John Markum

Category: Scripture

Why is Revelation so Confusing?

Posted on by johnmarkum

I recently finished an End Times series at Life Valley Community Church, called The Last Amen, in which I walked us through the important points of Biblical prophecy yet to be fulfilled. But Revelation – the last book of the Bible – can be very intimidating to read, not to mention confusing.
Here are four reasons why this concluding book of Scripture can be difficult to understand:

  1. Author’s Perspective. Revelation was written from the perspective of a first century writer to a first century audience. For example, Revelation 8;10-11 describes a “star” crashing into earth. It is clearly not a star as we understand the word, but it could mean an asteroid, meteorite, satellite, or an ICMB for all we know. We need to remember that Revelation was written for us, but it was not written to us.
  2. Apocalyptic Symbolism. Revelation is the only book of the whole Bible written almost entirely in a literary genre known as apocalyptic literature. It is replete with symbolism and iconography that is both terrifying and bizarre at times. Various people, creatures, and beasts with seemingly alien descriptions are almost all intended figuratively and are part of this style of writing.
  3. Chronology in Snapshots. Revelation is not a perfectly linear timeline of future events. Rather there are parts of the book which play out like a flashback scene in a movie. This is most evident with chapters 11-14 in the middle of the book, which many theologians refer to as a “Historical Interlude” as it retraces how we got to that specific point in the Tribulation. Additionally, many of the “scenes” of Revelation work as snapshots in time, as if different segments of John’s revelation which are connected, but not necessarily chronological.
  4. Summation of Scripture. So much of Biblical prophecy comes to an apex in Revelation that it is difficult to know what is being cross-referenced and what is simply borrowing language. Matthew 24, 2 Thessalonians 2, Daniel 7 and 9, Psalm 2, Zechariah 4, Genesis 3, 1 Corinthians 15, and many other passages seem to be overlapping and intersecting with Revelation. Nothing interprets Scripture like Scripture. And yet we must be careful not to force interpretations that are not intended by the Holy Spirit.

Revelation is a deeply important piece of inspired Scripture, worth studying and obeying (Revelation 1:3). But like all of Scripture, we must be careful to read and interpret it as it is intended, not as we would make it. God bless you as you spend time in the Word!

Blessings,
Pastor John

Did Mary Ever Sin?

Posted on by johnmarkum

I recently began addressing the doctrines of Catholicism that revolve around their belief that Mary was something more than Protestants Christians claim her to be. The four core dogmas of RCC Mariology include:

  • Perpetual Virginity. This is the notion that Mary remained a virgin after giving birth to Jesus, and was never sexually intimate with her husband Joseph, and gave him no children aside from Jesus (who was not biologically Joseph’s son).
  • Immaculate Conception. The idea behind this doctrine is that in order for Mary to have been the vessel for bringing God’s Son into the world, she too must have been sinless. Catholics will argue that Mary still needed Jesus as a Savior, but that she was saved from sinning, not saved from sin she committed like everyone else.
  • Mary as “The Mother of God”. This doctrine is based on the Greek title theotokos meaning “God Bearer” or “Mother of God”. Protestants generally reject this title, and I’ll discuss why in a later post.
  • The Assumption of Mary. This doctrine insists that Mary did not physically die like most people, but that she ascended into Heaven – or, God “assumed” her into Heaven – like Christ, Elijah, and Enoch are described as having experienced.

For today, let’s address Immaculate Conception…

First of all, it is worth mentioning that among a very small, select group of people in the Bible, Mary is not mentioned as having ever sinned. Noah got drunk, Abraham lied, David committed adultery and murder, Peter denied Christ, and on we could go. And yet, Mary is an exception to this norm.

The origin of this dogma begins in the 5th century, around the idea of Mary as the Christotokos or “Christ-bearer,” and culminates in the Council of Ephesus in 431 AD, where she was labeled the Theotokos, or “God-bearer,” which I’ll address in a later post. But some of the language around Mary’s innocence dates back earlier. Patristic fathers such as Irenaeus, used words such as “innocent” to describe Mary, in the mid-to-late 2nd century, And others such as Ambrose of Milan and Augustine more directly asserted that she was free from original sin.

While I hold high regard to the earliest church fathers, it is important to recognize that they were fallible also. Even the apostles were not free from mistakes! The perfect inspired words of Scripture they wrote in no way indicates that everything they thought or said was without error. We see this illustrated in Acts 15 at the Council of Jerusalem, where Peter, Paul, and James had robust debates about Gentiles coming to Christ!

Furthermore, we see from the letters of Paul that there were already a wide range of bizarre thoughts and heresies that were trying to seep into the early church. While Paul and the other apostles worked diligently to defend the Gospel against all perversions, their parting words foretold that heresy would continue to pry into the church (2 Timothy 4:1-4).

Catholics are quick to suggest that this means she never sinned. The problem is that she is not the only person in Scripture who is not directly charged with a recorded sin. Most of the apostles are not specifically recorded as sinning. Joseph, Mary’s husband, is not recorded as sinning. Timothy, Phoebe, Priscilla, Stephen, Phillip, and probably hundreds more are named, and yet never mentioned sinning. That’s because the Bible is an indictment on the sin of all humanity, not every individual human, with a log of their transgressions. And the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

One could just as easily say that the New Testament makes no mention of Mary being sinless, either! There is no veneration of Mary in the NT, no prayers offered to her, recognition of her outside the angel Gabriel who announced to her. So let’s look at what Gabriel says…

Luke 1:28, “And coming in, he said to her, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” Yes, you likely remember the verse saying “Hail Mary full of grace…” and that is how it is recited in the Catholic rosery. While the root word in the Greek is the root word for “grace” the original word is more often translated as “favored”. The semantics hardly matter, as both are an expression of God’s grace and favor over someone. The RCC will use this as one of very few verses about Mary’s spiritual character, however, to assert that she was sinless. But there’s a lot of problems with that interpretation.

The Greek word is used elsewhere in the NT. Ephesians 1:6-8, “to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace which He lavished on us. In all wisdom and insight…”

In these verses “freely bestowed” or “favored” is the same Greek word as “favored” or “full of grace” back in Luke. And it applies to all believers in Christ – who have definitely sinned. Furthermore, after the announcement of her pregnancy, Mary wrote a song that found its way into Luke – which I find beautiful. Luke 1:46-47, “My soul exalts the Lord, and my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.” In her outburst, Mary declares her own need for a Savior, and worships God for providing such a Savior for her!

Catholics have been careful to try to clarify that yes, Jesus is Mary’s Savior. But! Just as He saved us from our sin, He saved Mary from sinning at all. Thus, Jesus is still her Savior, but she also never sinned… It sounds nice, there is just no Biblical support for that! Romans 3:23 tells us plainly, “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” Jesus is the only human who walked the earth which the Bible clearly identifies as having never sinned. Hebrews 4:15 tells us that Jesus experienced temptation like the rest of humanity, “Yet without sin”. Luke records about 6 times at Jesus trials and crucifixion that He was innocent, blameless, and had done nothing wrong. Such is never said about Mary.

Conclusion: The doctrine of Immaculate Conception arose from the logic that Mary had to be sinless in order to give birth to the sinless Son of God. She did not need to be sinless, she just needed to be a virgin. Romans 5 makes it clear that we inherit our sin nature – sometimes called “original sin” – from our first father, Adam (Genesis 3). And as such, Jesus came from our Heavenly Father, rather than an earthly father who would pass on Adam’s curse. Romans 5:12, “Therefore, just as through one man [Adam] sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned…” verse 19, “For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the One [Jesus] the many will be made righteous.”

Christ skipped over the fallen nature of man by coming from His Heavenly Father, yet born of an earthly mother. As such He was fully God Himself, and free from sin – and yet fully human, able to take on the punishment of sin on behalf of the rest of humanity.

Takeaways:

  • The Doctrine of Immaculate Conception is based in human reasoning, not Scripture.
  • When we take the Bible at face value without asserting our opinions into it, there is no room for Mary to be sinless.
  • Mary is certainly worthy of our acknowledgment, as she brought our Savior into the world.
  • She is blessed among women – not above women. (Luke 1:42).

Next post in this series on Mary, we will address the Theotokos, the title ascribed to Mary by Catholics and Eastern Orthodox alike, meaning “Mother of God.”

Did Mary Remain a Virgin?

Posted on by johnmarkum

There are at least four key doctrines about Mary, the mother of Jesus, which are defended by the Roman Catholic Church (RCC). These dogmas are weak or outright heretical from a Biblical viewpoint, but clung to by the RCC because of church tradition. While I affirm church tradition in a general sense, such traditions must never take precedence over Scripture because God’s Spirit and His Scriptures do not contradict. Over the next few weeks here on my blog, I intend to address, and dismantle these dogmas from the Word of God. The four core dogmas of RCC Mariology include:

  • Perpetual Virginity. This is the notion that Mary remained a virgin after giving birth to Jesus, and was never sexually intimate with her husband Joseph, and gave him no children aside from Jesus (who was not biologically Joseph’s son).
  • Immaculate Conception. The idea behind this doctrine is that in order for Mary to have been the vessel for bringing God’s Son into the world, she too must have been sinless. Catholics will argue that Mary still needed Jesus as a Savior, but that she was saved from sinning, not saved from sin she committed like everyone else.
  • Mary as “The Mother of God”. This doctrine is based on the Greek title theotokos meaning “God Bearer” or “Mother of God”. Protestants generally reject this title, and I’ll discuss why in a later post.
  • The Assumption of Mary. This doctrine insists that Mary did not physically die like most people, but that she ascended into Heaven – or, God “assumed” her into Heaven – like Christ, Elijah, and Enoch are described as having experiencing.

For today, let’s address Perpetual Virginity…

Most Protestant Christians will be quick to point out that the Bible mentions Jesus having brothers, and indeed it does. In Matthew 13, Jesus is teaching in His hometown of Nazareth, and the people were having a hard time believing Jesus’ powerful words and wisdom. So they began criticizing Jesus, essentially saying “Who do you think you are?” because they knew Him and His family who grew up there in Nazareth. In Matthew 13:55-56, “Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not His mother called Mary, and His brothers, James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And His sisters, are they not all with us? Where then did this man get all these things?”

The Catholic response to this, is that Protestants have misinterpreted “brothers” and “sisters”, and the Greek word we interpret “brother” can be used to describe a close relative, likely a cousin. So I examined this further as it still felt like a odd interpretation to me. The Greek word in Matthew 13:55 for “brothers” is the Greek word adelphoi, the masculine of adelphai, which is translated “sisters” in verse 56. Everywhere you look in the New Testament, these words are translated “brothers” and “sisters”. Sometimes it is figurative, such as “brothers in Christ”, but it always means the common uses of the word “brother” never the broader assertion by Catholics as “relatives” or “cousins”. Never…

In fact, in Luke 21:16 Jesus says, “But you will be betrayed even by parents and brothers and relatives and friends…” This verse is perfect for studying this, because in context, we have several similar words and examples of how they are used. “Parents” means exactly as it sounds, literally “those who beget”. The word in Luke 21 for “brothers” is adelphon (same exact word for “brothers” in Matthew 13, with a different conjugation). But the word for “relatives” is the Greek word suggenes, literally meaning “relatives, kinfolk,” for which, “cousins” could be understood. Notice how completely different adelphon and suggenes are from each other in meaning, etymology, and use. And finally “friends” is the Greek philos which is related to adelphoi, but distinct from family, siblings, or relatives.

While this was enough of a slam dunk for me to move on, I pressed a little further, giving my RCC counterparts the benefit of the doubt that I – and vast numbers of far more talented translators – may have misinterpreted the meaning of this word. In Matthew 13:55 the people of Nazareth give the names Jesus’ “brothers”. In order, they appear as James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas. All of these were fairly common names (Peter was originally “Simon”, Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus, etc.), but why would Matthew feel compelled to record the names of Jesus’ four “brothers” if they were only cousins and not more closely related as siblings as the context of the verse and common use of the words would strongly suggest?

So I reasoned that if these were the half-brothers of Jesus, and Mary had given Joseph four sons (named in these verses) and an unknown number of daughters (unnamed in Scripture), then it stands to reason that these names given, were given in order from oldest to youngest, as was the custom of the culture (For example, the sons of Jacob in the OT, Genesis 35:22-26). That would mean that after Jesus, Mary gave birth to four more sons starting with James and Joseph. So I explored that possibility in more depth…

I realized that “Joseph” was Mary’s husband’s name, and tradition would warrant naming a son after their father. We see this in Luke 1 with the naming of John the Baptist (ironically, cousin to Jesus). “And it happened that on the eighth day they came to circumcise the child, and they were going to call him Zacharias, after his father. But his mother answered and said, ‘No indeed; but he shall be called John.’ And they said to her, ‘There is no one among your relatives who is called by that name‘.” (Luke 1:59-61). By the way, “relatives” in Luke 1, is the word suggenes again, but I digress…

This seems to lend more support to the idea that Mary did in fact have more children naturally with her husband Joseph. But why would Joseph name his second son after himself rather than his first son who is named “James”? Some Catholics may use that to suggest that “Joseph” was a family name and a cousin on Mary’s husband’s side – lending to their assertion that Jesus had no siblings and Mary had no other children. Until you look closer at the first son, James.

This James is mentioned by name elsewhere in the NT (Acts 1:14, Acts 15, Galatians 1:19, 1 Corinthians 15:7…), even being referred to as the “brother of the Lord”. So out of curiosity, I went back to Matthew 1, which records the paternal lineage of Jesus through his foster-father Joseph, and found that Mary’s husband had a father named “Jacob” (Matthew 1:16). And that was when I realized that “James” and “Jacob” are the same name. In fact, “James” is the English version of the Greek name “Jakob” in the same way that “Juan” is the Spanish name for the English name “John”.

This means that according to Matthew 13:55, Joseph and Mary had four sons after Jesus. They named the first one after Joseph’s father “James” or “Jakob”, and they named the second one after their father “Joseph” before having at least two more sons, Simon and Judas, and an unknown number of daughters along the way.

Add to this the fact that Matthew 1 tells us that Joseph received a dream before dismissing Mary for being pregnant with a child that he knew was not his. And after the dream, Matthew 1:24-25 says, “And Joseph awoke from his sleep and did as the angel of the Lord commanded him, and took Mary as his wife, but kept her a virgin until she gave birth to a Son; and he called His name Jesus.” The clear implication here is that Joseph waited “until” Mary delivered Jesus, and then took her to be his wife in every sense of the wording. The clearest, and most intelligent conclusion is that they had several children, at least one of which became a leader in the church, wrote the epistle of James, and later died as a martyr for his faith in his Savior and half-brother. To suggest anything else is eisegetical.

In conclusion: There is no merit in asserting the perpetual virginity of Mary after having delivered Jesus. Nothing is gained and nothing is lost theologically for accepting the clear teachings of Scripture and church history, that God blessed Joseph and Mary after delivering Jesus, with several more children of their own. I am also somewhat disturbed by Catholicism’s obsession with Mary’s sex life within her marriage after giving birth to the Lord. As if her perpetual virginity were of theological significance in the first place. Why does it matter if she lived as a married woman, had sex with her husband, and gave birth to other children after fulfilling God’s purpose for her to give birth to Jesus? Why does anyone care?! And if we do need to explore that (for some bizarre reason), 1 Corinthians 7:1-5 teaches us that it is sin for a wife and husband to withhold sex from one another. So the idea that God commanded Joseph to wed Mary, and then forbade him from living as husband and wife (which is recorded no where), is ridiculous to the extreme of cultish superstition.

Protestants are routinely accused as “hating” Mary, and this is utterly false and slanderous. As we continue this series of blog posts, I will address a proper, Biblical approach to how we should view Mary. But in my next addition to this series, I will address the Catholic theology of Mary being sinless, known as the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.

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