Mary, Mother of Jesus
c.274-337
"...blessed art thou among women..."
by Rit Nosotro( )
The following excerpt is used with permission from "The Berean Call", Dec 7, 2005
In Luke we read: "Hail, thou that art highly favored, the Lord is
with thee: blessed art thou among women...from henceforth all generations
shall call me blessed." I had no intent to avoid these passages and
no reason to do so. They contain nothing that would in the remotest way
support the false position to which the Roman Catholic Church has elevated
Mary.
The fact that Mary was chosen to be the mother of Jesus when He was born
into the world is the clear teaching of the Bible. That she should, therefore,
as Christ's mother, be highly favored and blessed among all women is only
reasonable as well as biblical and is not denied in any degree by true
Christians. To recite these undisputed facts would have been irrelevant
to the message of the book.
The claims in Roman Catholicism that Mary was conceived and lived without
sin, that she was bodily taken into heaven without dying, that she helped
to redeem us with the sorrows of her heart in concert with Christ's sufferings
on the Cross, that all grace flows from God to Christ and from Christ
through Mary to mankind, that she is the Queen of Heaven, the Mother of
Mercy, that prayers should be offered to her as the mediatrix between
men and Christ, that she is the Mother of and in charge of the Church,
that she obtains whatever she asks from Christ now in heaven and therefore
we ought to go to her with our needs, etc., etc., are all false, and none
of them has any support whatsoever in the verses you cite nor in any other
part of Scripture.
As for Revelation 12, here again the Roman Catholic Church defies both
Scripture and logic in its claim that the "woman clothed with the
sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve
stars" is Mary. The apparitions of Mary (all of which are demonic)
have at times appeared in this form in support of this false doctrine.
It is quite clear from Scripture that the "woman" depicted here
is symbolic of Israel, through whom the Messiah had been promised and
would come into the world. The "great red dragon," of course,
is Satan, who has sought to destroy the Messiah down through history by
destroying all Jews. These attempts are recorded in the Bible (Pharaoh's
decree that all male babies should be killed upon birth-Ex 1:16; Queen
Athaliah's attempt to destroy "all the seed royal" when Joash
was hidden from her-2 Ki 11:1; the attempt by Haman to have all Jews killed-Est
3:8-15; Herod's attempt to kill the Messiah -- Mt 2:16, etc.). Secular
history also offers proof of Satan's determination to destroy all Jews:
the destruction of Jews by the Roman Catholic Church, by Muslims upon
the decree of Muhammad, by Hitler, the intent to destroy Israel today,
etc.
There is no question that Mary could not possibly be the woman in Revelation
12. She never "fled into the wilderness [into] a place prepared of
God" (12:6). Furthermore, she does not fit the false Mary of Roman
Catholicism who was without sin. Pain in childbirth was pronounced by
God upon all women as a result of sin. Yet this woman "being with
child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered" (12:2).
How could she be the sinless Catholic Mary?
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"Since it's not covered in the Bible, the church is free to make up its mind," (Peter Strimer, spokesman for the Episcopal Diocese of Olympia referring to the corporeal assumption of Mary or her sinless life).
"Marium" in Arabic means "Mary," as in Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus. Although the Quran speaks about Mary in several places, "Marium" is specially for her. The Quran mentions her and Jesus as being pure and free of sin.
See also:
http://www.jeremiahproject.com/prophecy/marian01.html
