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Eric V.
Snow, sermonette, 12-10-2010, Ann Arbor, MI, UCG-IA
Do you think that wherever you go, “it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas”? Is this week’s noticeable snowfall around here making you dream “about a white Christmas”? Is this “the most wonderful time of the year” spiritually? Well, we in the Church of God know better than that. Over the next two weeks, this annual storm of paganism, materialism, and commercialism will hit us with its full fury. But even as this deceptive, category 5 hurricane moves ashore and so closely into our lives, can we find a bright silver lining in its dark clouds? Amidst all the malarky about Santa Claus, Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the red nose reindeer, and the Grinch who stole Christmas, can we find and focus on the small flicking light of spiritual truth that this holiday is allegedly about? We in the church of God should be willing to discuss a certain true teaching of the Bible even when most of the world is deceived into celebrating a holiday that’s supposedly about Jesus’ birth. It is a true scriptural teaching and a historical fact that God the Son was born miraculously of a virgin about 2013 years ago. Let’s now take this opportunity to spotlight a messianic prophecy that the Jews have long said Matthew quoted out of context.
S.P.S. By applying the principle of duality in
prophetic fulfillment, we can know Isaiah 7:14 was about Jesus’ birth also.
Now, bah
humbug, I really wish that the Grinch had succeeded in his plot to steal
Christmas . . . but, God’s truth is God’s truth. We in the COG shouldn’t be aware to discuss any true Biblical
teaching, regardless of whatever people in the world are saying about it
whenever. Or whether they are dreaming
about a white Christmas.
Matt.
1:18-25, esp. 23
This
account makes it very clear that Jesus was born of a virgin. True, skeptics commonly claim that’s not
possible. But obviously the Creator who
created life originally certainly can perform a miracle so that a virgin woman
can have a baby. If Jehovah can make
Adam from the dust of the earth, and Eve from Adam’s rib, it’s much easier for
Him to make a virgin give birth. But it
isn’t the focus of my message today to refute the assaults of atheists and
agnostics on the Bible’s historical reports of miracles done by God.
Instead,
let’s turn now to analyze what traditional Jews claim. They will attack the story of Jesus’ from
another direction: They will claim that
Matthew quoted Isaiah 7:14 out of context and that the word “almah” used here
doesn’t mean “virgin.”
Two main
points in reply: 1. The duality principle of prophetic
fulfillment refutes this argument.
Later, I’ll take up point 2. The
word “almah” can mean “virgin.”
Isaiah
7:10+
The evil
king Ahaz had a military crisis on his hands:
The kings of Israel and Syria had invaded Judah and attacked
Jerusalem. Ahaz paid off the Assyrian
Empire’s king to attack them from behind (see 2 Kings 16).
V. 13
Duality
principle: 1. A preliminary fulfillment
at the time, a child born of a virgin at marriage. 2. The main fulfillment
was when Jesus was born of a virgin.
The principle of typology:
Someone or something serves as a forerunner that represents a Biblical
truth that has a more complete revelation later.
Fundamental
basis of truth of Jesus as Messiah:
Jesus’ miracles and teachings showed that God sent Him on a mission to
reveal the Father to humanity. Greater
sign of greater truth: For a young
woman to give birth is common, but for a virgin to give birth, that’s really
miraculous. As the biblical scholar J.
Gresham Machen asked: "Why should an ordinary birth be regarded as a 'sign'?"
Now let’s
turn to point 2: The word “Almah” can
mean “virgin.” This word can be
translated “virgin” or (notoriously) in the RSV as “young woman.” By itself, the word is somewhat
ambiguous. Rebekah was called an
“almah” (Genesis 24:43) [turn to if have time] when she hadn’t yet
“known” a man. Also called a
“bethulah,” (v. 16), which can be somewhat ambiguous also in meaning. Standard claim is that if “bethulah” means
“virgin,” then “almah” can’t, but this chapter shows otherwise, when both words
are used about Rebekah before her marriage to Isaac.
In the
Ugaritic language and the Carthaginian dialect of Phoenician, the equivalent
term for almah also means "virgin."
Ugaritic was a Semitic language very similar to Hebrew, so scholars
analyze its words to learn more about the meanings of ancient Hebrew language’s
words. As the scholar James Smith reasons, if the woman giving birth
were unmarried, an illegitimate birth makes for a poor sign from God!
It’s
significant that the pre-Christian Septuagint’s translator used “parthenos,”
Greek word for “virgin.” Although one
can try to water this down, the word almost always means “virgin.” The famous pagan temple to the goddess
Athena in Athens is called the Parthenon:
Athena was regarded as a virgin, unlike (well) Aphrodite/Venus. “Parthenia” means, “virginity as a state of
being,” (see Luke 2:36) according to Bauer, Arndt, Gingrich’s Greek-English
lexicon, p. 626.
Basic
interpretative issue: Do we go with the
main meaning of the word, (say) 95% of the time? Or do we evasively hunt around for the 5% or the 1% exceptions in
order to avoid changing our minds? What
does God expect?
SO IN
CONCLUSION, we in
the Church of God should believe in and proclaim the virgin birth of Jesus even
during the world’s Christmas season.
The Jews are plainly wrong to insist that Isaiah 7:14 was only about a
sign for King Ahaz when two foreign armies were attacking Jerusalem and that
the word “almah” doesn’t have to mean “virgin” here. Let’s not be afraid to teach what’s God’s truth as God’s truth,
regardless of what time of the year it is.
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