Mother like no other

In Scripture, every time Jesus Christ addresses His mother, He calls her ‘woman.’ John 2:3-5, for example, relays, [3] And when they wanted wine, the mother of Jesus saith unto him, They have no wine.
[4] Jesus saith unto her, Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come.
[5] His mother saith unto the servants, Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it.

“If you want Mary to tell you what to do, here it is,” says Jordan. “Folks, if you really wanted to give the reverence due to the mother of Christ, if you really wanted to honor her, do what she says when she speaks in the Scripture. What she says is, ‘Whatever he says to you, do it.’ That’s interesting.”

*****

Everywhere the Word of God has ever gone so has literacy and unlike in Persia, Bible women were educated. In the 1st Century, for example, Rome ran Palestine and yet Mary and Elisabeth could not only read and write but were schooled in their Bible and could tell you what it said front to back.

“When the angel Gabriel comes to Mary to tell her about having a child, it’s fascinating how everything he says is so deeply rooted in Old Testament prophecy,” says Jordan. "When Zacharias and Mary talk, everything said between them is almost a direct quote out of the Old Testament.

“There’s a tremendous amount of doctrinal content in their statements and in the communication being made. You could compare that, by the way, with what is generally assumed to be communication from God today.

“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.

“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 but, boy, you can’t read through these passages about Mary and believe that! These are not unintelligent, uninformed, incapable people as they’re generally said to be.

*****

“Have you ever seen that stand-up show ‘Defending the Caveman’? I heard that (comedian) on the radio say a caveman has no idea what his wife is about, what she needs, what she says.

“That’s part of the evolutionary mentality that says humans 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.

“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 were in some areas farther along than where we are today.

*****

“Luke 1:30 says, ‘And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God.’ That verse is filled with doctrinal content although it’s really a simple statement by the angel Gabriel to young Mary as he describes to her the mission God has for her.

“Luke writes in Luke 1:28-29, ‘And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.

[29] And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be.’

“God is going to give Mary a very special privilege. That word ‘favored’ there is the idea of finding grace—finding a very special place of service with God.

“Luke 31 says, ‘And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS.’

“That’s a very clear purpose statement about what Mary is going to be involved in. There was never any question in Mary’s mind about the child she was going to have—who He was or what His purpose in life was going to be.

“ ‘Thou shalt have a son’ (there’s the humanity and the humility of the Messiah). ‘Thou shalt call his name Jesus’ (there’s His deity as well as His humanity as well as His mission). The name Jesus means Jehovah Savior. That’s a tremendous statement about who He is.

“Everything that the Messiah’s going to be, Mary has it laid out for her to start with. When you read that, you see the whole compass of the prophetic program all gathered together in just a few short statements given to Mary.

“I have to say to you there are theologians of our day that don’t get this. Mary understood something about the Bible that all the rest—the great theologians of our day—don’t get.

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“Right division and studying the Bible dispensationally has fallen into total disrepute today but the only way you can understand what the angel said to Mary—and the only way Mary could have understood, or would have had any expectation to understand what’s here—is in being a dispensational Bible student.

“While verse 31 relates to the first coming of Christ, verse 32 is about the Second Coming of Christ. One talks about what He’s going to be as He comes in His humanity, born of Mary. The other talks about what He’s going to be when He comes back as Messiah to reign.

“Now, if you’re left at the mercy of the theologians, they will tell you that the latter (the reigning) . . .

“I’ll never forget going to a retreat of a bunch of preacher guys my first year in Mobile College in Mobile, Ala., and having W.C. Dobbs (the best professor I ever had in school, bar none for anywhere I’ve ever been), go down through the passage in Luke and say, ‘Well, we know that Jesus was conceived in the womb of Mary and born to a virgin, and that He was going to be great and called the Son of the highest, but when it says in verse 33 that He shall reign over the house of Jacob, we know that that was just spiritually speaking. It’s not literal; it isn’t real; God is THROUGH with Israel and has replaced Israel with us.’

“Dobbs was an Amillennialist. He picked up my Scofield Reference Bible once and said, ‘Son, that book has done more damage to Christendom than any other book written in the 21st Century.’

“And I remember thinking, ‘How can I believe that verse 31 is literal if verse 33 isn’t literal?! If what’s said in verse 32 and 33 aren’t real and literal, then how can anyone think verse 31 is literal?!'

"How can it be saying something literal and then all of a sudden it isn’t literal anymore and it’s all figurative?! Either it’s literal or it isn’t literal. Either the house of Jacob is the house of Jacob, and the throne of David is the throne of David, and His reign is going to be forever, or it isn’t! And if that’s figurative then, for heaven’s sake, why is the virgin birth not figurative?!’

“You see how that makes no sense?! You’re left at the mercy of theologians to tell you what the verses mean; you’re left in a situation that endorses the apostate, where you don’t know whether God can say what He means or mean what He says because whatever He said He didn’t mean, and what He meant He didn’t say because it isn’t there!

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“Well, Mary had none of those problems. Mary asks the angel in verse 34, ‘How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?’ and the angel answers, ‘The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.’

“She caught it! She knew it was real! She knew this wasn’t some ‘spiritually understood’ idea of things that didn’t have anything to do with reality!

“She understood what the angel said, and the only way she could have understood it was obviously the way she was intended to understand it, and nobody has a right to change, or even to doubt the words and their natural meaning.”

(new article tomorrow)