Doctrine of Abortion    Heb. 087b 

This is an article from the Encyclopedia of Judaism which was published in 2000.  One of the editors was Jacob Neusner who is a very well-known rabbinical scholar and several others.  In this article they write…

The Jewish legal and moral attitude toward abortion based on biblical Talmudic and rabbinic sources…

Note that. They’re not dealing with modern Jewish formulations.  They are going back to Mishnaic interpretation, rabbinic interpretation, Talmudic interpretation of the Bible.

The Jewish legal and moral attitude toward abortion based on these sources including the response literature…

That is some modern literature that has been described in detail in English by various authors.  It states…

            In Jewish law an unborn fetus is not considered to be a person.

Now let me pause here.   That is really critical terminology because I am going to read something written by Harold O. J. Brown earlier and he argues a number of non-secularists. I think in his position that if it human – let me make another aside here – what is in the womb is human.  It is not non-human.  It is not something else.  It is going to be a human being.  It is human.  Unfortunately some people have inadvertently overstated the case and say that it doesn’t matter.

“It is just a mass of biological cells.”

No, it is human.  But he makes the supposition that it is human therefore it is a person.  Person gets into a legal definition.  Let me set that aside until I come back and address it later on.

So he says here…

            Jewish law an unborn fetus is not considered to be a person.

That means a legal entity that can own property, transfer titles, be legally recognized.  The person in Hebrew is considered nephesh literally soul which is what I have been pointing out.

It is not a person.  It is not nephesh until it is born. The fetus is regarded as part of the mother’s body and not a separate being until it begins to egress from the womb during parturition.  Until 40 days after conception the fertilized egg is considered mere fluid.

Those 40 days – where does that come from?  That comes back from Aristotelian thought that at forty days there was a quickening.  What is that based on?  Who knows?  But that was it.  At 40 days there was a quickening and that is when it begins to become human.  So that is where the 40 days comes from.

Intentional abortion is not mentioned directly in the Bible, but a case of accidental abortion is discussed in Exodus 21:22-23.

Now, that is the passage where it talks about case law.  You have two men fighting and they want to do each other bodily harm, but they inadvertently and accidentally hit a pregnant woman and the pregnant woman has a baby. One position that some people hold is a view that that is a miscarriage and that it is not a live birth.  But it is recognized by most scholars that the Hebrew word that is used there indicates live birth and is always used of live birth and so that’s the position that must be understood there.  It is a live birth which means that at the point of birth the baby is alive.  Any damage that is done is post birth.  So if life begins at birth, then obviously you have a living baby because it is after birth.  We will get into that in detail when we look at the exegesis of that passage.

So they are going to give the Jewish interpretation and this is only one Jewish interpretation and I have a host of other Jewish scholars who hold to the live birth view.  They argue that this is the miscarriage view.

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.

NKJ Exodus 21:23 "But if any harm follows, then you shall give life for life,

That miscarriage view would be that “if there other misfortune to the mother”. So that is how they interpret that.  The issue here is that by issuing a fine they are showing that what happens is significant.  It is not insignificant.  It is not just a mass of non-entity non-human cells. 

They say, “Well, if they had even considered it to be human, there would have been more than a fine.” 

No, what is interesting is if you get into looking at the Mosaic Law if a Jew harms another Jew there is a penalty.  If he kills a Jew (a Hebrew kills a Hebrew) there is a death penalty.  But if he kills a slave it is a fine.  A slave was fully human, but there is inherent recognition of a difference of a value of life.  That goes through a number of different laws in the Mosaic Law.  The writer of this article in the encyclopedia goes on to say…

            Most biblical commentators…

That would be Jewish – it is a Jewish encyclopedia.  Don’t get confused and think these are Christians.

Most biblical commentators interpret “no other misfortune” to mean no fatal   injury to the woman following her miscarriage.  In that case the attacker pays only financial compensation for having unintentionally caused the miscarriage no differently than if he had accidentally injured the woman elsewhere on her body.  Thus when the mother is otherwise unharmed following trauma to her abdomen that causes the fetus to be lost the only concern is to have the one who is responsible to pay damages to the woman and her husband for the loss of the fetus.

The major Talmudic source for abortion rulings in Judaism discusses a case of danger to the mother.  This reading reads…

If a woman is having difficulty in giving birth and her life is in danger one cuts up the fetus within her womb and extracts it limb from limb because her life takes presence over that of the fetus. But if the greater part was already born one may not touch it for one may not set aside one person’s life nephesh for that of another.  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.  Once the head or the greater part of the body of the infant comes out the infant may not be harmed because it is considered as fully born and in Judaism one may not sacrifice one life to save another.

There are many other Talmudic sources which support the non-person status of the unborn fetus.  In fact during the first 40 days of conception the Talmud considers the fertilized zygote to be nothing more that mere fluid however after 40 days have elapsed the fetus is deemed to be fashioned to form.  Laws of ritual uncleanness must be observed for fetuses older than 40 days implying that the unborn fetus although not considered to be a living person nephesh still has considerable status.  In fact Jewish law allows one to desecrate the Sabbath to save the life or preserve the health of an unborn fetus so that the child may observe many Sabbaths later.  The permissibility to kill the unborn fetus to save the mother’s life rests upon the fact that such an embryo is not considered a person nephesh until it is born.  Mimodades and Karo present another reason for allowing abortion or an embyotomy prior to birth where the mother’s life is in danger.  The argument of pursuit which understands the fetus to be pursuing the mother.

The point of this whole article (and it goes on for another two pages) is that in Jewish thought that because it is potential human life that apart from any other accident or any other factor all  things being considered what will result from what is in the womb is a human being.  God is putting together a human being bit by bit.  So nobody has the right to go in and stop it once this process has begun.  You can’t go in and test.  In rabbinical law you can’t test for any kind of diseases.  You can’t test for Down’s syndrome.  You can’t do any of these things because there is no stopping life.  That’s the position because they recognize inherently that what is in the womb is the image of God.  Therefore that involves both the physical and the soul dimensions.  So you just can’t mess with it.  This is extremely serious stuff.

On the other hand as I pointed out last time it is not deemed murder.  I think that is a very important distinction to make.  I am going to bring out something in just a minute.  We talked about that and this just shows that the position I am articulating which to a lot of evangelicals sounds really bizarre that you don’t have life until birth.

In fact in this next article that I am going to read by Harold O. J. Brown he says, “Who could ever imagine that the fetus could make it to birth without a soul?”

Where is your evidence for this?  Remember, that is an important word when I read you this next article.  Where is your evidence?

So we talked about the fact – what I have shown you is that this is not a position that is unique to Christianity; but it is one that is also consistent with the teaching of the rabbis going back to the Mishnah which is roughly at the time of Christ.  The Mishnah was written and codified in the 2nd—3rd century AD it represents an oral history that goes back to the 2nd, 3rd, maybe 4th century BC.

Now the next question that we are addressing is the question of when does God impart the soul?  How do we know this?  Now I have gone into Scripture to show that the Bible uses this language of “from birth to death”.  It is interesting one of the strongman arguments that I saw in this dissertation he just cited all of these things that creationists would argue from birth, from birth, from birth.

But, in all the passages he cited there was also the other end of the formula which is from death; but he left that out and said, “See they are basing everything on the use of a word.”

That was faulty argumentation.

So we have to ask the question, when does God impart the soul and how do we know the soul is there? Can you measure it?  Can you weigh it?  Can you see it?  Is there something physical that demonstrates the presence of the soul?

Now that is a very important question.  Well, in doing my research I ran across this second article which came out in the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School Journal.  The Trinity Journal came out (volume XIV) in 1993.  It was written by Harold O. J. Brown.  Now this is significant because Harold O. J. Brown is probably one of the top 5 significant protestant theologians who pushed the whole anti-abortion movement from the inception.  In fact, in the article he tells a story.  Let me see if I can find it here.  He tells a story about when Roe v. Wade first came down.

He says, “Unfortunately for those who consider abortion a moral evil indeed under most circumstances a crime, the evangelical community was very slow to react to Roe.  Prominent Christian leaders such as W. A. Criswell (He was a pastor of First Baptist up in Dallas which at the time was the largest Baptist church in the world.) greeted Roe v. Wade with favor.  In some cases apparently what seemed to be a reflex anti-Catholicism.  The question on his stand on this writer Dr. Chriswell…

See Harold O. J. Brown was of such stature he could call up W. A. Chriswell on the phone and ask him, “What are you going to do about this?”

He did the same thing with Billy Graham.  Harold O. J. Brown is probably in his mid to late 80’s now.  He was a major figure in neo-evangelicalism in the 50’s through the early 90’s.

He talks about when they first formed one of the earlier anti-abortion movements. Billy Graham was first on the board, but then when he saw where it was going he got off the board.  He just didn’t understand all of this.  He went on to talk about the fact that it was really the writing of “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” by Francis Chaffer and C. Everett Coop that galvanized the religious evangelical community into an anti-abortion stance.  I remember going to see (they did) a full media film presentation of that series in Dallas in about 1979-1980.  I remember going to that (just like I did with “How Shall We Then Live?”) with Tommy and Charlie and a bunch of other guys. We all sat there and went through the whole thing.  But that’s what galvanized the action.

Now who’s this guy Harold O. J. Brown?  I think it is important to give you a little idea of who this guy is and what his credentials are.  At the time he wrote this he held the Franklin Forman Chair of Christian Ethics and Theology and was a professor of Biblical and Systematic Theology at Evangelical Divinity School.  He is now professor Emeritus from there.  He served as a pastor in Switzerland.  He taught on the faculty of Trinity for numerous years.  He earned his four degrees.  He is well-educated.  He earned his four degrees from Harvard University and Harvard Divinity School.

I have been to Harvard Divinity School. They didn’t teach the Bible there.  When I first went there and looked at the list of courses was in about 1981 or 1982 and there wasn’t a Christian course there.  Now they had Christian books in the bookstore.  They had some Greek and Hebrew tools in the bookstore that I bought because I hadn’t seen those prices in 10 years.  That is probably how long they had been in the bookstore.

He has a degree from Harvard University and Harvard Divinity School.  He received a Bachelor of Arts in Germanic languages and biochemical sciences, a Bachelor of Divinity in theology, the Master of Theology in Church history and a Doctor of Philosophy in Reformation studies.  He also studied at the University of Marburg (Germany) and the University of Vienna (Austria) and taught courses in Basel, Switzerland and in India.  Now I just want you to be aware of those credentials because of a couple of things he is going to say. 

Now, he makes a couple of telling comments (and I think self-damming comments) that are dangerous to his position within his article.  In one section of the article which he entitles “The Question of the Soul – Unanswered or Irrelevant?”  He recognizes that for some people it is important to know when ensoulment takes place.  Now you would think that he had made that decision – that if he is this hardcore frontline evangelical anti-abortionist that he would have understood that issue.

I am just going to read some spot paragraphs here.                    

He writes in one place.

It is interesting that some of the medical and legal discussions about abortion are now turning to speculation concerning the time of ensoulment.

That is in the medical and legal community because he is saying that there is recognition that if we are going to take the life of the fetus we have to decide when a soul gets there  If they are materialists and Darwinists they can’t really talk about a soul.  So he is recognizing that this is as a problem for their position.

He says that …

This discussion is now turning to the time of ensoulment even though neither academic medicine nor law has hitherto had much to say about the nature of the human soul or even whether such a thing as a soul actually exists.

He goes on to say…

It is precisely because ensoulment on the one hand from the purely scientific point of view cannot be brought into the relationship with life or divification however defined but on the other hand is precisely associated in folk thought.

You see it is the popular people that are concerned about when the soul gets there.  But what he is pointing out here is something I didn’t realize.  The whole pro-abortion argument has developed completely apart from any discussion of ensoulment.  It has nothing to do with it. That never enters into their discussion behind it.

He says…

On the other hand precisely associated faux pas popular culture with quickening and thus with life that the concept of ensoulment is creeping back into the discussion despite its self evident religious or theological nature.

Now here is the point.  He recognizes here that the question – when does the soul get there- is one that is theological or religious in nature.

He goes on to say…

In order to bring the question of ensoulment into the picture when discussing the morality of abortion, the present factual situation must be studiously ignored, (According to him.)

Factually the government is not prepared to take the question of the presence or absence of the human soul into account.

Why not?  They don’t have an epistemological basis to do it.  He later recognizes that we don’t want the government trying to decide when the soul gets there.

It goes on to say…

It is neither prepared nor equipped to consider whether such a thing as a human soul exists.  Thus 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.  If it were possible to argue that for a certain time during gestation the fetus was without a human soul this would have only limited bearing on abortion law and abortion practice in the United States.

You see that is what he is recognizing.  Even if we could prove when the soul got there, it wouldn’t have any relevance on the legal decision.   The courts didn’t care when the soul got there.  That wasn’t a factor.

He says…

Because however everyone understands ensoulment, it is not possible to assume that the fetus remains without a soul until live birth.

What an assumption he has made!  See he has front loaded this with his own.

He says, “I can’t even imagine that a fetus would make it to live birth without a soul.  Nobody would do this.”

He says that…

Very few evangelical thinkers have proposed that the baby becomes a living person only when its first breath takes its first breath based on Genesis 2:7.

The problem is he gives no substantiation for that.  He just can’t imagine it so he generates it from his own arrogance.

Then he goes on to say in a separate paragraph several pages later…

The question of ensoulment cannot be answered scripturally.

Hello!  Here is this guy with all of these degrees - master of theology and PhD gone to Harvard, Harvard Divinity School, gone to a lot of conservative schools, teaches at conservative schools and is conservative to the core and he says that the Bible can’t tell you when the soul gets there.  After he has made a critique of both creationism and traducianism, his conclusion is that the Bible can’t tell you when ensoulment gets there.

So my question for him is - why are you saying it is a full human life at conception?  You don’t know when the soul is there.  Maybe the soul is not there.  How do you know?  He says that the Bible can’t tell him.

“So the question of ensoulment,” he says, “cannot be answered scripturally as the Scripture makes no reference to the process at all.”

But, even if we could answer it, naming and contrast to the prevailing views a late point in pregnancy our answer would not be relevant to the current legal discussion in as much as it would move on a theological plane and deal with issues of which the legislatures and courts are supposed to take notice.  Thus the only possible value of the discussion lies in the fragile support it may give to those Christians and others who believe in the soul and the effort to convince themselves our government and much of the medical profession have not embraced the method in which killing represents the solution.

Okay, what is he saying?

   1. He is saying that whatever is in the womb is human.  This is true.  This has to be admitted.  It is not just a mass of cells.  It is not a tumor. It is not a hangnail.  Given the normal progress this is how God is forming the home for a soul for a human being.  It is part of the image of God.
   2. He says Scripture cannot answer the question as to the timing of ensoulment.

This is completely false.

   3. We do not want the government or the courts attempting to decide the time of ensoulment apart from revelation.

Did you hear that?  He is actually right.  We don’t want the government coming in and determining when the soul is there because the soul can only be determined on the basis of (he would say) theological or religious basis.  I would say you can only know it from revelation.  You can’t know it from empiricism, rationalism or mysticism.  You can only know it from revelation.

   4. Only Christians have access to revelation.  I Corinthians 2:14.

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.

Okay, that is a key lynchpin in my argument.  You can’t base law for believers and unbelievers on that which is not knowable apart from their system of epistemology.  You can’t hold unbelievers accountable for knowledge that is only available through revelation.  Only Christians have access to revelation.

   5. Christians don’t agree as to the time of ensoulment.  There is no clarity there.  Over the history of Christianity there is no clarity.

Now I have my position.  I think it is pretty clear.  But, over the scope of Christianity there are two views and Christians don’t agree.

So are we going to base federal legal statute on information that is only available through divine revelation only knowable to born again believers and born again believers can’t agree as to what it means?

Therefore my conclusion is that this shouldn’t be an issue of federal law or the courts.  In my view, you don’t have full human life.  Now that word “full” is very important the way I am articulating this position because, what is in the womb is potential and progressively developing human life.  It is the physical, material body part of it; but they both work together.  That it is not murder.  To have abortion on demand or abortion at will or abortion for birth control is tantamount to interfering in a divine process.

Now I am going to deal with some other passages of Scripture in there, but that would make it immoral and sinful but not a matter of federal constitution.  That is my point.

Okay, now I want to come back and deal with some problem passages over the next couple of weeks.

The first problem passage that was raised to me was Job 3:3. So turn in your Bibles to Job 3:3.

It is very important to look at the whole context here in Job 3.  Job 3:3 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.'

Now the argument that is set forth here is life begins at conception.  We never said nothing begins at conception.  We said something did, something human begins at conception; but what we are saying is that the soul isn’t present until birth.  But this passage set forth - see you have a parallelism here and in that second half of the verse a male child was conceived.  See it is full human life.  Well, let’s look at the passage.  The context tells you that the issue here is primarily birth.  All through this section of Job, Job is bemoaning the fact that he was ever born.

NKJ Job 3:1 After this Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth.

Literally, in the Hebrew – cursed his day.  That is the Hebrew figure of speech for his birthday.  So he is cursing his birthday, not his day of conception.

The second thing we should note is that this extends throughout - that is a topical sentence.  It is narrative. The poetry begins in verse 3.  So the narrative says at this point Job opens his mouth and begins to curse his birthday and Job spoke and said…  Verse 3 is the first thing he says.

That is the Hebrew verb jalad meaning to birth.  It is not conception.

We might as well hunker down here with the way the rain is going.  We have 40 days and 40 nights.  We can go for a long Bible class tonight.  I don’t think we are going anywhere and I don’t think Ann Wright made it in with the cake tonight so there is nothing good back there to go back and eat.

So in the first stanza he says…

NKJ Job 3:3 "May the day perish on which I was born,

Jalad.

Then in the second clause he said…

And the night in which it was said, 'A male child is conceived.'

Now a male child has to do with the properties of the physical body, not the presence of the soul.  That is all that we are arguing - that there are two developments that take place in the development of the human being.  The first has to do with the development of the body and the second is the giving of the soul.  All this second stanza says is that a male child was conceived.

Now there are people that come along and say …when you look at some of these passages like if you skip down to verse 11 Job says…

NKJ Job 3:11 "Why did I not die at birth? Why did I not perish when I came from the womb?

There is the argument that because the first person singular pronoun is used there that he was present there.  Well, we have the same kind of thing, just hold your place and turn over to Psalm 139:13.  David says…

NKJ Psalm 139:13 For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother's womb.

They are not somebody else’s.  My soul wasn’t there yet, but those were mine in my mother’s womb.  They weren’t somebody else’s.  So how else would you articulate it?

See, he says, “Me, I was in my mother’s womb.”

Well, yes he was but who else was it?  Your body wasn’t in there.  There is no other way to articulate this in English.

NKJ Psalm 139:14 I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Marvelous are Your works, And that my soul knows very well.

All of this is using a first person pronoun to refer to that which is his body.

The point is if you look at the context of Job 3.  He goes on to say…

NKJ Job 3:4 May that day be darkness; May God above not seek it, Nor the light shine upon it.

NKJ Job 3:5 May darkness and the shadow of death claim it; May a cloud settle on it; May the blackness of the day terrify it.

NKJ Job 3:6 As for that night, may darkness seize it; May it not rejoice among the days of the year, May it not come into the number of the months.

Then we get down to more specifics in verse 10.

NKJ Job 3:10 Because it did not shut up the doors of my mother's womb, Nor hide sorrow from my eyes.

In other words my mother’s womb was not shut.  It was the birth.  You see this whole passage is talking about the birth of Job.  Why didn’t I die at birth?

We have looked at the terminology here - mirechem and mibeten.  Now one of the things that was pointed out in this dissertation which I thought did a decent job of this and a corrective in some sense is that as I pointed out before when you have certain words and components of words that sometimes you do yourself more damage by breaking down the particulars and the components than recognizing that the phrase or the clause or the whole saying has meaning in and of itself that is beyond the some of its parts.  So if you spend too much time trying to make a case for the preposition min or ek meaning “out from” as opposed to… I could use the preposition ek or min and say that I am going to pour this coffee out of this cup.  Now it has presence inside the cup and it comes from the source of the cup and it comes out.  You have other passages as we saw in Scripture if you try to take that meaning and that is a legitimate meaning for min or for ek.  If you take that meaning and make it cover every use of min or ek you have a real problem when you come to Revelation 3:10 when God promises that He is going to keep them out of the tribulation.  I forget the terminology there.  Let me go back and look real quick because that is the same type of prepositional construction.

Jesus says…

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.

That means you are not going to go into the trial at all.  There are parallels to that so you can go either way.  So if you press the preposition too far you can create a problem.

But what I did with this one dissertation as I kept reading, I was chuckling to myself because the writer is a dispensational pre-trib writer and yet he went so far without paying attention to the fact that there is an ek over there in Revelation 3:10.  He went so far in arguing that min and ek must always be source that he moved himself right into a post trib position without realizing it.  See, you have to understand and keep in mind all of these different uses and they are not hard and fast.  Language isn’t mechanical like that.

What is important as I pointed out last time is that the uses of mirechem and mibeten and ek kolia in the New Testament are idioms for “from birth”.  That is how they are translated.  As I pointed out numerous translations NIV, NASB, New English Bible, The New English Version - all of these recognize in numerous places that this is an idiom that should be translated “from birth.”  Don’t try to parse it into some kind of separation from birth or things like that.  It just means “from birth”. It’s not separation out from the womb.  It is just an idiom for birth as opposed to conception because in the Hebrew language they didn’t have a noun for birth.  So the only way to make the statement “from birth” was to use a circumlocution.

But they did have a noun as I pointed out the last few lessons, they did have a noun for conception. So that was available to them.  When they do talk about conception, they talk about two acts – that Eve conceived and gave birth.  These are two different events.  They are not viewed as the same.  There is the beginning of the process which develops the physical home for the soul and then there is the actual birth itself.

So Job 3:13 is not a passage that would argue for conception being a starting point where the soul is.  There is no evidence that the soul is there at conception, only physical masculinity.  But throughout the whole passage the argument is at birth.  Birth and death are the parameters that are given there.

I am going to close in prayer.

The Tests of Abraham’s life  RD/Gen/113

The first test was to go to a new land and to leave the family behind. To understand the tests we have to go back and understand the framework, the Abrahamic covenant. The positional promises that God gave Abraham are reduced to three: land, seed, and blessing. The tests all relate to one of those three promises. In terms of our position in Christ, how many aspects are there to that positional grace provision? We have all learned that God gave us forty things. That is our positional reality—all those things that God did for us, that we are blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies, which is a lot more than forty. So the tests that we encounter are going to be tests related to understanding what God gave us at the instant of salvation, because those are our eternal possessions that can never be taken away from us. So just as God tested Abraham with regard to the three components of that promise—land, seed, and blessing—we are going to get testing in relationship to understanding all of the dynamics of the Christian life in terms of what God has done for us in adopting us into the royal family, and all the aspects related to salvation—redemption, propitiation, reconciliation, aspects related to the Holy Spirit, His indwelling, baptism, sealing, filling, plus the fact that we are also indwelled by Jesus Christ, all these things. That is what we are going to be tested on. So that means that before we have the test we are supposed to acquire the knowledge. We learn in first and then apply it.
 
So the first test is to go to a new land. Is he really going to trust God to provide for him in the geographical place that God has provided for him. We know that he was a little hesitant in trusting God at first, so he goes to Haran first and is there for probably fifteen years or more, and then he moves on to the land finally.
 
Then he gets tested (Second Test) in relation to the land. Genesis 12:7, “And the LORD appeared unto Abram, and said, Unto your seed will I give this land: and there built he an altar unto the LORD, who appeared unto him.” This is after he arrives in the land, and this is the second statement of the land promise. Is he going to trust God and stay in the land when the famine comes, or is he going to try to solve the problem on his own? He tried to solve the problem on his own, which is what you and I do. Abraham is down in Egypt and out of fellowship, and God is just multiplying his wealth! When he finally leaves Egypt he is wealthy, even though he has failed in his spiritual test, but he has picked up certain things that will be the basis for further tests. That is just what happens with us. But Abraham and Lot become so wealthy that when they get back to the land, which has a famine problem, the land which God has promised him can’t support them. So now there is going to be this family rivalry.
 
We often have all kinds of tests in life. We have tests of things that are just inconvenient, we have to deal with people who are just not doing the job the way they should, we have to deal with bureaucracies and systems, we have health testing, financial testing, testing in the area of grief or loss, weather disasters—all of these things that can happen, and we have to decide how we are going to respond to each one. The issue there is always how we are going to choose to handle the situation. We can either handle it through human viewpoint or we trust the Lord, so that the foundation of all of our problem-solving is really the faith-rest drill, and that leads to the use of one of the ten problem-solving devices. That is divine viewpoint. If we go to human viewpoint we just forget trust, forget faith-rest drill, and we operate on human viewpoint. We work out really good rationalizations for what we are doing. It sounds good, and it may have a lot of truth in it. In Job, if you look at the statements made by Eliphaz and by Bildad and by Zophar there are a lot of things that they say that are right, but their structure is wrong, their framework is wrong. That is why it is so important to have a framework of biblical doctrine because even though you have components within your framework that are true if they are not put together in the right structure the structure is not going to hold weight. There are verses in Job that can be pulled out and we say it is a great statement, it is true. But of you look at the context he has positioned it within a faulty argument. In a case like that a person is mixing truth with error. And that is what we all do. We rationalize, we justify. For example, Abraham when he told Abimelech Sarah was his sister: “My life is going to be threatened here, I have to protect myself, don’t I?” That was his rationale. It is just human viewpoint trying to solve life’s problems without really trusting God. So we develop the strategies that get very complex to protect ourselves from perceived danger, loss, whatever we think that the threat is; and they all just come out of our sin nature. We see that Abraham has to go through this process because in the early stages here he is half obeying and half failing. But in that incremental stage he learns a little bit more each time about the trustworthiness of God.
 
This is really illustrated in Lot because Lot is so arrogant that all he can focus on is the temporal reality. Abraham, when he comes to the third test when Lot’s servants and his servants are fighting against each other and he says that the land is too small to support both of them, Abraham has learned from the previous test. The previous test he flunked. He didn’t respond by trusting God (no faith-rest drill); he didn’t respond by grace orientation. He didn’t recognize that God had graciously given him the land therefore God would graciously provide for him in the land even though there was a famine. Now he is back in the land and he still has a famine problem, and now he has a people-testing problem because Lot and his servants are causing problems, but Lot is totally self-absorbed and he is focusing on temporal reality. Abraham has learned to be gracious, so he says take your pick of the land. Lot is willing to sacrifice his whole spiritual life so that he can live in the right place, and he wanted to be there because that’s where the entertainment was, where the action was, and where the city life of his day was. So he is going to justify it in his mind and that leads to self-deception where he is completely divorced from reality. We really saw that picture when judgment eventually came on Sodom because his wife just doesn’t want to leave. She looks back, she just can’t pull herself back from all the carnality and all the attractions of the cosmic system. So God judges her for that.
 
We learned about the arrogance skills and the whole cycle from self-absorption, self-indulgence, self-justification, self-deception to self-deification where we become our own god. That is the same process that is illustrated in Romans chapter one, and if we don’t break this cycle through confession of sin and humility, realizing what God has done for us and humbling ourselves through the mighty hand of God—1 Peter 5:5-7—then we are just going to continue to deteriorate until our lives just fragment, and then we get the natural consequences intensified by divine discipline.
 
So the third test was the test to treat Lot with grace and generosity, and again it is related to the land. And when it is over with he passes the test God takes him aside and, at the end of chapter thirteen, and says, Walk in the land in its length and width for I give it to you. So God praises him for passing the test.
 
Then we come to the fourth test which is related to blessing. Abraham is mandated to be a blessing to those around him. We see the invasion of the four kings. So the test is going to be related blessing and to grace orientation. Is he going to deal with his pagan neighbors and with stupid Lot on the basis of grace and on the basis of God’s character rather than his character? He passed that test and demonstrated that he can be a blessing to his pagan neighbors. And that is an interesting example to us, that we can be good and kind to the pagans in our environment who are completely hostile to everything that we stand for.
 
Then the fifth test which was the test to express his gratitude to God. That is when he returned to Salem and he meets Melchizedek, the king of Salem. Melchizedek represents a royal priest, and he is going to be the type of the priesthood of the Lord Jesus Christ. But in this event Abraham has had a victory and so gets to express his gratitude to God and does so by giving the tenth of the spoils to Melchizedek as an offering of gratitude to God for what He has done. He also refuses to take anything from the king of Sodom because he wants to make it very clear that his victory and his involvement in the battle was related to his obedience to God and he didn’t have anything to do with the perverts in Sodom.
 
The sixth test in chapter fifteen is again related to the seed. It has been some time now since God promised Abraham descendants, and it hasn’t happened yet.
Abraham was apparently beginning to worry about this a little bit, so God comes along in chapter fifteen and He gives him a command. That is how we know it was a
Test. When there is a command then there is a test related to obedience to the command. Genesis 15:1, “After these things the word of the LORD came unto Abram in
a vision, saying, Fear not, Abram: I am your shield, and your exceeding great reward.” It is in this chapter that He makes it clear that the descendant will come from his
own body, it won’t be through his servant. The covenant is cut at this point.
 
The next test (Seventh Test) is related to the seed again, in chapter sixteen. This time it is, Are we going to trust God to provide the seed through Abraham and Sarah or are we going
to try to make another human viewpoint end run? This was the incident with Hagar resulting in the birth of Ishmael who becomes the father of a certain segment of
Arab tribes, and this is where the whole Arab-Israeli conflict had its beginning. So he fails that test. Rather than sticking with it, persevering, and trusting in God no
matter how impossible it seemed that Sarah could have a child, he gave in to human viewpoint rationalization.
 
Then we have another test (Eighth Test)  related to the seed in chapter seventeen. Here the covenant is reconfirmed, but now a sign is going to be given of the covenant, the sign of
Circumcision. This is going to be a picture of sanctification, the removal of the influence of the flesh, the sin nature. He trusts God and he and all those in his household
are circumcised. Again, God reconfirms the covenant with him and He states in addition that it is going to be with Sarah and that He will establish the covenant with his
son, Isaac. So the contract is expanded even further.
 
A ninth test comes in chapter eighteen and again this relates to blessing. Three visitors show up. One is the pre-incarnate Lord Jesus Christ and the other two are angels. He is very hospitable to his visitors and so he passes the grace orientation test.

Another test (Tenth Test)  in the chapter follows and this is again a test of grace orientation. God is going to take Abraham into His confidence and tell him that He is about to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities of the plain. That is where Lot lives and
so it is a test to see if Abraham is going to exercise impersonal love towards Lot. But Abraham passed the test, he has functioned honorably, he has passed the test of being a blessing to his undeserving neighbors and relatives, and he has dealt with them in grace.
 
The eleventh test occurs in Genesis chapter twenty, and again it relates to the seed. How is he going to protect the seed? Is he going to continue to trust God? Sarah
still isn’t pregnant, so now they go to live in Philistia, in Gerar, and Abraham lies about Sarah being his wife again. Why? Because he is afraid for his life. Rather than
trusting God he is afraid somebody is going to kill him and take Sarah for his wife. So he fails the test, but he is learning. He is learning that God is the one who is going
to protect him, and no matter what that seed is coming, the child is going to be born through Sarah, and in chapter 21 Isaac is born. And again there is a test to protect
the seed. Now there would be the threat of rivalry between Ishmael and Isaac. Ishmael and Hagar are sent away to protect the inheritance and the seed.
 
Abraham’s final exam is in chapter twenty-two where God tells him to take Isaac the promised son to Mount Moriah and to sacrifice him. So again it is a test related to
the seed, it is a test related to the faith-rest drill, and it is a test related to his personal love for God. Is the promise of God more real to him than his circumstances?
Does he love God so much that he will do anything that God asks him to do, even it means to take the life of his cherished son he had waited for for so long. He reasons
though, based on Hebrews eleven, that because God had promised that he was going to have a multitude of descendants through Isaac, therefore God, who has always
been true to His Word, must be true to this word. Even if he killed Isaac God could bring him back to life, so that was what he thought God was going to do. So he
never gives it a second thought, he takes Isaac to Moriah, lays him out on the altar, comes to the point where he is going to kill Isaac. God stops him, and he has
demonstrated that he is trusting God no matter what. And God provided a substitute, a perfect picture of salvation, that Jesus Christ is our substitute.
 
Abraham passes these tests, according to Hebrews 11:10, because he had a future focus. The reality of God’s plan for him in the future was greater than his present
circumstances. And that is the challenge to us, to grow to that point where no matter what is going on in our life this is only temporary, it is only this world. It is a future
world that He has prepared for us that He is preparing us for, and we have to go through these tests just as Abraham did and every other believer does in order to have
the capacity to properly function in terms of the responsibility and the privileges that God is going to give us to reign as kings and priests in the Millennial kingdom.
Abraham pictures that.

The Doctrine of Adam’s Original Sin  Gen. 032

1)      The term “Adam’s original sin” refers to Adam’s first sin. It is not his whole life, it is the first sin he committed which was the sin of disobedience in eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That was the issue. Throughout the Scriptures there is so much teaching about the impact of Adam’s sin, and it always treats Adam’s sin as a literal historical event. If that did not occur historically then it takes the foundation completely out from under what is taught in the New Testament regarding sin and salvation.

2)      Adam was the designated head of the human race, and that is called federal or representative headship. That means that is was Adam’s sin and not the woman’s sin that is determinative. 1 Timothy 2:13, 14, “For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived fell into transgression.” So in some sense her sin is not as significant as his, first because he is the head, and second because she is deceived. Her sin did not impact the creation, it did not impact their progeny. It was not her sin that was determinative, it was Adam’s sin.

3)      Federalism is the view that Adam is the representative of the entire human race. Therefore Adam’s decision would affect all of the human race. Adam’s decision was set up to be a representative decision so that whatever he decided, however he went, that would determine the course for the human race. If he passed the test and rejected the temptation and did not eat of the fruit if the tree of the knowledge of good and evil then all of his descendents would be born with positive, confirmed righteousness. If he failed the test, then all of his descendents would be born in corruption, in a world of suffering and spiritual death as well as physical death. Therefore when Adam sinned as humanity’s representative head the entire race fell. There are many examples in the Scripture of representative headship at work, where God designates a certain person as the head of the family or as the head of a people group, and their decision has ramifications that go down throughout all of history. For example, in Genesis chapter nine there is a curse announced by Noah on his grandson Canaan. Actually, it is his son Ham who violates Noah’s privacy, but when Noah pronounces a blessing and a curse on his sons that curse fell on Canaan. Canaan wasn’t even the one directly involved in the sin and it is actually his descendents on whom the curse falls. We can also say that the blessing on Japheth was one that didn’t actually go to Japheth himself, but went to all of the descendants of Japheth. Another example is with Esau and Jacob. When Esau sold his birthright to Jacob all of his descendants from the consequences of that as they were excluded from the blessing of the promise to Abraham and to Isaac. And again, the promise to Abraham is a promise of blessing to a representative head. The promise to Abraham was to all of his descendants. The principle in the federal headship of Adam is that God in His omniscience knew that any human being put in that same situation with Adam under any set of circumstances would end up committing the same sin eventually.

4)      The other view, which has to do with the transmission of guilt, is called seminalism, which comes from the Latin word which means seed. The idea in seminalism, which was a view originally set forth by Augustine and also held by Calvin and Luther, is the view that all humanity participated physically in Adam’s sin, that the sin nature and the guilt of Adam’s sin was passed on physically through procreation. That is the idea of seminalism. It is not only the sin nature but also the guilt of Adam’s original sin were passed on physically through procreation. The biblical support for seminalism comes out of a passage in Hebrews—Hebrews 7:9, 10, “And as I may so say, Levi also, who receiveth tithes, payed tithes in Abraham. For he was yet in the loins of his father, when Melchisedec met him.” Levi was one of the sons of Jacob who later became known as Israel. Levi was the great grandson of Abraham, so there was quite a distance of time between them. Levi was not physically present when Abraham paid tithes to Melchizedek, but what the writer of Hebrews says is that he was there seminally “in the loins of his father.” Therefore you can say that Levi paid tithes to Melchizedek. So the argument is that this shows that there is a physical or genetic tie or connection that is passed down physically through procreation from one generation to the other. When the argument is looked at you have Romans 5:12 to support federalism and you have Hebrews 7:9, 10 to support seminalism. The fact is, there are elements of both that are true and so we have to refine our thinking a little bit. Remember that in federalism both the sin nature and Adam’s original sin are imputed on the basis of the representative principle. In seminalism the sin nature plus Adam’s original sin are passed on genetically. But the way both are true is that the sin nature is passed on genetically and Adam’s original sin on the basis of Adam’s federal headship, is then imputed to that sin nature. So there are elements on both that are true and this is how you put them together. Adam’s original sin is the result of the federal headship of Adam; seminalism is the result of the physical connection the sin nature is passed on genetically from father to the next generation.

5)      Understanding how the elements of both are true. In seminalism we see that the sin nature is passed on genetically through procreation. On the male side every sperm cell in the human body contains 46 chromosomes which give the blueprint of who you are. Those chromosomes pass on the genetic physical aspect to the sin nature. Wee know this because the sin nature is referred to in Scripture with such terms as “flesh,” “body of sin,” an other terms indicating a physical dimension to the sin nature. When these chromosomes that contain this genetic corruption of the sin nature are passed on they go down through the male. The cell splits into two cells that have 23 chromosomes each, and then those two cells mature into two mature sperm cells. This is an operation called meiosis. Then on the female side there is an egg that is produced, and it starts off with 46 chromosomes but in the process of meiosis it throws off 23 chromosomes in what is called polar bodies, a process of cell purification, so that when it is ready for fertilization the egg has only 23 chromosomes and has been purified. So on the female side is a purified egg but on the male side nothing is lost and so there is still a sin nature. When the sperm cell fertilizes the egg then the sin nature is passed on from one generation to the next. This shows one of the reasons for the virgin birth. When the male side is removed at the virgin conception and the virgin birth of the Lord Jesus Christ, then what happens in the virgin conception is the Holy Spirit causes the egg to have parthenogenesis without benefit of the sin nature so that the product is one hundred per cent true humanity, minus a sin nature and minus Adam’s original sin. Because there is no sin nature there is no home for the assignment/imputation of Adam’s original sin. Therefore Jesus in His humanity is born without a sin nature and without the imputation of Adam’s original sin. He is born sinless or impeccable. That explains the seminalism side of the issue. It just deals with the physical transmission of the sin nature.  On the federalism side where we see Adam as our designated head, his guilt is imputed to us, so that at the instant of birth we are born with a sin nature, and that sin nature is going to be the home to which God is going to impute Adam’s original sin—the legal (not emotional) guilt of Adam’s original sin.

Doctrine of Adam's original sin.   Heb. 090b

   1. Adam's original sin occurred when he violated God’s mandate in the Garden of Eden.  In Genesis 2:17 he was told …

NKJ Genesis 2:17 "but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die."

That Hebrew there isn’t “dying you will die”.  That doesn’t make sense if you think about it in English.  It doesn’t make sense in Hebrew.  You have a qal imperfect in conjunction with a qal infinitive absolute.  It is a Hebrew idiom meaning that something is certain.  It is boldface, italics, underlined in upper case.  It is a statement of absolute certainty that something is going to immediately happen.  

   2. This sin of disobedience resulted in Adam’s immediate spiritual death - not something that happens 930 years later, but something that happened immediately.  If you eat some spoiled shrimp, you will get immediately sick. Right?  You aren’t going to wait 20 years and then get sick from that shrimp.   That wouldn’t make sense. But people often make the mistake of saying that the penalty for sin in physical death.  Physical death is a consequence of spiritual death.  It is a consequence of the act of spiritual rebellion.  So the sin resulted in Adam’s immediate spiritual death and the formation of a sin nature.  When you go through seminary (and Ike is going to find this out if he hasn’t discovered it already) and you get in theology classes, everybody gets all wrapped around the axel over - what does nature mean?  Is this something you can put under a microscope and observe?  What does nature mean?  You go through all kinds of discussions.    It basically means a capacity for disobedience and autonomy from God and it is something that is inherited genetically.  There is certainly a corporeal dimension to it, to the sin nature, the capacity for disobedience and rebellion against God. 

   3. The sin nature is a corruption of the image of God.  Now let me just stop there.  That is the first clause in this point.    The third point is that the sin nature is a corruption of the image of God.  If we go back to Genesis 1:26-27 (and we have spent a lot of time in those verses so I don’t think we need to spend a lot of time there.), God says, “Let us create man in our image and in our likeness.”  Too often in evangelicalism and in Christianity “image” and “likeness” have been restricted to simply the soul, simply the immaterial part of man.  As I pointed out time and time again, we can’t do that.  You can’t limit it to only the immaterial part of man.  He is talking about “Let us make the human race in our image and after our likeness.”  It is a term that involves not only the incorporeal part of man, immaterial part of man but also the corporeal part of man.  It is the totality of man that represents this imageness.  The body is just as much important as the immaterial soul.  So there is a physical dimension to being in the image of God.  Not that God looks like man, but that man is to be the representative.  In that case he represents God as His image.  So if the sin nature corrupts the image of God, if the image of God is only immaterial, then the corruption is only immaterial.   But if the image is both material and immaterial, then the image is corrupted and there is a physical and an immaterial dimension to that corruption.  That is the point that I am making.  It is not that it means that all of a sudden man looked worse, but that physical aspect certainly began to impact things so that man lost health.  He physically died.  He was subject to illness.  Eventually he becomes subject to all kinds of physical diseases because of the physical corruption of the image of God.  So the third point is that the sin nature is the corruption of the image of God which distorts the individual’s orientation to God.  That is in the spiritual realm – in that non-material realm because in spiritual death the human spirit is lost.  The human spirit is that immaterial aspect of man’s makeup that enables his soul to be properly oriented to God to understand the things of God, to communicate with God, and to have relationship with God.  When that dimension – whatever you want to call it (We call it a human spirit.) is gone - then the human soul in its self consciousness, in its mentality, in its volition, in its consciousness tries to orient itself to what?  A material universe because it has no anchor, no knowledge, no connection to the true spiritual dimension which is God.  Jesus says is John 4,

NKJ John 4:24 "God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth."

God is a spirit.  So in spiritual death man has no capacity to orient toward God.  So his thinking is automatically oriented and attracted to a material, physical universe.  There is an affinity there.  As a result he can’t understand the things of the spirit of God and many other factors.  So point number 3 is that the sin nature is a corruption of the image of God which distorts the individual’s orientation to God and supplies a capacity and orientation to rebellion toward God.  In Roman Catholic theology they use the term privation which means you lose something.  Something is no longer there.  They view sin as simply the loss of righteousness or holiness.  That is an anemic view of what happens in the fall because it is the loss of original righteousness.  It is not the acquisition of a nature that is corrupt and corrupting. So there is not a tangible gaining of that which is evil.  That is what the Scripture teaches.  We become corrupt.  You don’t just lose something.  We also acquire this orientation to God that is hostile.

   4. At the core of this sinful capacity we have two aspects.  I think whatever we do when we talk about the sin nature there are two poles around which all of the activities of the sin nature orient themselves.  The first is the autonomy of man.  I will use a little alliteration here so that we can remember this – autonomy and antagonism.  In autonomy man is arrogant toward God.  He is filled with himself.  Autonomy means self-law. Autos – nomos is self-law.  Man is going to be a law unto himself.  He is going to look to himself for absolutes.  He is going to determine what is right and wrong.  That is what Eve started to do when the serpent said, “Did God really say this?  Is that really true?”  He has put her in a position where she has to judge the veracity of God.  As soon as she began to judge whether or not God’s command was fair or not, then she was already flying down that slippery slope into failure.  So the first aspect of the sin nature is autonomy or independence, rebelliousness.  Man is going to rule things on his own apart from God.  The second is antagonism towards God. He wants to put himself first.  He is also hostile to God.  He is hostile to divine revelation.  He is hostile to divine truth.  Man’s basic orientation is to be hostile to the divine institutions and establishment truth.

   5. The sin nature renders the individual separated from God and depraved or corrupted in all aspects of his nature.  That is what the reformers meant when they used the phrase “total depravity”.  They didn’t mean that you were as bad as you could be.  They meant that every aspect of your being was affected and corrupted by sin.  Your consciousness, your mentality, your volition, your thought – everything is corrupted and affected by sin.  There is no element of man’s makeup that is free-floating like it was before Adam’s sin.  So the sin nature renders the individual separated from God and depraved and corrupted in all aspects of his nature.  Therefore man is unable to do anything that pleases God or gains God’s approval.  Now man can do relative-good things.  Jesus said to His disciples, “You being evil” - clear recognition of their depravity.  Modern man doesn’t like to think that we are evil - that those cute little babies that are born are evil.  They are just as evil.  All it is, is a sin nature wrapped up in flesh.  You know what the Bible says about the flesh.  That little baby is just as evil as he can be – just as evil as anybody else.  That little baby is as evil as Adolph Hitler.  He just hasn’t acted on it yet.  But, that is his capacity.  Man can’t do anything to please God. Jesus said to His disciples “You being evil know how to give good gifts to your children.”  See he is capable of relative good.  He is capable of all sorts of altruism.  He is capable of all kinds of helpfulness.  He is capable of all manner of kindnesses.  Man can do many wonderful, wonderful things as a fallen creature apart from the enablement of God.  But it is all tainted by a root that is corrupted by sin.  So man can’t do anything to merit God’s approval.  He is incapable of knowing God or responding in any way that includes something meritorious.  That leads us to the 6th point.

   6. The sin nature – this capacity, this corrupted aspect – can produce both sin in terms of active disobedience to God – active disobedience to revealed mandates.   That would be a definition of personal sin- direct disobedience of God and His character.   Sin can also produce that which is relative good.  It can produce morality.  Not long ago I was talking with a minister in a denomination.  I made the point that unbelievers can be incredibly moral, but that doesn’t mean that they are good in God’s eyes.  He didn’t know quite what to do with that.  What is typical today is morality is often used as a synonym for spirituality.  But Jesus recognizes that unbelievers can be moral.  The Pharisees were very moral.  We come at the text looking at it through the grid of the Holy Spirit’s interpretation and we see the Pharisees as the antagonists to Jesus, and therefore they are always bad.  But, until Jesus came on the scene the Jewish culture thought that the Pharisees were the epitome of moral rectitude and correctness and righteousness.  They were always going to the temple.  They were always praying.  They were always visible.  They were always studying.  They knew their Scriptures.  How could anybody be more righteous than they?  That is why Jesus came along in the Sermon on the Mount and said, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Scribes and the Pharisees, you can’t see the kingdom of God.”  They are good.  He recognized right there that they produced a level, a superior level, of righteousness.  But, that wasn’t going to be good enough.  So the sin nature produces both active disobedience to God, but it also produces that which is moral and that which is relative good, but it has nothing in it that gains God’s approval.  So point 6 is that Adam thus corrupted the imago dei that is the Latin phrase for the image of God.    The original sin thus corrupted the Latin phrase for the image of God, but it doesn’t eradicate.  Some people come along and they say, “Well, the image of God was eradicated by sin.”  It wasn’t.  Man is still in the image of God.  Go to Genesis 9 when God is defining the reason for capital punishment.  It is because of the fact that someone has killed someone else in God’s image.  Even though it has been corrupted, that is the basis for capital punishment.  It is not because it is a deterrent.  It is not because you want to set an example.   It is not for any of those reasons.  It is because somebody has reached the point where their soul is so corrupt that they have so little respect for a divine image bearer.  Then to take the life of a divine image bearer is an act of blasphemy against God.  To kill one who bears His image is an act against the one whose image he bears.   The reason you are to take the life of anyone who commits certain crimes is because they are viewed as an act against God because it is an act against one who bears His image. So the image isn’t eradicated; it is corrupted.

   7. The question then is – does Adam’s sin affect only Adam or does Adam’s sin affect his descendents as well?  Now that is an important question.  Some of you may be aware that today when we usually talk about issues related to sovereignty and free will related to election related to the extent of the atonement and some of these other things the things we usually talk about in terms of a debate that came out of the Reformation known as the Calvinist-Arminian debate.  Calvinists are those who are in the tradition of John Calvin coming out of Geneva, Switzerland.  The Arminians being the followers generally of James Arminius who was a Dutch theologian who taught in Holland.  The fact is that where their followers were by 1615-1616 is not where either Calvin or Arminius were to begin with.  Those are the terms that we use.  This debate didn’t just pop up in the early 17th century or late16th century.  It was the same basic debate that had begun back in the 3rd century, 4th century between Augustine who was the bishop of Hippo and a British monk by the name of Pelagius.  Pelagius taught that every person was born as Adam was created - no corruption, no sin nature, perfectly free volition, each person made their own decision as to whether they were fallen.  So according to Pelagius people could live their entire life without ever sinning and they would automatically go to heaven.  That was known as Pelagianism.  So that created the initial debate.  This has been an ongoing debate for numerous years.  Point #7 is does Adam’s sin affect only Adam or his descendents?

   8. If it affects his descendents, how does it affect his descendents?  How is it passed from one generation to another?  That leads to the two terms that we briefly introduced - seminalism and federalism.

   9. Let’s get our definition.  In Seminalism the entire human race, body and soul, was genetically present in Adam.   The entire human race, body and soul, material and immaterial are present in Adam.  This view is usually connected to a Traducianist view of the transmission of the soul.  This is seminalism.  Everything is passed on through procreation, through secondary causes, both the soul and the body.  The second view is called Federalism. This is the view that Adam stood as the head and representative of the human race.  Adam’s decisions were on behalf of all humanity.  This view is most consistently linked to the creationist view of the origin and transmission of the soul.  So those are the two positions.  

  10. We are going to look at the biblical support for the seminalist position and that is our passage.  That is the one passage they always go to in Hebrews 7:9-10.

NKJ Hebrews 7:9 Even Levi, who receives tithes, paid tithes through Abraham, so to speak,

Levi, not personally, but indirectly through his descendents….

We saw that the Greek there was really “in the manner of speaking.”

NKJ Hebrews 7:10 for he was still in the loins of his father when       Melchizedek met him.

We have done the exegesis of this verse.  This concept that he was in the loins of his father when Melchizedek met him is a figure of speech.  That is what the Greek says.  But historically this was taken to mean that Levi personally, actually, truly, genuinely paid tithes to Melchizedek because he is seminally present - body and soul - in Abraham, three generation back.  That is the only verse, the primary verse that they go to.

  11. Point number 11 gives the biblical support for the federal position.  This is found in Romans 5:15-19 and I Corinthians 15:22.

NKJ Romans 5:15 But the free gift is not like the offense. For if by the one man's offense many died, much more the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one Man, Jesus Christ, abounded to many.

That is the free gift of salvation or justification.

NKJ Romans 5:16 And the gift is not like that which came through the one who sinned. For the judgment which came from one offense resulted in condemnation, but the free gift which came from many offenses resulted in justification.

Now how did that judgment on Adam that came from one offense resulting in condemnation of the whole human race?  You see Paul is making this comparison between the way condemnation goes to the entire human race and the free gift of justification goes to the entire human race.  That is why I come back and say that both.  There is truth in both sides of this because Jesus Christ is our representative on the cross.  What qualifies Him in one sense to be there is because He is a true human and is genetically linked to the entire human race.  So there is truth on both sides.  You have to understand what elements apply to each side.

NKJ Romans 5:17 For if by the one man's offense death reigned through the one, much more those who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ.)

That is Adam's original sin.

It is talking about the offense and the judgment.

Now let me pause there a minute.  In fact I had the question-discussion with a pastor about this last week.  The question comes up – is physical death in the animal kingdom a result of man’s sin?  Why is that important?  Because some people will come along and say, “Well, there was death before Adam.  It is in the fossils.”  If you try to put any kind of life between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 then you can have (which is what the old Earth gap view did  and other views – progressive evolution view, threshold evolution view some of these other assimilationist views) will try to get an old earth position.  You will have millions or billions of years before Adam and then finally Adam pops up on the scene.  You just have spiritual death.  That is all that this is talking about – is spiritual death.  So you can have animals die.  Now there is a difference between animals and plants because the Hebrew word for animals’ life is nephesh hajah and that is not the same to apply to the life of plants.  So Adam could eat corn and he is not killing it.  I have read some people who tried to argue that.  “See those plant died when they ate it.  There was death.”  Different words!  You have to pay attention to the Hebrew text.  Death is a principle.

NKJ 1 Corinthians 15:22 For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive.

We will look at that in a minute.

NKJ 1 Corinthians 15:21 For since by man came death, by Man also came the resurrection of the dead.

Death came by Adam.  Death there is talking about physical death.  It is an anarthrous noun indicating death as an entity – not just the physical death of man.  This is death as an entity comes into creation as a result Adam’s sin.  Then of course we see the other elements of the curse that apply to the animals as well.

NKJ Romans 5:17 For if by the one man's offense death reigned through the one, much more those who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ.)

See he is not talking about animals per se here because why?  It is not the subject.  His subject is talking about Christ’s death bringing salvation.  So he is talking about man.  But the death that he is probably talking about here is not physical; it is spiritual because he is talking about the penalty, the condemnation.  Now you have to be careful in some of the creationists’ literature.  I have read a lot from guys in ICR, guys in Answers in Genesis and they don’t get this straight on the difference between physical death and spiritual death.  They want to make physical death the penalty for sin.  So you have to be careful there and don’t get caught by that trap.

NKJ Romans 5:18 Therefore, as through one man's offense judgment came to all men, resulting in condemnation, even so through one Man's righteous act the free gift came to all men, resulting in justification of life.

That is Adam’s disobedience to God.

So our question is how did this happen?

NKJ Romans 5:19 For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so also by one Man's obedience many will be made righteous.

That is the verse for the federal position talking about Adam as our representative just as Christ is our representative.

12.     As with many theological positions, these are often presented as either –or when it may best be understood as a both-and.  There are elements of both that are true.  Some aspects of man are physically and seminally present in Adam.  There is a physical connection that links us to Adam, but is also a physical connection that connects links us to Christ.  If you breakdown that physical connection then you lose the physical connection to Christ and it messes up salvation.   But, there is also a spiritual dimension, an immaterial dimension that relates to imputation of sin and imputation of righteousness.

13.     So in other ways man is represented by both Adam and Christ.  So both are true.   

14.     This allows for Adam’s sin to be legally and actually our sin.  It means that a physical dimension related to sin is passed on genetically to every member of the human race except for Christ because of the virgin birth.

15.     It also allows for Christ’s death to be for the entire human race because He is related genetically to the entire human race.  It also allows for Him to represent us on the cross.  So both sides are true.  There is physical connection and a federal representation.

The Doctrine of Adoption   RD/Gal/031

(The word for adoption is not used here [huiothesia/u(ioqesia]; it is used in 4:5)

Background:

1.       The practice of adoption is used in the Bible as an illustration of the new position of the believer in reference to God. Adoption in the ancient world was very different from adoption today. Adoption in the ancient world, especially in Rome, related to adulthood and inheritance. Under the Roman concept of adoption Paul emphasises the authority and the preservation of the family lineage, and there is an emphasis on all of the property and position that comes to the adult son. Roman adoption could bring in a slave. By the time the child reaches his majority and he is going to be adopted as an adult son at age fourteen, if he is a loser in life and the father says I am not about to give my inheritance to him, the pedagogue is much better than him, so I am going to adopt the pedagogue and make him my son. Roman adoption emphasised inheritance, not blood relationship, and applied to both the blood son and an unrelated heir.

2.       During his youth the son would wear a toga of youth which indicated his position, that he was still a child and not an adult. On his fourteenth birthday there would be a formal ceremony where the child would be designated an adult son. At that time the father would reach out and undo the clasp on the shoulder of the toga of youth and release it. Then he would take off his toga which was the toga of manhood and he would wrap that around the shoulders of the young man to signify that he was now the official son and heir of the family. If that did not happen then someone else would be designated.

3.       At the time of the ceremony there is a ceremonial purchase or redemption. A price is paid for the son. If the new son, the adopted son, is a slave then the actual purchase price is paid for his freedom. He is therefore redeemed from the slave market. If the person to be adopted is a free man then a ceremonial or symbolic purchase is made to purchase him from the authority of his natural father. The analogy should be obvious, i.e. that we are all born slave in the slave market of sin, and therefore God has paid that purchase price to redeem us with the death of Christ on the cross. The second form of the analogy is that we are under the authority of our sin nature from birth on until regeneration. At regeneration we are freed from the authority (not the presence) of our sin nature. Only by learning Bible doctrine can we have principles to apply to control the power of the sin nature.

4.       Adoption means that the boy, who is now an adult son, has all the rights and privileges of adulthood. He has the right to enter military service, the right to manage his own finances, he can get married, and he can carry out his responsibilities in the Republic of Rome. The child is now no longer under slaves but now commands slaves.

Doctrinal significance

5.       In one analogy Paul uses the child’s pedagogue to illustrate the history of salvation relationship of Israel to the law. From the time of the Mosaic Law up to the cross Israel is compared to this child.  Israel is under a slave called the pedagogue [Mosaic Law] and once the child reaches adulthood then that pedagogue no longer has any power or authority whatsoever.

6.       At adulthood the child now has all the rights and privileges which God has given to the church age believer. We are in the adult stage of spiritual life and have all these privileges and responsibility that God has given us. We have true freedom in Christ. Freedom without responsibility is anarchy.

7.       Adoption is one of forty different spiritual blessings which God provides every single believer at the moment of salvation.

8.       Adoption is always related to the believer’s position in Christ and his identification with Christ the seed of Abraham and eternal security. In Roman adoption once a child was adopted as the official son or heir that could not be reversed; it was permanent. The same is true in the spiritual life.

9.       Baptism by means of the Holy Spirit enters the believer into union with Christ, and that is the mechanics of adoption. So the process by which the believer is identified with Christ at the moment of salvation is called the baptism by means of the Holy Spirit.

10.   When we enter into union with Christ at the moment of salvation we become adult sons positionally. We are in Christ. Christ is the Son of God, the adult Son. When we are in union with Him we, too, are adult sons.

11.   As such, because we are in union with Christ, we are huios with Him; we are joint heirs with Christ. We have access to all of His wealth and power.

12.   Simultaneously with our eternal relationship and position in Christ we have a temporal relationship with Him. This relates to joint heirship. Our temporal fellowship relates to our inheritance. This is what we do with what we have.

The Doctrine of Adversity and Sress   Gen. 072b

1)      There are two kinds of pressures in life: adversity and stress. Adversity is the inevitable outside daily pressures of life that attack and seek to penetrate the soul. All kinds of things can produce adversity. The other kind of pressure comes from inside our soul, and that is stress. Stress is defined as the optional inside pressure of the soul caused by reaction to the external pressures of adversity. This is the only way the unbeliever can react to adversity, by building up stress in the soul. When the believer who is negative to Bible doctrine allows adversity to penetrate his thinking he has succumbed to the arrogance skill. Once you rely on your own resources instead of God’s you have already succumbed to arrogance and the result of that is going to be fragmentation in the soul. Stress is what happens when the carnal believer or the unbeliever try to handle any level of adversity through their own resources apart from God. It converts that outside adversity to stress in the soul which leads to a fragmentation of the soul.

2)      Adversity or outside pressure on the soul has two categories: a) suffering from the law of volitional responsibility or divine discipline. This is that adversity that we bring on ourselves, self-induced misery. You make bad decisions and that compounds to more bad decisions and the consequences of that. We’ll see that with Abraham. Once he left the land and decided that he was going to solve the problem of the famine on his own by going to Egypt he is not trusting God. God didn’t tell him to leave the land, He told him (v.1) “Go to the land.” He didn’t say to leave it when times get touch. He gives the land to Abraham (v.7) and the test here is to stay in the land. You know that if you are in the place where God wants you to be, if you are in fellowship and alive, God is going to supply your logistical grace blessings. God has promised Abraham a seed and that he will be a great nation. All Abraham had to say was, “Well, there may be a famine in the land but God promised He was going to make a great nation our of me and it isn’t going to happen if I starve to death. Therefore I am going to stay here and wait on the Lord to solve the problem.” The famine probably would have ended. But because he is out of fellowship he is not going to be a blessing to anyone. It he had stayed in fellowship and trusted God he would have been a blessing and God would have ended the famine. Instead he heads down to Egypt and in a state of carnality he is going to make several decisions that are going to create cursing and discipline for others. Notice: Here is economic, health, and physical disaster taking place in Egypt. The cause of it is because of the carnality of Abraham. He is not only a blessing to anybody, he is the avenue of divine discipline on the nation of Egypt. b) The other side of adversity is suffering for blessing. We will see that there was suffering that could have been turned into blessing if Abraham had stayed in the land. So the famine wasn’t the result of his bad decision, it was just the fact of living in the devil’s fallen world. It is how he responded, and if he had responded positively it would have accelerated his spiritual growth.

3)      Adversity is what the external circumstances of life do to you. You have no control over that. Stress is what you do to yourself, it is the result of your own volition, your own decision whether to trust God or whether to rely on your own limited resources.

4)      Adversity is inevitable. As we live in the devil’s world there is always going to be different kinds of adversity. But stress is optional and it depends on our negative volition. Adversity is always there. Every single day there are going to be things that go wrong, there are going to be people who don’t respond, don’t perform, don’t do what you think they should do. Your wife is not going to be as beautiful as you think she should be; your husband is not going to be as thin and good-looking as he was when you first met him. Your kids are going to do stupid things and be disobedient. You are going to have all kinds of people-testing with those you work for and work with, etc. It is inevitable, but what makes the difference is how you respond. What is interesting is that when Abraham is headed south and he is leaving out of Haran to go south he takes people with him, and the people that he had acquired—bad translation. It says, “the souls he had made [asah, the word to create].” What was he doing with these souls? These are the people that he led to the Lord as he was living in Haran. He has been already a blessing to those around him. But when he gets down to Egypt where he can have a witness, what does he do? Because he is living in carnality he has absolutely blown his testimony and has no basis for communicating the gospel or the truth about God to the Egyptians due to his not living in according to what is consistent with what he believes. So when we get out of fellowship it destroys our testimony before man and before the angels and the angelic conflict. This is a result of our negative volition and what stress does to our life.

5)      Stress in the soul always results in sin nature control. When you are under the control of the sin nature you are going to make one bad decision after another. What happens is that your spiritual discernment is shut down, you are quenching the Holy Spirit, and so you can’t make good decisions from a position of strength. A good decision from a position of strength in the believer’s life is in fellowship and operating on Bible doctrine. When you are out of fellowship you are operating from a position of weakness which is your sin nature. The result is that stress begins to compound, increasing carnality, you begin to reverse your spiritual growth and you begin to slide in to moral and immoral degeneracy which eventually destroys capacity for life, for love, and for happiness. It produces instability and causes neurotic and psychotic Christians, which is a pretty good description of the modern evangelical church. We don’t know how to trust God, and Abraham didn’t know how to trust God.

6)      Stress perpetuated in the soul means a failure to glorify God and therefore spiritual failure. Abraham goes into spiritual failure here when he goes down to Egypt and tries to solve the problem on his own and begins by telling a lie.

7)      The only solution, then, is the divine solution. The human solution is no solution. This is seen in 2 Corinthians 12:8-10 when Paul had to deal with the thorn in the flesh demon. We don’t know what the exact problem was. The context suggests that it was all of the difficulty he dealt with. Abraham isn’t learning the sufficiency of grace here and as a result is falling apart. Instead of being a blessing there is going to be negative consequences.  

The Doctrine of Adversity and Stress   Heb. 078b

1)      There are two kinds of pressures in life: adversity is the inevitable outside daily pressure of life that attacks and seeks to penetrate the soul; stress is what happens inside the soul. God takes us from the instant of salvation through a series of tests in order to reveal the flaws and failures of our own carnal, sinful creatureliness, and we have to learn to be dependent upon God and His provision. We have to learn to utilize the ten problem-solving devices so that we can grow from spiritual infancy to spiritual maturity. So adversity is the outside pressure; stress is the inside pressure of the soul caused by reaction to the external pressures of adversity. When the believer who is negative to Bible doctrine allows adversity to penetrate his thinking he has succumbed to the arrogance skills.

2)      We have to remember that adversity or outside pressure has two categories. There is suffering from the law of volitional responsibility or divine discipline. Galatians 6:7, “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” In other words, there is a certain amount of suffering we go through and we have to ask the question: Is this my own doing or is this just the result of living in a fallen world? Because we live in a fallen world we will encounter a certain amount of adversity that is not related to our own volition. This second type of suffering is that which is not related to our own volition. It is suffering that is the result of living in the cosmic system, suffering that God allows to come into our lives and is classified as suffering for blessing. Suffering for blessing is designed to accelerate spiritual growth. When we go through suffering for discipline we can convert it into suffering for blessing when we confess our sins, get back in fellowship, and then start applying the ten problem-solving devices to that particular adversity. Abraham is going to go through both classifications. He starts off in suffering for blessing. That is why the famine occurs. God is going to teach Abraham certain things about himself. Principle: Whenever we go through adversity the bottom line of the test is to learn to trust the character of God. It always has something to do with the character of God and learning to recognize that God is in control, learning that we must be dependent upon Him, learning that He is trustworthy in His righteousness, learning that He is fair in His justice, learning that He is more powerful than our circumstances in His omnipotence, learning that He is never surprised by any problem or heartache or difficulty that we face in His omniscience. As we learn these, our ability to trust Him strengthens and increases. This accelerates spiritual growth.

3)      Adversity is what the outside circumstances of life do to you; stress is what you do to yourself. Stress is always the result of our own volition. We react to that stress in some way where we are calling upon our own resources, our own ability, our own intellect to solve the problem in contrast to dependence upon God. So we just bring the stress upon ourselves. Every time we try to solve the problem on our own we have already made a negative decision toward Bible doctrine, and the sin nature is in control. Once the sin nature is in control then we are in trouble.

4)      Adversity is inevitable. Job says that man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. We can’t avoid it. Stress is optional and the result of our own negative volition to doctrine. James 1:2 is a key verse for understanding this. “Count it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter …” The word there for ‘encounter’ is the idea of falling into it. It just happens. For Abraham it is a famine.

Doctrine of  Adversity vs. Stress Gen. 144b

1)      Adversity is the outside pressure of either adversity or prosperity. Just about anything in life that we run into puts pressure on the soul, whether we realize it or not. So adversity is that outside pressure which comes from circumstances of life. Stress is inside pressure in the soul.

2)      Adversity is what the circumstances of life do to you. You live in a fallen world with fallen people. Those fallen people run fallen systems, everything is part of Satan’s cosmic system and you can count on it that there will be adversity. Stress is what you do to yourself, how you choose to respond to that external pressure that comes from situations in life.

3)      Adversity is inevitable. You can’t run away from it, hide from it, deny it or ignore it. Stress is optional and is your decision.

4)      Stress is always the result of the sin nature control of the soul. The fragmentation that takes place internally that as a result of the outside pressure is the result of sin nature control. The sin nature can produce some extremely attractive solutions to external adversity. The look, feel and sound good, and they work, but they only work on the short term. The short term can be a year, five years, ten years, but eventually it doesn’t work. The result is always stress and tnhat is a failure to handle adversity through the gracious provision of the ten stress-busters. When you don’t use the stress-busters you are using sin. You are relying upon yourself rather than God’s provision, God’s promises and God’s principles.

5)      The stress-busters allow the believer to face any situation in life and remain poised, stable and in control of the situation no matter how horrible or agonizing it might be, without giving into the sin nature. This is what we mean when we say that God’s Word is sufficient.

6)      Sin nature control means arrogance, always. It is either in overt arrogance or it is in pseudo-humility—both are manifestations of arrogance. This means there are the five arrogance skills: self-absorption where you just focus on yourself, always just thinking about your problems, your issues. That leads to and has produced self-indulgence, and that is part of the thinking of our generation. That leads to self-justification, then self-deception where you create your own concept of the world, your own little world, your own little norms and standards, your own value system, and then you start living like all the world should be that way. This leads to self-deification because it is ultimately rebellion against the authority of God, and you have taken God out of the picture and put yourself into the picture as the ultimate authority for everything in life.

Doctrine of Angelic Beginings

There are different views as to when God created the angels.

1) God creates the angels before Genesis 1:1;

 2) God created the angels between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2;

3) God created the angels on day 3, and this is usually argued for on the basis of the analogy that is found in the Scriptures where the angels are spoken of metaphorically as the stars of heaven, e.g. Job 38:7.

Then you would not have the angelic conflict or the fall of Satan until after Genesis 2:3. The first view, that the angels were created before Genesis 1:1, is preferable.

Summary of the Basic Doctrine of the Angelic Conflict

1)      What do we mean by angelic conflict? There are different terms that are used to refer to this: the angelic rebellion, spiritual warfare, spiritual conflict, etc., all of which refer to the fact that there is an ongoing war, and ongoing rebellion that occurs in the invisible heavenly sphere between two groups of creatures known as angels. They were all originally created by God holy and righteous and just but at some time in eternity past there was a rebellion that occurred and that this was the first introduction of sin and evil into God’s universe. So a definition of the angelic conflict is the invisible spiritual warfare between the forces of Satan and the forces of God. Ephesians 6:10-18.

2)      The course of the angelic conflict. It began at some time in the past when a creature name Lucifer rebelled against God, expressing the desire of his heart to be worshipped as God, to be elevated above all the other creatures because he thought that he could rule and reign the cosmos better than God could. He wanted all of the glory for himself. In that rebellion he recruited approximately one third of all the angels to his side and this revolt occurred some time prior to the creation of man in Genesis chapter one. On the basis on Matthew 25:41 because there is a past tense there, these angels were recruited and condemned to the lake of fire. At the time of Christ the lake of fire was already in existence and had been created and prepared for the devil and his angels. But for some reason they aren’t there. So the question is: Why not? What has lead to this postponement? By theological deduction and from a number of passages Satan accused God of injustice related to the sentence: something along the lines of how could a just God send His creatures to the lake of fire? Along the same lines Satan may have accused God of not allowing him to show that he could do just as good as God, that he could be God and run the universe. There may be a number of ways to articulate these ideas but it seems that when we go through the whole of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation there are certain themes that dominate in relationship to creatureliness and leadership. What God is demonstrating throughout all of history, and why He allows Satan to continue, is that the creature can never do that which only the creator can do, and that the creature doesn’t have those infinite capabilities—omnipresence, omnipotence, omniscience—to do what he wants to do, and the only way there can be order, truth, stability and happiness in the creation is for the creatures to be oriented to the authority of God. 

Angelology                                            Heb. 020

   1. We learn that angels are incorporeal being.  They have immaterial bodies. They are spirit.  They can appear as light.  Their flames of fire are language that portrays the light essence of their bodies. 

   2. The flames of fire indicate a possibility that the bodies are made of light or related to light.  It is probably also related to the seraphim.   The seraphim were the angels that flew around the throne of God. The word seraph comes from the Hebrew word that means the burning ones.   Perhaps this is a reference to the seraphim as the burning ones in Isaiah 6.

   3. Angels do not have an inheritance with God as believers do.  That is what sets us apart.  We have an inheritance just as the Lord Jesus Christ through His advance.  When we follow Him and are co-sufferers with Him according to Romans 8, we will be co-heirs with Him.  So we have an inheritance that the angels do not have.

   4. Angels are not to be worshipped.  They are servants of God that carry out His commands.  They oversee I believe the operation of the universe, but they are not to be worshipped.  They are a higher being than we are at the moment but one day we will reign and rule and judge the angels according to I Corinthians 6.

   5. Angels are servants who perform the will of God and serve Him and His people.  That is the emphasis here.  They are servants and the Lord Jesus Christ is a sovereign ruler.

Doctrine of Observations here related to Angelology. Gen. 098b
 

a)      We have to recognize that angels are created as non-material beings. They are not physically material as we are, they don’t have to follow the same laws of biology, the same laws of physics.

b)      From several passages it appears that angels have bodies that are composed of light or something like light. For example, in Hebrews 1:7 they appear as flames of fire.

c)      Angels would have the ability to transform themselves into material creatures that possess all of the characteristics of material bodies. For all purpose, as far as Abraham can tell, they are material creatures. They eat they drink, they rest, they sleep. He is going to wash their feet. Later on we see that when they are trapped inside Lot’s home and the Sodomite perverts outside are trying to pull them out into the street their hands are outside the door and they have to pull them back in. These are physical terms. So these immaterial creatures of light are able to transform themselves to have some kind of material bodies.

d)      From this we must conclude that angels are able to take on all biological functions of the material human body. This gives us an indication of what went on in Genesis chapter three when the sons of God (always a reference to angels in the Old Testament) looked on the daughters of men and took them as wives. This is further indicated in Jude 6 & 7. When we do the proper exegesis of these verses it indicates that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrha is imitating the immoral sexual sins of the angels of a previous time. “And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day. Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.”

The Doctrine of Angels,   Rev. 096b

An Introductory Summation

1)      Both the Greek word AGGELOS [a)ggeloj] and the Hebrew word malak, translated “angel,” are terms that mean simply messenger. The English word that we have for angel is simply a transliteration of the Greek word. It is a word that means messenger and obviously this is a functional term that tells us something about their role and purpose to serve as heavenly emissaries.  

2)      The term describes a class of rational immaterial spirit beings created by God to fulfil a variety of functions. They are mediators of divine revelation (Galatians 3:19); they are messengers of God (Daniel 10:11); they are witnesses of God’s justice, and this is their role throughout the book of Revelation; they are attendant to the divine throne (Ezekiel 1:5; Isaiah 6:2-6; Revelation 4 & 5); they are overseers of the outworking of divine judgment. Again, this is seen throughout the book of Revelation. They were originally created higher than man but man in the resurrection will be over the angels. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6 that we will judge the angels.

3)      Angels can appear in human form. They can apparently transform their immaterial bodies into material bodies that take on all of the attributes of flesh and blood (Genesis 18). Throughout the Scriptures they always appear as males. There are different categories of angels, so this indicates perhaps a ranking among the angels. Several angels are described as flying (Daniel 9:21; Luke 1:19), but not all angels appear with wings.

4)      Scripture reveals several classifications of angels. Cherubim are the highest class of angels. Lucifer, the pre-fall name we use to identify Satan, was of this class. He was the highest of the cherubs. Cherubs are identified in Scripture in association with the glory, the holiness, and the majesty of God. They are described in Ezekiel 1:5-14, and even though the name cherub is not used in chapter one, in Ezekiel 10:20 the connection is made: “These are the living beings that I saw beneath the God of Israel by the river Chebar; so I knew that they {were} cherubim.” They are distinct from a second category which is called seraph or seraphim. The term “seraph” is Scripture refers to burning, so these are the burning ones. They are viewed as white-hot flames almost, and whenever we see lamps or flames we not only think of the illumination we think of judgment and purification, and so they are also a associated with the holiness of God—Isaiah 6, the vision of Isaiah of the throne of God. Then we have the living beings. Even though that terms is used to describe the cherubs in Ezekiel it is also used of these four living beings in Revelation 4 and 14. We then have Michael who is identified as the archangel (Jude 9), the leader of the angels. The other angels that is identified in Scripture by name is Gabriel, and he is the messenger who announces significant events related to Israel. He announces the birth of the Messiah, he warns Joseph, he appears in the Old Testament with Daniel.

Doctrine of Angels as Pastors    Rev. 029

The first thing that we should note is that in the book of Revelation this word AGGELOS is used 67 times. It is used only 175 times in the whole New Testament. In Revelation, of those 67 uses 59 of them refer to supernatural beings. This weights the evidence in that direction. You really have to come up with sound evidence to make it a human messenger, and to demonstrate that it is not an angel. So word usage pushes us in the direction of a supernatural being. We just can’t get away from that, AGGELOS never, not one place in secular literature or the New Testament, refers to a pastor.

1)      The first line. What is a mystery? A mystery is previously unrevealed truth. So we have here an identification of the angels with the stars. The claim of the liberals is that the early church went to secular imagery to provide some sort of substance to Jesus’ birth, for example. You never see them come from the position that secular history is borrowing from Christianity and from the Bible, which is much more likely. The Bible often, with tongue-in-cheek, is poking at secular imagery and mythology. For example, at the time that John wrote this Domitian was the emperor. Domitian pictured himself with seven stars on a gold coin that was minted about 83 AD, about 8-10 years before Revelation was written. He pictured himself sitting on the globe of heaven playing with these seven stars, and it is a picture of him as the Caesar being in control; he is the sovereign and controller of the universe. This symbolism of seven stars or seven planets originated in Crete in the ancient world, which is where the mystical god Zeus was born, and on ancient Cretan coins Zeus is pictured on a heavenly globe with these seven stars in his hands. What the Scripture does is show God’s poking fun at this. It is not Zeus that controls, not Domitian, it is Jesus Christ who has the seven stars. The ext of the Bible itself tells us how to interpret the symbolism. The seven stars are the seven angels.

2)      We have a problem. If we want to take these stars as referring to pastors then we have to come up with some form of biblical corroboration for taking stars as pastors. If we go through the Bible stars are used in specific ways. The stars in most usage refer to literal light-bearing bodies that God created and scattered throughout the universe. This is first mention in Genesis 1:16. Other passages are Genesis 15:5; 22:17. The second way that builds off that literal meaning is that the stars were used to symbolize the innumerable descendants of Abraham. Genesis 22:17; 26:4; Exodus 32:13. A third way the word stars is used is to symbolize the twelve tribes of Israel. Genesis 37:9; Revelation 12:1. In three Old Testament passage, though, stars represent angels. Job 38:7; Isaiah 14:13; Daniel 8:10. In the New testament there are four passages that refer to angels as stars, and they are all in Revelation: 1:16, 20; 2:1; 12:4. Stars never represent human leaders anywhere in the Scriptures. So we see that there is a strong reason for sticking with an angelic interpretation of this word.

3)      There is another line of evidence that we need to follow, and that is how angels are represented in the book of Revelation. There are 67 uses of the word so that means that there is a heavy emphasis on angels in the book of Revelation. One of the major functions of angels in the book of Revelation is operating, as it were, as officers of the heavenly court, the Supreme Court of heaven, and as witnesses for the court of the execution of divine judgment and the execution of God’s judicial sentences in human history. This is important because the entire book of Revelation deals with this whole theme of judgment, that eventually every one of us is going to be held accountable. We are going to be standing before God in one of three basic judgments. We will stand before the Lord at the judgment seat of Christ, which is for believers only. The issue there is not whether or not your destiny is heaven, it is how well you did as a believer in terms of your advance. To guarantee that you are going to be at the judgment seat of Christ you need to believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sins. You trust in Christ as your savior. It is not about good works, morality, ritual, or what church you belong to, but about the Lord Jesus Christ. If you put your faith alone in Christ alone then you will appear before the judgment seat of Christ, and you will be evaluated not on the basis of sin but on how obedient and how mature you became, and then there are rewards that are given out. The second judgment that is mentioned in the sheep and goat judgment that occurs at the end of the Tribulation which is the separation of believers and unbelievers in the Tribulation period. The third judgment is for unbelievers only. This occurs at the end of the Millennial kingdom, it is the great white throne judgment. The issue there is whether you trusted Christ as your savior. Once again, the issue there is not sin. Sin was paid for on the cross by Jesus Christ, totally.

Angels in Revelation                          Rev. 030

Revelation 1:20, “The mystery of the seven stars which you saw in my right hand, and the seven golden lampstands. The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches: and the seven lampstands which you saw are the seven churches.”

This study is important because the structure of the next two chapters is in some way based upon an understanding of who these angels are. As we go through the background of the role of angels in history and prophecy and we look at the role of angels in the book of Revelation what we are going to discover is that this enhances our understanding of the individual role of the believer in the angelic conflict. While it is not necessarily a major problem to identify these angels as pastors, because of course, the bottom line is the individual congregations receive the communication of this information in Revelation 2 & 3. But if we go beyond an understanding that this is pastors and recognize that the term “angel” (AGGELOS) actually refers to officers of the heavenly court, then what it does is it puts us and our Christian life within the framework of the congregation in a different perspective than one we have perhaps thought of before.

We saw last time that angels communicated judgment from the Supreme Court of heaven. The period of the Tribulation which is covered in Revelation chapters four through nineteen is a series of ongoing judgments, and it is these judgments that are announced by various angels. So they communicate the various judicial decisions that come forth from the throne of God. Second, they warn of impending judgments. They warn of these judicial pronouncements, so they function again in a role that is similar to an officer in a modern day courtroom. Third, they carry out of mediate these judgments. It is Supreme Court of heaven that pronounces the judgment but it is an angel that carries out the function, the actual operation of the judgment. Whether it has to do with some sort of geophysical disaster or whether it has to do with some sort of disease or sickness it is carried out by an angel.

If we look at analogy to a modern courtroom we see something that is parallel—not identical but a reflection of this heavenly function. It is my view that all law proceeds ultimately from heaven. It is God’s way of structuring His relationship with man from the very beginning. In the garden of Eden God had a legal structure. The verbiage and terminology that is used in Genesis 1:26-28 where God said, “Let us make make man in our image and according to our likeness,” was later adopted in human contracts so that in the human realm they were modeling there contracts, their legal relationships, on the way God had originally set things up with man. Once Adam sinned in the garden there was a restructuring of that initial covenant. We call the first covenant the creation covenant, the second covenant as the Adamic covenant, then later the Noahic covenant. But God uniquely restricts and defines His relationship with man according to these legal contracts. When you look at all the other religions of the world you don’t have a god who binds himself contractually to a certain standard of behavior operation. That tells us that ultimately all law flows from an absolute which is the character of God. This is one reason why there is this battle over whether you can have the Ten Commandments in a courtroom. The very presence of a plaque or poster or statue that has the Ten Commandments on it is an expression of the idea that law is based on something that goes beyond the Constitution, beyond society, and beyond culture. Law is based on an eternal absolute that is grounded in the character of God. To those in our society who have rejected the existence of God and rejected absolutes it is a tremendous insult for them to see the Ten Commandments. It is an affront to their desire to be independent and autonomous and to run their life according to their own arbitrary whim. So this is what motivates this move to remove the Ten Commandments.

When we look at Scripture we see that all of Scripture is structured in a kind of legal framework that supports this analogy of a courtroom. In modern courts the person who is responsible for communicating information from the judge to the jury and who is responsible for maintaining order in the courtroom is known as a bailiff. But in the Federal Court you have a US Marshall, and his responsibilities go far beyond that of a bailiff in a state court. A US Marshall serves as a body guard or honor guard for the federal judge. He serves warrants and carries out the official decrees of the judge and of the court. This is something that is analogous to the role that we see angels play throughout Scripture.

The first time that we see any angelic being in the Old Testament other than Satan are the cherubs that are assigned to the entry way to the garden of Eden at the end of Genesis chapter three. After Adam and the woman had sinned part of the judicial decree for their punishment was that they were barred from having access to the tree of life. So God places a sentry, a guard, a cherub with a flaming sword, and that sword throughout Scripture is a picture of having authority over life. This cherub has the authority to take the life of any human being who tries to enter Eden and to take of the fruit of the tree of life.

We then see a couple of angels accompanying the pre-incarnate Lord Jesus Christ when He comes down to bring judgment on Sodom and Gommorah. The Lord stays behind with Abraham but it is the two angels who go to Sodom and bring Lot and his family out, and they are the ones responsible for executing judgment on Sodom and Gommorah. Then later on in the Old Testament there is a situation where David decides to conduct a census of the people in violation of the plan and the will of God and as a result of that God is going to bring judgment on the nation. He gives David the option as to how he would like this judgment carried out, and so there was an angel carrying out that judgment on the nation at that time. So throughout the Scriptures there are angels carrying out the judicial decisions from the Supreme Court of heaven. Of course, not to mention the angel of death that visits the tenth plague on the Egyptians during the time of the exodus.

The third line of evidence has to do with the role of angels in the angelic conflict. What is the role of the angels in the angelic conflict?

1)      We recognize that the term AGGELOS [a)ggeloj] or angel means a messenger. But the primary use of the term AGGELOS or its Hebrew counterpart refers to supernatural intelligent beings that God created to serve Him in the administration of the universe. We know from Job 38:4-7 that God first created the angels. The second thing we note is that is says all of the sons of God sang for joy. So we know that there wasn’t a break among the angels yet, they were still in a harmonious relationship, still united. It says then that he goes on to create the rest of the universe. Then comparing that Scripture with others, like Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28, we know that the highest of the angels was known as Lucifer the son of the morning and that he sinned by becoming arrogant. He wanted to be the one to rule the angels.

2)      At some point after the creation of the universe Lucifer fell into arrogance, and he enticed a third of the angels to follow him in his rebellion against God.

3)      After some indeterminate period of time the angels were allowed a period of time either to follow Satan or to remain loyal to God. When this time finished God convened a trial and He sentenced these fallen angels and Satan to the lake of fire. Matthew 25:41—“was prepared,” past tense indicating it was already in existence.

4)      Why aren’t the angels in the lake of fire? If they were sentenced to the lake of fire before man was ever created, then why aren’t they there now? Why has that sentence been postponed?

5)      The Scripture does not directly answer the question. We can deduce the answer by looking at a number of different things that go on in the Scriptures. What we have first of all is a challenge to God’s authority. At the very root Satan’s sin is a desire to be like God, so he challenges God’s authority. He desires to demonstrate in this appeal of God’s decision that God is really some nasty old mean tyrant who just wants to do things His way, that God doesn’t really want to allow His creatures to really fulfill their potential and to really be able to do everything that given him the ability to do. So Satan is just accusing God of being a nasty old meany and not letting him do everything that Satan knows that he can do. What God wants to demonstrate in the process of human history is that the creature can’t ever be who he wants to be unless he is doing it under the complete authority of God. Satan’s claim is that the creature can autonomously find happiness and meaning in life by being everything that he wants to be. What God is going to demonstrate in history is that when the creature acts independently of God, no matter how innocuous the act may be, it will always culminate in crisis and catastrophe and judgment. There will be all kinds of negative consequences to that action. What God is demonstrating as well in this is that only genuine humility on the part of the creature can lead the creature to real happiness and stability in life. We see a picture of this in Jesus Christ. The character qualities that are emphasized in the Lord Jesus Christ are completely antithetical to the character qualities that are emphasized by human viewpoint and by Satan’s cosmic system. So what God is demonstrating through Christ foremost and through us secondarily as we reflect His character is that only when the creature acts in ways consistent with God’s character can there be real stability and real happiness. In Philippians 2:5-11 we are told that Jesus humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death. This is just the opposite in terms of character quality of what Satan exemplified. In the previous verse Paul writes that Christ Jesus, “who being in the form of God [being in the essence of God] did not consider it something to be grasped at.” This is what Satan did. He wanted to grasp at it; he wanted to be God. Jesus Christ who is God did not think holding on to or asserting His own deity was something to be held on to and He was willing to humble Himself to the point of becoming a creature so that He could demonstrate the kind of character that a creature should have in terms of humility. So what we see in terms of Satan’s challenge to God’s authority is answered in Jesus Christ’s obedience to God’s authority. A second way in which the angelic conflict is played out has to do with Satan’s challenge to God’s love. Satan challenges God’s love in the sense that he is asking how a loving God can send His creatures to eternity in the lake of fire. He is saying that he just wants to run thing the way he wants to run them, and what is so wrong with that? This is the same thing that is found in the disobedient human  heart. We just want to live our life the want to live it, so God should quit meddling with me! That is what we hear people say. They just want to be left alone, they don’t want God interfering. And what God is demonstrating in human history is that no matter what man tries to do—and in all of human history God will show every kind of creaturely independence—it always fails. Not only does it always fail but it always results in some sort of crisis, some sort of catastrophe; it always brings about unintended consequences of extreme suffering for the creature. In the garden it wasn’t the eating of the fruit that was inherently evil, it was the act of disobedience. But it was disobedience in a form that seemed trivial, and everything that we see in human history is the result of that simple act of eating a piece of fruit. So what God is demonstrating is that His focus is on the victim, that He is concerned about what happens to the human race, the creature, as a result of this sin. And what makes Satan’s sin so egregious I because of what it did to the other angels and because of what it does in terms of all the suffering in human history. It is all the result of a creature wanting to act independently of the creator. So God is using human history to demonstrate the flaws in Satan’s logic and to demonstrate that the creature can never ever act independently of the creator. Third, Satan is challenging God’s justice, His fairness. He is saying that God isn’t really fair to the creature, that He hasn’t really given him a chance to sow what he can do. Satan wants an opportunity to show that he can rule the universe. Dr Louis Sperry Chafer pointed out in his Systematic Theology that one of the greatest evidences of Satan’s failure is all of the suffering and disorder and war and calamity in human history. See, Satan wants to prove that he can be god, that he can run everything, that he can bring peace and prosperity, and order into the world, that he can rule it as well as God can rule it. But what he didn’t realize was that when he tempted Adam to sin and then Adam sinned and they began to procreate until eventually there are millions of sin natures running around who all want to be god, that he had created a whole bunch of competition. Everybody wants to be god and nobody wants to listen to Satan as their authority either. So now he has to bring order into this chaos that he created. So Satan has challenged God’s justice. He wanted to show what he could do in running the universe; he wanted to replace God. What God is demonstrating is that no one but Himself, no one but God can rule the universe. The creature, like Satan who is brilliant and has more knowledge than any human being could ever amass, is still finite in his knowledge and ability, and he can only be in one place at one time. So he can’t do what he is attempting to do. When the creature operates on the basis of arrogance the ultimate result is always self-destructive. Only when the creature is in complete submission and obedience to the creator can there be harmony and genuine love, and all of this flows through true humility.

6)      Human history provides evidence to support God’s case in a legal court of appeal. First of all we see that Satan’s guilt, his disobedience, brought about a judicial sentence from God. He was sentenced to the lake of fire some time in eternity past based on our understanding of Matthew 25:41. Furthermore, we also see that Adam’s guilt also invoked a judicial sentence. The structure of Genesis 3:14ff where God outlines the consequences to the serpent, to the woman and to the man, fits the concept of a judicial sentence. These are the consequences, the punishment for their actions. The issue at stake is God’s integrity—His righteousness and justice. Over and over again throughout Scripture we see this emphasis on God’s righteousness and His justice. Furthermore, we see this analogy to the courtroom played out in basic terminology that is used. For example, the new term that is used to refer to Lucifer is the Hebrew word satan, which means “the accuser.” So it is a legal term, it refers to someone who is bringing an accusation into a courtroom. We see this in Zechariah 3:1-7, “And he showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the LORD [Yahweh, the Lord Jesus Christ], and Satan [the accuser] standing at his right hand to oppose him. And the LORD [God the Father] said unto Satan, The LORD rebuke you, O Satan; even the LORD who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you: is not this [Joshua] a brand plucked out of the fire? Now Joshua was clothed with filthy garments, and stood before the angel. And he answered and spoke unto those that stood before him, saying, Take away the filthy garments from him. And unto him he said, Behold, I have removed your iniquity from you, and I will clothe you with rich robes [a picture of the imputation of righteousness, the removal of guilt]. And I said, Let them set a clean turban upon his head. So they set a clean turban upon his head, and clothed him with garments. And the angel of the LORD stood by. And the angel of the LORD protested unto Joshua, saying, Thus says the LORD of hosts; If you will walk in my ways, and if you will keep my charge, then you shall also judge my house, and shall also keep my courts, and I will give you places to walk among these that stand by.” The picture is of a courtroom scene, standing before the Supreme Court of heaven with Satan as the accuser and the Lord Jesus Christ as the one who is defending Joshua. We see the same thing again in 1 John 2:1, “My little children, these things write I to you, that you sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.” Satan is the one who accuses us, but it is Jesus Christ who is our advocate, our defense attorney. We also have the idea of courtroom in the idea of covenants throughout the Bible. There is the initial Edenic covenant, not mentioned in Genesis 1:26-28 but is referred to later on in Scripture (Hosea). There is the Adamic covenant in Genesis 3, the Noahic covenant in Genesis 9, the Abrahamic covenant reiterated in various places in Genesis, the land or real estate covenant, the Davidic covenant, the New covenant. These are all contracts. Sometimes when we talk about the Bible we talk about the Old Testament and the New Testament. Testament is a legal term, a contract. So at the very root of all human relationship to God there is a contract. God has bound Himself to us contractually. This doesn’t happen in any other system of religion, so what we have is a unique setup. God is under girding all human relationships with a legal structure. That doesn’t remove it from being personal but it gives a basis for stability and structure to our relationship with God. We know that we can trust Him, He is not going to go off and do something different next year or next century, He is going to fulfill what He said in His covenants. He had bound Himself legally, and this is why we as Americans with a legal system based on a Judeo-Christian background have a respect for the law that is unique in history. So once again we see that the Bible is structured in terms of a legal framework. Furthermore, we have various scenes that are reminiscent of a courtroom. We have the scenes in Job chapter one when the angels, the sons of God, come before the Supreme Court of heaven. Then Satan the accuser comes in and accuses Job. Zechariah 3:1-7 also has that same imagery. When we look at salvation, salvation is couched in legal terms. The reason we need salvation is because of sin. The terms that we use for sin are terms that come out of a legal context. HAMARTIA [a(martia] means to miss the mark, it is the basic word for sin. It means to fall short of a standard and it would be used of a violation of law. We have in the Old Testament the word “transgression.” This is the Hebrew word pasha, which refers to a crime or criminal action, the violation of a law. The Greek counterpart to this word is PARAPTOMA [paraptwma] which indicates, again, the violation of a standard. Another word that is used of sin is ADIKOS [a)dikoj], not righteous. Terms for sin refer to a legal violation; words for salvation also refer to a legal satisfaction. Propitiation indicates that the law has been satisfied, and when it comes to the character of God what that means is that the character of God has been satisfied with the work of Christ on the cross. The word “imputation” is legally crediting something to someone’s account, so that when we trust Christ as our savior the perfect righteousness of Christ is legally credited to our account. Now there is a positive balance and when God looks at out character He looks at the character of Christ and declares us justified. We are righteous, that is what it means to be justified by faith. It means that when God looks at our record He is looking at the character of Christ, not ours, and he says we are justified. Terms like “forgiveness,” APHIEMI [a)fihmi], a concept we are familiar with in 1 John 1:9, is another legal term. All of this indicates that our relationship with God is couched in legal terminology, it is all governed by legal concepts. Then we get into other aspects of Scripture and we find that there is a word group that shows up a lot, especially in John’s writing, and it is based on the word MARTUREO [marturew] from which we get our English word “martyr.” It means “witness,” of one who provides a testimony. John 1:7, talking about John the Baptist. John writes, “These are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you might have life through his name.” What is written? These “signs” are written, and there are basically seven signs that are given in the Gospel of John to indicate that Jesus is exactly who He claimed to be. These are, as it were, seven witnesses that John is marshalling. In almost a legal sense he is going to trot them out one at a time to demonstrate that Jesus is exactly who He claimed to be and that if we believe and accept the fact that he is the Messiah, the one who died on the cross for our sins, then we can have eternal life. So the Gospel of John is filled with this legal terminology. Cf. John 3:11, once again we see that it is this legal terminology of witness and testimony that we see in his vocabulary. Cf. also John 5:30-37 where we have 13 references in eight verses dealing with “witness, testimony, righteousness.” 1 John 5:9-12 is another example that our whole relationship with God is wrapped up in legal terminology. This gives us great confidence as believers that we can count on God. There is an absolute out there that is greater than us that is unshakeable, and it is grounded in the character of God. Furthermore, this means there is accountability. So we have judgments in the Scripture: like the judgment seat of Christ, and evaluation for believers; the judgment of the sheep and the goats at the end of the Tribulation; the great white throne judgment at the end of the Millennium. When we come to the bema seat and study concept of rewards and inheritance for believers there is terminology such as inheritance that is referred to again and again through legal terminology that we would find in a will or a testament at the time of death. Again and again and again God is using legal terminology to define that relationship. In conclusion, what we see is that in all of this God has wrapped up human history in this mantle of legal terminology and it must fit into some broader category, and this is the appeal trial of Satan.

7)      We see that angels observe human actions to learn about God’s character, especially His justice and His grace. These are the issues that are challenged by Satan. For example, 1 Corinthians 4:9, “For I think that God has displayed us the apostles last, as men condemned to death: for we are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men.” So our life is made evident to the angels; they are watching us. 1 Peter 1:12, “To whom it was revealed, that not to themselves, but to us they did minister the things, which are now reported unto you by them that have preached the gospel unto you with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven; which things the angels desire to look into.” The angels are curious about this. They are learning things about the character of God and about this whole legal structure from watching and observing. 1 Timothy 5:21, “I charge you before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, and the elect angels, that you observe these things without preferring one before another, doing nothing by partiality.” The angels are watching the local church, and in this case they are watching the pastors of the local congregation.

8)      Angels observe human history as confirming witnesses to God’s covenants and as agents for executing the judgments contained in those covenants. What is meant by this is that God sets up a contract with us and says that if we violate it there will be certain judgments. The angels are witnesses to the contract that God sets up and they are the ones who carry out the judgments contained in those contracts. What is our precedent for this? Galatians 3:19, “Why the law then? It was added because of transgressions … having been ordained through angels by the agency of a mediator.” No angels were mentioned in Exodus 19 & 20, but Galatians 3:19 and other passages tell us that angels were there, though not mentioned in that passage. The mediator here is Moses. “… until the seed would come {the Lord Jesus Christ] to whom the promise had been made.” The law was given because of sin on the part of the nation Israel and it is given through the angels. The Greek word here is DIATASSO [diatassw]. DIATAGMA [diatagma] is the noun form. The TASSO or TAGMA has to do with something that is ordered or structured. DIA is the preposition meaning “through.” So it is focusing on something that is organized, structured, and outlined. The other passage where we find the noun is in Acts 7:53, “Who have received the law by the direction of angels, and have not kept it.” The idea here is that the angels organized and ordered the law. What does that mean? Hebrews 2:2, “For if the word spoken by angels” – the angels spoke the word, the giving of the law. When did this happen? Deuteronomy 5:22, “These words the LORD spoke unto all your assembly in the mount out of the midst of the fire, of the cloud, and of the thick darkness, with a great voice: and he added no more.” So God spoke verbally and audibly to the Jews when they were assembled below Mount Sinai. It is not something they heard internally. Deuteronomy 33:2, “And he said, The LORD came from Sinai, and dawned on them from Seir; he shone forth from mount Paran, and he came with ten thousands of saints [a noun form of kadash, “holy ones,” angels]: from his right hand went a fiery law for them.” When the Lord came at Sinai, Moses says, there were ten thousand angels with Him. When we put all of this together what we realize is that God gave the law to Moses and then apparently there were angels who communicated and exegeted the law to the Jews at the base of Mount Sinai. They made sure that they understood how the law was to be applied and understood. That is what Hebrews 2:2 is talking about. Three times in the New Testament there is reference to this. It is ignored in the Old Testament. What is going on here? It is that angels are serving as officers of the court to make sure that things are understood. The conclusion is that there is a legal operation taking place here. In the Old Testament when God gave the law to Moses He gave two copies. One copy went into the ark of the covenant and one copy went to the people. What is happening with the book of Revelation is that the Lord Jesus Christ is giving the revelation to John who is making seven copies of the whole book for each church. At the heavenly level the Lord Jesus Christ is giving an angelic witness a copy of the critique sheet for each congregation. That angelic witness is standing as a functionary of the heavenly court as a witness of God’s grace and integrity in each congregation. God is evaluating each congregation. These seven epistles are not like we have from Paul and Peter and John earlier in the New Testament which are talking about how to live the Christian life. These are evaluation statements. To the church us said that it still has time to change its mind in certain areas and to apply doctrine and move forward. To the angel is said that if these churches don’t straighten up and apply doctrine, then it is their job to execute judgment and take out the congregation. That is what happened historically to these seven congregations. They failed to apply doctrine and they went through the process of judgment. This is a cycle that we see again and again in human history. People become complaisant with what they have, complaisant with the doctrine that they have been taught, and eventually they begin to take it for granted, they begin to take God’s grace for granted, and before long the spiritual life isn’t significant for them and they become distracted by all the details of life. The next thing you know they are in reversionism, the churches begin to deteriorate, get into ritualism and legalism, deny the deity of Christ, the creatorship of God, deny creation, and before long they are under judgment and God takes out the congregation and eventually the nation.    

Doctrine of Angels in Revelation  Rev. 058b

In the book of Revelation the word AGGELOS is used 67 times, out of a total of 175 times in the whole New Testament. So a third of the usages of AGGELOS in the Bible are in the book of Revelation, and in all but eight of those 67 it refers to a supernatural being. The eight that are questioned refer to these angels of these seven churches. What we discover is that all of the other 59 are supernatural beings, so it would fit the usage in the book to say this refers to an angel, not a human messenger.

1)      AGGELOS means a messenger in its primary use as supernatural intelligent beings that are used by God to serve Him in the administration of the universe. One thing that stands out is that they are used by God in the administration of blessing and judgment toward mankind or to individual human beings.

2)      At some point after the creation of the universe Lucifer fell into arrogance. He lusted after the authority of God and wanted to be thought of as God. He wanted that control, he wanted to run the universe. That is described in Isaiah 14:12-14; Ezekiel 28:11-15.

3)      Somewhere after this God convened a trial and he sentenced these angels who followed Lucifer to a penalty of the lake of fire. Jesus refers to this is Matthew 25:41 where he says that the lake of fire was prepared for the devil and his angels. That verb “prepared” is a prefect active indicative, indicating that it currently is in existence. It is talking about the present reality of a completed past action. In other words, the lake of fire has already been fully established and completed in the past and it currently exists. What Jesus was saying here is that the penalty was set up and the lake of fire was established but for some reason the angels were not placed into the lake of fire. So this establishes the fact that something happened, some delay has occurred between the original guilty verdict on Satan and the angels and the final consummation of putting them in the lake of fire. We know that at the end of Revelation is when Satan and the angels are cast into the lake of fire, so why is there this delay? It is clear from various indications in Scripture that human history is directly related to this angelic rebellion that occurred in eternity past, that God has created the human race in order to demonstrate through us certain aspects of His character and His ability to rule the universe that can only be learned by experiment. The word “experiment” is used in the sense of something that demonstrates a known point. So what God is demonstrating in human history is His character, His love, His justice, His righteousness. It becomes clear from observing various texts throughout Scripture dealing with Satan and with Jesus and the virtues of the Christian life that what is at stake is first of all the attribute of love. God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son…” So Satan apparently has challenged God’s character in the sense that, If you really loved us you couldn’t sentence us you couldn’t send us to eternity in the lake of fire. So another challenge that we infer from Scripture is that God’s justice has been questioned. How can a just God enact such a harsh penalty? What God is demonstrating is just why this is so harsh. Poverty, war, disease, suffering, are the result of human beings doing the same thing that Satan did: “I want to be like God.” We are all trying to be like God and there is such a fragmentation throughout history that has brought all of this chaos and disorder. So God is demonstrating in each generation, in each dispensation where he gives different amounts of information and different amounts of empowerment, that no matter how little or how much God gives to the human race, no matter what He does to help us, that unless there is total obedience to Him it all falls apart. In every dispensation the dispensation ends in chaos. No dispensation has ended on the ascendancy, it always ends in human failure. So God is demonstrating through this experiment of the human race that no creature can ever find peace, prosperity, happiness, apart from total dependence upon Him. So it is, as it were, a trial. When you go to trial lawyers come forth and present evidence, the data, case studies, in order to demonstrate their point. That is what God is doing in history. So the angels are involved, as it were, as witnesses in this enormous trial that God has set forth in human history. God is validating in a courtroom kind of setting His character and the fact that only He can rule the universe and Satan cannot.

      Within this appeal trial concept we see certain legal notions brought forward, one of which is this concept of being a witness. For example, in John chapter one John the Baptist came forth as a witness to bear witness to the light. The verb is MARTUREO [marturew], the noun is MARTUROS [marturoj]. These are terms that are used in a courtroom, just as we use them today. John 3:11, “I tell you the truth, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still you people do not accept our testimony.” 1 Corinthians 4:9, “For it seems to me that God has put us apostles on display at the end of the procession, like men condemned to die in the arena. We have been made a spectacle to the whole universe, to angels as well as to men.” In other words, we are a visual evidence for the angels. They are watching us, learning things from us. This is what Peter says in 1 Peter 1:12, “It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves but you, when they spoke of the things that have now been told you by those who have preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven. Even angels long to look into these things.” Ephesians 3:10, “His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms.” This makes it clear to us that angels are watching us. We are a test case, as it were.

4)      Human history provides evidence in a legal court of appeal which establishes Satan’s guilt, Adam’s guilt, and God’s integrity.

5)      Angels observe human actions: 1 Corinthians 4:9; 1 Peter 1:12; 1 Timothy 5:21.

6)      Angels observe as confirming witnesses to the giving of divine covenants. Whenever we enter into a contract we have to have a witness, as in the marriage contract. Witnesses give testimony to the validation of the covenant. The same thing happens with angels. Galatians 3:19. Angels were present at the giving of the Law as confirmatory witnesses. Cf. Deuteronomy 4:26. How does God use angels in the Bible? The first place we see angels is in Genesis chapter three: cherubs. After the fall God sets many cherubs with flaming swords to keep people away from Eden. Throughout the Scripture swords are used as an emblem of power over life and death. They are used by God to exercise judicial activity. The second time we see angels mentioned is in Genesis 19 when the two angels come with the pre-incarnate Christ to visit Abraham, and then they go to Sodom and Gomorrah to execute judgment. The next time they are seen in Genesis is on Jacob’s ladder, and that was a picture of angels descending and ascending on the staircase, being used by God in the distribution of blessing related to the Abrahamic covenant. These covenants are legal documents. They involve witnesses, so the angels are involved. There are angels again at Mount Sinai to be witnesses to this legal document. Then the next time we see angels appear is in 2 Samuel 24 and the parallel passage in 1 Chronicles 21 where we read about the fact that an angel was sent by God to bring judgment on the Jews because David disobeyed God when he numbered the people. Then we get into Daniel where Daniel speaks about watchers, holy ones. Human history is being watch and in some sense guided by these angels—the decree of the watchers, Daniel 4:17, 23. In the New Testament in Acts 12:23 Herod Agrippa was struck by an angel of the Lord. What we see in all this is that the pattern throughout the Scripture from Genesis to revelation is that angels are used as witnesses of legal documents and they are used in the framework of executing judgment and blessing on human beings in general and on believers in specific.

The function of angels in the book of Revelation is to deliver God’s judgments on mankind. They are witnesses of God’s judicial enactments on the human race. What exactly are these seven letters to the seven churches? They are the judicial evaluations of these churches. So if we takes angels here as literal angels, and these are judicial documents evaluating the spiritual life of these congregations, then what we learn is that there is an angelic counterpart in this trial setting to each congregation that is keeping a record. They are angelic court recorders who are responsible for observing local congregations to write up evaluation reports. These evaluation reports are then utilized at the judgment seat of Christ in the future. So once we take this terms and understand it literally as true angels, then we explore what the Scripture says about the role of angels, it makes perfect sense to understand these as angels who are keeping a record that goes into the heavenly court documents on each congregation.

Doctrine of Angels in the Angelic Conflict   Rev.  030

1)      We recognize that the term AGGELOS [a)ggeloj] or angel means a messenger. But the primary use of the term AGGELOS or its Hebrew counterpart refers to supernatural intelligent beings that God created to serve Him in the administration of the universe. We know from Job 38:4-7 that God first created the angels. The second thing we note is that is says all of the sons of God sang for joy. So we know that there wasn’t a break among the angels yet, they were still in a harmonious relationship, still united. It says then that he goes on to create the rest of the universe. Then comparing that Scripture with others, like Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28, we know that the highest of the angels was known as Lucifer the son of the morning and that he sinned by becoming arrogant. He wanted to be the one to rule the angels.

2)      At some point after the creation of the universe Lucifer fell into arrogance, and he enticed a third of the angels to follow him in his rebellion against God.

3)      After some indeterminate period of time the angels were allowed a period of time either to follow Satan or to remain loyal to God. When this time finished God convened a trial and He sentenced these fallen angels and Satan to the lake of fire. Matthew 25:41—“was prepared,” past tense indicating it was already in existence.

4)      Why aren’t the angels in the lake of fire? If they were sentenced to the lake of fire before man was ever created, then why aren’t they there now? Why has that sentence been postponed?

5)      The Scripture does not directly answer the question. We can deduce the answer by looking at a number of different things that go on in the Scriptures. What we have first of all is a challenge to God’s authority. At the very root Satan’s sin is a desire to be like God, so he challenges God’s authority. He desires to demonstrate in this appeal of God’s decision that God is really some nasty old mean tyrant who just wants to do things His way, that God doesn’t really want to allow His creatures to really fulfill their potential and to really be able to do everything that given him the ability to do. So Satan is just accusing God of being a nasty old meany and not letting him do everything that Satan knows that he can do. What God wants to demonstrate in the process of human history is that the creature can’t ever be who he wants to be unless he is doing it under the complete authority of God. Satan’s claim is that the creature can autonomously find happiness and meaning in life by being everything that he wants to be. What God is going to demonstrate in history is that when the creature acts independently of God, no matter how innocuous the act may be, it will always culminate in crisis and catastrophe and judgment. There will be all kinds of negative consequences to that action. What God is demonstrating as well in this is that only genuine humility on the part of the creature can lead the creature to real happiness and stability in life. We see a picture of this in Jesus Christ. The character qualities that are emphasized in the Lord Jesus Christ are completely antithetical to the character qualities that are emphasized by human viewpoint and by Satan’s cosmic system. So what God is demonstrating through Christ foremost and through us secondarily as we reflect His character is that only when the creature acts in ways consistent with God’s character can there be real stability and real happiness. In Philippians 2:5-11 we are told that Jesus humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death. This is just the opposite in terms of character quality of what Satan exemplified. In the previous verse Paul writes that Christ Jesus, “who being in the form of God [being in the essence of God] did not consider it something to be grasped at.” This is what Satan did. He wanted to grasp at it; he wanted to be God. Jesus Christ who is God did not think holding on to or asserting His own deity was something to be held on to and He was willing to humble Himself to the point of becoming a creature so that He could demonstrate the kind of character that a creature should have in terms of humility. So what we see in terms of Satan’s challenge to God’s authority is answered in Jesus Christ’s obedience to God’s authority. A second way in which the angelic conflict is played out has to do with Satan’s challenge to God’s love. Satan challenges God’s love in the sense that he is asking how a loving God can send His creatures to eternity in the lake of fire. He is saying that he just wants to run thing the way he wants to run them, and what is so wrong with that? This is the same thing that is found in the disobedient human  heart. We just want to live our life the want to live it, so God should quit meddling with me! That is what we hear people say. They just want to be left alone, they don’t want God interfering. And what God is demonstrating in human history is that no matter what man tries to do—and in all of human history God will show every kind of creaturely independence—it always fails. Not only does it always fail but it always results in some sort of crisis, some sort of catastrophe; it always brings about unintended consequences of extreme suffering for the creature. In the garden it wasn’t the eating of the fruit that was inherently evil, it was the act of disobedience. But it was disobedience in a form that seemed trivial, and everything that we see in human history is the result of that simple act of eating a piece of fruit. So what God is demonstrating is that His focus is on the victim, that He is concerned about what happens to the human race, the creature, as a result of this sin. And what makes Satan’s sin so egregious I because of what it did to the other angels and because of what it does in terms of all the suffering in human history. It is all the result of a creature wanting to act independently of the creator. So God is using human history to demonstrate the flaws in Satan’s logic and to demonstrate that the creature can never ever act independently of the creator. Third, Satan is challenging God’s justice, His fairness. He is saying that God isn’t really fair to the creature, that He hasn’t really given him a chance to sow what he can do. Satan wants an opportunity to show that he can rule the universe. Dr Louis Sperry Chafer pointed out in his Systematic Theology that one of the greatest evidences of Satan’s failure is all of the suffering and disorder and war and calamity in human history. See, Satan wants to prove that he can be god, that he can run everything, that he can bring peace and prosperity, and order into the world, that he can rule it as well as God can rule it. But what he didn’t realize was that when he tempted Adam to sin and then Adam sinned and they began to procreate until eventually there are millions of sin natures running around who all want to be god, that he had created a whole bunch of competition. Everybody wants to be god and nobody wants to listen to Satan as their authority either. So now he has to bring order into this chaos that he created. So Satan has challenged God’s justice. He wanted to show what he could do in running the universe; he wanted to replace God. What God is demonstrating is that no one but Himself, no one but God can rule the universe. The creature, like Satan who is brilliant and has more knowledge than any human being could ever amass, is still finite in his knowledge and ability, and he can only be in one place at one time. So he can’t do what he is attempting to do. When the creature operates on the basis of arrogance the ultimate result is always self-destructive. Only when the creature is in complete submission and obedience to the creator can there be harmony and genuine love, and all of this flows through true humility.

6)      Human history provides evidence to support God’s case in a legal court of appeal. First of all we see that Satan’s guilt, his disobedience, brought about a judicial sentence from God. He was sentenced to the lake of fire some time in eternity past based on our understanding of Matthew 25:41. Furthermore, we also see that Adam’s guilt also invoked a judicial sentence. The structure of Genesis 3:14ff where God outlines the consequences to the serpent, to the woman and to the man, fits the concept of a judicial sentence. These are the consequences, the punishment for their actions. The issue at stake is God’s integrity—His righteousness and justice. Over and over again throughout Scripture we see this emphasis on God’s righteousness and His justice. Furthermore, we see this analogy to the courtroom played out in basic terminology that is used. For example, the new term that is used to refer to Lucifer is the Hebrew word satan, which means “the accuser.” So it is a legal term, it refers to someone who is bringing an accusation into a courtroom. We see this in Zechariah 3:1-7, “And he showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the LORD [Yahweh, the Lord Jesus Christ], and Satan [the accuser] standing at his right hand to oppose him. And the LORD [God the Father] said unto Satan, The LORD rebuke you, O Satan; even the LORD who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you: is not this [Joshua] a brand plucked out of the fire? Now Joshua was clothed with filthy garments, and stood before the angel. And he answered and spoke unto those that stood before him, saying, Take away the filthy garments from him. And unto him he said, Behold, I have removed your iniquity from you, and I will clothe you with rich robes [a picture of the imputation of righteousness, the removal of guilt]. And I said, Let them set a clean turban upon his head. So they set a clean turban upon his head, and clothed him with garments. And the angel of the LORD stood by. And the angel of the LORD protested unto Joshua, saying, Thus says the LORD of hosts; If you will walk in my ways, and if you will keep my charge, then you shall also judge my house, and shall also keep my courts, and I will give you places to walk among these that stand by.” The picture is of a courtroom scene, standing before the Supreme Court of heaven with Satan as the accuser and the Lord Jesus Christ as the one who is defending Joshua. We see the same thing again in 1 John 2:1, “My little children, these things write I to you, that you sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.” Satan is the one who accuses us, but it is Jesus Christ who is our advocate, our defense attorney. We also have the idea of courtroom in the idea of covenants throughout the Bible. There is the initial Edenic covenant, not mentioned in Genesis 1:26-28 but is referred to later on in Scripture (Hosea). There is the Adamic covenant in Genesis 3, the Noahic covenant in Genesis 9, the Abrahamic covenant reiterated in various places in Genesis, the land or real estate covenant, the Davidic covenant, the New covenant. These are all contracts. Sometimes when we talk about the Bible we talk about the Old Testament and the New Testament. Testament is a legal term, a contract. So at the very root of all human relationship to God there is a contract. God has bound Himself to us contractually. This doesn’t happen in any other system of religion, so what we have is a unique setup. God is under girding all human relationships with a legal structure. That doesn’t remove it from being personal but it gives a basis for stability and structure to our relationship with God. We know that we can trust Him, He is not going to go off and do something different next year or next century, He is going to fulfill what He said in His covenants. He had bound Himself legally, and this is why we as Americans with a legal system based on a Judeo-Christian background have a respect for the law that is unique in history. So once again we see that the Bible is structured in terms of a legal framework. Furthermore, we have various scenes that are reminiscent of a courtroom. We have the scenes in Job chapter one when the angels, the sons of God, come before the Supreme Court of heaven. Then Satan the accuser comes in and accuses Job. Zechariah 3:1-7 also has that same imagery. When we look at salvation, salvation is couched in legal terms. The reason we need salvation is because of sin. The terms that we use for sin are terms that come out of a legal context. HAMARTIA [a(martia] means to miss the mark, it is the basic word for sin. It means to fall short of a standard and it would be used of a violation of law. We have in the Old Testament the word “transgression.” This is the Hebrew word pasha, which refers to a crime or criminal action, the violation of a law. The Greek counterpart to this word is PARAPTOMA [paraptwma] which indicates, again, the violation of a standard. Another word that is used of sin is ADIKOS [a)dikoj], not righteous. Terms for sin refer to a legal violation; words for salvation also refer to a legal satisfaction. Propitiation indicates that the law has been satisfied, and when it comes to the character of God what that means is that the character of God has been satisfied with the work of Christ on the cross. The word “imputation” is legally crediting something to someone’s account, so that when we trust Christ as our savior the perfect righteousness of Christ is legally credited to our account. Now there is a positive balance and when God looks at out character He looks at the character of Christ and declares us justified. We are righteous, that is what it means to be justified by faith. It means that when God looks at our record He is looking at the character of Christ, not ours, and he says we are justified. Terms like “forgiveness,” APHIEMI [a)fihmi], a concept we are familiar with in 1 John 1:9, is another legal term. All of this indicates that our relationship with God is couched in legal terminology, it is all governed by legal concepts. Then we get into other aspects of Scripture and we find that there is a word group that shows up a lot, especially in John’s writing, and it is based on the word MARTUREO [marturew] from which we get our English word “martyr.” It means “witness,” of one who provides a testimony. John 1:7, talking about John the Baptist. John writes, “These are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you might have life through his name.” What is written? These “signs” are written, and there are basically seven signs that are given in the Gospel of John to indicate that Jesus is exactly who He claimed to be. These are, as it were, seven witnesses that John is marshalling. In almost a legal sense he is going to trot them out one at a time to demonstrate that Jesus is exactly who He claimed to be and that if we believe and accept the fact that he is the Messiah, the one who died on the cross for our sins, then we can have eternal life. So the Gospel of John is filled with this legal terminology. Cf. John 3:11, once again we see that it is this legal terminology of witness and testimony that we see in his vocabulary. Cf. also John 5:30-37 where we have 13 references in eight verses dealing with “witness, testimony, righteousness.” 1 John 5:9-12 is another example that our whole relationship with God is wrapped up in legal terminology. This gives us great confidence as believers that we can count on God. There is an absolute out there that is greater than us that is unshakeable, and it is grounded in the character of God. Furthermore, this means there is accountability. So we have judgments in the Scripture: like the judgment seat of Christ, and evaluation for believers; the judgment of the sheep and the goats at the end of the Tribulation; the great white throne judgment at the end of the Millennium. When we come to the bema seat and study concept of rewards and inheritance for believers there is terminology such as inheritance that is referred to again and again through legal terminology that we would find in a will or a testament at the time of death. Again and again and again God is using legal terminology to define that relationship. In conclusion, what we see is that in all of this God has wrapped up human history in this mantle of legal terminology and it must fit into some broader category, and this is the appeal trial of Satan.

7)      We see that angels observe human actions to learn about God’s character, especially His justice and His grace. These are the issues that are challenged by Satan. For example, 1 Corinthians 4:9, “For I think that God has displayed us the apostles last, as men condemned to death: for we are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men.” So our life is made evident to the angels; they are watching us. 1 Peter 1:12, “To whom it was revealed, that not to themselves, but to us they did minister the things, which are now reported unto you by them that have preached the gospel unto you with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven; which things the angels desire to look into.” The angels are curious about this. They are learning things about the character of God and about this whole legal structure from watching and observing. 1 Timothy 5:21, “I charge you before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, and the elect angels, that you observe these things without preferring one before another, doing nothing by partiality.” The angels are watching the local church, and in this case they are watching the pastors of the local congregation.

8)      Angels observe human history as confirming witnesses to God’s covenants and as agents for executing the judgments contained in those covenants. What is meant by this is that God sets up a contract with us and says that if we violate it there will be certain judgments. The angels are witnesses to the contract that God sets up and they are the ones who carry out the judgments contained in those contracts. What is our precedent for this? Galatians 3:19, “Why the law then? It was added because of transgressions … having been ordained through angels by the agency of a mediator.” No angels were mentioned in Exodus 19 & 20, but Galatians 3:19 and other passages tell us that angels were there, though not mentioned in that passage. The mediator here is Moses. “… until the seed would come {the Lord Jesus Christ] to whom the promise had been made.” The law was given because of sin on the part of the nation Israel and it is given through the angels. The Greek word here is DIATASSO [diatassw]. DIATAGMA [diatagma] is the noun form. The TASSO or TAGMA has to do with something that is ordered or structured. DIA is the preposition meaning “through.” So it is focusing on something that is organized, structured, and outlined. The other passage where we find the noun is in Acts 7:53, “Who have received the law by the direction of angels, and have not kept it.” The idea here is that the angels organized and ordered the law. What does that mean? Hebrews 2:2, “For if the word spoken by angels” – the angels spoke the word, the giving of the law. When did this happen? Deuteronomy 5:22, “These words the LORD spoke unto all your assembly in the mount out of the midst of the fire, of the cloud, and of the thick darkness, with a great voice: and he added no more.” So God spoke verbally and audibly to the Jews when they were assembled below Mount Sinai. It is not something they heard internally. Deuteronomy 33:2, “And he said, The LORD came from Sinai, and dawned on them from Seir; he shone forth from mount Paran, and he came with ten thousands of saints [a noun form of kadash, “holy ones,” angels]: from his right hand went a fiery law for them.” When the Lord came at Sinai, Moses says, there were ten thousand angels with Him. When we put all of this together what we realize is that God gave the law to Moses and then apparently there were angels who communicated and exegeted the law to the Jews at the base of Mount Sinai. They made sure that they understood how the law was to be applied and understood. That is what Hebrews 2:2 is talking about. Three times in the New Testament there is reference to this. It is ignored in the Old Testament. What is going on here? It is that angels are serving as officers of the court to make sure that things are understood. The conclusion is that there is a legal operation taking place here. In the Old Testament when God gave the law to Moses He gave two copies. One copy went into the ark of the covenant and one copy went to the people. What is happening with the book of Revelation is that the Lord Jesus Christ is giving the revelation to John who is making seven copies of the whole book for each church. At the heavenly level the Lord Jesus Christ is giving an angelic witness a copy of the critique sheet for each congregation. That angelic witness is standing as a functionary of the heavenly court as a witness of God’s grace and integrity in each congregation. God is evaluating each congregation. These seven epistles are not like we have from Paul and Peter and John earlier in the New Testament which are talking about how to live the Christian life. These are evaluation statements. To the church us said that it still has time to change its mind in certain areas and to apply doctrine and move forward. To the angel is said that if these churches don’t straighten up and apply doctrine, then it is their job to execute judgment and take out the congregation. That is what happened historically to these seven congregations. They failed to apply doctrine and they went through the process of judgment. This is a cycle that we see again and again in human history. People become complaisant with what they have, complaisant with the doctrine that they have been taught, and eventually they begin to take it for granted, they begin to take God’s grace for granted, and before long the spiritual life isn’t significant for them and they become distracted by all the details of life. The next thing you know they are in reversionism, the churches begin to deteriorate, get into ritualism and legalism, deny the deity of Christ, the creatorship of God, deny creation, and before long they are under judgment and God takes out the congregation and eventually the nation. 

Apostles Deaths

James   half brother of our Lord

   Beheaded in Jeruselum    AD 44

James the Less

    Throned from theTemple then beat to death

Plilip   

   Whipped then crusified

Andrew

   was crusifed on a cross for three days

Peter

   first beaten then crusified upsidedown

Thomas

   trused thur with a spear

Jude

   was crusified in AD 72

Bartholomew

   beaten to death with clubs

John

   sentenced to a pot of oil, then died of old age

Paul

  beheaded in Rome by Nero

Barnabus

  was stoned to death by Jews

Mark

  dragged thur the street by his feet burned the following day

Luke

  hanged on a olive tree in Greese

Mathisis

   stoned then beheaded

Doctrine of Apostleship  RD/1 Cor. 002

1)      Apostle comes from the Greek word APOSTOLOS [a)postoloj] which means someone who is commissioned and sent on a mission. It is a word that is not used very much in classical Greek literature. There are a few instances of it where it is used to described the mission of a military or naval commander, or a governor of a Greek colony, but outside of a few uses it is a rare noun. The verb APOSTELLO [a)postellw] which means to send is used much more frequently. But one of the things we always have to remember when we get into the New Testament and into New Testament vocabulary is that the background for understanding the terminology of these words is more often than not Hebrew and Old Testament concepts rather than fifth-century BC classical Greek. The precedent for the vocabulary is the Old Testament. An apostle was someone who was sent out as a personal envoy or representative and that was exactly the function of an apostle in the church, he was a personal envoy or representative of the Lord Jesus Christ.

2)      There were two categories of apostles in the New Testament. It is important to recognize that there is a common and a technical use of the word “apostle,” and it depends on who sends, who does the commissioning. In the technical use which refers to the twelve apostles Jesus Christ is the one who sends. In the common or everyday use which related to men who were commissioned by a local church they were sent out as missionaries or on some specific errand or mission. The common use refers to the local church sending out missionaries on to the field. For that reason some other men were called apostles, but they did not receive the commission from the Lord Jesus Christ, they received it from a local church. The unique spiritual gift was only given to twelve men, eleven of the original disciples outside of Judas Iscariot, and then Paul. 1 Corinthians 15:7-10. This was a temporary spiritual gift and it vanished from history with the death of the apostle John about 96 AD. The second use had to do with a pioneer missionary or someone who was specifically commissioned by a local church to fulfil a specific mission. Acts 14:14; Romans 16:7. The gift of apostleship was a spiritual gift. By definition, therefore, it could not be bestowed by man. All spiritual gifts are sovereignly bestowed at the instant of salvation by God the Holy Spirit. 1 Corinthians 12:28, 29.

3)      Three qualifications for the gift of apostleship. First, they are appointed by God the Holy Spirit and commissioned by the Lord Jesus Christ—1 Corinthians 12:8-11; 1 Corinthians 1:1; Galatians 1:1. Second, they were to be an eyewitness of the resurrection, or have seen the resurrected Christ—1 Corinthians 15:8-9; Acts 1:22. Acts 1:22 also seems to suggest that they observed the teaching of the Lord during His incarnation. What about Paul? If you lay Paul’s life over the chronology of the New Testament it becomes obvious that Paul must have been in Jerusalem at the same time the Lord Jesus Christ was in Jerusalem. Paul was probably at least 25 when we first see him at the stoning of Stephen in Acts 7 & 8. He would have been in Jerusalem for about 12 years because he came from Tarsus to Jerusalem at age 13 to study to be a rabbi, and he would have been in Jerusalem at least three years before our Lord started His public ministry, and he would have been attending a rabbinical school during the entire time of our Lord’s ministry. It seems that he would have been a witness of many events in the life of Christ. Third, they were imbued with miraculous powers. Along with the gift of apostleship they were given other spiritual gifts. Cf. Acts 5:15; 16:16-18.

4)      Apostleship came after the ascension of Christ (Matthew 10 precedes the church).

5)      Apostles were recipients of direct revelation from God and were the only authorized source for divine revelation.

6)      The apostolic gift died out in the first generation. There was no provision for successors. It is not passed on though the laying on of hands, there is no such thing as apostolic succession. That term was originally used in the next century, the second century; but at first it did not refer to a succession of individuals, that was the perversion of it as it came down into the Roman Catholic church. It wasn’t a succession of individuals but a succession of doctrine. You were a successor of the apostles if you taught the same doctrine the apostles taught.

Qualifications for an apostle. Remember, an apostle was a spiritual gift given to a few individuals and it was related to laying the foundation of the church—Ephesians 2:20. This was a gift that was limited to the church age and to only twelve individuals.   RD/1 Cor. 046

1)      They were appointed by the Holy Spirit, 1 Corinthians 12:8-11. In Acts chapter one lots were drawn for a replacement for Judas Iscariot. So there were a body of men basically determining who has a spiritual gift. One argument against that is that the Holy Spirit refers to them as “the twelve” later on in Acts before Paul is saved, so the Holy Spirit wouldn’t be making a mistake, if Matthias is included in the number there would be twelve, if he is not then there would only be eleven. However, the counter argument to that is in 1 Corinthians 15:5 NASB “and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.” That is talking about Jesus’ resurrection appearances between the resurrection and His ascension which is ten days before Pentecost, and it leaves two or three days before Peter gets his idea to pick a new apostle. But Paul says He appeared to the twelve during this period when there is only eleven. What had happened was that the disciples had become known as the twelve, it was the name of the group. They were called the twelve for three years and even when they lost one of them they still called them the twelve. So when they refer to the twelve in Acts chapters three and four it is not a term that recognizes the legitimacy of Matthias because the term was also used when there were only eleven.

2)      An apostle was an eye-witness of the resurrection or had seen the resurrected Christ. 1 Corinthians 15:8, 9; Acts 1:22. That means that there is nobody today who is an apostle.

3)      They were commissioned as an apostle directly by the Lord Jesus Christ. 1 Corinthians 9:1. The Greek word for apostle is APOSTOLOS [a)postoloj] and it means someone who is commissioned, appointed, delegated a specific task and authority to fulfil that task. The important thing is to identify who does the commissioning and the task to which they are commissioned, because there are some other individuals in the New Testament to whom the word “apostle” is applied. But these are not apostles in the same sense that James and John and Paul were apostles. This is a secondary sense because the apostles, i.e. the twelve, were all commissioned by Jesus Christ and they received a spiritual gift of apostle. Others such as Barnabas and three or four others that are mentioned are commissioned by a local church to a particular task, usually in the realm of what we would call today missions. They were sent out and commissioned to take the gospel to a particular area. It is apostle in a non-technical sense.

4)      The apostles were also given the credentials of signs and wonders. Acts 5:15; 16:16-18; 2 Corinthians 12:12 NASB “The signs of a true apostle were performed among you with all perseverance, by signs and wonders and miracles.”

The Doctrine of Apostleship   RD/Gal/001

   1. The Greek word is apostolos [a)postoloj] which has a rich heritage in the Greek. We need to note that in this particular passage it is used without the article. In Greek if it does not have the definite article it can be for emphasis of quality, it can still be definite, or it can be indefinite. The definite article in Greek functions quite differently from the definite article in English. Here we have the use of the indefinite article because Paul is one apostle among many. He sais he is an apostle. But the in anarthrous emphasis of this Paul would also emphasise the highest quality of the noun, the high quality of apostleship. He is an apostle of Jesus Christ. Apostleship was the highest rank in the membership of the royal family of God in the church age.

   2. The word apostolos is a Greek word that was used originally in classical Greek for a high ranking admiral or general officer who was chosen to command either a naval fleet or an army. The root meaning of the word apostolos is the one who is sent, and then it takes on a technical meaning for the one who is commissioned with a task. The individual was commissioned to perform a task and given the authority and responsibility to carry out that task. That means that the word inherently connotes command and leadership responsibilities. It was also used to refer to a group of Greek colonies and then it developed over time to just refer to the leader of that group. It came to mean someone with authority, someone with leadership; it had both a military background and a colonial background. When we come to the New Testament we discover that this word is used to refer to a temporary spiritual gift.

   3. The gift of apostleship by way of definition in the New Testament had two categories. The first is the technical sense—a spiritual gift. As a spiritual gift we know that it was given by the Holy Spirit at the moment of salvation. It is determined by the sovereign plan of God the Father. As we see here in the first verse of Galatians every member of the Trinity is involved in the process of determining the spiritual gift[s] of each believer. Spiritual gifts are give a) at salvation; b) they are determined by the sovereignty of God and distributed by the Holy Spirit; c) they are irrevocable; d) spiritual gifts are in some cases developed (e.g. pastor-teacher)—there needs to be time for training, there needs to be growth to a certain level of spiritual maturity, there needs to have been time to study the Word of God.

   4. An apostle is one who was commissioned by Christ Himself to the task of establishing the church in the church age. That is the technical use. Then there is the general use of the word that describes men who are commissioned by either a local church or by one of the apostles themselves as a missionary. The Bible uses the word apostle to refer to men like Barnabas, James the brother of the Lord, and two or three others. They do not have the spiritual gift of apostle, they do not meet the other qualifications of an apostle, and therefore they are not an apostle in the technical sense. There were only twelve apostles in that technical sense, the eleven plus Paul.

   5. When we look at the spiritual gift of apostle: a) it was the first and highest of all spiritual gifts ever given. This gift is listed first in terms of its priority in both 1 Corinthians 12:28 and Ephesians 4:11; b) the apostles had plenary [full] powers; c) the spiritual gift of apostleship carried the highest authority God has ever delegated in the church age. The apostle had authority over all the local churches, and in contrast the pastor has authority over only the one local church; d) the purpose for the spiritual gift of apostleship was twofold. First of all, the communication of the Word of God and the formation of the New Testament canon. All of the New Testament books were either written by an apostle or they were written under the authority of an apostle. Luke was not an apostle but he was the travelling companion of the apostle Paul and wrote under his authority. James wrote under the authority of John and Peter in Jerusalem; e) the gift of apostleship was given in the pre-canon period of the church age. While there was no written New Testament there needed to be leadership by those men who understood the doctrines related to the church age; f) it was also the responsibility of the apostles to train pastors, establish local churches, and to establish local church policy; g) apostles were not appointed until after the resurrection of Christ—there was a group of apostles mentioned in Matthew 10 but this is a different category who were sent to Israel. This was a temporary commissioning by the Lord Jesus Christ to witness to Israel and not what we are talking about with reference to the New Testament, church age spiritual gift of apostleship; h) the spiritual gift of apostleship was temporary and discontinued after the completion of the canon of Scripture. We know this because of the qualifications to be an apostle. An apostle needed to be a witness to the teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ and he had to be commissioned as an apostle by the resurrected Lord. (Paul was in Jerusalem and would have been about 16 or 17 years of age when Jesus began His public ministry. It stands to reason that Paul was probably among the Pharisees who were antagonistic to Jesus in the Gospels)

   6. Who were those who had the gift of apostleship? Remember that there is a distinction between the two different categories of apostle. Who are the eleven men plus the apostle Paul? We find the list in Matthew 10:2-4—Simon Peter, his brother Andrew; the two sons of Zebedee—James who was murdered very early under Herod Agrippa and the apostle John who wrote the Gospel; Philip who was an evangelist and very concerned with evangelism; he used that gift in two places in Acts. Bartholomew who was also called Nathanael, Thomas, Matthew (Levi), Simon the Canaanite, James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus who was also called Jude. Twelfth would be the apostle Paul.

   7. In Acts chapter one Peter gets the great idea that there needs to be twelve disciples. So they are having a meeting where they have been in prayer as they wait in Jerusalem as the Lord instructed them for the coming of the Holy Spirit. Peter makes the suggestion that they choose from among  them someone to take the place of Judas. They cast lots and chose Matthias to be the twelfth disciple. The problem with this is that man does not choose people to have a spiritual gift. Men do not determine who has any spiritual gift. Spiritual gifts are determined under the sovereignty of God the Father and distributed by God the Holy Spirit. Man cannot elect what is sovereignly distributed by God. Paul makes this point in Galatians 1:1 because his authority had been questioned by the Judaisers. He uses the phrase “not from men.” The phrase in the Greek is apo plus the genitive plural of anthropos [a)po a)nqrwpoj], the generic term for humanity, mankind. apo plus the genitive emphasises source or origin. So the first thing Paul is saying here is that he is an apostle but not from the source of men, mankind. Secondly he says, “nor through the agency of man,” dia plus the genitive singular  anthropou [dia a)nqrwpou], which emphasises agency. The gift of apostleship is not passed on from man to man; it does not come from apostolic procession. Apostleship comes through the agency of Jesus Christ—dia [dia] plus the genitive singular—and God the Father. Paul then says, “who raised Him from the dead.” This is an aorist participle, egeiro [e)geirw], meaning to raise up. God the Father is the one who raised Jesus Christ from the dead. This is a subtle reminder that Paul has seen the resurrection of Christ. When Paul went on his first missionary journey he went to the area of what is now south central Turkey, the area that is known as Galatia. The people were very familiar with his testimony and how he had seen the resurrected Lord on the road to Damascus.      

The Dctrine of Apostleship  RD/Gal/009

1.       The word apostle comes from the Greek word apostolos [a)postoloj]. There are two senses in which this word is used in the New Testament, a general sense and a specific sense. The root meaning of the word describes someone who has been commissioned by a group or an individual and given the authority to perform a task. The general usage would refer to those who are commissioned by a local church—like Barnabas and a number of other people who are mentioned in the New Testament. They don’t have the spiritual gift of apostle; they have been commissioned by a local church as a missionary. The specific use of the word apostle refers to those who have the spiritual gift of apostleship and who meet certain qualifications. This describes the eleven original disciples plus the apostle Paul.

2.       The six requirements for apostleship: a) An apostle of Jesus Christ must be Jewish. They were sent out originally to the house of Israel, Matthew 10:6, before the church age; this was the limited use of apostle. According to Deuteronomy 18:9 cf. Romans 3:1, 2; Matthew 10:1-5, the Scriptures were given to Israel. Israel was specifically given the custodianship of the revelation of God, so the apostles who would deliver more revelation had to be of the nation Israel. b) An apostle must have received a call and a commissioned to his office directly from the Lord Jesus Christ. Galatians 1:1 cf. Acts 1:24-26. c) An apostle must have been an eyewitness of the Lord Jesus Christ in His teaching, John 15:27; Luke 22:28; Acts 1:21, 22. Paul made it clear that he met this requirement as an apostle, 1 Corinthians 9:1; 15:8; Acts 22:6-21. d) An apostle must possess authority in communicating divine revelation. What he says is not up to a vote, it came directly from God. What he wrote under divine inspiration was indeed the voice of God and carries the authority of God. 1 Corinthians 2:10; Galatians 1:11, 12 cf. 2 Timothy 3:16. e) An apostle was required to furnish the signs of an apostle. He performed certain miracles which were his calling cards; they provided credentials for his claim to be an apostle. f) An apostle possessed complete authority among all the churches.

Six requirements to be an apostle  RD/Gal/002

1.       An apostle of Jesus Christ must be a Jew. He had to be from Messiah’s nation.

2.       An apostle must have received a specific call and commission to his office directly from Christ. The nature of his office: he had full plenary powers, full authority. This was the highest rank in the church age. The precedent was set by the Lord Himself in Luke 6:13 NASB “And when day came, He called His disciples to Him and chose twelve of them, whom He also named as apostles.” Paul elaborates on this in 2 Corinthians, and especially here in Galatians 1:1.

3.       They must have been an eyewitness of the ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ and have heard His teaching. If they were to be foundational witnesses to Jesus Christ and what He taught then it was necessary for them to know a) what He taught, and b) to have seen His public ministry while He was alive on the earth. (Paul was probably among the Pharisees and scribes who were arguing with Jesus during Jesus’ time on the earth) Paul made is specifically clear that he was an apostle.1 Corinthians 9:1; 15:8; Acts 22:6-21.

4.       An apostle must possess authority in communicating divine revelation. When an apostle spoke it was “Thus saith the Lord.” He was the mouthpiece for God; he gave absolute truth. What he wrote from divine revelation was directly from the mind of God. 1 Corinthians 2:16.

5.       An apostle is required to furnish the signs of the Apostles. 2 Corinthians 12:12 NASB “The signs of a true apostle were performed among you with all perseverance, by signs and wonders and miracles.” All of these things authenticated their message. They demonstrated the veracity of their message.

6.       An apostle possessed plenary authority among all the churches. Peter, for example, judged Ananias and Sapphira on the basis of his authority as an apostle. Paul asserted his responsibilities over all of the churches, 2 Corinthians 11:28 NASB “Apart from {such} external things, there is the daily pressure on me {of} concern for all the churches. And he dictated to the different churches what they should do in various, e.g. disciplinary matters such as in Corinth in 1 Corinthians 5:3. They had authority to tell every local church congregation how to conduct their business.

In summary, apostleship was a unique spiritual gift that was sovereignly delegated by the Lord Jesus Christ and distributed by the Holy Spirit, 1 Corinthians 12:27, 28; Ephesians 4:11; Colossians 1:1. In the pre-canon period of the church age certain spiritual gifts such as apostleship were necessary in order to communicate the revelation about the church age and the unique spiritual life of the church age because they didn’t have it written down yet. Once it was all written down it was no longer necessary for these people to continue their function—apostleship, prophecies, healing and tongues, for example. Apostles were not appointed until after the resurrection of Christ and they did not really become operational until the day of Pentecost when the church age began. Galatians 1:1 NASB “Paul, an apostle (not {sent} from men nor through the agency of man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised Him from the dead).” The reason he mentions resurrection here is because Paul himself was commissioned by the resurrected Christ, and he is reminding his readers of his testimony of how he came to know the Lord on the road to Damascus when Jesus Christ appeared to him.

3.       An apostle is a unique spiritual gift sovereignly delegated by the Lord Jesus Christ. 1 Corinthians 12:27, 28; Ephesians 4:11; Colossians 1:1.

4.       Today all spiritual gifts are the permanent spiritual gifts. All spiritual gifts can be classified into two categories: permanent and temporary. The temporary gifts included miracles, knowledge and wisdom, prophecy, tongues, interpretation of tongues, healing—temporary gifts given during the transition period of the early church when the canon of the New Testament was not complete in order to communicate revelation in the early church age that was not accessible through a written canon of Scripture.

5.       In the pre-canon period of the church age (35-95 AD) certain temporary gifts were given for the church to carry on until the canon was completed.

6.       Certain gifts such as apostleship, prophecy, miracles, healing, tongues, interpretation of tongues, knowledge and wisdom, exhortation, discerning spirits, faith, ceased their function by 96 AD.

7.       Once the canon of the New Testament was completed and circulated all temporary spiritual gifts were withdrawn.

8.       The apostles to the church were not appointed until after the resurrection of Christ, according to Ephesians 4:8, 11. Christ distributed them.

9.       Apostles to the church therefore are not to be confused with the apostles to Israel in Matthew 10:2-4.

10.   The apostle John was the last of the apostles and died in approximately 96 AD.

11.   Any claim to be an apostle today is heresy, blasphemy, a complete violation of the Word of God.

Doctrine of Appearance of Jesus Christ  Rev. 019

There were a number of times that Jesus Revealed Himself in these post-resurrection appearances. It was not that He just had this one appearance to the disciples but He appeared to over 500 in 17 different post-resurrection appearances.

   1. Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene on the resurrection Sunday morning. Mark 16:9-11; John 20:11-17. She was one of His most devoted followers and unlike the disciples she wasn’t hiding, she was concerned about taking care of the body in the tomb.
   2. He appeared to the other women. Matthew 28:9, 10. There were other women who came to the tomb. There is a tremendous contrast here between the courage of the women to go to the tomb and identify themselves with their savior, unlike the men who were hiding.
   3. Later that afternoon He appeared to Peter. Luke 24:34; 1 Corinthians 15:5 where Peter is referred to by His Aramaic name, Cephas.
   4. Even later that afternoon He appears to two disciples who headed to Emmaus, a northern suburb of Jerusalem about 15 miles away. Luke 24:13-3.
   5. In the early evening He finally appeared to the ten but at this time Thomas wasn’t with them. Luke 24:36-43; John 20:19-23.
   6. To the eleven disciples a little later on that evening. He comes back and now Thomas in there.
   7. Several days later he appeared to seven of the disciples who were by the Sea of Galilee. They had been out fishing and when they came back to the shore for breakfast when He appeared to them. John 21:1-23. It is there that He gives His marching orders to the disciples, and specifically Peter, that their job is to feed the sheep.
   8. He then appeared to and taught 500 believers at one time. 1 Corinthians 15:6.
   9. He also appeared to members of His immediate family. Jesus had various brothers and sisters, the Scriptures say. None of them believed in Him, accepted Him as Messiah, before the resurrection.
  10. He appeared to eleven disciples on a mountain in Galilee. Matthew 28:16-20. It is there that they are told to make disciples and baptize. Jesus is addressing the disciples, and through them the leaders of the church, that this is the mission of the church—to make students of the Word. Baptism simply reflects that which was soon to take place at the moment of conversion. So the emphasis is on two things: evangelism, indicated in the early church through baptism because baptism is a picture of our immediate identification with Christ in His death, burial and resurrection. The physical act of baptism with water was a picture and a type of the spiritual act of baptism by the Holy Spirit, that at the instant of faith alone in Christ alone we are identified with Christ in His death, burial and resurrection by the Holy Spirit. This becomes the mission statement for the church in the church age, that this is our task, to take the gospel to the nations. This is the New Testament equivalent to the command to Abraham in Genesis 12:3 to be a blessing to all people. It is through the evangelistic ministry in the church age that the blessing mandate of the Abrahamic covenant is brought to fulfillment.
  11. The final appearance of the Lord during the intermediate period before Pentecost was at the time of His ascension. This is described in Luke 24:44-53; Acts 1:3-9. Jesus appeared at that time to the eleven and He gives them their final marching orders that they are to take the gospel to Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and to the uttermost part of the earth. That is a reiteration of the great commission. It is the structural marker for the book of Acts. The remainder of the resurrection appearance are all post-ascension, and they involve a temporary departure from the right hand of the Father.
  12. His next appearance was to the first martyr of the church, Stephen, Acts 7:55, 56. It is as Stephen is being stoned that he is filled with the Spirit, gazes to heaven, and God pulls back the veil so that he sees the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. Jesus is pictured here as standing because He is receiving Stephen into heaven. He is still “seated” as the technical aspect referring to His session but He is pictured as standing for the reception of Stephen.
  13. The most famous post-ascension of Jesus is to the apostle Paul on the road to Damascus. Once again, this is not just Paul having a vision, this is an objective appearance. His associates didn’t see Jesus but they saw the bright light and they heard the sound of His voice. This indicates it is an objective appearance but they weren’t supposed to hear the words and Jesus wasn’t appearing to them, so they didn’t see the specifics. But they saw something. If Paul had just been having a dream or a hallucination nobody else would see anything. Acts 9:3-6; 22:6-11; 26:13-18.
  14. Jesus then appeared after this to Paul in Arabia. Acts 20:34; 26:17; Galatians 1:12, 17.
  15. He appeared to Paul a third time in the temple. Acts 22:17-21, where He is commissioning Paul as an apostle.
  16. He appeared to Paul a fourth time when Paul was in prison, Acts 23:11.
  17. The final appearance of the Lord Jesus Christ was to John on the island of Patmos where He commissions him to write the things that he sees. Revelation chapter one. This is the last time that Jesus Christ appeared in history. After the close of the canon there was no longer a reason for Him to appear. 

 

Doctrine of the Arrogant Skills

 

Self-absorption

Self-indulgement

Self-justification

Self-deseption

Self-dietification

 

Doctrine of the Ascension and Session   Heb. 015

   1. The Jews at the time of the First Advent expected a one-coming Messiah.  They didn’t anticipate a dual advent.  We talk about First Advent and Second Advent.  The first time He came in incarnation and was born in the manger in Bethlehem.  He will return a second time when He returns in glory to establish His kingdom at the end of the tribulation. We understand that.   But if you were a Jew living in 50 BC or 10 BC or 5 BC, you were thinking that the Messiah was coming to establish a glorious kingdom and somehow redeem the world in terms of sin.  But you just thought of one coming. That shaped their understanding.  When Jesus did start teaching that He was going to die and come back, they had a difficult time with that.  Even John the Baptist sent his disciples to Jesus to ask if He was the guy.  Think about that.   John the Baptist was a cousin.  He is miraculously born as well because his mother is one of the 6 barren women in the Scripture.  She gives birth to him as the result of an angelic visitation.  She is not impregnated by the angel but as a result of the announcement by the angel she is told that she will give birth to a child.  The father was told that he would father the child.  That would be John.  His mother Elizabeth is a cousin of Mary’s.  She is pregnant a few months before Mary is. So from the time of his birth he would have been told that he had a special role in the kingdom plan of God to announce the Messiah.   When Jesus his cousin comes down to the Jordan he says, “Behold the Lamb of God.”  He baptizes Jesus.  In that baptism the heavens open and he hears the voice of God.  He saw the literal physical three-dimensional dove that is the Holy Spirit appear and come and settle over Jesus.  He has seen all of this.  Then when Jesus starts talking about the fact that the kingdom isn’t going to come now (He has been rejected so it has been postponed) he is so confused.  He asks if he has made a mistake.  That is hard for us to factor, isn’t it?  But he gets really confused there.   Jesus eases his anxieties.  The Jews expected a one-coming Messiah.
   2. The Jews confused the cross and the crown.  They wanted the crown before the cross, the glorious Messiah before the suffering Messiah.  We can see clearly that He had to suffer before He could reign.  He couldn’t bypass the cross and go directly to the kingdom.  That is what Satan wanted Him to do. That is why that was a temptation in the wilderness. That is why after fasting for 40 days and He is in a state of physical weakness, He was tired and hungry.   He was fully aware of what He would go through in terms of the cross.  Satan comes along and says, “I will give it to you.  You don’t have to go through the suffering”.  Suffering is a key word that we are going to see in Hebrews.  Suffering doesn’t necessarily mean that you are beaten down.  It means that you are going through adversity, testing of some kind or another that you have to apply the Word.  Jesus is given the opportunity to bypass the cross.  But He does not do that.  He passes the test.

NKJ 1 Peter 1:10 Of this salvation the prophets have inquired and searched carefully, who prophesied of the grace that would come to you, 11 searching what, or what manner of time, the Spirit of Christ who was in them was indicating when He testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ and the glories that would follow.

The Old Testament taught that but the Jews didn’t appreciate it.   They saw that one coming and did not make that distinction.  If they had made that distinction, they might have wondered why.  That is one reason why the Church Age wasn’t revealed.  The Church Age wasn’t revealed in the Old Testament because the Jews would have had some indication of their own failure.  So this means that they had a legitimate choice to accept the Messiah when He came and the kingdom could have come in when Jesus Christ offered it to them.  We know that they didn’t.  God has real contingency in His plan.  So the kingdom was presented. You see this pattern in all the gospels, at least the synoptics – Mathew, Mark and Luke.  From the incarnation to the end of His second year, there is the offer of the kingdom.  Then there is this rejection of the king that crystallizes in the Pharisees accusing Jesus of casting out demons by the power of Beelzebub.

Jesus calls it the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit.  So the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is not simply denial that Jesus Christ is your Savior.  You can’t blaspheme against the Holy Spirit today.  It was a historically conditioned sin.  I believe it was historically conditioned to that time only.  The Jews rejected him and that was blasphemy of the Holy Spirit.  In Matthew 12, Jesus spells out that there were serious consequences and that is what happened in AD 70.  Israel goes out under the fifth cycle of discipline.  So He began the ministry with the offer of the kingdom.  There is a rejection of the King.  This leads to the crucifixion of the King.  It is foundational to understanding everything related to the session, your inheritance and your spiritual life. We just can’t escape it.   This is foundational.

I know that there are some people that when we get into this study it brings in so much that your head starts spinning.  That is why you have to hear it again and again.  I have taught this about 6 times.  Each time I can synthesize it a little better.  Each time I go through this it is like the Lord taking out a 2 x 4 and hitting me on the head with it to get my attention on a few things.  It opens up so much in terms of understanding the spiritual life today and what is going on. This is why prophecy is important.  Prophecy has to do with what the end goal is and what is going to happen tomorrow eschatologically speaking.  That is tomorrow in terms of the next age or dispensation.  When we get a clear fix of that in our head, then it begins to change the way that we live today.

This is an extremely mundane example for those of you who struggle with the extra pound or two.  If we had a clear vision of what we would look like if we stuck with a diet for a few months, it would be a lot easier to exercise that discipline in the mean time.  Once you get that set in your head, it makes it a lot easier.  That is the idea here.  As a believer if you get a solid mental picture of what is going to happen after you die and what your eternal destiny is; it focuses you on what you are doing now.  There are a lot of mundane issues in life that we get so bent out of shape over and spend so much time being distracted with that would disappear.   Then we see what has happened to Ulan and we realize that we spend a whole lot of time on things that are not essential.  We have to understand this kingdom issue.

   3. John the Baptist, Jesus, and the disciples all proclaimed a message about the proximity of the kingdom.  “Repent for the kingdom is at hand.”   This isn’t a salvation message.  They had a salvation message.  This is related to Israel’s basic orientation towards life.  They were legalistic. They were told that they had to straighten up, change their minds, and be grace oriented or the kingdom wasn’t going to come.  The kingdom was being offered.   All of these guys had that message.

NKJ Matthew 3:2 and saying, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!"

NKJ Matthew 4:17 From that time Jesus began to preach and to say, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."

The disciples were sent out to teach.

NKJ Matthew 10:6  "But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

Notice it’s not to the gentiles, but to Israel.  What do you think is going on?  The                 kingdom of heaven is the crucial message.

   4. Near the midpoint of His ministry the Jewish religious leaders rejected Jesus as Messiah leading to the postponement of the kingdom.

Now that sets up for understanding the ascension.  Jesus has to ascend.  The kingdom is being postponed.  What is happening now during the session has to do with the preparation of what is going to happen then.

Next time we will tie in Daniel 7 and Psalm 2.  Psalm 2 also sets us up for Hebrews 1:5.

This helps us understand what the Lord is doing now and I hope this has a great impact for you.

Doctrine of Ascension of Christ     Heb. 040a

1 Christ’s ascension is the basis for present encouragement and strength in difficult times.  His ascension becomes the foundation for the writer’s challenge to people to hang in there when things are difficult.  The ascension is not just a doctrine that talks about the fact that Jesus has gone to heaven and He is sitting there at the right hand until the Father says it is okay to come back.  There is a practical reality that He is at the right hand ready to come to our aid and strengthen us in difficult times.
1 Christ’s ascension is the culmination of His victory over sin and death on the cross.  He died on the cross and He paid the penalty for our sins.  Then He was buried.  He rose again on the third day.  It is the ascension that is the Father’s final approval and acceptance.  When He goes home to be with the Father is when He ascends to heaven.  Ephesians 4:8f  went back to Psalm 68:18 and picked up on that ascension imagery when the ark was taken up to the top of the temple mount as a picture of God’s victory over all of Israel’s enemies.  That imagery is used to communicate what happens at the ascension of Christ. He has had victory over all of the enemies.  If the enemy has been defeated, then that certainly encourages us that even though it may not feel like those enemies are defeated, the battle is over and the battle is won.   This is just the mopping up operation to give us an opportunity to grow and mature and to prepare us for our future ministry and service with the Lord Jesus Christ in the Millennial Kingdom.
3 This means the evil, the suffering, the horrors, the adversity that we face on a day to day basis in a fallen world is only temporary.  All this that we go through is just temporary.  The battle has been won.   We have a glorious future to anticipate.  All of this flows out of an understanding of the present session of the high priesthood Christ. 
4 This means that He is going to come back.  He is going to return.

Doctrine of Atonement           Rev. 011

“He washed us” is an idiom in the Scripture for the cleansing that comes by means of “his own blood.” There is rich imagery here. To understand this we need a quick review of salvation. The washing concept and the use of “by his blood” are terms that are consistently used in relation to the total doctrine of salvation. First of all we have to understand that the problem is sin. Sin is that which is contrary to the perfect righteousness and justice of God. When Adam and Eve disobeyed God that plunged the human race into sin and created a variety of problems that had to be resolved in terms of their salvation. So a brick wall was set up between man and God, and that is the sin barrier.

The first element in the sin barrier is the problem of sin itself. The second problem is the penalty of sin. Because man is a sinner he violates the righteousness of God; because of the penalty of sin he is spiritually dead and can’t have a relationship with God. Each human being is born guilty of Adam’s original sin and bearing the penalty of sin in terms of spiritual death, incapable of having a relationship with God. The third problem in the barrier is God’s own character. Because God is perfectly righteous He can’t have a relationship with a sinful creature. The righteousness of God is His standard; the justice of God is the application of that standard. So before God can save a fallen creature His righteousness and justice have to be satisfied. Man has a problem because everything he does is –R; he lacks righteousness. Isaiah 65:6 says that all our righteousnesses are as filthy rages. That means that every good deed, the most righteous things man does don’t cut any ice with God. They are filthy rags. On top of that we are spiritually dead and there is no way that we can get into heaven when we are spiritually dead. Finally, there is our position in Adam. We are in Adam and the Scripture says that in Adam all die. These are the different dimensions of the sin problem.

The cross resolves all of these problems. It is at the cross that God deals with all of man’s problems. First of all the problem of sin, that every human being is born a sinner, is resolved by unlimited atonement. Jesus Christ paid the penalty for everyone’s sin. That doesn’t mean everyone is going to heaven but it means that the penalty has been resolved. It has been paid by Christ on the cross but it isn’t applied yet. The emphasis in the atonement is its unlimited dimension. It is for everyone. All have sinned and come short of the glory of God and Christ paid the penalty for all. The penalty itself is paid in the aspect of salvation known as redemption. Redemption always has with it that idea of paying a price. Redemption is not for the elect; redemption is for all. What about those who don’t believe? Are they redeemed? Yes, but we will see what happens shortly.

The character of God is resolved through propitiation, justification and imputation. When Christ died on the cross he propitiated God’s character. Scriptures teaches in many passages that the atonement was for all, redemption was for all, and propitiation was for all. But it doesn’t teach that justification is for all or that imputation is for all, or that regeneration is for all. Unlimited atonement, redemption and propitiation have to do with the objective work of Christ on the cross. When He died on the cross His death was sufficient for all. He actually paid the penalty for all and God the Father’s justice and righteousness was satisfied for all. However, there is still a problem. Te problem is that the individual is still –R, he still lacks righteousness. He is still spiritually dead, and he is still in Adam. Christ’s death didn’t transfer us from any of that, it just paid the penalty and took care of the objective aspect of the cross but not the subjective application of the cross. So the issue for each individual is faith alone in Christ alone. The instant that one puts his faith alone in Christ alone God the Father imputes to that one the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ. As a result of that God looks at us, sees that perfect righteousness and says, You are justified. It is a judicial declaration from the Supreme Court of heaven.

God solved the problem of the barrier. Remember this whole thing is resolved by “the blood of Christ,” the phrase is used to describe all of these different doctrines. Redemption, propitiation, justification and cleansing are all aspects that are resolved by the blood of Christ.

This concept of washing goes throughout the Scripture. Psalm 51:2, which has to do with David’s confession of his sin of adultery. “Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.” There are two places in life where we get cleansing. When we trust Christ as savior we are cleansed positionally; when we confess our sins after salvation we are cleansed experientially. Psalm 51:2 is talking about a post-salvation cleansing. Psalm 51:7, David uses the same verbiage again, “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.” He is already saved but post-salvation sin gets a little dirt on us, so we have to be washed again. The positional aspect is indicated in Isaiah 1:16, 18, “Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil…. Come now, and let us reason together, says the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. ” In the New Testament we have the same imagery used. Titus 3:5, “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Spirit.” How are we saved? Through the washing of regeneration. This also raises the terminology Jesus uses in John 13:10 in the episode of the foot washing of Peter. “Jesus said to him, He that is washed needs not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit: and you are clean, but not all.” The background is that if we lived in that culture our bodies would already be clean. we would have taken a bath. This was the Passover, the highest holy day in all of the Jewish calendar, so before coming to dinner we would have taken a bath. This verse uses the Greek word NIPTO [niptw], not the word for washing. The word for washing is LUO [luw], the word we have in Revelation 1:5. Instead of using LUO, a complete bath, Jesus uses the word NIPTO, meaning a partial washing. He is simply washing the feet, not the whole body. Jesus was teaching a principle that Peter didn’t understand now, but would afterward.

John 13:8, “Peter said to him, You shall never wash my feet. Jesus answered him, If I wash you not, you have no part with me.” The word translated “part” is the Greek word MEROS [meroj]. The way we interpret the English word “part” is in the sense of a role, a part to play. That is not what MEROS means. MEROS was a technical, legal term in ancient Greek legal documents known as testaments and wills. If you were designating your inheritance to someone that portion that they received was the MEROS. What Jesus is saying to Peter is, If you don’t let me cleanse you, i.e. if you don’t go through life confessing your sins and being cleansed so that the production in your life is through the filling of the Spirit, the result is going to be your loss of inheritance. In our inheritance are two aspects: permanent inheritance and contingent inheritance. There are some things that every believer will receive in heaven—a new resurrection body, eternal life, great joy and happiness. But some of us will have things that others do not have. For example, in the letters to the seven churches we read that those who overcome will be allowed to eat from the tree of life which is in the paradise of God. Others who overcome will be given the crown of life. Others will be able to eat from the hidden manna. Others will receive a white stone with their name written on it, a name that no one else can read. So there are all of these various promise given to believers who over come, that is, those who advance to spiritual maturity. So when Jesus says this to Peter He is saying that if he doesn’t wash him in terms of periodic cleansing in the Christian life he won’t have an inheritance because he will live his whole Christian life in the power of the flesh and not by walking by the Spirit. “He that is bathed [LOUO] needs not save to wash his feet, but is completely clean: and you [Peter] are clean, but not all [the disciples].” Not all the disciples are cleansed. Judas is the unbeliever in the midst.

Washing is a major metaphor in the Scripture for salvation, but it is also used when it is talking about post-salvation cleansing from sin—1 John 1:9. This goes back to Exodus 29:4, “And Aaron and his sons you shall bring to the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, and shall wash them with water.” When a priest was initiated into the priesthood he was bathed from head to toe. Each time a priest went into the tabernacle the first piece of furniture that met him was the golden laver, and he would have to wash his hands and his feet. That was a symbol of the fact that he had done things and been places he shouldn’t have. In other words, he had committed sin. So he had already been washed from head to toe, indicating he was saved; now he had to go through periodic cleansing or washings before he could go and serve the Lord as a priest in the tabernacle and the temple. So now he has a partial washing, he is now in fellowship, he is cleansed. The real issue is cleansing. The sin must be dealt with.

We see how this fits with the flow and the context of John’s thoughts. Remember, John was there is John 13. He wrote John 13! He understood these principles, he wrote 1 John 1:9. “And has made us kings and priests to God and his Father.” This whole imagery of washing comes right out of the Old Testament imagery of priests, and that is what Jesus is talking about in terms of serving Him in John chapter thirteen.

The KJV and the NKJV then the verse reads “kings,” that “he has made us kings.” That is incorrect. Other versions will say, “he has made us a kingdom and priests.” Scratch out the word “and,” it is not in the original of any of the texts. It says literally, “he has made us a kingdom”—“he has made us a kingdom [a domain or a dominion], priests to his God and Father.” What characterizes this dominion is that every individual in the church age functions as a priest to God. There is a construction here in the grammar that is called a double accusative. The verb is the aorist active indicative of POIEO [poiew]. It is past tense, a constative aorist, it is  simply summarizing the whole process in one simple statement without reference to its beginning or end or its target—“he has made us.” Then the accusative direct object is “us,” but the word “kings” is also an accusative. The main verb “he hade” has two direct objects—“he made us kings.” This construction is called a double accusative, and verbs that take a double accusative are verbs like POIEO. In this type of construction usually one of the words is a person: that’s “us.” The other, a thing: that’s “a kingdom.” In most cases the person “us” receives the thing in the accusative case. So in this case we believers receive something: a position in this kingdom. “Kingdom” is the more remote of the two objects. The next word is “priests.” It is in apposition to “kingdom,” so it is describing the kind of kingdom that this is, or our role in that kingdom—we are priests.

This also takes us back to the Old Testament. In Exodus 19:6 the Jews were told, “You shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” So Israel was set apart as a special kind of nation. As a nation they were going to be a priestly nation even though not every member was a priest. Only those who were from the tribe of Levi were priests. In the church age God calls out a new set of people. The Jews failed. They are not replaced by the church, God is still going to fulfill all of His promises to Israel in terms of the covenants. But what we have in the New Testament is that the writers take the Old Testament passages related to the nation of Israel and apply that same principle to the church. In the Old Testament Israel was called out to be a counter culture in the world. They were to represent God to the world. They failed, and because they failed God postponed His plan for them. The kingdom doesn’t come to them, it is postponed. There is a temporary shift from Israel to the church. What God is doing in the church is the same kind of thing He did with Israel, He sets us apart as a counter culture in the world. We are not of the world, we are in the world. We function as priests and this is the imagery that was picked up in a number of different verses related to our function as priests.

Hebrews 13:15, “By him therefore let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God continually, that is, the fruit of our lips giving thanks to his name.” That is part of our priesthood. We praise God, we give thanks to God, we are grateful to God; it is a part of the fruit of the Spirit in our priesthood as we live in the filling of the Spirit.

1 Peter 2:5, 9, “You also, as living stones, are being built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ…..But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should show forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.” We are a holy priesthood, a holy kingdom. This also has implications for the future. The word “priest,” interestingly enough is not used in either the Gospels or in the epistles in relationship to believers, but the concept is there in terms of our spiritual service until we get to the passage in 1 Peter 2:9. But the word is used in Revelation 5:10 and 20:6. “And has made us a kingdom, priests to our God: and we shall reign on the earth…. Blessed and holy is he that has part in the first resurrection: on such the second death has no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years.” So we will rule and reign with Him in the coming kingdom and fully function in our priesthood in that kingdom. How do we learn to do that? We learn to do it here and now. That is one of the reasons Revelation was written: to warn us that we are in a training camp right now, and there is a future ruling and reigning and priestly responsibility that we will fulfill in the coming kingdom. Our training is now, so whatever we get in this life, whatever level of maturity we reach, whatever doctrine you learn during this time on earth is preparatory for our future work in ruling and reigning with the Lord Jesus Christ.

So we come to the end of verse 6 where John expresses praise to Jesus Christ: “to him be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen.” This is because of who he is. John closes with the word “Amen” which is used some seven or eight times in Revelation. It is from the Greek word AMEN [a)mhn] based on a Hebrew word amen which means to be true. “So be it” is the idiom. It is derived from a word indicating stability. In fact the root meaning of the word had to do with the foundation of a pillar, something sunk down deep in the ground that was unshakeable. So it came to indicate faith and it also came to indicate a certainty or affirmation of certainty.

Doctrine of Atonement     RD/Heb 142b

So anyway, as Dr. Whitcomb was presenting this paper and going through this he also went through some of the same material on atonement that I presented and had come to the same conclusion that the idea of kaphar for atonement is the word that emphasizes more the idea of cleansing than it does the idea of covering.

So just to review, I pointed out that:

   1. The English word for atonement that we have in our Bibles and Old Testament (doesn’t occur in the New Testament) was coined in the English from the phrase at-one-ment which is a word that emphasizes reconciliation – bringing two disagreeing parties together as one.  So that emphasized reconciliation.
   2. If you look the word “atonement” up though in any English dictionary, what you will also discover is that it is often defined with the word “redemption” because there is a blood sacrifice that’s made.  There is the bull that is sacrificed, a goat that is sacrificed.  Their blood is brought in as a sin offering and put on the mercy seat and then sprinkled in front of the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies.  It is that blood sacrifice and it’s the blood that pictures the payment price for sin.  That is redemption.  The word redemption means to pay a price.  That’s the core meaning in the word redemption.  But payment of a price is a very different idea than bringing people who are at odds with one another together in reconciliation.   So they’re not synonyms; but they speak of different facets of the work of Christ on the cross.
   3. Then there’s the whole imagery of the mercy seat itself the kaphoreth as it was called in the Hebrew which is hilasterion in the Greek – called the mercy seat.  This depicts the satisfaction of God’s righteousness and justice.  Before God can be truly reconciled to man, His righteous standard has to be satisfied and His justice has to be appeased.  If you look up the word kaphar in many dictionaries or even atonement in English; it will also use this word to appease justice or to appease someone’s wrath.  So that brings in this idea of propitiation that is also vital to understanding all of Christ’s work on the cross.
   4. Then another word that is used relates to the fourth point - that because God is propitiated and the penalty is paid, the debt of sin is then cancelled.  It’s that idea of canceling or wiping out the debt – just completely removing, eradicating, blotting out the debt as if it never existed that we have the idea of forgiveness.
   5. And also another word that’s used in theology is expiation.  Now forgiveness is a very important term.  That should be Colossians 2:12-14 down there on point 4 not Colossians 1:12-14.

Four key passages on the Unlimited Nature of the Atonement

1 Timothy 4:10 ^NASB “For it is for this we labor and strive, because we have fixed our hope on the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, especially of believers.” Whenever we read that word “hope,” the Greek word elpis [e)lpij], it has a future orientation. It is looking forward to something that we expect, something we anticipate, and it has the idea of a confident expectation. The “living God” here is God the Son. The Greek says exactly what the English says here: “who is the Saviour of all men [without exception], especially of believers.” Every human being who has drawn breath throughout the centuries has had his sins paid for. Christ is the Saviour of all men but in a unique way, a special way, in an applied way only to believers. He has paid the sin penalty for all but only believers reap its benefit because only believers receive the imputation of Christ’s righteousness and only believers are regenerate. So 1 Timothy 4:10 is a key passage for demonstrating that there are two levels of orientation through the saving work of Christ: one for all, and another for only those who believe.

2 Peter 2:1 ^NASB “But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will also be false teachers among you, who will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought [agorazo] them, bringing swift destruction upon themselves.” The false teachers in this chapter are not saved. The false prophets relate to the Old Testament under Israel; the false teachers are present in the church age. The “destructive heresies” are so because they take the believer’s attention off the Lord Jesus Christ, they take attention from off the sufficiency of God’s grace, of God’s Word, they put the focus on human ability and human works and not on the sufficient and completed work of Jesus Christ on the cross. The reason why Peter uses the word “secret” here is because there heresies are always encased in Scripture. The words “even denying the Mater who bought them” is the key phrase for the extent of the atonement. A lot of people down through history have denied Jesus Christ, they did not have a substitutionary view of the atonement.

1 John 2:2 ^NASB “and He Himself is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for {those of} the whole world.” Propitiation refers to the fact that He satisfied God’s righteousness and justice. In propitiation there are a couple of key words: kapporeth is the Old Testament word that related to the mercy seat, that area on the ark of the covenant between the two cherubs. The cherubs represented the righteousness and justice of God, and once a year on the day of atonement the high priest would bring the blood of the sacrifice, the lamb that was without spot or blemish, and place it upon the mercy seat. Inside the box were emblems of Israel’s sin. So it was a visual image of how God’s justice and righteousness were satisfied by sin being covered by the blood of Christ. That is the principle that is in the Greek word hilasmos [i(lasmoj] and hilasterion [i(lasthrion] which are the words for propitiation. The idea is that God’s righteousness and justice are satisfied, not just for our sins but for the whole world. Christ is the one who satisfies the Father, and so the doctrine of propitiation relates to the whole world; the doctrine of redemption relates to the whole world.

2 Corinthians 5:18 ^NASB “Now all {these} things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation.” What we see here is that it is man who is reconciled to God, not God to man. It is man who is the sinner, it is man who violated the standard in the garden, so man must be reconciled to God. So reconciles. God does the work, man simply accepts it. He performed this work of reconciliation through Jesus Christ. Not only did he perform the work of reconciliation through Jesus Christ but then to us who are believers in the Lord Jesus Christ He has given the ministry of reconciliation—to every one of us. It is every believer’s job to announce and proclaim the message of reconciliation.

Doctrine of Atonement and the Cross

Rev. 173b   Heb 144b

1. Atonement comes from the English phrase:
at-one-ment, emphasizing reconciliation.

2. The blood sacrifice relates to the payment of a
price–redemption.

3. The mercy seat relates to the satisfaction of
God’s righteousness and justice–propitiation.

4. Because God is propitiated and the penalty
paid, the debt of sin is cancelled–expiation,
forgiveness (Col. 1:12–14).

The Doctrine of Unlimited Atonement

1)      Did Jesus die for all? Did He only die for the elect?

2)      A high Calvinist will hold to a five-point Calvinism but he will believe that you should make an offer of the gospel and evangelise those who are lost; a hyper-Calvinist is someone who doesn’t believe you should ever give the gospel to anybody, that if God wants them to be saved He will do it without any help from you or me.

3)      The problem that really under girds this whole subject is the question: In what sense did Christ die for you? Was it a substitution? The problem that high Calvinists come across is that if Christ really died for you then why aren’t you saved? He paid the penalty so you ought to be going to heaven. But it isn’t enough to have the sin penalty paid, there has to be an imputation of righteousness and regeneration. The limited atonement people would say that that it is a real substitution but they can’t get past the fact that it would indicate in their minds that everybody would be saved, so their solution is that was only a real substitute for those who are saved. Then there is the classic flour-point position unlimited position which holds that the payment for sin is unlimited but it was conditional or hypothetical. In other words, he paid for the sins of everybody but it is only theirs actually if they trust in Christ. That is how most people express unlimited atonement. But then there is a problem which the high Calvinists have pointed out which is that that renders the language of the Scripture a little bit nebulous because the language of Scripture has a real substitution—Christ paid for our sins; truly, not hypothetically. Our position is that it is an unlimited atonement but with a real substitution, that Christ paid for the sins of all so that sin is no longer the issue. John 3:18 ^NASB “He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.” The issue isn’t sin anymore because Christ paid for the sin. The issue is belief in Christ.

4)      Scripture clearly teaches that the atonement of Christ was unlimited; it was for all. Isaiah 53:6 ^NASB “All [every human being] of us like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; But the LORD has caused the iniquity of us all [everyone] To fall on Him.” John Calvin, who did not believe in limited atonement, wrote: “I approve of the ordinary reading that he alone bore the punishment on many, because on Him was laid the guilt of the whole world. It is evident from other passages, and especially from the fifth chapter of the epistle to the Romans that many sometimes denote all.” He died for all, for everyone without exception. In Isaiah 53: 6 the same group of people must be included in the all that begins the verse as the all the all ends the verse. This is the same meaning as we have when we come to the New Testament in 1 Timothy 2:4 ^NASB “who [God] desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” Jesus says the same kind of thing when He is weeping for Jerusalem in Matthew 23:37 ^NASB “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were unwilling.” Jesus wants all those unbelieving rebellious Jews to be gathered to Him. He has a plan that is inclusive of all, but the reason not all are saved is not because He only died for some but because they are not willing to trust Him. They have rejected Him; they have not believed in Him. John 3:17 ^NASB “For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.”  

There are several different attributes of God that are emphasized in the book of Genesis.     Gen. 002

1)      The first is that God is a living God who is deeply involved in His creation. So that the laws of nature are really the laws of God, the laws that He set in motion and that He continues to watch over, and the laws that He continues to sustain. God is eternally existing and He is distinct from all creation: Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” This statement stands in marked contrast to every other statement in the ancient world or even modern times about creation.

2)      We see God in Genesis as one who interacts with man. He comes and walks in the garden in the cool of the day and teaches Adam and the woman before the fall. He is the one who seeks out and takes the initiative to spend time with him, to find out what the problem was after they disobeyed Him. He is the one who takes the initiative to provide a solution to the problem that man has created. It is God who speaks, it is God who sees, it is God who hears the problems of man, it is God who rests at the end of the creation week. God is intimately involved with His creation. He interacts with mankind throughout creation. We see this in Genesis chapters 1, 2,3, 17, 18, and other chapters.

3)      He is the one who created mankind as a reflector of Himself. Man is created in the image and likeness of God. We are to reflect God’s character, His attributes, we represent God. We were originally created to represent God and to rule over creation—Genesis chapter one.

4)      God is the one who enters into the human arena with a human form and human acts—Genesis 12, 18, 32. This shows the divine initiative of grace.

5)      He reveals Himself. God is not hiding from man. He is not playing sort of a cosmic hide and seek game with man. He is continually giving testimony to Himself. The psalmist says the heaven declare the glory of God. Paul says in Romans 1 that the invisible attributes of God are clearly seen in the creation. If people don’t see God it is because they don’t want to see God. Yet He is the one who is continuously seeking man, saving man, disclosing Himself and revealing Himself to mankind.

We see the emphasis on the sovereignty of God in Genesis.

1)      God is the ruler of the heavens and the earth, the one who disposes as He wills. He is called the Most High God, as we have seen already. He is, as we see in Genesis 1, the creator of everything. There is nothing in the heavens or on the earth that does not owe its existence and its sustenance to God. He controls everything.

2)      We see His acts in Genesis 1 as a God who names some things and individuals. He names the light day and the darkness night. His naming of things indicates His control. He determines the limits, the animals will procreate after their kind. He determines the limits, the boundaries of the waters and the land, and He determines nature. It is God who determines that something that is what it is, it is not what it is because of chance. If you are a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, if you believe the Scriptures, if you believe that Genesis one is a clear statement of a seven day creation and restoration, as we will see, then if you look at an oak tree you do not se the same tree that an unbeliever sees. You see leaves and acorns and branches, but what you see is something that was intricately created and designed by God, and what they see is something that is there by pure random chance. That means that whatever else is said about that tree believers do not see the same thing as unbelievers. The implication of that is profound because that means there is no neutral ground. We cannot go out there in the creation and say, Well let’s find some common ground in the creation we can agree on. We can’t agree on anything. The tree you see and believe in is not the tree they see. What they see is the product of time and chance and it just happens to be there. What you see is something that was purposely put there and designed that way by an omnipotent, sovereign God. And that makes all the difference in the world.

3)      God sets forth mandates and prohibitions for all things. After creating the animals in Genesis chapter one He says they are to multiply according to their kind, and He blesses them and gives an order to all living things to be fruitful and multiply. This indicates that He rules, nothing is there by chance.

4)      God brings about judgment in the curse. When He is disobeyed He judges that disobedience, and He outlines the consequences of that disobedience in the curse in Genesis chapter three. He brings about judgment on the evil of man at the time of the world-wide flood under Noah. He brings about another judgment on rebellious mankind at the tower of Babel. And He brings about judgment on Sodom and the cities of the plain.

5)      God is able to prophecy and predict the future, indicating His control of human history. God controls human history and brings about His purposes in history, and that is why He can prophecy the future—Genesis chapters 15 & 46.

6)      God disposes of people and property. He gives Canaan to His people. Notice that He gives Canaan the right to the land. He tells Abraham in Genesis 12 that their evil has not reached its fullness yet, so He does not take the land away from the Canaanites until the proper time, and then He takes it away and gives it to His people. This shows that God has the right to determine who will live where and who own what property.

7)      God promises kings to Sarah. He says, You will have kings that come forth from you. He is able to control who their descendants are and what their powers will be—Genesis 17.

8)      God controls people’s dreams. Abraham has dreams in Genesis 15; Jacob has dreams in Genesis 28, 31; Joseph interprets dreams in chapters 37, 40, 41. God controls people’s dreams and communicates through those dreams.

9)      God establishes and removes people in political power. He raises up some and He removes others. Genesis 41, God sustains Abimelech in his rule over the Philistines.

10)   He tests people—Genesis 22. He tests Abraham’s faith by ordering him to sacrifice his son, Isaac.

11)   God rules over nations, economies, and life—Genesis 40-41. Ultimately, economics are not determined by the market, they are determined by God.

12)   God chooses whom He will bless. He chose to call out Abraham; He chose to make a special people out of Abraham; He chose to bless him. The choosing of Abraham did not involve his eternal salvation, it involved God’s special plan for Abraham and his descendants, that God would bless them and use them to bring about His redemptive plan.

Then we see an emphasis that God is omnipotent throughout Genesis.

1)      He is the one who creates the heavens and the earth, and every detail within the earth. God is in control of all of the details of creation, and certainly God can oversee the details in our lives.

2)      He creates the human race, mankind, and sustains mankind. God is all-powerful.

3)      He prevents Enoch from dying in Genesis chapter five. Enoch walked with the Lord and he was not. He did not die, he just walked off into heaven with God one day.

4)      He controls the time and the duration and the extent of the world-wide flood at the time of Noah.

5)      He protects Abraham--Genesis 15—from the assaults of the four kings.

6)      God controls the womb. In many cases He closes the womb so that Sarah, Rebecca and Rachel could not give birth. This is not because God was mean-spirited, but God was teaching that He alone brings life where there is deadness. It is a picture of our spiritual life where there is spiritual death. Genesis 20, 21, 25, 30.

7)      God controls the fertility of the flock, so that when Jacob is raising his flock separate from Laban’s flock, and Laban sets up conditions, all of a sudden all then sheep are giving birth to spotted lambs. So Jacob is blessed. Whatever conditions Laban set up Jacob continued to prosper because God is the one who controls the fertility of the flocks.

8)      God is the one who can cripple a man. He cripples Jacob with simply the touch of His hand—Genesis 32.

Then we see that God is righteous and just in Genesis, that He is not a capricious God but a God who is righteous and just in contrast to the gods of the Gentiles.

1)      He punishes disobedience with death. Spiritual death is the punishment for the disobedience of Adam and the woman in the garden of Eden.

2)      God is the one who announces a just judgment on sin or disobedience to Him. So He applies His righteous standard to the affairs of mankind.

3)      He punishes Cain for murder, but because it is at such an early stage of the human race He does not take Cain’s life but puts a mark on him and protects him. That is a sign of God’s graciousness in Genesis.

4)      We see in Genesis 6 that God destroys the inhabitants of the earth because man is evil and the thoughts of his heart are evil continuously.

5)      God scatters the nations because of their rebellion—Genesis 11.

6)      He curses and blesses people due to how they treat Abraham’s seed. This is a major theme throughout the rest of Genesis. Blessing by association.

7)      God refuses to judge the innocent along with the guilty. He will not judge Lot and his family if they are righteous along with all the unrighteous in Sodom and Gomorah.

8)      Go treats the kings of the earth justly. When Abraham goes to Abimelech and says Sarah is his sister God warns Abimelech and instead of destroying him He protects him, He treats him justly, even though Abimelech is an unbeliever.

9)      God is the one who protects and vindicates His people. Rachel and Leah, the two daughters of Laban, are treated unjustly by their father Laban, yet God vindicates them and they finally leave and head back to the promised land. Jacob works for Laban and even though he is treated harshly and mistreated by Laban, God protects and ultimately vindicates Jacob.

10)   God made things right for Joseph, even though Joseph was unjustly charged and unjustly imprisoned. Eventually he was released and placed in the second highest position in Egypt. God exercised His righteousness toward Joseph and so the supreme court of heaven took care of the details. It was not up to Joseph to vindicate himself.

We see an emphasis in Genesis on the grace of God

1)      God provides everything for mankind in the perfect environment of the garden. There is nothing left to chance. God always supplies everything, His grace is sufficient.

2)      Then, after their disobedience, God provided a physical covering for them, the sinners, despite their disobedience, and He provides salvation and life for mankind. They do not deserve it or earn it but God graciously provides.

3)      He protected Cain from avengers and put a mark on him to warn off those who would avenge him, that they would suffer the justice of God if they avenged the death of Abel.

4)      He gave grace to Noah and the earth. It took Noah 120 years but it was a 120-year warning period to warn the earth about the coming judgment. It was during that time that Noah and his sons went throughout the world preaching the gospel and yet there was no one who responded.

5)      He remembered Noah in Genesis 8 and Abraham in Genesis 19, and God blessed them and protected them.

6)      God provided water and protection in the wilderness for Hagar in Genesis 16.

7)      God preserved the righteous in the covenant in chapter 19.

8)      God intervenes time and time again when people fail, chapters 12, 20, 26, and he always supplies what is needed.

9)      He freely established His covenant and blessed deceptive Jacob.

10)   It is God who graciously sent angels to watch over and protect Jacob in Genesis 28 32. He watches over and protects us even when we don’t deserve it, even when we are in rebellion.

11)   He gave prosperity to Jacob in chapter 33; He prospered him.

12)   He blesses Egypt with the future knowledge of a coming famine, and provided Joseph as someone to lead them through the crisis in chapters 39ff.

Doctrine of Authority   Kings 061b

The Bible speaks of different spheres of authority.

   1. We know that God the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, even the pre-incarnate Lord Jesus Christ from eternity past, was to submit to the authority of God the Father. Within the Godhead itself this authority relationship always existed. That means that authority is not something that God put into place in order to control creatures, it is not something He ordained or instituted in order to restrain sin, but that authority itself is something that is inherent in the very nature of the social structure of the Trinity.

   2. We see in Scripture that angels are to be subject to Christ. Angels also have an authority structure that is described in terms of principalities and powers and authorities, indicating that there is an authority structure and hierarchy within the angelic order itself; but all angels are to be subject or submitted to Jesus Christ (1 Peter 3:22).

   3. We see that every church age believer is to be submitted to the authority of Jesus Christ. He is the head of the body—the term “head,” the Greek word kephale [kefalh] in Scripture means authority, the one who is the leader, the one who is in charge or in control. Christ is the head of the church. That doesn’t mean He is the source of the church, it means that He is the one in control, the leader.

   4. The Scriptures teach that servants are to submit to masters and slaves are to submit to their owners (1 Peter 2:18; Ephesians 6:5). One of the interesting observations we have to make when we look at the Scriptural commands to be obedient to various authorities is that the Bible never puts conditions on them. It never says children are to obey their parents when they are right, it never says wives be submissive to their husbands when they are loving and understanding, it never says believers be obedient to the Lord Jesus Christ when you think it is a good idea. There aren’t any conditions placed on obedience to authority because authority is such a foundational issue in God’s creation.

   5. Wives are to submit to their husbands (Colossians 3:18; Ephesians 5:22). Paul says, “as to the Lord,” indicating that the authority relationship between a wife and her husband will mirror her response to the Lord Jesus Christ’s authority in her own life. How anyone responds to authority says something about how they respond to the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ in their life.

   6. Children are to submit to their parents. How long for? As long as the parents are paying one cent for their upkeep, they are under parental authority.

   7. The young are to submit to their elders. That is, those who are more mature, wiser, and have been down the road a little longer (1 Peter 5:5).

   8. Church members are to submit to their leaders (Hebrews 13:7, 17).   

Doctrine of Authority in the Bible   RD/Kings-062b

1. God the Son is to submit to the authority of God the Father.    1 Cor 15:28; John 5:19–30

We know that God the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, even the pre-incarnate Lord Jesus Christ from eternity past, was to submit to the authority of God the Father. Within the Godhead itself this authority relationship always existed. That means that authority is not something that God put into place in order to control creatures, it is not something He ordained or instituted in order to restrain sin, but that authority itself is something that is inherent in the very nature of the social structure of the Trinity.

1 Cor. 15:28, “Now when all things are made subject to Him, then the Son Himself will also be subject to Him who put all things under Him, that God may be all in all.”

2. Angels are to be subject to Christ. 1 Pet 3:22

We see in Scripture that angels are to be subject to Christ. Angels also have an authority structure that is described in terms of principalities and powers and authorities, indicating that there is an authority structure and hierarchy within the angelic order itself; but all angels are to be subject or submitted to Jesus Christ (1 Peter 3:22).

1 Pet. 3:22, “who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, angels and authorities and powers having been made
subject to Him.

”3. Every church age believer is to submit to the authority of Christ. Eph 5:24

We see that every church age believer is to be submitted to the authority of Jesus Christ. He is the head of the body—the term “head,” the Greek word kephale [kefalh] in Scripture means authority, the one who is the leader, the one who is in charge or in control. Christ is the head of the church. That doesn’t mean He is the source of the church, it means that He is the one in control, the leader.

Eph. 5:24, “Therefore, just as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything.”

 

4. Servants are to submit to their masters, slaves to their owners. 1 Pet. 2:18; Eph 6:5

The Scriptures teach that servants are to submit to masters and slaves are to submit to their owners (1 Peter 2:18; Ephesians 6:5). One of the interesting observations we have to make when we look at the Scriptural commands to be obedient to various authorities is that the Bible never puts conditions on them. It never says children are to obey their parents when they are right, it never says wives be submissive to their husbands when they are loving and understanding, it never says believers be obedient to the Lord Jesus Christ when you think it is a good idea. There aren’t any conditions placed on obedience to authority because authority is such a foundational issue in God’s creation.

1 Pet. 2:18, “Servants, be submissive to your masters with all fear, not only to the good and gentle, but also to the harsh.”

5. Wives are to submit to their husbands. Col. 3:18; Eph 5:22

Wives are to submit to their husbands (Colossians 3:18; Ephesians 5:22). Paul says, “as to the Lord,” indicating that the authority relationship between a wife and her husband will mirror her response to the Lord Jesus Christ’s authority in her own life. How anyone responds to authority says something about how they respond to the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ in their life.

Col. 3:18, “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.”

 

6. Children are to submit to their parents. 1 Tim. 3:4; Eph 6:1

 Children are to submit to their parents. How long for? As long as the parents are paying one cent for their upkeep, they are under parental authority.

Eph. 6:1, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.”

 

7. The young are to submit to their elders.
1 Pet 5:5

The young are to submit to their elders. That is, those who are more mature, wiser, and have been down the road a little longer (1 Peter 5:5).

1 Pet. 5:5, “Likewise you younger people, submit yourselves to your elders. Yes, all of you be submissive to one another, and be clothed with humility, for ‘God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble’.”

8. Church members are to submit to their
leaders. Heb 13:7, 17

Heb. 13:7, “Remember those who rule over you, who
have spoken the word of God to you, whose faith
follow, considering the outcome of their conduct.
Heb. 13:17, “Obey those who rule over you, and be
submissive, for they watch out for your souls, as
those who must give account. Let them do so with
joy and not with grief, for that would be unprofitable
for you.”

 

 

SUMMARY POINTS

1. Authority is not part of the created order but part of the makeup of the Triune Godhead.

 

Authority is not simply a part of creation, it is part of the makeup of the creator. Therefore it is not something that is secondary; it is primary, and part of God’s very structure and part of how God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit operate. So authority in and of itself is good. Ultimately every issue in life comes back to the Godhead, and that is why it is so important to think of things always in terms of who God is and His position as the creator separate and distinct from the creation

2. Authority is necessary for any social group, organization, or order to function.

 

Authority is necessary for any social group, organization or order to function. Without authority there is lawlessness, anarchy, no order. 1 Corinthians 14 teaches that God is a God of order. So the very act of rebelling against an established authority carries with it certain theological implications, certain statements about God, so that by violating authority in any way that is wrong is ultimately a statement of blasphemy against God.

3. At the very center of all authority is God who is the source of all authority.

 

At the very center of all authority is God who is the source of all authority. How we respond to any derivative authority says something about how we respond to God’s authority.

4. Authority was the ultimate issue in the angelic conflict, so authority becomes the ultimate issue in the believer’s spiritual life. Not just the authority of God, but response to other authorities which God has established.

 

This goes ultimately back to the angelic conflict. Violation of authority is ultimately arrogance, the arrogance of an individual who believes they know more or can do it better than the person who is in authority. It may, in fact, be true that someone can do something better than a person in authority, and it is true in many areas; but if there was no principle of authority nothing would ever get done and order would dissipate. All of this goes back to the fall of Satan. In Isaiah 14:13, 14 we read the indictment on Satan: “in your heart”: it is a mental attitude; “I will ascend to heaven, I will raise my throne above the stars of God, and I will sit on the mount of assembly in the recesses of the north… I will ascend about the heights of the clouds… will make myself like the Most High.” It was a statement, a thought, of rebellion that Lucifer knew more than God did, and that he could run the universe better than God can. And that is at the core of every single act of rebellion against authority in human history—the idea that I can do it better than the authority can. We see this working itself out in human history from the very beginning in Genesis chapter three.

 

So we see some principles in challenging authority.

 1) Be careful in picking your battle. Make sure the issue is the specific, stated Word of God;

 2) Be wise in the way you negotiate with the person in authority. Let your attitude be one of humility and construct an appeal that is attractive to the person you are negotiating with;

3) When you go into this realize that the answer yes and it maybe no. If it is no then you have to either submit to that authority or, if you are not going to submit to the authority you have to be willing personally to take the punishment;

4) Don’t become distracted; don’t get off on side points; don’t argue irrelevancies; 5) Be prayerful. 

 

The Doctrine of Authority Orientation   RD/Gal/005

One of the most important principles that we can have in our life is to be oriented to authority.

1.       Authority orientation is recognising that in every sphere of life God has established specific authority. Respecting those authorities primarily because of the position or office that that person holds, not necessarily because of the personal actions of that individual, because of their personal integrity or lack of it, or their personal character. The issue is not who the person is or what their character is like, but the office or position that they hold. There are all kinds of positions in life that come with inherent authority—the position of a king or a president, the position of an employer, a supervisor, a manager, a husband, a father, a parent. All of these are positions that come with inherent authority, even if the person in that authority may be doing something wrong, their character may not come up to the level that is expected of a person in that office. Authority orientation means that we respect the office and the authority of the office even if the person who is holding that office is unworthy of it at that particular time. To do otherwise means that you are setting yourself up as the final judge and arbiter and authority in every situation, and that is nothing more than pure arrogance.

2.       Authority is an ontological reality related to the essence of God, not a created reality. (Ontological = the essential being or essence of a thing or a person. For example, one of the arguments for the existence of God is the ontological argument.) The ontological reality of God is His essence. His one essence is shared equally and fully by each member of the Trinity; they are therefore co-equal, co-eternal and co-infinite. How does this relate to authority? Within the Trinity itself there is an authority structure. The whole concept of authority relationship is integral to the basic essence, an ontological reality in the nature of God. This is not an authority structure that violates their equality. Within the Trinity there are clear role distinctions and authority relationships. So that means that the principle is established that authority orientation is basic to orientation to life and reality, and if we are not oriented to authority and the authorities in our life; and we if are not oriented to reality we are divorced from reality, and to the degree that we are divorced from reality we are going to end up as a neurotic and psychotic believer, a failure in life and the spiritual life.  

3.       Therefore authority structures are not in themselves related to sin or tainted by sin but are intrinsically good. Authority is an intrinsically good concept.

4.       Orientation to authority is learned primarily during the first six to eight years in life. This puts a tremendous burden of responsibility on parents whose job is to instil authority orientation. But we mustn’t forget the fact that every child has volition.

5.       Failure to orient to the spheres of authority in your life will mean that you will be dominated by arrogance and your sin nature, and you will be a failure in life and in the spiritual life. You have to be oriented to authority. That doesn’t mean that that authority is always right; in fact that authority can be wrong most of the time. The issue is that that is the authority that God has established over you and so you have to be responsive to that in the correct manner. Two wrongs never make a right.

6.       God has established two spheres of authority. These are the secular sphere and the spiritual sphere.

7.       In terms of the secular sphere there are five divine institutions which represent establishment truth. Establishment truths are principles related to both believers and unbelievers. They are principles established by God for the stability and the success of the human race regardless of their spiritual status. This includes morality. The first divine institution is individual responsibility. This has as its authority the individual’s volition. The second is the divine institution of marriage, designed by God to be between one man and one woman. Marriage has its established authority structure where the husband is the authority. The third is the institution of the family. The authority is parents: “Honour your father and mother.” Fourth, human government. The ultimate authority there is whatever the legislative authorities are. The fifth is national division. This is very important. God established it at the tower of Babel. God is the authority there because when man starts to violate that authority structure with internationalism then God steps in and performs the corrective discipline. In the spiritual realm we have the authority of the Christian. The Word of God is our absolute and final authority. In the early church there was the apostolic authority where apostles were given a temporary spiritual gift for the purpose of leadership and communication of doctrine.

Doctrine of Baptism   Heb. 057b

Seven Baptism

Three Ritual baptisms

   1.  The first of the ritual baptisms is the baptism of Jesus.  This is a unique baptism.  It is identifying Jesus with the plan of God.  Jesus came down to the Jordan  in Matthew 3:13-17 to be baptized by John the Baptist.   This was the initiation into His public ministry and His identification with the Father’s plan of salvation.

   2. The second baptism which actually shows up first chronologically in the New Testament.  It is broader and it is different.    It is the baptism of John the Baptist.  This is not the same thing because Jesus wasn’t a sinner.  John the Baptist was calling sinners to repentance so that didn’t apply to Jesus.  The baptism of John the Baptist identified the person who was being baptized in the water with the kingdom of God.  It is interesting. I got into a funny argument with somebody not too long ago.  Dr. Chaffer had a lot of wonderful things to say but Dr. Chaffer was a Presbyterian.  Presbyterians believe in sprinkling.  If you have never read it in Chaffer’s Systematic Theology, he has a very detailed and wrong explanation of how John the Baptist’s baptism was sprinkling.     But he was a Presbyterian.  A lot of people don’t realize it, but a lot of the faculty at Dallas Theological Seminary in the early years and even up into the 70’s were ordained Presbyterians.  I had Dr. Ed  XXX for history.  He baptized (sprinkled) all of his children.  Ed Bloom who was one time the pastor of here also sprinkled.  Dr. Walvoord sprinkled his children.  Back in the 40’s he was the pastor of a Northwest Presbyterian Church in Fort Worth.  There were a lot of Presbyterian influences there.  He was wrong about that.  You can’t get sprinkling out of baptism.  This was John’s baptism.

   3. Then you have the third baptism in the New Testament – believer’s baptism.   This is indicated in Matthew 28:19-20 and other passages such as Acts 2:38, 41, 8:36-38.  You get into Acts 19 which is pretty late in Paul’s career.  He is in Ephesus and the disciples of John the Baptist show up.  Here are a lot of Old Testament believers who have been baptized with John’s baptism.  They show up in Ephesus and they have never heard anything about Jesus or the Holy Spirit or the cross.  They show up and what is Paul’s first question?   “Whose baptism were you baptized with?”  They said, “John.”  He said, “No.  We are going to go down and get baptized in the name of Jesus.”  That is done immediately.  Water baptism for the believer was a visual representation of what took place in terms of the baptism of the Holy Spirit.  Baptism of the Holy Spirit and positional truth (just the name positional truth) are such abstract terms that some people don’t understand them.  Just as communion gives us these two elements, the unleavened bread and grape juice or wine to picture the person and the work of the Lord Jesus Christ, so we have a real simple training aid for sheep.  Remember that sheep are sheep not because they are warm and cute and cuddly.  They are dumb and stupid.  Being a sheep is not a compliment.  We have this simple little training aids so that we can come to understand these important complex things.  So believer’s baptism was pictured in water baptism.  It is a picture of what happens to every believer at the instant of salvation that they are identified with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection so that we are cleansed from sin positionally and enter into a newness of life.  Romans 6:3

There are 4 dry baptisms.

   1. First of all there is the baptism of fire which is judgment at the end of the tribulation.  Those are identified with fire and judged.

   2. There is in the life of Christ the baptism of the cross where He is identified with our sins.  There is the baptism of the cross.  He told Peter “Can you be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?”

   3. The third one is the baptism of Moses.  This is in I Corinthians 10:3.  Of course the only people that got wet then were the Egyptian soldiers.  The people who were dry were the ones who were saved.  All of those who were identified with Moses and his faith in God followed him through the Dead Sea, stayed dry, and were delivered.  It was the Egyptians that got wet.

   4. The baptism of Noah.  Then I Peter 3:20-21 talks about baptism. It doesn’t use that word specifically until you get to verse 21.

These three water baptisms involved four factors.

   1. The person who performs the baptism.  We will call that the agent of the baptism.  It is going to have a grammatical significance when we get there.  

   2. The element that is used provides the identification.  We see water.  We see fire.  We see the Holy Spirit.  That is the element that provides the identification.  In ritual baptism it is water in all three instances.

   3. The third factor is the person who is being identified with something.

   4. Fourth, there is a new status that the person is identified with.  The person going to John the Baptist is identified with the kingdom.  Jesus is identified with the Father’s plan.  The believer is now identified with the person of the Lord Jesus Christ.  There is a connection between the baptism of the Holy Spirit and water baptism.  This is what isn’t taught and is rarely understood.  We have to take time to take each of these apart piece by piece so we can put it all together.  

Doctrine of Baptism    Heb. 058b

Definition:  It is always important to define our terms.  Baptism is one of those doctrines that is a continual source of confusion and distortion especially as it is related to both the believer’s baptism and baptism of the Holy Spirit.  The streets have run with the blood of Christians over this doctrine of baptism.  For example during the period of the Reformation after Martin Luther began the Reformation by nailing the 95 disputations or thesis on the door of the church at Wittenberg,  he began a movement where there was a shift away from the legalistic teaching of Roman Catholicism.  But not everything that Rome  taught that was wrong got left behind.  Many of the reformers continued to hold to a certain amount of allegorical interpretation, especially when it was related to prophecy.  They also held to baptism by sprinkling and they held to infant baptism.  They still held to this idea of the merger of church and state.  That became a major issue.  Since the time of the emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, there had been this identification of Christianity with the political state.  As a result entry into the church, they became identified with entry into citizenship. They become one and the same thing.  How do you enter into the church?  You enter the church through infant baptism.  It is also the same time you enter into citizenship in the state.  Therefore to come along and say that infant baptism is not relevant or is invalid is to also make a political statement.  That is treason.  So this was taken very seriously.  In the Reformation you have the example of Swiss reformer Zwingli who had three of his students come to an understanding that the Bible taught that baptism should come only after a person had put their faith alone in Christ alone and that infant baptism meant nothing.   They were tried for heresy.  They were convicted and sentenced to death by drowning.  How ironic.  Zwingli had them held under.  They wanted to be baptized and held under so he had them held under until they died.  But that was how people felt about these things.  That was how they believed.  Theology mattered.  There were 100’s if not 1,000’s that were martyred for these convictions of baptism.  I often ask the question - what makes a Baptist a Baptist?   I have asked that question of Baptist friends of mine.  I did and internship at a Southern Baptist church when I was in seminary.  I asked the minister what made a Baptist a Baptist.  I don’t know what his answer was, but it was wrong.  In fact I have only met one man who knew what made a Baptist a Baptist.  He was not a believer.  He was a Jewish urologist.  He was the only one who knew the answer to this.  There are two things that make a Baptist a Baptist and neither one of them have anything to do with Jesus Christ.  Number one is the belief in separation of church and state.  Number two is a belief in baptism by immersion.  That’s it.  That is what makes a Baptist a Baptist.  You say, “Wait a minute.  All the Baptists I know believe that Jesus died for their sins.  They believe in the trinity and they think that you have to believe these things to be a Baptist.”  You have been fooled too.  Baptists will tell you right off the bat as soon as you try to pin them on a doctrine that they are a non-creedal people.  Do you know what that means?  That means that there is no doctrinal statement that you have to affirm in order to be a Baptist.  They will fight and die for that.  They have!  That is why the Southern Baptist Convention for the past 30 years has been fighting this battle over the inerrancy and infallibility of the Scripture.  They couldn’t appeal to a doctrinal statement that all Baptists had to affirm in order to be Baptists saying that you have to believe in the infallibility of Scripture.  So they had to fight it with awful political infighting and everything else within the denomination.  So that becomes an issue.  So baptism has been the source of quite a bit of contention and fighting over the years.  But, guess what.  The reason I am saying is because I heard one pastor say not long ago that he didn’t know what to teach about baptism because it has been so divisive - like the gospel of grace hasn’t been divisive, like the dispensations haven’t been divisive, like the pre-trib rapture hasn’t been divisive, like the trinity hasn’t divisive, like tongues hasn’t been divisive.  I mean everything is divisive.  We have to teach what the Word of God says.  Every doctrine at some point or other - you have one who takes one view and another takes another view.  Sadly they think that the other is the enemy and they start fighting each other instead of the real enemy.  So we have to pay attention to what the Word teaches.  The word baptism is from the Greek verb baptizo which means to dip, to plunge or to immerse.  It is an action that signified the identification of someone with an action, a person, an object or a new status in life.  Let’s talk about that a minute.  The literal meaning of the word meant to dip, plunge or immerse.  You would take a piece of clothe and you would immerse it in the dye and bring it out.  You would make sure that the dye permeated all of the fabric so that it would be of a solid color throughout.  That is one way in which the word was used.  It has its literal meaning of immersion, of dipping.  It was also used in a figurative sense.  The figurative sense indicated identification with someone just as the fabric when placed in the dye was identified with the color so when you took certain objects and dipped them or immersed them in something it identified them with whatever they were immersed in.  For example in the Greek army Xenophon in the 4th  century BC described how new recruits in the Spartan army dipped their spears into pig’s blood before they going into battle.  This identified the spear as having been changed from being a hunting spear to now being a warrior’s spear.  Euripides in the 5th century BC used the word to describe a sinking ship.  As the ship sank, its character or nature was changed.  The wood became identified with the water.  It no longer floated.  It sank.  That is the idea there.  There is a literal meaning to dip, plunge or immerse and a figurative sense – what it indicated which is identification with something.  That is primarily how the word is used in Scripture.  It emphasized identification with something.  There are as I said earlier 8 baptisms in the Scripture.  Three of them are ritual water baptisms.  I am going to mention them first but we will study them last.  The three ritual water baptisms are first of all the baptism of John the Baptist.  This is when John the Baptist identified the person going into the water with the kingdom  of God.  That was what he was doing.  He said to repent for the kingdom  of God is at hand.  He would take the person and immerse them in water.  This was an identification of that person with the kingdom  of God.  This baptism was unique to John and to his ministry.  We have to remember this because between the Apostle Paul’s Second and Third Missionary journeys which is a long way into his ministry (early 50’s, about the same time he is writing to the Corinthians) he was in Ephesus.  He spent two years in Ephesus.  And he had a Bible school in Ephesus.  They met at a rented space in the school.  They had a regular meeting there.  It was the school of one of the philosophers there.  He trained men to teach the Word and evangelize.  They went out all over the Roman province of Asia.  That is the map that we see every Sunday morning when we are studying the 7 letters to the 7 churches.  They started churches all over the Roman province of Asia.  Now while he was in Ephesus  there was a group of disciples of John the Baptist.  They hadn’t heard anything about Jesus, the Messiah, or the crucifixion.  They hadn’t heard any of that.  They just knew that they had been to Israel, probably to go to Passover one year.  There they heard John the Baptist and they were baptized with John’s baptism.  Then they left and they went back home to Greece.  They didn’t hear anything else after that. Then Paul comes along and he teaches about Jesus Christ.  So they come in Acts 19.   Let’s just turn to Acts 19 because I want to emphasize this.

Doctrine of Baptism    Heb. 059b

   1. Definition:  The English verb baptize comes from the Greek verb baptizo which means to dip, to plunge or to immerse.  As an action it signifies identification of someone with an action, with a person, with an object or with a new status in life.  Identification is its significance.

   2. Then I went to the second point to talk about the different baptisms.  There are three ritual baptisms which all involve water.  

         1. Baptism of Jesus in Matthew 3:13-17

         2. Baptism of John the Baptist in Matthew 3:1-11

         3. Baptism of Church Age believers in Acts 2:38, 2:41, Acts 8:36-38.  We will come back and talk about the significance especially of the believer’s baptism at the end.  I want to deal with the dry baptisms first.

   3. I pointed out that there are four elements in ritual baptism that are important to understand.

         1. There is a person who performs the baptism.  The word we are going to use here is the agent of the baptism.  The reason we do that is because we get into some interesting exegesis because in some passages you shift from an active voice verb to a passive voice verb where the subject performs the action to a passive voice verb where the subject receives the action.  So rather than becoming confused with this concept of who is the grammatical subject of the sentence, we want to talk about proper terminology.  The agent is the one who performs the action whether it is passive voice verb or an active voice verb.  So keep that in mind.  We may not get there tonight.  In the sentence, John hit the ball.  John is not only the grammatical subject of the verb hit, he is also the agent who performs the action of the verb.  If you make it a passive voice construction, the ball was hit by John.  John is no longer the subject of the verb.  The ball is now the subject of a passive voice verb, but John is still the agent who performs the action.  That is why we use this terminology.  That is going to become important because that has not always been clear in grammatical discussions of the baptism by means of the Holy Spirit.  So people have gotten confused over this.  You have actually ended up with two different baptisms by the Holy Spirit and you didn’t know it.

         2. The element that provides the identification.  So you have the agent who performs the action.  John performs the action.  The Holy Spirit is not the one who performs the action though.  So we have to understand that.  Then there is the element - water, Spirit, fire.  These are three instances,

         3. Then you have the person identified - that is who is being identified in the passage. In the baptism by Moses, the Jews in the Old Testament coming out of slavery in Egypt are the ones identified.  With John’s baptism it is the Jew who is repenting for the coming of the kingdom.  So we have to look at the person identified.

         4. Then there is a new status into which the person is entered.

Those are the elements.  We have to keep these elements in mind as we analyze the doctrine of baptism.  We always find these things present even in dry baptisms.  They are not only present in ritual baptism but also in wet baptism.  All of that we have covered in the past.

   4. The five real baptisms are all dry baptisms.  We will take them in chronological order.  We will list them and then come back and talk about each one.

         1. The baptism of Noah  I Peter 3:20-21
         2. The baptism of Moses  I Corinthians 10:2
         3. The baptism of fire mentioned in Matthew 3:11-12
         4. The baptism of the cross  
         5. The baptism of the Holy Spirit

Doctrine of Baptism   RD/1 Cor. 105

1)      Definition: It is from the Greek word baptizo [baptizw] from the root bapto [baptw] meaning to dip, plunge, or to immerse. That is what it means. We have to separate the meaning from what it signifies. What happened in the early church was that somewhere along the line they quit immersing and they started sprinkling. That changed the meaning. Then there was the identification with the state and the church that went through the Middle Ages. By the time of the Reformation they had the state church going where entry into citizenship in the state was identical to become a member of the church. To become a member of the universal church there was infant baptism by sprinkling. That also made a person a citizen of the country. So if you challenged the validity of infant baptism you were challenging a political structure and it was viewed as treasonous. That is why there was such hostility during the Reformation to the people who were called Anabaptists [ana = again]. They said infant baptism was no testimony at all and you had to be baptized again, it was for believers only. It is a post-salvation ritual that is designed to teach the principle of positional truth. Its significance was identification.

2)      There are three ritual baptisms which are all water baptisms. The first is the baptism of John the Baptist, Matthew 3:1-11,and this was a baptism involving repentance for the nation Israel because the kingdom of God was at hand. They were to change their mind about the Messiah. When Jesus came along and He was baptized by John, He wasn’t baptized with John’s baptism, because Jesus did not need to repent of anything, he was the Messiah, so the second ritual baptism is the baptism of Jesus, Matthew 3:13-17. The third ritual baptism is believer’s baptism where the believer is immersed in water, and this is a sign of death, and when he is brought out of the water that is a sign of his resurrection to new life in Christ. It is a picture of the fact that at salvation the believer is identified with Christ in His death, burial and resurrection.

3)      But there are five real baptisms and they are all dry. The first is the baptism of Noah. 1 Peter 3:20 NASB “who once were disobedient [the angels], when the patience of God kept waiting in the days of Noah, during the construction of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through {the} water.” Water is involved but the people who got wet died. [21] “Corresponding to that, baptism now saves you—not the removal of dirt from the flesh, but an appeal to God for a good conscience—through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” We have to understand that word “corresponding.” This is the Greek word antitupos [a)ntitupoj], and he is saying “Analogous to that.” So what we have in the Old Testament is an identification with Noah’s three sons and their wives, and they are all identified with Noah. They are saved, they are delivered through that judgment. So Peter says, analogous to that baptism now saves you. Two things in Scripture: a type, which is an example or shadow image, and what it represents, the antitype. The antitype, which is that word “corresponding to,” the baptism that now saves you, is the baptism of the Holy Spirit where we are placed in union with Christ. So the type which is going to teach something, the shadow image, that teaches something about the baptism of the Holy Spirit, has to be Noah’s ark. To have an antitype you have to have a type. The baptism of the Holy Spirit is an antitype of Noah. So the implication is that Noah’s ark has to be a type of baptism. What we see there is that their identification with Noah brought about their salvation. Then to make sure we understand that it is not referring to water baptism Peter says: “not the removal of dirt from the flesh.” Water baptism doesn’t save us. “…  but an appeal to God for a good conscience—through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” It is faith alone in Christ alone, not water baptism that saves. Then the second real baptism is the baptism of Moses, the third is the baptism of fire where all unbelievers who survive the Tribulation are judged, Matthew 3:11, 12. The fourth real baptism is the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and the fifth is the baptism of Christ’s death.

There is one other passage that people go to to try to prove that you have to be baptized to be saved, and that is in Acts 2:38 NASB “Peter {said} to them, “Repent, and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” This is in Peter’s sermon on the day of Pentecost and in English it looks like you have to repent and be baptized. The key here is understanding the Greek. The first command, repent, is an aorist active imperative, second person plural—You all repent! The word “baptize” is an aorist passive imperative but it is a third person singular. The words “of you” is also plural. To put this together, what Peter is saying is to repent, and that was the message to change their mind about who Jesus was. Change your thinking about Jesus Christ, all of you. It is a command to everyone, a general offer of salvation. Then he says, “Each of you.” Now he is individualising it: those who have repented, you need to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. It is a parenthesis. Then “the forgiveness of your sins” is plural, “and you will receive the Holy Spirit.” So repent, your sins, and receive, is all plural; he is talking to the group. Then “each of you be baptized” is talking to those who have received the gift of the Holy Spirit. He is actually saying, “Repent for the forgiveness of your sins and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, and then let each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ.”

So in 1 Corinthians 15:29 Paul is not validating baptism for the dead, he is simply saying that you have a practice, whatever it was, and the fact that you do it is a presupposition that there is resurrection.  Why even do that unless there is resurrection from the dead. So he is arguing from what they are practicing that they have an inherent belief in a future resurrection. Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the seal of God’s approval of His death on the cross. His death on the cross provided the salvation for us when He died spiritually on the cross, that he paid the penalty for our sins so that we could have salvation by faith alone in Christ alone. 

The Doctrine of the Baptism of the Holy Spirit RD/Gal/031

1.       Definition: The baptism of the Holy Spirit occurs once at the moment of salvation when every believer is identified with Christ in his death, burial and resurrection, and is simultaneously created a new spiritual species capable of utilizing divine power. We have all of these assets, forty spiritual things—all of the assets for living the spiritual life. We are placed in permanent union with Jesus Christ; that is what the baptism with the Holy Spirit is all about. This ministry of the Holy Spirit is unique to the church age. It is not ecstatics, emotional, experiential, and is not signified by speaking ion tongues.

2.       The baptism of the Holy Spirit occurs at the moment of salvation for every single believer. It is not an experience or an emotion. It is just like forgiveness, justification, reconciliation. These things all happened the moment we trusted Christ as our saviour. We only understood them later when someone taught us from the Scripture about those doctrines.

3.       Is there one baptism of the Holy Spirit or two?

4.       In the theology of Pentecostalism they say that there are two. Why? If we understand the history of Pentecostalism it grew out of back woods religion in America, out of two or three revivals in the early years where very few, if any, of the major teachers had any formal education, much less formal Bible education. In fact, the Pentecostal movement began on January 1st 1901. A Bible teacher who had very little training of his own had a little Bible college in Topeka, Kansas, and one of his students, Agnes Osmond, suddenly spoke in tongues. Everybody then expected it to be real legitimate languages but when it turned out that it wasn’t many people were disillusioned at that point. The Bible teacher then left Topeka and went to Houston, Texas, where he had a classroom. There was a one-eyed black preacher there with no education and no background by the name of William J. Seymore who had to sit out in the hallway to hear what was being taught. Then Seymore was called to a little black “holiness” church in a warehouse in Los Angeles. He started teaching this doctrine that the baptism of the Holy Spirit comes after salvation and that is was signified by speaking in tongues, and everything just broke loose and it spread like wildfire. That is its roots. As a result of that all of their teaching was based on the English text, not the Greek text. So when they read the passages in the English text related to the baptism of the Holy Spirit they saw two different phrases. In 1 Corinthians 12:13 we read: “For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body.” Then they read the prophecy of the baptism of the Holy Spirit in Matthew 3:11 where John the Baptist said: “As for me, I baptize you with water for repentance, but He who is coming after me is mightier than I, and I am not fit to remove His sandals; He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” There’s only one problem, and that is that in Greek both phrases (by and with) are identical—en plus the dative of means plus the word for the Holy Spirit, pneumati [e)n pneumati]. It is a dative of means and should be accurately translated, “You will be baptised by means of the Holy Spirit and fire.” It is the same phrase in both passages. Because it is the same phrase it is talking about the same event. In the Gospels and Acts the baptism is future (until the day of Pentecost). In 1 Corinthians 12:13 it looks back. This is a common expectation now that every single believer is baptised. In Pentecostal theology 1 Corinthians 12:13 is said to refer to being baptized by the Spirit and that occurs at salvation (some people hold this) and then there is a second baptism which is with the Spirit. But we see from the Greek that they are identical. There is only one baptism by means of the Holy Spirit. Another problem is that in the debate over this there is commonly defined as the following: that the baptism of the Holy Spirit is that God the Holy Spirit places the believer into Christ. How is this played out in Matthew 3:11? The same is true for all the other baptism passages. This is the statement that John has made and is stated in Mark and Luke, and restated by Jesus in Acts 1:5. The last phrase is important: “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” The subject is Jesus Christ; the verb is baptize. Notice is it still future tense. He will baptize you by means of…” “Means” here is expressed by the en clause, en plus the dative of means—“by means of the Holy Spirit.” The ultimate state, “into Christ,” is not mentioned. IN the baptism statement there is a subject, a verb, a direct object, an en clause; and then the final state which is mentioned in 1 Corinthians 12:13 is indicated by the Greek preposition eis [e)ij] plus the accusative, indicating direction or the final state of baptism. We see this in the first part of Matthew 3:11 where John says, “I baptize by means of water (en houdati /e)n o(oudati) for repentance (eis metanoia/ e)ij metanoia). eis indicates the state and in John’s baptism the state was repentance, moving from being non-repentant to being repentant. One other passage for illustration: 1 Corinthians 10:2 NASB “and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.” Here we have the subject “all,” the verb “baptized,” “into [eis /e)ij] Moses…” That is their new place of identification. The significance of baptism is always identification.  By means of what? “…the cloud and in the sea.”  They passed through. That is represented by the en clause, “by means of,” the parting of the waters of the Red Sea and following the cloud of the Shekinah glory leading them. That indicated their new identification with Moses.

The way that normally we find the baptism of the Holy Spirit defined is that God the Holy Spirit places the believer into the body of Christ. Who is performing the action in that sentence? The Holy Spirit. But what does Matthew say—and Luke and Mark and Acts? When it is prophesied Jesus Christ performs the action and He does it by means of the Holy Spirit. So to be technically correct, to form a definition of the baptism of the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ uses the Holy Spirit as the agent to identify the believer with Himself. It is what is called retroactive positional truth and is the topic of the first part of Romans chapter six. Positional truth has to do with our position “in Christ.” At the moment we are saved we are identified with Christ in His death, burial and resurrection. As a result of that and part of that, simultaneously God the Father takes the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ and imputes that to the believer. That is the basis for our being declared perfect righteousness—justification.            

Galatians 3:26 NASB “For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. [27] For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.” They have clothed themselves in the perfect righteousness of Christ as an adult son. As a result of that, the old ethnic distinctions under the Mosaic Law don’t apply anymore. [28] “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” We all get the same spiritual assets. It doesn’t mean that these distinctions are eradicated in reality—men are still men and women are still women, etc. Spiritually it is not an issue because all have the same assets. Conclusion: [29] “And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to promise”—the promise of the Spirit, the blessing of the Abrahamic covenant; “heirs according to the promise” which is justification by faith alone. It is by faith alone, not by the law; the law no longer applies.

The Baptism With the HS; Gal. 3:27-29 RD/Gal/032

The promise is ultimately made to Abraham and his seed (singular) who is identified in v.16 as the Lord Jesus Christ NASB “Now the promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. He does not say, ‘And to seeds,’ as {referring} to many, but {rather} to one, ‘And to your seed,’ that is, Christ.” So we see that even though the plural word promises is talking about those promises encapsulated in the Abrahamic covenant they were spoken to Abraham and to his seed (singular). Verse 19 NASB “Why the Law then? It was added because of transgressions, having been ordained through angels by the agency of a mediator, until the seed would come to whom the promise had been made.” There we see that the promise is made to Abraham and his seed, which is the Lord Jesus Christ.

If we are going to understand this passage we must understand what promise means. The promised blessing comes by faith alone in Christ alone, v. 22 “…so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe.” The promise in this passage is the promise of God the Holy Spirit, v. 14 NASB “in order that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we would receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.” But there are seven distinct ministries of God the Holy Spirit to the believer, so to which one is it referring? We see in vv. 27 & 28 that it is the baptism of God the Holy Spirit.

What exactly is the baptism of God the Holy Spirit? The reason that this is important is that it is critical for understanding the nature and the dynamics of the spiritual life in the church age. There is a tremendous amount of confusion that has entered into Christianity over the last 150 years over identifying what is the nature of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Remember there are seven distinct ministries of God the Holy Spirit: a) Efficacious grace, i.e. when God the Holy Spirit takes the faith of the spiritually dead unbeliever and makes it efficacious for salvation; b) Regeneration. God the Holy Spirit creates and simultaneously imparts to the believer a new human spirit; c) The filling of the Holy Spirit, which is temporary—the believer can lose it, and recover it through the use of 1 John 1:9; d) Sealing of the Holy Spirit; e) Baptizing of the Holy Spirit; e) Bestowal of spiritual gifts at the moment of salvation; f) Indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

The baptism of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:13) occurs once at the moment of salvation. Every believer is identified with Christ in His death, burial and resurrection and is simultaneously created a new spiritual species capable of utilising divine power. At the moment of salvation the believer is placed into permanent union with Jesus Christ, positionally sanctified, which makes him a member of the body of Christ and positionally higher than the angels. This ministry of God the Holy Spirit is unique to the church age and is not ecstatics, emotional or experiential. The baptism of the Holy Spirit is occurs at the moment of salvation for every believer. It is not an experience, it is not an emotion, and it is not signified by speaking in tongues or any other phenomena. The baptism of the Holy Spirit, just like justification, is known to the believer only by subsequent study of the Word of God. Problem: Is there one baptism of the Holy Spirit or two? (Explained in the previous lesson).

Galatians 3:27 NASB “For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.” There we have an aorist passive participle. Who performs the action of the verb? It is not stated. 1 Corinthians 12:13 NASB “For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body…” baptizo [baptizw] is the main verb—ebaptisthemen [e)baptisqhmen] is an aorist passive indicative of baptizo. Passive means that the subject is acted upon by someone. In an active voice the subject performs the action; in a passive voice the subject receives the action. Who is the subject of the verb in this verse? It isn’t stated. We just have an agent, “by one spirit.” That is a dative clause. So we go back to the very first mention of the baptism of the Holy Spirit in Mark 1:4 NASB “John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins…. [8] I baptized you with water; but He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” The first use of the word “baptize” here is an aorist active indicative. John is performing the action of the verb, but then “he will baptise you” is a future active indicative, and who is the subject of “will baptize you? The subject is “he.” Whoever “he” is performs the action of the verb—“he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit,” en pneumati [e)n pneumati], the same phrase is in 1 Corinthians 12:13, “by one spirit,” which doesn’t state the subject of the verb, it states the one through whom the action is performed but not the agent, not the one who performs the action. This may seem like a minor point but the implications are critical for understanding the dynamics of the spiritual life and everything that God has for us. What we see in this prophecy is that John the Baptist is saying that Jesus Christ is the one who performs the action of baptism by means of the God the Holy Spirit.

A statement of the baptism of the Holy Spirit: “This occurs at the point of salvation when the person believes in Christ as their personal saviour. The Holy Spirit brings each believer into union with Christ.” Who is the subject of that sentence? What is the verb? The verb is “brings into union.” That is the meaning of baptism, to identify us with Christ. The meaning of baptism is always identification. Who performs the action of the verb in that sentence? God the Holy Spirit. Is that what Mark 1:8 says? “He [Jesus Christ] will baptise you with the Holy Spirit.” Matthew 3:11 NASB “As for me, I baptize you with [by mean of] water for repentance…” John performs the action. John’s baptism was for repentance [e)ij plus the accusative of metanoia] to signify identification of the coming of the messianic kingdom. “… but He who is coming after me is mightier than I, and I am not fit to remove His sandals; He [Jesus Christ] will baptize you [future active indicative] with [e)n pneumati] the Holy Spirit and fire.” The picture that John is presenting is that just as he takes somebody and plunges them into water to identify them with the new state of repentance, Jesus is going to take the new believer and metaphorically plunge them into the Holy Spirit—cleansing and identification with Christ—in order to identify them with Himself in terms of retroactive positional truth.

1 Corinthians 10:1, 2 NASB “For I do not want you to be unaware, brethren, that our fathers were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea; and all [the people] were baptized (aorist passive indicative) into (e)ij—what they are identified with) Moses in the cloud and in [en/ e)n clause] the sea.” They are identified with by means of the cloud and the sea. This is a very technical formula in the Greek for stating baptism. There is a group who is baptized, someone who performs the action—subject of the active form of the verb—then there is the instrument used to perform the identification, indicated by an en clause, then the new state of identification indicated by an eis clause.

1 Corinthians 12:13 NASB “For by one Spirit [en pneumati—indicating the instrument used to perform baptism] we were all baptized [aorist passive indicative] into one body…” The one who performs the action is not mentioned in this verse at all because the emphasis isn’t on Christ doing it. The emphasis that Paul is making in 1 Corinthians 12 is the unity of the body because the Corinthians were all divided and making a big issue out of their different spiritual gifts. “…whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free, and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.” Notice the similarity. There is no distinction between slave or free, Jew or Greek; we are all one, we have all partaken of the same thing.

Galatians 3:27 NASB “For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.” The words “into Christ” is our eis clause. That is the new state into which we are identified. We are identified with Christ and we clothe ourselves with Christ. So how do we understand baptism? Just as John the Baptist would use water symbolically to indicate the identification of this person with the new state, so Jesus Christ uses the Holy Spirit. Titus 3:5 NASB “He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit.” Here we see how regeneration is related to the baptism of the Holy Spirit. They are not the same thing but they are related. Jesus Christ takes the believer, uses the Holy Spirit in cleansing and in regeneration, and in that process is how He identifies the believer with His own death, burial and resurrection. The result of that is the imputation of the righteousness of Christ.    

The result: Galatians 3:28 NASB “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” In other words, you Galatians have been mislead by the Judaisers and are still making an issue out Judaism. But because of what has happened at the cross and at Pentecost, because of this unique ministry of God the Holy Spirit, there is no longer racial/ethnic distinctions according to the Mosaic Law in the present church age.

Galatians 3:29 NASB “And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to promise.” If you are a believer, then there are two conclusions: you are Abraham’s offspring, and because you are Abraham’s offspring you are heirs according to the promise. What promise is this? Verse 14 NASB “in order that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we would receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.” So according to verse 29 if you belong to Christ you are a believer and an heir according to the promise, i.e. that you have received the baptism of the Holy Spirit at the moment of salvation. If we go through Acts—1:5; 2 at Pentecost; 11:16; 19:46—we will see that some passages there is speaking in tongues but in others there is the baptism of the Holy Spirit and no speaking in tongues. There is no set pattern in Acts. Acts is an historical book, a transitional book, and you never ever go through a historical or transitional book as the basis for doctrine. You can’t go to Acts to find a solution, which is what the Pentecostals say, you go to the epistles.      

The Doctrine of The Baptism of the Holy Spirit

RD/1 Cor. 080

1)        Baptism of the Holy Spirit did not occur in the Old Testament. Baptism of the Holy Spirit has to do with being identified with Christ, therefore there was no baptism of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament, it is unique to the church age.

2)         The baptism of the Holy Spirit was first prophesied by John the Baptist prior to the inception of Jesus’ ministry. In Acts 1:5 it was still future. Matthew 3:11 NASB “As for me, I baptize you with water for repentance…He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire”—en pneumati. The verb is baptize, present active indicative. The active voice means that the subject performs the action of the verb. When the active voice verb is used then the subject, then one who performs the action, is also referred to as the agent. So when John says, “I baptize you,” I is the subject, and that means that John the Baptist in that phrase is the agent of baptism; “with water,” the preposition en plus the dative case of hudor [u(dwr], indicating the means by which he accomplishes baptism. We know that the meaning of baptism was to dip, to submerge, and its significance was identification. John’s baptism was a wet baptism, he baptized or identified the individual by means of water. Then there is another clause: “for repentance.” Here there is the preposition eis [e)ij]. The three elements to focus on: the voice, where is the in clause? which indicates the means, the instrument used to perform the baptism, the identification, and where is the eis clause? which indicates the new state. If you are being initiated into something it is that new state that you are being initiated into that is indicated by the eis clause. So the way this should be translated is: “I baptize you by means by water into repentance.” Then there is a contrast indicating a parallelism: “but He who is coming after me [Jesus Christ] is mightier than I, and I am not fit to remove His sandals; He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” Here is the same verb baptizo [baptizw], now in the future active indicative. It is active voice so “He” performs the action of the verb. So in the parallel we see that Jesus is the subject of the active voice verb, so He is also the agent of the verb, the agent of the action of baptism. If we take the sentence, “Jesus will baptize by the Holy Spirit” where we have an active voice verb “will baptize” and Jesus is the subject or the agent, if we transfer that to a passive verb we indicate that somebody will be baptized. How do we express the agent now? In English we express the agent with that preposition “by”—by Jesus. See a problem? In the verse, Jesus will baptize by the Holy Spirit, John said. But when you transfer that into a passive form and you say X or the individual believer will be baptized by Jesus by the Holy Spirit you hear the redundancy. That is where we get into confusion. In English we will express the agent or the performer of the action in a passive voice verb with the preposition “by.” But that is also the same preposition that we use in English to express the means used to accomplish the action of the verb.

What this led to was the fact that among non-Charismatics they were inadvertently talking about two different baptisms. This was a problem in Charismatics because they recognized the difference and said 1 Corinthians 12:13 clearly takes place at salvation so you have a baptism by the Spirit that happens to everybody at salvation, but you get a second one that is done by Jesus in the Gospels and that is the one that comes after salvation. So in traditional Pentecostal theology they came up with two different baptisms. The answer for most non-Charismatics was that they’re the same baptism but there is only baptism, and the way it was normally taught was that the Spirit was the one who performed the baptism, and the Holy Spirit identifies you with Christ. See the problem? In that sentence the Holy Spirit identifies you with Christ, the Holy Sprit is now the subject of the verb and the agent. Will that fit? Because if you are going to call that personal agency you confuse the grammar term with the reality. That’s where it ended up inadvertently in a non-Charismatic position reaffirming two baptisms. But they are not, there is only one baptism.

Acts 1:5, Jesus says the same thing: “for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” John performs the action, therefore he is the agent performing the action of the verb. John baptized with water: en hudati; “but you will be baptized,” future passive indicative, “with the Holy Spirit,” en pneumati, “by means of the Holy Spirit.” So once again, the Holy Spirit in both the Matthew passage and the Acts passage it is the Holy Spirit who is the means. 1 Corinthians 10:2, “and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.” “Were baptized” is passive, which means the subject, “all,” receives the action of the verb. All the Jews were baptized “into (eis) Moses, by means of (en) the cloud and by means (en) of the sea.” In Greek, when you shift something from an active voice to a passive voice to express the subject, the agent, the one who performs the action, you use the preposition huper or dia, not en.

That means that the phrase “by the Spirit” in verse 13 should be understood not as indicating the one who performs the action or the agent of the action, but is indicating the means of the action. It should be translated: “We were all baptized by means of one Spirit.” It doesn’t mentioned the one who performs the action, we know that from Matthew 3:11. Jesus Christ is the one who performs the action; He is the agent; he is the one who is the subject of the verb; he is the one who is performing the action of baptism, and He does it  by using God the Holy Spirit to identify the believer with Himself in His death, burial and resurrection.

Titus 3:5 NASB “He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit.” Washing there  brings in this whole water imagery of washing and cleansing. What John did was take the individual and use water to symbolize cleaning and identification. He would plunge them into the water and he would bring them out into a new state of repentance. What happens in the parallelism is that he says Jesus is going to come along and instead of using water to put the believer into a new state he was going to use the Holy Spirit to put the believer into a new state. So Jesus is going to take the believer, as it were, and using the Holy Spirit is going to plunge the believer into the Holy Spirit and that affects washing and regeneration and all of the other Spirit-related ministries, and he identifies the believer with Himself.

What this shows is that there are not two different performers of action. You don’t have Jesus doing it in the Gospels and the Holy Spirit doing it in 1 Corinthians, and it is illegitimate to say that Jesus is the ultimate one who does it and the Holy Spirit is the immediate performer of the action. That doesn’t work grammatically. The only thing that works is to be consistent, that it is the Holy Spirit who is the means of effecting this identification. Technically we need to refer to it as the baptism by means of the Spirit. We are filled by means of the Spirit; we walk by means of the Spirit; we are baptized by means of the Spirit. It is the Spirit who is the means of effecting all of these different elements in the Christian life. 

The Doctrine of the Barren Woman   Gen. 066b

1)      The significance of barrenness is not some sin on the part of the woman. With the barren women in Scripture that are mentioned the barrenness is related to something significant that God is going to do in their life.

2)      Sarah, Genesis 11:30; Rebekah, Genesis 25:21; Rachel, Genesis 29:31; the mother of Samson, Judges 13; Hannah, the mother of Samuel, 1 Samuel 1; Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist. The seventh woman whose womb gets introduced into Scripture is Mary. The empty dead womb or the barren women is all a type of then fact that God will bring a special life into the womb of Mary. With these barren women their wombs are incapable of producing a child, and of even carrying a child in the case of Sarah. It was just not physically possible. God is going to perform a miracle in bringing life where there is death.

3)      There was a spiritual significance to this. The absence of barren women was to indicate Israel’s spirituality and God’s blessing on them. The presence of barren women was to indicate that God was judging the nation. Exodus 23:26, “There shall nothing cast their young, nor be barren, in thy land: the number of thy days I will fulfil.” If they obeyed the law there wouldn’t be any miscarriages and there wouldn’t be any barren women. It was a sign. God would sovereignly control this situation depending on the spiritual status of the nation.

4)      Thus, the barren womb in these pictures portrays the emptiness and the lifelessness of spiritually dead mankind. The barren womb is a picture of man in spiritual death.

5)      In each of these cases God miraculously brings forth life where there is death. It is a picture of regeneration. Only God can solve the problem of spiritual death.

6)      Ultimately this is a picture of the virgin womb of Mary, that there a unique life would begin in the womb of Mary who would solve the problem of everyone’s spiritual death, and He would bring life where there was death and be the source of regeneration.

The Doctrine of the Barren Woman   Gen. 092b

1)      The significance of barrenness is not some sin on the part of the woman. None of the women in the Old Testament were barren because of sin in their life, it was because of something that God was teaching through their barrenness.

2)      These were the women that are said to be barren in Scripture: Sarai, the wife of Abram; Rebecca, the wife of Isaac; Rachel, the wife of Jacob—it is interesting that the wives of the three patriarchs of Israel are all barren women. That should be the first clue that there is something going on here related to God’s development of the nation Israel—; the mother of Samson; Hannah; Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist in Luke chapter one.

3)      Exodus 23:26 gives an insight. The absence of barren women would indicate that Israel was spiritual, indicating Israel’s positive spirituality and divine blessing. But the presence of barren women in Israel indicated Israel’s carnality and divine judgment. It was a sign. “There shall nothing cast their young, nor be barren, in thy land: the number of thy days I will fulfil.”

4)      Thus we see that the barren womb in these women picture the emptiness and lifelessness of mankind apart from God and apart from Jesus Christ. The fact that they were barren was a picture of spiritual barrenness. It was also a picture of spiritual death. What is it that distinguishes Abram from the culture around him? He is a Gentile, like everybody else, from Ur of the Chaldees but he is a believer in the pre-incarnate Jesus Christ and is regenerate. He is going to have a couple of boys, Ishmael and Isaac, and what distinguishes them is regeneration. God is illustrating this life from death in the womb of the matriarchs of Israel. That is what sets them apart, that the foundation of this nation of people is miraculous. There is a 90-year-old woman who is going to give birth. It is a picture of how God gives life where there is no life.

5)      In each case God miraculously brings forth life where there is death or there is no life. This is a picture of regeneration. The point is that only God can solve the problem of spiritual death by providing spiritual birth. And all of the six women are foreshadowing one individual: the virgin birth of the Lord Jesus Christ.

6)      The barren womb is type of the virgin womb of Mary, and there the solution to the barren womb is the new life in the incarnation of the God-Man, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Doctrine of the Barren Woman. Gen. 115b

1)      We have to recognize that the first three barren women of the Scripture are the three matriarchs of the new Hebrew people, the chosen race, called out by God. There is a theological emphasis here. They are the wives of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This is not a coincidence. Their barrenness is designed to teach that the nation Israel, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, did not come into existence by chance. It wasn’t simply something that was the product of human will. The call and the choice of Abraham is not related to his salvation but to a new work that God is doing in history. He is calling out a new people through whom He is going to reveal His Word and bring the savior into history. 

 

2)      The significance of barrenness is not some sin on the part of any of these women. There were certainly many other barren women in the Scripture that are not mentioned, so we have to answer the question: Why these? And there are only six that are mentioned in all of Scripture. The first is Sarah in Genesis 11:30, the second is Rebekah in Genesis 25:21, the third Rachel is Genesis 29:31. Then we have the unnamed mother of Samson in Judges 13, then Hannah, the mother of Samuel in 1 Samuel 1. It is another 1000 years before there is a mention of a barren woman, and that will be Elizabeth who will be the mother of John the Baptist. Notice something significant about the children that each of these barren women have. They are foundational to something that God is doing in history. The first three are the mothers of the nation Israel. Then there is the mother of Samson, and Samson is the judge who doesn’t deliver the nation. He was a Nazirite from birth and from the time he was old enough to make decisions he violates that Nazirite vow again and again and again. He is a picture of the complete decadence of the nation, the paganization at the time of the Judges, and at the time of his death he is blinded and though he takes out a lot of Philistines he doesn’t deliver the nation. At almost the same time in history there is another barren woman, Hannah. Hannah and the mother of Samson are about the same age, and while God is working through one mother to bring about a judge who is a picture of the depravity of the nation He is working through another mother to bring about the man who will be the last judge and also a prophet in Israel. That is Samuel. It is through him that the nation will be judged and he is the one who will anoint Saul the first king, and then David the second king. It is through David that the Philistines are finally destroyed as a military power. So we have this theme running through these pregnancies that God is bringing life where there has been spiritual death and barrenness. Then we have Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, and again there is a miraculous birth, and he is the forerunner who is to announce the arrival of the Messiah.

 

3)      The absence of barren women was also an indication of something about Israel’s spirituality, according to the Mosaic law in Exodus 23:26, that of they obeyed the law God promised that there would be no one miscarrying or barren in the land. There was also the warning that if there was disobedience there would be barren women and miscarriages in the land as an indication of their carnality. So the absence of barren women indicates Israel’s spirituality and divine blessing, the presence of barren women in the Mosaic period indicated Israel’s carnality and divine judgment. But that only applies to the time of the Mosaic law up to the time of Christ. It was not in effect at the time of the Patriarchs.

 

4)      Conclusion: The barren womb in these women pictures the spiritual emptiness and lifelessness of mankind, that mankind is spiritually dead. Only God can bring life where there is death.

 

5)      In each case God miraculously brings forth life where there is death. It is a picture of regeneration. Only God can solve the problem of spiritual death by spiritual birth. Ultimately each one of those women is in some way a type of what happens with Mary in the virgin conception and birth, because where there was no means of production God brought life into the world. Jesus Christ is the life and the light of the world.

 

6)      The barren womb is is a type of the virgin womb of Mary. There the solution to the barren womb was the new life in the incarnation of the God-Man, Jesus Christ.

 

Doctrie of The Barrier RD/Gal/004

This barrier that is erected is comprised of several different ingredients which we will just call bricks.

The first brick is the problem of sin itself. Romans 3:23 NASB “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Every human being is a sinner and cannot measure up to God’s standard. Isaiah 64:6 NASB “…all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment.” Our sin prevents us from having any kind of relationship with God.

The second brick in the barrier has to do with the penalty of sin, which is spiritual death. Romans 6:23 NASB “For the wages of sin is death…” Spiritual death is eternal separation from God.

The third brick in the barrier has to do with our physical birth. We are born in Adam. Adam was both our federal head, i.e. he is a representative—“In Adam all die”—and our genetic head, so that we are physically, biologically related to Adam so that the consequences of sin which affected everything in nature make us all guilty of Adam’s sin, both federally and spiritually. Genesis 2:17; Romans 5:12; Ephesians 2:1, “being born dead in our trespasses and sins. So the problem is that in our physical birth we are born spiritually dead. Isaiah 64:6a; Romans 9:30-33; Romans 2—“there is none that doeth good, no, not one.”

The fourth brick in the barrier is relative righteousness. As far as the Word of God is concerned there is not a single human being who can measure up to the perfect righteous standard of God. God is both perfect righteousness and perfect justice. The righteousness of God is His absolute standard; the justice of God is the application of that standard. Whatever the righteousness of God demands the justice of God provides. What the righteousness of God rejects the justice of God condemns, but the love of God provides a solution through the grace of God. What the righteousness of God approves the justice of God blesses through the love of God as expressed through the grace of God. So God’s righteousness is His perfect standard. Because man cannot come up with that perfect standard of God he stands condemned, so he has the problem of relative righteousness.

The fifth brick in the barrier has to do with the character of God, as just explained. Because God is perfect righteousness and perfect justice man cannot measure up to God and therefore stands condemned.

The sixth brick is our position in Adam. 1 Corinthians 15:22 NASB “For as in Adam all die…”

This is our problem, the sin barrier which is erected between God and man. God in His grace provided a perfect solution to every aspect of the sin problem. These are the doctrines related to salvation. The sin problem was taken care of by the doctrines of redemption and unlimited atonement. The basic idea of redemption is that a price is paid. Redemption means to pay a price. It translates the Greek word agorazo [a)gorazw] which has to do with buying something in the market place. The agora was the Greek name for the market place. Another word is exagorazo [e)cagorazw] which means to buy something out of the market place. Redemption passages: Ephesians 1:7; 1 Peter 1:18, 19. Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins and he purchased us our of the slave market of sin. That is redemption.

Unlimited atonement means that the extent of that redemption applies to every single human being. Jesus Christ actually removed the problem of sin. Every sin is paid for, so the issue is no longer is: Are you going to pay for your sins? The issue is: Are you going to accept Jesus Christ as your personal saviour? The issue at the great white throne judgment is not sin. God is never going to bring sins up to you or me again at the judgment seat of Christ; at the great white throne judgment the issue is not sin, it is human good, it is whether man’s good deeds have measured up to the perfect righteousness of God. Jesus Christ paid the penalty for every single sin that the human race will ever commit. 1 John 2:2 NASB “and He Himself is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for {those of} the whole world.” 2 Corinthians 5:14 NASB “For the love of Christ controls us, having concluded this, that one died for all, therefore all died.” 1 Timothy 4:10 NASB “For it is for this we labor and strive, because we have fixed our hope on the living God, who is the Savior of all men, especially of believers.”

The penalty of sin was taken care of by the doctrine of expiation. Expiation means to remove a debt. We have a debt against us because of our sin. Colossians 2:14 NASB “having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.”

The problem of physical birth is resolved by regeneration. John 3:1-18. We were born spiritually dead and at the moment of salvation God the Holy Spirit creates a human spirit, it is simultaneously given to us, and at that moment God the Father imputes to that human spirit eternal life. So we have a new life in Christ.

The problem of our relative righteousness is dealt with by the doctrine of the imputation of perfect righteousness. Imputation means to credit or legally declare as one’s possession perfect righteousness. 1 Corinthians 1:30; 2 Corinthians 5:21. Because we now possess the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ God the Father declares us just, justified. Justification does not mean just as if I had never sinned; it means we are justified by God, declared righteous or just because we possess the perfect righteousness of God.

The character of God problem is resolved by the doctrine of propitiation. Propitiation means that God the Father is satisfied—His perfect righteousness and justice are satisfied. What the righteousness of God rejects the justice of God condemns. But when we possess the perfect righteousness of God—what righteousness of God approves now, because we have His perfect righteousness—the justice of God can bless with eternal life. Romans 3:22-26; 1 John 2:2. Verses for justification are Romans 4:1-5; Galatians 2:16.

The problem of our position in Adam is resolved by our new position in Christ. 1 Corinthians 15:22b NASB “…so also in Christ all will be made alive.” At the moment we put our faith and trust in Jesus Christ then through the baptism of the Holy Spirit we are placed in union with Jesus Christ.

All of this is part of the gospel. As we can see from this, so much was performed by Jesus Christ on the cross that to think that we could add anything to it is absolutely absurd. That is why Paul is so harsh with these Galatian believers, because if you add anything to faith alone it destroys salvation.

Genesis is the book of Beginnings, and there are 26 Beginnings in Genesis.        (Genesis 001)

1)      It is the beginning of the space-time continuum. Before Genesis 1:1 there is just God and the third heaven, there is no universe, no such thing as space or time.

2)      It is the beginning of the universe. He creates a space-time continuum, which is a special location for the universe.

3)      It is the beginning of our solar system.

4)      It is the beginning of vegetation and animal life on planet earth.

5)      It is the beginning of earth as the home for the human race, not necessarily the beginning of earth as a planet but the beginning as a home for the human race.

6)      It is the beginning of the human race.

7)      We see the beginning of the institution of marriage.

8)      We see the beginning of the institution of family.

9)      We the first sin and the beginning of sin.

10)   We see the first divine judgment on sin.

11)   We see the announcement of God’s plan of salvation.

12)   We see the beginning of law and the judicial system.

13)   We have the beginning of economics—buying and selling, and principles that should undergird all economic theory.

14)   We have the beginning of labor. Labor begins before the fall.

15)   We have the beginning of society and social structures.

16)   We have the beginning of language and learning.

17)   We have the beginning of cities and the first urban development.

18)   We have the beginning of God’s grace because man is no longer deserving and is fallen.

19)   We have the beginning of animal sacrifice as a picture of the future work of Jesus Christ on the cross.

20)   We have the beginning of music.

21)   We have the beginning of metallurgy.

22)   We have the beginning of demonism.

23)   We have the beginning of idolatry.

24)   We have the beginning of globalism and internationalism, and the first United Nations comes about in chapter eleven.

25)   We have the beginning of government and national distinctions.

26)   We have the beginning of Israel, the Jews as a distinct race.

Doctrine of Beginings     RD/Gen 006b

Genesis 1:1, the Bible speaks about four beginnings. The first, God, isn’t really a beginning. He is eternal, everlasting, not temporal, Psalm 90:2, “Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.” God has no beginning and no ending, He always is. The phrase “In the beginning” is the phrase that John picks up at the beginning of his Gospel. John is writing from the Jewish perspective and that phrase would take a Jewish reader right back to Genesis one, and he would be thinking about that beginning of space-time history. “In the beginning was the Word [Jesus Christ].” The word “was” is a translation of the imperfect active indicative of the Greek word EIMI [e)imi] the word for existence, and it could be translated, “In the beginning the Word was continuously existing already.” In other words, it takes us to a point of time when time began, when space began, when matter began. He says, “At this point in time the LOGOS was,” imperfect tense, continual action in past time. The LOGOS was existing, emphasizing the eternality of the second person of the Trinity. So God has no beginning or ending, He is eternal.

Then we come to the second beginning in Scripture, the angels. The angels are not eternal, they are creatures. Psalm 148:2, “Praise ye him, all his angels: praise ye him, all his hosts.” The term “hosts” is the Hebrew word which means armies. It is a synonymous parallelism where the angels are synonymous to armies. Then in v. 5 of that psalm, “Let them praise the name of the LORD: for he commanded, and they were created.” This attributes the creation of the angels to Yahweh. This is a strong argument for the deity of Christ because in Colossians 1:16 where Christ is said to be the creator of all things, including angels, “in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers [terms related to angels]: all things were created by him, and for him.” So Paul in the New Testament says it was Jesus Christ who creates the thrones, dominions, authorities. In Psalm 148:5 it says it was Yahweh. Yahweh, then, equals Jesus Christ. Then in Job 38:4-7, a crucial passage for understanding some dynamics in Genesis chapter one. God is confronting Job with his finiteness. Job has been complaining and groaning about his suffering and questions whether God is really a just God. Why don’t you tell me why I suffer? God is not going to answer Job. He is not answerable to us for why He allows certain things into our lives. And in order to demonstrate to Job that Job is just a miserable little creature and has no right to question God as to His purposes or His actions, God begins to fire a number of rhetorical questions to Job, all of which reinforce the idea to Job that he really has no right to question God. “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof; when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” The phrase “morning stars” is parallel to “sons of God,” and the term “sons of God” is a term that always refers to the angels. It is not talking about believers. Only when we get into the New Testament does becoming a son of God become a term for believers. The angels were present when God was creating and laying the foundations to the earth, and when He is doing that they are not divided. Notice it says, they sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy. This would be before Lucifer fell, before the angelic conflict revolt.

Then we have a beginning for man, referenced in Matthew 19:4, “And he [Jesus] answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning …”

The fourth beginning. John refers to the beginning of the Church, 1 John 2:7.

The Doctrine of Blessing by Association  

Gen.  083b-084b

1)      Definition: Blessing by association is the extension of benefits of divine blessing to those in the periphery of either a) a Jew, or b) a Christian. Therefore it is a consequence of divine grace. It is undeserved and unearned but nevertheless there are those who receive the overflow of blessing.

2)      Certain logistical blessings of God go to all Jews wherever they are on the basis of the Abrahamic covenant. The Jewish race is going to continue down throughout history because God has certain promises that He has made to Abraham that have never yet been fulfilled. The provisions of the Abrahamic covenant are still in effect.

3)      Blessing by association in relation to Christians is the result of God’s blessing provision or protection for believers which overflows to those in his periphery. So it is a different dynamic functioning for church age believers. So for the church age believer the basis for blessing differs because it is a different contract. We are not under the Abrahamic covenant, we are beneficiaries of the new covenant. The believer receives blessing from God on the basis of grace because he has the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ. As we advance and mature then God distributes these blessings, and when God distributes these blessings to the maturing believer there is always going to be benefits to those around him.

4)      The biblical basis for understanding this is seen in two cases, both in Genesis: the provision of the Abrahamic covenant in Genesis 12:2, and the episode on Genesis 18.

5)      Blessing by association may also extend to historical heritage. An example is in 1 Kings 11:12 after Solomon has been so disobedient to the Lord and is told that the kingdom will be torn away from him. “Notwithstanding in thy days I will not do it for David thy father's sake: but I will rend it out of the hand of thy son.” There is historical heritage blessing by association. The same kind of thing is seen in the history of western Europe. The Reformation heritage has extended from the early part of the sixteenth century down through the twentieth century in providing stable institutions. What we have to recognize is that divine blessing is based on grace, never on works, and the blessing is based upon the righteousness we possess from imputed righteousness. Blessing by association in the church age is an extension of John 13:34, 35—through the operation of impersonal love for all mankind. Romans 12:14, “Bless them which persecute you: bless, and curse not.”

So what we see in these two episodes in Genesis 14 is that Abraham understands that he is to be a blessing to those around him. The principle is to love your neighbor as yourself.      

Doctrine of the Blood of Christ; John 19:28-30 

 RD/John 111 & 112

John 19:31 NASB “Then the Jews, because it was the day of preparation, so that the bodies would not remain on the cross on the Sabbath (for that Sabbath was a high day), asked Pilate that their legs might be broken, and {that} they might be taken away. [32] So the soldiers came, and broke the legs of the first man and of the other who was crucified with Him; [33] but coming to Jesus, when they saw that He was already dead, they did not break His legs. [34] But one of the soldiers pierced His side with a spear, and immediately blood and water came out. [35] And he who has seen has testified, and his testimony is true; and he knows that he is telling the truth, so that you also may believe. [36] For these things came to pass to fulfill the Scripture, ‘NOT A BONE OF HIM SHALL BE BROKEN.’ And again another Scripture says, ‘THEY SHALL LOOK ON HIM WHOM THEY PIERCED’.”

For the most part we will not look at those verses in detail until we look at the aftermath of the crucifixion: His removal from the cross and His burial. But there are two verses in the middle here that do relate to our subject, and that is verses 34, 35 when the soldiers pierced His side resulting in blood and water coming out. The reason this is an issue is that there has been a lot of confusion over the phrase “blood of Christ” in the Scriptures. The problem is whether or not the physical blood of Jesus Christ was unique, incorruptible, and the efficacious element of His saving work on the cross. There are many through church history who have taught that. This view can be traced as early as Chrysostom who lived from 347-407 AD. Luther and Calvin held this view, as well as many others, that somehow Christ’s body was drained physically of all the blood and that He bled to death on the cross. Among many Protestant fundamentalists there is a tendency to take the phrase “blood of Christ” in a very strict, literal fashion, and so it has become a sort of touchstone of controversy. The passage that many go to is Hebrews 9:12 NASB “and not through the blood of goats and calves, but through His own blood, He entered the holy place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption.” But the phrase “through His blood” is dia + the genitive, indicating the basis for something and not the cause.

We need to understand that when we talk about “by His own blood” just exactly what it means when it refers to the blood of Christ. Is this to be taken as a literal statement or is it an idiom or figure of speech in the original languages. We find this phrase in several passages of Scripture, e.g. 1 Corinthians 10:16 NASB “Is not the cup of blessing which we bless a sharing in the blood of Christ? Is not the bread which we break a sharing in the body of Christ?” Ephesians 2:13 NASB “But now in Christ Jesus you who formerly were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.” Hebrews 9:14 NASB “how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” 1 Peter 1:18, 19 NASB “knowing that you were not redeemed with perishable things like silver or gold from your futile way of life inherited from your forefathers, but with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, {the blood} of Christ.” The point is that the coin of the realm that was used to purchase our salvation is the blood of Christ. But is this a phrase that should be understood literally, or is it a phrase that should be understood figuratively?

To understand this we have to look at some basic verses in Genesis to understand the nature of the penalty for sin as it was announced by God in the garden of Eden. Genesis 2:17 NASB “but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.” We have seen that the phrase “will surely die” was based on a Hebrew idiom which doubles the verb. It is a qal infinitive absolute plus the qal perfect of the verb. We saw that it doesn’t have the idea of two deaths there. Having two verbs doesn’t mean there are two deaths. The point is that it is not that we have two deaths in this verse but only one death and that is spiritual death, and it is immediate. The judicial penalty was spiritual death but the consequences have a physical dimension. Genesis 3:19 is the first mention of physical death. It is the outline of the curse that deals with the consequences of sin. That is the difference. We have to maintain that understanding that the judicial penalty was spiritual death but that there were physical consequences that related to the animal kingdom, the woman, the woman, their relationship with one another, and nature.

Then there is an interesting statement by God. Genesis 3:22 NASB “Then the LORD God said, ‘Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might stretch out his hand, and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever’…” This is more than simply an implication that he would live forever, it is a clear statement that it was possible that fallen man who was spiritually dead could hypothetically avoid physical death by eating of the tree of life. So that would indicate that physical death wasn’t the penalty for sin or even part of the penalty for sin because it could be avoided by eating from the tree of life. That is why it is important to distinguish between penalty and consequence. The penalty had such universal impact that it reverberated throughout the entire universe.

So when Christ went to the cross His physical suffering related to the physical dimension of the curse of sin. But that did not pay the penalty for sin, it simply demonstrated that he could have victory over the physical consequences of sin. That is why He died physically; it was to show that He would through the resurrection have victory over physical death. So we see that from the very beginning that the penalty was spiritual death distinguished from the consequences of physical suffering and physical death.

What, then, was the solution? The solution is then indicated and applied in Genesis 3:21 NASB “The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife, and clothed them.” In doing that there was the shedding of blood. That term is not used in the verse but it is clearly implied, and when we come to chapter four and see that Abel brought the firstlings of his flock in v. 4 it must be presumed that there has been some divine instruction on sacrifice. So in the Old Testament there was the provision of animal sacrifices and the Lord taught that to Adam and the woman in Genesis 3:21 so that there was the institution of the family sacrificial system from Genesis 4 and following through the Old Testament. Then there is another expansion of the idea of sacrifice in the Levitical system.

Another important passage in understanding this is Leviticus 17:10 NASB “‘And any man from the house of Israel, or from the aliens who sojourn among them, who eats any blood, I will set My face against that person who eats blood and will cut him off from among his people. [11] For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood by reason of the life that makes atonement.’” First of all, this passage makes the statement that the life of the creature is in the blood. What exactly does that mean? It doesn’t mean that the soul indwells the blood, as some people have taken it. It is, again, a figure of speech that indicates that blood is inherently necessary to maintain life. It is the tangible, concrete, visible evidence that there is life in the creature. You can’t see the soul, it is intangible, immaterial. The other thing that indicates life is breathing. So the statement that the life of the creature is in the blood is simply a mention of tangible evidence of life in the creature. The second statement is that the blood makes atonement for one’s life, and the point that we need to observe here is that God has chosen the sacrificial blood to be the symbol of the redemption price for a person’s life. When God said “I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your souls” it doesn’t mean that it has an inherent value. It has value only because God says He has given it for atonement. The phrase in the Hebrew is the qal perfect of the word natan, the standard word for giving. Verse 11: “…it is the blood by reason of the life that makes atonement,” so it is not the inherent value of blood but what it represents, that the blood represents the life that is there.

For example in Genesis chapter nine when we look at the Noahic covenant there is a warning: “Only you shall not eat flesh with its life, {that is,} its blood.” In other words, don’t eat things that are still alive. Genesis 9:5 NASB “Surely I will require your lifeblood; from every beast I will require it. And from {every} man, from every man’s brother I will require the life of man. [6] Whoever sheds man’s blood, By man his blood shall be shed, For in the image of God He made man.” There we see that the phrase “man’s blood” is really an idiom for life—whoever takes a man’s life.

Leviticus 17:12 NASB “Therefore I said to the sons of Israel, ‘No person among you may eat blood, nor may any alien who sojourns among you eat blood. [13] So when any man from the sons of Israel, or from the aliens who sojourn among them, in hunting catches a beast or a bird which may be eaten, he shall pour out its blood and cover it with earth. [14] For {as for the} life of all flesh, its blood is {identified} with its life. Therefore I said to the sons of Israel, ‘You are not to eat the blood of any flesh, for the life of all flesh is its blood; whoever eats it shall be cut off.’” Because it represents life blood is to be drained from the body as a sign of respect for life. The conclusion from this is that blood is a tangible or symbolic representation of the intangible, imperceptible, immaterial presence of the soul which is the key to life.  

In the Old Testament salvation was based on the anticipated fulfilment of the promise of the Messiah. This is most clearly seen and evidenced in the Old Testament on the mercy seat. The ark of the covenant had a lid placed over it. Inside the ark were three objects: the Ten Commandments (Law), manna (sustenance), Aaron’s rod that budded (the authority of the Aaronic priesthood). Israel broke the Ten Commandments, they rejected God’s provision of manna, and they rebelled against Aaron’s leadership, so each of these represented sin in the nation. On top of the ark there was placed this lid which is the mercy seat, and on each side of the mercy seat was an angel, a cherub. The wings of the cherub touched over the middle so that they faced one another so that each looked down upon the mercy seat. The high priest would come in and place a bowl taken from the sacrificial blood of the unblemished lamb and would place that on the mercy seat. When the two cherubs faced that—they represented the righteousness and justice of God—it indicated that the righteousness and justice of God was satisfied by the shedding of blood, the taking of life. This in turn was a picture of what was to take place on the cross. It was not that the blood in and of itself was efficacious but that God had assigned it that value.

This is the basis, then, for understanding a verse like Romans 3:25 NASB “[Christ] whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith. {This was} to demonstrate His righteousness, because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins previously committed.” The word “propitiation” is a translation of the Greek word hilasterion [i(lasthrion] and it refers to the mercy seat. It means satisfaction, that God’s justice and righteousness was satisfied by Christ’s death. Now we see that “blood” is not talking about physical blood but is a symbolic or tangible representation of death. So what this passage is really saying is that God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His death, through faith. [26] “for the demonstration, {I say,} of His righteousness at the present time, so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.” There was the anticipation which is pictured by the mercy seat and the sacrifice of the lamb that was without spot or blemish.

We must realise that the sacrifices in the Old Testament were not efficacious in and of themselves, they just had that temporarily assigned value. For example, Hebrews 10:1 NASB “For the Law, since it has {only} a shadow of the good things to come {and} not the very form of things, can never, by the same sacrifices which they offer continually year by year, make perfect those who draw near…. [4] For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.” It was simply that God the Father designed a plan whereby people in the Old Testament prior to the coming of Christ could be saved by virtue of anticipation of the completion of that work. From this we see that the blood of the animals represented the presence of the animal soul and therefore the presence of life. The shedding of the blood represents the taking of life. So the physical sacrifices were a shadow or a type of a reality that was yet future. It was used in the Old Testament as a visual aid, a training aid, to demonstrate the horror of sin and the heinousness of spiritual death. Over and again God uses these very concrete images to continue to remind Israel of the extent of sin and the damage that sin has caused.

What we have in the Old Testament is physical animal sacrifice which is a physical representation of the physical human death of Jesus Christ on the cross. And, as in line with all of the previous teaching in the Old Testament, physical human death itself is a tangible, concrete expression of the spiritual death that has already taken place on the cross as payment for our sins. Christ’s death on the cross involved two categories of death. We know this from two passages in Scripture: Isaiah 53:9 where “deaths” is plural; Colossians 2:12 where “dead” is plural.

Just as there was a spiritual, judicial penalty for sin and physical consequences, the atonement of Christ on the cross shows victory over the physical consequences of sin because it pays the spiritual penalty for sin on the cross. Notice two verses in John. John 19:28 NASB “After this, Jesus, knowing that all things had already been accomplished, to fulfill the Scripture, said, ‘I am thirsty’.” So before He died physically He knew that all things had already been accomplished; it was finished. So it was spiritual separation from God the Father. [30] “Therefore when Jesus had received the sour wine, He said, ‘It is finished!’ And He bowed His head and gave up His spirit.”    

Blood of Christ    RD/Heb/143b

In the New Testament, the expression “the blood of Christ” is the figure Metalepsis; because first the “blood” is put (by
Synecdoché) for blood-shedding: i.e., the death of Christ, as distinct from His life; and then His death is put for the perfect satisfaction made by it, for all the merits of the atonement
effected by it: i.e., it means not merely the actual blood corpuscles, neither does it mean His death as an act, but the merits of the atonement effected by it and associated with it.
                        (EB, Figures)

So, here, in Rev. 1:5, it must not be rendered “in his blood,” which is not only contrary to Old Testament type (where nothing was ever washed in blood, which would have defiled and
made unclean instead of cleansing!) but is contrary to the letter as well as the spirit of the Word. Rev. 1:5 means washed us or loosed us from our sins by, or in virtue of, through the merits of, His atonement. In Rev. 7:14, so that such expressions are to be avoided, as “washed in the blood of the Lamb”; and the
sentiment contained in the verse:—

Blood Of Christ    Rev. 010

The term “blood of Christ” is used again and again in Scripture, it is a legitimate way to talk about what Christ did no the cross.

Acts 20:28 ^NASB “Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God which He purchased with His own blood.”

Romans 5:9 ^NASB “Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath {of God} through Him.”

Romans 3:25 ^NASB “whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith. 

Ephesians 1:7 ^NASB “In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace.”

Ephesians 2:13 ^NASB “But now in Christ Jesus you who formerly were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.”

Colossians 1:20 ^NASB “and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross; through Him, {I say,} whether things on earth or things in heaven.”

Hebrews 9:14 ^NASB “how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?”

Hebrews 9:22 ^NASB “And according to the Law, {one may} almost {say,} all things are cleansed with blood, and without shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.”

Hebrews 10:4 ^NASB “For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.” He takes away our sins.

Hebrews 13:12 ^NASB “Therefore Jesus also, that He might sanctify the people through His own blood, suffered outside the gate.”

1 Peter 1:18, 19 ^NASB “knowing that you were not redeemed with perishable things like silver or gold from your futile way of life inherited from your forefathers, but with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, {the blood} of Christ.”

But this imagery goes back to the Old Testament.

1)      The phrase “blood of Christ” or “His blood” or “the blood of the Lamb” is a common biblical phrase describing the death of Christ. Five times it is used in the book of Revelation, ten times in the book of Hebrews.

2)      Unfortunately this is often a misunderstood phrase and people who ought to know better take it as a literal description. We must understand that under the principles of literal interpretation, which means that we understand the Bible in terms of the plain, normal use of language, we clearly recognize the use of figures of speech. This includes metaphors and similes, personification, hyperbole, and other figures of speech. There are clearly understood idioms in the Bible and that is why we have to interpret the Bible by the time in which it was written.

3)      Following the basic rules of word study we see that throughout the Old Testament the phrase “shedding of blood” takes its meaning from the original murder of Abel by Cain. He sheds his blood. In that case there was a literal shedding of blood because he used a sacrificial knife in order to kill his brother Abel. But there is an extension of this to all kinds of wrongful death. Genesis 9:4 sows an extension of this where blood is related to life: ^NASB “Only you shall not eat flesh with its life, {that is,} its blood.” Blood therefore stand for life. The shedding of blood is an idiom, then, that means the loss of life. Genesis 9:6 ^NASB “Whoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed, For in the image of God He made man.” This is the foundational verse for capital punishment, and it has never been rescinded. It is part of the Noahic covenant which not only promised that God would not destroy the earth by water but that whoever shed man’s blood, by man would his blood be shed. The shedding of blood is talking about violent murder, not that it has to literally be bloodshed.

This is clearly recognized in the standard, scholarly Greek lexicons. The blood of Christ stands for the life of Christ that He gave for our atonement. This is a term picturing the violent loss of life, but the loss of physical life stands for His spiritual substitutionary death.

Doctrine of Capital Punishment, I; Gen. 9:1-17 Gen. 049b

Verse 6, “Whoever sheds man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.” That has historically been understood as the verse which under girds the institution of human government, so this begins the next dispensation and it brings into focus the fourth divine institution. The first divine institution was the institution of human responsibility, that man is accountable for his actions. This implies volition: that man can choose to obey or disobey God; that man can be held responsible for his decisions and ultimately he is responsible to God. God is the authority in the first divine institution. The second divine institution was marriage, which is for believer and unbeliever alike. The laws of marriage is for one man and one woman. The third is the institution of family. This is what breaks down when you have Adam and Steve trying to get married, you have the breakdown of the family, the breakdown of the whole structure for raising children and teaching them how they should obey God and the whole concept of authority, because the very structure in such a home violates the authority of God. This is why marriage is a factor because if the sanctity of marriage as defined in the Bible is not maintained it breaks down families and it breaks down society. These first three divine institutions are for the human race, given before there was ever sin, and they are for the purpose of perpetuating the human race, for perpetuating values and teaching within the structure of a family; they provide stability in a culture. A fourth divine institution is introduced here in Genesis 9, and that is the institution of human government. And the most serious decision a governing body, whether it is within a small family, whether it is tribal, a clan, whatever the governing structure is, there is a basis for some form of authority that makes judicial decisions. The most extreme of these is the decision to take the life of a human being because he has committed some criminal act and has thereby forfeited his right to live. So in these two or three verses in Genesis 9 there is the basis in the Scriptures for the establishment of the judicial function in the human race, and that is the foundation for human government. There is one more divine institution established in Genesis 10, and that is the divine institution of nations and tribal distinctions of groups.

Capital punishment is first authorized and mandated in Genesis chapter nine and it becomes the foundation for the institution of human government. This is an issue that is controversial for some, and there are a lot of people who just don’t understand it. We will begin to look at this in terms of the problem it presents to us in the 21st century in our culture. Supreme Court Justice Marshall wrote that “the death penalty is no more effective a deterrent than life imprisonment. It is also evident that the burden of capital punishment falls upon the poor, the ignorant and the underprivileged members of society.” In that one quote we really crystallize what the anti-capital punishment is. First of all, that it is not a deterrent, and secondly that it is not applied evenly or fairly or judicially. The first statement presumes an argument that is often put forth in American discussions on capital punishment, and that is the fact that the reason for capital punishment is that it is a deterrent. But that is not the argument, the reason, the rationale for capital punishment that is given in the Scriptures. So if you are going to get into an argument or discussion on this, argue from a biblical basis, don’t get sucked into a non-biblical rationale in arguing. Second, he points out that there is a methodological flaw in its application. The conclusion from that is that if we are not doing it right, don’t do it. That is false reasoning, because there are many things in life that we don’t do right but that doesn’t mean we stop doing them. Just because a principle is not fairly applied doesn’t mean you do away with the principle. It means you have to revamp your application, but it doesn’t mean you go back and do away with the principle. But this quotation in a nutshell is the anti-capital punishment argument.

Just by way of introduction in terms of the history, the United States has executed over 800 people since 1976 when the legitimacy of the death penalty was reestablished. That is not very many people. That is as of December 2002 and at that time over 3700 men and women were on death rows in various states across the country. If only 800 people have been executed since 1976, think about that in terms of a deterrent argument. You don’t have much of a chance of being executed on that basis. So it can’t really operate as much of a deterrent if it is not applied very frequently.

The second thing in terms of the current situation is that the United Nations has passed a resolution calling for all nations that continue to execute to restrict the number of offences for which the death penalty may be imposed, and to suspend executions with a view toward abolishing the death penalty. So there is international pressure on nations that still utilize the death penalty. We will see in Genesis 10 that the United Nations is just another attempt of man which has gone on since the tower of Babel to reverse the impact of the curse of the tower of Babel and to create an international organization that goes against the fifth divine institution. We see problems with this today. For example, after 9/11 when terrorists were identified in different countries such as Germany and France they would extradite them to the US because the US practices the death penalty. And there is a problem with this in the US, as when some murderer escapes to Canada the Canadian government won’t extradite him back to the US unless there are assurances that the murderer will not be executed. So there are other nations dictating policy to the US out of their arrogant rebellion against the Word of God.

In the US prior to 1972, 5707 had been legally executed for capital crimes in the 20th century. That does not seem a large number, and certainly not a deterrent. One wonders how many people were convicted of homicide during that same period of time. In 1972 the US Supreme Court handed down landmark decision by a five to four vote ruling that the death penalty statutes in Georgia and Texas violated the eighth amendment by involving cruel and unusual punishment. The key issue for some of the Justices was that among those eligible for the death penalty only a few were chosen and the standard was not consistent or clear. In other words, there was not a pair application principle. During the next three years 35 states rewrote their capital punishment laws to conform to the Supreme Court decision, and then on July 2, 1976, by a seven to two vote, the Supreme Court declared capital punishment acceptable and legitimate. In 1977 executions resumed and there was an expectation that there would be numerous executions, but there were not. As this developed in 1987 the Supreme Court handed down another five to four decision ruling that racial bias in imposing the death penalty was really insufficient grounds for challenging the constitutionality of capital punishment laws. Statistics do demonstrate that blacks are much more likely to be convicted and sentenced to death than whites, especially when the victim is white and the murderer is black. Those least likely to be convicted are blacks when the victims are blacks. But the Supreme Court ruled that despite the fact that there were disparities and an unequal application of the law, that did not change the nature of the law. That is the principle. Just because a law is not applied fairly or evenly doesn’t mean you throw out the law, it means you change the way it is applied.

There have been various forms of execution utilized in this country: hanging, public hanging, was a common form of execution through the 19th century. If there is going to be a penalty that is to act as a deterrent, people have to see it. We live in a society that is so distanced from life and death that most people can’t handle death and they can’t handle birth. Generations ago many were born and died in the same bed, and the whole family saw both. Now we have these sterilized injections that nobody witnesses, and it is a painless death, and this is supposed to be a punishment. The idea is that it is a penal death, it is a punishment, not something that is supposed to be easy or sanitized. Execution switched to electrocution, introduced in 1888, and then there was the gas chamber introduced in 1924. By 1983  nine states decided to use lethal injections and this has brought various mixed reactions. In 1981 the American Medical Association passed a resolution stating that a physician as a member of a profession dedicated to preserving life when there is hope of doing so should not be a participant in a legally authorized execution. They viewed it as being inconsistent with their Hippocratic oath.

In England as recently as 1800 there were over 200 crimes that were considered capital offences. That is important historically because when the American Constitution was written in 1789 and the Bill of Rights was adopted, the eighth amendment prohibited the use of cruel and unusual punishment. Let’s look at that as a historical document. You have to interpret it in terms of the intent of the writers and in terms of the times in which it was written. It was not mean to be a “living document” despite what people say. If that kind of interpretive rationale to your taxes you’ll go to jail; or if to the Bible you’ll go to hell. You can’t come along and say something mean that to one generation but it means something else to this generation. It has to be what the authors intended, so you have to define cruel and unusual punishment in light of the times when the Constitution was written. In England at that time there were 200 crimes that were capital offences but by the 20th century Britain has outlawed the death penalty. Between 1970 and 1980 six western European countries outlawed the death penalty. By 1980 world-wide 20 countries had outlawed the death penalty for all crime, but since then many more have abolished the death penalty. By 1992 the number of countries and territories that retained the death penalty had been reduced to only 106. So it can be seen that the move is against the death penalty.

What are the arguments that are usually advanced against using the death penalty? First of all, there is the one we usually hear from our kids: everyone else is stopping it. Everyone else is stopping it; we should too. According to Amnesty International the reason it should be stopped is because governments all over the world are eliminating the death penalty. But governments all over the world do not have a Judeo-Christian foundation for their judicial system. We do. The answer to this objection is simple. Everyone isn’t stopping it, though many are. The ones who do are doing it because they bought into an anti-biblical world view.

A second argument that is used against capital punishment is that it neither deters violence nor makes society safer. This is really a form of a truism—something that is commonly accepted to be true but it is not—that violence can’t stop violence. We have to use violence to stop violence in a fallen world. Remember that when Jesus went to the Garden of Gethsemane in order to prevent being taken or assaulted prior to the time, knowing that He needed to go to the cross, He told the disciples to bring along a couple of swords. There is a time to fight and a time not to fight, and a time to protect yourself. He knew that if there was violence toward Him that would prevent Him from going to the cross that it needed to be stopped by violence. The rationale that is normally presented here comes from statistical evidence. For example, you will hear that records from 1967-68 states that states that did not have a death penalty had a lower first degree murder rate than states that did have a death penalty. Other studies from 1920 to 1955, Michigan, which was the first state to abolish the death penalty, had a lower homicide rate than either Ohio or Indiana, and they both had the death penalty. Others will point to a study where Missouri abolished the death penalty from 1917 to 1919. Prior to the abolition of the death penalty and after its reinstatement the number of homicides rose steadily, but during the period when there was no death penalty homicides steadily decreased. The problem with this is that you can’t really analyze an unknown. The unknown: how many people didn’t commit a murder because they didn’t want to die? There is no statistical way to measure that, so you cannot prove whether it is a deterrent or not because you never can measure how many people didn’t commit a murder. So the idea that it isn’t a deterrent isn’t a provable argument. Furthermore, you don’t know what other factors might be at play in the culture at that time. You can point to a lot of different periods in states histories and in US history where you have a rise in the homicide rate and a decline in the homicide rate, it doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not there is a change in the death penalty law. These things just fluctuate. It cannot be known what it would have been like in a state like Michigan if they had had the death penalty, you can’t prove the negative. Furthermore, in the US criminals know that they aren’t likely to be executed. That is one factor. Remember the number of people who have been executed is relatively small compared to the number of people charged or who have been found guilty of first degree murder.

A second reason you can’t go to the deterrent argument is that in murders of passion thought and reason aren’t the issue. In a murder of passion there is not thought of what the deterrent is, there is more concern about not getting caught as opposed to not having to pay the full penalty. And a third point, which has already been mentioned, is that there is no way to measure how many people do not commit a murder because of the possibility of the death penalty. So the conclusion is that it is impossible to demonstrate that the death penalty doesn’t deter.

Nevertheless, deterrent isn’t the biblical argument. The biblical argument is given in verse 6, and that is: “Whoever sheds man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.” Why is there capital punishment, according to God? Because it is a theological statement: you have destroyed a person who is created in the image and likeness of God. This is so serious in God’s eyes that it means a murderer has forfeited the right to live. It doesn’t mean that it isn’t a deterrent; it may be a deterrent, but that is not why God said to do it. It is not vengeance, it is simply that the person has forfeited the right to live.

Another argument that is used against capital punishment is that it is discriminatory. There is a presuppositional problem here, and that is that people in our society think that discrimination is wrong in and of itself. But we make a discrimination every time we make a decision for one thing or another. Discrimination in and of itself is not wrong, but they flash this idea that it is discriminatory so therefore it is wrong. It is not true. God is going to discriminate at the great white throne judgment. People who trust Christ get saved; people who don’t are going to the lake of fire. Every time a judge makes a decision in a courtroom he discriminates. But, of course, what they are saying is it is not equally applied, and there are some statistics that indicate that there are serious problems with the way the death penalty is applied. A recent study of death sentences in Philadelphia found that African-American defendants were almost four times more likely to receive the death penalty than were people of other ethnic origins who committed similar crimes. Over 80% of people executed since 1976 were convicted of killing white victims, although people of color make up more than half of all homicide victims. That is not a fair or balanced application of the law. Furthermore, a defendant who can afford to pay his or her own attorney is much less likely to be sentenced to die. Ninety-five percent of all people on death row could not afford to pay their own attorneys. These are inequities in the system. Furthermore, from 1930-1957 in the US more than half of the executions for murder involved non-whites, and in the south more twice as many blacks as white were executed. That is an inequity in the system. Of all people legally executed in the US between 1930 and 1980 about 53.3% were black, even though US population during that period was only 10% black. So there are a lot of problems with the way in which the death penalty is applied, but it doesn’t mean you don’t apply it. Remember, God in His omniscience, when He established this principle in Genesis 6, knew that man would not apply it fairly. Nevertheless, He delegated that responsibility to the human race.

Another complaint is that it is used to silence political opposition. That would not apply to the US but it certainly would apply in some countries. Once again, this is a problem of methodology, it is not a problem of morality. 

There is the complaint that it is irreversible. Juries make mistakes. Sometimes the wrong evidence is brought forth. Sometimes more evidence is discovered down the line. Once again, God in His omniscience knew that man was fallible and would make wrong decisions. Nevertheless, he delegated the responsibility to man. It is not an option, it is a responsibility for man to govern well and to govern wisely, even though he will make mistakes.

Another objection is that the death penalty isn’t a solution. The argument is that it just creates more victims, it doesn’t really solve anything, it just perpetuates a cycle of violence, and “if we truly believe that killing is wrong we must abolish the death penalty.” That is a direct quote from the Amnesty International web site. What is wrong with that statement? Killing isn’t by definition wrong. In the ten commandments it doesn’t say “Thou shalt not kill,” it says, “Thou shalt not murder.” There are many times when the taking of human life is legitimate and authorized in Scripture. Don’t make an absolute of a wrong principle and then try to force everything to fit it. That is what is happening there, there is this presupposition that killing and violence is inherently and always wrong, therefore don’t keep perpetuating it. Furthermore, that argument says it just creates more victims. In this sense the victims are the family of those who are executed, the family of the criminal. He created them as victims as well as the person he murdered. It is not the punishment that is making them victims and, furthermore, it is questionable that the family should be called victims. They are simply not victims in the same sense that the person murdered is a victim. We have to put our emphasis on the victim of the crime, and their family, and not on the criminal and his family.

The objection that it is just vengeance. But it is not about vengeance, it is about justice. Vengeance has to do with an unauthorized individual settling a score; justice has to do with the legally established authorities dealing with a criminal act. We must realize that justice can be retributive without being vengeful; they are not the same thing. Then we must realize that because some victims are vengeance-motivated doesn’t mean the death penalty is vengeance based. In any society those who cannot keep the laws should be punished because they don’t obey the law.

The underlying issue goes back to the debate that has been going on for the last 150 years: Is incarceration for punishment or for rehabilitation? If you believe that man is inherently good, then you are going to want to rehabilitate because they are “rehabilitatable.” It’s not his fault, it is society’s fault! He grew up in poverty; he was abused when he was a child; it is not his fault he grew up to be a mass-murderer! But the Bible says that the heart is deceitful above all things.” We are corrupt sinners, and that it takes discipline to restrain the sin nature, and when any individual is at a point where they are no longer capable of restraining their sin nature to the point that it becomes destructive to society, then they need to be removed from society just as you would cut out a malignant cancer. That is what the death penalty is all about. It is looking to what is best for society and not what is best for the criminal.

A further objection that is raised against capital punishment is that it is cruel and unusual punishment. What is claimed here is that by definition the death punishment is cruel and unusual. But the founding fathers didn’t understand it that way, did they? They clearly authorized the death penalty, and they utilized means of execution that we no longer think are acceptable. What happens it that those who are against the capital punishment usually argue that any kind of punishment is cruel and unusual. They just don’t want any kind of punishment at all. They argue that “cruel” means deliberately causing pain or injury. Also they would say that the emotional grief caused by simply arresting this “poor” criminal is cruel. The problem is that we get into redefining what is cruel and unusual in terms of our culture. The answer to this is that the executions that are actually carried out in this country for capital crimes is not unusual, and since the criminal is not tortured the penalty is not cruel.

When we come to the Bible it doesn’t define what kind of death penalty, the methodology; it doesn’t set up a specific form of government, it just lays down the principle: that man has the prerogatives to police himself. That means that he has to adjudicate criminal actions and to deal with them in an appropriate manner. And because of the rationale that is given in Genesis chapter nine is that man is in the image of God we have to recognize that, in our first principle, capital punishment is first and foremost an issue of theology. If anything has to do with taking a life then ultimately it must be understood in terms of a theological framework. It has to do with the value of human life and why God created man, and so capital punishment, then, becomes an issue of theology. In fact, all ethics, all moral judgments, are ultimately determined by a person’s theology. So if you are a believer then you have to go back to the Bible and let the Bible define your understanding of any issue. You can’t let society define it; you can’t let the inappropriate or inequitable application of a principle define it. You have to start with an absolute and then you work your applications out from that absolute. It is a matter of theology because whoever determines what life is, when it begins and ends, what its parameters are, is the one who determines the basis for taking life in a just manner.

We have to recognize that capital punishment was not a part of the first two dispensations—of perfect environment between creation and the fall, or the dispensation of human conscience between the fall and the flood. But God sees fit to establish it here in Genesis 9.

Capital punishment is as much a part of the Noahic covenant as the promise to not flood the earth again and the authorization to eat meat. If any part of this contract is still in effect the whole contract is still in effect. This is going to be different when we get to the Mosaic law. The way that many Christians argue for capital punishment is to go to the Mosaic law, but the Mosaic law was a temporary law code and it was only for the nation Israel. The Noahic covenant is for every nation on the planet and it is still in effect. The Mosaic law code ended at the cross.

The authorization for capital punishment comes from God and not from man. This isn’t something that was generated by the creature. This authorization is a mandate, not an option; it is not based on pragmatics, such as a deterrent effect, but on an absolute: man is in the image of God. Thus the authorization for capital punishment provides the basis for human government. The Noahic covenant legitimizes capital punishment for only murder, but this does not restrict its application in other areas. It does imply certain things: that if there is going to be a system to adjudicate and determine guilt there needs to be a system for the objective evaluation of evidence.

The Mosaic law provides a divinely authored government constitution showing that capital punishment may be applied in other areas: Murder was a capital crime, Exodus 21:12; Numbers 25:26-31. Sabbath violation, Exodus 35:2. Cursing parents, because he had failed to learn authority orientation. That would lead to a breakdown of authority in society and lead to, criminality, Leviticus 20:9. Adultery, because it breaks down the second divine institution of marriage, and that would lead to the destruction of society, Leviticus 20:10. Incest, breaks down the family, Leviticus 20; Sodomy, Leviticus 2