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Sex was not in God's original plan: Difference between revisions
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William Branham had this bizarre teaching that God did not intend children to be born by sex. | William Branham had this bizarre teaching that God did not intend children to be born by sex. | ||
=What the Bible teaches= | |||
It was clearly God's intent that men and women would produce children together: | |||
:''And '''God blessed them'''. And '''God said to them''', “Be fruitful and '''multiply and fill the earth''' and subdue it...<ref>The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton: Standard Bible Society, 2001), Ge 1:28.</ref> | |||
=What William Branham taught= | =What William Branham taught= | ||
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The strange thing is, if this was the case, why did God create men and women with sexual organs that were '''designed''' to produce children? Did He '''glue a penis on Adam''' as an after-thought? Were Adam and Eve created with '''parts of their bodies that God never intended them to use'''? | The strange thing is, if this was the case, why did God create men and women with sexual organs that were '''designed''' to produce children? Did He '''glue a penis on Adam''' as an after-thought? Were Adam and Eve created with '''parts of their bodies that God never intended them to use'''? | ||
= | ==Message churches addition to this doctrine== | ||
Message ministers attempt to use Psalms 51:5 to prove that God never did intend children to be born by sex: | |||
:''Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.''<ref>The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton: Standard Bible Society, 2001), Ps 51:5.</ref> | |||
This does not prove William Branham's doctrine at all. It merely states that after the fall, all men have a congenital tendency toward evil. This doctrine finds expression in the following Bible passages: | |||
:''And when the LORD smelled the pleasing aroma, the LORD said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done.<ref>The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton: Standard Bible Society, 2001), Ge 8:21.</ref> | |||
:''If they sin against you—for there is no one who does not sin—and you are angry with them and give them to an enemy, so that they are carried away captive to the land of the enemy, far off or near...''<ref>The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton: Standard Bible Society, 2001), 1 Ki 8:46.</ref> | |||
:''Who can say, “I have made my heart pure; I am clean from my sin”?<ref>The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton: Standard Bible Society, 2001), Pr 20:9.</ref> | |||
One is a sinner and lives under the power of sin, in some sense from the first moment of one’s existence. This statement, often falsely understood (in the history of Christian theology also), does not mean either a sin of the mother or of the parents, or a sin the speaker has inherited from ancestors or even from an original couple; nor is it a sin originating from procreation or through ritual impurity. | |||
This is not an explanation of sin achieved by the human being’s pointing away from himself to others, tracing it to something outside the self. Instead, it touches and ensnares him, as David himself acknowledges in verse 6: | |||
:''“I have sinned.” | |||
Sin is a given, with his being and becoming, from the beginning. The human being knows no time of innocence in which he as yet had no need of God’s care and God’s graciousness, for which he prays in the opening appeal. He acknowledges not only this or that individual fault, not only the transgression of this or that commandment; he understands himself not only as the perpetrator of individual sins — rather as altogether a sinner before God, in the face of every cause–and–effect relationship for which he himself is responsible, and accepts responsibility, from forever, without exception.<ref>Frank-Lothar Hossfeld and Erich Zenger, Psalms 2: a Commentary on Psalms 51-100, ed. Klaus Baltzer, trans. Linda M. Maloney, Hermeneia—a Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005), 20.</ref> | |||
When David says, “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me,” he is not blaming his mother for his sin, of course. The whole tone of the psalm is against any such idea. David is confessing his sin and taking full responsibility for it. He is confessing that there was never a moment in his existence when he was not a sinner. As one of the early commentators says, “He lays on himself the blame of a tainted nature instead of that of a single fault.”<ref>James Montgomery Boice, Psalms 42–106: An Expositional Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2005), 428.</ref> | |||
=Quotes of William Branham= | =Quotes of William Branham= | ||