‘Behold, the Lamb
of God’
ide
o amnos tou theou
College Study
93rd teaching
11.24.2014
“Theotokos…?”
Review:
Well we haven’t met for a few
weeks so let’s review our study from last time. It was entitled “Keeping the
Silence” wherein we found that though the silence of the 400 years between the
Old and New Testaments had been broken by the words of God brought by Gabriel
to Zacharias, that Zacharias could not share those words with others because
his unbelief ended up making him mute. The proverbial cat had his tongue. Not
until the birth of his son John could he hope to speak again, and thus sadly,
the depression and the sadness and the anticipation of the entire Jewish nation
suffered on without comfort because one man, Zacharias, did not believe. Unbelief,
remember, has consequences. It is dangerous. Don’t play around with it. Don’t
let it just sit in your life. Deal actively with it. If you have doubts, do
your research and find whether these doubts are founded or unfounded.
Now to get our brains working, let’s recall
some facts we learned last time: What attribute of God does the name “John”
point to? Did Zacharias deserve to have a son? Why not, he was a good guy,
righteous, blameless? Why would John the Baptist be great in the sight of the Lord?
His humility said of Christ: “He must increase and I must decrease”. We talked
about how John had a special calling upon his life and so he was to be filled
with the Spirit and not with “spirits”, liquor, wine. He was to be influenced
by the Spirit of God, not be under the influence of alcohol.
Last week we also talked about “change”.
Change came in John’s day, as it can in ours, primarily through the preaching
of the message: the gospel. Ironically, unbelief will keep us from the very
thing we need to increase our belief: faith comes by hearing the word of God.
And just like in Zacharias’ lifetime, when his unbelief meant that people could
not hear the words of God, so too in our day: unbelief will keep us and others
from hearing God’s words because we will not study it and we will not share it.
All of our hope for change in this world and in our country will mean nothing
if it is a hope not founded in the word of God and the power of the gospel to
change the heart of society: the hearts of people.
End
of Review
Luke 1:21-31.
Zacharias has just received the message from Gabriel that he’s going to have a
son in his old age but because he didn’t believe it, he would be mute.
Meanwhile, outside…
“And
the people waited for Zacharias, and marveled that he lingered so long in the
temple. But when he came out, he could not speak to them; and they perceived
that he had seen a vision in the temple, for he beckoned to them and remained
speechless. So it was, as soon as the days of his service were completed, that
he departed to his own house. Now after those days his wife Elizabeth
conceived; and she hid herself five months, saying, ‘Thus the Lord has dealt
with me, in the days when He looked on me, to take away my reproach among
people’.
“Now in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was
sent by God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man
whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. And
having come in, the angel said to her, ‘Rejoice, highly favored one, the Lord
is with you; blessed are you among women!’ But when she saw him, she was
troubled at his saying, and considered what manner of greeting this was. Then
the angel said to her, ‘Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with
God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bring forth a Son, and
shall call His name JESUS.”
Our study tonight is entitled:
“Theotokos…?” That’s T-H-E-O-T-O-K-O-S dot-dot-dot question mark!
Luke takes us now into the realm of
the virgin birth. It’s miraculous enough to talk about old men and women having
children, but now, something more: a virgin bearing a child, an overriding of
the natural human reproductive system. But Luke, lest we forget, was a doctor.
Evidence seems to show that Luke, far from being an uneducated barbarian of the
ancient world, was a civilized, intelligent, scholastic man of letters. His
medical profession and the complex language that he uses in writing the longest
of the four gospels indicates that he was a learned man. He knew his Greek. He
knew his profession.
I bring that up at the outset to
make clear to us the real shock of what’s going on here. Luke begins his gospel
with a story about two really old people having a baby, and THEN he moves into
a story about a very young virgin woman having a baby, too. Now, do you think
for a moment that Luke didn’t know how babies are made? What kind of a doctor
would he be if he knew all about how to work on various diseases but if he
didn’t understand the human reproductive system?
We, the people of the modern era,
sometimes are tempted to look back upon the people of 1st century
Palestine, the people that populated that area of the ancient world, and think
of them as simple, uneducated, superstitious, over-religious loonies. Skeptics
like to claim that the Bible comes to us from a superstitious people, not from
a people group concerned with facts and history.
After all, they seemed to be madly
in love with mythology. They were people who believed that human-shaped gods
lived on mountain tops, that when it rained it was the gods crying, that when
thunder roared it was because the gods were angry. But we cannot forget that
these were people, like the Greeks for example, who were far from uneducated
and unscientific, even from our standards. Oh sure, the Greeks got a lot of
things wrong in physics and biology and their understanding of the natural
world, but they already lived with a rigid structure of logic and mathematics.
They were studiers, thinkers and scientists, not just superstitious pagans. In
many ways, they were more civilized, more advanced 1800 years ago than Europe
was just 300 or 400 years ago. The Greeks and Romans were far from
unintelligent.
Eratosthenes is credited with being
the first person to measure the Earth’s circumference. Theophrastus, the father
of botany, classified and named most of the plants known at that time in the
world. Archimedes invented a screw device that could pump water from a lower
elevation to a higher one. Plato inscribed at the entrance to his Academy: “Let
no man ignorant of geometry enter”. Heck, the city of Rome had a working
underground sewer system for waste management, something which London didn’t
even innovate until the 1800s. Far from stupid,
these religious ancients were scientific and intelligent. They, and Luke
included, knew how babies were made.
Therefore, what Luke is including
here with the story of a birth to two elderly people and later the virgin
conception must be miracles. Luke understood them to be miracles. Luke, being a
good, studied doctor, knew that babies don’t just spontaneously pop out of old
women beyond the age of childbirth or out of virgins who had never slept with
men. Let’s not let anyone dismiss the miracles of the Bible simply as mythology
held by ancient people who didn’t know any better. Luke knew better. He knew
that this is not how babies are made. Luke, just like Aristotle and Archimedes
and Eratosthenes, knew this would be a case of the miraculous.
Note that it was because they all
understood the Laws of Nature that they could recognize a miracle, such as the
virgin birth. They all knew that virgins do not get pregnant, and thus it could
only be something special. So let us not submit to the skeptic who says that
the ancient people were too stupid to know the difference between a miracle and
reality. They were smarter than your average illiterate, over-entertained,
attention-deficit American. Heck, I don’t think I could come up with the
Pythagorean Theorem or Archimedes’ screw. They, though religious, had a firm
grasp on the rational, on an understanding of the world around them, enough to
know that virgin births do not just happen.
C.S. Lewis makes this exact point in
his book Miracles. He writes: “The
idea that the progress of science has somehow altered this question is closely
bound up with the idea that people ‘in olden times’ believed in [miracles]
‘because they didn’t know the laws of Nature.’ Thus you will hear people say,
‘The early Christians believed that Christ was the son of a virgin, but we know
that this is a scientific impossibility.’ Such people seem to have an idea that
belief in miracles arose at a period when men were so ignorant of the cause of
nature that they did not perceive a miracle to be contrary to it. A moment’s
thought shows this to be nonsense: and the story of the Virgin Birth is a
particularly striking example. When St. Joseph discovered that his fiancée was
going to have a baby, he not unnaturally decided to repudiate her. Why? Because
he knew just as well as any modern gynaecologist that in the ordinary course of
nature women do not have babies unless they have lain with men. No doubt the
modern gynaecologist knows several things about birth and begetting which St.
Joseph did not know. But those things do not concern the main point– that a
virgin birth is contrary to the course of nature. And St. Joseph obviously knew
that. In any sense in which it is true to say now, ‘The thing is scientifically
impossible,’ he would have said the same: the thing always was, and was always
known to be, impossible unless the regular processes of nature were, in this
particular case, being over-ruled or supplemented by something from beyond
nature. When St. Joseph finally accepted the view that his fiancée’s pregnancy
was due not to unchastity but to a miracle, he accepted the miracle as
something contrary to the known order of nature… as evidence of supernatural
power… Nothing can seem extraordinary until you have discovered what is
ordinary. Belief in miracles, far from depending on an ignorance of the laws of
nature, is only possible in so far as those laws are known…”
Luke was a doctor. He knew better.
The record of this miracle isn’t a self-indulgent piece of myth, it is the
record of a historical fact, an overriding of the laws of nature, so far as the
good doctor was concerned. Thus is becomes particularly striking that a doctor,
a learned man, was chosen as one of the writers of the gospel accounts. He
wasn’t an idiot.
*Now when Zacharias finally comes
out of the temple, he comes out silent, unable to speak to answer the questions
of the shocked crowd of priests and worshippers.
“Hey, Zack, what took so long?” “Why
the long face, old man?” “What happened to you?”
But v.22 indicates that he could not speak to them. He could only make
signs, play charades, to try to communicate with them. Do not forget Zacharias.
Unbelief will ruin your ability to communicate the word of God to your own
heart and to the hearts of others. It will throw a wet blanket on top of the
fire of the word of God. Unbelief will keep you from listening to sermons,
rather than merely hearing them. Unbelief will keep you from cracking open your
Bible to wash yourself with it. Unbelief will keep you from sharing the best
kept secret of modern Christianity: the gospel.
v.23,
now it is remarkable to me in this short verse that Zacharias still completed
the days of his service. In other words, he finished his shift. After the
vision of Gabriel, after being struck dumb, he didn’t go straight home. Think
about that for a moment. Who wouldn’t let their employee go home from work
after they’ve lost their ability to speak? Here, Zack finds himself disabled,
unable to speak, and he stays and finishes his shift.
Gravely, that says something about
the nature of their religion at that time. Four hundred years had passed since
Malachi and with no new word from God, no great movement of His Spirit, the
people had settled down into a cold, stagnant, over-traditionalized, liturgical
nightmare of religion. How do I know? Because Zacharias, a priest, could still
serve out his functions in the temple without the ability to speak. How? How
could he possibly serve in the Temple without speaking? Clearly, it didn’t
matter what anybody said if a man who couldn’t speak could be a priest.
Zacharias could preach no more
sermons, could say no more words of comfort, could utter no more prayers, could
not retell the stories of their forefathers, could direct no one who was lost
or searching for God without the ability to speak, but how long had it been
since those things actually mattered? The sermons were ceremonies. The words
were spoken in ritual. The prayers were prayed from memory not from the heart.
All of these things had long since ceased to have any meaning and any real
effect on the average temple-worshipper’s spiritual life, if indeed a man could
serve out his shift as priest without ever speaking.
We see exactly how bad the Temple
had become when Jesus only a few short decades later goes into the house of His
Father and overturns the tables of merchandise and drives out the swindlers and
the charlatans and the thieves.
It is a sad indictment upon the people
of God that it is fully within our power to do nothing, to let a downward
spiral of apathy drag us into meaningless ceremony. We can do “nothing” so well
and for so long that all the passion of true faith and the Spirit of God that
stirs up His church we can reduce to
mere ashes of cold religion, liturgy, memorized sermon-snippets and slogans and
ritual-prayers. That’s what they had done to the Temple in Zacharias’ day, and
it is easily what we can do to the Church of God in our day. We are the wet blankets!
God save us from ourselves. God save
us from numbing the Body of Christ like some kind of spiritual pain-killer. No
wonder the disease of leprosy is used in Scripture as a metaphor for sin.
Leprosy is a mutilating infection that results in a lack of ability to feel any
pain. I found this picture of a man with leprosy from 1886. Guess how old he
is? Twenty-four, and he is so disfigured by the infection that he looked like
he was in his nineties. Leprosy will debilitate, disfigure and literally destroy
you with numbness. That was Zacharias’ Temple in his day: numb, unfeeling, all
sensation toward God removed. Oh there were a few faithful living in the nooks
and crannies, the elderly couple Zacharias and Elizabeth were blameless before
the Lord, but the whole organization had become one, big, unfeeling organism.
We need to rise up and be the
generation that says “No” to the dulling of the church, that says “No” to
compromise with the world, “No” to impurity, “No” to chasing after the things
of the world, “No” to playing around with sin, “No” to forgetting that the
return of our Lord draws near. Be driven to serve the Lord. Be moved to make
the Church of God great.
Let me ask you: Would you let
yourself be infected with leprosy? Would you allow the bacteria to crawl
unchecked up your arm? Would you sit back and just watch as your fingers are
eaten away? Or would you go and get help? Would you rush to find a doctor, a
physician? Would you do everything you could to wash yourself and find a cure?
Of course you would. You would rush to get rid of the garish infection. You
wouldn’t want it to touch you.
You should have the exact same
reaction to sin in your life. It is even more destructive than leprosy. Yet how
often we tolerate and even play with the sin in our lives, thinking it’s just
fine. Would you think it “fine” to let leprosy infect your body? Don’t think
any less of sin! Run to the great Physician, Christ for the cure, run to Him to
be washed and made clean, run to Him for grace and strength to conquer the sin
that would ensnare you, and tolerate spiritual leprosy in your life no longer.
v.24-25,
I still submit that the greater miracle was not that Elizabeth bore a child in
her old age, but that she and Zacharias conceived
a child in their old age. Can you imagine? Well, we’ll try not to…
Elizabeth’s words there in v.25 are revealing. She says that God
has taken away her reproach, her disapproval and disappointment, her disgrace,
among people. We’re reminded that in this time and in this culture, barrenness
was considered to be a physical disability and in religious terms, it could be
considered as a curse from God. Many, perhaps, had considered Elizabeth’s
inability to have children to mean that she was cursed, or to mean that she was
being punished for some secret sin.
Wasn’t that the accusation which
Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar brought against Job? They accused all the
misfortune, the great trial that Job was experiencing, to be his punishment for
some secret sin he had committed. And it simply wasn’t the case in Job’s life,
and it’s not the case in Elizabeth’s. We were told that she and her husband
were righteous and blameless. There’s no indication from the text that God had
given them this trial because they were being punished.
Rather, their faith was being
perfected. And when John is born, in God’s timing, he is the perfect age to be
the forerunner to Jesus Christ. Everything about their situation is about God
doing things perfectly.
Anyone like drinking tea? I
personally love it. There’s little more relaxing then a mug of hot tea on a
cold night. But what is the difference between tea and plain old hot water?
It’s a difference of flavor. Unless you’ve let the tea sit in the water, be
submerged in the water, and steep in the water, you’ve just got regular
unpalatably-hot water. When the tea is submerged in hot water, there is no
flavor.
In the same way… unless a human
being is submerged in the hot water of trials, the heat of tribulation and
trouble and stress, there is no flavor. You ever meet some people that just
don’t seem to have any depth to them? It’s almost like they’ve never had any
experiences in life. That’s probably because they’ve never went through some
really difficult things.
But what you find is that great
people are people who have greatly suffered, who have experienced tremendous
sorrows and losses and come through it. These are people with a lot of
“flavor”, a lot of depth. That is especially true if they are a Christian.
Unless you and I go through the trials and endure them with patience so that
our faiths are perfected, then we won’t have any flavor, no depth. We’ll be
just about as boring and drab as plain old hot water. Sometimes you can feel
like you’re drowning in some depressing situations. Don’t be depressed. Don’t
drown. Remember the Lord in your trials and let your faith be matured.
v.
26-27, now we’re shifting gears. Six months into Elizabeth’s pregnancy,
Gabriel is sent back to Earth again, this time to deliver a message not to a
doubtful old man but to a young virgin instead. By God’s grace, His words were
heard not nine months into Elizabeth’s pregnancy, but six months in. So we’re
moving now into the record of the virgin birth, or more specifically the virgin
conception.
But what I’d like you to notice
first off is that Luke purports the virgin conception to be a historical event.
Note the setting he provides. He gives us a rough estimate of a historical date
along a certain historical timeline which he bases on the rule of Herod the
Great, a historical figure. God sends Gabriel to a historical city of Galilee
named Nazareth, a historical place, to real human beings named Joseph and Mary.
What we have here is no myth. The
places are real places. The people are ordinary human people. The time is a
real historical time period. The virgin conception, thus, takes place in a real
historical setting in time and space. It did not take place in some mythical
land or with mythical people. The only bit of myth here that you could get
riled up about is the angel and the virgin conception itself. Everything else
is stripped down to a clear realism in the real world.
Christ, then, comes into the world
on the basis of a miracle, yes, but on a miracle which claims to be nothing
less than a historical fact. All the fundamental beliefs of Christianity, the
events surrounding the life of Jesus, whether it is His birth or His
crucifixion or Resurrection are each events which claim to be historical, real
events and not mere mythology. Some of these are events which are attested to
even outside of the Bible, by real historical people like Tacitus, Suetonius,
Josephus, etc.
If that is true, then get this:
Christianity is a faith based on facts not feelings.
We cannot fall into the temptation
of the world to think of Christianity as simply some kind of ahistorical,
sentimental-system. I for one am sick to death of sentimentality, insubstantial
sighs without any basis in historical reality or this present reality, beyond
just making you and I “feel” saved, “feel” close to God, “feel” happy or
blessed or whatever. I’m not saying Christianity is some icy, emotionless void.
I am saying that Christianity is not based on those emotions. Truth is not true
because it makes you feel good. Truth is true because it is factual, and that’s
it. Truth can make you feel great, but that’s not really the point of truth is
it. And what’s more, some truths don’t make us feel very good at all, like the
truth that we need to make some serious decisions on dealing with sin.
Note: a fundamentally
feel-good-faith is a faith-failure. It is something that people came up with to
help them feel better about the world and about their lives. I have heard
atheists claim that Christianity, indeed all religion, was an invention of
mankind to soothe our sense of loneliness and isolation and insignificance in
the universe. Our ancestors felt lonely, so they populated the natural world
with supernatural gods. Our ancestors felt isolated, so they created angels and
demons and monsters and supernatural beings that were said to speak to us. Our
ancestors felt insignificant, so they created religions which placed humanity
at the center of the universe.
That may be true of the
multitudinous pagan faiths that history has produced, but it simply is not true
of Christianity. Christianity is no crutch to help us happily limp along
through life. A preacher of bygone
years, Paris Reidhead, preached an incredible sermon titled Ten Shekels and A Shirt. In it, he
perfectly captures this idea of Christianity as a feel-good faith, as if the
humanistic church said: “…we don't know there's a heaven. We don't know there's
a hell. But we do know this, that you've got to live for 70 years! We know
there's a great deal of benefit from poetry, from high thoughts and noble
aspirations. Therefore it's important for you to come to church on Sunday, so
that we can read some poetry, that we can give you some little adages and
axioms and rules to live by. We can't say anything about what's going to happen
when you die, but we'll tell you this, if you'll come every week and pay and
help and stay with us, we'll put springs on your wagon and your trip will be
more comfortable. We can't guarantee anything about what's going to happen when
you die, but we say that if you come along with us, we'll make you happier
while you're alive."
Christianity is a faith that is
based on historical facts, attested to by the word of God and the writings of
other ancient historians, purporting that Christ actually lived and died and
the church historically built up around the claim that He had risen from the
dead. Christianity was not the invention of insecure men and women who simply
wanted to feel good, and so that cannot be its primary purpose today simply to
make insecure men and women feel good. We’re mistaken to believe that both
historically and personally.
I mean that to say that Christianity
not only wasn’t created to make people feel good, but that Christianity isn’t here
to make you feel good. Well it can,
and it does. There is joy in the Lord. The fruit of the Spirit is love
exemplified in joy. But if Jesus Christ
came and died just to make you happy, then I submit to you that there was no
reason for the crucifixion! He could have made us happy aside from sending the
Son of God to a humiliating and torturous death which points to our hopeless
addiction to sin.
How could a faith like this only be
there to make you happy, a faith which says to you “in this world you will have
tribulation” or “take up your cross and follow Me” or that we have a moral
responsibility to God to preach the gospel to the lost otherwise they are
destined to walk straight into the eternal lake of fire? That doesn’t make me
feel good. The doctrines of human depravity, of hell, of judgment, of suffering
that occupy Christianity don’t all make me feel good at all.
And so we dress it up, give it a
snappy title. God becomes a cosmic genie whose one consuming thought is making
you and I happy, and then the Church swells into a mega-congregation full of
people passionate about blessings but so ignorant of Scripture they couldn’t
tell you anything about it, and then we glamorize the bloodied, rugged beams of
the cross of Calvary until we’re left with modern Christianity: a glittering,
seductive, beautiful monster that dangles out tiny baubles and prizes for the
faithful: wealth and fame and comfort and nothing else, no cross, no following
in His footsteps, no responsibility, no duty, nothing but an empty promise of
lights and candy and fun to be had.
Ray Bradbury wrote it perfectly in
his frightening dystopian novel, Fahrenheit
451: “Christ is one of the ‘family’ now. I often wonder if God recognizes
His own Son the way we’ve dressed him up, or is it dressed him down? He’s a
regular peppermint stick now, all sugar-crystal and saccharine when he isn’t
making veiled references to certain commercial products that every worshiper absolutely needs.”
That’s a modern, corporatized Jesus
Christ made to sell products, smile at the camera and make you feel good, and
it is as far removed from the Christ of the Bible as any heretic ever dreamed.
Christianity is a faith of facts not
of feelings. Contrary to what Mrs. Osteen would have us believe, we are made to
bring God glory, to make our Father happy, to worship Him. We’re not here to
worship ourselves, and neither is God. The universe does not revolve around you
and I. God is not merely some supernatural butler there at the beck and call of
our every heart’s desire, there to fetch blessings for the fathomless,
bottomless pits of our greedy hearts.
The Lord of glory is there to be
glorified, and in that and that alone
you will find all your comfort and all your sense of belonging and all your joy
and happiness, in serving the King of kings as you were so designed to do, but
you will not get it by looking to get it by itself, not unless you get it as a
by-product of what you were made to do: give God the glory.
Like any dream, happiness disappears
if you try to look directly at it.
*Now back to our story: since we’ve
established that this is a real factual account, at least it claims to be, and
that this is a real historical event, note what it involves. It involves an
angel, Gabriel, visiting Joseph and Mary. Let me ask you this: who were these
two?
Joseph was a carpenter and Mary was
his betrothed. That means she was promised to be his wife. They were Jewish and
they lived around the 1st century in the area of Palenstine in the
middle east. Now beyond that, there’s not much else to be known. There are a
handful of verses that merely make mention of Joseph, Jesus’ step-dad, and only
really a handful more verses that reference His mother, Mary.
So far as we know, they, like
Zacharias and Elizabeth were a couple of nobodies. They were really unknowns.
Even from the perspective of their own people, they were probably less
important than Zacharias. At least Zack was a priest. Joseph was just a
carpenter. And look where they lived: Nazareth in Galilee.
They didn’t live in Rome, the
capital of the empire. They didn’t even live in Jerusalem, the center of
Israel. They lived in Nazareth in Galilee, a place not exactly known for being
on the map. It seems that it was a place of little importance. When the crowds
questioned whether he was the Christ, some of them said in John 7:41 “Will the Christ
come out of Galilee?” Or when Jesus was calling his disciples, Nathanael remarks
in John 1:46 “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
So this was not the swankiest town. More
like the middle of nowhere.
Now that raises an objection in more
than a few minds. Richard Carrier is an atheist activist and author who I’ve
listened to in debates with various Christian teachers and apologists, and he
raised the objection in a debate he participated in that God could appear to
him at any time but why doesn’t He, if He really wants him to believe? In other
words, the objection has been phrased differently: Why would Jesus Christ not
show himself better? Why chose to be born into superstitious, 1st
century Palestine where there are no cameras and not the modern age, or why
would Jesus not appear to the Pharisees and the Emperor and the Herods but to a
few lower class people in a backwater society in antiquity?
Why be born to Mary and Joseph when
He could have been born into the household of Caesar? But asking that question
bridges upon a theological consideration: the character of God, or why God would choose to do something
this way and not some other way, thus the objection can only be answered with a
theological answer, and there’s no use giving a theological answer to an
atheist, since they don’t accept theology!
But if we were to answer it, answer
why it is that God chose to be born in such humble surroundings, in a dirty
manger, rather than the palaces of the Roman Emperor, we need only remind
ourselves that “God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble”, that “God
chooses the foolish things of the world to confound the wise”, that God sent
His Son “not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance”. What we get from
reading the Bible is this full scheme of God’s character that He actively
chooses to deal with the outcast and the lowly and the humble and the forgotten
rather than the mighty, the proud,
the strong, the rich.
Consider that the gospels indicate
that Jesus did in fact appear before Herod, the ruler of Judea. But in Luke 23 we’re told that Jesus didn’t
say anything to Herod at all. “He
answered him nothing” it says. Why? That was Jesus’ chance to get on top of
the world. One miracle in Herod’s court would have brought him before Caesar
himself and Jesus could have made it and avoided the whole crucifixion. Ah… you
see then that Jesus Christ had a mission that took Him straight toward the hill
of Calvary, and nowhere else. He wasn’t interested in feeding the opulent pride
of Herod or Caesar, and appearing before the councils of the government like a
dog performing tricks. He was out to seek and save that which was lost, and He
would do that by going not to Caesar’s palace, but to the lonesome cross.
Can we question God’s wisdom? Why
did God not appear before Caesar, but come instead to a lowly, insignificant
couple in Nazareth of Galilee? God knows better than that.
v.28,
the angel comes in and says “Hail, Mary! Full of grace!” Oh no, does he say
that? Look closely, he doesn’t. That phrase “full of grace” is a favorite of
the Catholic church, pulled from this exact passage in Luke 1:28, and they run with it to all kinds of crazy doctrinal
interpretations.
Being a good protestant, I recognize
that it is my duty to give you the proper biblical understanding of Mary, the
mother of our Lord. First, let me give you some understanding of just how far
some people have gone in taking this ordinary woman, Mary, and elevating her to
a level of venerated goddess-hood.
Eugenio Maria Guiseppe Giovanni
Pacelli, more succinctly known as Pope Pius XII, wrote the following prayer not
to God, but to Mary. You tell me if this is at all biblical: “Enraptured by the
splendor of your heavenly beauty, and impelled by the anxieties of the world,
we cast ourselves into your arms, O Immaculate Mother of Jesus and our Mother,
Mary, confident of finding in your most loving heart appeasement of our ardent
desires, and a safe harbor from the tempests which beset us on every side. Though
degraded by our faults and overwhelmed by infinite misery, we admire and praise
the peerless richness of sublime gifts with which God has filled you, above
every other mere creature, from the first moment of your conception until the
day on which, after your assumption into heaven, He crowned you Queen of the
Universe. O crystal fountain of faith, bathe our minds with the eternal truths!
O fragrant Lily of all holiness, captivate our hearts with your heavenly
perfume! O Conqueress of evil and death, inspire in us a deep horror of sin,
which makes the soul detestable to God and a slave of hell! O well-beloved of
God, hear the ardent cry which rises up from every heart. Bend tenderly over
our aching wounds. Convert the wicked, dry the tears of the afflicted and
oppressed, comfort the poor and humble, quench hatreds, sweeten harshness,
safeguard the flower of purity in youth, protect the holy Church, make all men
feel the attraction of Christian goodness. In your name, resounding
harmoniously in heaven, may they recognize that they are brothers, and that the
nations are members of one family, upon which may there shine forth the sun of
a universal and sincere peace. Receive, O most sweet Mother, our humble
supplications, and above all obtain for us that, one day, happy with you, we
may repeat before your throne that hymn which today is sung on earth around
your altars: You are all-beautiful, O Mary! You are the glory, you are the joy,
you are the honor of our people!”
Wow. That’s eloquent, eloquent
heresy. Where can you find any of that in the Bible? Show me where the New
Testament indicates that Mary was a perpetual virgin, that she is the one who
sent the Spirit of God to the church, that she is co-redemptrix with Christ,
that she was bodily taken up into heaven known as the Assumption of Mary.
That’s all it can be, is an assumption, since the Bible never mentions the end
of Mary’s life. What about the claim of the Immaculate Conception, that Mary
was born free from all stain of original sin? Is that really what this means
here when Gabriel says “high favored one”, does he mean “full of grace”? Does
Gabriel really mean that she was full of grace as far as being sinless?
Let me ask you this: why was Mary
highly favored? Was it because of something she was or was it because God is a
God of grace? Grace is God’s unmerited favor, and Mary was highly favored
because God is highly gracious.
I looked up Luke 1:28 in an English-Greek interlinear Bible today which
contains a literal translation of the original Greek text, and the literal
translation of the angel’s greeting is this: “Hail, one having received grace!” The Greek word is kexaritomene, which does not mean “Full
of grace” as in grace was in Mary herself, it means that she had received the
grace of God, just like every sinner, just like you and me. Oh? Yes. A
variation of the same word is found in Ephesians
1:6. There, it says in the literal translation, where the word we’re homing
in on comes across clearer: “…predestinating
us to adoption through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure
of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, in which He favored us
in the Beloved.”
God has favored us by showing us His
grace in exactly the same way that He
favored Mary by showing her grace. That doesn’t mean we’re all going to have
virgin births. That doesn’t mean that Mary was born free from sin. It means
that God is gracious toward sinners and that is all that it means.
I was curious to find a Catholic
response to this statement that the Greek text simply will not support their
claim that Mary is “full of grace” meaning free from sin. I found a response.
Complaining of this protestant statement, a Catholic wrote on the forum of
Catholicplanet.net (heh): “He is using a dictionary argument: 'The dictionary
says that this word means that... therefore [theological conclusion]' But the
meaning of Sacred inspired Scripture cannot be dependent on the dictionary,
which is not inspired. The Bible is full of profound meaning, far beyond what
any dictionary could express. Tradition and the Magisterium have understood
that word of phrase, in any language, to mean that Mary is entirely filled with
the grace of God. It is not worth your time to debate the dictionary meaning of
words in ancient Greek. The Faith is not based on such things, nor should you
ever speak as if it were.”
The Faith is not based on the
general, accepted meaning of words? The church tradition can declare something
that is not even there in the literal meaning of the text?
Now that is maybe not representative
of everything that Catholicism could argue in defense of their wild
Mary-doctrines, but it is crazy nonetheless. To claim in essence that words no
longer have their basic meaning when it comes to inspired Scripture, is to
throw out all rationality for the sake of “faith”. If Christianity is not based
on the given meanings of words, especially the words of the original text, then
we have no idea what the Bible actually says.
You may recall that the title for
our study tonight was “Theotokos…?” The complete story revolving around the use
of this term we shall have to save for next week, but I’ll give you the basic meaning
now. The Greek term Theotokos comes
from two words put together to mean “Mother of God” or literally “God-bearer”
or “the one who gives birth to God”. Obviously, that can cause a few
protestants to feel as if their skin is crawling, and there has been
significant debate in this area through history, which we’ll have to touch on
next week. All the craziness of Catholic Mariology shall have to wait to be
refuted next time.
What I’d like you to notice in
closing is that even the best people need the grace of God. We aren’t to assume
from a mistranslated passage here in Luke that Mary was sinless. She received
the grace of God because she was a
sinner, just like Zacharias and Elizabeth, just like Noah, just like Abraham,
just like Moses and David and Elijah and Jeremiah and Daniel. They were all
human beings, some of them pretty great human beings, but all of them with
their faults.
But what was special about Mary was
this: she was a virgin. Virginity, even in our over-sexualized era, still
speaks of purity. Oh true that sexual purity is often frowned upon, scoffed at,
and joked about as out-of-date. Our modern society holds up sex to such an
extent that it’s almost comparable to the false elevation in which Catholics
hold up Mary. But needless to say, virginity and aiming to keep your virginity
in a world that constantly tells you to brashly give it up is no longer a
virtue. Chastity is no longer a virtue.
But here’s the thing, and I don’t
want to end with a typical “purity conference” exhortation, although that is
important. My point is that somebody needs to speak up for purity. Did you know
that Christians are compared to virgins? Looked down upon and considered
hopelessly old-fashioned and hokey, yes. But we are compared to virgins in the
words of Christ Himself.
Matthew
25. The parable of the ten virgins.
“Then the kingdom of heaven shall be likened to ten virgins who took
their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. Now five of them were wise,
and five were foolish. Those who were foolish took their lamps and took no oil
with them, but the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps. But while
the bridegroom was delayed, they all slumbered and slept. And at midnight a cry
was heard: ‘Behold, the bridegroom is coming; go out to meet him!’ Then all
those virgins arose and trimmed their lamps. And the foolish said to the wise,
‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ But the wise answered,
saying, ‘No, lest there should not be enough for us and you; but go rather to
those who sell, and buy for yourselves.’ And while they went to buy, the
bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him to the wedding; and
the door was shut. Afterward the other virgins came also, saying, ‘Lord, Lord,
open to us!’ But he answered and said, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, I do not know
you.’ Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour in which the
Son of Man is coming.”
We are like those virgins waiting
for the coming of our Bridegroom, Christ, waiting and watching for His appearing.
And what are we to do while we wait? How are we to watch for Him?
I
John 3:3, “And everyone who has this
hope in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure.” What hope? The hope that
He shall be revealed and that we shall see Him as He is, John says one verse
before.
Christians, hear me, we are to live
in purity. How can we expect to call ourselves Christian if we’re living lives
other than ones that are dedicated to Christ? How can we call ourselves
Christians if there is no difference between our lives and the lives of those
who don’t know Christ? Are we living as if we don’t know Christ while still
bearing His name? What a paradox! We must be pure! That’s why we’re typified as
virgins in that parable of Jesus. That’s why the prophets cried out against the
people of God committing spiritual adultery and fornication when they pursued
other gods, other interests, lesser things than the God of all things.
Christ did not suffer and die so
that you and I could live lives largely indifferent toward Him, overcome with
sadness and depression, whining and whimpering through every hopeless trial, uninterested
in seeking Him, studying His word, attending church, fellowshipping with the
brethren, ministering to and equipping His body. He did not die just so we
could live as Christian waifs playing around with the pleasures of the world
and then sitting through a few short hours of Bible study every week. He did
not die so we could betray His love with apathy and impurity, immersing
ourselves not in His truth but in the filth of earth.
Are you one of the foolish virgins,
unprepared for the coming of Christ? If He were to return tonight, would you be
found a part of His church or would you be left behind? Will He come to find
faith, or will He come to find that you would rather chase after the world than
run after Him, treating His grace as a common thing and taking it and Him for
granted? If so, He would have every right to leave such a person behind, just
as a man or a woman would have every right to call off their engagement
immediately if they found out their betrothed was sleeping with the best man or
the maid of honor.
It is time that we, by the grace of
God, give Jesus Christ all the attention and devotion He deserves. Go home and
begin anew that devotion to Him, today. Don’t put it off tomorrow. You don’t
know about tomorrow. You don’t know whether it will come or not. You go home
and devote yourself to Him today. You go home and begin to study His word. You
go home and you pray to Him maybe like you’ve never prayed before. You go home
and cry out for the power of His Spirit to transform you. You go home and
demand purity of yourself by the grace of God and nothing else.
Arise. Awake. Walk as children of
light. Redeem the time, because the days are evil.
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