Biblical Framework

Charles Clough

Lesson 111

 

We’re going to move to the Scriptural material that is used to show the person of Christ, particu­larly Old Testament passages.  Before we go there, I want to draw you attention to the picture in the notes, the diagram on page 29, because that diagram shows the process of rejection.

 

                        Unbeliever                                                                    Believer

              --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                    Pagan worldview                                                                   Biblical worldview

 

                                                               Virgin birth

                                                                       New Testament claim

                                          Rejected!                                                     Accepted

 

Figure 1.  The fact of the virgin birth claim is interpreted in accordance with one’s worldview of God, man, and nature.

 

When we started this series this year, when we’re talking about the Lord Jesus Christ, since He is the light of the world, men’s response to that light doesn’t argue for the inefficiencies of God’s revelation.  The rejection of Christ simply exposes the heart of the people who are doing the rejecting.  It gets back to John 3.  So in the diagram what I’ve done is I’ve said it’s undeniable that the Christian faith says that Jesus Christ is virgin born.  That’s undeniable, and we have evidences, as we’ve said, that’s why the Jews were calling Him a bastard and Mary a fornicator. That’s why they were doing it.  They wouldn’t have done that if there hadn’t been the claim that He was virgin born.  So the very fact that you have all the scuttlebutt on the streets about who Jesus is shows that, in fact, the virgin birth claim was not only in the Scripture, it was known in the street. Every­body knew the claim.  The question is: what is the response to the claim?  The response to the claim is two-fold; you accept Christ or you reject Him.  There’s no neutrality, and if you reject Him, why do you reject Him.  Why does a person argue that there’s no light in the room?  Because their eyes are faulty; only blind people deny that light is there.  If someone cannot see God in Christ, all that shows it they’ve punched their eyes out, that’s all.  It’s an act of self-mollification where the unbelief deceives itself and punches its own eyes out.  Therefore it rejects the light.

 

How does it do that?  You see in the diagram it’s the world view, it’s the suppositions in the heart of men, and that’s why we’re so careful to quote, on page 27-28, I wanted to give you that quote because I wanted you to see that these elements that we keep talking about over and over and over because we all need repetition, this stuff is all around us, and we have to be aware of it.  Here’s a good statement, here’s this guy, teaching in a Summer School of Theology, out of Harvard, in 1909.  Follow his statement:  “The new thought of God will be its most characteristic element.  This ideal will comprehend the Jewish Jehovah, the Christian Universal Father, the modern physicist’s omnipresent and exhaustless Energy, and the biological concept of a Vital Force.” What is he doing?  He’s doing the Continuity of Being thing, i.e. that nature, God and man are all made of the same stuff; all God is is a super man.  He’s just different in quantity, but not qualitatively different. There’s no Creator/creature distinction.  If you can’t distinguish between the Jehovah of the Scripture and the physicist’s idea of a vital force, you’re already wrapped up in this thing.  If that’s how you think in your heart, then the logical conclusion is that this business about Jesus Christ is malarkey, it’s wrong.

 

That’s why I titled the last section “Unbelief’s Need to Reject the Virgin Birth.”  That sort of unbelief has to reject the virgin birth in order to be consistent with itself.  That kind of unbelief can’t permit the miraculous virgin birth to be a bona fide plain, because if it were a bona fide plain the way the Scripture says, it would be self-refuting to the position.  So there has to be a denial.  I emphasize this because I find it helps in conversations, it puts a shock value in your conversations.  When someone thinks they’re going to intimidate you because they know you’re a believer and they say well, I don’t believe that, it’s nice to come back well of course you don’t, I wouldn’t either if I were in your position.  It’s not quite the reply these kind of people are used to hearing.  It’s a good conversation starter, believe me, because [they say] what do you mean by that?  Then you’re off to the races.  We want to see the structure of this.  Two people can slug it out; we don’t have to take all the hits as Christians.  It doesn’t mean that we have to be snotty and impolite about it, but it does mean that in the realm of ideas we can be as aggressive as any non-Christian.  We have the truth; we don’t have to sit there and be intimidated and look like the third string. 

 

We’re going to go on and get into the three areas of data that the Scripture present.  I’ve tried to classify this in terms of these three classes.  In other words, what I’m trying to do, I’m taking the Biblical data about Jesus Christ, and I’m putting it in three boxes.  The reason I’m doing that is because it’s easier to remember it that way, it’s a convenient handle for you to see why, as we get into the heresies that develop, where these heresies go wrong.  This is tough stuff, this is not easy material and it underscores my contention all along that we cannot study the Bible from the New Testament backwards.  We have to study the Bible from the Old Testament forward, and here’s going to be an illustration as we go through the next few weeks we get into some pretty deep stuff.  We’re going to wind up dealing with the Trinity.  All this sounds abstract and theoretical, but I hope when we get through this you’ll see it’s not abstract and theoretical at all, it’s very practical.  It has some powerful practical results and the Holy Spirit through the Church has always sensed this.  This is why there were all these debates that went on. 

 

In fact before we even get to the data, look at the handout on page 37, this is the kind of thing that you need to be aware of as a literate Christian.  There’s no new thing under the sun, said Solomon, and that goes for heresies.  What I’ve done on that diagram is I’ve listed six recurring heresies in the history of the Church.  They are ancient and they are modern, and they keep coming up again and again and again.  We want to get used to seeing these things, and then we’re not taken off balance by them.  The Jehovah’s Witnesses come knocking at your door and that’s just Arianism, it’s been around for 18 centuries, the same old stuff, nothing new. The Watchtower Society out of Brooklyn didn’t make this stuff up, Arius did, he had first grabs on it; he didn’t have a patent and a printing press so he can’t put his copyright on it.  The point is, they haven’t introduced anything new, nothing that the Church hasn’t discussed for centuries.  That’s what we want to look at, and every one of these heresies bleed off into very practical results.  They either wash out salvation, they wash out knowing God, they just wash out a lot of truth.  We want to keep that in mind. 

 

We’re going to come to the Biblical data and I’ve divided it into three parts.  The first part I’ve entitled “The Two Old Testament Streams of Revelation.”  The next one: “New Testament Christ-for-Yahweh Substitutions in Old Testament Citations,” substitutions where Jesus Christ is substituted for Jehovah when the New Testament authors quote Old Testament passages.  The Old Testament passage will read “Yahweh” or “Jehovah did this.”  When this passage is repeated in the New Testament, it is “The Lord Jesus Christ did….”  So you have Christ substituted for Jehovah in the Old Testament quote; this is deliberately done, deliberately and repetitively done in the New Testament.  Keep in mind, this is monotheistic Judaism, so this is a powerful plain that Jesus Christ is God.  Why, if He isn’t God, are they substituting Him for Jehovah in all these passages?  The third thing is: “New Testament Christ-for-God Substitutions in Historic Roles,” where we also have substitutions in function, in other words, God the Creator does certain things.  In the New Testament the Lord Jesus Christ does those same things, so we have a substitution, often in the same point of works, where He actually shows this, Christ actually does these things, things which any person who read their Old Testament would recognize immediately what this means.  So all this data is what was used for 500 years of debate and argument inside the Church, because it took the Church five centuries to get down and argue about who Jesus Christ was in all the fine details. 

 

I want to start on page 30 by looking at a New Testament passage, 1 Tim. 3:16.  This apparently, though nobody knows for sure, was part of a hymn or some poem that was circulated in the early church in Paul’s day.  Presumably he’s quoting it, maybe the congregation that Timothy pastored knew this passage or something, it’s not in the Bible, but it’s such a prepositional summation of truth about Christ that it presumably either was a creed that was in poetic form, or it was part of a hymn, someone had set this to music.  He concludes 1 Timothy by saying, “And by common confession, great is the mystery of godliness,” the key word in this whole thing is the word “mystery.”  When you see that word, “mystery” in the New Testament, it’s a technical term that usually refers to revelation that completes the answer to a question that the Old Testament asked and never answered.  A “mystery” is not a mystery like a mystery novel, when “mystery” is used in the New Testament it refers to a New Testament new revelation, something that was not revealed in the Old Testament. So this is new New Testament truth.  A lot of New Testament truth isn’t new; it’s just repeated out of the Old Testament.  But when you see the word “mystery” that is new.  “He who was revealed in the flesh, was vindicated in the Spirit, beheld by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory.”  It’s obviously Christ.  Paul says that that Christology, that truth about Jesus Christ is a mystery, it’s something new; it’s something that wasn’t perfectly revealed in the Old Testament.

 

What we want to move to is what led up to that “mystery of godliness.”  That’s what we call the two streams of revelation.  Here’s how these streams look, and now we’ll start looking at some verses.  One stream in the Old Testament, this is all Old Testament now, why are we going to the Old Testament? Which did God reveal first? He’s a good teacher, He didn’t teach lesson 52, He taught lesson 1, lesson 2, lesson 3, lesson 4, lesson 5, then he got to 52, you don’t start with 52, you go back to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.  That’s what we’re doing, going back to these early lessons in the Old Testament and we notice something.  There’s a whole stream of evidences that speak of God’s place with man, in other words, God’s home is with man. 

 

We often think of God’s home as heaven, but where was God’s home in Genesis 2?  What did God do in Genesis 3, after man fell?  He kept him out of the home.  Remember, the first sign of capital punishment, and by the way, the Pope came out against capital punishment, another proof that he never reads the Bible.  Capital punishment is the basis for all civil authority in the Scripture.  This is why it’s in Romans 13, what’s the “sword” in Romans 13.  Genesis 9, what’s the story there?  Capital punishment.  The first capital punishment in Scripture was done not by man, because that didn’t happen until after the flood, it was done by angels.  The angels had lethal weaponry in Genesis 3; they’d kill anybody that came into Eden.  They were guards that were put all around, angelic guards, armed, that were surrounding the Garden of Eden, and no man was to get in there, period.  Off limits! 

 

It reminds me when I was in the Air Force and you go into these command posts, sometimes the Strategic Air Command and other places, and you see this big sign, they always have a big sign there just to warn you.  It always reads: Use of deadly force authorized by the Commander.  That means that people were in side arms and there were bullets in those side arms, and if you walk into that room without clearance and you get shot.  They mean it.  I had one airman one time, he thought he was a smart aleck and he went out where they had nukes on some of the aircraft, and he was supposed to do his duty out there, he was supposed to report to the guard, get clearance and go out on the flight line.  The guard wasn’t there, so he decided I’m too busy, I’m not going to wait for the guard, and he went right on through the gate.  He got about fifty feet inside and all of a sudden he heard WHOOM, and he hit the deck and behind him was this nasty looking police dog and he was turning around looking up the muzzle of a gun pointing right at his face.  That’s what happens because in that area you don’t have these kinds of people floating around your million dollar aircraft with nukes in them, you protect them, it’s off limits. 

 

That’s the way Eden was, Eden was off limits after the fall.  What a picture of the separation of God and man.  Men were not authorized to see God, to walk with Him, or talk with Him period; you’re out of here.  That was God’s home, God’s throne; the water came out from the throne of God, watered the face of the earth.  So the fall ruptures this whole thing.  The fall strikes at this, therefore ever forward in the Old Testament you have this longing, this longing for God to come back and make His home with man.  This is why God’s name, sometimes you see this in the Bible, like this name, which we’ve commented on before, “Immanuel,” it’s a code.  We see it as a name and we often think of it as a popular name, but actually it’s just a code; “im” is the Hebrew word “with”; “el” is God; and “manu” is “us”; “with us is God.”  It [can’t understand word] the home, the longing of the heart to restore this broken fellowship between man and God.

 

So there’s a stream in the Old Testament that looks forward to God’s place with man. We’re going to look at verse after verse; I just want to aim us so we see what we’re going to do.  Then we have a second stream of revelation in the Bible that looks forward to an ideal human ruler, or human king out of David.   You have these two streams.  If you look carefully at those two streams what do they argue for in the person of Jesus Christ?  What is His two natures?  The two streams.  What is one stream? God.  What is the other stream? Man.  Jesus Christ is God; Jesus Christ is man. So the deity and the humanity of Jesus is prevalent in these two historical streams from the Old Testament. 

 

We’re going to look at these streams and at some verses.  If you really want to do a study I’ve listed a lot of the verses in there, there’s plenty more.  Let’s go to Isaiah 52:7, we already know in the Old Testament the Shekinah glory, God’s glory, dwelt in the tabernacle, God’s glory came into Solomon’s temple, but that wasn’t enough, and men knew that.  That was just a faint appearance of God.  But in Isaiah 52:7, this Old Testament verse is very important for many reasons, but here’s one of the key reasons.  This verse is the first time that the word “gospel” occurs in the Bible.  This is the first place you see the word “gospel.”  Remember the rule, when you study the Bible the first occurrence of the Word is the one that gives it the flavor.  So you always want to grab that first occurrence; if you’re looking in a concordance and you see where that word first occurs, chronologically, sometimes you have to adjust it because the books in the Bible aren’t chronologically the same as in the concordance, but if you find the first occurrence, try to saturate your mind with the context, in which that thing was revealed. 

 

This is a prophetic view of Isaiah, and Isaiah 6 gives the context, “Therefore My people shall know My name; therefore in that day I am the one who is speaking, ‘Here I am.’”  What’s “that day,” it’s obviously future, Isaiah is a prophet, he’s looking down the corridors of time, he’s looking toward the future, and he says: “How lovely on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news,” the gospel, now comes the content of what Isaiah visualizes the gospel as being, “Who announces peace and brings good news of happiness, who announces salvation, and says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns!’”  Look at that phrase, “Your God reigns.”  Who’s reigning? God is reigning.  Who reigned in Isaiah’s day?  The kings of the north and south.  David, as a man after God’s own heart as David was, he wasn’t this.  They wouldn’t be looking forward to this if David had satisfied them.  There’s this desire, this passion, to see a day when God Himself will once again reign with men. 

 

Let me put a little spin on this for the 21st century, we are used to seeing our universe as the planet earth as a mere speck in this vast universe, a sort of incidental speck, because all of us have been told in school, every class we’ve had, every book we read, every movie on Star Wars that you go see, that the earth couldn’t possibly be the center of the universe. We don’t know very much, but we know that the earth couldn’t possibly be the center of the universe.  Theologically in the Scripture, where is the center of the action historically?  Where does the incarnation take place?  It doesn’t take place on Venus.  Where did the crucifixion of Christ take place? It didn’t take place on Jupiter.  This is the planet, this is where, theologically is the center of the action.  In the book of Revelation, where does God finally wind up reigning from?  The earth.  So this is that stream of looking forward to God reigning where man is.  God and man were made for fellowship.  It’s a deep and profound thing that’s imbedded from one end of the Scripture to another. 

 

I want to go to some passages that show you how deep that theme became at this period in Israel’s history, this is between 1000 and 700 BC.  Isaiah preached that the good news of the gospel would happen when God came and solved the problem.  In other words, it gets back to good and evil. When that good/evil problem is dealt with, that’s the good news.  Turn to the Psalms; I want to go to a set of the Psalms in the 90’s.  All the Psalms in the 90’s have a common theme. Scholars have referred to these particular Psalms as The Enthronement Psalms.  I want to show you four of them.  These Psalms have a familiar connection to Isaiah 52:7.  These are all enthronement Psalms.  In other words, they’re looking forward and praising God with the idea in mind that He’s not far off, He’s not separated way out away from us, He’s with us and He’s reigning. 

 

Psalm 93:1, “The LORD reigns, He is clothed with majesty; The LORD has clothed and girded Himself with strength; indeed, the world is firmly established, it will not be moved. [2] Thy throne is established from of old; Thou art from everlasting. 

 

Psalm 97:1, how does it begin? Same phrase.  “The LORD reigns; let the earth rejoice; let the man islands” or continents “be glad.  [2] Clouds and thick darkness surround Him, Righteousness and justice are the foundation of His throne. [3] Fire goes before Him and burns up His adversaries round about. [4] His lightnings lit up the world; the earth saw and trembled.”  This is what people looked forward to.  Why did they look forward to this sort of thing?  Again it goes back to a very basic truth.  The point is that the Bible knows that the period in which we live, this period, good and evil, is abnormal; it is not normal.  Your non-Christian friends have a real problem here.  They may laugh at you but they are the ones that are the sad cases, because those poor people are sitting here in a universe in which good and evil coexist forever, always has been around, always will be.  Isn’t that a lovely situation?  Only in the Bible do you have a resolution to this problem.  The poor non-Christian sits there and he has to accept the fact that evil is normal, it’s a normal state of affairs to be killing people, raping people, death, natural disasters, etc., it’s all part of the world, it’s never going to go away, always been here.  What a sick view that is. But that’s the only view these poor people have because there’s no revelation of any resolution to the problem. 

 

This period when God separates the good and evil, that’s when God reigns. These Psalms are nailing this down.  Notice in this particular Psalm it says the Lord reigns, but then look at verse 3 and 4, what’s that talking about?  The destruction of evil.  It was a thing to be rejoicing in.  See why the gospel, when you see it in its depth in the Scripture, is a fierce thing.  It’s not this wimpy please accept Jesus kind of thing, some sick impotent little sounding thing like that, when the gospel is heavy duty stuff here.  The gospel says the universe is going to be destroyed and rebuilt, and there’s a lot of people going to hell, they’re part of the garbage disposal, because when God finishes this abnormal state is no longer going to exist, because it’s abnormal.  He will not tolerate this existence beyond a certain point in time.  That’s when He reigns, God reigns.  He doesn’t reign until then. 

 

Psalm 98, same theme, “O Sing to the LORD a new song.”  When do you see a new song in Scripture?  When something great has happened.  Remember when the Exodus happened, Miriam got out there and she made a new song.  “O Sing to the LORD a new song, for He has done wonderful things, His right hand and His holy arm have gained the victory for Him [2] The LORD has made known His salvation; He has revealed His righteousness in the sight of the nations, [3] He has remembered his lovingkindness and His faithfulness to the house of Israel; all the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God.” Look at verse 4, addressed to the creation, “Shout joyfully to the LORD, all the earth; break forth and sing for joy and sing praises.” [5, “Sing praises to the LORD with the lyre; with the lyre and the sound of melody, [6] with trumpets and the sound of the horn, shout joyfully before the King, the LORD.”]  Verse 7, “Let the sear roar and all it contains, the world and those who dwell in it.  [8] Let the rivers clap their hands; let the mountains sing together for joy, [9] Before the LORD; for He is coming to judge the earth; He will judge the world with righteousness, and the peoples with equity.”  

 

See the hope, see the power of this.  Think of it, the non-Christian mind has never come up with anything like this. The nearest thing was really a rip-off of Christianity, it was called communism.  Communism looked forward to the salvation of society by the dictatorship of the proletariat when all the governments would be thrown down, etc. Communism had a great attraction for people because it promised some kind of relief.  It was en empty promise, it was a phony promise, all it gave was totalitarianism because in the end, what was communism? Salvation by works, and God will not permit salvation by works, either individual works or government programs or all the rest.  When God solves a problem it will be on His terms, on His schedule, with His implementation policies. 

Psalm 99, “The LORD reigns, let the peoples tremble: He is enthroned above the cherubim, let the earth shake! [2] The LORD is great in Zion, and He is exalted above all the peoples. [3, “Let them praise Thy great and awesome name, Holy is He. [4] And the strength of the King loves justice; Thou hast established equity; Thou hast executed justice and righteousness in Jacob. [5] Exalt the LORD our God, and worship at His footstool; Holy is He.”] 

 

I think you get the point.  Imbedded in the Old Testament is this passion to see God once again break out and have fellowship with man, but it’s not a naďve belief because the fall of man is so deeply rooted in these people’s minds they realize that can’t happen, God can’t reign, we can’t have resolution to this problem until something happens. What is it that has to happen?  What has to happen is the separation of the good and the evil.  That has to happen and that is an awful thing.  That is an awful thing to happen!  That’s what these Psalms are talking about, the earth trembling, etc., everything that’s going on. 

 

We want to go further.  We want to look at a second stream and that has to do with a thing we studied, the fact that in the Old Testament God made a series of promises.  We want to talk just a minute about this word [covenant] that we see in the Bible, we want to substitute this word [contract] for that word, and the reason I want to substitute it is because it comes up in every day life, we all know what a mortgage is, we all know what a contract is on your car, a contract on your home, we know that there are certain legal terms, we sign on to this.  When you take a note out at the bank, a contract specifies you will make payment, payment, payment, payment, etc.  In other words, it lays out a pattern of behavior for the two parties.  You get the car, and the bank gets your money, and the dealer gets the money from the bank.  All that happens, it’s all laid out in terms, explicit terms.

 

The interesting thing is that outside of the Bible this doesn’t happen, only in Biblical Christianity do you have a God that makes contracts.  Hinduism doesn’t do this.  Buddha never made a contract.  Confucius doesn’t, Allah doesn’t.  It’s funny why the God of the Bible make contracts.  What does that say?  Only the God of the Bible speaks.  If I make a contract it means I reveal something. That’s proof right there that only the God of the Scripture speaks.  Where are the other gods words, where are their contracts, where are their signatures?  God signed one contract, the Noahic Covenant; we have it optically every time it rains, right in the sky.  What is that? The rainbow is a physical manifestation using water droplets of a certain diameter, to show us physically with refracted light what His throne look like, because the first rainbow isn’t from the rain.  The first rainbow in Scripture, the primary rainbow is the bow around the throne that Ezekiel sees, and is seen in the book of Revelation.  What we call a rainbow is a secondary phenomenon that reflects the glory of the throne. That’s what it’s there for.  It’s His signature.  Every time He does a rainbow—I signed, this is Me, I’m talking to you.

 

In the Old Testament the Davidic Covenant was an extension of the Abrahamic Covenant that promised that David’s genes, through David there would be the Messiah, and He would be the perfect human leader.  The desire of all the great leaders of history would be fulfilled in His Messianic character.  Psalm 89 is dedicated to the Davidic Covenant.  In Psalm 89:4, at the beginning of the Psalm, and verse 36 toward the end of the Psalm, reference is made to that contract.  Notice Psalm 89:3-4, “I have made a covenant with My chosen; I have sworn to David My servant, [4] I will establish your seed forever, and build up your throne to all generations.” You will always have a son who will reign forever and ever.   Verses 35, “Once I have sworn by My holiness; I will not lie to David. [36] His descendants shall endure forever, and his throne as the sun before Me. [37] It shall be established forever like the moon, and the witness in the sky is faithful.”  So God has said I have this covenant, this contract.

 

On one hand God is going to come back and reign with man; on the other hand there’s going to be this ideal human leader.  Turn to Prov. 30 and we’re going to look at some verses that hint that these two lines, these two streams of revelation that we’ve talked about, the God stream and the man stream, that those two streams converge in history.  There’s a power to the Old Testament that looks forward to this, and you get these little hints.  These hints would seem to be nonsense were it not for the fact we know God is nonsensical, so why do we have these verses that sound this way. 

 

Prov. 30:4, it’s talking about God, obviously, it says: “Who has ascended into heaven and descended? Who has gathered the wind in His fists? Who has wrapped the waters in His garment? Who has established all the ends of the earth?” This is asking the same questions God asked Job to show the incomprehensibility of God.  Now look at this one, think about this, monotheistic Jews, “What is His name or His son’s name? Surely you know!” 

 

If you look at the quote on the bottom of page 31, Arnold Fruchtenbaum, Hebrew Christian scholar, personal friend of mine, writes about it and he says this: “When we look at the events described in these four questions, it is obvious that only one person could possibly do all those things: God Himself…. We first had four questions asking who did these great things. The answer was: God did all those things.  The fifth question was: What is God’s name? The answer: YHVH, the great I AM is His name…. The sixth question is: ‘What is his son’s name, if you know?’  The obvious meaning here is that this great God, the great I AM, has a Son…. No one knew the name of the Son of God throughout Old Testament Judaism. But Old Testament Judaism did know that God had a son.”  It’s a striking passage.

 

We want to look at some more striking passages.  Turn to one that is intriguing, you get this in Christmas hymns, but it’s a carefully constructed verse.  Again, why are we looking at these verses?  Because these verses hint that the two streams of revelation, two streams of prophecy that God is going to be with man and there’s going to be an ideal human leader, these two streams converge, they don’t meet in the Old Testament, they converge. 

 

In Isaiah 9 notice the care with which these sentences are structured.  Notice how carefully they are put together.  Isaiah 9:6, “For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us; and the government will rest on His shoulders; and His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of peace.”  Look at that, “a child is born,” think about that.  “A child is born!”  Is that a human or God?  It’s human, “a child is born.”  But then you look at the list of His names and included in the list of His names is the term “Mighty God.”  What has happened here is that this term “Mighty God” has been interpreted down through history by heretics as just merely meaning a heroic deity, a divine figure kind of thing, not necessarily literally God.  Again, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, if you ever pull this out they’re going to try to pin your ears back because they’re going to say that this just means “mighty God,” it doesn’t mean God God, it just means a heroic God.  Unfortunately for the Jehovah’s Witnesses one of the principles of reading Scripture is let the context interpret the term.  If you look in the concordance and you check this word out, “Mighty God,” and you ask yourself, where is the nearest location where this word is used again, it’s the next chapter.  So turn to Isaiah 10:21.  Who do you suppose this is? 

 

Isaiah 10:21, talking about the future, “A remnant will return, the remnant of Jacob,” will return to whom? “A remnant will return, the remnant of Jacob, to the mighty God.”  Who did they leave? Jehovah.  You can’t return to somebody you didn’t leave, so Isaiah 10:21 is a contextual support for Isaiah 9 referring to full deity. So this “child is born”… “will be called Mighty God.”

 

There are other passages which I have listed on page 32 and you can go through those, but the most important verse, most important chapter, most important section of the Old Testament, according to the New Testament, is Psalm 110.  On page 32 I give all the New Testament references to Psalm 110, showing you that the Holy Spirit in the New Testament utilizes Psalm 110 an awful lot.  [Matt. 22:41-45; Mark 12:35-37; Luke 20:41-44; Acts 2:34-35; Heb. 1:13; 10:12-13.] 

 

Let’s turn to Psalm 110 and look at this one.  Why are we looking at it? Because we are looking at seeing a convergence of the humanity and the deity in the Old Testament.  Who is writing this Psalm?  David.  See the title, in the Hebrew text that’s part of the text.  It’s not a title, the English translators put it at the top, if you study the Hebrew, verse 1 reads “A Psalm of David.”  That is the first verse, not the title.  So David is writing this Psalm.  What does David say?  “The LORD,” it’s capitalized in the English translation, that’s what name for God?  Yahweh, Jehovah.  “Jehovah says to my Lord: Sit at My right hand, until I make Thine enemies a footstool for Thy feet.”  Let’s back up a minute, what does 1 mean?  Jehovah says to David’s Lord… well if David has a Lord he’s got to be above David.  But David was the supreme person in the land, so who is David’s Lord that Jehovah says “Sit at My right hand?” 

 

See how this opens up the possibility for a complexity in the Godhead, this opens up the idea that the Old Testament is not a solitary lone monotheistic belief, there’s multiplicity in there.  Enough said. We’ve studied the two streams, that’s what we just got done doing.  We said that the stream of verses in the Old Testament looking forward to God coming to be with man, there’s a stream talking about the ideal ruler of man being of the lineage of David, and the convergence of these two.  By the way, Psalm 110 was one of the first David Psalms, probably the only Davidic Psalm, to look forward beyond David.  So it’s clear that the Holy Spirit at this point in David’s life had already convinced him that he wasn’t the Messiah, there was one to come after David who would be the ultimate Messiah, and it’s this mysterious figure who’s the Lord, who the LORD talks to the Lord.  That’s the One who’s going to be the Messiah. 

 

Now we come to the second series of evidences and the quickest way of looking at this is to look on the chart on page 34.  You can look all these verses up yourself, but we’ll look at some of them because they’re pretty powerful.  Let’s take those at the bottom of the chart, Rev. 1:8; 2:8, 22:13, and… [blank spot]  look at this expression that occurs here. 

 

NT Location of Citation          OT Passage Cited            Christ-for Yahweh Substitution

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Acts 2:17-21, 33, 38, 39              Joel 2:28-32                        Christ/Yahweh pours out the Spirit

                                                                                          Christ/Yahweh called upon by men

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1 Corinthians 10:0                      Numbers 21:5-6                  Lord (Jesus) Yahweh test by rebellious people

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Ephesians 4:7-11                        Psalm 68:18                        Christ/Yahweh descended and arose

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Philippians 2:9-11                       Isaiah 45:23                        Christ/Yahweh object of loathing

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Hebrews 1:8a, 10-12                  Psalm 102:25-27                  Christ/Yahweh the immutable Creator

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Revelation 1:8; 2:8; 22:13            Isaiah 44:6; 48:12                Christ/Yahweh the Alpha and Omega, the

                                                                                          Beginning and the end of history

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Table 1 – Six sample Old Testament citations and allusions in the New Testament showing the apostolic method of substituting Christ for Yahweh in crucial passages.

 

Isaiah 44:6, we won’t bother with Isaiah 48:12, it’s an identical type thing; hold that place and turn to Rev. 1:8.  Isaiah 44:6 says, and notice Isaiah is talking, “Thus says the LORD,” Jehovah, “the King of Israel and his Redeemer, the LORD of hosts,” he says “I am the first and I am the last, and there is no God besides Me.” How much more grammatical power can you pack in a verse to teach full deity here?  “I am the first and I am the last, and there is no God but Me.”  That’s the context of this statement.  The word “first and last” translated in Greek as “alpha and omega.”  It’s like A and Z, the first of the alphabet and the last of the alphabet.  The last Greek letter is Omega; the first Greek letter is Alpha. 

 

Now if we look at Rev. 1:8, look at the context.  “‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, The Almighty.”  You could say, well maybe that’s the Father speaking, maybe that’s not the Son.  Turn to Rev. 2:8, one of the letters to the churches.  Who is talking to John and giving him the content of these letters.  It’s Jesus Christ.  Jesus Christ is conducting an inspection of the churches, this is like an IG in the military, it’s an inspection report and the Lord is the commander, and He’s going through the churches and He’s telling him here’s what’s right and here’s what’s wrong.  It’s an on scene report of the state of the church and He’s doing it in these representative churches.  So it’s clearly the Lord Jesus that’s speaking this.  But what does he use as a title in verse 8?  He says “…the first and the last,” now the proof that this isn’t the Father is look at the rest of the sentence, I am “the first and the last, who was dead, and has come to life,” did the Father ever die and come to life.  So here Jesus Christ appropriates for Himself a title which in the Old Testament context refers to God and God alone.  What do you do with this?  Is this blasphemy or is God Jesus Christ?  See what’s happening here.

 

The chart shows you all the instances of this.  Turn to Phil. 2:9-11 because that one is often used, very frequently in our Christian work, and sometimes we don’t think about it because we’re so busy trying to think what does that mean to me as a Christian and that’s fine, but we don’t think about the foundation underneath the verse.  “Therefore also God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him” the Son, Christ, “the name which is above every name, [10] that at the name of” who, the Father or at the name of Jesus? “…at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those who are in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth, [11] and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” 

Look at verse 10, if you have a study Bible there’s a reference in there, and that reference keys you over to Isaiah 45:23, “I have sworn by Myself,” verse 22, context, who’s talking, “For I am God, and there is no other. [23] “I have sworn by Myself, the word has gone forth from My mouth in righteousness and will not turn back, that to Me every knee will bow, every tongue will swear allegiance.”  Why is that verse ripped out of this Old Testament context and applied to the Lord Jesus Christ if Jesus Christ isn’t God? 

 

Do you see what I’m saying?  You’re trapped here, we have to confess that Jesus Christ is God, or we have to say we’ve got a bad case of blasphemy going on here in the way these Old Testament quotes are cited for the Lord Jesus and the New Testament writers think nothing whatsoever of plugging in the Lord Jesus’ name in place of Jehovah.  See that, the substitution of the Lord Jesus Christ in a verse that in the Old Testament clearly refers to God and God alone. 

 

I don’t know how many times I have heard in my Christian life, well, the Bible doesn’t really say that Jesus is God.  I don’t know how much clearer we can get here, when you have Jews who are monotheists, who read the Old Testament and see all this stuff, and you have the substitution… what is this?  It’s theological promiscuity going on here or Jesus Christ is who He claims to be.  So it’s simply not true that the New Testament doesn’t say that Jesus is God. 

 

We could cite all those passages in that table, but we want to go one step further and look at the third category of evidence. We’ve exhausted category one, we’ve looked at category two, now we’re going to come down where the Lord Jesus Christ functionally does the things that God and God alone did in the Old Testament. 

 

Follow with me on the notes on page 34, I want to cover a few things, we’ll read through the notes, you can look up the verses.  “Very similar to the second category of Biblical data about the hypostatic union is the third remaining category.  New Testament authors show their apprehension of Christ’s full deity by unashamedly and courageously reporting Christ in roles which God alone could perform.  John says that Christ is the Creator of all things (John 1:3).  Paul claims He is the ‘firstborn of all creation,’” and I put that in there because this is another one that the Jehovah’s Witnesses will try to pin you back on.  You’ll quote Colossians, [they’ll say] oh well, that’s not really claiming that because the firstborn of all creation, in other words He was the first of the creation. 

 

So let’s look carefully, “He is the ‘firstborn of all creation’ which refers not to the first created here, as the Jehovah’s Witnesses try to claim (who ignore the fact that had Paul wanted to say that he would have used the term ‘protoktistos’ that means the first created),” there’s a Greek word that says that, but he didn’t use that word, he used the word “first-born” basically.  It refers to “the first in rank (cf. Psalm 8 9:27), i.e., Christ is heir of the universe.”  It’s meaning the first in rank, so it simply means Christ is Lord; it’s just another way of saying He’s Lord of the universe.

 

Now this is a crucial one, look at this one.  “Moreover, Christ is said to forgive sins (not merely to pronounce forgiveness of sins as a priest would do),” do you see the difference?  What does a priest do?  Does he forgive sins or does he pronounce in the name of God that they are forgiven?  He pronounces that they are forgiven in the name of God.  Why can’t the priest forgive sins?  Because you didn’t sin against the priest.  Who only can forgive sin?  The One that you’ve sinned against, which is God.  If you go over and cream somebody and they have a brother and the brother says I forgive you, not quite, you didn’t offend that brother, you hurt the other person, that’s the person who has to forgive you.  The only person that forgives is the person that’s been hurt.  Who’s been hurt by sin?  God.  So who alone can forgive?  And the Jews knew this, read the context when Jesus gets in these situations, He says I forgive you of your sin, and they said excuse me, what did this guy say?  Only God can forgive sin.  Right! Guess what that means. 

 

So this is something powerful, and it happens almost insidiously in the New Testament that you read through it and never catch it, but if you read carefully the New Testament text and visualize yourself, visualize how you’d paint this scene.  Here these people are, and here’s this Jesus character, and He says I forgive you of sin.  Now can you imagine how stupid that looks if Jesus wasn’t God.  That’s one of the powerful evidences.

 

“… an act which once prompted Jewish onlookers to remark, ‘Who can forgive sins but one, Even God?’ (Mark 2:5-7).  Only the one offended can do the forgiving.  To forgive sins, therefore, Christ was identifying Himself with Yahweh Who was the One offended.  Christ identified His teaching with God’s in contrast to the prophets to whom the Word of God only sporadically came (cf. Isaiah 40:8; Mark 13:31; John 7:16.).  Furthermore, at times Jesus indicated He was omniscient (John 8:48), omnipotent (Matt. 8:23-27 cf. Psalm 89:9) omnipresent (John 3:13) and eternal (John 8:58).”

 

John’s Gospel is a great exercise for this.  If you read through John’s Gospel, John is so insightful and he has such literary artistry at how he does this.  He has Jesus do these little things, he reports, and then he goes on with the verse, and he barely leaves you with a clause, and then he goes right on, and you tend to read John’s Gospel too fast because it’s easy to read.  But what you don’t see is these bombshells that he’s putting in there, boom, boom, boom all the time in these verses.  The greatest one I can think of in the Garden of Gethsemane, here come the temple police, tough guys, out to arrest the Lord Jesus Christ, and he says “I AM” and they all fall to the ground.  Then John says this happened and that happened and he goes right on, and these guys don’t even have time to pick themselves up and John’s talking about something else.  It happens so fast to you.  Observe the text.  The Gospel writers are very careful guys; under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit they set this out very nicely.  So Christ is substituted for God.

 

“In addition, Jesus’ free use of the very intimate Old Testament title for God, ‘I AM,’ is expressed in the Greek… as ego eimi (Exod. 3:14) is a strong claim.” And I give you all the references there.  [“Examples of Jesus’ claiming this title for Himself are John 8:58 and 18:5-6.  In the same vein, when Jesus was confronted with a would-be worshiper,] He unlike other Biblical monotheists, permitted the worship to occur with no rebuke,” we haven’t time to point that out, I refer you to the verses [Luke 5:8; John 20:28 cf. Acts 14:11-15; Rev. 19:10; 22:8-9].  Can you remember in the New Testament, sometimes angels would appear to believers, and the believers would start to worship, and what did the angels always do?  Don’t worship me, get up, don’t worship me.  That’s the angel’s response.  But the Lord Jesus allows it.  So what do we do with that one? 

 

In the next paragraph I challenge you to read those five verses.  “Finally, in at least three, and perhaps five, passages in the New Testament, Jesus is very clearly and unambiguously called God.”  John 1:1, Titus 2:13, 1 John 5:20, those are the three biggies.  In Titus 2:13 He is both God and Savior, and the construction is the Granville Sharp rule, if you have an article plus a noun and a noun, and that all refers to the one article for those two nouns, then it’s the same person.  When you read that construction in Titus 2:13, He is God and He is Savior, same person, not two, one, one article.  John 5:20 calls Jesus Christ God in a context where he’s denying all other gods.  The other two verses are somewhat problematic, I believe they do teach that Jesus Christ is God, in Romans 9:5 and Heb. 1:8, it just that it’s more convoluted to argue for that and defend it against a determined opponent. 

 

That’s the data, next week we’ll deal with what the Church did with this to begin to formulate the doctrine of the person of the Lord Jesus Christ.  All this doctrine, this data that’s imbedded in the text will be used, and there’ll be fights that go on for centuries over this text or that text or another text, until finally the Church reaches a point when it has a very clear idea of the Lord Jesus Christ. 

 

---------------------------

 

We have time for some questions.  Question asked: Clough replies:  Good question, because if we aren’t clear here then we can’t understand imputed righteousness and inherent righteousness either, because they’re analogues.  The question is that she would like some more clarification about the difference between imputed sin and inherent sin.  We said Jesus Christ had to be virgin born to avoid three categories of sin.  The reason He had to be free of sin is because He had to be the sinless One who atoned for sin; if He wasn’t sinless then He could only atone for His own sin, not ours.  The Lord Jesus Christ had to somehow become the Lamb without spot or blemish.  How do you do that?  We say He did it through the virgin birth.  The virgin birth is so elaborately designed and choreographed that it avoids these three issues. 

 

In one sense it avoids personal sin, in the sense that the Lord Jesus came into the world as a perfect person and never once sinned in His personal life.  Adam came into the world as a perfect person and did sin.  So Adam sinned and Jesus didn’t.  That was their choice. That’s a clear act of sin; we all know that one, that theology we’ve got down great.  Personal sin—everybody knows what that is. 

 

Imputed sin and inherent sin also operate and it’s because of those that the plan of salvation is designed the way it’s designed.  Imputed sin, let’s think about the word “impute.”  It’s nothing more than an old-fashioned word that means to value or credit.  When an accountant credits in a column, instead of a debit they credit, when you’re buying stock in Company X and you’re sitting there, gee, how much is this stock worth for this company, you look at the balance sheet and the income statement and you wonder, well, I don’t know, how much per share is this company worth.  What you’re doing is you’re imputing value to the company; you’re trying to compute in your head what this thing is.  Let’s take it down to an every day situation.  When you go the grocery store to buy food, and you’ve got a choice between this product and that product, you’re imputing, you’re evaluating whether you’re going to buy this or whether you’re going to buy that.  Is that package worth 1.53 or can I get a better deal?  All those calculations you make when you buy things, or are thinking of buying things, that is imputing, that’s the experience of imputing, crediting. 

 

God credits, He also does something analogous to the way we buy groceries, except the difference is that He’s omniscient and when He evaluates His evaluation is perfect, but our evaluations aren’t.  You may that nice hunk of broccoli in the grocery store and get home and there’s a big fat worm in it, so you didn’t evaluate that one right, if I’d known that I wouldn’t have paid that for it, because we are imperfect evaluators.  So our evaluations are always imperfect.  God’s evaluation is always perfect.  So what God says is that he visualizes the human race in Adam, corporately, the whole shebang, all men, all woman, all babies, all children, everybody “in Adam,” corporately.  We said that you see that corporate nature of the human race in passages like Hebrews where it talks about Levi being in the loins of Abraham, etc. 

 

Here may be an illustration from contemporary politics that would show this corporateness.  The President of the United States authorized a missile attack on Bin Laden’s hideaway in Afghanistan, back a month or two ago.  That was an act where you could argue was just done in the White House.  But Bin Laden who is the object of the attack, one of the greatest and wealthiest terrorists on the face of this earth, in my opinion a lot more dangerous that Y2K, he takes that as something done by all the people in the United States.  Therefore, in his eyes he has a right to kill any of you, me, terrorize us, bomb us, kidnap our children or anything, because although Mr. Clinton signed the strike order, he did it in the name of the United States of America.  Therefore, corporately we share what went on in that attack, in that assault.  That’s easy to see.

 

So it’s similar, when Adam sinned, God credited all of us collectively in Adam.  You say that’s unfair, if I’d been in the Garden of Eden I wouldn’t have done it.  Bologna!  You’d have done the same thing.  The point is that Adam acted as our representative before God, and God evaluated Adam as a rotten thing, imputed sin.  That’s what imputed sin is.  Romans 1 talks about that.  So all the human race is evaluated as sinning in Adam.  Sometimes it’s called original sin, but I don’t like that because that tends to smack of some Roman Catholic anthropology theology and I just prefer the term imputed sin.  God imputed sin to all of us because of our representative.

 

You can say that’s unfair, but you see, it’s good that it happened that way, because guess what else happens?  In Romans Paul argues the doctrine of imputation backwards: just as God imputed Adam’s sin to all of us, guess what He also does?  He imputes the perfect obedience of the Lord Jesus Christ to all those who are going to be “in Christ.”  Isn’t that wonderful!  And it’s independently, just as our personal sin is kind of separate from Adam’s sin, and yet it’s sort of part of it all, so our personal righteousness isn’t what gains us imputed righteousness.  What gains us imputed righteousness is our position in the Lord Jesus Christ, and His perfect work is credited to our account by God the Father.  That is an amazing thing.  Paul builds on that in Rom. 5, a very difficult passage, where this happens. So that’s imputed sin, and it’s answered by imputed righteousness through Christ.  In that case, Adam and Christ are very similar.  One is the head of all the human race, the other is the head of all the regenerate human beings.  That’s imputed sin.

 

Let’s move to inherent sin.  Maybe that’s a bad term, we might call it, inherited sin, because inherent sin has to do, not with a legal valuation, nor does it have to do with the individual acts that we do, personal sin.  Inherent sin refers to that insidious power that we all experience as our flesh that pulls us down.  It’s that which without regeneration we are called “dead in our trespasses and sins.”  It’s the spiritual death that reigns in our souls, from which there is no escape, apart from regeneration, the giving of the new nature, and the impartation of that new nature. 

The difference between imputed sin and inherent sin is like this: imputed sin is credited immediately to our account; imputed sin leaps directly from Adam to you, and from Adam to me, independently of what my father did, my grandfather did, my great-grandfather did, Japheth, Noah, all the way back to Adam, it’s not talking about that. It’s leapfrogging; imputed sin is, from Adam, boom, to me.  I’m in Adam, boom, I’m credited for it.  Inherent sin, on the other hand, is transmitted, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, down through time.  If imputed sin is a legal concept or evaluation kind of thing, like you use in a grocery store when you’re buying things, then inherent sin is energy, or fatigue, spiritual fatigue that brings me down, that apart from the regenerating power of the Lord Jesus I cannot meet temptations, I fall.  It’s what drags us down. 

 

That’s inherent sin.  We are inherently sinners.  We are dead in our trespasses and sins.  So not only are we credited as sinners because of our union with Adam, but we are also sinners from our birth.  That’s David, in Psalm 51 when he confesses his adultery and murder, David goes back and he confesses very deeply.  It’s very interesting, that confession Psalm, we studied that, and you read Psalm 51 in light of the narrative of what David had done, it strikes you as very un-modern and un-psychological, because he says “Against Thee, and Thee only, have I sinned,” as though what he did to Bathsheba and her husband Uriah is almost incidental.  The way to interpret that isn’t that David’s making that incidental, he was very aware of it.  It’s rather that by contrast what he did before God was a thousand times worse than what he did to Bathsheba and Uriah.  That’s the nature of Psalm 51, confession of sin.  So he confesses “against Thee, and Thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in Thy sight,” and then he says and I am a sinner from my mother’s womb.  Now what does he mean by that?  It means that he not only recognizes that he personally sinned, category three, but he recognizes that he had inherent sin, all of his life, category two. 

 

Three categories of sin: personal sin, inherent sin and imputed sin.  It’s to circumvent all three of those that God invented this neat method of getting a member of the human race into existence so He’d be genuine humanity, yet He would escape the three categories of sin.  It’s quite a maneuver, you talk about a chess game, you figure this one out.  The plan of salvation is perfectly executed, designed from eternity past, designed billions of years before anybody ever sinned. God created Adam so he would be redeemable; that’s what Paul says.  In other words, before Adam was even created, he was created because God knew that he would sin, and God wanted to save him.  So God even made him in his creation this way.  This is why He took woman out of the side of man?  Why did He go through that little story?  Isn’t that just a cute little poetic story?  NO, it’s not just a cute little poetic story; woman was taken out of Adam so she could be save-able.  If Eve was an independent creation, and Adam sinned, she wasn’t in Adam, or if she sinned and he didn’t, anything that happened over here doesn’t have a thing to do with her.  So by taking her out of the side of Adam, she too is derivative of Adam, and therefore she’s part of Adam.       

 

So all of this gets involved but it shows you that you dare not come into the Scripture at sixty-five miles an hour with a cafeteria approach, I want this and I don’t want that, I want this but not that, this looks good but I don’t think that’s great, and just zip on through.  No, you don’t do that, because all these are details and they all fit together.  We may not know how they all fit together but they all fit together somehow, and we can at least see bits and pieces of this elaborate, magnificent plan of salvation that God has designed.

 

That’s the three: inherent sin comes down through and it’s more like energy and fatigue; imputed sin is an utterly different idea, it’s the legality, the evaluation and it’s immediately credited to us by virtue of our position in Adam. 

 

Question asked: Clough replies:  Let me run through that again, and let me caution you on what is of the Word and what is speculation.  We know in Scripture that somehow the imputed idea, not inherent, I’m talking about imputed, comes through the man, and we get that out of Hebrews 7 and these passages that speak of the sons and their father, and what the father does the sons reap.  Inherent sin is transmitted biologically, it’s a spiritual death, but it’s wrapped up in the imagery of the Bible with the flesh, and it seems to be transmitted biologically.  David, in Psalm 51, I was a sinner from my mother’s womb, so he’s inheriting the process. 

 

Eve is called the mother of all life; man is never called that.  She is said to be one woman whose “seed” will be that which conquers Satan.  It’s not Adam’s seed, it’s Eve’s seed.  And that is a strikingly strange passage, it’s a very awkward thing to say, because the word “seed” if you look in the Greek translation of the Old Testament is translated by “sperm.”  It just doesn’t fit.  So when you see these verses like that, they just kind of BAM, they just boom, they don’t fit right, you have to back up and say wait a minute, the Holy Spirit knew what He was doing when He picked this vocabulary, what is He trying to tell me here?  Why is He using male sexual imagery for the woman?  What’s this all about here?  We infer the idea that the woman’s egg, her ovum, is free of the contamination of sin is a speculation of Dr. Custance.

 

All Christian scholars don’t agree because they think that it’s okay because the virgin birth, the Holy Spirit interrupted the process and miraculously did it, but I think that it has merit, for this reason.  The Holy Spirit could have eliminated... if her ovum was contaminated by sin He could have certainly worked it out but it seems that it’s more clever of God to have set up the creation with this doorway, let’s put it this way, like a door, so that He could walk through that door without jerking around, changing the DNA structure, whatever it is that’s contaminating our DNA, and making us all die, that He has this biological entryway. 

 

What Custance’s case is that these Scriptures that speak of this odd thing that’s going on, and then he takes a physiological fact that the germ seed, or the stem cells, that aren’t differentiated, that come out of the sperm and the egg, that these cells are passed on identically from generation to generation to generation to generation, and they’re different, they’re just simply different from the body cells that are all specialized.  So he looks at the sperm which can’t live, it’s stripped of a lot of things that the ovum has, the ovum can live and the sperm doesn’t have the viability of it, so what Custance has argued is that he thinks that when Eve ate and Adam ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, more happened than just symbolism.  He believes that there was a toxin in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and that it was absorbed into their bodies at the point that they ate, so that this toxin went to work, and whatever it is, it biologically contaminated everything except the ovum, and that this is passed from mother to daughter, from mother to daughter, mother to daughter.  The hint that there’s this doorway, this strange thing about women in the Scripture is, if you look at the Scripture there’s constant attack on this point.

 

For example, in Genesis 6 there’s a strange passage that plagues Bible scholars.  What the heck was the sons of God doing with the daughters of men?  I’m sorry but people try to make that the godly seed and the ungodly seed, but it just doesn’t work because the Hebrew text is clearly saying these are divine beings, these are angelic beings that were mating with human females.  Why would they have done that?  Why don’t you have female angels mating with male human beings, why do you have this funny gender thing going on?  It’s very conceivable that what that was is a Satanic attack.  If there could be genetic affects of angelic intercourse that destroyed that ovum, so it wasn’t a pure ovum any more, it was contaminated, biological engineering, if that had been successful, Satan would have been successful in stopping and shutting down the door and the human race would no longer be save-able. 

 

What in fact God did, He brought a destruction of the entire earth because of this thing. Whatever this thing was that was going on, God said that is going to stop.  Not only did God say it was going to stop, but in the book of Jude He had a special sentence passed on the angels who transgressed, and they’re in a special place in hell called Tartarus.  It’s not just hell like everything else, they are confined to a special place because of whatever it was that they were doing back then in Noah’s day.  It’s a strange thing, we’re not given much information on it, so all this is speculation.  It just, to me, seems to fit the way God works, and it pulls together some of these passages.  I would not stake my theological life on this.  I would just simply say that I think it’s a godly speculation worthy of our interest, and I think this is shown also in Jewish tradition by the desire of the Jewish women, whom I presume, at least Arnold thinks this but I’ve never developed it to find out where the historical confirmation is, of the desire to be the mother of the Messiah, that kind of hidden tradition. 

 

It all seems to be there, and Eve is called the mother of all life. Why?  Why is she called the mother of all life?  It’s kind of convoluted but that’s the best I can do is speculation.  If you really want to get into the biology and the physiology and the anatomy, he has a 450 page book called The Seed of the Woman, and he goes into all the biology and all the experiments that have been done in this area.  He’s not flippant about this.  Arthur Custance has the background; he was a physiologist in Canada for the Canadian military that devised a lot of the counters to torture of human beings, because the communists had these elaborate ways of torturing people.  It was Arthur Custance who studied those systems of torture to find out why the human body would react, why could you torture people and get them to commit to these things, horrible things that Custance had to deal with.  So he’s very, very schooled in details of human anatomy, he’s not an amateur, he’s a PhD in is field. 

 

Next week we’ll move on to the hypostatic union doctrine and if you haven’t read some of those verses in the notes, I really hope you will.  Just skim some of them, particularly those five verses, Titus 2:13, John 1, you’ll want those in your head as we get into this doctrine.