Hebrews Lesson 88 May 17,
2007
NKJ Psalm 119:9 How can a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed according to Your word.
We got started in this subject about
6 weeks ago – had a couple of breaks when I went out of town and due to
weather and some other things. We are basically coming out of a controversial
passage in Hebrews 7:9-10. There we read…
NKJ Hebrews 7:9 Even Levi, who receives tithes, paid tithes through
Abraham, so to speak,
Or literally “in a manner of speaking” indicating that
the writer of Hebrews is writing in figurative language.
This thing about figurative language is really
important because as I have gone through a number of things trying to handle
some of the more difficult phrases and passages related to this whole issue of
when does life begin, the origin of the soul, the transmission of the soul -
one of the things that come up is this idea of idioms and figures of speech.
It’s tough to try to understand some of those concepts because we are so far
removed from the spoken language. It is difficult sometimes to figure out when
things are idiomatic because once a phrase becomes idiomatic, then breaking it
down syntactically can really lead you in a wrong direction. If someone were to
tell you to go jump in the lake, if you were to take that and break that down
in terms of a wooden literal interpretation and break it down in terms of its
grammar and syntax; it wouldn’t lead you to a correct understanding of the
meaning of the phrase. The same
thing is true with other clauses.
This is one of the things that is
developed in Bible study since the advent of computers especially in the last
twenty years. That is not just studying words and terms
which has always been a part of word studies, but to recognize that in many
instances clauses or phrases or idiomatic phrases become greater than the sum
of the parts. So you can spend all the time in the world exegeting
two words in a clause or a phrase but recognize that a phrase takes on the
meaning of its own that is different from just a breakdown of the individual
terms that are in there. That can lead you to some misapplication and
misunderstanding of some passages. So that is all part of this.
I keep going back and reading more and more things and
trying to work through different aspects of this to kind of flesh out some of
the problems because there are a lot of problems in understanding these
passages. There have been a lot of steps and missteps. I think there have been
people – it is a very emotional subject as to when full life actually
begins. Is it at conception? It is at birth? Is it transmitted physically? Just
how does this all work? I think there are passages that have not been dealt
with honestly and openly on both sides of this particular controversy.
Last time (in case you weren’t here)
we started off going back to Genesis 2:7 and focusing on a few key ideas
related to the fact that God formed man and that verb yatsar indicates
the fashioning, the forming the shaping of the external part of man.
Now if I can remember this because I
was doing a lot of tangential reading right before I came to class tonight
which did not necessarily make into my notes but hopefully somehow it got
engraved for at least 30 minutes on my mental hard drive.
I want you to turn to Job 1. No,
it’s not there. Okay, we will pick it up and grab it at some other point as we
go through the night I am sure.
Just another statement of where Job
is talking about how God formed his body and then dressed the muscles and the
bones and the sinews. I was going there for an example of how God shapes the
physical body. But in that passage it speaks as if God is directly involved
much like the passage we looked at in Psalm 139. See we come in and we talk
about how God is directly involved in the creation and impartation of the soul,
but that He indirectly or mediately generates the
physical body because humans are involved in the act of procreation. But even
though God is mediately involved in something the
Scriptures still speak as if God is directly doing it because God is the author
of both the soul life and the physical life – the development of the body
within the womb. That is what yatsar focuses on.
God formed man of the dust of the
ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. I just pointed out
last time that God’s breathing is anthropomorphic because God doesn’t breathe.
He doesn’t have lungs. But the breath of life in relationship to man is to be
understood literally. There have been those who want to claim that this
breathing of life (the word neshamah that is used here) is
sort of a one-time pattern – the initial creation of life in the garden.
Certainly this is distinctive. Adam doesn’t have a circulatory system. He
doesn’t have any sort of neurological system. He doesn’t have any development
of musculature going at all on prior to the breathing of God and the
impartation of the soul, which is what happens with the development of
biological life - the development of the body in the womb. It is a progressive
thing. It develops. There is not a one-to-one correspondence there. We
acknowledge that. That’s true.
But, this phrase “breath of life” (and neshamah) is used
again and again throughout Scripture as being indicative of when life is
present. We talked about Genesis 2:7 and Deuteronomy 22:16 and Joshua 10:40 and
11:11 and Psalm 150:6.
Then we have the phrase nephesh hajah which
is one of those clauses that it is not just nephesh
which is sometimes translated soul. It is not that it becomes a living soul. It
is not just hajah; but it is the phrase nehpesh hajah. Nehpesh hajah is used
in Genesis 1:20 for birds, in Genesis 1:21 for sea creatures and in Genesis
1:24 for animals. So this is not a term or a phrase that is distinctive to a
human soul. And so it is more correct to say that this simply means he becomes
a living entity. He is alive. He wasn’t alive before. There is life.
So that is another difference
between the progress of a biological development,
development of the body in the womb because it is alive as biological
life. It is living. There is
circulation. There is the development of neurological pathways. There is
response to external stimuli. If you had given any kind of external stimuli to
the body of Adam lying there on the ground before God breathed into him, there
wouldn’t have been any response. It was completely inanimate and lifeless. So
these are aspects of this that we must take into account.
I pointed out again in terms of
review is that the key issues become determining how the Bible expresses the
parameters of life. I had concluded in the lesson before that that the position
that I am articulating is that you don’t have full life – you have a
progressive development – the progressive development of the body in the
womb prior to birth. But it is at birth when the soul is given. That is when
you have full human life – only at birth. The parameters in the Scripture
are birth and death as I pointed out.
So to illustrate that and to show
that I am not making this stuff up out of thin air - see there are a number of
evangelicals who really react to this. But if you go Judaism and you go back to
the Talmud, you go back to the Mishnah and I quoted
from the Encyclopedia
of Judaism that they articulate this same position. It is not full life,
human life until it is nephesh at birth. I am not going to
quote the whole article like I did last week. Just in review in that article it
states…
The commentators explain that the
fetus is not considered to be a nephesh or person until it has
left the womb and entered the air of the world; one is therefore permitted to
destroy it to save the mother’s life.
That is the only exception because
in Judaism and the Talmud and the Mishnah, they
understand that what is going on in the womb is human. It is not just a mass of
cells that is non-human. God is involved in that process and that you don’t
interfere with it and stop it at all. It may not be murder; but it is just
short of murder. Unless you have to make a decision between the life of the
mother and the life of the infant in the womb, there is no interference
whatsoever – no abortion. This has been the traditional view in Judaism
and it was the view of the early church. In fact there were some early church
fathers that even went so far as to say it was murder. Now they hadn’t refined
at that point (That is the early second century) of distinction between Traducianism and creationism. None of those things had been
developed.
Then I went to a modern anti-
abortionist Harold O. J. Brown who is a well-known evangelical scholar who is
really at the forefront of the whole right to life, the protestant right to
life anti-abortion crusade. He wrote an article that came out in the early 90’s
in the Trinity
Theological Journal out of Trinity Seminary. He makes some astounding
statements in this particular article. One of the statements he made is that
the discussion of ensoulment for all practical
purposes is necessarily confined to those religious circles especially but not
only Christian ones who do believe that man has a soul. He goes on to say that
the question of ensoulment cannot be answered
scripturally.
Now I think it can be answered
scripturally.
But he is claiming from his position
as an anti-abortionist, as a right-to-lifer he is claiming, “Well, we don’t
know.”
Well, if you don’t know from your
study of Scripture, and I went through all of his
academic last time - he is an extremely well-educated, biblically educated
individual.
He is saying, “We can’t know.”
Well, if you don’t know how can you
base law on something you can’t know as a Christian? When you have access by
the Holy Spirit to the completed canon of Scripture and if you say you can’t
know, how can you go out and insist that abortion is murder? The presupposition
of that is that a soul is there.
He does make a point in discussing
this whole issue that he can’t imagine – he doesn’t give one shred of
support for the statement – he can’t imagine how any Christian could ever
think that the fetus could go a full 9 months without ever having a soul. He presuppositionally rejects the creationists’ at birth
position because he doesn’t think it makes any sense whatsoever.
So I concluded with him last time by
making three points of what he is saying.
So I made a three
point conclusion. I think this is the core of my presentation on this
issue. Number one, only Christians have access and can understand the things of
the Spirit of God – i.e. revelation. I Corinthians
2:14. If you can only know when the soul is imparted (no matter when it
is) through revelation and unbelievers cannot know it because it is revelation
(they can’t understand the things of the Spirit of God) then you can’t base law
code on information that is not accessible to the unsaved mind.
You can build all kinds of ethical
systems developed totally apart from Scripture that recognize that murder is
wrong, that recognize the right of private property, that recognize that
thievery is wrong - all kinds of moral standards. Don’t fall into a distorted
evangelical distortion that says that only Christians can come up with ethics.
Only Christians have a consistent basis for coming up with the ethics that they
do. But there are a lot of non-biblical systems that come up with high moral
standards. They are robbing. They are not consistent. We can point that out,
but it doesn’t mean that they don’t. That doesn’t mean that on the basis of
reason on the basis of empiricism - you can’t decide willy-nilly murder isn’t a
good thing. That doesn’t promote stability in society.
You can come to certain conclusions
about ethics just on the basis of empiricism and rationalism, but you can’t
determine when the soul enters the body on the basis of anything other than
revelation. So you don’t base law that is for believer and unbeliever on
something that is knowable only to the believer. And by the way believers don’t
agree at all and have argued this for centuries. So why would you want to base
a universal standard on disputed understanding of revelation.
As we go through this whole issue
there are three passages that continuously come up in terms of the question -
how can you claim whatever side you are on in light of this particular passage.
The most difficult, the one that
gives trouble to both sides (and both have to be honest with that) has to do with John the Baptist. Let’s face it - there are
things about the ministry of John the Baptist that are
a little bit strange. John is a cousin of Jesus. He has probably heard the
story of what happens in Luke 1, the story of his miraculous birth,
announcement of his birth, the announcement of the birth of his cousin Jesus
and the virgin birth and virgin conception of Jesus all of his life.
Yet when he gets thrown in jail he
sends a message to Jesus and says, “Are you really the Messiah?”
There are other things about John
the Baptist that are a bit unusual to understand because we don’t always
understand the dynamic that is going on in terms of Old Testament theology. If
you don’t understand Old Testament theology and the whole issue related to the
kingdom, you are going to fall flat on your face with John the Baptist.
So, let’s go to Luke 1. This is the
first passage people will go to. Of course first of all we have to properly
translate it. Now his father is Zacharias. His mother is Elizabeth. Elizabeth
has not been able to get pregnant. She is one of the 6 women in Scripture that
Scripture makes a point out of their barrenness. There is a purpose for that because God is going to make
sure that she becomes pregnant in miraculous circumstances. Zacharias is his
father and he is a priest. It is his turn to serve in the temple. When he goes
in an angel of the Lord appears to him in verse 11. When Zacharias sees the
angel of the Lord he gets extremely agitated because he figures that he is
going to die. This is it.
NKJ Luke 1:13 But the angel said to him, "Do not be afraid, Zacharias, for your
prayer is heard; and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall
call his name John.
NKJ Luke 1:14 "And you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his
birth.
We will come back to this verse in
just a minute.
You have a couple of key words there
in the Greek that are very important, but the most important is the one
translated “gladness”. This is a word that from its Old Testament background
was always associated with the joy that would come from the presence of the
Messiah. When Messiah would appear and bring the kingdom there would be great
exuberant joy and excitement. That is what this word has. The emphasis is it is
not the mental attitude stability of the first word “joy” which is chara.
It is a different word that has a very strong emphasis from the Old Testament.
It is the Greek word agalliasis. So it has this nuance. When
you see that word immediately you should be thinking in terms of the coming of
the Messiah – eschatological joy.
Remember we think of eschatology as
what is happening in the future at the rapture and at the Second Coming. But,
if you were at the time of John the Baptist and the Messiah hadn’t shown up for
the First Advent yet, when you are thinking eschatology you are thinking about
the Messiah coming and bringing the kingdom. Remember the message of John the
Baptist was going to be – prepare the way of the Lord for the kingdom of
heaven is at hand and repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Then Jesus
shows up and the message He starts off with is – repent for the kingdom
of heaven is at hand. Then He sends out the disciples and their message is
repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. It was all
eschatological.
So this word is very important
because the angel is telling him that he and Elizabeth are going to have this
particular kind of eschatological exuberance. It is going to characterize him
and Elizabeth. We will come back to that in a minute.
In verse 15 he says…
NKJ Luke 1:15 "For he will be great in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink
neither wine nor strong drink. He will also be filled with the Holy Spirit,
even from his mother's womb.
Now wine is what we think of as
wine. It is the fruit of grapes. Strong drink is beer. I know some of you are
already thinking it is scotch or bourbon. But, they hadn’t developed the
process and abilities to distill beverages yet. That didn’t come along until
about the 8th or 9th century AD. So, strong
drink from the Old Testament word referred to barley beer. So he is saying that
he…
and shall drink neither wine nor strong drink. He will
also be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother's womb.
Now before we look at this issue of
“filled with the Holy Spirit”, let’s stop a minute and look at the initial announcement
about his not having wine or strong drink. Who does that remind you of? Somebody
who we have studied recently - who does that remind you of? Sampson. So let’s
go look at Sampson for a minute. Now this is going to be a tough passage for
some of you.
In Judges 13 we have a parallel
situation. We have a mother who is barren. We have an announcement of a
supernatural conception by the angel of the Lord.
NKJ Judges 13:3 And the Angel of the LORD appeared to the woman and
said to her, "Indeed now, you are barren and have borne no children, but
you shall conceive and bear a son.
I made a point out of this that
these are two separate words, two separate actions. Conception is the start of
the process, when fertilization occurs. Giving birth is what happens at the end
of the process when the child comes out of the womb.
NKJ Judges 13:4 "Now therefore, please be careful not to drink
wine or similar
drink, and not to eat anything unclean.
That is to the mother. Now the angel
of the Lord is not concerned with pre-natal health here. This has to do with
the Nazirite vow that Sampson is going to be under.
But from the moment of the announcement, (the conception is going to occur
momentarily - in the next day or two) the mother is not supposed to drink wine
or strong drink or to eat anything unclean. Why?
NKJ Judges 13:5 "For behold, you shall conceive and bear a son. And no razor shall
come upon his head, for the child shall be a Nazirite
to God from the womb; and he shall begin to deliver Israel out of the hand of
the Philistines."
What we would think is that if that
is just biological protoplasm in the womb and it really doesn’t have great
significance until there is ensoulment, then why does
it matter what she does? It matters because as I have pointed out we shouldn’t
create this dichotomy between the body and soul, between the material and the
immaterial. They are both part of the image of God. They develop separately so
that this passage is showing that God is very much concerned about what happens
to that which is in the womb. So for the period of her pregnancy because of who she is going to give birth to because of Sampson’s
future purpose she has to indicate the distinctiveness and uniqueness of his
future ministry. So she too is not supposed to drink wine or beer or eat
anything unclean. Verse 5 explains.
for the
child shall be a Nazirite to God from the womb;
This is iterated there. The point
that I want to make is that it shows again that we have to take into account
the importance of the development of what is going on in the womb.
There is this myth that it is part
of the mother’s body. It is not part of the mother’s body. That is why it has
in many cases the baby in the womb has a different blood type. You can
fertilize an egg in a Petri dish and implant it in any womb in any female on
the planet and if they are biological white parents, you can plant that in a
womb of a black woman and that baby is gong to be white. That baby will have
the genetic tendencies of the parents. It is going to look like the biological
father and the biological mother because that entity is a distinct entity.
It’s mother dependent in the sense
that for life it must get its nourishment through the placenta. But the
interesting thing in God’s creation is that the placenta will allow a mother
with one blood type to mix her blood in with the fetus who has a different
blood type. The mixing of blood types doesn’t occur naturally. That is a
provision of God that shows that what is in the womb is not just a tumor or
hangnail or just a mass of cells.
It is something that is going to be a full human being and must be
treated as sacred life. That is the Jewish position. Life is sacred. Even if it
doesn’t have the soul yet, it is sacred life. God treats that which is in the
womb as that which is very valuable.
So let’s go back to Luke 1:15
NKJ Luke 1:15 "For he will be great in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink
neither wine nor strong drink. He will also be filled with the Holy Spirit,
even from his mother's womb.
That is the New King James
translation. He would be filled with the Holy Spirit. That word for filling is
this word which also shows up in Luke 1:41 pimpleme
which means to cause to be full. It is related to but is a distinct word from pleroo.
It is not the same word that is used in Ephesians 5:18 for the filling of the
Spirit. It is a different word. It is pimpleme plus a genitive. See in
Ephesians 5:18 when you have the command “be filled by means of the Spirit”
that is a command using the verb pleroo (a different verb) plus a
dative which is an instrumental dative. It should be translated “filled by
means of the Spirit”. That is a different operation of the Spirit than what we
have going on here. This is pimpleme plus the genitive - “be
filled of or from” literally – of or from the Holy Spirit. This kind of
genitive can often be used for means.
It is the same kind of ministry of
the Holy Spirit that you have in the Old Testament with enduement.
It is the ministry of God the Holy Spirit just as you had (but to a greater
degree) because you remember John the Baptist was greater than all the Old
Testament prophets. He has a greater measure and influence of the Holy Spirit
than any of the Old Testament prophets; but it is the same kind of ministry to
the leaders to Bezalel and Aholiab
who crafted the tabernacle, to the judges, to Sampson. It is related to his
role within the theocratic kingdom of God and the theocratic message that the
kingdom is about to come. It is not related to his spiritual life per se. The
other thing about it is that there is nobody in the Old Testament, no one in
the New Testament of whom we have this phrase stated that isn’t a regenerate
believer.
A precondition for having this
operation of the Holy Spirit is that you have to be regenerate. The way some
people want to handle this and I think they are some translations that will
translate this next phrase “He will be filled with the Spirit even within his
mother’s womb” and that’s not a good translation. The New King James translates
it “even from his mother’s womb” which is more literal – ek koilia. But the NIV catches the
sense of this idiom in that it is from birth.
The reason I keep belaboring this is
because this is really where I think a lot of the discussion needs to be today.
The Old Testament phrase was mibeten and the New Testament
phrase is ek koilia.
One of the things I was doing this
afternoon is consulting some more technical word study dictionaries on Hebrew that
are out and came up with these two statements.
The first statement is from The New
International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis –
long title and long abbreviation. It is evangelical in its orientation by
evangelical scholars. It is edited by William Van Gemeren who is evangelical. This is not one of the
more liberal based dictionaries like the second one is. It came out in the late
90’s published by Zondervan. In that article under
the heading of “beten” it says as the discussion of the
concept from the womb…
The writer states…
The beginning of one’s life on earth
is sometimes viewed as “when he comes out of his mother’s womb”.
See, that is what I have been
saying. It is birth that is the beginning of life. Here is an evangelical
scholar in a technical Hebrew dictionary admitting that this is the thrust of
this particular phrase. It is from birth. Birth is the time of the beginning of
life.
Then the second quote – see he
references TEDIOTE which is the Botterweck and
Ringgren who were the two editors. It is a European
production of the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament. They are still
translating. I bought the first four volumes when I was in seminary and that
was – John the Baptist was a private back then. They are still
translating. I think they came out with volume XIV finally this year and they
have two more to go. I might get the last two before I die. But in the Theological
Dictionary of the Old Testament in volume II, page 97 the writer states…
Birth, then, being the terminus a quo (that is Latin
for the beginning) birth then being the beginning in life,
Here you have two different highly
respected Hebrew theological dictionaries both of which affirm what I have been
saying for the last several lesson is that this phrase mibeten
and ek koilia is an idiom for “from
birth”.
Now the reason I make this point is
that there have been those who have tried to make an issue out of the use of
those prepositions - the use of the min and the use of the ek.
Some of you have heard that – the emphasis on the partitive
use of the min
and the partitive use of the ek.
What I am saying here and by taking this back to my introduction is that this
is an idiomatic statement. It’s not based on how the preposition is used. In fact
I read one critique of that position last week and he went so far in one
direction in trying to explain the fact that min and ek
never can have this partitive idea that he completely
eviscerated his own understanding of Revelation 3:10 when Jesus says to the
church of Philadelphia…
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.
We went through that. That is an indication
of the Rapture. You see ek and min can have several different meanings. In
some contexts they clearly mean “keeping you from something never having
entered into it”. And in other passages it indicates source. It says you came
from Philadelphia. That clearly means that at some point you were in
Philadelphia. So you do have these differences. But if you start parsing the
grammar in a phrase that is an idiom you are going to end up misunderstanding
the whole thing. It is an idiomatic phrase because you don’t have the
vocabulary to say “from birth”. There is no noun. I pointed that out. I just
wanted to give you a little more documentation on what I have been saying.
Luke 1:15 goes
on to say…
NKJ Luke 1:15
"For he will be great in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink neither
wine nor strong drink. He will also be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from
his mother's womb.
The NIV translates it that way as it
does both of these phrases ek koilia and mibeten
numerous times. So that is legitimate. It is from birth.
Now I am going to go off the
reservation here. I would love to be able to say that I have been able to
demonstrate that “from birth” doesn’t mean from the instant of birth. My gut
feeling is that it is just a general idiom for from an early age. But, I can’t
document that anywhere. The closest I have been able to come is that passage
over in Acts that we looked at a couple of weeks ago when it talked about the
man who was born cripple and that he was crippled from birth. That is how the phrase
is.
When would you know that he was
crippled? Was he going to get up and walk the first day after he was born?
Unless there is a physical deformity, you wouldn’t know that he wasn’t going to
be able to walk maybe for weeks or months. That is different from the blind man
in John 9:1 who is blind from birth.
You could figure out that a baby was blind pretty quickly, but not with
the crippled man. So that may take some time. I would love to be able to demonstrate
this because I have a sense that it has got to be early because my big problem
is and the problem you don’t find anybody wrestling with on the other side of
the question here is how can you have John the Baptist having a relationship
with God the Holy Spirit before he is regenerate? How exactly does that work
since you don’t have that pattern anywhere else in Scripture? That is a serious
problem with anybody (especially) claiming that this filling takes place in the
womb. As I am going to point out, when you have this word pimpleme
it is almost always followed by some sort of a verbal articulation. For example
we will get into the next passage in Luke 1:41
NKJ Luke 1:41 And it happened, when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary,
that the babe leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy
Spirit.
What is the next thing that happened
in verse 42?
NKJ Luke 1:42 Then she spoke out with a loud voice and said, "Blessed
are you
among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!
You can go through every use of pimpleme
in the New Testament and every tine the writer says that so-and-so was filled
with the Holy Spirit, the next thing is they say
something. See this is different from the sanctification ministry of the
filling of the Holy Spirit of Ephesians 5:18. This has to do with revelatory
information and direct guidance by God the Holy Spirit. So just exactly how is
John the Baptist going to be speaking either in the womb or in the first 6 or 8
or 10 months of his life? I am not sure. I just have a lot of questions on this
and nobody is addressing them. I don’t think we have enough information to
address them.
The next thing we need to do is go
to Luke 1:41
NKJ Luke 1:41 And it happened, when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary,
that the babe leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy
Spirit.
These are three events that are
stated - she hears the greeting, the baby leaps in her womb, her explanation in
verse 44 indicates that there is a relationship between the two. Then
subsequently or unrelatedly Elizabeth is filled with
the Holy Spirit. Then she says something in verse 42.
There are some important
observations here.
If you go through Luke 1 you have
the initial episode with the announcement to Zacharias about the birth of John
the Baptist and then the conception of Elizabeth and her 5 months of pregnancy
in verse 24 and the six months of her pregnancy. She doesn’t know this. She is
down in Judea. She is 50 miles from Nazareth. Back then they didn’t have email
and they didn’t have text messaging. They didn’t have a cell phone. They didn’t
have telegraph or even pony express. So at that time the angel Gabriel comes
and announces to Mary up in Nazareth that Mary is going to conceive and that
she is going to give birth to the promised Messiah. When that is completed, the
angel tells her in verse 36…
NKJ Luke 1:36
"Now indeed, Elizabeth your relative has also conceived a son in her old age;
and this is now the sixth month for her who was called barren.
NKJ Luke 1:37
"For with God nothing will be impossible."
NKJ Luke 1:38 Then
Mary said, "Behold the maidservant of the Lord! Let it be to me according
to your word." And the angel departed from her.
NKJ Luke 1:39 Now Mary
arose in those days and went into the hill country with haste, to a city of
Judah,
She gets up the next morning to go
see Elizabeth. Elizabeth does not know that Mary is pregnant. Mary is barely
pregnant. She does not know that Mary is pregnant with the Messiah. She has no
information that way. So when Mary shows up Elizabeth’s excitement over Mary is
just her normal excitement over seeing her relative. That’s it. She is not
excited because of Messianic implications at that point because she doesn’t
have a clue. She didn’t get the text message. So when Mary enters the house of
Zacharias, it happened when Elizabeth hears the greeting of Mary that there is
this activity in the womb.
Now let’s talk about this activity
just a little bit. The same word is used in verse 44. It is skirtao which means to leap, to spring, especially of animals, to
leap for joy or to exalt. Now this is a really interesting word. It is used in
the Septuagint for movement in
the womb. Can you think of where that might be? Jacob and Esau
– movement in the womb - skirtao. Okay! It is also
used to refer to physical exuberance because you are excited about something.
Now as a result of that it became an anthropopathized
in Classical Greek (if there is such a word) … It
became an anthropopathic statement that was
frequently ascribed to animals.
For example in a
writing of Longus who actually writes in 2nd
century AD which is very close to New Testament times, he says…
The
word is used of a dog leaping for joy after getting the scent of a hare.
Now this is really good….
The dog leaps for joy…
Does a dog leap for joy because he has
emotions like a human and volition or is this because this is the instinct that
is bred into him, and we are anthropopathically
imputing human emotions to this exuberant leaping about? The word is frequently
used of the activity of sheep and rams gambling about on the hillside or young
calves leaping about in the fields.
So it has this figure of speech idea
along with it. So it comes to be an idiom again that is associated with humans
leaping for joy. So the babe is leaping in the womb. Now that is that word. We
have got to deal with each of these words and then we have got to deal with
whether or not we have a figure of speech going on here. The babe leaps.
Then we have that next phrase for
joy. The way that is translated in most English translations makes it look as
if - I would expect some different words in the Greek actually – some
different prepositions. But what we have is an “en” clause. En always indicates means, usually. En is the
preposition. We don’t have a “hoti” clause
which would be causal. It doesn’t say he leaped in the womb because of
joy. It is the preposition en which one use could be giving a reason for something. En plus the
dative can do that.
But according to Arndt and Gingrich,
it also has a sense of explaining the surrounding circumstances. What are the
circumstances that are going on around a certain activity? So you have this
movement of John in the womb.
Now are we going to say on the one
hand that at six months you have fetal activity and development to the degree
that this fetus hears the sound of another person outside of his mother and
knows (cognitive activity) that that is Mary and that she is pregnant (she is
not even showing yet, she has barely conceived) with the Messiah. Is that what
we are saying? That is really what the one position is arguing - that John
knows that that is Jesus’ mommy there and that Jesus is in her womb.
Now I find that to be difficult from
our understanding. Now you can’t hang anything on science because we are always
learning new things. But at this stage we are not sure how much cognitive
activity is going on in the brain in the womb. Now there is certainly
development of the brain.
I remember and you do to, back in
the 80’s and 90’s that it was real popular for mothers to try to develop the
brain activity of the fetus by playing classical music, other kinds of music.
Mothers would do that. Studies came out in the late 90’s showing that the
connections aren’t there for that to have any impact. There is no memory - nothing. It doesn’t
do a cotton-picking thing because the synapses aren’t connecting yet and all of
this isn’t happening. It doesn’t really happen until 5 or 6 weeks after
birth. Hmm….
So if that is not there until after
birth then how can we be arguing that what John the Baptist is engaged in is a
lot of cognitive activity from deep inside his mother’s womb? I am having
trouble with this. So, maybe there are some other things going on here and this
isn’t a passage anybody ought to be going to trying to decide whether or not
there is a soul in the womb.
What happens is, there is a viable
explanation for this. It seems to fit the text. The text is saying that both in
both verse 41 and 44 there is the connection with what happens to the mother. In
verse 41 it happened when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary. Who heard the
greeting? John? No, he isn’t even called.
Here is another interesting thing
– the word brephos is used for infant here. You
have a number of different words used for infants and babies and children in
Greek.
Some people come along and they will
say, “See in Greek brephos is used of what is in the womb
and brephos is used of a baby; so there is no distinction in the
New Testament between what is in the womb and what is out of the womb.”
That was a Greek word folks! That
didn’t come out of a biblical context. That was the Greeks’ idea. They didn’t
believe that you had full human life inside the womb at all. They were pagan.
Let’s not go there. That argument isn’t going to work at all. So we have to be
careful.
That is one thing that I have
discovered in reading this - on both sides there are a lot of unguarded
statements. There are a lot of hyperbolic statements and there are a lot of
statements made that just aren’t in evidence. As I pointed out last time in Job
3:3, just because it says…
NKJ Job 3:3
"May the day perish on which I was born, And the
night in which
it was said, 'A male child is conceived.'
People say, “See, life begins at
conception.”
No, that just says that at
conception you can tell the difference between whether it is a girl and a boy. That’s
physical. That doesn’t tell you that there is a soul there. It doesn’t tell you
that life begins there. We read into these verses too often what we want to see
in the verse.
So you have skirtao - leaping in
relation to joy. Whose joy? I think it is the mother’s joy because we have
already been told back in Luke 1:14 that she is going to have this kind of joy.
It is related to the eschatological joy of the Messiah. So her joy, her
excitement at hearing Mary come even though she doesn’t know anything about
Mary being pregnant or the Messiah, she is just excited and that creates an
environment that causes fetal stimulation.
Now we can document this possibly. I
am not going to say that this is the only explanation for fetal movement. There
are all kinds of reasons that babies are going to move. But, it has been
demonstrated that there is one kind of reflex called the startle reflex or moral
reflex that is one of many biological and neuromuscular responses in a fetus. There
was a study done at USC a number of years ago where they took an artificial
larynx and put it up next to the mother’s abdomen to create a three second
sound and in every case there was a physical reaction by the fetus. That doesn’t
mean there is a soul there. That doesn’t mean it is volitional. It is like
hitting your leg just below the knee with a hammer. Your leg is going to jerk.
It is a reflex action. It doesn’t indicate volition. It doesn’t indicate
anything other than a response to sound. This is a possible explanation of what
is going on here.
The timing of course is supernatural
because what God is indicating is this movement to gain Elizabeth’s attention
to make her realize - because this movement was more than probably typical
fetal movement. It really got her attention and then she was filled with the
Spirit. She recognizes that something has happened to Mary that is beyond her
knowledge.
Now that deals with Luke 1 in both
of those instances. There is a lot that is going on in that particular passage
and I am not sure that we understand all of it. I think it is a very weak passage to go to because if you
have got John the Baptist engaged in all of this cognitive activity inside the
womb then you have got some other problems with him being filled with the Spirit
and not being regenerate. So there are some various problems there.
One last statement, I mentioned brephos. The term brephos
is used to refer to Jesus and John until they are taken to the temple on the 8th
day and dedicated. Then he is called John. He is not called John…
In the start of this the angel tells
Zacharias, “You are going to call him John.”
He doesn’t start calling him John
until he is dedicated on the 8th day. He is still referred to as a brephos.
That is significant. He is not personalized with a personal name until he gets
presented to the Lord on the 8th day of dedication, which is when he
is no longer referred to as a brephos. So that would indicate
under a Jewish concept that he is fully recognized as a person within the
context of the covenant at the time of his circumcision on the 8th
day and not before. So there is another indication that there’s a distinction
there.
Well, that ought to cover most of
what we have gone into in Luke 1. The other passage that is a difficult passage
that people get into is Exodus 21:22 which we will come back to next time. This
is the episode within the law when men are fighting and there is a pregnant
woman nearby and she gets inadvertently hit and gives birth prematurely. So we
have to look at that in some detail. Then when we finish that we will start
wrapping this up and go to another level of the discussion. You see the next
level of discussion is once you decide when the soul enters into the body, and
then you have to figure out the transmission of sin and what our relationship
with Adam is. Is it seminal or is it federal? This brings in a whole other ...
and these two issues of whether the soul is created at birth or passed on
through procreation or directly related to how theologians understand our
relationship to Adam in terms of federal headship or seminalism.
Once again one of the key passages in our passage in Hebrews 7:8-9. So we have
to understand this crucial to understand our whole relationship to Adam and the
transmission of sin.
So we will get to that and probably
not get it all of that done before I head off to Israel. Let’s bow our heads in
closing prayer.