Kristen,
The Lamb “slain from the foundation of the world” is the one I was thinking of too. After all if Jesus the resurrected man can go back in time and walk with Adam, then He can go back before Adam was created and be there for the creation.

The firstborn of all creation is a reference to preeminence. The “first-born” rights were not necessarily given to the first one born. But it is a term of preeminence.

pinklight,
I hope that my answer, answers both of your questions. If not, please feel free to probe for further clarification. I think that a second witness would be a good thing to ask for, if anyone is claiming to speak the truth about a “fact”. Those who are honest should not have a problem providing another witness. Those who are deceptive would not appreciate anyone questioning their assertions. I think that the more witnesses we have (biblical test only requires 2 or 3), the more confidence we can have that we have sufficient evidence to test the validity of any claim.

pinklight,
I believe that Paul was especially talking about the issue of sin since he said in 2 Cor 13:2

2 Corinthians 13:2 (NASB95)
2I have previously said when present the second time, and though now absent I say in advance to those who have sinned in the past and to all the rest as well, that if I come again I will not spare anyone,

However the term “fact” that Paul used goes even beyond discipline or a legal matter. The Greek word he used is “rhema” which has two basic meanings:

? that which is said, word, saying, expression, or statement of any kind
? after the Hebrew an event that can be spoken about, thing, object, matter, event

Arndt, W., Danker, F. W., & Bauer, W. (2000). A Greek-English lexicon of the New Testament and other early Christian literature (3rd ed.) (905). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Under the first point they include prophesy, prediction, speech, sermon, proclamation, teaching and divine understanding.

I would take this to include any statement that is to be believed as a fact. For example if you tell me that the moon is made of blue cheese, I would need to have a verification of that “fact” to put my belief in what you have said. A sworn statement by one of the astronauts, etc could be a second witness.

I have received emails from people giving me outrageous statements that could be very slanderous to individuals and I ask them to confirm their sources, with documents that I can verify for myself. When I ask for the second witness, usually I never hear from them again. I think the second witness is a good, and biblical safeguard.

Did God say that He took a female out of Adam? I know that many think this, but it isn’t supported by the text.

Genesis 2:22 (NASB95)
22The LORD God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man.

Notice that God fashioned the woman from the rib. He doesn’t say that he took out a female and fashioned a female from it. The female wasn’t in existence until God fashioned her after the rib was removed from Adam.

This doesn’t diminish the value of the woman, but I believe it gives the woman full identity of her own. She was not inside the man as a woman within a male/female body, but a complete identity of her own as fashioned by God outside the body of the male. This made them both individuals, but with the same original DNA structure. One human race, but separate male and female. Her identity, according to the text, was not removed from Adam, but was created by God Himself outside of Adam, from a part that came from His DNA.

I did a post back in 2009 that talks about the myths that have been presented about God being female as well as male and that God took a female out of the body of a male. I know that this is a very romantic idea, but I would rather have the truth and know that we are truly God’s creation as fully female and in His image rather than holding to old time myths that distract us from the truth. Here is the old post. http://strivetoenter.com/wim/2009/02/02/adam-and-his-ms-organ/ I welcome any comments, questions or differing views, if anyone thinks that I am the one who has it wrong.

Although the “rib” is in the feminine, this does not make it female. It is part of the Hebrew grammar that makes things that are without life but which resemble organic things are in the feminine gender. See the Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar under syntax of the noun. (see below a screen print)

More in the next comment.

Patricia,
You said:

Genesis 1:26-28 “Let us make man (gender neutral) in our image

There is no neuter in the Hebrew. While I agree that God is talking about the human race (thus not just the male), “man” is in the masculine (since the masculine is the traditional use for generic people)

More in the next comment.

Hi Patricia and welcome to my blog!

I am always encouraged when I read the testimony of a woman who hung in their with her calling and did not let men try to steal her blessing from the Lord. Way to go!

Now as far as God being male and female and that God made Adam both male and female in the beginning, I have heard these arguments before, and I am sorry to say that I cringe when I hear them.

First of all if God is not male because He is pure Spirit and has no testosterone and no male parts, then He cannot be female either as He does not have estrogen nor does He have any body parts so He cannot be female. But I do believe it is safe to say that in His character He has shown the characteristics that we commonly claim for male and the ones we commonly assume to be female. The feminine nature is part of the entire human nature and we are all in the image of God.

More in the next comment.

Dina,
Welcome to my blog!

I also agree that Adam had two sins – listening silently, yet knowing the truth while his wife was deceived, and then eating the fruit. I believe God listed the “listening” first and then eating second, so I think God see’s the refusal to help Eve spiritually in her greatest time of need (while she was being deceived and didn’t know it), as the greater sin, since Adam was sinning against God and Eve.

As far as two human races, one from Adam and one from Eve, that was not God’s way since His desire was to have one human race and one Savior for all. I believe that is why it is so vital that Eve came from Adam’s own body before Adam sinned. This leaves just one human race, yet with a Savior who is the last Adam, yet without sin. Only God’s foreknowledge could have prepared such a plan that thwarted satan’s plan to destroy us all.

gengwall,
Thanks for the kind words! Words like these help to reinforce that my work is not in vain. Sometimes I just really need encouragement!

But I’m not sure how to interpret “Christ is the origin of all men”. Is it your position that this is addressing creation? That doesn’t seem to follow the Christ-Word-God argument because, I think, the Word was what created, not the human Christ?

Yes, it sure does appear to be about creation of mankind. This past year I have been teaching through the book of Hebrews with a small group bible study and I put a lot of effort into researching and studying on Melchizedek. My eyes were popping open and so were the eyes of the entire group!

Then I look at the “man” who walks with Abraham, and walks with Adam and shows up in the fire with the three Hebrew lads. Did the author of the book of Hebrews think that there was something special about Melchizedek? It does appear so. Did Paul appear to think that the humanity of Christ was unlimited through time in 1 Cor. 11? The wording seems to suggest that to me. All other explanations seem to have gaping holes.

I am not sure if this helps or not, but it is what has blown my mind about the place of the resurrected man who is my Lord. When we see Him in heaven, I don’t think we will need to stand in line to give Him a huge hug!

gengwall,
Under point 1, the claim that only the male is created directly in God’s image is the teaching of Bruce Ware of CBMW and his quotes are in my DVD set.

Lamb,
It is good to be back. My resolution this new year is to be far more active on my blog and to make it more of a priority even while I am still researching and writing my new script.

Gengwall,
My post isn’t just about CBMW, but about complementarians which do very somewhat from each other. However the typical comp response that I have been getting from comps is that God is male. Where do they get this from?

CBMW says things like:

Biblical, masculine language for God is not culture-dependent, but rather is God’s chosen self-revelation of his identity.

Thus CBMW can speak out of both sides of their mouth. They can deny in places that God is male, yet out of the other side of their mouth they affirm that He is masculine. His identity, they say, is masculine. What does masculine mean? What does identity mean?

identity: condition or character as to who a person or what a thing is
male: pertaining to or characteristic of a male person; masculine
masculine: pertaining to or characteristic of a man or men

CBMW writes:

Therefore, the masculine language for God in the Bible is not due to what Israel or the early church thought about God, primarily, but, ultimately, this way of speaking of God comes from God himself. Because the Bible is God’s own chosen self-revelation, we must take seriously the language God chose to use to communicate to us what he is like. This revelation, by God’s choice, includes all the masculine God-language of the Bible, and therefore it cannot be dismissed as merely the by-product of a patriarchal cultural. To dismiss the masculine language for God in the Bible is to dismiss how God has spoken of himself, and this is a serious matter. http://www.cbmw.org/Journal/Vol-13-No-2/How-Shall-We-Speak-of-God-Seven-Reasons-Why-We-Cannot-Call-God-Mother

pinklight,
I will pray for you. May the Lord direct and guide you as you trust Him for answered prayer.

Margaret, welcome to my blog and thanks for your comments!

Mara, thanks for the link!

gengwall,
Thanks for your comments. You said:

It isn’t even exactly correct to say Jesus went back in time. The resurrected Jesus currently exists simultaneously at every point in our time just as He exists simultaneously at every place in our space.

That may be another way to say it. However what I was trying to communicate was to show that while the “son of man”, the Christ, Jesus the incarnate Word, limited Himself so that He could live as a man here on the earth and lived with all of our limitations, when He was resurrected, His body was no longer under those limitations. It may be hard for some to think through that Jesus is still a man…but a resurrected man, glorified and without our limitations, nevertheless still in the flesh.

I was also trying to communicate that the Lord, in His human body would not have appeared in the Old Testament time without nail holes in His hands, since it was only the resurrected Lord of glory that was free of limitations. He had the DNA of His mother, before the time of His mother, in His resurrected body.

I do think that it is okay to say that He went back in time, just as the OT says that God said that He was going to come to see if all the evil He had heard about was so. God doesn’t need to “come down” when He is omnipresent, but it is a way that God communicates to us so that we understand. In the same way the resurrected Jesus doesn’t need to go “back in time” when His resurrection body is unlimited in time or space, but I think it also helps us to understand His relationship with Abraham and Adam.

Thoughts?

Thanks A. Amos Love.

I also updated my comment to corrected the errors. Often I do my blog work at night when my comments show my tiredness and errors can creep in. I think I fixed all my errors so that it is completely readable now. 🙂

Jesus, as a resurrected man, who is now no longer limited to time and space, should be able to appear as a resurrected man without respect to the limitations of time. What this means is that without limitations, He can go back in time just as He can go forward in time.

Look at Melchizedek in Hebrews and check out everything it says about him. It sounds like a “man” who is back in time before the birth of his mother, but who is recognized by Abraham so that Abraham gives tithes to him.

Who is the “man” who walked in the flames with Daniel? He had the form of the “son of man” which is a Messianic title. I believe that if we were able to go up to Him and see Him clearly we would have seen nail holes in His hands. This is only possible if He is unchained by time in His resurrected body.

Also consider that the death of Jesus is said to have been from before the creation of the world, yet He died in our time. Could this resurrected Lord have appeared to Adam and was He able to be there at Adam’s creation? breathing life into Adam’s body? If He is truly unrestrained by time and as the “son of man” the Christ, Lord of all, I don’t see why not. I see hints of this everywhere in the OT.

17 Retha,

As far as the term for rape, the same word is used in Lamentations 5:11 and 2 Sam 13:32.

The problem with rape in the Old Testament times is that the woman who is raped is no longer wanted for marriage as she no longer has her proof of virginity. In the case of Tamar, Tamar was raped by her brother, but after the rape she should have been given to her brother for marriage and his rejection of her for marriage was considered a greater wrong then the original rape.

blockquote>2 Samuel 13:16 (NASB95)
16 But she said to him, “No, because this wrong in sending me away is greater than the other that you have done to me!” Yet he would not listen to her.

When Amnon refused Tamar after violating her, she then lived in a desolate or destroyed, ruined and abandoned state in her other brother’s home.

2 Samuel 13:20 (NASB95)
20 Then Absalom her brother said to her, “Has Amnon your brother been with you? But now keep silent, my sister, he is your brother; do not take this matter to heart.” So Tamar remained and was desolate in her brother Absalom’s house.

So it appears that giving the woman to the man so that she was his responsibility to care for and looked after for her whole life, is a more compassionate thing to do rather than leaving her in the state of a victim ineligible for marriage.

What may seem irrational in our time, did have purpose in a strong patriarchal system of that time.

Rose, (and I do understand your hesitancy to use your real name), here are my thoughts on your questions:

1. It’s always bothered me that angels have always taken male form in the Bible when they’ve appeared to human beings. If females really *are* equal to God in His sight, why are there no female angels? When God talks about the angels appearing before Him in Job, why are they “the sons of God”? If God loves women equally to men, why can there not be angelic “sons AND daughters of God”?

Spirits do not have body parts to they are not named as “male” and “female”. Yet they do appear as “male” when they come to earth. I believe that this is on purpose for a couple of reasons. The first reason would be that angels are seen as all in one category, so seeing them as “male” and “female” would divide them rather than keep them as one. Secondly those who are “of God” are ALL called “sons” so that even women are God’s “sons” and joint heirs with God. The image then is “sons” and not divisions between “sons” and “daughters”. Perhaps another reason would be that seeing angels as women might be too distracting to men.

Any thoughts about these reasons?
You also said:

That kind of suggests to me that women are second-class citizens in God’s eyes, but I know that cannot be the case, so somebody please help me there!

I do not think that this suggests that women are second-class citizens, but rather that we are all in one class. All of us as “sons” of God is a position of equality, not lifting the male as better than the female.

You asked:

2.) Whenever there were births announced by angels, why is it always the birth of *males*??? Why didn’t God ever send angels to announce to Mary’s parents, for example, that they would have a daughter who would be that one special woman that *every* Jewish woman wanted to be, who would be the mother of the foretold Messiah? John the Baptist’s birth was foretold. Most importantly, Jesus’s birth was foretold. Why couldn’t Mary’s birth have been foretold? Why was it always male babies that got to be foretold? That, too, kind of suggests that God doesn’t consider female babies to be as important as male babies.

I believe that John the Baptist’s birth was foretold because there was to be one forerunner of Christ who would be filled with the Spirit from conception. But Mary’s birth was not special. She was not filled with the Spirit from conception, nor was her birth anything of the ordinary. Her life lived out in humility was what brought her into the place of giving her consent to be the mother of the Lord Jesus.

Another thing to look at, regarding women as having equal importance with the male, is to look at Sarah. It wasn’t Abraham’s seed that was important except through her. God indicated that only the son born through Sarah would be the child of promise.

I hope this helps a bit for your questions. Please feel free to post whatever questions you have. Please excuse me whenever I am slow. I try my best to fit my time here on my blog, within all my other ministry responsibilities and sometimes I am much faster than at other times.

Rose, welcome to my blog. I am sorry that I am slow in getting back to your original post.
You said:

I have very “old-fashioned” beliefs as far as being a Christian is concerned. I believe the Bible is the perfect, inspired Word of God and I do believe that Jesus is the one and *only* way to the Father in Heaven and that you can only be saved and have eternal life through Him alone.

If that is old-fashioned, then I too am old-fashioned.

I do *not* have a lot of the traditionally comp beliefs that most others with these same beliefs tend to have. I do believe that Phoebe was very likely a deaconess in the early church and I do believe that Priscilla was a pastor of a home church, facts that a lot of comps like to try and sweep under the rug and overlook to suit their own purposes

Praise the Lord!

I think that Deborah is a very strong example of God putting a woman in a position of spiritual authority over His people, and if God would do that in the stricter Old Testament days then why wouldn’t He do it in the New Testament days and the Age of Grace, right?

It seems unthinkable that the Old Testament women of God would have more freedom than the New Testament women.

Anyway, I just wanted to introduce myself. I’ve been a lurker here for quite some time and I really love your blog, Cheryl. It’s a great place for someone “in the middle of the road,” I guess you can say, whose opinions of theology don’t seem to fit in too many places in the Church nowadays.

Thank you for coming out and introducing yourself! It is SO enjoyable for me to “meet” the people that visit my blog, especially those who regularly come here. My other DVD projects do prevent me from being as fast to post and/or comment as I would like to, but I do love the community that this blog provides.

Rose, I hope you and others like you who are “middle of the road” feel warmly welcomed and feel free to contribute your own thoughts.

It seems that the churches who do hold to truer Biblical beliefs are chauvinistic as heck when it comes to women being in positions of leadership, especially within the church, and the churches who *do* treat women as equals are apostate as heck and ridiculously liberal in their beliefs!

This is the one thing that frustrates me too and one of the reasons why I want to have my voice heard as a conservative, God-loving, believer in “every Word of God as inspired” Christian. I do not want the issue of women in ministry to draw people to liberalism nor do I believe that it is necessary. I do believe that this is what sometimes happens only because there hasn’t been more churches open to the gifts of God’s women believers. I find this truly sad.
Now to your questions. I will answer right away in my next comment here.

Retha, sorry for being so slow to get to the questions on my blog. Your question is an excellent one.

Jesus said an amazing thing in John 8:45 –

John 8:56–57 (NASB95)
56 “Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day, and he saw it and was glad.”
57 So the Jews said to Him, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have You seen Abraham?”

Jesus is saying that Abraham saw Him. The Jews understood this and questioned how Jesus could have been in contact with Abraham when Jesus was not even 50 years old.

Some see Jesus coming to Abraham as a man, as a pre-incarnate revelation of the Son, but I believe that each appearance of Jesus in the Old Testament was in His resurrected flesh. How can that happen? Now that is another question. If you are interested in more, I can share.
Suffice it to say that I believe Jesus, the resurrected man, was there at Adam’s creation.

Jack, I don’t get into those kinds of fleshly details as I am interested in the spiritual area.

Frank,
Thanks for stopping by and for the kind words.

Lydia,
I also find the message so uplifting that it blessed my socks off and I wanted to share it.

Don,
I always like to go back further when I see a “therefore” as I teach in my bible study. We need to know what “therefore” is there for.

Thanks pinklight and Rachel!

Aaron, that wasn’t appropriate. You came here and charged me with deceit, so you should expect a response to that.

By the way my next post that I am working on will be about Ephesians 5 so I would think that might be helpful for you especially as I will be quoting a male pastor.

Aaron, I do hope that you stick around and can keep a respectful tone as you will certainly fit in and be welcome to dialog.

Excellent answer Mara!

Bobby,
There is no order that God has created that keeps out His gifts from the common good. When Christians read into God’s Word a Church-wide prohibition on God’s female “sons”, this makes God out to be one who contradicts Himself. It is time to get back into the context of God’s Word. Context is king.

Ryne,
Thank you for the encouragement and welcome to my blog!

Don,
Just as Lin said, his comments can offend other males. That is so sad.

Lin,
Thanks for the info Lin. I did not know that about John Knox. Now the quote by Phil seems even worse to me. If he were in my ancestral line, I don’t think I would brag about it.

Hey Cindy,
I definitely do discernment, but I have never been called a diva before so I think I will pass on that one. 😉