For at the window of my house I have looked out through my lattice, and I have seen among the simple, I have perceived among the youths, a young man lacking sense, passing along the street near her corner, taking the road to her house in the twilight, in the evening, at the time of night and darkness. And behold, the woman meets him, dressed as a prostitute, wily of heart. (Proverbs 7:6-10, ESV)

The Christian Faith Is Built Upon The Rock Of God Himself

This is a companion piece to Rob Bell: “Tramponinianity and the Virgin Birth. In it I show you why using the Virgin Birth of Christ in his pathetic illustration of how the Christian faith should be flexible is not only ridiculous, it also shows more evidence of Rob Bell’s own disrespect for the real Christ of Biblical revelation. What we have now in this neo-liberal cult of the Emergent Church are weak kneed professing Christian teachers like Rob Bell and Brian McLaren who are as limp as cooked angel hair spaghetti.

Bell has dreamed up this whole warped and toxic analogy of the trampoline of compromise as opposed to the brick of absolute Truth simply because these kinds of wishy washy lukewarm liars are afraid to take an actual stand for the Jesus they profess to follow. “O, you don’t like that doctrine,” they quietly whimper, “then we’ll stretch it and bend it to suit you.” So rather than to boldly stand for the Truth which the Lord has implicitly stated in the Bible instead they went off on their own slinking away to join an Emergent rebellion against the Word of God.

Now in order keep ourselves free from conflict in the lovey dovey man-pleasing world that Rob and the Emergent Church live in we can go ahead and bend and stretch cardinal doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ just like the springs of a trampoline. Yeah, this way if you disagree they can say, “that’s ok, let’s just love ‘Jesus.’ ” But in the real world we can see that instead this actually works out to “let’s love of our own concept of Jesus” (see–2 Cor. 11:4). And the genuine Jesus Christ was quite explicit about where the true Christian should build his life.

The Master told us the wise Christian would build their lives upon the rock solid truth of the immoveable and unchanging Rock of God Himself and His Word. Or have those Emergent vipers even tried to reimagine and repaint these Words from the Master – “Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the Rock.” (Matthew 7:24) One of the key points in the previous “Trampolinianity” piece was that the New Testament wasn’t written in Hebrew, so while “Rabbi” Rob wows those who don’t know any better, the Virgin Birth is critical to the Christian faith.

God Himself Is The Source Of The Doctrine Of The Virgin Birth Of Christ

It is exactly as Pastor Casey Freswick correctly points out in Postmodern Liberalism: Repainting A Non-Christian Faith:

Christians confess in the Apostles Creed that Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, was “conceived by the Holy Spirit” and “born of the virgin Mary.”8 Rob Bell claims this is a flexible interpretation of the Bible. He teaches that people claiming that Jesus had an earthly father who understand the apostles’ words about the birth of Jesus as a cultural myth (lie) to get the followers of Mithra to embrace the Christian faith is not a denial of the Christian faith. We may deny the virgin birth as long as we continue to live in the reality of God’s love. Doctrine is not that important. “Doctrine is a wonderful servant and a horrible master.”

Rob Bell is absolutely wrong. The virgin birth, like the doctrine of the Trinity, is a doctrine of Christ essential to having God. These doctrines are not horrible masters but blessed truths. The truth of the virgin birth is stronger than Rob Bell’s feeble attempt to distort the nature of Biblical truth. The virgin birth is true because God’s Word reveals it as true. This is not an interpretation of Scripture; it is the clear teaching of the Bible. If this makes me arrogant according to Rob Bell, then it makes Paul and John and the Word of God arrogant as well. Rob Bell’s position is the repainting of historic liberal theology. (Online source)

The inspired Greek text tells us the birth of Jesus of Nazareth came as a result of Mary being found to be with child from the Holy Spirit (Matthew 1:18, Greek). If we are to use Rob’s trampoline analogy and take out the “spring” of the Virgin Birth then we will logically have to throw out the inspiration of the Bible itself. You see the origins of Messiah and just Who He would be were discussed long before the “mystery religions” two hundred years before Christ that Rob is so fond of talking about. While the Apostle Matthew also discusses the Virgin Birth, this birth itself was revealed by God the Holy Spirit through the prophet Isaiah some five hundred years before those mystery cults.

Here’s what you need to understand, just as Satan has raised up his deceitful spirits like Rob Bell now with his doctrines of demons, is it really any wonder that the Devil would have raised up his mystery minions to sow confusion prior to the birth of Christ? Consider now that because of this false teaching by Bell, who claims to be a pastor-teacher sent by Jesus, I am now shifting into an argument I would use with a Jehovah’s Witness concerning the Deity of Christ. Some of what I will point out actually comes from my article Jehovah’s Witnesses and Isaiah 9:6.

And yes, we will concede that Rob does say he believes in the Deity of Christ and the Virgin Birth, but the point is he obviously doesn’t know these essential doctrines of the historic orthodox Christian faith simply cannot be stretched (changed) and/or removed without throwing out the plenary inspiration of Holy Scripture. Isaiah 7:14 reads – Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel. When this verse is then cross-checked with Matthew 1:22-23 we find the name Immanuel means “God with us,” and that this passage of Holy Scripture is speaking of Jesus of Nazareth.

Rob Bell Creates Questions Instead Of Answering Them

What’s amazing to me is that someone who is allegedly a Christian pastor would actually make the following argument. Yet in Velvet Elvis: Repainting The Christian Faith (VE) Bell himself opens the door for someone to be able to doubt the Virgin Birth when he says:

But what if, as you study the origin of the word “virgin” you discover that the word “virgin” in the gospel of Matthew actually comes from the book of Isaiah, and then you find out that in the Hebrew language at that time, the word “virgin” could mean several things (026)

Now before we roll out the Rob Bell sympathy wagon there is just no real way to defend him here. Instead of doing what I’m going to do and show you that this is actually a false teaching Bell instead leaves it open for people to doubt. I don’t know his motivation so I can only assume he wanted to do so to push forth his ludicrous notion that the Virgin Birth could be removed from the Christian faith and everything would be just fine. The huge hole Bell dug for himself here is that, yes the Hebrew almah can mean “young woman,” but he neglects to inform his readers about the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures called the Septuagint.

This translation was completed at least one hundred years before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth and was in as common a use in its day as the King James Version is today. When the Jewish scholars who made this translation came to Isaiah 7:14 they used the word parthenos in translating the Hebrew word almah. All of us who hold to the historic orthodox Christian faith use the historical-grammatical approach in our hermeneutics. We already knew about the word almah in the Hebrew and that parthenos was used in the Septuagint and in Matthew’s Gospel. This nothing new at all.

The Messiah Was To Be God Himself

However, the key idea of the Greek text of Matthew is that it is itself inspired by God the Holy Spirit. That fact is Matthew used parthenos because God Himself chose to use it in relation to the Virgin Birth of Christ and so He guided Matthew to do so. In fact, actually Rob should really relate to that because in a piece on Beliefnet called Find the Big Jesus: An Interview with Rob Bell our resident Emergent Rabbi was asked if he had a favorite prayer or mantra. Bell replied, “My favorite and most oft-repeated mantra is probably, ‘God, what are you telling me now?’ ”

Come to think of it, what Matthew was likely doing as he wrote His Gospel is really not so unlike Rob’s favorite mantra. Likely the inspired Apostle was asking “God, what are You telling me now?” So when Matthew asked God the same thing Rob Bell himself says he asks God, the Lord showed Matthew the Virgin Birth of Christ (Mashiach, Hebrew). And the reason we cannot possibly concede this Virgin Birth is because Matthew 1:20 informs us – that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit (literal Greek). Then verse 21 goes on to say that Joseph was to – call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.

Now we put this all together as we consider that Matthew was a Jew trained by Christ Jesus Himself and would surely have known that the Hebrew Scriptures which make up our Old Testament are quite clear that Messiah, the Savior, was to be God Himself. For example Isaiah 43:3 – “For I am the LORD, your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior; and “Then all mankind will know that I, the LORD, am your Savior, your Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob” (Isaiah 49:26). And now just possibly God the Holy Spirit has snapped the spell of Bell long enough for you that some light might penetrate the Emergent darkness of Rob’s centered on man mystic musings so that you may actually see.

Despite how clever you may have thought Rob Bell can be, the truth is that if we do away with the Virgin Birth, we literally do away with the doctrine of a Savior. Again, if “Jesus had a real, earthly, biological father named Larry, and archeologists find Larry’s tomb and do DNA samples and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the virgin birth was really just a bit of mythologizing the Gospel writers threw in,” then we will have accepted the destructive higher criticism of the Bible. And as such these vitally important questions remain:

Just exactly what kind of a minister truly sent by the Lord would ever dare question the Word of Him Who sent him? And just how many times does rebellious Rob have to fail the test of a true man of God before you can finally see through it?