Last time we began a study of Samson and
we came to Judges 13:5 and in Judges 13:5 and the following verses where the
angel of the Lord has appeared to the mother of Samson, she is informed about
the fact that this child that she is already pregnant with, we saw that it’s
poorly translated in most versions as a future tense, in the Hebrew it is a
perfect tense and should be understood in the sense that she has already conceived
and that she is already pregnant and that she is going to have a child and this
child is going to be a Nazirite. We looked at that last time and saw that
in the Nazirite vow, it was a voluntary vow that was taken for a temporary
period of time. With Samson it is going to be different. Samson is
not a voluntary vow; God is imposing the vow on him and it will be for the
duration of his life, from birth to death.
But, uniquely, his mother is told
that she too must follow at least a portion of that vow. There were three
things that were part of the Nazirite vow. Number one, they were not to
not only avoid drinking any wine, they were not to have any contact with the
fruit of the vine at all; no grapes, no grape juice, and remember Samson is
near a culture that’s influenced by the Greeks so they couldn’t have any grape
leaves, you know the Greeks are always wrapping something up in grape leaves so
they couldn’t eat that, they couldn’t have anything to do with grapes.
Secondly, it seems to be a vow, I can’t find where it applied to women, a vow
that was specifically for the male and they were not to cut the hair of their
head at all. That was the outward visible sign that they had taken the
Nazirite vow and the third aspect of the vow, they were not to have contact
with anything that was dead. Of course that was also part of the dietary
law of the Mosaic Covenant which forbade eating of certain foods and if you do
a study of the foods that are forbidden it doesn’t have anything to do with health.
Every now and then you’re going to
run into somebody who is going to say they have some great diet for you and
they’re going to base it on the Mosaic Law and that’s why the Jews had that
diet is because of course they didn’t now how to adequately prepare these foods
and it wasn’t until that later they could eat them and they try to make the
whole thing hygienic but that’s false because everything is made clean and
declared clean and that believers in the Church Age can eat anything, no
dietary restrictions. In Acts 10 with the vision God gave to Peter where
He was informing him of the inclusion of Gentiles into the Church, and of
course, He didn’t instruct Peter at that time that now you have to cook pork
until it’s at least medium well in order to kill all of the bacteria, you don’t
need to cook other foods to…there was no change in the way in which they
prepared food, there was no scientific advance when it was clearly an issue of
spiritual truth. And what God was teaching through the dietary law was that
death was the result of sin and that God could have nothing to do with sin. God
is holy; the word “holy” even though it’s a rather antiquated term and
over-used in a lot of religious verbiage and not everybody knows what “holy”
means; it comes from the Hebrew word qadash which means set apart and it
emphasizes the uniqueness and distinctness of God, and that God cannot have
anything to do with sin. And so what God was teaching through this
physical training aid of the dietary law was that if you ate anything that was
a scavenger, that had something to do with death, then that made you
ceremonially unclean, it’s not that it was a sin, but it made you ceremonially
unclean and you had to perform certain sacrifices of the Levitical sacrifices
before you were cleansed and could go into the temple and the whole point was
to train people to think in terms of how pervasive sin was and how it affected
everything.
So this is really a visual aid, a Nazirite
is a visual aid that his focus is on God; the Psalmist tells us that God gave
wine for the joy of man’s soul and the word for “wine” there is not grape
juice, it is wine and it was an alcoholic beverage and so clearly God
recognizes that there is a validity to drinking alcoholic beverages. It’s
drunkenness that’s forbidden by Scripture, not enjoying wine or beer or
whatever you might enjoy; it’s avoiding getting to the point where you’re
rational faculties and your volition is impaired to any degree by that.
So it is temperance, it is not abstinence. But the Nazirite was to
abstain to show as a visible _expression that his joy, his happiness was based
exclusively on God. So there was this unique facet to the vow of the
Nazirite.
Now when the angel of the Lord comes
to the woman, we don’t know her name, just the mother of Samson, she’s told
that she too is to avoid drinking wine herself and not to eat anything unclean
because of the child that is in her womb. Then we come to verse 5 which
states, “For behold, you shall conceive,” and that should be translated “you
have conceived, and will give birth to a son, and no razor shall come upon his
head, for the boy shall be a Nazirite to God from the womb; and shall begin to
deliver Israel from the hand of the Philistines.”
So we raised the question last time,
because this question should occur to people who are reading this text,
especially in light of the tremendous controversy that has been going on in
this nation ever since the Supreme Court decision of Roe vs. Wade, what exactly
is the value of human life and what is the value of life in the womb? And
what exactly is the life in the womb and how should that affect decisions that
are made, legislative decisions and judicial decisions? Is abortion
legitimate, illegitimate; is it simply a moral or spiritual issue or is it a
criminal issue? And these questions, of course, have become litmus tests
for almost orthodoxy in Christianity, conservative Christianity and some cases
even conservative politics. And yet what happens more often than not,
about 99.9% of the time is you get a lot of heat and not a whole lot of light
when discussing this. And yet as believers we need to recognize that God
addresses every important issue in life, and the Scripture tells us that it is
sufficient for all matters of life and godliness, the spiritual life.
So it is going to give us insight
truth about what is going on inside the womb and what our position as believers
should be. And there is clarity there; it is not dark. In the next
hour we’re going to look at issues related to inerrancy, infallibility, and one
of the points is that God has communicated to be clear, not to be
unclear. He has communicated to be perceived and not to confuse
man. And yet what we find in this area is a lot of confusion. This
last week I was reading through a contemporary volume on systematic theology,
one that is popular today, it came out in the 80s and has become a major
textbook used in many seminaries today, most conservative seminaries; the
author is considered an evangelical. I would put him pretty much to the
middle, to the left of whatever evangelical means and in many cases I don’t
care for the author myself because in many cases he says these are the three
options and I’m not sure which one it is but these are the strengths and weaknesses
of each position and he basically bails out of a lot of issues where he should
be making decisions, because the bottom line from all of that well, isn’t God
clear. I mean, you’re supposed to have a degree, a PhD and you know the
original languages and you don’t know what God’s saying about this?
That’s what he did in the issue, in his section discussing the nature of human
life and the origin of the soul, he goes to the historical positions as we
will, and then he concludes by saying we really can’t say that the Scriptures
are clear; science really can’t tell us when the soul is present, that is not a
factor of empirical data and so the only thing we can conclude is that since
abortion is wrong, obviously there must be full human life in the womb.
See, he back-argued the position and that’s the kind of lousy logic you find in
so many treatments of this subject, on both sides of the issue. So we
need to address what the Scripture says and I began last time by looking at the
Hebrew that is used here for the phrase, “from the womb.”
So our first point is that this is a
technical prepositional phrase from the Hebrew, min is the preposition,
plus the noun for womb, and here it is a full or plenary word, min ha beten,
whereas normally what you find in the Hebrew there is sort of a contraction
where it is the preposition is just joined directly to the noun and it comes
across as minbete. And here the min, the preposition has a
local meaning, indicating the point of departure and therefore means away from
or from. It is not talking about inside the womb because that would be
the preposition B in the Hebrew which means “in.” So it is outside
the womb, it’s not talking about life in the womb and the text here in Judges
13:5 is simply stating that the boy will be a Nazirite to God from birth.
Now I want to review why I say it is
“from birth.” It’s talking about him, that he’s going to be a Nazirite to
God from birth, because the three mandates to be a Nazirite, dietary law, uncut
hair, and not touching a dead body all relate to his volition. And the
reason it says “from birth” indicates that his volition isn’t active in the
womb. It’s not activated until he is born. Prior to birth there is
a mandate to his mother. Now why is that? At least what this is
going to indicate and what we’re going to see by the time we get to the
conclusion is that God places a value on what’s going on inside the womb and
her life and her abstinence from wine, from strong drink which we saw last time
is the Hebrew word shakar which means barley beer, and the fact that she
had to give up wine and beer for the period of her pregnancy is to be a visible
symbol that God is doing something special through her. It really doesn’t
say anything specifically about whether or not there is full human life inside
the womb. So the first point we looked at last time was the technical
phrase that’s used here.
The second point is that is this an
idiom? Is it possible, and there is at least one or two authors that I’ve
read that try to claim that mibeten is an idiom for “from
conception.” But as I noted last time there is a Hebrew word, hareyon
from the verb harah, you have on the one hand a verb, harah, and
then you have its noun, hareyon and this is the noun; harah is
the verb. When you have the word for birth you have the verb yalad,
but there is no corresponding noun. So my argument is that if you’re
talking about conception, the Hebrew does have a word to state literally “from
conception.” You would say min hareyon. But if you’re
talking about “from birth” there’s no word; the language is lexically
impoverished at that point and there is no word, literal noun for birth, so you
have to use an idiom and the idiom that they used was mibeten. If
you want to talk about birth you used the phrase mibeten. Now
there’s a couple of things we need to understand here that I want to make sure
everyone is clear on. First of all, this is a difficult…number one, it’s
a flash point doctrine for some people, sometimes when I teach what I teach some
people think it automatically justifies abortion and it doesn’t, that’s a non
sequitur, it’s irrelevant. There have been many, many Christians over the
years who have taken this identical position and that was never an issue.
It’s just become such an emotional flash point over the last 25 years or so
that everybody jumps to illegitimate conclusions.
The second thing I want to do, if
you haven’t been around very long, if you haven’t been a Christian for very
long, maybe some things that we’re going to cover are a little difficult for
you, that’s okay, you have to follow the procedure. When you’re eating
spiritual food all you can eat is oatmeal and cereal and you have to put the
steak aside and say I’ll come back to it and study that at a later time when I
have a little better frame of reference and can understand it a little better,
a little more clearly.
The third point that we have to get
to is to understand the basics of how God made man and the composition of
mankind, of a human being. So turn to Genesis 2:7 where we see the
mechanics of how God created Adam, the first man. There we read, “And the
LORD God formed man of dust from the ground,” now we must remember there are at
least four different words in the Hebrew language to describe God’s creative
activity. There is the word bara’ which is used only of God as the
subject and expresses His divine creative activity. There is the word asah;
asah generally refers to making or doing, it’s the more general word for
making or manufacturing something. Then there is the verb yatsar,
and yatsar is the word that is used of, let’s say a potter forming an
object on his potter’s wheel and it means to shape or to form an existing
material.
So we read here that “the LORD God formed man,” it’s not bara’,
it’s not asah, it’s talking about the physical formation of his body,
that he “formed man of the dust from the ground,” that means he used the
chemicals in the soil to produce the human body. And that’s what he’s
talking about here, is the material part of man, that there is a distinction in
man between a material body and an immaterial soul. If man was simply
material, if everything were material then when man died there would be nothing
to go to heaven. But Scripture says that at the instant of death we are
absent from the body and face to face with the Lord and that indicates that the
soul is distinct from the body as well as many, many other passages, this being
the first one. “The LORD God formed man of the dust from the ground,” and
so that forms his biological life. This is the formation of his physical
body and everything necessary. At that point you have biological life and
of course the text doesn’t go into it, doesn’t go into the fact that there is
cell life and there are all kinds of things going on at the cellular level on
the body. This even happens after death, the soul is departed to go to
heaven and there are certain cell things that are still going on, there are
still certain reflexes, they diminish rather rapidly after death. Some
continue much longer, a year, two years down the road; your carcass is still
going to be growing hair, fingernails and toenails, and five, ten, fifteen,
twenty minutes after death somebody can tap your knee with a little hammer and
you’re still going to get a muscular reflex. There is still cell life
even though the soul is no longer there, even though the brain wave is flat and
the heart wave is flat there is still life at a cellular level and it gradually
over time, in some cases more rapidly, that life at the cellular level begins
to dissipate and disappear.
So there’s a distinction between
that must be made between biological life and biological activity and soul
life, and that’s the second part of the verse. It says that God “formed
man of the dust from the ground,” that is related to the body, “and He breathed
into his nostrils the breath of life,” and the Hebrew word there is neshamah
for “the breath of life,” God breathed naphach, the breath of life, neshamah
into him; it is that breath that imparted to the physical body of biological
life the immaterial soul of Adam, and it was only at that point where you had
biological life united with soul life that you had real human life. When
there was just a body and no soul there, there is no full human life there;
it’s potential human life and it’s important because it’s potential human
life. It’s not just a mass of cells; it was important because of what it
was designed to be. God had not completed the task yet but once the soul
was imparted to the body then man became a living being. It wasn’t until
you had the unity of biological life plus soul life that you had human
life. And that is what makes true humanity. And until you have both
elements present there is no human life.
So we start off with biological life plus
soul life and that equals human life. Now let’s look at some other
passages that teach this distinction between the soul and the body, between the
immaterial part of man and the material part of man. In Isaiah 10:18 we
read, “And he will destroy the glory of his forest and his fruitful garden,”
and the glory of his forest and his fruitful garden refers to mankind, “he will
destroy the glory of his forest and his fruitful garden, both soul and body.”
They are viewed as distinct elements, “both soul and body, and it will be as
when a sick man wastes away.” Another passage is in Genesis 35:18, “It
came about as her soul was departing,” this is talking about the death of
Rachael, “It came about as her soul was departing (for she died),” so that
indicates that when her soul left the physical body, when soul life departed
biological life that is when death occurred; “when her soul departed,” that’s
when Rachael named Benjamin.
A three-fold division is stated in 1
Thessalonians 5:23, “Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you entirely and
may your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete, without blame at the
coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” I don’t want to get diverted and run
down a rabbit trail on the makeup of man but there are two views on the makeup
of man; one is called dichotomy and the other is called trichotomy. A
true dichotomous in the true theologically accepted use of the term believes
that man is made up of two elements, material and immaterial and that all of
the different facets that are mentioned in the Bible, from the mentality, the
heart, the soul, the spirit are all just different aspects of the immaterial
and they all blend together and that’s as far as those folks want to press
things. Now trichotomists is the second position and trichotomy teaches
that man is made up of three parts, three components: a body, a soul and a
spirit, and that in some passages these words are used in a very technical
sense. And they are here, 1 Thessalonians 5:23 as they are in Hebrews
4:12, “that the Word of God is alive and powerful, sharper than any two-edged
sword, piercing even to the dividing of the body, the soul from the spirit…” in
these verses, Hebrews 4:12 and 1 Thessalonians 5:23 the Bible makes a clear
distinction between the soul and the spirit.
Furthermore, in Jude 1:19 we read,
“These are the ones,” talking about the false teachers, false prophets and they
were unbelievers, “These are the ones who cause divisions,” and then it’s a
horrible translation, worldly minded,” it’s not worldly minded, that’s
kosmos in the Greek, it’s psuchikos here, not kosmos, and psuchikos
means soulish, and then you have an appositional phrase which defines what
psuchikos means, and it’s again an interpreted translation in the New
American Standard, “devoid of the Spirit,” and they capitalize “Spirit” and
that is an interpretive decision by the translator. But psuchikos
means soulish, and in 1 Corinthians 2:14 we’re told that “the psuchikos
man cannot understand the things of the spirit of God for they are spiritually
discerned.” And there we again see that the unbeliever is called psuchikos
and he can’t understand the Word of God because there’s some portion of him,
something in his makeup that he’s missing; he’s soulish, he’s not
spiritual. In other words, Jude tells us he’s devoid of…literally it
means not having spirit and it should be lower case “s” referring to the human
spirit.
So the position that we teach here
at Preston City Bible Church is that man was originally created in the Garden
with a material body and an immaterial soul and spirit. The soul is
comprised of his mentality, his emotion, his volition, his conscience and that
comprises the image of God, and that was linked together with a human spirit
and it was that human spirit that enabled man, the creature, to have a
relationship with God and to understand doctrine. But at the point of
spiritual death, when Adam disobeyed God and ate of the fruit of the tree of
the knowledge of good and evil he lost that human spirit; he died
spiritually. That’s what spiritual death means; we are born dead in our
trespasses and sins; we don’t have a human spirit. And at regeneration
something is born again and see, this is a problem with the dichotomous is he
doesn’t really want to make this distinction between soul and spirit.
He’ll go to passages like the one we looked at the other night in Daniel 2:1
that the spirit of Nebuchadnezzar was troubled and there are other passages
that talk about the spirit, ruach, the spirit of Pharaoh was troubled,
and that’s just a generic non-technical use of the word ruach to refer
to the immaterial part of man. We do that all the time in every day
conversation. Sometimes we talk about…even within a paragraph we’ll use
the same word in a technical and in a non-technical general sense. And
the Scripture does the same thing as well and you can’t run around and every
time you see the word “spirit” impose a technical definition on it. And
some people do that, we saw that just now in the translation in Judge 19, that
some translators every time they see the word “spirit” they have this knee-jerk
reaction and they want to translate it with a capital “S” and they don’t bring
enough theology and background to the text to correctly and properly interpret
it.
So what we’ve learned in this sub
point here, point number three, is that the soul is distinct from the body,
Isaiah 10:18, the soul departs the body at death, and third, the soul is part
of two aspects, two immaterial aspects of humanity, and man is born without a
human spirit and he acquires a human spirit, he’s given a human spirit by God
at the point of faith alone in Christ alone. At the point that anyone
puts their faith in Jesus Christ and accepts Christ as Savior they are
regenerated and God the Holy Spirit creates and simultaneously imparts that
human spirit to you as a believer and that now gives you the ability, to
potential to be able to understand Bible doctrine, to be able to understand the
Scriptures so that it now can make sense to you, especially under the teaching
ministry of God the Holy Spirit. So that leads us to point number
four.
Point number four is what we’ve
stated already and that is that human life, full human life is the joining of
biological life with soul life. The question then becomes when does that
occur? At what point in time does that occur? Does that occur at
conception? Does that occur somewhere between conception and birth? Does
it occur at birth? Furthermore, is it transmitted through procreation or
is the soul a special act of God each and every time? Those are the
questions that must be addressed? Is the soul a special creation of God
that’s imparted at birth or at conception or some time in between, or is the
soul physically transmitted through the act of procreation?
With Adam we see that the soul life
was created and imparted to his biological life almost at the instant that God
created the biological life. There wasn’t much of a time differential but
then Adam’s human body did not have to go through the normal growth process,
the normal nine month gestation period. So we need to ask, is this a
one-time event where breath comes only to Adam and consequently after that for
every other person, it comes at…the soul is transmitted either through
procreation or given at conception.
A couple of passages will clarify
this. Ecclesiastes 12:7 talks about death and the death of a human being,
“then the dust,” that is the physical body, “the dust will return to the earth
as it was,” see we were formed from the dust of the ground, the chemicals of
the soil, and Ecclesiastes says then at death “the dust will return to the
earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it.” And
there that is a non-technical use of spirit; it’s talking about the immaterial
part of man. See, spirit means breath, wind, sometimes it means thinking,
sometimes it’s almost used synonymously with the soul, but here it just refers
to the immaterial part of man. This is the Old Testament equivalent of
Paul’s statement, “absent from the body and face to face with the Lord.”
“….the spirit will return to God who gave it.” Now notice that, God is
the One who gives the spirit, it’s not God who gives the body in this verse.
We want to make that distinction because what happens in the process is that
with Adam God initiated two procedures; biological life was created and given
the ability to procreate and replicate physically. God is still involved
in the process but in an indirect supervisory manner. We’re going to see
that that’s not purely passive at all so just because it’s indirect or what is
also called mediate doesn’t mean it’s passive and it’s sort of almost like a
deistic idea of God, you know, God just lets nature take its course. He
is involved and that’s part of what we’re seeing with the dynamic with
Samson.
Soul life, on the other hand, comes
from God according to Ecclesiastes 12:7 and that soul life comes from God
indicates that God is directly or immediately involved in the creation of each
and every human soul. Other passages support this. For example, in
Job 33:4 Job says, “The Spirit of God has made me,” asah, “and the
breath of the Almighty gives me life.” “…the breath of the Almighty gives
me life,” so Job recognizes that it is when he breathes his first neshamah,
that’s the Hebrew word translated breath here, it’s the same word that we saw
in Genesis 2:7, that when God breathed into Adam he became a living
being. So Job recognizes the fact that it is neshamah
that gave him life and at that appoint he became a living body, he became full
humanity.
Again, we read in Isaiah 42:5, “Thus
says God the LORD, who
created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and its
offspring, who gives breath to the people on it.” There we see it is God
directly providing neshamah, breath, to people on it.
So there is a distinction, and then in parallelism, and those of you who went
through the Old Testament intro course last year when I talked about poetry, we
have synonymous parallelism here with the “spirit to those who walk in it,”
again spirit is a general use of the word ruach, referring to the
immaterial part of man, that God is the One who gives that to man; it is not
your parents who gave you that, they gave you your physical body, they didn’t
give you the neshamah, the breath, the soul life. That
came from God. And that’s what these passages stress over and over and
over again, is God is the One who directly imparts that through breath.
And the first breath that a baby takes after birth is when he inhales through neshamah,
inhales his soul and it’s at that point that full human life is present; it’s
at that point that the material biological life is joined with the immaterial
soul life.
Now there’s always been a level of
controversy over this among theologians and there are three positions that have
been taught throughout the history of Christianity on the origin of the
soul. The first is heretical and non-Biblical but in the early church it
was taught by some because they were influenced by the philosophy of Plato and
that is called the pre-existence of the soul. We’re not going to spend
any time on that because there’s no Biblical support at all and when we talk
about creation of the soul and impartation at birth there’s no time gap between
the creation of the soul and its impartation to the body at birth; the soul did
not exist a minute, two minutes, five minutes, five years, ten years, five
centuries before it was joined to the body; it was simultaneously created and
imparted to the body. So there is no pre-existence of the soul.
That is a pagan doctrine.
The second view is a view called
traducianism. Traducianism was first articulated by an early church
father by the name of Tertullian and Tertullian lived from 160-225 AD.
Tertullian is most widely known because he’s the one who coined the word Trinitas
in the Latin for Trinity. Tertullian also held to a view that the soul
was material. And so he taught that the soul was transmitted through
physical procreation, which would make sense if the soul is material then it is
transmitted physically. So that was the first position.
The other position also documented
early in the Church is the view of creationism. And that is the view that
I am teaching, that each soul is immediately created by God, the body is
mediately created and imparted, and the body is produced through the physical
act of procreation. Now the thing is that we need to recognize the
dominance of creationism. A hundred years ago W. G. T. Shedd, who was a
traducianist argued against creationism but he commented that at that time the
majority of theologians were creationists. Now that shocks a lot of conservative
evangelicals today because they think that creationism means…they just
automatically think that means you’re pro-abortion and they can’t accept
this. But men like John Calvin, Charles Hodge who was head of the
theology department at Princeton and among the Princeton theologians was among
those who fought off liberalism and help to craft our current understanding of
inerrancy and infallibility. Contemporary theologians, 20th
century conservatives like Louis Berkhof as well, Martin Luther, Jerome and
Aquinas all held to creationist positions. Aquinas, Jerome, these are
great (quote) “saints” (end quote) in the Roman Catholic hierarchy of
saints. Aquinas is considered the greatest theologian by Roman
Catholics and Aquinas states in his Summa Theologica that “it is heresy,”
notice that, he didn’t mince words, “it is heresy to think that the soul is
transmitted through the semen.” That is a strong statement. You
won’t find too many Roman Catholics or pro-lifers that are aware of that.
I just want you to understand that there has always been this level of
controversy.
Point six introduced the three
categories, theologically of the origin of the soul. Point seven; let’s
look at technical terminology and how it is used throughout the Old Testament.
For example, in Job 1:21, he said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb,” that’s
mibeten again, “and naked I shall return there,” not literally to the
womb but he will return to the LORD, “the Lord gave and the Lord has taken
away, blessed be the name of the LORD.” Notice, mibeten means from
birth; the parameters of life here are from birth to death. Over and over
again we’re going to see the Bible indicate that the parameters of human life
are not from conception. Job had a word, he could have said min
hareyon, but he doesn’t, he says mibeten, he doesn’t say “from
conception,” he says “from birth.”
Job 3:11 he says, “Why did I not die
at birth,” he doesn’t say why was I not aborted, why didn’t my mother miscarry,
why was I even conceived, he says, “why did I not die at birth, and come forth
from the womb and expire.” So he recognizes in that statement that he
wasn’t a full human, the soul was not present in the womb. Job 10:9, “Remember
now, that Thou hast made me as clay,” that’s the biological life, “and wouldst
Thou turn me into dust again.” It’s referring simply to the biological
life, that’s not talking about the soul life.
Psalm 22:9, “Yet Thou art He who
didst bring me forth from the womb,” from birth, “Thou didst make me trust when
upon my mother’s breast,” it’s talking about life outside the womb. Psalm
22:10, “Upon Thee I was cast from birth,” not in the womb but “from birth,” and
notice there the translator in the New American Standard translates mibeten
as an idiom for “from birth,” not “from the womb,” but that’s what it literally
says in the Hebrew, but it is from birth. Then it reads, “Those who speak lies
go astray from birth,” if it was conception there would be an active sin nature
inside the womb but they “go astray from birth” because that’s when the soul
life enters and that’s when the sin nature is activated.
Point number eight; birth and death
are the Biblical parameters for life. Over and over and over again and I never
hear anybody address this. Ecclesiastes 3:2, “A time to give birth and a
time to die,” it doesn’t say a time to conceive and a time to die, it says “A
time to give birth and a time to die.” Isaiah 9:6, “For a child will be
born to us,” not a child will be conceived for us, but “A child will be born to
us, a son will be given to us.” Matthew 11:11, “Truly, I say to you,
among those born of women there has not arise anyone greater than John the
Baptist,” not among those who are conceived but “those who are born among
women.” Luke 2:10-11, “And the angel said to them,” this is the
announcement to the shepherds at the time of Jesus birth, “Do not be afraid for
behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which shall be for all the people,
[11] For today in the city of David there has been born for you a Savior, who
is Christ the Lord.” There wasn’t an angelic announcement to the world of
conception but at birth. Job 15:14, “What is man that he should be pure,
or he who is born of a woman that he should be righteous.” Job 38:21,
“You know, for you were born then, and the number of your days is great.”
Job 10:18, “Why, then, hast Thou brought me out of the womb; would that I had
died and no eye had seen me.” Why was I born? Job 10:19, “I should
have been as though I had not been, carried from womb,” mibeten, from
birth, “from womb to tomb.” From birth to death! That’s the
parameters in the Scripture, not from conception.
That leads us to point number ten;
nevertheless, life, that is biological life in the womb has significance and
value as God’s indirect creation. This doesn’t mean that what is going on
in the womb is simply a mass of cells. This is not simply a mass of
cells, this is not simply a tumor, this is not just a… it is a potential human
life. And so you can’t go along with the argument of the pro-abortion
crowd that it’s nothing more than a meaningless mass of cells, like a wart or
like a tumor or something else that you just want to excise. There is
something of significance and value there. For example, in Job 10:8 we
read, “Thy hands fashioned and made me altogether, and wouldst Thou destroy
me?” And it’s talking there, using an anthropomorphism for God’s hands,
talking about God’s involvement in the physical process. [9] Remember
now, that Thou hast made me as clay,” see, God is indirectly involved because
God’s not involved directly in procreation. God uses the means of
physical human procreation to form the biological life but God is involved in
the process, and this is a tremendous comfort to people. This is
something you never hear.
Remember in John 9 when Jesus heals
the blind man, He comes to the blind man outside the temple and the disciples
said who sinned, this man or his parents? And at this point we’re going
to get a profound understanding of divine involvement in the formation of our
physical life. The Jewish thinking at that time was that any kind of
birth defect like this was a result of this person’s sin or the parent’s sin
and Jesus’ response is neither, he was born this way for the glory of
God. In other words, God was involved directly in the formation of this
man’s biological life such that he was born blind, with this physical defect,
so that God could get glorified. Now that’s a profound thought because
when people are born with birth defects or with physical handicaps, and they
say why God, did You make me that way? It’s for God’s glory because
through that limitation God…the potential is that God is going to be glorified
if that individual applies doctrine to the situation and overcomes that
physical handicap, that test, through the use of doctrine.
So we see here that even…this builds
our understanding of the fact that we can’t come along and say oh, there’s
going to be some birth defect so let’s abort the baby. Just think of what
would have happened with that syphilitic mother who gave birth to Ludwig von
Beethoven if somebody had said you’re going to have a child that’s going to be
born with defects and you’re obviously sick so let’s just go ahead and have an
abortion. See, that’s human reasoning but the Scripture is saying God is
involved in the process.
Psalm 139 is a passage everybody
goes to to try to prove that there’s full human life in the womb but it can’t
be used for that. Psalm 139:13 says, “For Thou didst form my inward
parts,” inward parts is not talking about the soul, inward parts is talking
about the internal organs, it’s talking about how God is involved in the
process of developing every aspect of biological life. “Thou didst weave
me in my mother’s womb.” That’s parallelism and it’s talking about how
God is involved in the process of forming biological life; it is not that it is
just a mass of biological cells.
Psalm 139:14, “I will give thanks to
Thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made,” because of what God did in the
womb in forming biological life, there’s no mention of the soul here, David now
gives thanks to God because of what he has physically, because of his biological
life. He says, “Wonderful are Thy works, and my soul knows it very
well.” Verse 15, “My frame” that is the physical body, biological life,
“My frame was not hidden from Thee, when I was made in secret, and skillfully
wrought in the depths of the earth. [16] Thine eyes have seen my unformed
substance; and in Thy book they were all written, the days that were ordained
for me, when as yet there was not one of them.” So it’s talking about
even in the womb God had a plan for David and that plan included imparting a
soul to that biological life, but first the biological life had to be formed as
the home for the soul and then at birth the soul would be imparted to it.
Conclusion, therefore, is physical
biological life is so significant that God instructs Samson’s mother, that just
as in his physical life he is to be manifest as a Nazirite so she must not
defile him or herself even when his body is in the womb. There is value
to the human body in the womb; it’s not just a mass of cells, there’s something
valid there.
Now let’s stop and talk about the
implications of this in terms of social law. First of all I want you to
remember that in the history of Christianity, you know, someone might say up
until the present time, and believe me if you read the scholarly literature by
some evangelicals, like the theologian I mentioned earlier, there’s not even
consensus today, but some would try to argue that there is, and there’s
probably greater consensus today because of the reaction to Woe vs. Wade back
in 73. But throughout the history of the Church there has always been
tremendous disagreement about just when the soul and the body are
united. And they argue from Scriptures. Now if, and
I’m just using this as an argument; if, assuming it’s true that the Scripture
is just unclear, if we can’t know from Scripture when the soul is united to the
body, and we can’t know from science when the soul is united to the body, then
how in the world can we legislate laws making abortion murder and
criminal.
My argument is that unbelievers are
never held accountable to spiritual truth that is discernable only from direct
revelation of God. Unbelievers are never held accountable to any mandate
in Scripture that is discernable only by revelation of God. Why is
that? In 1 Corinthians 2:14 we’re told that the natural man cannot
understand the things of the Spirit of God because they are spiritually
discerned. Turn there, this is an important passage and it’s important
for understanding how we learn doctrine as well. Let’s start at 1
Corinthians 1:9 so we pick up the context. “But as it is written,” and
here we have a quote from the Old Testament, from Isaiah 64:4, “Eye has not
seen nor ear heard,” that’s empiricism, what is discoverable and learnable
through the senses, “Eye has not seen nor ear heard, nor have entered into the
heart of man,” that’s rationalism, the mind of man, “Eye has not seen nor ear
heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things,” and here we have an
neuter plural of a relative pronoun, “the things which God has prepared for
those who love Him.” Now what are “things?” Well, in context the
“things” are doctrine, that which is revealed by God. And it is saying in
this quote that rationalism can’t get there, it hasn’t entered into the heart
of man, the mind of man, empiricism can’t discover these truths, “eye has not
seen nor ear heard the things which God has prepared for those who love
Him.”
1 Corinthians 2:10, “But God has
revealed them to us through His Spirit,” so revelation comes through the Spirit
of God, and they have been revealed to whom? “To us.” Who’s
us? “Us” is believers, it is not believer and unbeliever, “God has
revealed them to us through His Spirit, for the Spirit searches all things,
yes, the deep things of God.” And the “things” once again refers to
doctrine, it’s got to go back… on a relative pronoun you have to go back to its
antecedent so “the things” here is talking about doctrine, “the Spirit
searches,” the Spirit exposes, “all things, yes, the deep things of
God. [11] For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit
of the man which is in him? Even so, no one knows the things of God
except the Spirit of God.” Now here we have…there’s at least three
different meanings to the word pneuma, translated “spirit” in this
passage. “What man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man
which is in him?” this is like a proverbial statement and saying only a
man can know what’s inside him, only his immaterial soul and there “spirit” almost
means soul, and Paul uses that way in parallelism because he’s bringing out the
aspect of the Spirit of God, that no one knows the things of God, no one knows,
that is, the thinking, the doctrines, the ideas of God except for the Holy
Spirit. It’s the Holy Spirit’s domain for revelation.
1 Corinthians 2:12, “Now we have
received, not the spirit,” that here means attitude or thinking, see, spirit, pneuma,
doesn’t mean the same thing every time you read it; within this verse from
clause to clause Paul shifts the meaning. “Now we have received, not the
spirit of the world,” that is the attitude or the thinking of the cosmic
system, “but the Spirit,” capital “S”, “the Spirit who is from God.” Now
the King James translates that with a capital “S” but this should be a small
“s” and I don’t have time to go into the exegesis of this passage but
everywhere else that we have the Holy Spirit mentioned here, pneuma is
in the genitive case, the Spirit of God, Spirit of God, Spirit of God, Theos
is in the genitive case, but we have spirit of God, pneuma Theou, but
here we have a distinct change; it is the pneuma ek tou Theou;
it’s the only time spirit is used in this whole section where you have a
prepositional phrase defining the ultimate source of God. “The Spirit
from God” is not the Holy Spirit here, it is the human spirit, “but we have
received the human spirit who is from God.” Paul makes a precise
distinction when he uses “spirit” here; he could have said pneuma Theou
and it would mean the same thing, “spirit of God,” but everywhere else he uses pneuma
Theou in this passage he’s talking about the Holy Spirit, “but we have
received the human spirit,” that’s what enables us to understand doctrine, “we
have received the human spirit who is from God, that we might know the
things.” See, if that’s Holy Spirit then Old Testament believers who
never received the Holy Spirit wouldn’t be able to understand the revelation of
God.
Let me make that clear again.
I saw it go right past half of you. This is how you have to think
exegetically when you go through a passage. If this is talking about…when
it’s talking about the “spirit who is from God,” if that’s the Holy Spirit, and
the reason we receive that is to “know the things,” which is revelation in this
passage, doctrine, “to know the things that have been freely given to us from
God,” if that spirit is the Holy Spirit and He’s given to understand the
Word…now the Holy Spirit is given to understand the Word, but if that’s what
this is talking about, then the Old Testament saints who did not have a Holy
Spirit could not understand doctrine. But he did receive the human spirit
and it’s the human spirit that is that portion of man’s immaterial makeup that
enables him to have a relationship with God and to understand Bible doctrine.
So therefore it can’t be the Holy Spirit because that would leave out the
entire Old Testament rank and file of believers and it must refer to the human
spirit from God, “that we [believers] might know the things [Bible doctrine]
which have been freely given to us by God.” Notice, it’s very important;
we’re going to get to a verse in a minute and if you don’t understand that
“things” refers to doctrine revealed in the Scripture you’ll really get
confused. He says “these things,” what’s that—things? It’s
doctrine.
1 Corinthians 2:13, “These things we
also speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit
teaches,” and here it’s Holy Spirit clearly and the Holy Spirit teaches
doctrine to the apostles and then they communicate it, that’s the process of
revelation, “comparing spiritual things,” spiritual concepts, “with spiritual
words.” So that’s the process of building a frame of reference and
developing doctrines.
1 Corinthians 2:14, “But the natural
man,” that is the psuchikos man, the unsaved man who just has a soul and
no human spirit, see, if this is Holy Spirit then you get into real problems
when you try to apply any of this to Old Testament saints. “The natural
man,” the soulish man, “does not receive the things of the Spirit of God,” that
is the things, the doctrines that are revealed by the Holy Spirit, “for they
are foolishness to him, nor can he know them, because they are spiritually
discerned,” they are discerned through the human spirit. So the
unbeliever can’t understand these things. So we’re going to pass
legislation on a national level based on something that is discernable only by
revelation under the teaching ministry of God the Holy Spirit and available to
believers only? That’s absurd! That is absolutely fallacious!
You never make law on the basis of something that’s discernable to Christians
from revelation alone.
1 Corinthians 2:15, “But he who is
spiritual,” that is the person who is born again and has a Holy Spirit,
“judges,” that is evaluates or is able to understand “all things.” Now
what does “all things” mean? See, everybody reads this and oh, well now
that I’m a believer I can discern all things…out there. But that’s not
what it’s talking about; “all things” refers to what in this passage?
We’ve seen it every verse, it goes all the way back to verse 9, the “all
things” refers to doctrine. What that is saying is that the person who is
spiritual, that is born again and has a human spirit, can understand everything
in the Scripture. It’s not dependent upon your human IQ, it’s not
dependent on your education level, it’s not dependent on your cultural
background, it’s dependent on being regenerated, having a human spirit and then
walking by means of God the Holy Spirit. Verse 16, “For who has known the
mind of the LORD,” that’s
Bible doctrine, “For who has known the mind of the LORD that He may instruct him? But we
have the mind of Christ.” This is the Word of God, it is the very
thinking of Jesus Christ. How do you know what God is like and what
Christ is like? Study your Bible, that is the source.
So what we learn from this is that
in this whole issue of the value of human life, by teaching creationism we are
not diminishing the value of life in the womb. In fact, it emphasizes the
value of life in the womb but it recognizes that full human life is not in the
womb, only biological life but that biological life is not insignificant or
irrelevant or just a biological mass, it is potential human life and for that
reason it must be treated with respect and with value and a mother that is
expecting a child should watch her diet and take care of herself and all of
those things that are involved in making sure she has a healthy child.
And that unless there is some extremely good reason for stopping that pregnancy
no one should interfere with the normal process that God has set in
motion. But abortion, therefore, would not be murder, it is immoral,
perhaps, in many cases, it is sin, perhaps, in many cases, I’m not going to get
into the details of when it is and when isn’t, but it is not murder.
And so Samson’s mother is instructed
to take particular care because of what God is going to do through her son and
she is to follow the same dietary laws, not because of what it’s going to do to
what’s in her womb but because she too is a visible sign to the nation Israel
that God is doing something to deliver the nation and so she too must be set
apart because of what God is doing in her womb.