“Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel” (Isaiah 7:14)
eh? Come again! You…outta your mind. or what?
Well, prophet Isaiah (around 700 B.C.) has done some pretty crazy things in his life. Let me give you some examples (borrowed from Judah’s Jottings Bible Pages 15 )
Take something very simple like naming your new born son. With all the wonderful array of monosyllabic, bi-syllabic, modern, movie-star, stylish, Sanskritish names dangling tantalizingly from Google, you must be a stick-in-the-mud buffoon to pick a moniker like Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz. Yet, God tells Isaiah (Isaiah 8:3) to do just that. The meaning of that name: “Quick loot, fast plunder” ( something that might resonate with Robin Hood !) sounds extremely hilarious until you consider that it foretells the spoiling of Syria and Samaria by the king of Assyria. Meaning aside, what a pain it will be in the various stages of life for the boy – starting with the birth certificate, through school register, passport, PAN card, and now Aadhar?
Imagine the first day at school for instance:
“What’s your name sonny boy? “
“Maher-Shalal-Hash…….”
“That’s quite enough. We’ll call you Mash.”
Laughter all around!
That was also the last day of school for little Maher, for he never went back .
Home schooling? Perhaps!
Man, you don’t even have the freedom to name your son! Poor Maher – does he really have to bear the burden of the socio-geo-politico milieu of the day, in the way he is called? Not fair.
Isaiah didn’t ask those questions. In one sense, he didn’t have the freedom.
He was a prophet. A true one at that. Being a genuine prophet of God is no easy business. Check this out.
The LORD spoke through Isaiah son of Amoz. He said to him, “Take off the sackcloth from your body and the sandals from your feet.” And he did so, going around stripped and barefoot (Isaiah 20:2) (NIV).Mercifully we are spared video images in Vimeo and YouTube of this three year long spectacle, for I doubt if he was anything like Christopher Atkins!
Ah…we are digressing…..the power of visuals!
The point is Isaiah, the true and genuine prophet, said something out of the blue that just doesn’t make sense. It militates against the natural law instituted by God himself.
Fast forward >>> 700 years later:
God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth with a message for Mary, who was promised in marriage to Joseph. The angel told Mary that she would have a son, whom she was to name Jesus. The angel said, “He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High God.”
Mary asked how this could be as she was a virgin. The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and God’s power will rest on you.” ((Luke 1:26-38)
Was Gabriel out of his mind? He may be one of the leading lights among the staff in heaven, but he is still an angel -right? Do angels have minds?
Uh..uh. it is getting a little too metaphysical for comfort, what?
Let us plunge in anyway and see what we can discover. Hebrews 1:14 says “Are not all angels ministering spirits“….? So we may gather that angels are not independent in their thinking; they are “sent to serve those who will inherit salvation“.
Sent by whom? By God, as the above passage from Luke makes clear.
So here, God confirms what his prophet Isaiah foretold 700 years ago. It might seem a long time, but then God being eternal, does not operate by our understanding of time. Elsewhere the Bible says (2 Pet 3:8): ‘With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like a day“. In fact Isaiah’s was not the first prophecy on the subject. This was planned in eternity, announced as early as Genesis 3:15 and fulfilled in the fullness of time ( Galatians 4:4, among others).
But why a virgin?
There may or may not be agreement that David’s mother was Nitzevet, but what is abundantly clear is that David declares his conception sinful “5 Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me“.(Pslam 51). We can conclude that the process of conception where a man is involved is declared sinful because of the blood lineage from Adam our fallen ancestor.
I know this is a short treatment of a vast subject, but we must move on with the understanding that Jesus was not conceived in sin, he committed no sin and thus was supremely (and needless to say, uniquely) qualified to die for the sins of the whole world and reconcile and restore mankind to the lost relationship with God. As the book of Romans puts it most profoundly: “17 ……if by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ! 18 Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people“.
For the wages of sin being death (Romans 6:23), Adam had to die but Jesus as a sinless person, really didn’t need to. And only because “he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2) he died.
We see no such immaculate conception in the case of Krishna. There is no record of his birth in time on earth being eternally planned, nor subsequently prophesied, no special appearance of any heavenly being to his mother Queen Devaki, for his birth arose from her sexual union with her husband King Vasudeva. If Krishna were not a mythological character we may conclude that he was born in sin, as David declares. But it doesn’t really matter for he did not suffer and die for humanity and therefore was not in a position to offer salvation to mankind.
Yet writing in page 26 of his first volume Paramahansa Yogananda says (and I quote) :
“When the devotee feels his consciousness one with the Universal Christ, …..he rejoices in the ultimate joy, as Jesus proclaimed, “I (Christ Consciousness in creation) and my Father (Cosmic Consciousness beyond creation) are one.” I would say that this is a rather laboured explanation of Jesus’ simple declaration: “I and My Father are one” (John 10:30)
Going on to talk about such devotees, PY seems to be straying into unknown territory for he says (and I quote): “Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (incidentally taken from John 1:13 in the Bible). PY goes on ” The son of man is the physical body, which comes out of another human body as a result. All souls are children of human will and sexual union, born of protoplasm of God, made in His and the bloodline of family or racial heredity. But image son of God means the soul, the inherent divine consciousness of man, born not of man’s will or flesh or sex or family blood or pedigree, but of God. Thus in truth all human beings are sons of God, children born of God, made in His image”.
Only with the last statement in the previous paragraph there is accord with the Bible. For detailing the creation story Genesis 1:27 says, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him“. With his broad approach of talking about all souls, PY seems to be giving the short end to (the exceptional) Jesus Christ who was in fact the only man born “not of the will of man, but of God” .
We have already seen in earlier posts the reason for Jesus’ coming to earth. “For God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not die but have eternal life.” This being our understanding of divine love, we are perplexed to see PY jumping in with the statement talking about “…….his Omnipresent Love of God is why I consider Bhagavan Krishna and Jesus Christ, avatars of East and West, as the supreme expressions of the Krishna-Christ Consciousness (the Universal Kutastha Chaitanya), for in them was evident in the highest degree the incarnation of God’s divine love and compassion. Krishna’s love gave to the world the yoga of liberation from the sea of suffering through scientific meditation and right action, and the devotional approach of flinging oneself on the Divine Compassion”.
Apart from the illogicality (I think you can see that I am avoiding the word “absurdity”) of comparing a mythological character to a real person, please also note that we have already dealt with the futility of comparing yoga (stemming from love?) with the blood of Jesus.
Then again PY surprises us with a declaration abstracted from the Bible about the (quoting PY) “consummate sacrifice of his body to alleviate the sins of many, the incomparable love of God that is an infinitude of mercy and forgiveness. The paramount meaning of the birth of Jesus is the forgiveness of God“.
Isn’t PY merrily weaving in and out of the truth in his quest to establish the elusive harmony?
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