot of people have the impression from the Bible that
God says thou shalt not have sex, and that knocks all the fun out of life and
so therefore God’s a meany. And they
think these rules were made just for someone to say that God is an old fogy, He
doesn’t like it and He doesn’t want anybody else to enjoy it, something like
that.
I hope after we reach verse 30 you will finally understand that these
rules are not hanging in midair, they are grounded to the very form of our
bodies, our souls and our human spirits and therefore when God says don’t do
something, He’s not just mouthing off, He’s warning us that if you do this
you’re going to get hurt, and actually you will find that God places boundaries
on sex in order to increase the pleasure of sex and to make sex a more
wonderful thing. This is why the
boundaries are placed there, not to subtract from blessing but to increase the
blessing. We will go through various physical
and spiritual proofs to show you how this works out in experience.
Now briefly a breakdown on this material; there are six cases that Moses
presents in verses 13-30. Six different
cases; now these six cases are not all the cases of the Law, there are other
passages in Scripture such as Lev. 18 where there are many, many more cases
treated. Deut. 27 treats some more. These are not all; these are cases that are
selected out of the corpus of all possible cases to show, to illustrate the
principles. Therefore as we go through
this you will find us going to Lev. 18, we’ll be examining many different
passages and as the study proceeds you will see that there are many, many
things included in the Word of God just summarized briefly here because
remember, for those of you who think this is inappropriate for the pulpit, just
remember this was a sermon delivered by Moses to a mixed congregation. Therefore, what is good enough for Moses is
good enough for me. So the Word of God
preserves for us, in tact through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit an actual
sermon that not only was preached once but had to be listened to every seven
years. Therefore these people got it
every seven years they went through these passages and this passage is mild
compared to some that are coming up so just relax.
Let’s look at the outline for these verses, we’ll get the main outline
and then we’ll go back. Case one, verses
13-21, deals with the case of suspected promiscuity, and various illustrations
are in this case, there are certain principles applied in this case which we
will study in detail. The second case, found in verse 22, this is the case of
discovered adultery; underline the word “discovered” because it’s going to
solve something when we get into the divorce passage in Deut. 24, so this is
the case, not just of adultery but it is case of discovered adultery. The third case, verses 23-24, the case of the
promiscuous fiancée. That is in 20th
century language what the King James is telling you in verses 34-34. This girl is a fiancée and she is
promiscuous. The fourth case, verses 25-27, this is the case of the raped
fiancée and there are certain principles here which again we will go into
detail and show the basis of why God warns against this process. Case five, verses 28-29, the fifth case, the
case of the raped single girl and again we will deal with the reasons of why
she is treated differently than a fiancée who I turn is treated differently
than a wife. Case six, the case of
marrying a step-mother, verse 30.
There you have six cases that Moses illustrates his point. He has a lot of points to illustrate and in
order to understand the meaning of some of these illustrations we have to go
back and look at the background, the basic doctrines that these people knew and
therefore these illustrations were fine and were well understood by these
people because they had the preparation to understand the illustration. We do
not have the preparation. In fact, when
I began to study this passage I had this all outlined very wonderfully and
discovered that in order to carefully explain this I had to dump all my notes
and start all over. So I have been
revising my notes, so therefore this is going to take a long time to get to the
basis of why certain things are in this passage. To get to the background of this we are going
to study certain categories of doctrine so when we go through this passage we
will understand.
The first category of doctrine, the doctrine of man, who and what man
is. This is an explanation of man and
before the evening is over you’re going to see man has a problem, he’s alone
and God bifurcates him and you have the development of sex
characteristics. Therefore we have to
understand first man himself. There are
seven principles or seven points in the doctrine of man.
The first one, there are two realms of creation, matter and spirit, so
when you speak of creation keep in mind that you are speaking of two distinct
realms. This sets us up because when we
get into these passages there are certain things done to these sex offenders and
they are done for reasons which are grounded upon this principle. There are two realms of creation, matter and
spirit. References from the Bible: Job
38:4-7 where you have the angels present when God physically creates, showing
that the spiritual creation preceded the physical creation. In John 3:6 Jesus says “he that is born of
the flesh is flesh; he that is born of the spirit is spirit” and therefore
there are two realms of existence. In
Col. 1:16 Paul says that Jesus Christ is the Creator of things visible, the
physical world, the world of matter, and things invisible, the world of the
spirit. So Jesus Christ is not Himself
an angel, He can’t be if He’s the creator of the entire realm of the
angels. Jesus Christ, God-Man, the
Second personality of the Trinity is the creator both of matter and of
spirit. Then Heb. 1:7 tells us that the
angels are personalities and yet they are entirely spiritual. So the first point on the doctrine of man is
that there are two realms of creation, matter and spirit.
The second principle, the second point in the doctrine of man. There are
three relationships between spirit and matter in the Bible. This again is important because it sets up
categories for us to understand sex; sex involves some of these categories and not
other categories. So there are three
relationships given in the Word of God that define the relationship between
matter and spirit. The first of these
relationships is the creating and sustaining relationship that God Himself and
only Himself has. This is unique to God;
He creates matter and He sustains matter; He’s not part of matter. He creates and He sustains it; He gives
structure to it; He gives the physical laws to it. He puts the properties in matter that we
describe scientifically by our laws, mathematical models that are created are
basically descriptions of the form that God has put matter in. We find this in the Word of God, you can use
several verses, Gen. 1:1 is an obvious one but there are more powerful
references in Isaiah. Isaiah had to deal
with this problem in his day, so we have three references in the book of Isaiah
to the fact of this creating, sustaining relationship between spirit and
matter. Isaiah 43:10; Isaiah 44:24 and
Isaiah 46:9-11. These passages tell us
that God and God alone created matter and He is the one that gives it form, He
is the one that not only gives it form but He sustains it moment by
moment.
That is one relationship between spirit and matter and that is unique to
God, but now we have another relationship that I have never seen covered in
seminary and I don’t know why, it’s quite obvious but I’ve never seen anyone
deal with this, and that is what we call the influence relationship. So we have the sustaining relationship and we
have the influence relationship and the people that are involved here are
angels. I’ll take you through certain
passages of the Word of God to prove that angels can manipulate the physical
laws of the universe. They have been given this property by God; they do not
violate the physical law but they can manipulate through the physical law. Sometimes this concerns such things as our
sicknesses and answers to prayer so it is important that we understand angels
can influence matter. The first example
is found in Gen. 19 so let’s turn to Gen. 19 for the first illustration of the
influence relationship of angels on matter.
Gen. 19:1, the destruction of Sodom, “And there came two angels to Sodom
at evening; and Lot sat in the gate of Sodom: and Lot seeing them rose up to
meet them; and he bowed himself with his face toward the ground,” these are two
angels, the third angel which was described in chapter 18 has disappeared, he
stayed behind to talk with Abraham, that’s the Lord Jesus Christ in his
preincarnate form. But these are two angels
that went on down the road and they were going to take care of a little job
that they had to do and that was to annihilate Sodom, and they announced the
role of their mission in verse 13, but let’s look at verse 12 first. The Sodomites were involved in all sorts of
sexual practices, etc. from which we get the word sodomy today. “And the men said unto Lot, Hast thou here
any besides? Sin-in-law, and thy sons, and thy daughters, and whatsoever thou
hast in the city, bring them out of this place.” The angels are moving Lot out, evacuation
before destruction. Verse 13, “For we
will destroy this place, because of the cry of them is waxen” or grown “great
before the face of the LORD; and the LORD has sent us to destroy it.”
And of course you remember the story of the destruction of Sodom. Remember, Lot’s wife turned back and was
turned to a pillar of salt, etc. Now
it’s interesting that some archeologist digging in the realm of Sodom has
discovered under the sand remnants of this great destruction and the great
mystery is, here’s a cross section of this sand area, you dig down and you find
a very strange thing, anywhere from five to fifteen feet below the level of the
sand, even there today and you can see this, is a layer of glass, sand that was
heated so hot that it turned to glass; there is no known way in which this
could have occurred except by a nuclear explosion, so therefore the speculation
is did these angels somehow in that day release the power of the atomic bomb in
a primitive form that would have annihilated Sodom? There is no known way in which to cause such
a vast realm of sand down deep that existed at that time in history, to turn to
solid glass, so there was a fantastic destruction of Sodom at this point in
history, caused by angels, operating as unto the Lord.
Then we have other illustrations in God’s Word of this influence
relationship. Some of them are
illustrated in Job 1:12; Job 2:6 where you have Satan influencing matter, he
influences the physical body. We have for example fire from heaven, we have a
storm, we have biological balances inside the human body that Satan is able to
manipulate. And if Satan is able to
manipulate these he is able to bring about sickness and so on. Another example
of angels influencing matter, Acts 5:19 where the angels come in and release
the apostle from prison; obviously the angel has to interfere with matter, he’s
got to turn the key in the lock. And
then we have the final climactic way in which angels manipulate matter and this
is in Rev. 16:1, here you have another illustration from the Word of God of the
realm of the spiritual world influencing the material world. Now some of you wonder how prayers are
answered; this is one of the means that God uses to answer prayer; through His
angels He can manipulate physical laws, economic laws, biological laws,
chemical laws, etc. And He can work His
will in and through the existing system of laws that have been set up through
manipulation of various statistical occurrences, etc.
Rev. 16:1, “And I heard a great
voice out of the temple saying to the seven angels, Go your ways, and pour out
the bowls of the wrath of God upon the earth.” Verse 2, “And the first went,
and poured out his vial upon the earth, and there fell a foul and painful sore
upon the men who had the mark of the beast, and upon them who worshiped his
image.” So here you have angels able to
affect and influence the human body.
Whether this is done through secondary means such as a disease or
whether it’s done through an actual biological breakdown in the body is not
clear. Verse 3, “And the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea, and it
became like the blood of a dead man; and every living soul died in the sea,”
and there you have a chemical transformation.
Probably if you had been there it would not necessarily involve a
violation of chemical laws but a manipulation of those chemical laws. Then you have verse 4, “And the third angel
poured out his vial upon the rivers and fountains of waters, and they became
blood.”
We needn’t go on and on through the Bible but this gives you some idea
of the fact that spirit influences matter in many ways in the Bible. The first one, the creating sustaining
relationship is true only of God. The
second one, the influence relationship is true of angels.
And now we have the third one and here is where category man
exists. Man is neither one of these
influences; man is a union relationship, not an influence. So whereas before an
angel could come along and manipulate matter, in the case of man you have the
human spirit put with a human body, human spirit plus human body equals human
soul. And it is the human spirit in
union with the body, with the flesh, that produces the soul life. Now this union works both ways. It means that we, as members of the human
race, experience the sufferings of the flesh.
For example, the angels fell and there’s a law in the universe that says
“the wages of sin is death,” “the soul that sins shall die,” now that’s true,
but the angels that sinned do not experience the result of their sin as you
experience the result of our collective sin and our personal sin because angels
do not have physical bodies. They
experience a hardness of the heart; they experience sorrow of a type but we
experience sorrow because our human spirit is married to the human body, is
united with the human body and this union is not broken until death. It’s begun at the point of physical birth;
terminated at the point of physical death.
And during this time our human spirit is inseparably united with the
body. And if something hurts the body we
sense it in our spirits. And there’s
this cross relationship and this is the third kind of a relationship that
exists between matter and spirit.
The creating/sustaining relationship, God; the influence relationship,
angels, and the union relationship man and man alone with one possible
exception, the animal kingdom in a very general sense. So you have these three relationships between
spirit and matter.
Now we go to the third principle of the doctrine of man. The third principle of the doctrine of man is
that personality, which we have defined as volition, conscience, personal
affections and mentality, these attributes of personality are attributes of the
spirit, not of matter. They exist because
they are spiritual qualities. Now you
see this because God and angels have personality but they have no body,
therefore these are attributes of the spirit, not of the body. Therefore when they exist in man they exist
because man is made in the image of God and that image of God is not physical,
that image of God is spiritual. So
personality is a property of the spirit, not of matter.
Now we come to the fourth principle. The fourth principle is that the
human spirit, what is it? It is the
immaterial part of man that produces the soul life. What is the human spirit? The human spirit is the immaterial part of
man that results in soul life. References for this, Gen. 2:7, God formed the
body, breathed into him the breath of lives, which is a reference to the human
spirit, and man became a living nephesh,
or living soul. So, the human spirit is
that which produces the soul life in man.
You find this in Gen. 2:7, you find it in Num. 16:22; 27:16 and James
2:26. James 2:26, you remember the
reference, the body without the spirit is dead.
It is the spirit that gives life to the body.
The fifth principle under the doctrine of man. What is the soul? The soul is the person that
results from the union of the human spirit with the human body. What is the soul? The soul is what results
from the union of the human spirit and the human body, that’s the soul. And the soul usually in the Old Testament, as
far as I am able to find, is oriented toward the details of life. Everywhere
you find nephesh and you look it up
in a concordance, you find it in terms like this: to take some physical desire
to the desire of your nephesh, you
see it’s oriented to the details of life, and it’s oriented and involved in
sex. Here is the center of sex, the soul
life.
Sixth, the body is shaped by God in the womb but it’s made alive at the
time of physical birth. Now this is an
important point about the human body and I want to review why we say that the
embryo in a woman who is expecting a baby is not considered in the Bible to be
a living soul. There are to lines of
reasoning. The first one is in Gen.
2:7. There are two lines of evidence for
proving that embryos, fetuses, are not living in the sense of the Word of
God. This has important implications
because of the problem of abortion, etc.
People get all excited because of abortion and make it murder; it’s not
murder. It’s sin against the Lord in
some areas but it is not murder; it cannot be unless the embryo is a human
being. You have the human body. There are two lines of evidence for this, one
is Gen. 2:7 combined with another verse.
Now Gen. 2:7, “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground,
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of lives; and man became a living soul.” The word “formed” here is yatser and it means to mold as a man would mold pottery. So here you have the creation of the physical
body before it’s living. So you have
this procedure, body first, then added to the body is the human spirit; result,
living soul. And when the human spirit hits
the body then it becomes a living soul.
Now that is originally how man was made but watch how the Psalmist
describes man being made in the normal process of reproduction, Psalm 139:13ff,
this passage refers back to Gen. 2:7, remember this or you won’t see the point
the Psalmist is making. Remember Gen. 2:7 is the picture and the Psalmist
refers back to the picture and what does he say: Verse 13, “For thou hast possessed my reins”
the Hebrew means kidneys, reference to the inner man, “thou hast woven
[covered] me together in my mother’s womb,” so therefore the process of the
nine months of pregnancy of a woman is looked upon as a period of construction,
not finished product. “Thou hast covered
me in my mother’s womb, [14] I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and
wonderfully made. Marvelous are thy
works,” etc.
Verse 15, “My substance” the word substance means embryo, “My embryo was
not hidden from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously [intricately]
wrought,” the Hebrew means embroidered, it’s the Hebrew word embroidery and it
was used when women would get to the final stage of putting color on the
garment, it meant the final point of construction. So it says “when I was made in secret and
embroidered,” the color was put on, the finishing touches, “in the lowest parts
of the earth.” Now you know from verse
13 this is not occurring in the lowest parts of the earth but the lowest parts
of the earth refers back to Gen. 2:7 and sets up the analogy that the Psalmist
is thinking of in terms now, that just ad God formed the man’s body in Gen. 2:7
so God in the womb of a pregnant woman is building the embryo, it’s the same
process.
Verse 16, “Thine eyes did see my embryo [substance] yet being imperfect
[unformed]; and in thy book all my members were written,” it’s all confused
here, it should be “and in thy book all the preordained days were
written.” “… all the preordained days
were written, and this tells us something about the formation and this is why
although this embryo is not a human soul it is very important because that
embryo as it is developing here during the nine months of pregnancy is taking
on the characteristics that will enable it to be the vessel for the human
spirit to live out a life that God has designed for it. So therefore this
balances the doctrine and gives importance to this period of time because it’s
then when God is working to form the features and characteristics that will
enable the human spirit to live out its life in the physical world. So it is not altogether unimportant. However, it is viewed as a period of
construction analogy with Gen. 2:7.
Now the legal proof that the embryo is not a living soul, turn to Exodus
21:22, this is a case where you have a woman who is carrying her child and she
is assaulted. “If men strive, and hurt a
woman with child, so that her fruit,” that is the embryo, “depart from her,”
she loses her embryo, loses the fetus, “and yet no mischief follow,” that means
no danger or physical injury to the mother,
she has lost her baby but she herself remains uninjured, “so that her
embryo departs fro her, and yet no mischief follows; ;he shall be surely
punished, according as the woman’s husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay
as the judges determine.” Notice, “he
shall pay as the judges determine.” Now
if the embryo which has obviously been lost in verse 22, if the embryo was a
living entity the man wouldn’t be getting off by paying the judge; he would get
off only by capital punishment.
Proof: turn to Lev. 24:17. By the
time we get through the next lessons of Deut. 22 you will have a complete sex
education from the Biblical point of view and you won’t have to buy all the
garbage that you’re going to get in the schools. “He that kills any man shall surely be put to
death.” “He that kills any man shall
surely be put to death!” All right,
that’s the absolute principle of Old Testament law, a life for a life, nephesh for nephesh, and if you take a soul you die for the soul. That is the principle, so we have the
principle articulated in Lev. 24:17 but when we come over to Exodus 21:22 where
we have a case of assault in which the embryo is destroyed, it is not
considered murder. Since it is not considered
murder the embryo is not a nephesh.
Therefore we find from two lines of evidence in Scripture that the woman
during the time that she is bearing her child, that child is incomplete, it is
an unfinished product and therefore is not a human life. Now, this means that the human body is
incomplete, it obviously means that since the nephesh to be in existence has to be produced by the human body
plus the human spirit, it means that the human spirit has not yet come to dwell
in that baby. Now when does the human
spirit come to dwell in the baby? It
comes to dwell when that baby’s body, and I make allowances for sometime in the
future when medical science will be able to raise fetuses apart from the
woman’s womb, nevertheless, when the baby reaches the point where it can
physically exist on independent systems, on its own systems, that point at
which the human spirit is put into that body.
It follows the same sequence that you find in Gen. 2:7. What was the sequence back there? First formation of the body, so you have the
complete formation of the body and after the formation of the body then the
human spirit is put in. Then God
breathes into it. So here comes entry, human spirit; result—soul life. Therefore when the baby’s body is to the
point where it can live independent of the mother’s body, at that point the
human spirit is put into that baby’s body.
So then this represents the human body as it is spoken of in
Scripture.
Now the seventh point on the doctrine of man. Man has four stages in history; man has four
basic stages in history that involve the interplay of his human spirit, the
human soul and the human body. Sex is
involved in two out of the four stages and only two out of the four
stages. The first stage is
innocence. In innocence you have… the
set up looks like this, you have the human spirit, the human spirit is present,
obviously the body is alive. So you have
the human spirit present but the Greek of 1 Cor. 15:44, 45 and 50 suggests that
this body is a psukikos or soulish
body, which means that you have the human body down here but the human body is
a psukikos body, psukikos or designed primarily for the soul life, not for the
spirit life, which we infer therefore that when Adam was created, although the
human spirit was there it was in uneducated, undeveloped form. This was the naiveté of the innocent
state. So you have the human spirit
alive but undeveloped. You have the soul
dominant and the body is made of three components. Now obviously those of you who have had
anatomy can name many more components but I want you to keep track of these
three because they change from stage to stage.
The human body is looked upon as made of flesh plus bones plus
blood. Those are the three elements the
Bible keeps talking about when it talks about your human body. Adam and his wife had this in their
body. Also in the stage of innocence you
had sex; sex was an authorized procedure in the state of innocence, which shows
you something else, that sex preceded the fall, not followed the fall. Sex is a legitimate exercise that God has
given to man, it is not to be apologized for and it is not to be laughed at, it
is a normal operation that God has given to man. The problem is that man has ruined it through
the fall.
Second phase of man is his fallen state, or what we call in the plan of
salvation phase one, prior to phase one the fallen state of man. Here after Adam fell something happened to
the human spirit. It blacked out; it’s
there in one sense in that it’s sustaining the physical body but spiritually
speaking it’s zero. When you evangelize
an unbeliever you have to remember who you are evangelizing; you are
evangelizing a person whose human spirit is deactivated and blacked out and he
is not going to understand divine truth. Therefore you’re going to have to rely
on the Holy Spirit to shake this into his soul and make it meaningful to
him. Your job in evangelism is to
communicate the truth as clearly as you know how. Concentrate on clarity of communication and
let the Holy Spirit take it from there.
That’s the issue in evangelism.
So you have the human spirit but the human spirit is blacked out. You have the soul and the soul has problems
too. Both the soul and the human spirit fall under the dominion of something
that proceeds out of the body. In the
body is the seed of the old sin nature.
That’s why in the body the old sin nature is perpetually identified by
the word “flesh,” basah in the Hebrew
and sarx in the New Testament, the
Koine Greek. And it’s no accident, that’s not just a spiritual term; it means that
the old sin nature is somehow connected with the material decay going on in
your body. Physiological illnesses, the
influence if 1 Kings 19, the physical state upon the human soul is one
illustration of how this works, but the old sin nature in the Bible that every
man is born with basically emanates from his body. Now there’s a reason for this, this is not
just a random observation; you’ll see how it turns out in the end, but watch
what happens now. What does the body
have? The body has flesh, same as innocence; the body has bone, same as
innocence; the body has blood, same as innocence, but something’s been added.
When man is in the fallen state what is added to the body now? Death!
Or decay, and you have the fact that the moment the baby is born basically
his body is already deteriorating. So
you have then the fourth element added to the body and the body is the thing to
watch because the body identifies the state that man is in.
Now we have the born again experience; now we come to the third stage of
man and here is the regenerate stage.
Here is a person who has received Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior;
here’s a person who has heard the gospel, the Holy Spirit has made the message
real in his heart, he has responded by faith.
Now what happens? God the Holy
Spirit regenerates him and this is what happens: the human spirit now is
enlightened. The human spirit is
released, in principle, from the domain of the flesh. This is redemption, the very word redeem
means to release, to get out from under the control of something, and so when
you are regenerated it means that God the Holy Spirit takes your human spirit,
which is your ability to categorize and absorb spiritual phenomena, it takes
this element of you, the human spirit, and liberates it from the dominion of
the flesh. It does not mean that you
become a plaster saint because by your own volition you can subject it to the
flesh once again through negative volition, but in principle it has been freed.
Then you have the soul of the regenerate person and the soul of the
Christian is the battleground between the spirit and the flesh. You have the body down here; you have the old
sin nature operating through the body, lust patterns, etc. solicitation to your
volition. From the human spirit you have
the Holy Spirit. [Blank spot] The Holy Spirit goes through your human spirit
and you have this constant clash and this is what the holy war… we discovered
with the war on the flesh, the war with the world, and the war with Satan, etc. All this is going on in the soul so the soul
becomes the battleground in this third stage of man’s existence.
Then his body receives some benefit, only some however, of the three
[can’t understand word] process. Once
again the body is made of flesh, the body is made of bones, the body is made of
blood, and the body has decay processes in it and sometimes though the body is
benefited by the action going on in the soul, you can see this is you study
oftentimes the face of a person who has received Christ before and after. And you can see oftentimes a definite
physiologic change. So the body is
helped in some respects, but only in some respects.
Now we come to the most interesting stage of man’s existence of all and
that is the resurrection. By the way,
you have sex in the fallen state, you have sex in the regenerate state; sex in
three out of the four stages, but now we come to the resurrection. In the resurrection stage the human spirit
now attains dominancy. We get this from
1 Cor. 15:44, 45 and 50 where this body is called the pneumatikos body, which means that body is now designed for a
liberation and a complete living of the human spirit. And so we have the human spirit that attains
a maximum development, and by the way, there are repercussions as far as the doctrine
of reward is concerned, as to the scope in which your human spirit will exist
for all eternity based on what you do in this life. The soul, the soul is still there, now it’s
evidently subordinate in some way to the human spirit but the most interesting
change is the body. Now the body has had
a tremendous transformation at regeneration.
Let’s look what happens.
First, the fallen body had this, the fallen body had flesh, and
resurrection body has flesh. How do I
know the resurrection body has flesh?
It’s simple; it’s what Jesus Christ said in Luke 24:39, He said “see My
body, flesh and bones a spirit has not but touch Me and see that I have
them.” Jesus in His resurrection body
had flesh. So although it’s a new kind
of flesh, still evidently it’s very similar.
Flesh and bones and blood, plus decay, now watch what happens,
resurrection body has bones, Jesus Christ, Luke 24:39 says I have flesh and
bones, but now minus blood. 1 Cor.
15:50, flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. Why is this?
Because blood… what does blood do in the body? Just think about it physically for a
moment. What is blood?
What is the function of blood?
Blood is a two-way street. Blood
takes O2 and food to your cells of your body and it exhausts CO2 and
waste. The blood is an exchange system,
an exchange system between your physical body and your physical
environment. Resurrection body is not
dependent upon the physical environment, therefore resurrection body does not
exchange material with the material environment, therefore the resurrection
body does not have blood and this is why the resurrection body in Luke 24:39
lacks blood. It has no blood in it. Decay, minus decay, there is no decay in the
resurrection body. It exists forever; it
exists free from the wounds and scars of life; amputees, there are no people
walking around with wooden legs in heaven.
There is only going to be one person that has scars on his resurrection
body and that is the Lord Jesus Christ to remind creation for all eternity that
it was He who bore our sins on the cross.
So these, then are the four stages of man’s existence and this completes
the doctrine of man. What have we said?
We said first there are two realms of creation.
We said there are three relationships between spirit and matter: the
first relationship is the creating sustaining relationship that God only has;
the second relationship is the influence relationship that angels have. The third relationship is the union
relationship that is absolutely unique to man.
The third statement we have made in the doctrine of man is that
personality is the property of the spirit and not of matter. The fourth statement that we have made is
that the human spirit is the immaterial part of man that produces the soul life. The fifth statement, the soul is the person
resulting from the union of the human spirit with the human body. The sixth statement is the body is shaped by
God in the womb prior to the input of the human spirit. Seven, the four stages of man include:
innocence, fallenness, regenerateness, and resurrection. The first three have sex, the last one does
not.
Now we come to Gen. 2 and we will begin on the purpose and design of
sex. We’re going to examine this passage
in Gen. 2, summarize some of the principles so that at least we’ll get some
benefit out of it tonight, and then we will have a refined summary next week
and continue finishing the purpose and the design of sex by way of introduction
to Deut. 22.
Gen. 2:7, once again, “The LORD God,” yatser, He “molded man of the dust of the ground,” that’s his body,
“breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” that’s the human spirit, “and
man became a living soul.” Now let’s
examine first the word “man.” It does
not mean male; the word “man” in this context has no sexual overtone, it is the
word adam, and it’s adam, accent on the last syllable. adam
is deliberately put in here because in verse 7 the word for ground is adamah, and “ah” is the feminine
ending. So the word for ground is adamah, and the word for man who is
formed of the ground is adam.
Therefore what does this tell you about man?
Man’s chief characteristic is that he has an earthly material body. And this is why we are called “men” in the
Bible. The word “man” does not have a
sexual overtone. There is another word
in the Hebrew that has to do with the sexual difference, that comes later. But the word “man” itself has to do only with
the origin of man, that he has a ground-like existence, he has a material
existence.
Verse 8, and this all occurs on the sixth day, “And the LORD God planted
a garden westward in Eden; and there he put the man whom He had formed,” yatser, again emphasis on his material
body. Verse 9, “And out of the ground
made the LORD God to grow every tree,” now those of you who get a little
college religions class and they say there are two different accounts of
creation, there’s an account of creation here in Gen. 1 and then there’s an
account of creation in Gen. 2 and in the account of creation in Gen. 1 the birds
and bees are made before man and now in Gen. 2 man’s first and then comes the
birds and the bees, now which is right?
Genesis 1 is right; Genesis 2 has been misunderstood because of the verb
tense of verse 9. “Out of the ground God
had made,” this is a pluperfect tense, He had made these things already and
since He had already made these things, this describes the character of the
garden into which He puts man. Verse 10,
“And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was
parted, and became four heads,” this is the antediluvian system of the global
irrigation system that God had worked out, one continent with four rivers, no
oceans.
Verse 15, “And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of
Eden to dress and to keep it,” and the word “keep” is the first word that
should tip our attention to man’s problem and the rise of the woman. He was to “dress and to keep the
garden.” The word “keep” means to
protect it from something, so you have the garden; the word “garden” means
park, it comes from a Persian word, paradise is actually the Persian word and
it means park. So God had a little park,
the park is not called Eden; the park was located in a region called Eden. So you have a large region called Eden,
inside Eden you have a park. And Eden
evidently was God’s headquarters on the planet and He was going to erect all
sorts of things here and Satan didn’t much like this. And you have Satan apparently running around
Eden and the objective is that here God has laid out a park, He has put man in
the park and now Satan is going to come for the test. So the overtone of the test is already here
in verse 15.
Now verse 16, “And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree
of the garden you may freely eat; [17] But of the tree of the knowledge of good
and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day that thou eatest thereof
thou shalt surely die.” You have certain
death predicted here in verse 18. Again,
verse 19 you have you have a pluperfect verb, “And out of the ground the LORD
God formed every beast,” or had already formed every beast. Here you begin in verse 19 to see a test, but
to understand the text we have to go back to verse 18 for a moment and pick up
the word “help.” Now often we have read
this as a helpmeet, as though it’s one word.
It is not one word, it is two words.
A “help” is a noun, “meet” is an adjective in the English, not in the
Hebrew however, a help meet. Now we’ll
explain these two words. The word “help”
is hazar, with a hard kind of “h”, hazar.
That is what woman is called, and this is a phenomenal title because
this word is never used of man again in the Bible, it is only used of God.
For example, turn to Psalm 33:20, there are a lot of references but I’ll
stick to the Psalms. I think once you go
through these references you’ll pick up the use of this word hazar.
“Our soul waits for the LORD; He is our hazar and our shield.” Now
who is it talking about? It’s talking
about the Lord, Jehovah, He is our hazar.
Psalm 70:5, I will show you every occurrence of hazar, every time it
occurs in the Psalms, it’s only four or five times but I want you to see every
time this word occurs how it’s used.
This is how you understand the Bible, what it means. People think you can get anything out of the
Bible but if you are going to study the Word of God carefully there is only one
thing you can get out of it if you study it literally, grammatically and
historically, and that is the truth.
Psalm 70:5, “I am poor and needy; make haste unto me, O God. Thou art my hazar and my deliverer; O LORD
make no tarrying.” Who’s it speaking of
here? It’s speaking of God.
Psalm 115:9-11, “O Israel, trust thou in the LORD; He is their hazar and their shield. [10] O house of
Aaron, trust in the LORD: He is their hazar and their shield. [11] Ye that fear
the LORD, trust in the LORD; he is their hazar
and their shield.” Who is it talking
about? God.
Final reference, Psalm 146:3-5, “Put not your trust in princes, nor in
the son of man, in whom there is no hazar.”
So here again you have hazar, and of
course here you might say it’s related to man but the idea is sharply brought
out what it really means in verse 5, “Happy is he that has the God of Jacob for
his hazar, whose hope is in the LORD,
his God.”
I hope you have seen from this reference that hazar is used over and over and over and over and over again in
Scripture to refer to God and in a context in which you are in a jam and you
need out. And particular a satanic jam,
so wherever you have man involved in a satanic attack you need God as a hazar, to help him get out of a jam, and
every time this word is used it is used of God except, turn back to Gen.
2. This shows you some of the spiritual
reason why there is such things as females running around. We’ll get involved
with some of the details of this next time but I want to go through the passage
at least enough so we can get some principles tonight.
Verse 18, “And the LORD God said, It is not good,” and this proves to
you that this whole thing occurred on the 6th day of Genesis 1
because when God got through the seven days He looked upon everything that He
had made and said it is very good.
Therefore chapter 2 is a blowup of day six, and this activity happened
on day six. And there are certain interesting
principles. “The LORD God said, It is
not good that the adam,” this is not
the word for sex, this is the word for the personality, the soul that God had
made, and “it is not good that he should be alone: I will make an hazar meet for him.” Now the word “meet” is the other word that
we want to clarify here. This is a word
which means… literally it comes from a word which means “according to,” that’s
the preposition, plus another preposition which means in front of, plus a
preposition which means him. And that’s
all translated in the King James as “meet.”
“According to” plus “in front of him.”
Now what does this mean? This is
an idiom in the Old Testament which means something that corresponds to and is
equal to.
For example, if God was walking in the Garden He would walk up to man
and He’d look at man, He’d stand in front of man and look at man, and He says
what I want is a hazar that looks
like him, that is exactly like him that will correspond to him, and this hazar must help him. Now we’re going to get into just exactly how
she helps him next week, when we remember the fact that hazar is always used to get man out of a satanic jam. So this is a [can’t understand word] and it
doesn’t mean that she… now this of course includes it but it doesn’t mean that
ladies always use vacuum cleaners and wash the dishes for the man, etc. That is true, that’s part of it, but hazar here has far more powerful and
serious implications for the role of the female in the world. Hazar,
she is the hazar that meets the man’s
needs.
Now verse 19-20, God had a little experiment that He performed. God always in history never gives you
something without selling you first; grace is always sold in the sense that He
sells you on your need for it before He gives it to you. So God is going to run
a little experiment. So what He does in verses 19-20 is He announces what He is
thinking about in verse 18. So then what
does he do? Verse 19, “And out of the
ground the LORD God had formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the
air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them:” now what does
He do? Here’s Adam, he’s in Eden. Here’s Eden, the geographical location on the
antediluvian earth, here’s the park, Adam’s there. And God has animals all over the world and he
picks out some of these animals that He has made and He brings them to
him. Now why does God bring the animals
to Adam? It says in the Bible in verse
19 “to see what Adam would call them and whatsoever Adam called them, every
living creature, that was the name thereof.”
Now let’s look at Adam’s soul at this point. He has a human spirit, he has volition, he
has conscience, he has personal affections and he has mentality. There is his soul; now his soul looks out on
the world and God brings these animals up to him, and Adam looks at these
animals and he sees these things and his mentality automatically registers
language, God had built in the structure of language into his soul and so he
comes out with a name. And in the Hebrew
every time you have something named it means more than just tacking a label
onto something. It means that Adam would
look at these animals. It doesn’t mean
God brought all the animals but God brought a sampling of these animals to him
and Adam would look at these animals and he would comprehend with his genius,
Adam was a genius, remember he had not yet fallen so therefore his brain was
not yet decaying, so he had fantastic mental capabilities and he would look at
these animals and he’d size them up. And
he’d say this animal is such and such, and the name that he would give them, we
never got these recorded in Scripture, but he gave them names originally and
the names indicated the nature of the animal.
But then in verse 20, “And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the
fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field,” and if you study the Hebrew
this does not mean all animals, it means all domestic animals, animals that are
close to man. So this is not an idea
that in 24 hours he named all the animals.
It means that God brought to him a sample of the domestic animals,
animals that were close to him. Now,
“but for Adam there was not found a hazar
that corresponded to him.” So you have
Adam standing here in the Garden, here he is, he’s looking around and up comes
little creature on four legs and he says no, that doesn’t work. Then the next
one comes, and maybe this one is crawling around on six legs and he says no,
that doesn’t work, that’s not corresponding to me. So he rejects them, he names them and says
no. And the result of the search and
experiment, verse 20 is “there was not found an hazar that would correspond to him.”
Now verse 21, God performs the first medical operation. “And God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam,”
this is not natural sleep, this is anesthesia, so God anesthetizes Adam and He
performs a little operation; He takes one of his ribs, “and closed up the flesh
instead thereof. [22] And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made
he a woman,” now this has important implications in the New Testament and some
of you who think these details are trivial, I’ve got news for you. Whole
doctrines in the book of the Pastoral Epistles hinge on this verse, this is so
important, the woman’s role in the local church. “And the rib which the LORD God had taken
from man,” here what does He take from the man, now watch how woman is
made. Men, you want to find out how
they’re made, look, they are made from “rib,” rib is matter, not human
spirit. So what happens? The rib the Lord takes from the man and makes
he a woman, and the word “make” is interesting, it’s banah and it’s used in the Hebrew for building buildings. See Moses had a wonderful sense of humor, you
see men were created and women were built.
So gentlemen, when you see a woman and you say she’s well-built you are
saying exactly what the Bible says, she is well-built. And the Lord built the
first woman and she was the best built of them all. This woman was a perfect individual and Adam
blows the whistle in verse 23.
Verse 22 first though, the last clause, the Lord God, after He’s
finished making her and building her, He “brought her unto the man.” Now this is interesting, first of all it
establishes the supremacy which we’ll deal with later on that Adam is a single
entity and out of him comes the woman so you have male/female, and you do not
have God creating male and creating a female.
If you had that you would not have a unified human race. Stop and think of it for a moment. To have an absolutely unified human race you
have to have one, not two, people to start it.
You have to have one person that starts it, and this is why this is not
just a little mythical story here, this has tremendous implications. You have the whole race united in Adam.
So then God does something to her, He brings her to Adam. Now this is an illustration, we’ll apply this
later on to dating and marriage and so on, because the doctrine still holds,
right man and the right woman. This man had a need; Adam had a need, God
recognized that need but what did Adam do? Adam couldn’t supply the need, Adam
didn’t have the information available to meet the need and so God created the
woman and brought her to him. And when she comes to him Adam says, and in the
Hebrew this is poetry, he sings, this may be the first time and the last time
but nevertheless he sang when he saw a woman, “This now is bone of m bones, and
flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of
Man.” Here now you have the word for
male and female. This is not adam in
the Hebrew, this is the word ish, and
you take the feminine ending and add to it you get isha. So there’s your word male and there’s your word for female,
and here is where man is called ish,
and her name is not Eve, her name is isha
and it’s not called Eve until later on.
But please notice by way of application God knows your needs today,
those of you who are single and He is able to supply those needs. Just as God supplied the right person for
Adam who had a need there is a right person for you and you can relax because
God, if you trust Him, will supply you with the right person and you don’t have
to go frantically around engaging in promiscuity and all the rest of it to find
the right person. In fact I will show
you in ensuing classes the more you engage in promiscuity the less probability
you have of ever finding the right person because you will foul yourself up and
him or her to the point where you’ll never recognize the right person when they
come along. Adam immediately recognized, in verse 23, after he had been naming
all these animals, here comes woman, God brings her, she’s evidently escorted
up to Adam, the first marriage actually, and Jesus Christ was the escort, the
preincarnate Christ escorts this woman up to Adam. And Adam begins to break out in song and he
calls her “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,” which means that he
identifies her physically. She had come from Adam physically and she is
identified physically and here you have the rise of sex.
Verse 24, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and
shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh,” you have the rise of
sex and the doctrine of marriage. The one-flesh relationship referring to the
act of sex and you have the home established by the cleaving unto his wife and
you have no in-laws in the Garden of Eden.
That was why there was perfect environment. “Therefore shall a man leave his father and
his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife.”
So here you have the introduction of sex in the Bible. Please notice how it comes about. Number one, it does not come about because
God wants to reproduce another generation.
That is involved but sex in the human realm is not just for reproduction
and this is why it is so important to avoid promiscuity because sex has another
function described in the Word of God and there’s nothing greater, more danger
to it, to destroy this other function than promiscuity. Promiscuity will destroy sex’s number one
reason for existence and every time people engage in promiscuity they are
hurting themselves and they are actually sentencing their sex life for the rest
of their lives to suffering. They’re
sentencing it to something less than it could be under the grace of God.
Next week we will finish the purpose and design of sex and hopefully
start with Deut. 22.