Jesus wasn't plan B!

Genesis 2:15-17, “And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”

This passage has been a puzzle to many Christians and the subject of much criticism from unbelievers. The question often asked is why would an all-knowing God put the Tree in the Garden if He knew Adam would disobey and bring the Curse on all of creation? If there were no tree, Adam could not have eaten of it so would not have sinned by disobeying God. No tree means no Fall, no Curse, and no history of death in the world. In other words, if God knows everything, why didn't He just not put the tree in the garden and spare the world generations of misery?

Critics sometimes exaggerate the dilemma, hoping to raise doubt on the omniscience of God or the plausibility of the Bible. Such criticism could have a chilling effect on the gospel. It tries to make it look like God made a mistake and then had to come up with the cross as a way to fix it. Jesus was a sort of “plan B.”

There are a few bad assumptions behind this criticism. First, it's completely non sequitur as an argument for atheism. I'm not sure exactly how it follows that, because people die, there can be no God. You could try to make a case that He's not a loving God or that He's not the God of the Bible but there's no reason we must necessarily conclude that death means there's no God. It goes back to a point I made a few months back: people have a false idea of how God should act and, when they can't find a god who acts that way, they conclude there must be no god at all.

The other flaw in this criticism is the assumption that eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was the only sin Adam could have committed. Removing the tree does not necessarily mean Adam could no longer sin. Adam still had free will and so could have disobeyed God in other ways. For example, God also commanded Adam and Eve to multiply; Adam could have refused. We have to ask if it is even possible for God to create a creature with free will but not the ability to choose to disobey Him? It's sort of like asking if God could create a square circle.

I certainly can't claim to completely understand God. Indeed, if a finite, simple man like me could completely understand Him, He wouldn't be a very big God. But after having thought about this and looking into His word, I think I have an inkling of why things are the way they are.

We like to say that God can do anything. Of course, there are things even God can't do. God cannot lie, for example. He cannot even be wrong. And here is another very important thing – God cannot stop being God. He will always be the Infinite One, the Eternal One, the Perfect One. Logically speaking, it can be no other way.

Isaiah 46:9-11 says, “Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me, Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure: Calling a ravenous bird from the east, the man that executes my counsel from a far country: yea, I have spoken it, I will also bring it to pass; I have purposed it, I will also do it.”

Like this passage says, there cannot be anyone like God. In logic, there is an interesting paradox called the Irresistible Force Paradox. Essentially it says that irresistible force and an immovable object cannot exist simultaneously. One must yield to the other. The same is true for God. Not only must there be only one supreme power, He must also have supreme authority. You cannot have 2 beings with free will unless the will of one of them yields to the other. Think about it – what would happen if one god says, “this will be blue” and the other says, “no, this will not be blue”? One of them must yield to the other.

When God made man, He could have made us like robots who only can do what He programmed us to do. That isn't what God wanted. He wanted someone with whom He could have fellowship - someone who would have emotions and reason similar to His. So, He created us in His image. Yet, even though we are like God, we cannot be just like God. God wanted us to have fellowship with Him. He created us with free will and the ability to genuinely love Him. But by giving us free will, it was inevitable that we would disobey him. If we have free will, there will come a point that what a man wants will conflict with what God wants. Obviously, God would have known all this.

God is love (1 John 4:7-8). Because of His perfect love, He desired an object to love. However, His perfect justice would not allow Him to suffer the disobedience of His creation. So when He purposed to create us, He simultaneously would have had a plan to reconcile us to Himself again, once we disobeyed Him. His plan was the cross!

Revelation 13:8 refers to Jesus as, “The Lamb, slain from the foundation of the world.” In dutiful obedience to the Father, Jesus created the entire universe and shaped man with His own hands, knowing that the cost would be His own blood. It's overwhelming to think about it. It reminds me of a moving passage from that famous hymn:

And when I think that God, His Son not sparing,
Sent Him to die, I scarce can take it in
That on the Cross, my burden gladly bearing
He bled and died to take away my sin!

God didn't make a mistake. He didn't create us without realizing the cost. Jesus wasn't plan B. He was always the plan!

The significance of the Greek participle in Matthew 5:27-28

Matthew 5:27-28, Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.

Some translations of the Bible are better than others.  Of course, there are a few translations I wouldn’t recommend but, among mainstream translations, each has its pros and cons.  One strength of the King James Version is that its translators had the very clever idea of identifying participles with the ending in “eth.”  Examples would be believeth, thinketh, or, as in the verse above, looketh.  

In English, many people mistake participles for verbs.  They usually have a verb root and end in “ing.”  So, words like jumping, swimming, running, and looking are all participles even though they’re describing an action.  They don’t act like verbs; instead, they act like adjectives, adverbs, or even nouns (when a verb is used as a noun in English, it’s technically called a gerund).  

If I said, “Do you see the man standing by the door?,” I’m using the word “standing” as an adjective to describe which man I’m talking about.  I’m not necessarily concerned with what he’s doing - I’m pointing out who he is.  He’s the man standing by the door.  Get it?

In Greek, participles act in ways very similar to how they act in English.  In the subject verse, the word looketh is the Greek word blepōn (βλέπων, present participle of βλέπω, Strong’s Word 991).  It means “looking” but it is used with an article so a literal translation would be “The one looking.”  Just as in my English example, the participle is used here to point out  who this person is.  He’s the person who looks at women in order to lust after them.

Later in Matthew (Matthew 7:16), Jesus said, “Ye shall know them by their fruits.”  In other words, a person isn’t defined by his actions; rather, his actions reveal who he is. A person who looks at women to lust after them, is an adulterer.  It's not “looking” at women that makes a man an adulterer because an adulterer already. When he looks at a woman to lust for her, he is only doing what adulterers do.

By way of analogy, consider dogs: dogs aren't dogs because they bark; they bark because they're dogs.  I remember hearing a pastor tell a story about a mean dog who always tried to bite people.  Whenever anyone visited, he would have to muzzle the dog so it couldn’t bite people.  The dog never bit anyone again but the muzzle didn’t make it a good dog, did it?

In that same way, adulterers look at women in order to lust for them.  It doesn’t matter if they never commit the act - they’re still adulterers.   They’re like the bad dog who wears a muzzle.  Maybe they don’t commit adultery because of social pressures.  Maybe they’re afraid they’ll get caught.  It could be that they think the object of their lusts doesn’t feel the same way - otherwise they would!  Whatever the reason he doesn’t commit the act, Jesus made it clear that he’s already an adulterer.   

Proverbs 23:7 says, “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.”  Who we are on the inside is revealed by what we do. In other words, adulterers lust, murderers hate, thieves envy, liars tell lies, etc. We’re not sinners because of the sins we commit. We commit sins because we’re sinners!

Some people think of themselves as basically “good” because they haven't committed any “major” sins. That's because they don't consider their lusts, envy, or hate to be major sins.  What they don't understand is that these are symptoms of who they really are. It doesn't matter how good these people think they are – the Bible makes it clear we are all adulterous, thieving, lying  murderers who need a Savior.

The Greek New Testament does not call the Holy Spirit an it!

Grammatical gender is rather ordinary in most languages but completely absent from English.  In English, men are he/him, women are she/her, and everything else is an it.  Because English follows a sort of “natural gender,” English speakers often believe gender in other languages also denotes the sex or personhood of what is being discussed.  If a noun in another language is masculine, for example, English speakers assume it denotes a human male.  

Grammatical gender is merely a type of grammatical designation.  In Spanish, for example, the word for a lady’s dress is el vestido, which is masculine, while the word for a man’s necktie is la corbata, which is feminine.  This seems totally absurd to English speakers because a lady’s dress should obviously be feminine and the necktie, masculine!  

In my opinion, it’s unfortunate we even use the word gender to describe it.  It might help native-English speakers if we imagine the word class when talking about gender.  For example, instead of saying masculine nouns, we could say class-M nouns.  Since this blog is written in English, I’m assuming the people who read it also speak English so grouping nouns into classes instead of gender might help you as you think about this post.  

Spanish only has two genders: masculine and feminine.  There is no neuter gender in Spanish.  However, Greek has three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter.  Since the New Testament was written in Greek and since English uses he, she, and it, the tendency to project our English understanding of gender onto the text becomes almost irresistible.  Therefore, problems sometimes arise when people try to use the gender of a Greek word to make a doctrinal point.  

A blog that calls itself Examining the Trinity has pointed out that the Holy Spirit in the original Greek is neuter.  They went on to say this:

But "Holy Spirit" in the original Greek is neuter and therefore the neuter pronouns "it," "itself" are used with it in the original NT Greek! Any strictly literal Bible translation would have to use "it" for the holy spirit (since it is really not a person, but God's active force, a literal translation would be helpful in this case).

This is an extremely amateurish argument. It demonstrates how a little knowledge can be dangerous. Most people who use this argument really can't read Greek. Instead, they have heard once that the Greek word for “Spirit” is neuter so, because of their understanding of English, they buy into the argument that the Spirit is an “it.” Of course, there are some people who indeed understand Greek's grammatical use of gender but still repeat the argument with the intention of preying on the audience's ignorance of the subject.

First, this is a blatant example of special pleading because the same people who raise this argument don't apply this same standard everywhere. In Matthew 2:11, for example,  the Bible says the wise men, “saw the young child with Mary his mother.” The Greek word for child here (paidion, παιδίον, Strong’s word 3813) is neuter so, to be consistent, they should translate this verse as “they saw the young child with Mary its mother.” Of course they don't do that. Neither do they refer to the church as her or the book as him or “correctly” render the hundred other instances where Greek gender does not agree with English ideas of gender.

There's another subtle flaw in the above quote that might escape notice. The author seems unaware of the flaw and cites a source that commits the same mistake. See if you can spot it in this quote:

The Greek word for 'spirit' is neuter, and while we use personal pronouns in English ('he,' 'his,' 'him'), most Greek manuscripts employ 'it.' [bold in original]

Did you catch it? If not, don't feel bad because it's sort of a technicality and some might accuse me of splitting hairs. However, I feel it's an important consideration. This quote says, “most Greek manuscripts employ 'it.'” The reality is that NO Greek manuscript contains the word, it! The word it is an English word which conveys a certain meaning in English. It is more precise to say that the Greek manuscripts use the neuter pronoun (auton) whenever the antecedent is a neuter noun. The original authors were not thinking “it” whenever they wrote "auton." Again, think, “class” instead of gender and it might help.  Class-N nouns use class-N pronouns.  

A language is more than its vocabulary; each language also has its own grammar as well as its own idioms. The goal of any translation is to express the same meaning in the target language that is conveyed in the original language. A good translation should obey the rules of the target language – not slavishly render a hyper-literal, word for word exchange of the original language. The pronouns used in our translations should follow the rules of English, not Greek! If the antecedent is an object, the English pronoun should be it. If the antecedent is a person, the English pronoun should be he or she.

If anyone wants to deny the Personhood of the Holy Spirit, he must make his case using Scripture. A weak appeal to the gender of a Greek word – especially an appeal made by someone who can't even read Greek – isn't even close.

These aren’t just expressions

Have you ever heard the adage, “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead” or “By failing to prepare you are preparing to fail”?  Witticisms like these are invented to encourage best practices or to describe some obvious truth.  These particular quotes are attributed to Ben Franklin but many other American characters have quipped equally memorable expressions.  Statements like these are ingrained in our culture - they are our lore, if you will.

Some idioms we use are very short: barking up the wrong tree, shooting fish in a barrel, taking candy from a baby, pleading the fifth, and etc. I don’t know how many of these I could cite - certainly dozens, maybe hundreds.  In every case, when we hear phrases like this, we usually know what the speaker means to say.  

Often, though, we don’t have any idea how a phrase came into use in the first place.  For example, why does “put up with” mean “to tolerate”?  If a non-English speaking person tries to translate the words put, up, and with, individually, he will still not be able to understand what the English phrase means.  It’s just one of those things we say without knowing why we say it.

I came to this realization many years ago, while I was still a teenager.  When I was coming out of Ahrens Vocational School in downtown Louisville, KY, there were some Gideons (I didn’t know they were Gideons at the time because I’d never heard of them) on the sidewalk handing out New Testaments to students.  I took one.  

Even though it was only a NT, this was the first Bible I’d ever owned.  My family did have a big Bible but it was more like a table decoration.  You know the kind: 5 inches thick, gilded pages, and embossed with “Holy Bible” on the front in Old English font.  I remember flipping through that tome but I never actually read it.  But now that I had a Bible of my own - one which was pocket sized and more convenient to carry with me - I decided for the first time to start reading it.

The NT starts with Matthew, of course, and as I read it, a strange familiarity began to creep over me.  I kind of knew about Jesus -the Savior, He died on a cross, rose from the dead, and all that so that wasn’t new.  What struck me the most, though, were the familiar sayings that I’d heard and even used all my life!

I thought it would be interesting to take a minute and consider just a handful of expressions, used in our everyday lives, that are taken straight from the Bible.  For the sake of this post, I’m limiting this to examples found in the Gospel of Matthew.  Are we ready?  Let’s begin:

“Man can’t live on bread alone,” Matthew 4:4

“He’s the salt of the earth,” Matthew 5:13

“He’d give you the shirt off his back,” Matthew 5:40

“He always goes the extra mile,” Matthew 5:41

As weird as it might sound, I had heard all of these expressions before; I just had no idea they were based on Bible verses.  Seriously.  Looking back now, I laugh at how ignorant I was of Scripture.  To me, “going the extra mile” was just another adage similar to, “early to bed and early to rise….”  I guess I just assumed someone like Ben Franklin or Mark Twain made it up.  

There are many more examples, still.  Ronald Reagan called the US a shining “city on a hill”; he took this from Matthew 5:14. Some people believe Abraham Lincoln coined the phrase, “A nation divided against itself cannot stand” but he was actually quoting Jesus in Matthew 12:25.

I’ve seen Bible verses being used (knowingly or unknowingly) in the workplace.  When a manager doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing, we might say it’s a case of, “the blind leading the blind” (Matthew 15:14). In a large corporation, sometimes conflicting directives are given to employees and they say, “the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing” (Matthew 6:3).

If we become especially angry with someone, we might say, “I’ll have his head on a platter” (Matthew 14:10-11).  If a child says something funny or clever, we might quip, “Out of the mouth of babes….” (Matthew 21:16).  When a loved one isn’t living up to his potential, we might tell him, “You’re hiding your light under a bushel” (Matthew 5:15).  When someone quits after a long struggle, it might be said, “he gave up the ghost” (Matthew 27:50).

If you’ve been a Christian for a while, you’re probably familiar with all of these verses.  However, I’m telling you that, when I was an unbeliever, I was completely oblivious to the source of these common turns of phrase.  It was only as I began to read them for myself, that I began to understand how much Christianity had already shaped my understanding of the world.

It wasn’t until a few years later that I became a Christian.  Once I became born again, I believe God instilled in me a hunger for His word.  It’s like I can never read it, think about it, or talk about it enough.  Yet in spite of how much I’ve learned from the Bible, I’m embarrassed by how little I think I know it.  Those first few nuggets that caught my eye as an unbeliever, weren’t just expressions.  They were a testimony to how rich the Bible is in wisdom and how enduring its advice can be.