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 Gabriel comes and says these things to Mary about having a child, it’s fascinating how everything he says is so deeply rooted in Old Testament prophecy, and when Zacharias and Mary talk, everything they say they almost directly quote out of the Old Testament,” says Jordan.
“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.
“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 and boy, you can’t read through this passage 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, 21st 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 during that period of time were in some areas farther along than where we are in our day.
“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.
*****
“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.
*****
“The issue of 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 that Mary could have understood, or would have had any expectation to understand what’s here, is if she were a dispensational Bible student.
“Verse 31. That’s the first coming of Christ. Verse 32. That’s the second coming of Christ. One talks about His first coming and the other talks about His Second coming. 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.
“If you’re left at the mercy of the theologians, they will tell you that that 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. He was the best professor I ever had in school--bar-none in anywhere I’ve ever been: W.C. Dobbs.
“Dr. Dobbs, the first night, was speaking and he ran down through this passage. And he said, ‘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 he said in verse 32 and 33 aren’t real and literal, then how come you think verse 31 is literal?! How can he be saying something literal and then all of a sudden it isn’t literal anymore; it’s all figurative?! Either it’s literal or it isn’t literal. Either he meant what he said or he didn’t mean what he said! 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?!’
“Makes no sense! You’re left at the mercy of theologians to tell you what it means. You’re left in a situation that endorses the apostate and 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.
*****
“Well, Mary had none of those problems. When Mary heard that she said in verse 34: ‘How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?
[35] And the angel answered and said unto her, 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 and designed idea of things that didn’t have anything to do with reality. She understood what the angel said, and the only way that 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.
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