Hebrews Lesson 85
April 12, 2007
NKJ 1 Corinthians 10:13 No temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to man; but
God is faithful, who will not allow
you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also
make the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it.
In our study of Hebrews 7 we have
come down to the last three verses in the chapter which brings up a very
interesting theological debate that has gone on down through the
centuries. Primarily we ought to just look at 8, 9, and 10. In this
case…
NKJ Hebrews 7:8 Here mortal men receive tithes, but there he receives them, of whom it is witnessed that he lives.
Here is the key verse…
NKJ Hebrews 7:9 Even Levi, who receives tithes, paid tithes through Abraham, so to
speak,
NKJ Hebrews 7:10 for he was still in the loins of his father when
Melchizedek met him.
That (father) would be
Abraham.
Now the issue here is how we
understand this phrase, “He was still in the loins of
his father Abraham.” In one sense this is taken by a lot of people
rather literally that through the progenitor all the descendents are literally,
fully, actually within them seminally. That is the position that is
taught. That is the correct term for it - seminalism. There
are two views that theologians have developed for understanding the
relationship of the members of the human race to Abraham. One is a seminal
relationship which is purely physical. The other
is federal – that Adam is our federal head. Those two positions we
are not getting into yet because they are also related to two other
positions. One is called creationism and the other Traducianism. That
has to do with the origin of the soul.
These two issues and 4 positions are
all related. Now down through the ages theologians have tended to chose sides – one or the other. I am of the
opinion (because there is a lot of Scripture you can go to to
support both) that in some senses they are all true. We are going to work
through that in the next few weeks as we go through this to try understand the
ways in which the seminal position is true and the ways in which the federal
position are true and the ways in which the creationist view is true and the
way the traducianist position is true. The
bottom line is that you have certain aspects of the human being that are passed
down physically through procreation. And you have other aspects
which are immaterial. The soul is immaterial. It is important
to understand the distinction here as well as the influence of external
philosophy on this whole debate because that does have a particular and
significant role. We’ll get into that maybe a little bit tonight.
So let’s start off where we were
last time to pick up the definitions. There are two views on the origin of the
soul.
As a matter of fact, I brought with
me tonight the January-February 2007 issue of Israel My Glory. In the January-February issue and then again
in the March-April issue there are two parts actually of a series on the
morality of God under the heading “The Foundations of Faith” by Dr. Reynold Showers. Dr. Showers has his doctorate from
Dallas Seminary. I have read a number of his books over the years and they are
very well done. He is a very meticulous researcher- thinker. His
theology is very sound in most areas. He began in the January-February edition
in part 9 of this series on this great controversy on the origin of the
soul. It is a two-page article on pages 36 and 37. He gives an introduction,
as I did last time. I talked about how this debate as to the origin of the
soul relates to and is usually correlated to the abortion controversy. He
takes the first page to deal with that. Then he takes (and each page has
three columns as you can maybe see) 1-2/3 columns to introduce the issue of the
origin of the soul and that first theory that I dealt with last week briefly on
the preexistence theory of the soul which comes out of
a Greek philosophical background - mostly a platonic background. The view
is consistent with reincarnation. It did have a slight acceptance among
some in the early church, but it was negligible. Then he gave basically
one column (because it is about 70% of one column and 40% of another column) to
the creationist view. I felt when I read that that he just didn’t
understand the theory in the best articulation and he didn’t present it
honestly and accurately. He ignored a tremendous amount of data that has been
utilized over the centuries.
I find this to be typical of
conservative evangelicals ever since Roe v. Wade in 1973. There were at
the time of Roe v. Wade (I know that Bruce Walkie who
was the chairman of the Old Testament Department of Dallas Seminary did a
flip-flop. Bruce has done flip-flops on I don’t know how many of his
theologies over the years, but he was dispensational back then. He is
covenant reformed now. He changed a lot of positions. He is a great
grammarian, but he is not the best theologian) a lot of theologians who
did that. There were a lot of people who did that between the 60’s and the
70’s because they assumed that a creationist position on the origin of the soul
– that is that God directly creates and simultaneously imparts the soul
to each baby at birth and that it comes through that initial breathe. A
lot of people took that and thought it automatically meant that abortion was
legitimate. They knew that historically the church had always been against
abortion despite the position. But, they just automatically assumed
that. Still today you will run into many people who think that it is an
automatic, necessary conclusion from a creationist position. It is not an
automatic, necessary conclusion. In fact I think it is an inconsistent
conclusion from a creationist position. A creationist position I think is
what the Scriptures clearly teach. But to go to the next step to say that it
means that all abortion is okay is a total leap because of the fact that other aspects of Scripture. We will get into that as we go
through this. I just want to point that out.
He does a good job of pointing out
the 3 basic questions that have to be addressed if you are going to handle or
present a consistent view of the creationist position.
He writes…
First, it does not explain the biblical teaching that all human beings
sinned in Adam. Second (he says, and we will deal with each of these.) the
creation theory there is no explanation of the sinful nature of all human
beings from the time of their conception. (It does. That has been clearly
articulated by numerous theologians. He doesn’t like it) Third the
creation theory finds it difficult to explain the fact that children often
inherit the intellect and character of their parents.
That is explained also. We will
deal with each one of those. I just found it odd that when you get into
the next issue he uses all 6 columns and three pages to present the Traducianist view. He only presents a column to
present the creationist view - 90% of that is the flaws that he sees with the
creation view. So, he doesn’t do an adequate job of presenting it.
Well, we have used the two key terms
– Traducianism and creationism. We will
review them again for you.
Traducianism is from the Latin word traducere which means to transfer. It is the view in theology
that teaches that both the material body and the immaterial soul are
transmitted through physical procreation. Actually I shouldn’t have
immaterial soul there even though later theologians up into the Reformation
period up into the present would try to treat the soul immaterially. The
reality is that this view was originated by Tertullian
in the second to third century (AD). Tertullian understood the
soul to be material. So one of the major weaknesses with the Traducianist view which has not been
explained is how the immaterial get transmitted by the material. That
is not particularly dealt with along with another number of important
scriptural exegetical issues which we will deal with.
The other view that goes back
equally as far (in fact it is the view that was there when Tertullian
introduced the Traducianist theory) and that was the
creationist view that taught that the body was generated physically through the
physical act of procreation but the soul of each person is created directly by
God and is imparted simultaneous at the birth of each baby as indicated by
taking a breath. This is held by numerous people - Jerome who translated
the Vulgate, Thomas Aquinas who is considered the angelic doctor (He is the
theologian for the Roman Catholic Church coming out of the Middle Ages), John
Calvin, Charles Hodge, contemporary theologian was Louis Burkhoff
all held to a creationist view. These are not intellectual lightweights by
the way or theological lightweights. They are very adept in what they
presented.
Aquinas in fact said, “Traducianism is heresy – to think that the soul was
transmitted through the semen.”
So how do we understand this? We
have to build our case slowly, gradually from Scripture and not jump to
conclusions that aren’t in evidence at the beginning. So let’s take it
very cautiously and slowly as we go through this.
First off we have to start with the
creation of man in original formation which takes place in Genesis 2:7. There
we read…
NKJ Genesis 2:7 And the LORD God formed man of the
dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man
became a living being.
This would be the chemicals
in the soil. He takes the earth and he begins to form man from the
earth.
That always reminds me of one of my
favorite little stories about some evolutionists who finally got to the point
where they could create life in the laboratory.
So they said, “Well, we don’t need
God anymore. We have proof that God is unnecessary so we are going to tell
God that He is unnecessary and He is worthless. We can do it all ourselves
and we don’t need Him.”
So they challenged God and God came
out and said, “Okay. I will take up your challenge. We will see what
you can do. We will have a contest and you can go first. I will be a
gentleman and you can go first. You create life.”
So the scientist said, “Okay. That
sounds fine. I appreciate the opportunity.”
So he leaned over and picked up some
dirt.
God said, “No, no, no. You have
to create your own dirt.”
God originally created the chemicals
of the soil. Remember that? So it is from the chemicals of the soil
now that God is going to form the physical body of man. Now this is why
this whole issue of Platonism comes into play. The problem that you have
that comes out of the influence of Platonism is this issue between matter and
the immaterial or as Plato put it – between the ideas and the
forms.
He had a great cave illustration
that everybody is in a cave. You remember when you were kids and you would
have real bright light or somebody would hold up a flashlight and turn the
lights off in your bedroom and you would hold up your fingers and you would
make a shadow image of a dog or a rabbit or something like that. That
would go up in the wall. Well, Plato’s view of knowledge was that all you
and I ever see are the shadows on the wall. That’s it. We don’t see the
thing that actually makes the image. That is what he would call the form
– the form or the ideal. That’s not in the physical creation.
Down here in a lower story - he has
this dichotomy in the way he views reality. Down below what you have is
matter. The form or the ideal is pure and it is good, but matter is
inherently evil. Everything that is of real value has to do with the pure,
the good, the form, the ideal. This is where you have
the realm of spirit. Down here of course is where you have the realm of
body.
Form/Ideal
Pure Good
Spirit
matter/nature
evil
body
Only the philosophers ever got
enough information to come up out of the cave and see ultimate reality –
the ideas, the forms.
This came over into the early
church. Up here, this was changed to grace. This is the realm where
God operates. Down below it is matter or nature. As Christians they
knew that creation itself wasn’t evil. But, it wasn’t important. When
you get into the affect of neo-Platonism on Christianity, they dump the ideas
that it is evil; but it is just not important. What is really important is
what goes on up here in the realm of spirit and soul.
Now I am not going to embarrass
anybody here because I think everybody would answer the question the same
way.
But, most of us have heard people
teach about the soul and say, “The soul is the real you.”
Right? The soul is the real
you. How platonic! The body isn’t important. Do you hear
that? If the soul is the real you, the body is irrelevant. It is just
dirt, dust and chemicals. It is not significant. That is purely a
neo-platonic idea of life.
Here is a principle- the body is
just as important as the soul.
We studied this earlier in Hebrews
when Jesus Christ says to the Father, “A body you have prepared for Me.”
Now think about this a little
bit. God the Father is sitting there – let’s say a day or two before
Genesis 2:7. He is sitting there up on His throne and He has got His head
down in His hand like The Thinker. I
am being a little anthropocentric here (or a little anthropomorphic). He
is thinking about this.
He says, “Hum. One day I am
going to have to take My essence (that is spirit in terms of the Second Person
of the Trinity) and I am going to have to get all scrunched down and put Myself
into this body, this creature I am about to create. So I have to design a
physical body that is the best expression possible that I can have to express
all that I am in My infinite being and as a spirit.”
So He doesn’t just come up with some
idea and say, “Oh. Bipedal humanoid. What a great idea. Let’s give that a
shot.”
This is well thought out.
God is saying, “Of all the possible
ways in which we can create this body.”
Just think about some of the
different ideas that human have come up with. Think about that famous bar
scene in the first Star Wars movie
that had all those different creatures in there or some of the Star Trek shows where they have all the
different Cleons, and Romulans
and all these different creatures - trivets or
whatever they were. You had all these different bodies,
all these different options and God in His infinite omniscience would know all
of the variables.
So He says, “I am going to pick a
finite physical body that is going to be the home for the Second Person of the
Trinity whose job it is to reveal Me and to display who I am within this
physical body.”
So this physical body is not an
afterthought. It is not something that is just a home for the soul. It
is as important and as significant as the soul. There is no time your soul
doesn’t operate without a body. You have got a physical body now. Based
on Luke 16 there is going to be some sort of interim
body between now and the future. Otherwise how is the soul going to
see? How is the soul going to hear? At physical death when the soul
is separated from the physical body, how is the soul going to hear, see,
experience anything? The soul has to have a physical body in order to
receive any sensory data – seeing, hearing, tasting, anything. It
has to come through a physical body. So a physical body is just as
important.
That is what was missing from a
tremendous amount of theology in the Middle Ages because they tended to
denigrate the significance of anything physical due to this influence of
neo-platonic thought. It denigrated marriage. It denigrated
sex. It denigrates food and pleasure and all of these other things. That
is why the people who were the real spiritual people were the monks (the monastics) who were operating up here where they are living
off in their monastic community where all the emphasis is on the spirit and
soul development. We are not going to eat a whole lot. We are not
going to drink a whole lot although they did develop some very fine beers in
the Middle Ages in the monasteries. In fact the current issue of Christian History is devoted to monastic
spirituality, which is another whole rabbit trail that I could go down. It
is coming in Gang Busters.
Let me just get off on this a
minute. If you haven’t noticed this, the trend for the last 20 years
among evangelicals has been to go back to a Middle
Ages, Roman Catholic contemplative form of spirituality. Asceticism, monasticism, going back - in fact they don’t call them
initiates because that would have to be someone who was becoming a Benedictine
monk. But they have according to this issue in Christian History the lay people who can associate themselves with
a monastery. A large number of people who are associating (I don’t mean 1
or 2%, probably 10-15%) with monasteries today are protestants. We
are on our way back to Rome, folks. In fact this morning (I haven’t had
time to go back and investigate the whole thing) I got an email from Charlie
Clough. It was a forward from an email from Tommie Ice. We all spend
a lot of time together.
Tommie was writing this email to
Charlie saying, “I know you like to read Charles Colson.”
Many of you have heard Charlie
reference Charles Colson. Chuck Colson was a lawyer. He was in the
Nixon White House. He was guilty of various crimes of Watergate. He was
sent to prison. He trusted Christ as a Savior and since then developed
this huge national prison ministry. He has written a number of books and he has
a number of valuable insights. It also has a number of flaws. It
turns out that Chuck Colson has been promoting the writings of a man named
Henry Nouwen. He is one of these contemporary
contemplative mystic types. He (Henry Nouwen does)
also promotes the works of an earlier writer named Thomas Merton who was into
all this New Age type of mystical spirituality. This is coming on big time
today.
Now let me connect some of these
dots for you. There is another big name today that is promoting these same
two people – Henry Nouwen and Thomas
Merton. That’s Rick Warren of the Purpose
Driven Life and the Purpose Driven
Church. We are going to have a mystic driven spiritual life.
That connects to the core things we
were studying the last several weeks on Sunday morning on worship in evaluating
the claims of contemporary Christian music and contemporary Christian worship movement. Their core understanding of worship is
subjectivity. It is a certain mindset. The music and the words are
designed to get you into a certain mindset. So we have to have these
little praise courses because that helps get you into this particular
mindset. That mindset is one that has affinity with the kind of mindset
that is defined as worshipful and spiritual in this contemplative spirituality
movement that goes back to the medieval mystics and ascetics and the pillar
saints and all these other things, stuff that went on in the Middle Ages. We
are going back to Rome folks in a big way. So you need to be aware of how
these things connect.
Worship is not defined by a
subjective mental attitude or mental state of some sort of ethereal lightweight
happy mentality. When Jesus was angry at the
moneychangers in the temple and threw them out, He was worshipping God. When
they can factor that into their definition of Sunday morning worship, they
might be getting somewhere biblically. Most of them don’t do that –
that jars, that violates their whole concept of love and feel good, and let’s
just be all emotional here. All of this goes back
to these horrible ideas that came into the early church through platonic
thought. It deemphasizes the physical, the material and nature. We
saw that all the way through the Middle Ages how it
impacted their art and how it impacted music. In art it was two dimensional. It tended to present people in an
ideal manner. Pictures of people didn’t look like people. You
couldn’t identify them as individuals. Once you had a shift towards the
later Middle Ages—and that wasn’t due to getting
back to the Bible—it was due to getting back to Aristotle. When they
got back to Aristotle, Aristotle emphasized the particulars. It was Plato
that emphasized the universals or the ideals.
How does this affect us? Well,
the way it affected the whole idea of the origin of the soul and our
understanding of the soul and the formation of the body is it puts the
formation of the body of man from the dust of the ground…
“Well, that is kind of
secondary. God is just doing that to get to the really important part of
creating the soul.”
What I am telling you is they are
both important. You never have human souls function without some kind of
body.
Let’s go to Luke 16. What is
interesting is in almost all these passages there have been so many changes and
challenges and things in recent years that it boggles my mind compared to what
I was taught and what I have concluded down through the last 30 years or so
since I was in seminary.
NKJ Luke 16:19 " There was a certain rich man who was clothed in purple and fine
linen and fared sumptuously every day.
He (the certain rich man) is
unnamed.
NKJ Luke 16:20 "But there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, full of sores, who
was laid at his gate,
Now here is the first point. It
starts like it might be a parable. There are a lot of people today who will
tell you this as a parable. But, parables don’t name the individuals in
them. Once they start getting named, they are talking about real
people. Remember the parable of the prodigal son. You had a certain man
and he had two sons. Nobody has got a name. They are parables. This
is not a parable. This is treated as a real event that is taking place
outside the range of our empirical faculties.
NKJ Luke 16:21 "desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man's
table. Moreover the dogs came and licked his sores.
This is a pathetic sight of this
homeless guy outside of the rich man’s house.
NKJ Luke 16:22 "So it was that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels to
Abraham's bosom. The rich man also died and was buried.
Lazarus dies.
There is a doctrine there that the
angels come and escort our souls into the presence of God. Abraham’s bosom
was also paradise. This is the place where believers before Christ died on
the cross - where Old Testament saints went – sort of a holding place
until sin was actually paid for and the opening to heaven was made by Christ’s
death on the cross.
NKJ Luke 16:23 "And being in torments in Hades, he lifted up his eyes and saw
Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.
Now throughout the Old Testament
these are real places. So this isn’t just parabolic.
“He” means the rich man.
You are not in torment if there is
not some sort of nervous system that can telegraph pain to the soul. He is
in torment and he saw. There has to be some sort of faculty for
seeing. He can’t be some disembodied soul like Casper the Ghost floating
through the air or some of those whatever they were protoplasmic things in Ghostbusters. There is some sort of
interim body there. It might not be like our physical material body that
we have today, but it is some sort of body.
NKJ Luke 16:24 "Then he cried and said, 'Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and
send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue;
for I am tormented in this flame.'
He has to have a mouth and a tongue
to cry out.
Dip what? The
tip of his finger. If he is just a disembodied soul, there is no
finger to dip.
That tells us that both the
unbeliever (the rich guy) and Lazarus have some sort of body. They are not
just disembodied souls. There is some area in which they feel pleasure and
pain. The rich man is feeling tremendous amount of heat-type of pain. He
desperately wants to be cooled off. He wants water dropped off on his
tongue.
NKJ Luke 16:25 "But Abraham said, 'Son, remember that in your lifetime you
received your good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things; but now he is
comforted and you are tormented.
Abraham says that it isn’t going to
work. The great point of this is that the rich man wants Lazarus to go
back to his brothers and tell them what is going to happen to them. If he
rose from the dead and went back and told them about all that happened and gave
them a message from me, then they would believe. Abraham says in verse 29…
NKJ Luke 16:29 "Abraham said to him, 'They have Moses and the prophets; let them
hear them.'
They have Moses and the
prophets. If they don’t believe them, they won’t believe Lazarus. That
is a fabulous passage because what that is saying is that the testimony of the
Word of God is equal to if not superior to any empirical or rational data that
you can come up with to try to convince somebody of the truth of
Scripture. The Scripture is self-authenticating. It is the final
authority. If they won’t believe the Scripture, they won’t believe
anything else.
The point that we are getting out of
all this is that there is no time when there is not some sort of body to house
the soul. The idea that bodies are insignificant, secondary, not important
- real you is your soul comes out of the influence of
Platonism and neo-Platonism on Christianity. Both are important. God
spends a tremendous amount of time talking about this.
Jesus says, “A body you have
prepared for Me.”
So the body is important.
The Lord God formed man from the
dust of the ground. The word there for form is the Hebrew word jatsar which
means to shape or mold as a potter shapes clay into some sort of
instrument.
NKJ Genesis 2:7 And the LORD God formed man of the
dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man
became a living being.
What is interesting here is that the
word for breath is this word neshamah. God
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul at
that particular point.
Now I will come back and talk about
some of those other terms later on, but right now I want to talk about the
importance of breath. It is when God breathes into the physical body that the
physical body comes alive. That is when you have the soul (the immaterial
part of man) introduced into the physical body. It is at that point that
it becomes a genuine, living, fully human person. But, let’s just take an
example here. If you were to come up before God breathe into Adam’s body
and you were to take a machete and chop off the head, would you be guilty of
murder? No, because the soul is not there yet. Is that the right
thing to do? No, that is not the right thing to do. The purpose of
this is to create a human being who is going to be in the image and likeness of
God. The body is just as much a significant part of what is being
developed as the soul. They haven’t come together yet to be a full human being,
but they are both important. It is vital for us to understand some things
about just when the Bible talks about life beginning.
I have entitled this lesson The Biblical Parameters of Life. In
the process of doing some research on this I’ve gone back through this whole
topic numerous times over the last 20 years and changed my views considerably
over time. There are some things that are not pointed out by just about
anybody. Not that I am patting myself on the back, but it just seems like
in so many areas we just jump to comfortable conclusions without evaluating all
the data.
In Job 1:21, Job says…
NKJ Job 1:21 And he said:
"Naked I came from my mother's womb, And naked shall I return there. The
LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; Blessed be the
name of the LORD."
There is a lot about this verse that
we could go into but the main thing that we want to look at is that Job
recognizes that the Lord is the one who gives him life. That life includes
his physical life as well as his soul life - both the body and the soul.
When he says, “Naked I came from my
mother’s womb,” there is a technical phrase there in the Hebrew that we will
look at in just a minute.
The emphasis is not on “naked I
arrived in the womb”. I want you to pay attention to this because it is
one of the most important things that you will find and I don’t know that it is
in print anywhere. That is that the Bible never ever puts the parameters
of life at conception and death. I am going to document that later
on. Watch this. The Bible always puts the parameters between birth
and death. It never ever (The vocabulary is there in the Hebrew) puts the
parameters at conception - not once. This is just one place that you see
that.
He is talking about the beginning of
life is at birth.
When he says, “The Lord gave,” that
is in parallelism to what he has just said in the previous phrase. So it
is the Lord that is behind and is the one who is indirectly involved in that
birth process and in the death process.
That is all we will say about Job
1:21 right now, but we will come back to it a little later on. The
important phrase that we have here is one that shows up a little later on and I
will talk about a little later on.
The word for womb in the Hebrew is beten; the
preposition is min. When it comes
before a consonant it drops the “n” so it would be mibeten. It means from the
womb. Now we talked about this preposition. It works the same way in
Hebrew.
Sometimes the word from is… for
example I could say, “I moved back to Houston from Connecticut.”
If I talk about it that way, then it
clearly says that I was in Connecticut. But when Jesus prays for the
disciples to be kept from the evil one, there is no indication that they are
ever in the evil one. Okay? So it has these two different nuances. That
becomes important in a study we did not that long ago on Sunday morning in
another passage in Revelation 3:10.
So why don’t you turn over
there. I am not going to do a detailed exegesis of this verse. The
causal clause at the beginning of verse 10 belongs to verse 9. There are
technical syntactical reasons for that. Unfortunately the verse was
divided here, but the standard practice in Greek is not to begin a sentence
with because. If you want to get the details of that go back and listen to
the tape where I went through it in detail. So the sentence actually
begins, I will also in addition to other things…
NKJ Revelation 3:10 "Because you have kept My command to
persevere, I also will keep you from the hour of trial which shall come upon
the whole world, to test those who dwell on the earth.
The hour of testing is a technical
for the tribulation. Keeping you from the hour of testing is the Greek
preposition ek which is parallel to the
Greek preposition min. It is
clear that it means that they are never in the hour of testing. They are
kept from ever going into it. So if we were to diagram this in a chart we
would do it something like this…
Sometimes “from” is
inside the circle as in the phrase “I moved here from Connecticut.”
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But in most cases - Jeff Townsend
documents this in a totally unrelated subject to the one we are studying when
he wrote an article in Bibliotheca Sacra
back in the early 80’s on Revelation 3:10 that the vast majority of uses in the
New Testament - “from” is not ever entering into. It doesn’t involve being
in this place. It is talking about exiting or being outside of it. The
starting point is outside of the circle.
The reason this is important is this
phrase that I am looking at mibeten is a Hebrew idiom for birth. In fact, I did a
search through Logos on the English phrase “from birth” in the New American
Standard and came out with about 9 hits. In the Old Testament every time
you have the phrase that is translated in the English “from birth” it is always
mibeten or mirecham which is the parallel term. It is a synonym for the
womb as well. We will get into that in a minute. So this phrase “coming from my mother’s womb” is consistently treated
by translators as an idiom for “from birth”. It doesn’t mean inside
the womb. It means from the time of birth.
So, Job is saying, “Naked I came
from birth and naked I will return”.
He is focusing on birth and death as
the parameters of life.
In Job 33:4, Job says...
NKJ Job 33:4 The
Spirit of God has made me, And the breath of the
Almighty gives me life.
This is not the technical word bara. Now
there is a lot of debate over the meaning of these three different Hebrew words
for create – bara, asah, and jatsar. I
have already talked about jatsar. Bara
is the word that is used in Genesis 1:1.
NKJ Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The unique thing about bara
is the only person who baras
anything is God. God is the only subject of that verb – anywhere in
Scripture. So only God can create, bara. Thus we see as a
secondary meaning, not the core meaning, ex nihilo creation in some places.
So here when Job says, “The spirit
of God has made me”, this is a more generic term and could imply some other
things.
Then in parallelism it says…
The word for Spirit there is ruach. That is
the word that we have for breath back in Genesis.
“The breath of the Almighty gives me
life.”
So what Job is saying here is that
it is not just Adam. See that is what the traducianist will argue – when you go to Genesis 2:7
that is just how it got started. That is the only time there is
this breathing of God that creates life or imparts the soul.
But Job says that too. Isaiah
is going to say that as well. There are numerous
passages that say that.
Full life is related to breathing
which begins at birth.
Ecclesiastes 12:7 is
another crucial passage to look at here. The writer of Ecclesiastes says…
NKJ Ecclesiastes 12:7 Then the dust will return to the earth as it was, And the spirit will return
to God who gave it.
Then is the time of death.
That is the physical body
decomposes.
The word for spirit in the Hebrew is
ruach
– for Holy Spirit, for wind, for breath. It has a variety of
meanings just like pneuma
in the New Testament. It can mean breath, but it also refers to in this
context it has to refer to the immaterial part of man. You have a material
part that decomposes in the grave. You have an immaterial part and it goes
to God. There is a connection between the fact that the immaterial part is
called ruach
meaning breath or wind and the fact that it is related to the neshamah, the
breath of God. They work together. They are parallel and correlated
concepts. So you have two processes - a physical process which generates
physical life and an immaterial process that generates the soul life.
Now another thing just so we don’t
get too confused here. There are three parts to the human makeup we say. We
go to passages - I Thessalonians 3, Hebrews 4:12, where there is a distinction
between body soul and spirit. But these words for soul and for spirit are
not always used in that technical sense. Sometimes they are used
interchangeably and they both can refer, either one can refer to the immaterial
part of man. We talk about the spirit of pharaoh (the ruach of pharaoh) in the Old
Testament. He is not saved, but he has this immaterial part. So the ruach of man is just a term, a generic term, non- technical term - for the immaterial part of man. It
doesn’t always refer to what we would refer to in another context, to the human
spirit meaning that part of man’s immaterial nature that he receives at
regeneration, the natural man (the soulish man) of I
Corinthians 2:14 and Jude 9 (something like that. I am not sure of the
passage) do not have. So the term spirit is also applied in a technical sense
to that element that was lost in spiritual death and gained in
regeneration. Here it is a non-technical use of the word. Context
dictates.
Isaiah 2:22 is
another passage that emphasizes the importance of breath.
NKJ Isaiah 2:22 Sever yourselves from such a man, Whose breath is in his nostrils; For of what account
is he?
It is an emphasis on breathing as
crucial to presence of soul life.
NKJ Isaiah 42:5 Thus says God the LORD, Who created the heavens and stretched them out,
Who spread forth the earth and that which comes from it, Who gives breath to
the people on it, And spirit to those who walk on it:
Somebody was asking me a question
about this the other day. When you have the LORD that indicates
that the Hebrew behind it is YHWH, the sacred Tetragrammaton. When
you have lower case like God, it is Elohim. Sometimes
you will have GOD and Lord. That will mean that God is a term that
they are using to translate YHWH and lower case Lord would be Adonai. So sometimes you have YHWH Adonai. So they would translate that Lord God. That
is just a typical style feature of most Bibles.
Who what? Who gives
breath? You see this is ongoing action. It is not “who gave breath at
the beginning of the process going with Adam and it continues”. He gives
breath to the people on it, not to the singular person Adam, and the process
got started which is what the Traducianists would
want to argue. But He continues to give breath to the people on it and
spirit (ruach)
to those who walk on it.
You see where ruach is parallel to neshamah for
breath. God is the one here who is being pictured as being directly or
immediately involved in the process of bestowing the soul.
NKJ Isaiah 57:16 For I will not contend forever, Nor will I always be angry; For the spirit
would fail before Me, And the souls which
I have made.
He is talking about ruach. If He
were really angry the spirit of man would fail.
It is a bad translation. It is
not soul there. It is neshamah, the breaths which I have
made. Again we see this parallel between spirit and neshamah.
So I have just gone through these
passages to show that there are numerous passages after the creation that
continue to talk about God imparting the souls through His breath. Breath
is crucial to understanding the presence of life and the presence of soul
life.
The next thing I want to look at as
we go through this has to do with understanding when God imparts the soul and
you have a complete full human being. Once again we are going to deal with
the parameters of life. The Bible presents these parameters from birth to
death, not from conception to death. So we are just going to ratchet our
argument up a little step and get into a key verse in Psalm 22:9-10.
He speaks to God.
NKJ Psalm 22:9 But You are He who took Me out of the womb; You made Me trust while on My mother's breasts.
NKJ Psalm 22:10 I was cast upon You from birth. From My
mother's womb You have
been My God.
That is the word mirechem. Rechem is a word
for the inner parts. Sometimes rechem is the source of compassion.
From my
mother’s womb, mibeten. Those are the two words. We are going
to see them in synonymous parallelism numerous times – rechem and beten - the womb. You
see mirechem
– mi is that Hebrew preposition
min drops the “n” when it comes
before a consonant. You see how the New American Standard translates it
from birth. You see they understand it. You are putting in a passage
that is at the core of the debate over this, they will translate it “from the
womb”. But when you go to non-central passages all of a sudden they
recognize that it is “from birth”. I am arguing for consistency here. So mirechem and mibeten both have
that idea of from birth. So from the womb doesn’t mean in the womb. It
means from the time the child comes out of the womb. You see this also in
Psalm 58:3
NKJ Psalm 58:3 The wicked are estranged from the womb; They go astray as soon as they are
born, speaking lies.
That is they are fallen from the
womb - mirechem.
“Those who speak lies” is in synonymous
parallelism to the wicked. Go astray is synonymous parallelism to
estranged. Go astray from birth is mibeten. So you see mibeten and mirechem are
synonymous terms both indicating the concept from birth, not from conception.
Isaiah 46:3 is
another key passage.
NKJ Isaiah 46:3 " Listen to Me, O house of Jacob, And all
the remnant of the house of Israel, Who have been upheld by Me from birth, Who have been carried from the womb:
Born meaning carried.
You see not from conception. It is
talking about the nation. When was the nation conceived? It doesn’t
fit a parallel. You see it talks about birth, when it began. That is
the beginning of the nation. It is not conception; it’s birth.
So those terms are used synonymously
there– mibeten
first and then mirechem
in the second usage.
NKJ Job 1:21 And he said:
"Naked I came from my mother's womb, And naked shall I return there. The
LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; Blessed be the
name of the LORD."
Mibeten – from my mother’s womb.
Job now begins to have a pity party
after his suffering.
NKJ Job 3:11 "Why
did I not die at birth? Why did I not perish when I came from the womb?
He says, “Why did I not die from
birth.” Not conception - birth.
It is post birth, the beginning of
life.
He says in Job 10:19…
NKJ Job 10:19 I would have been as though I had not been. I would have been carried
from the womb to the grave.
Mibeten.
So you see the argument here is that
life begins at birth and ends with death. Those are the parameters. You
don’t have a single place...
NKJ Isaiah 44:2 Thus says the LORD who made you And formed you
from the womb, who will help you:
'Fear not, O Jacob My servant; And you, Jeshurun,
whom I have chosen.
NKJ Isaiah 44:24 Thus says the LORD, your Redeemer, And He who formed you from the womb:
"I am the LORD, who makes all things, Who stretches out the heavens
all alone, Who spreads abroad the earth by Myself;
You see in the phrase “from birth”,
you have a preposition from which in the Hebrew is min and the Greek is ek plus a noun. You have a noun. Here I have the
verb jalad. You
don’t have a noun related to it in Hebrew. You don’t. There is no
noun. So you can’t say in Hebrew “from birth” because you have to have a
preposition and a noun. You can’t have a prepositional phrase from birth
because Hebrew has a verb for birth jalad but, it doesn’t have noun for
birth. So you have to use an idiom or circumlocution to talk about from
birth. This is why they use either the word mibeten or mirechem – from the womb. There was no possible way – no
vocabulary, no tool to talk about from birth using a noun. It didn’t
exist.
But you do have a verb harah which is the verb which means to conceive. It is used
52 times in the Scripture. You also have noun form which
is present in numerous places in the Scripture. You can talk about “from
conception”. So, if there is the vocabulary – there is the tool to
talk about “from conception” - why does the author always use the mibeten or mirechem? Because, he is not talking about from
conception. He has the vocabulary tools to do it, but he never
does. It is never from conception to the tomb. It is always from
birth to the tomb. Those are the parameters. So that helps us
understand I think something very important about the parameters of life.
I have brought this up in
discussions and debates with other guys – guys who don’t agree with
this. They just sit back and they are quiet. Usually we don’t come
back to this discussion. I am not meaning that in the sense that… They
have never heard it before and they don’t have an answer. I don’t know of
anybody that has heard this that has had an answer. It surprises them. I
have never found this to be developed in any literature in any pro or con either
side of this discussion. I have never seen anybody either present it or
adequately deal with it.
I think that was one example.
NKJ Genesis 4:1 Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, and said,
"I have acquired a man from the LORD."
There is the verb – and gave
birth to Cain. So you have both conception and birth in that particular
verse. So see these words were all there. So if the Old Testament is
making a case that the parameters of life are from conception to death which is what every body argues in the abortion
discussion, why is it that the Bible never ever ever
sets conception as the parameter? It just isn’t there.
The big question is so what actual
impact does this have on the abortion debate? We will get there because
there is a lot more on both sides of this to cover than we can possibly cover
tonight. So we will come back the next class. We will review this again.