Reverence due to Mary

One of the most startling, collective doctrinal statements in all of New Testament Scripture for the study of prophecy is what the angel tells Mary, and if you’ve got that straight you can straighten out about 98 percent of the heresy in Roman Catholic and Protestant theology, says Richard Jordan.

The Hebrew form of the name Mary is Miriam. As you know Miriam was Moses’ sister and it’s the same name.

Luke 1: 28: [28] 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.

When Gabriel says, “Hail,” he doesn’t fall down to worship her, you notice. The next verse: [29] And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be.
[30] And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God.

Notice Dr. Luke, as a good physician, his evaluation of the condition of Mary when Gabriel came was that she was a virgin. Verse 34 says: [34] Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?

Now, the Revised Standard Version says, “How shall this be seeing I have no husband?” Then it wouldn’t surprise you when you go back to Isaiah 7:14 that the prophecy that the RSV and those kinds of Bibles translate is that, it’s not a ‘virgin,’ but “young woman, young maiden” and that kind of thing.

But there’s 12-14-year-old kids not a half of a mile from here having babies and they don’t have husbands. That isn’t what the verse said. She said, “How can I be pregnant with a child when I’ve never had sexual relationships with a man?” I know not a man, with “know” being in a biblical sense. Pretty straightforward.

Dr. Luke, in his evaluation, said Mary is a virgin. The reason that’s important is come back to Matthew 1. There’s a great controversy about that, of course, because that’s a basic miracle.

Isaiah 7:14: [14] Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

 The Hebrew word “virgin” there is the word “alma,” and sometimes that word is used to describe a virgin.

Genesis 24:42: [42] And I came this day unto the well, and said, O LORD God of my master Abraham, if now thou do prosper my way which I go;
[43] Behold, I stand by the well of water; and it shall come to pass, that when the virgin cometh forth to draw water, and I say to her, Give me, I pray thee, a little water of thy pitcher to drink;

Alma is a word in Hebrew that means the same as our English “virgin”. Then there’s the word “alma” that sometimes refers to a virgin and sometimes maybe doesn’t. But as it’s used in the Bible, it always does.

In order to find where it doesn’t refer to a virgin, you have to go out into other kind of literature.

But all of that is moot when you come to Matthew 1:23: [23] Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.

This is why I say to you all the time, if you study the Bible, compare verse with verse. The Bible contains its own definition, its own system of understanding.

And while it may be wonderful to know what Josephus said about something, or what Will Durant said about Roman history, or what somebody says the word is used in the secular culture of that day, the key is what does God mean when He used it in His Book!

So if I’m trying to figure out what Isaiah 7:14 is talking about, and it’s quoted in Matthew 1, I get some help.

In Matthew 1:23, that word translated “virgin” there, the Greek word means nothing other than exactly what our English word means, so if there’s the possibility of two different definitions in Isaiah, Matthew 1:23 tells you which definition to use.

So the RSV and the J.B. Philips and the New English Bible, and the Jerusalem Bible, and all these versions that say “young woman” and “maiden” back there, and all the preachers and teachers and commentaries that do the same, are wrong because Matthew 1:23 doesn’t allow two definitions. It only has one definition. And so it picks for you . . . you see, if you can translate it one of two ways, which way do you choose? Well Matthew 1:23 tells you which way to go.

Now, I know YOU don’t have a question about that, but you’re going to hear people when you get out there in the marketplace constantly tell you, “Well, that word virgin didn’t mean a virgin.”

When I was coming up through school back in the ’60s I was raised as a lad in a modernist denomination. We actually finally had a pastor who stood in the pulpit and said that he did not believe in the virgin birth of Christ! Fortunately for me, I had believing parents and that was the last time we went to that church. 

There was a guy, Neil Sorey, a very famous theologian 60 years ago, who propagated the idea that Jesus Christ was the illegitimate son of a blond-haired, blue-eyed German soldier who was down in Palestine from Rome (one of the Roman soldiers who came out of Europe down into Palestine and was there ruling) and that he had a relationship with Mary and that’s where who the father of the Jesus Christ was.

Now, Neil Sorey didn’t invent that idea. That idea’s been around for 2,000 years. He just popularized it. I remember hearing that and I remember later on learning that that idea was as old as two millenniums ago and I got real mad, thinking, “Here’s a guy that wrote a book, made a name for himself, going around propagating this like it was all brand new and he discovered it and it had been around for almost two thousand years!”

There are people, you hear it at Easter time, who talk about, “Jesus didn’t really die, he just passed out and they put him in a tomb and because the tomb was cool he had just swooned and he was revived.”

That idea is as ancient as the hills! You just need to know about some of these things. There’s the idea that Isaiah didn’t write all of Isaiah that it was written by Deutero-Isaiah. Two Isaiahs. Then there’s the Graf-Wellhausen theory that Moses didn’t write the Pentateuch and that was really written by JPED and R.

All that stuff has been debunked and proven wrong but you’ll hear it repeated. So, what you have in Luke 1 is an historic account written by a good historian who happened to be a medical doctor. He makes a medical evaluation and says that the virgin was “espoused.”

In Old Testament terminology an espousal is equivalent to marriage prior to the couple living together as husband and wife. They’d been committed to one another but they hadn’t taken up the relationship of living together as husband and wife as yet.

So Luke is making a very defined medical declaration here in Luke 1:27: [27] To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name was Mary.

When it says “hail,” he doesn’t worship her, he just greets her. Notice it doesn’t say blessed art thou ABOVE women or blessed art thou OVER women. It just says blessed thou art AMONG women. She’s viewed just like any other woman but she’s especially BLESSED.

That word “favor” means to have grace shown unto you. When you favor somebody, you give them a special gift of attention.

In Psalm 116:16, the Messiah identifies Himself as “the son of the handmaiden of the Lord.” What Mary’s doing is she’s saying, “Okay, I believe that this Scripture is being fulfilled.” Mary’s heart and mind was filled with the Word of God.

She didn’t do what Zacharias did. It says he was troubled and fear fell on him and he said, “Well, beh, uh, heh, uh!” Mary said, “Here’s this message,” and she starts thinking in her mind and what’s in her mind?! The Word of God.

Listen, folks, the way you respond to things that happen, you begin to think about them, if you’ve got the Word of God filling your heart and mind and dominating your thinking processes, and you begin to think about what’s happening in life, in what context, what’s the frame of reference that you’re thinking about them in? The Word of God.

Psalm 116:16: [16] O LORD, truly I am thy servant; I am thy servant, and the son of thine handmaid: thou hast loosed my bonds.

When the Messiah comes, that’s going to be His profession. Mary says, “Okay, if I’m going to be the one through whom the Messiah’s going to be born, behold here I am. Do exactly what the Word of God says; I’m ready. I’m here.”

Now you talk about the reverence that’s due to Mary--there it is! You talk about an example of “present your body a living sacrifice,” a completely, totally dedicated vessel for the purpose of God, there it is.

There may be her equal in Scripture, but there’s not her superior when it comes to this issue. The reason she was highly favored, given much grace, is because she BELIEVED God’s Word. She had an intelligent understanding of God’s Word, and when the angel Gabriel came to break the silence, she knew it was going to be broken.

There are people there in expectancy waiting for Him to come. They knew the time schedule and when Gabriel came and appeared to her, she knew she got a message from God; she believed it.

Luke 1:48: [48] For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.

Come with me to Malachi and notice why she said that. Malachi 3: 12] And all nations shall call you blessed: for ye shall be a delightsome land, saith the LORD of hosts.

I have to tell you I run in to a bit of a conundrum when I get to passages like this because we can take almost every line of these verses about what Gabriel says to Mary, and what Mary’s going to say here, and we could spend the next year, because almost every line in it is a reference to an Old Testament passage that begins a chain of passages through the Old Testament that’s a whole doctrinal chain of categorical information.

So connected into the Word of God was Mary that everything she says just hooks into verses that hook into another verse. If we got involved in it, we’d never get through with the Book of Luke.

The point is Mary knows that there’s more than just her getting a blessing here. She knows that she’s just a representative of her whole nation and what’s going to be said of the nation is said of her because she’s going to be the one through whom the Messiah, the Savior of the nation, is going to come.