In Mark 16:16 Christ says those who believe AND are baptized shall be saved. Does this mean baptism saves? How could the thief on the cross be saved then?
The book of Mark is a little strange in that our best manuscripts completely end the book of Mark at Mark 16:8.
The rest of the book of Mark including that part about baptism was added later and is probably not part of the original narrative.
The longer ending of Mark is a well-known issue and the only other place this happens is the section in John 8 where the woman was caught in adultery (John 7:53-8:11). These are two of the only large places something was clearly added to the text from later church tradition. They could be further eyewitness stories but it’s hard to tell, so I tend to treat them carefully.
Even if it is original, He could be talking about the willingness to be baptized as a testimony, since refusing something like that would be disobedient and might prove they didn’t truly believe.
Notice, when He gives the parallel statement later, the only group that is condemned are those who don’t believe (saying nothing about the unbaptized)
Leviticus 26:11 God talks about his soul? Never caught that before. This verse implies that God must have a soul?
In Leviticus, and in the rest of the Bible, the concept of the “soul,” especially when it is expressed like that, is a very strong way to say “every fiber of my being.”
In the Bible, soul is not treated as a separate entity from your body and spirit; it’s a word to describe your entire self (or your entire conscious experience).
The word “soul”doesn’t refer to only one small part of you. It refers to the whole man and/or your entire conscious experience:
(Genesis 2:7 CSB)
Then the Lord God formed the man out of the dust from the ground (body) and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils (sprit), and the man became a living being (Hebrew word for soul).
So in this case, Leviticus 26:12 may be better understood by translating it like this:
And I will make my dwelling place among you, and I will genuinely not despise you.
(The implication is that if they do not obey in the way God commanded, His presence, grace, and blessing would depart from them and His actions would show contempt and scorn for them.)
I did not know Luke was the only Gentile in an all Jewish cast of New Testament writers? Is this true?
Yes Luke is the only Gentile writer on the New Testament unless the book of Hebrews was written by a Gentile, but nobody knows for sure who wrote it. Luke gathered accounts of as many eyewitnesses as he could and probably wrote to one of his Gentile friends named Theophilus.
Luke 1:15 says that John the Baptist was filled with the Holy Spirit before he was born. This would appear to support “Election” as a fetus would be too young to choose.
As difficult as it is for us to struggle with and accept, election is biblical, with Peter, the Apostle Paul, and even Jesus being strong in the subject. There’s a lot to unpack there and we would have to examine a few texts to see what’s going on, but the point is that God works all things according to His will, and that includes our salvation (see Ephesians chapter 1, Romans chapters 8 and 9, and John chapters 6 and 10 for the strongest passages on this). This doesn’t mean we’re robots, but it does mean that God opens the eyes of the spiritually blind so they can see His love and glory, and that when He does, they respond in faith.
There’s a tension there between our own responsibility and God’s election. Both of them are given to us in the Bible and both of them are true at the same time. There are many who disagree and it’s not worth splitting fellowship over, especially because the main focus is the fact that we’re saved by Christ alone, from God’s grace alone through faith alone on the foundation of Scripture alone for God’s glory alone.
It’s not that there’s tension between those two things in real life, I mean that there’s a tension because the Bible clearly teaches both concepts.
Like 1:25 what disgrace was taken away from Elizabeth? Luke had already said she was blameless?
Luke 1:25 it was a disgrace in those days to never have any children. She was blameless (in that situation) because she didn’t do anything to warrant the curse and pain of being childless.
I do not understand the whole valuation thing in Leviticus 27 for men and women and their ages? Why did God put more value on men if Christ died for all? And the women were the ones who appeared to never waver and waited for his body while the men who knew Christ best ran off? Also, Leviticus 27:28 how can something devoted to destruction be holy to the Lord?
This valuation in Leviticus 27 has nothing to do with their redemption or their true value, it probably had to do with their economic value. This offering wasn’t to purchase them from anything, it was because that particular person was devoted to Temple service and instead of fulfilling their service, they could pay money.
That’s why they’re valued differently. A man and his prime offers more economical value because he can do harder manual labor
In Leviticus 27:28 it’s saying that if you dedicate something to Temple service, you can’t sell it or get rid of it
In verse 29, it talks about either an animal that has been dedicated as a temple sacrifice, or may be talking about a criminal who incurs the death penalty. But the context seems to have a lot more to do with a sacrificial animal.
Luke 1:35 the Holy Spirit did not have actual physical intercourse with Mary correct? The Holy Spirit is not a physical thing correct? The physical Christ was conceived by some other means than intercourse?
Did Christ have physical form before being born to Mary?
If He was and has always been, then how was he “born again” unless there was no physical version of Christ until conception started in Mary’s womb?
Christ (God the Son) most likely appeared in physical form during other parts of the Old Testament (Joshua 5:14) but He never took on human flesh to such an extent that He was willing to indwell a physical human body, and on top of that, to indwell it permanently after the resurrection.
It’s not some physical union that the Holy Spirit was engaged in, but He still miraculously supplied the seed that was lacking in Mary to conceive. “This was a holy act by a holy God to produce holy offspring” as Douglas Wilson puts it.
The reason this was necessary is that the curse of the Sin Nature wasn’t passed down genetically, but covenantally. The Father of a child passes along the sin nature, as the covenant head of the household (even if he’s not in the picture), and so if Jesus had a physical father, He would have inherited that sin nature. He needed to be unblemished by sin in every aspect. For more on covenant headship, Paul unpacks this a bit in Romans 5
Just as Adam was an untainted, unfallen, direct creation of God, Jesus is called the Second Adam because His physical body is untainted, unfallen direct creation of God
On top of that, Jesus came from the kingly line of Jeconiah (also named Coniah or Jehoiachin), and his family line was cursed by the prophet Jeremiah in Jeremiah 22:28-30. Jesus wouldn’t have inherited that curse either since He didn’t have a physical father to inherit the covenantal guilt of His ancestors either.
When it comes to Jesus being in physical form before he was born, it’s not necessary for him to begin to exist once he takes physical form, since he is God, the second person of the Triune Godhead, he’s always existed, he’s coeternal with the Father, he took on some kind of physical form to show himself to a few people in the old testament, but he first took on physical human form at the Incarnation.
I understand that the Son has always existed but was his indwelling in Mary the first time he had a physical body?
When he died and rose again that was still his healed physical body also correct?
When he ascended to Heaven what happened to his physical body? Is he in it now? Is it on ice? Will he “pick it back up” again when he returns in Glory?
when we see Angels sometimes appearing in the old testament, it’s hard to tell if they have physical form but they are visible in some way. It would make sense to me that if they had the power to wipe out an entire Camp of enemy soldiers they would have the power to appear in some kind of physical form, so that may not have been his first physical appearance, but it was definitely his first appearance as a real, genuine human being who was born naturally and grew naturally just like any other human
Also, after his resurrection he was resurrected in a glorified body that is the same physical human body he lived with during his life and ministry, but according to the Apostle Paul it’s glorified Beyond the normal human weaknesses and limitations that we experience
When he was resurrected and appeared to the disciples, he still had the nail prints and the spear wound in his side, but rather than being hurt by them, he wears them proudly as tokens of his crucifixion
So this doesn’t necessarily mean that when we’re resurrected we’re going to have the same physical illnesses we died with.
Christ’s physical human body was taken up into heaven and even to this day, the Bible tells us that he seated at the right hand of God the Father in the Heavenly throne room and he continues to pray for us, continuing his role as our great high priest forever.
What’s the story with Samson in the book of Judges? I don’t understand any of it, why the supernatural strength? Why the long hair? What’s the purpose of the story?
I may have to unpack a little bit of what’s going on, but first, it’s important to lay a foundation of understanding how to read these kinds of passages.
The first foundation to establish is that these things happened and were written “for our instruction” as the Apostle Paul explains in Romans 15:4.
So we read Scripture as history, we read Scripture as a work of literature (as it so often demonstrates literary mastery and contains vivid imagery and symbolism on top of the historical aspect), but the most practical reason we read Scripture was that God had certain things happen and were recorded as an example and were given “for our instruction” (As 1 Corinthians 10:11 also says).
The second foundation we have to lay, then, is the understanding that as the creator of the universe, God has called certain people to fulfill certain roles to accomplish his purposes or to demonstrate some example for us to follow or avoid. Or to warn us of falling into similar mistakes, traps, or sins that they did.
So for Samson, (first of all), God was the one who called him to have the strength he did. It wasn’t because Samson was anything, but because God would raise up someone who would have the ability to defend the nation of Israel in a peculiar way (that nobody else in biblical history ever had again).
This was a strength so humanly impossible, that we can say beyond any question, nobody could have accomplished any of this without God giving him the ability to be like that. We see a similar theme with the man named Gideon, who was called to lead an army of only 300 soldiers. The reason the army was so small was because if it had been a reasonable size, Israel would have grounds to “boast over me, saying, ‘My own hand has saved me.’” (Judges 7:2).
So the strength Samson had was something he had no right to boast in, and the token of its divine source was the “Nazirite vow” that he had been under since before he was born. For more information about this Nazirite vow, you can read Numbers chapter 6, particularly in the beginning.
Since Samson was under this vow, cutting his hair would have essentially been the only way to break it besides eating anything made from grapes, which was another way to dishonor the vow. (The reason for the grapes probably carries symbolic or literary significance that I might unpack one of these days, but I’ll leave it alone for now).
The woman Delilah who continued to pester him into finding his weakness, and the overwhelming idiocy of his blindness to her plot was an important part of our instruction as well. Just as what happened with Samson, so often we forfeit the strength, wisdom, reputation, and testimony God has given us and trade it for a one-night stand with essentially a prostitute.
There’s a palpable irony to the entire story. But even though he neglected all the warnings and betrayed his own people and nation, along with his Nazirite vow by yielding to the woman, God showed grace toward the end of his life, after his humiliation and slavery, in that he had one final gift of that unnatural strength to redeem his honor and topple the building onto himself and the people who were inside.
I know there’s still a lot more to unpack, but hopefully it makes more sense to read these stories as not only history but literature and instruction. They’re packed full of symbolism and sometimes, it will only make sense if you recognize where the imagery comes from and what it refers to.