Hebrews Lesson 89 May 24, 2007
NKJ Psalm 119:105 Your word is a
lamp to my feet And a light to my path.
Somebody sent me this in an email
the other day. I read it and was somewhat shocked - although not really after
what I said on Tuesday night talking about how we no longer have freedom in
this nation. It is just a sham. We live under tyranny. This came the next day
and so I thought I would read it to you.
The source of this is the Illinois
State Rifle Association. The headline for the article is “Confiscation of
Registered Guns Begins in Illinois”.
The Chicago Police Department and the Illinois State Police have teamed
up to make good on Mayor Daley’s pledge that if it were up to him nobody would
have a gun. Daley and his elite CAGE (that is an acronym) Unit are
apparently taking advantage of gun privacy loopholes to pinpoint certain
individuals for inclusion in the confiscation program. The ISRA (that is the Illinois State Rifle Association) is following up on leads
in one case that has disturbing implications. An elderly first generation
Chicago resident was recently paid a visit by an Illinois State Police
trooper.
After asking to come inside the man’s home, the trooper asked if the man
owned a gun to which he replied, “Yes.”
The question then is, is honesty the
best policy?
The trooper then directed the individual to surrender the firearm.
Remember, this man hasn’t done
anything wrong. He hasn’t violated any law whatsoever.
The man complied with the officer’s demand and the trooper left with the
gun. The story gets better. The gun in question was purchased legally by the
man in the 1970’s shortly after he became a US citizen. When Chicago’s infamous
gun registration scheme went into effect in the early 1980’s the man registered
the firearm as per the requirement. However over the years the fellow
apparently forgot to re-register the firearm and forgot to renew his Illinois FOID card.
I am not sure what that is -
probably some sort of firearms identification card.
So what does this all mean? In the last edition of the Illinois Shooter
we reported on the activities of a shady task force known as the Chicago
Anti-Gun Enforcement Unit. That is CAGE. This elite
squad operated jointly by the Illinois State Police, the Chicago Police
Department and the Cook County State Attorney’s office supposedly exists to
identify illegal gunrunners. However information gained by the ISRA makes it clear that the CAGE Unit is targeting law-abiding
citizens, not criminal gunrunners. Thanks to a ruling by a liberal federal
judge, this CAGE Unit now has the name of every single person in the
United States who since 1992 lawfully purchased more than one handgun in the
period of a week. The CAGE unit also has all the makes, model
and serial numbers of those guns.
In essence the Chicago Police Department is now registering guns and gun
owners nationwide. The ISRA has also learned that the CAGE unit has
compiled a list of families where more than one person in that family holds an FOID card. Acting on that information the CAGE unit is now
contacting gun shops where those families have shopped and is illegally
registering all guns purchased by those families. Now it appears that the CAGE unit is scrubbing Chicago’s gun registration list against the list of FOID cardholders. Indications are that folks who have let their
registrations and FOID’s lapse will have their guns confiscated. We have to
wonder how long it will be until state troopers show up at the doors to
confiscate the guns of non-Chicago residents who have let their FOID’s expire.
You see when law enforcement has no
respect for the Constitution because the judicial system has no respect for the
Constitution because nobody knows how to apply literal historical grammatical
interpretation to law anymore, law becomes a very fluid – whatever you
think and I may think what the law actually says is just up for grabs. It
depends on how any liberal judge can come along and redefine and reinterpret
the law. He can make black mean white and white mean black. The result is a
continuation of judicial tyranny brought about by liberals – not just
democrats. There are some democrats – they may be few.
You know there is an “n” letter left
out of that word – demoncrat.
There are some democrats who might
be conservative. And there are a heck of a lot of republicans who are liberal. They
are not moderate; they’re liberal.
Most of these republicans that are running today (I know I am getting
awfully political) are to the left of John F. Kennedy in the early 60’s. We
wonder why things are the way they are. It is because everybody is affected by
some sort of non-literal subjective interpretation because they bought the lie
that the Constitution is a living document.
When you have Christians who can’t
interpret the Scripture literally think that they are voting for anybody in the
White House and that their Christianity influences their vote, they are as
self-deceived as any liberal because 95% of the subjective Christians that are
out there today have no idea how to literally, correctly interpret the Bible. So,
how can they interpret anything when it comes to law? That is why we have a
President who continues to – he has one or two good points and the rest
are just as bad as any democrat because he doesn’t understand absolutes. Unless
we have any politician in office who understands absolutes, we are in
trouble.
But they are a reflection. We get
exactly what we deserve. They are a reflection of the culture and we are getting
exactly what we deserve. We need to take warning as believers. This isn’t
getting better and it’s not going to get better. It may be much worse. As I
pointed out the other night, who would have thought that the US Congress would even entertain some of the hate speech legislation that
they have voted in favor of to have the President sign? I mean it is a direct
violation of the Bill of Rights. Yet again and again and again we are going to
see reverse reasoning take place as subjective emotional post-modern liberal
legislators call white black and black white. The enemy in all this is going to
be anybody who believes that there is anything that is absolute, especially if
it has to do with God or religion. You have that evil religion gene in your
system and you need to be taken out and put into some kind of concentration
camp. We were wrong in doing that
with the Japanese, but we will be justified in doing it with the Christians.
Trust me. It is coming!
We are in our study of Hebrews. We
ought to pause for about 10 seconds and have silent prayer again so everybody
can get back in fellowship. We are in our study of Hebrews in Hebrews 7:8-10. Don’t
turn there yet because that is our jumping off spot. We have been dealing with
the whole issue of the origin of life. We have one more passage to cover before
we go to the next issue that comes out of these verses in Hebrews 7:8-10.
Open your Bibles to Exodus 21. We
are in the midst in Exodus 21 of the Mosaic Law which provides the law code,
the civil ceremonial code for the Jews in the land. It is an expression of the
righteousness and the justice of God. It’s based on what is known as case law. That
means the Mosaic Law does not address every possible instance in relation to
specific situations of legal violation, illegality, or criminality. It addresses
it in the sense of giving examples within each category and then it would be up
to the Jews as they develop their code of law to operate within that
framework.
That seems to be the policy that God
follows from the very inception in Genesis. Genesis 1 - God initiates human
vocabulary. He calls the light day and darkness night. He begins to identify
certain creatures. He identifies the sun and the moon and other things. He
initiates human vocabulary, but then it is up to Adam to carry on the process
within the framework of what God has revealed. The same is true in the way that
God has revealed doctrine. God revealed doctrine in the framework of different
kinds of literature. You have historical narrative. You have poetry. You have
different types of epistles and the gospels. All of these are different types
of literature.
God did not sit down and reveal to
us a systematic theology. You don’t open the Bible to page one and get
prolegomena. You do if you open up Chafer’s Systematic
Theology or Berkoff’s Systematic
Theology or any standard systematic theology. But that is not how God did
it. God did it in such a way that He encapsulates all of the categories of
doctrine within different kinds of literature. You have historical literature because
it is a man’s purpose. He is designed for the purpose of us to come along and
to study and analyze the text and then extrapolate from the text the categories
and then to build and develop our understanding of the categories down through
the years. In the same way Adam began to evaluate all the animals in the
garden. He began to recognize that some were large and some were small. Some
had long necks; some had short necks. Some flew; some didn’t fly. What he had
to do was to organize the data, categorize it, classify it and then come up
with nomenclature that was beyond what God had already initiated in order to
properly reflect the nature of all these different creatures.
You see this same pattern all the
way through Scripture. God expects man to use the intelligence, the brain that
God has given him, within the framework of divine revelation in order to
develop his thinking.
The same way with the believer -
when you face problems in life, what the average believer wants to do is pray
to God and say, “Get me an answer.”
And we expect something in the
morning mail! What God expects for us to do is go to the Scriptures and think
deeply and profoundly about those Scriptures and how they relate to what we are
doing so that our minds are engaged in what God has revealed and under the
teaching ministry of God the Holy Spirit, we begin to understand how to think
and God’s thinking. That is how wisdom is developed. Well, all of that fits
within the basic way in which God revealed the Mosaic Law. I talk about every
kind of situation, but it gives the parameters so that on the basis of case
law, other laws can be developed facing similar type circumstances. That is the
kind of thing that we have in Exodus 21. There are different kinds of case laws
set out here concerning violence. If you look back in Exodus 21:12…
NKJ Exodus 21:12 " He who strikes a man so that he dies shall surely be put to
death.
That is your basic principle of
capital punishment. Capital punishment isn’t grounded in the Mosaic Law. Capital
punishment is grounded back in the Noahic Covenant because it is God’s
principle for the era between the Noahic Covenant and the return of Christ. That
is a standard procedure.
But there are exceptions to this
particular law.
NKJ Exodus 21:13 "However, if he did not lie in wait, but God delivered him into his hand, then I will appoint
for you a place where he may flee.
In other words if it is not
premeditated and it is accidental, then God sets up these cities of refuge
where the person who committed manslaughter can flee. He can live within the confines of one of those cities of
refuge, but if he ever comes out then he is subject to the law of retaliation.
NKJ Exodus 21:14 " But if a man acts with premeditation against
his neighbor, to kill him by treachery, you shall take him from My altar, that
he may die.
In other words there is no sanctuary
for him because of the premeditation involved in that particular kind of
murder.
NKJ Exodus 21:15 " And he who strikes his father or his mother
shall surely be put to death.
If you have a parental abuse, then
that is punishable by capital punishment and the child’s life should be taken
in order to keep the cancer of lack of authority orientation and rebellion -
keep that cancer out of the culture.
It is interesting. I was talking to
someone the other day. They were commenting on the fact – they had been
up to Dallas Seminary talking to one of the counselors on staff up there about
one of the major problems coming into the seminary today. With the young people
coming right out of college, they don’t have authority orientation. Because of
that they get into all kinds of personal, moral problems and other problems
that wouldn’t have been a part of the package to the same degree 20 or 30 years
ago. They have no concept of authority orientation. That is a problem that has
to be dealt with, with students on campus. This is why God addresses the
problem of the rebellious child so much.
Verses 16 down through 20 give other
aspects. It is interesting. Look at verse 20.
NKJ Exodus 21:20 " And if a man beats his male or female servant
with a rod,
Something that would be considered
quite heinous in our society…
so that he dies under his hand, he shall surely be
punished.
NKJ Exodus 21:21 "Notwithstanding, if he remains alive a day or two, he shall not be
punished; for he is his property.
If you read that verse from the
framework of the kind of liberalism that has influenced American thinking about
slavery since the early 1800’s, then you are going to have problems interpreting
that verse. Again and again in the Mosaic Law God does something really funny. If
a man owns…. If I go out and kill a Jew next door and it is premeditated, then
I am supposed to come under capital punishment. But if the guy who lives next
door is a Moabite and he is not a Jew or if he is a slave, then the punishment
is different. He is still full human life, but see God is not wrong in
this.
We have to come to the
presupposition that as Paul says in Romans 7…
NKJ Romans 7:12 Therefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good.
It’s not wrong. Well, maybe our modern thinking is
influenced by some false value system that is applying this to these different
situations.
Slavery was authorized in the Mosaic
Law. God doesn’t authorize sin folks. That is what your presupposition needs to
be. God doesn’t authorize and validate sin. But the kind of slavery that was
practiced in Israel was a slavery that had a lot of outs. It had a lot of ways
in which the individual slave could get out of it. He only stayed there for
life if he chose to. That’s why he was to pierce his ear with an awl. It was a
visible sign that he had voluntary chosen a life of slavery. But it was
designed to provide a safety net for people who had used their credit cards too
much and gotten involved in too much debt and couldn’t get out of debt. So now they could indenture themselves.
That is the word we would use. They would indenture themselves to a master and
work off their debt. Then at the end of 7 years or 5 years or 4 years or
whenever the sabbatical year would come - what would happen at the end of that
time period? Actually it was the Year of Jubilee. When the Year of Jubilee
would come at the 50th year and all debts would be repaid. They
would become free. They could also
work and buy their freedom back. So there were all kinds of ways. There wasn’t
the kind of chattel slavery that was practiced in the United States. That was a
different kind of slavery. But, the issue is that slavery per se is not in and
of itself an evil.
That is what you get from people
like Charles Grandison Finney who is the real father of the abolitionist
movement in America. He had a bad theology. We have gone over that before. He
didn’t believe that man was inherently a sinner. He didn’t believe in
substitutionary atonement. He did believe that man was perfectible and therefore
society was perfectible. What we have to do to perfect society is get rid of
the big 5 evil sins of the 19th century. That is still with us
today. You have to get rid of slavery. You have to get rid of child labor.
Women have to be able to vote. You have to get rid of the evil alcohol. This
was all part of the social scenario there.
So we have to look at the Scripture
and say that the Scripture gives us the framework for how laws should
function.
We don’t start off with some
abstract idea developed from our culture and then come back and read that into
the Bible and say, “Oh look. The slave here is going to be treated as
property.”
That is wrong.
“Well, this must be some barbaric
law code.”
That is what liberal theologians do.
That is how they read this and that is why they come up with the idea that the
Bible is just some historically developed literature and religion just like
every other religion. So they are imposing Darwinistic evolution of religion
viewpoint on the Scripture.
So all that just by way of introduction
to get into our passage. In Exodus 21:22 we have one of the few passages that
people go to, to try to argue that there is life in the womb and this is the
best that you can come up with scripturally in a case that involves abortion.
If you look at verse 22 it reads….
NKJ Exodus 21:22 " If men fight, and hurt a woman with child, so
that she gives birth prematurely, yet no harm follows, he shall surely be
punished accordingly as the woman's husband imposes on him; and he shall pay as
the judges determine.
That is a translation from the New
King James Version and that is a superior translation to the one in the New
American Standard. The New American Standard says…
NAS Exodus 21:22 "And if men
struggle with each other and strike a woman with child so that she has a
miscarriage, yet there is no further injury,
he shall surely be fined as the woman's husband may demand of him; and he shall
pay as the judges decide.
See, there is the difference. If you
see NASB says “miscarriage” but the New King James says “give
birth prematurely”. That is the more accurate translation because as I have
noted in this particular slide the verb there is jatsa which is the standard verb for giving birth. It is the same
verb that is used of the birth of Jacob in Genesis 25:26. It is a verb that always
indicates a live birth. Live birth means that the baby comes out and takes a
breath and at that point as we have studied receives the impartation of the
soul and at that point becomes fully alive - fully ensouled.
The situation here is that men
struggle with each other and strike a woman with child so that she has a
miscarriage, yet there is no further – that word further isn’t in the
Hebrew of verse 22. It is not in the Hebrew of verse 23. It needs to be read…
NKJ Exodus 21:23 "But if any harm follows,
then you shall give life for life,
The harm that comes to the child is
post-birth harm. It’s a result of the situation. The child subsequent to birth
comes under some sort of injury. That is what the law is addressing - not what
happens in line with a miscarriage – causing the miscarriage and not a
live birth. We are talking about a live birth here. This doesn’t have anything
to do therefore with the subject of abortion. It has to do though with the
value of life. Now once the child is born, the child receives neshamah – the breath of life from
God. And therefore the law related to the precious value of human life comes
into effect. Under the Mosaic Law you have the principle that was known as lex talionis, which is the law of
retaliation of an eye for an eye and so forth. This is what is explained in
verse 23 and following.
NKJ Exodus 21:23 "But if any
harm follows, then you shall give life for life,
NKJ Exodus 21:24 "eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand,
foot for foot,
NKJ Exodus 21:25 "burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for
stripe.
Now that “under the law” is really
again a figure of speech. We have been studying that on Sunday morning. We
studied figures of speech. It is the idea that the penalty fits the crime. The
penalty fits the crimes - not that if I knock out your tooth you have to in
turn knock out my tooth. If you look at the Scriptures, often there are
financial penalties assessed for certain kinds of damage. So it’s not
identical. It is not to be taken literally, but the idea of retaliation in kind
so that the punishment fits the crime. This should be assessed if there is
subsequence damage. These two men are fighting and they hurt a woman. So if
there is damage to the woman or there is injury to the child after birth, then
there should be the application of lex
talionis.
That pretty much takes us through
and completes our study on the origin of life, so let’s have a review here to
go over some basic principles that we have gone through in our study.
NKJ Hebrews 10:5 Therefore, when He came into the world, He said:
"Sacrifice and offering You did not desire, But a body You have prepared
for Me.
I made the point there that we have to come to grips with. When God is
sitting there anthropomorphically in Genesis 2:7 and He is playing with the
clay that is going to be the body of the man, He is thinking 4,000 years ahead
to the fact that the Second Person of the Trinity is going to be incarnating
Himself into this body. So whatever the body looks like, however it is shaped,
whatever its capabilities are, it’s got to be the highest and best form for the
function of revealing eternal God to finite mankind.
God just doesn’t pick this shape by tossing the dice and saying, “It
seems like a good idea. I think we can cause a few things to happen.”
He is intentionally choosing this form, this shape, this structure
because the infinite Second Person of the Trinity is going to incarnate
Himself, going to become finite and express and reveal the deity, the essence,
the attributes of God through this finite representation. That is the same
thing that Adam is. That is whole we are going to get into with the first Adam
and the Second Adam. The first Adam is designed to represent God. He
fails. The Second Adam comes along
and represents God not just in terms of His internal attributes, but also in
terms externally. He is a physical representation of God. This idea that
minimizes the body comes out of Platonism. In Platonism as we have studied you
have this idea that matter is inherently evil. That which is spiritual, the
ideal – that is what’s best. So in Platonism matter was evil.
Now when Neo-Platonism came along and affected Christian thought they
knew that matter was good because at the end of Genesis 1 when God has created
the material world, the material universe He says, “It is all good.”
So we can’t say that the material world is bad, but it is not that
important. So neo-Platonism led them to stress the ideal - stress the soul over
the body, stress the spiritual over the physical. That led to all kinds of
dichotomies in their thinking and led to all kinds of problems. What we have to
do is reign that back in and recognize that throughout the Bible there is an
emphasis on the physical, an emphasis on the material body. This is why you
have a physical bodily resurrection of Jesus. It’s not this idealized
resurrection that occurs at the end of one of the movies – Zepharaelli’s Jesus of Nazareth that came out in the late
80’s. They hear this disembodied spirit because Jesus rose in your hearts. No,
it is a physical bodily resurrection that the same body that was lying in the
tomb is somehow chained to the resurrection body. That is why when Mary
Magdalene goes into the tomb, when Peter and John go into the tomb, what do
they see? They see that the body that Jesus had in His incarnation is
gone.
If God were giving Him a new body He could have given Him a new body because
the body is irrelevant. But, body is not irrelevant. What he had as a physical
body prior to the resurrection is the same body. When it comes out of the tomb
the napkin that covered His head, the clothes that covered His body –
they are gone. I mean they are lying there in the same place because the body
is gone. The body is important.
Christians have done a terrible time through the centuries dealing with
the importance of the body. This is why Paul emphasizes this in different
places in I Corinthians. The body is important. It’s not just the immaterial
part, the immaterial soul. So we have to surgically remove a lot of this cosmic
thinking that comes out of humanistic philosophy from our thinking. It has
impacted Christianity way too much over the years. So we recognize that there
is an importance on both the physical home for the soul. It is very important. God
is directly involved in it even though He does it through indirect processes as
I pointed out as we went through all of those studies. Many passages in
Scripture state or express God’s involvement of things with very direct
terminology even though God is using secondary means such as weather, such as He
prepared a great fish to take Jonah back to the direction he was supposed to
go. He uses intermediate means.
When we talk about being saved we say, “God saved me.”
Yes, but He used an intermediary to give me the gospel. He uses
intermediate means but yet we still speak as if God did it directly. So you
have passages in Job, you have passages in Psalm 39 that talk about God forming
the physical body. It stresses the importance of the physical body and its
preparation. You can’t dismiss it as just a mass of cells and blood and muscle
and tissue. It is that which is going to form the home for the soul. It is an
image bearer in the making.
NKJ 1 Corinthians 2:14 But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God,
for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.
If you trace that Greek word there for “things” all the way through that
passage from about 2:8 all the way down to the end of the chapter, it refers to
the things which the eye has not seen, ears have not heard, neither has it entered
into the heart of man. In other words, it is talking about knowledge -
knowledge which is not based empiricism, that can’t be derived from empiricism,
knowledge that can’t be derived from rationalism can only come from the Holy
Spirit. Since unbelievers have no access to data that comes only through the
revelation of the Holy Spirit (that is revelation of Scripture), then they are
not held accountable. No one in the Old Testament is ever held accountable for
knowledge that is specific to revelation.
Never! There is not one example of that.
Let me give you a basic example of
the kind of thinking that goes behind that. The Mosaic Law was given to the
Jews. It wasn’t given to the Moabites. It wasn’t given to the Philistines. It
wasn’t given to the Assyrians or the Babylonians or the Romans or the Greeks. Yet
almost most all of these people come under divine judgment in the Major
Prophets. You go to Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel - there are burdens against
the Moabites, against the Edomites. There are oracles of judgments against the
Philistines, against the Babylonians, against all of these different people
that surrounded Israel. God is bringing judgment against them. But He never
once holds them accountable for anything that is unique to the Mosaic Law.
God lowers the boom on Israel
because they violate the Sabbath. He never mentions the violation of the
Sabbath when He deals with the Babylonians or the Egyptians or Tyre or Sidon of
any of these other people. Why? Because God never made that part of the
revelation they’re answerable to.
But the Gentiles are answerable to
two things. They are answerable to general revelation which according to Romans
1 is enough to hold every human being accountable for the knowledge of God. And
so because every human being once they reach the age of accountability knows
that God exists, they are held accountable for that. So these nations are
judged for idolatry. It goes back to the creation covenant. It goes back to the
Noahic Covenant. They are also held accountable for their attitude to Israel
– not because revealed that to them, but because God promised that to
Abraham.
He said, “If anybody curses you, I
will curse them. If anyone treats you with disrespect (treats you lightly), I
will treat them harshly.”
There are two different words for
cursing in that anti-Semitic paragraph of the Abrahamic Covenant. I am saying
that to make the point that God never holds unbelievers accountable for that
which they are unable to understand and learn. I read to you a section from an
article from Harold O. J. Brown who is one of the foremost evangelical
theologians and anti-abortionists.
He basically throws up his hands and
says, “We can’t know when the soul gets there, but how could anybody possibly
believe that the fetus could last all the way to birth without having a
soul?’
What is his frame of reference
there? What is his ultimate criterion? His own rationalism!
“It doesn’t make sense to me that
the fetus could go to birth without a soul. So therefore who would believe
that? That is ridiculous.”
But, he has no foundation for that. He
has no empirical data for that. He hasn’t even established a rational syllogism
to support that. He has just argued it out of pure raw emotion. So the only
conclusion we can come to is that potential life means sacred life. The image
and likeness of God is a term that incorporates both the physical and the
immaterial. It includes the whole dynamic that is there. It is used that way. In
fact most of the places where those two words are used in the Bible, without
exception - about 98% of the places where those two words are used, they
describe a physical object. Once again I am not saying that God exists - we are
not Mormons – God doesn’t exist in a man-shaped body. He is spirit. But
we are saying that the physical part is very much important to the whole
image-ness of God.
Now that brings us to a conclusion
of that doctrine. Now we are going to go into a new doctrine. We had to go
through all of that because that doctrine of the origin and the transmission of
the soul is fundamental to understanding the next doctrine which comes out of
our passage in Hebrews 7:9-10.
NKJ Hebrews 7:9 Even Levi, who receives tithes, paid tithes through
Abraham, so to speak,
NKJ Hebrews 7:10 for he was still in the loins of his father when Melchizedek met him.
I translated that. A better
translation would be “in a manner of speaking.” That is up front in the Greek
text. This is alerting you the reader to the fact that what he is saying is not
to be taken literally, but to be understood in a somewhat figurative
sense.
Levi himself never received tithes. It
is the tribe of Levi as the priests that were the tithe collectors in the
theocracy of Israel. So, even that is somewhat of a figure of speech.
That is “met Abraham”, not “met
Levi”. You have to make sure you get the right antecedent on that pronoun.
Now people (by people I mean
theologians) go to this verse and they use it to support a view related to the
origin and transmission (that key word is transmission) of sin what we would
refer to as the imputation of Adam’s original sin. They use that to support a
view that is call seminalism. Seminalism always goes hand-in-hand with a Traducianist
view of the origin and transmission of the soul. They connect because you have
this physical transmission of the soul through the semen and then it is that
seed (seminalism) that is the way in which the guilt of Adam’s sin is passed on
down through the generations.
On the other hand, you have a view
that we will get into in just a minute called federalism. Federalism is a view
that it is not a physically related thing. It is a federal designation that
Adam is designated as our representative. So Adam’s sin becomes our sin by
representation.
Now these are very important concepts.
Over the next two or three weeks we are going to try to break it down and help
you understand this because this is crucial to understanding Romans 5 and I
Corinthians 15 and several other passages. So let’s get an opening introduction
this evening.
What is important here is to try to
come to grips with the whole issue of how the soul is corrupted. One of the
questions that are raised is that if God is going to create and impart the soul
at birth, then how does it become sinful? God can’t create a sinful soul. So
how does that soul become corrupted and become sinful and become totally
depraved and come under condemnation?
And so the answer that is proposed
by Traducianists is that, “Well, we will get God out of the picture. God is
only involved mediately for the body and the soul and the sin nature is passed
on physically, biologically through procreation just as the soul is.”
That is their solution to the
problem. So we are going to get into issues related to Adam’s original sin,
related to the doctrine of imputation which of course is going to deal with not
only the imputation of sin but the imputation of Adam’s guilt to each one of
us, the imputation of our guilt to Jesus Christ. All of this is related. You
just thought the issue of the origin and the transmission of the soul had to do
with how people get souls. All of this is interconnected.
That is what is so fabulous about
studying theology. There is this whole web of interconnectivity between
different concepts and different verses. If you start changing one thing, it
changes everything else and you start having problems in different areas.
Usually the way these kinds of
things are set up in a typical seminary classroom or systematic theology book
is that you are either-or. You either hold to creationism or Traducianism. It is
either the body or the soul. Remember that. You are in seminalism or federalism. It is either the
body or the soul, so you have this dichotomy. Both sides can marshal a number
of Scriptures in support of their position. So you come out of a typical
seminary classroom scratching your head and thinking thoughts similar to those
expressed by Louis Sperry Chafer.
“Well, they could go either way. I
think I am going this way.”
That is how he handled the problem
of creationism versus Traducianism.
He said, “Well, they are pretty
close. There are a lot of verses on the side of Traducianism and a lot of verses
on the side of creationism. But I guess I am going to be a Traducianist.”
It was 50.1% to 49.9%. What happens
is you have a lot of men come out of classrooms and they think, “Well...”
They start to become theological
agnostics at that point. It is a very dangerous thing.
They begin to think, “Well, if these
double or triple PhD’s that are teaching me in class can’t understand this
issue; then it’s really not understandable. If they can’t unscrew the
inscrutable then how can I with nothing more than a master’s degree unscrew the
inscrutable?”
Then what happens is the first
domino in theological agnosticism has developed and before long you become a
pan-millennialist. You can’t decide whether you are pre-millennial or
post-millennial or a-millennial so you are just a pan-millennialist. It will
all pan out in the end…
And that is dangerous because the
next thing you know you are not clear on the gospel. As long as you do
something with Jesus – and “we don’t know which Jesus it is”. Maybe it is
Jesus the gardener or Jesus the ball player, but as long as you do something
with somebody named Jesus somehow that gets you in to heaven. So you can invite
him into your heart or walk the aisle or you can commit yourself.
It just leads to…
“The only thing that we can know for
sure is that we have had an experience and God has done something for us. So
let’s all get together and put our arms around each other and have an emergent
church. We will all feel good about God and God will be impressed that we feel
so good about him and about each other. That’s got to get us some brownie
points.”
Nobody knows anything any more.
Our starting point on this is trying
to understand Adam’s original sin and how Adam’s original sin gets transmitted
to the entire human race so that all are guilty of Adam’s sin. So we have to
define Adam’s original sin first of all.
Adam’s original sin refers to the
first act of willful disobedience to God committed by the first man, Adam in
the Garden of Eden. It’s not Eve’s sin. If Adam had resisted the temptation and
only Eve had eaten of the fruit, then only Eve would have fallen. She would
have gotten kicked out of the garden and God would have gone to plan B for a
helpmate for Adam. We would have had the first divorce. But that didn’t happen
because Adam decided that the woman was more attractive than God, which has
happened many times down through history.
We are almost out of time so I am
going to tell you another story. We will get into this next time. I will tell
you one more story. This is just appalling to me.
Women have such power. You don’t
understand that. Women have such power over men and over theology. One of the
ways I first noticed this was in studying cults. It is amazing how many cults
were started by women. What is even more amazing is how many husbands got
screwed up theologically under the influence and pressure of their wives.
Back in the 1980’s there was a new
ick-ack or spasm in the Church Age with the rise with what became known as the
Vineyard Movement, the Signs and Wonders Movement. John Wimber was a pastor out
in southern California. Originally he was Quaker. He was dispensational - at
least he said he believed what the Scofield Reference Bible said. That doesn’t
make you dispensational. That just means you believe those notes. But he really
didn’t understand it. Anyway, to make a long story short, he became
charismatic. But he becomes charismatic under the influence and pressure of his
wife. But they aren’t classic Pentecostals or Charismatics because they believe
that speaking in tongues can come – some Christians will, most won’t. That
is not like Pentecostals or Charismatics.
“Maybe it is related to the baptism of
the Holy Spirit, maybe not. We just have to be open to the fact that God can
still send people who heal and speak in tongues and this kind of thing.”
In the mid 80’s three Dallas
Seminary professors who had been professors of mine and friends of mine in a couple
of cases went Vineyard. They got fired from Dallas Seminary. All three of these
guys were influenced by their wives. Read their testimonies.
My wife was feeling like, “Oh, it’s
not just doctrine. It is such a cold intellectual thing this Christianity. I’ve
got to feel something. I have got to have more emotion in my Christianity. I
feel so distant from God.” So the wives get into this kind of subjectivity.
The same thing happened recently. The
news came out about this at the end of April – that Francis Beckwith who
was a professor of theology at the seminary at Baylor University. Francis
Beckwith has been around for a long time. He is a noted evangelical theologian
and apologist. He has written lots of books – technical theological books
on lots of different subjects and was currently or up to that point was the
president of the largest association of evangelical theologians – the Evangelical
Theological Society. At the last meeting in November he was elected president.
He didn’t tell anybody that he was beginning to have reservations about
evangelicalism. But due to a particular turn of events, he felt like he had to
come out of the closet at the end of April and so he told everybody that yes
indeed it was true that earlier in April he had gone to confession at the local
Roman Catholic diocese and he had confessed his heresy of being an evangelical
and he had received full absolution and was accepted back into the Roman
Catholic Church.
As a child he had been raised
Catholic and had gone through all the different hoops that you have to in order
to be a catholic. So they gave him absolution and welcomed him back into the
Roman Catholic Church.
One of the first questions my wife
asked me when she heard this was, “What does his wife think about this?”
You see a woman is going to ask that
kind of question.
His wife was leading the way. She
wasn’t raised a Catholic.
But she was out there 20 yards in
front of him saying, “I think this is what we need to do.”
So he let her lead him right along
the chain of decision making and so now the Roman Catholic Church is taking out
full page ads in newspapers throughout Central and South America saying, “Major
Evangelical Theologian Returns to the True Church.”
There are a lot of people who claim
that they somehow understand doctrine and theology and it is academic. Just
because somebody can go along and give some sort of verbal affirmation to a
doctrinal statement doesn’t mean they understand it, even if they have three
PhD’s by their name. What a world we live in.
Let’s bow our heads in closing
prayer….