It is easy to pass by the significance of little words, which sometimes affect the meaning of passages quite dramatically. Here are just three examples.
1. “Until”. Matthew 1:25-26. “Joseph did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took his wife but knew her not UNTIL she had borne a son.” From this little word UNTIL we glean that AFTER the birth of Jesus, Joseph had normal intimate relations with his wife, and that they proceeded to build up a family. In fact the family members are named in Matthew 13:55, “Is not this the Carpenter’s Son? And are not His brothers James and Joseph, and Simon and Judah, and are not all His sisters with us?” The reason for stating this is to show that the Roman Catholic Church, and the Eastern Orthodox Church have built up a fabulous lie in maintaining a perpetual virginity in Mary. Having declared this virginity to be lasting, they then had to invent an alternative source for the Lord’s brothers, by saying that they were the children of Joseph of a former marriage. This would have made Joseph a man of advanced years, when marrying Mary, a girl of some 14 years. Furthermore, when the angel told Joseph to take Mary and Jesus down into Egypt, he would needs have been a young and virile man to cope with the journey, and would not have been troubled about a clan of other children, left in Nazareth to look after themselves for an indeterminate time.
2. “These”. Matthew 25:40. In the teaching of the sheep and goats, we find, “Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of THESE my brethren, you did it unto me.” Now, the Lord referred to the occasion as “when He is seated on the throne of glory”, and this means that He has gathered His Bride Company, who are now at His side in the picture He presents. Therefore, when people start arguing about whether they are sheep or goats, they fail to recognise that the Church of Jesus Christ is not being represented as either. The sheep and goats are from the nations at the time of God’s judgments at the beginning of His Millennial Kingdom. The presence of the Church being with the Lord at this time is reinforced in Jude by the words “He comes with ten thousands of His saints.”
3. “There is”. In John 5:2 we read, “Now THERE IS in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Hebrew called Bethzatha, which has five porticos.” Expositors uniformly tell us that John wrote his Gospel near the end of the first century. But Jerusalem was destroyed by the armies of Titus in AD70, and the location of Bethzatha would no longer be standing. This goes to show that John must have written BEFORE AD70, and it is my studied belief that in fact ALL the N.T. writings were completed before that date.
