Handmaiden intelligence

“It’s amazing when you go through the first chapter of Luke and see what John the Baptist’s mother and dad, Zacharias and Elisabeth, and what Mary, and obviously Joseph along with her, knew about the Bible,” says Jordan.

“Sometime you get the idea that people back in Bible times were a bunch of illiterate rubes who didn’t know what was going on and boy, you can’t read through this passage and believe that! In fact, you’ll see later on the little comments that John makes when, for example, Zacharias needs to tell him what John’s name is going to be. He takes a writing pad and writes on it. These are not unintelligent, uninformed, incapable people as generally they are said to be.

“Have you ever seen that stand-up show ‘Defending the Caveman’? I heard the guy on the radio and he said a caveman has no idea what his wife is about, what she needs, what she says. There’s the ad where he says, ‘If a woman says I’ll call you, she means tonight I’ll call you, and if a man says I’ll call you, he means sometime between now and the time he dies. The caveman idea is he never catches on; he doesn’t know, he’s illiterate, blah, blah, blah.

“That’s part of the evolutionary mentality of about how we used to be dumb, dark cave dwellers –you know ‘Oooh, oooh, oooh!’ kind of stuff—and now we’re enlightened, 21^st century real brains. We got it all figured out. Of course, if you look around you, and you figure, ‘If this is gotten it figured out, we’re in trouble!’

“You go back through history, especially you go back through the Scriptures, and you see people 6,000 years ago and they weren’t cave dwellers. In the time between Adam and Noah, the technological advances that existed on the planet during that period of time were in some areas farther along than where we are in our day.

“In Genesis 4 you see the sciences and the arts developed. Everything from metallurgy and transportation and so forth. These people didn’t walk out just dummies. Mankind has had a tremendous amount of understanding, and you read books about the 1st Century and you’re sort of like everybody was illiterate and nobody could read or write and that kind of thing. That just wasn’t true.

“Here Mary is, just simple—she calls herself the ‘handmaiden of the Lord.’ Just a simple lady who was educated and. by the way, she was a LADY who was educated. In some places in the world that isn’t a common thing, like if you go into, for example, Persia.

“Everywhere the Bible ever went, whether it was in Israel or whether it was through the two centuries of Christianity, everywhere the Bible goes, literacy goes. Why would that be? We’re people of a Book. Israel was the people of a Book.

“Here’s a little lady in the 1^st Century . . .  Rome runs Palestine and yet she, Elisabeth, Zacharias, John and a whole host of others, are not only able to read and write, they are extremely intelligized about what the Bible has to say. They are schooled in their Bible.

“These are not dumb, illiterate people, and you need to kind of make a mental shift out of that kind of thinking when you think about these people. They weren’t just wide-eyed ignoramuses sitting around just being fooled by something they thought was a vision. These are people who are cool, calculating, thoughtful people who evaluated what was going on by the objective standard of God’s Word, just like you and I should do. They’re not a whit behind us in those regards.

“So when Gabriel comes and says these things to Mary, it’s fascinating how everything he says is so deeply rooted in what the Old Testament prophecy is all about, and when we’re going down through you see when Zacharias and Mary talk, everything they say they just almost quote out of the Old Testament.

“So if Gabriel was kind of shining her on here she would have caught him. There’s a tremendous amount of doctrinal content in these statements and in the communication that’s being made. You could compare that, by the way, with what is generally assumed to be communication from God today."