<script>
  (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
  (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
  m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
  })(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');

  ga('create', 'UA-47423994-1', 'fortunecity.ws');
  ga('send', 'pageview');

</script>
<center>
<br>
	
	<div>	
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="https://ad.broadcaststation.net/ads/show_ad.php?width=728&height=90"></script>
	</div>
</center>
In the following pages I will provide copies of my work on Inspiration and Preservation, updated weekly.
==========================
TWO HERESIES - ONE SCRIPTURE
	I?m going to do something in this space that I would normally frown upon.  I would normally take this Bible study section and write an expository examination of a Bible passage.  I still think this is the best method of preaching.  When we do ?topic studies? we tend to put too much of ourselves into the writings.  We tend to ?proof text.?  It is much better to let God speak for Himself in an examination of that which He has said.
	So, why do I make an exception to my own rule?  Simply because there is an effort today, as there has always been, to reduce the authority of Scripture.  
	For the past one hundred and fifty years, or so, the primary attack against faith in the preserved Word of God has been centered upon the ?oldest and best? manuscripts - which are, in reality, neither the oldest nor the best.
	This attack continues.  However, a ?new,? yet similar attack has come to the fore with the spurious history of the ?Di Vinci Code? fictions.  Both of these center on a fictional ?revision? of the Holy Scriptures in the days of Constantine and the council of Nicea.  The older heresy, that of the ?oldest and best? manuscripts, claims that this council was used to ?streamline? the Scripture into a standardized model, the implication being that there were many variations swirling around the confused church at that time.  The argument goes that the Alexandrian manuscripts somehow escaped this ?revision? and represent a text much closer to the original.  Even the proponents of this argument will not argue that this text is the original - just that it is closer.
	The more current and popular heresy is that the council was used to suppress the gnostic ?gospels? because Constantine wanted a text more favorable to empire building.
	I mention both as ?heresy? because of their low opinion of God and His Message.  If either of these heresies were true we would not have a faith worthy of defending - nor of practicing.  At the heart of these fictions is a belief that God is not powerful enough to protect that which He has inspired.  Not only does this impact upon His power, this also impacts upon the love of God.  Did He really give us a Word - which had to be important or He would not have given it - and then withdraw that Message?
	Also, how intelligent do we consider God to be?  Did He really take the time and effort to inspire a Word which He either knew was going to be lost to mankind; or, did He not foresee this eventuality?  Either way His intelligence is called into question!  
	And, if this is true, what about the Message of Salvation?  What are we to make of that?  Did He get it right?  Do we even have what He said this to be?
	And, what of the Holy Spirit.  Where is His power to lead and guide the churches of the Living God?  Jesus made a prophecy in Matthew 16:17 & 18 - ?And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.  And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.?  This is a very important prophecy in the current discussion.
	In examining this verse it would be good to first consider what the passage does not say.  Popular interpretation of this verse carries the implication that Jesus has promised to build His church upon Peter.  This is not the case.  Jesus said to Peter, ?You at ?Petros? (a little rock ) upon this ?Petra? (a large rock) I will build my church...?  A subtle but important difference.  Peter is called a piece of gravel while the church is called a large stone.  Gravel comes from a stone; it is of the same essence while being an individual part.  Jesus is saying that Peter is part of a larger organism based on his statement of affirmation of the Person of Christ.  In that sense each individual Christian is a ?Peter? in this Biblical sense.
	Notice that Jesus said that ?flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee...?  What had not been revealed?  The affirmation that Jesus is ?...the Christ, the Son of the living God.?  It is upon this, the fact of the Divinity and Work of Jesus Christ, that Christ promised to build His church.  
	Notice, also, that this is NOT the church.  This affirmation is that upon which the churches of Jesus are to be built.  In point of fact, no church which denies the full divinity and sacrificial work of Jesus Christ is a church in the Biblical sense.  The term translated ?church? is ?ecclesia,? which simply means an assembly called out for a particular purpose.  My old unit in the 4th Infantry Division was a ?church? in this sense; we were called out of the general population to perform a distinct duty.  The distinct duty of each of the individual churches which Jesus established is to affirm that He is, ?...the Christ, the Son of the living God.?  There is much that comes under this heading.  But, this much is foundational.
	So, if we can not be certain that we have preserved for us the Eternal Word of God, then we can not affirm that we have a true picture of just Who Jesus Christ is in reality.  Don?t say, ?But my experience...?  Experience is untrustworthy.  Experience depends upon mood swings, subjective individual interpretation of facts, other people, reactions to medications, pizza too late at night before we go to bed, and the attacks of Satan upon our spiritual lives.  In the words of the street, ?Words don?t cut it!  What might be, might be.  But, what is, is!?  
	That is why God inspired His Word to us.  That is why He did count it important enough to preserve it for us!  His Word is a sure anchor in all changing cultures and societies.  A wise man once said, ?God said it.  I believe it.  That settles it.?  He was wrong!  God said it and that settles it whether I believe it or not.  That is why we do have, given from the Loving God, Himself, a Word that is True and Preserved.  We can trust this Word even more than we can trust ourselves!
	In the coming months we?ll be looking at the transmission of the Word of God to us today.  This will be following my study outline of ?God Keeps His Word.?  My prayer is that this study will be profitable in your spiritual life.  We do have a Word we can trust.  We do have a Message that is important.  May we take this Message of Salvation from sin out into the world of lost mankind.
	There are a couple of points that I would like to make about this compilation before we get started.
	First, and most importantly, I am not an expert in the subject of textual criticism.  Anyone who would disagree with this observation has, apparently, never met me!  I do believe, however, that if the Message of Scripture is for us - and I believe that It is!, then it must be important or God would not have given us that Message.  Since this Message is important I do not believe that God would willingly allow that Message to be lost for a thousand years.  God is powerful enough to keep that from happening if He so desired.  It should be obvious that He would so desire.
	There are many words which will be cited in this study that were made by people who are experts.  Checks the notes.  Check the bibliography as it is given.  Get some of these works.  Our faith is not in vain.  God honors true study by giving reason for that faith which is within us.  I realize that we do not have to understand everything in order for it to be of God.  How good it is that God does allow us to try His works and see that they are both Good and True.
	Some of the sources which I have cited would not agree with the conclusions which I have reached.  For the most part these have to do with good men who are committed to the inspiration of the Holy Scripture.  I have cited them because of their views on inspiration.  I have taken that view of inspiration to what is, I believe, its logical result: If God did care enough to inspire His Word, He also must have cared enough to protect that Word!  The God we worship is not a God of absurdity.  Why would He have bothered to inspire a message which He knew - and, He would know! - was going to be lost for a thousand years and then be, maybe, patched mostly back together by the same type of men who would have allowed it to be lost in the first place?  As I said, this is my conclusion and not necessarily that of all the sources which will be cited.
	God?s love is shown forth in the giving of His Message to mortal man.  Salvation, the approach of sinful man toward Holy God allowed, is only because of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the Cross of Calvary.  His Message to us of that tremendous miracle of love is shown forth in the pages of His Holy Word.  His power is shown forth in the preservation of that Message.  His grace is shown when He allows us to respond to Him because of that Message.
	The Bible is not simply a book.  The Bible is not simply a record of sacred history.  The Bible is even more than our guide in this life and to the next.  The Bible, this is a glorious thought,
is God condescending to speak to mortal man.
	God has never lost control of His Word.  He has never hidden, nor has He allowed the forces of Satan to hide, His Book from His true children.  His power to preserve His Book has never failed because His love toward lost mankind has never failed!
1 July 2005
INSPIRATION AND PRESERVATION
	?All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness...?  II Timothy 3:16
	I once managed a gas station that had a car wash attached.  My entire crew (I had inherited them from the former manager) consisted of high school and college age young men.  The station was located at the edge of the city, sort of ?out in the open,? and on the top of a small hill.  While working there during the day shift I never gave that location a thought.
	Then one night all these young men wanted off from work so they could go to social functions at their schools.  I understood that this was going to be a highlight of their young lives, so I agreed to work the second shift so they could be with their friends and classmates.  No problem.  I was young enough myself that it wouldn?t be a hardship on me.
	The second shift began in the late afternoon and continued on into the night.  As the sun went down, the wind speed went up.  This station was in a town near the Mississippi River in northern Illinois.  
	As the sun waned and the wind began to whip up, the mist from the car wash began to join in the mix.  I soon realized something that I should have understood very easily: Wind mixed with water can get fairly cold on an evening in late March in the northern half of Illinois.
	Some things are so obvious that we should simply understand them because they are what they are.
	The Bible is inspired.
	The Bible can be a very simple Book if we will just take the words written therein at their face value.  In Genesis, for instance, the Bible simply states the existence of God.  No great lengths are taken to explain that fact.  The Bible just says that this is so.  The closest that the Bible comes, as far as I can tell, to arguing the fact of God is in Psalms 14:1 - ?The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God...?
	In other words, the Bible doesn?t tell us that we have to accept the existence of God; the Bible just describes our state if we do not.  
	It is the same in the matter of inspiration.  The Bible doesn?t take a long time to argue the fact of inspiration.  It just states that fact.  Pendelton, in his epic ?Christian Doctrines? makes this observation:
I have thought proper to say as much as this concerning inspiration, as there will be no chapter of this work specially devoted to the subject.  Indeed, such a chapter will hardly be necessary for if the Bible is, as I have attempted to show, a revelation from God, its inspiration must be granted.?
	Now, as we begin to look at the transmission of this Message from God down through the ages, we would do well to look at this doctrine of inspiration.
	First, it would be good to note that the verse above says that ?All scripture is inspired...?  The passage does not mention the men who penned those words.  
	Part of the majesty of the Person of God is that He used imperfect men to write a Perfect Book.  Bynum (King James Fans(?)) makes the observation that ?Not even Paul or Peter were infallible.  It is God?s Word that is infallible and inspired of God.?
	This simply means, in accordance with II Timothy 3:16, that the writer?s were not, themselves, inspired of God.  However, through the Glory of God, His Spirit worked on various men, who were themselves imperfect, to produce a Word that was (and is!) perfect.
	Peter, writing under inspiration, put it this way: ?For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.?  (II Peter 1:21)
	By the way, what was it that made these men holy?  It was the power of God displayed through them.  Check out these men in Scripture and you will see that they were flawed.  It was the power of God displayed on, and in, them that produced the Bible.  It was not their own human goodness.
	There?s a sermon in that for today.  God is able to use us if we are willing to be obedient to His Holy Will.  We will not, of course, write Scripture.  But, He can use us to distribute that Message of the Scripture into a world in need of the Message of God.
	It is good, of course, that God in His wisdom did inspire those Words rather than those men.  If the inspiration lies upon the Words, then we still have a Message which we can trust today in the faithful transmission of those Words.  We have, in reality, an inspired Message in faithful copies of those very words.  
	The human penmen pass from history.  But, the Words of the Message of God are alive and vibrant to us today as they are still the Words of God.
	This also means, of course, that any other words are not the inspired message of God.  
	Any other scripture, so called, which is not these words from God, is not the message of God.  These may contain moral and ethical teaching; but, they cannot be the message of God unless they are the inspired Words of God.
	This, of course, brings up an important point.  What about our translations?  They are important to us.  Most of us do not have a knowledge of the original languages which were in those original autographs.  Can there be an ?inspired? translation?
	As Fuller (Which Bible?) points out, ?The original Scriptures were written by direct inspiration of God.  This can hardly be said of any translation.?  The idea of a translation, any translation, being inspired of God is false.  A translation may be God honored, or God empowered as it is true to His actual inspired words; but a translation can not be inspired.
	The following argument is from my work ?The Tree at Marah:?
...God could only have given full inspiration to one set of writings - the Words of the originals.  After all, He is a God of Power; He is not a God of absurdity.  If God did, indeed, give His Word perfect and established forever, inspired in the words of the original Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic, it had to be perfect.
It could only remain perfect in exact copies of those originals.  To allege that this perfection was moved from these Words to the words of any translation, even the KJB, is to say that God was mistaken in His assertion that the original inspiration was perfect.  I am not ready to say that God was mistaken!
The only other possible argument I could see, to claim inspiration for the King James Bible, would be that He had inspired the words of the KJB as well.  Again absurdity raises its reasonable head.  To inspire the KJB in such a way is to say that God had decided on an ending program for His first stab at an eternal Word.
Again, this would bring into question as to whether or not God had made a mistake in His first stab at a Scripture that was ?...settled in Heaven.?  (Psalm 119:89)
This also begs the question of how long our KJB would remain as the Word of God.
This throws our entire concept of inspiration into turmoil.  We have ripped from our faith that upon which our faith is founded: The Unalterable Word of God.
Not only that, but we are suddenly presented with a God Who is not the Unchanging One.  He is become a vacillating Sovereign Whose pronouncements we can only trust for we know not how long.  What is to become of the promise of our eternal salvation if God would change His mind on so important a factor as His very message to us?
Worse still, this sort of occurrence would bring into question the entire cosmology of Who we understand God to be.  We understand God to be The God of Eternity.  If He would choose to do away with His promise of an eternal Word in a time-centric manner, where does this place our understanding of Heaven, and of Hell, and of the very nature of God, Himself?
No!  No!  No!  The King James Bible, for all that I love and revere it, can never be the completely unalterable, eternal, inspired Word of God.  What a travesty it is that anyone would ever suggest that this is so!
	Nonetheless I would argue that we can trust our King James Bibles as the Word of God in the English language.  This venerable version was translated, unlike the many modern ?versions,? from the words of the true text which God inspired and preserved for us today. 
	It is the transmission of those Words which will be the subject of our study.
8 July 1005
INSPIRATION AND PRESERVATION (Continued)
	As we were looking at last week, the inspiration of Scripture did not lie upon the individual penmen.  They were, of course, as I Peter 1:21 makes clear, ?moved upon? by the Holy Spirit.  But, they were not themselves inspired.  It was the Words which bore the mark and imprint of inspiration.
	The word ?inspiration? means literally, to breathe out.  The illustration I like to use here is that of a public speaker.  As I speak to a live audience, the air is forced out of my lungs and over my larynx - voice box.  This action causes the air molecules to vibrate.  This vibration causes a ripple effect, much like a stone thrown into a pond will produce those little waves that go out in a circular fashion from the point of impact.
	As these ?air waves? reach the listeners? ears, they produce a vibration against the ear drums of the hearer.  This, in turn, sets off some action in the nerves of the ears which produce the phenomena of sound within the hearer.
	In a very real sense, I could argue that the sound my listener would hear is my breath.
	The Words of the Scripture are the very Breath of God upon our souls.  
	In a manner that I cannot begin to understand, much less to explain the mechanics of, we have a real relationship with the God of the Universe as we read His Word.  It is a personal contact, on a spiritual level, between ourselves and God.
	For the Christian, the Holy Spirit of God teaches us, and illumines what God has said, as we read these Words.  That is why those same Words can offer such comfort when we need comfort, and conviction when we need convicting.  The Bible, inspired of God, is a Living Book unlike any manmade book.  
	I have commentaries that were written centuries ago.  They are very useful and give great insight on the passages upon which they comment.  But, the Bible speaks to me in a way that even the best commentary never can.  
	As we read His Word, and pray in faith, we have a relationship with God as He is our Constant Contemporary.  This is because His Living Words are fresh each time we look upon them.  They are able to speak to us in this ?modern? world, in our changing and varied cultures, because He is eternal.  His Words are therefore also eternal.
	We speak often of the ?original autographs? of Scripture.  These were, of course, inspired.  But, any faithful copy of those words - the same words in the same order - is also inspired because these are the very Words of God as given under inspiration.  A faithful and accurate copy is as inspired and authoritative as were those ?original autographs.?
	I have a DVD of me speaking at a Bible conference last summer.  As this DVD is played, the electronic configurations within my television pick up the impulses of my words.  This is converted into sound waves just as if I were speaking in person.  Those sound waves reach the ears of the hearers in the same way as if I were speaking in person.  Those are still my words.
	But, the fact does remain that I am not with every person who might play that message on their T.V.  My words, of course (and obviously!), are not inspired.  Still, the DVD player does allow one to hear my exact words and to receive the message which I had intended.
	God?s Words are like that - but more!  My words were a reproduction of what I had said.  God?s Words are more than a simple reproduction.  They are His Words by inspiration.  They are His breath upon us as we read His Message.
	The inspiration did not lie upon the parchment, or the ink, or even with the mind and abilities of the human penmen.  All of these things are temporal.  They are of time and subject to decay.  Inspiration lies in the Breath and Word of God.  God is of eternity.  His Words are not subject to decay.
	We will take up this idea again in our next session as we look at the transmission of those inspired Words throughout the centuries.  
15 July 2005
INSPIRATION AND PRESERVATION (Continued)
	Some question has arisen as to why I am continuing to write on the doctrine of Inspiration when the professed thrust of these talks was to be on the doctrine of the Preservation of the Scripture.  There is a Scriptural reason.
	We are often confused with the claims of many that the only purpose of the Scripture is to teach religious stories.  In actuality the Scripture gives much practical admonition for all of our lives.  
	This is quite reasonable and expected in a Book from God to man.  After all, almost every mechanical item we buy in a store has an ?owners manual? from the manufacturer to give guidance as to how to get the best performance from his machinery.
	God has also given us an ?owners manual? for our use in living our lives to the fullest.  There are many such ?nuggets of instruction? within the pages of Scripture.  One of these is an observation which is readily understood by everyone from the builder of a house to a first grade teacher.  Isaiah 28:10: ?For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little.?
	Simply put, we begin with those concepts which underlie the edifice of our argument.
	Without inspiration there would be no need for preservation of the Scripture.  Conversely, we shall see later, without preservation there is no purpose in inspiration.
	Criswell (Why I Preach That the Bible is Literally True) makes this statement: ?It is the verbal inspiration which assures us that the truth delivered from God is trustworthy because the Lord communicated it to us without error.?
	God is our Creator.  He is, in a sense of the word, our Manufacturer.  We should expect that He has given us a ?Guide Book? to better order our steps in this physical world.  Since we know Him to be all-powerful and loving, we understand that this Book would have to be perfect in It?s original offering to mankind.
	That is what we have!  We have a perfect, because God inspired It, and preserved Word because we have a Perfect and Eternal God!
	It is from the pages of this ?Owners Manual? that we can learn to more efficiently order our lives.  It is from this Bible that we can learn of the God Who created us and stands ready to offer salvation to our sinful selves!
	This is our Christian dogma.  We have an inspired and perfect Book!
	Gipp, in An Understandable History of the Bible, speaks of the specialness of this Gift to the Christian:
...?the infallible Word of God? [is] one of the doctrines that separates us from the world.  We take pride in thundering forth that we are not as the unregenerate world.  We have a guideline.  We have the guideline, the Word of God!  Then we hold our open Bible up for all to see and shout, ?this is God?s Word!  It?s perfect, infallible, inerrant, the very words of God.?
	Gipp goes on to argue that we may make many claims as Christians.  We claim the Virgin Birth, the Divinity of Christ, salvation as based on faith in the effectiveness of the death of Christ, the fact that Jesus is coming back.   Other people may make outlandish claims on every subject under the sun.  Many may assert that our claims are nothing more than ?mooncheese.?  But, our claims are backed up by - more than that, they are predicated upon the plain statements of, the Inspired and Preserved Word of God!  It is to this Book that we appeal to back our claims and our beliefs.
	It is to the understanding of the doctrine of preservation that we appeal to back up our fidelity to this Book.  Without an inspired gospel, we cannot have a certain gospel.  Without a certain gospel we have no rational to back our claims and our beliefs.  Without a certainty that God did say it, and that He has preserved it so that we can know that He said it, we have no basis upon which to found our claims and theologies other than the sifting sands of the culture of changeable mankind.
	It is upon a belief that this Scripture is reliable that we base our entire faith.  Barnhouse (The Bible Under Attack) put it well:
?...one of the greatest leaders of the Church of England, Bishop Ryle of Liverpool, wrote: ?Give me the plenary, verbal theory of Biblical inspiration with all its difficulties, rather than the doubt.  I accept the difficulties and humbly wait for their solution.  But while I wait, I am standing on the Rock - ?IT IS WRITTEN.??
	It is a truth that if we cannot accept the doctrine of inspiration of the Scripture we have no where to turn but heresy.
	Criswell (Why I Preach That the Bible is Literally True) makes this observation, of inspiration:
?If we surrender the truth of verbal inspiration of the Bible, we are left like a rudderless ship on a stormy sea.  We are at the mercy of every wind that blows.  Deny that the Bible is the very Word fo God and we have no ultimate standard of righteousness and no supreme authority for our salvation.  It is impossible to overestimate what evil is wrought when the Word of God is denied.?
	He goes on to use this illustration and observation:
?...one day a friend of mine [story by W. A. Criswell] went to a great northern university to study for his Ph.D. degree in pedagogy.  While he was there, he made the friendship of a young student in the divinity school.  When time came for this young preacher to get his degree in theology, a church in the Midwest called him to be their pastor.  The young minister went to my friend who was studying for his doctor?s degree in teaching and said these amazing words to him: ?I am in a great quandary.  I have been called to be a pastor of a church in the Midwest, but it is one of those old-time, old-fashioned churches that believe the Bible as the Word of God.  Now I do not believe that the Bible is the Word of God and I do not know what to do.?  My friend said to him, ?Well, I can tell you what to do.?  The young theolog eagerly replied, ?What?? and my friend said, ?I think you ought to quit the ministry!?  That is what I also think.  If a man does not believe that the Bible is the Word of God, he has no place in any pulpit in the land.  All his preachments are nothing but speculations, and if he has not the authority of God back of what he says, he has nothing to say.?
	Amen and Hallelujah!  Preach the Truth, brother.  If we do not have the honest Words which were given by God we should open a civic center, or a social organization, or write an opinion column in the local paper.  Without the unction of the Word of God we have no business trying to teach the people of God the things of God!
	But!  If those Words were once inspired and then lost to the churches and people of God...  What kind of shallow truth do we have to utter?  What kind of God can we expect to expound upon? Even I can write a work which will be soon forgotten.  I?m in the process of doing that!  
	But, God is a little above my quality.  He is above my strength.  He is above my intellect and skill.  God, if He really did inspire any word for mankind, has the power and inclination to preserve that Word.  
	We cannot argue for inspiration without also arguing for preservation!  We will begin to see the interconnectedness of these two cardinal doctrines in our next session.
*** 22 July 2005
INSPIRATION AND PRESERVATION (Continued)
	We have been looking at the inspiration of the Scripture.  The purpose has been to lay a foundation for a look at the preservation and transmission of the Scripture.  This is somewhat necessary because the doctrines of Preservation and Inspiration are entwined doctrines.  If one fails, so does the other.  Toss out Inspiration and there is nothing to preserve.  Toss our Preservation and inspiration is useless.
	Dr. David Otis Fuller (Counterfeit or Genuine) made this observation in regards to these twin doctrines:
?Although separate doctrines, the doctrine of preservation is very closely connected to the doctrine of inerrancy.  Preservation is necessary in order to maintain an adequate view of inerrancy.  Without preservation, the doctrine of inerrancy is only an academic question and has little bearing on the formation of doctrine and exegesis.?
	Without inerrancy, which is guaranteed by the inspiration of the Powerful, Creator God, we can have no message worth maintaining.  All of our preachings are then based on conjecture, tradition, and fable.  We have no firm foundation for our faith.  It is all become guesswork and hope.  Our very salvation is a ?maybe.?  And, without this inerrancy, guaranteed by inspiration, our view of God is no more certain than our night visions after eating pizza too late at night!
	We would be left with nothing on which to found our faith and hope.  No understanding or knowledge of the existence and nature of God.  No spiritual leading for this life.  No honest understanding of, or hope for, salvation in the world to come.
	But, to the praise of God, He has not left us to wander our way on our spiritual journeys.  He has given us an inspired road map in His Word to us.  Inspiration had insured that this road map need not be updated.  It is perfect in every way.
	That inerrancy and inspiration could not have been continued past the first draft of the document unless God had promised, and then accomplished, the preservation of His Word.  In such a case of His non-involvement in preservation we would be left as above - without a Sure Word to trust and follow!
	Dr. Jack Moorman (The Authorized Version [an audio tape]) makes the observation that there are probably as many verses in the Bible on preservation as there are on inspiration.
	Beyond this, Gipp (An Understandable History of the Bible) makes note that ?Every argument for inerrant, infallible inspiration applies also for the inerrant, infallible preservation.  It is the same God!?
	This is, of course, a true observation.  God is not a God of absurdity.  He is a God of power.  To suggest that the Great God Who created the universe and all that is within it would be so slovenly in His methods as to inspire a word which He would know would be lost to His churches, is to demean His great Works and Intelligence.
	The Word we have today was either inspired and preserved under the power of God, Almighty, or we have no Word and no understanding of God.  His Power is called into question as are all His mighty works of creation and sustaining.
	God has the power, should He choose to act upon this fact, to both inspire and preserve.  Ray (God Wrote Only One Bible) notes that, ?The writing of the Word of God by inspiration is no greater miracle than the miracle of its preservation...?
	A seminary professor in a Midwestern fundamentalist seminary made the statement recently that God could have chosen to preserve His Word, but obviously did not choose to do so.
	This is a ?fundamentalist??
	It seems obvious that God, if He did have the power to preserve His inspired Word, should He choose not to do so, is guilty of hiding His Message from His Church, the Bride of Christ!  Is that the statement that a ?fundamentalist,? one who believes in the ?fundamentals of the faith,? would make?
	No!
	This is a statement that would follow that liberal theological bent which says that we do have the Word of God.  It argues that we have only the ?Message? of God.  It argues that our God is not capable of maintaining a pure word or a pure people.  It argues against the very salvation of our souls to argue that God would allow His Eternal Word to be lost in a time-centric manner.
	This sort of argument argues against the majesty of the Eternal God.  This argument brings doubt upon His eternal Holiness.  The argument brings doubt upon the goodness of God towards man.
	This sort of argument argues against the very original issuance of the Word of God into this world!  If we believe that God did give His Word to mankind, we must surmise that He had a purpose in doing so.  To argue that He choose not to preserve His Word is to argue that He never gave it in the first place.
	In the light of inspiration, preservation is not only logical.  It is also necessary!
	We will look at this a little more in the next issue.
***29 July 2005
INSPIRATION AND PRESERVATION (Continued)
	As we again begin this we study I?d like to reiterate the correlation between the doctrines of inspiration and preservation.  They are married in the sight of God and are become one in the sight of man.  We have no purpose in stating, or even believing, in a pseudo doctrine of inspiration if we can not also argue the fact of the doctrine of preservation.
	Now, just in case you are placing me in your cross-hairs of oratorical brilliance over my statement calling inspiration a ?pseudo doctrine,? what else can we call it if God did not preserve that which He inspired?
	We certainly can?t consider inspiration an important doctrine if God thought so little of His original word to us that He didn?t care enough to preserve that message.  Can we?  Should we place any emphases upon a doctrine which God deemed as unimportant?
	Indeed, if God considered the original writings of the Scripture as so unimportant as to withdraw His protecting hand from the finished product can we in sincerity argue that this message is still important today?
	I could have saved a lot of money on schools and books if God?s (alleged) Word is just another writing by the ancients.  
	Folks, if God did not care about His Word enough to protect it then He does not consider it to be important to anyone today.  And, by extension, He doesn?t care very much about us today because He has not given any new word lately!
	If God did not preserve His Word then we need to close up the churches and use Sunday as a day to sleep in and read the funny papers!  The world already does this!  The world has a much surer grasp on spiritual realities than do any of us if the Word of God is not important to the God of the Word!
	We may as well eat, drink and be merry because we have no hope of heaven.
	Our studies and convocations should begin to major on the works of Shakespear and Hemmingway.  At least these might have some relevance to the culture and the man in the street!
	What good is it to believe that the ?original autographs? were inspired and then lost to the churches of the Living God.  And, what was He doing while this was going on.?
	Remember the words of Elijah to the false prophets of Baal.  He had challenged them to prove their god?s ability.  When they failed, he asked them to ?...Cry aloud: for he is a god: either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked.?  (I Kings 18:27) 
	Where is your god if He was unable, or just unwilling, to preserve something so important as His Message to you?
	Bynum (Use the Bible God Uses), makes a very clear observation on this subject:
?Of course we believe that the original autographs were the inspired Word of God.  Since no one in the past ever had all of the autographs at one time, since no one in the present even has one fragment of any of the autographs, we must approach this subject from a different angle.?
	That ?different angle? is that many of the theologians, and most of the present day Bible critics and translators, are wrong!  Dead wrong.  Deadly wrong in the spiritual sense.
	Hills, (The King James Version Defended) notes that, ?[i]f the doctrine of the divine inspiration of the Old and New Testament Scriptures is a true doctrine, the doctrine of the providential preservation of the Scriptures must also be a true doctrine.?
	If we honestly believe in the Jesus of the Bible, we must believe in the Words of the Bible.  They are either the Words of God, preserved because of His fidelity to His Own Words, or they are the words of man, subject to decay and distortion.  One or the other, folks.  Their ain?t no third choice unless we discount the power and love of God, Almighty!
	Hills notes that this simple affirmation of our faith leads us to accept inspiration, infallible inspiration, of the original documents of Scripture and a trust that God could, would, and did providentially preserve this original text through the years of time and ?...to a belief in the Bible text current among believers as the providentially preserved original text.?
	Folks, we either have it (the inspired Words and the Words which were inspired!) or we don?t!  
	Do we honestly believe that God had no purpose other than showing He could do it, or some sort of cosmic pride, in inspiring His Word?  
	Gipp (An Understandable History of the Bible) asks this question and then answers it:
?Why did God inspire His word perfectly?  Obviously the answer comes back, ?So that man could have every word of God pure, complete, trustworthy, and without error.??
	And now, we are to suppose, God lost control of that Word somewhere along the line and we must do what we can to get back to as close as we can to what He originally said?  What a low view this is of God.  And what a sinfully high view this is of man.  
	We argue that God woke up one day.  He looked about the world and said, ?Oh, my!  Those people have lost the Word I inspired for them.  What a bummer!?
	Gipp further argues:
?...if God wrote the Bible perfectly in the ?originals,? but we cannot have those same words today, then it would seem that He wasted His time inspiring it perfectly in the first place.?
	But, in reality, the truth of the matter is even worse.  If we argue that God did not care to preserve His inspired Word, but at the same time argue that our (mankind?s) intellect and work can ?recreate? a facsimile of the lost Word, we are placing ourselves above God in two very sinful ways.
	First of all, we are guilty of trying to undo what God has caused to happen in His oversight of human history.  
	If we follow an all-powerful Sovereign God, then why are we attempting to reconstruct what He has allowed to be unconstructed?  Is it wise, or truly spiritual to try to retrieve that which God has decided to be of no further use?
	Second, by using our own intellect to pick and choose which words may be true Words - and by extension which Words are false words, we have placed ourselves above God by making our own preferences as superior to Him.
	This is what is being done as we remove our trust from the Traditional Text which God has preserved, and move on to the Hort/Westcott, or the Nestle?, or the various eclectic texts of which are the basis for the newer English versions.
	As Denton wrote in The Voice of the Nazareen, we can not make a case for the inerrancy of the Scripture while we are trying to make a case that it needs to be changed.  This is what is being done by using a ?...perverted and polluted Greek...? text as a basis for a translation.
	We will spend some time , down the line, looking at why this is a true statement.  These modern texts - of the so-called ?oldest and best? - are a ?perverted and polluted Greek? text.
	Fuller (Counterfeit or Genuine) asked this question of those who might argue that we need a new textual base for our old Book, ?If the text of the Scripture was not preserved, what was the need for having an inerrant original??


***5 August 2005

INSPIRATION AND PRESERVATION (Continued)

	We left off last week with a question.  Dr. David Otis Fuller (Counterfeit or Genuine) asked a very simple question regarding the inspiration of the Scripture: ?If the text of the Scripture was not preserved, what was the need for having an inerrant original??

	An honest and heartfelt belief in the inspiration of the Holy Scripture, by the Powerful God of the Universe, should lead one to the logical conclusion that this God Who cared enough to, as the Hallmark cards say in their advertising about their product, ?send the very best,? would not withdraw this care from the very people to whom He had initiated His correspondence in the first place.

	The Hallmark people have a great company, and put out some very good cards, but I have to believe that God cares about us even more than do they.

	In The Corruption of the Word, Kevin James writes:

?The idea that God watched over the transmission of His Word through the ages to ensure the purity of His revelation is called providential preservation.  Providential preservation says that, although one copy will differ slightly from another, the differences are so minor that there will be no hindrance to the correct understanding of the text.  The true text has always been available by the providence of God.?

	In the newer translations, and sadly in many editions of the venerable King James Bible, we will find footnotes which question many passages.  The entire ending of the Book of Mark is called into question on the basis of very little evidence to it not being in the original and a great preponderance of evidence as to its veracity.  The incident of the woman taken in adultery in John, chapter eight, is questioned.  She is denied her audience with the Master through the doubt of the modern critics more than from the weight of the evidence available.

	Many more instances could be cited, and will be cited as we continue this study, as to the vast difference between the God Blessed King James Version and the ?inspiration lite? elixir we are  served from the purveyors of the many modern versions.

	The underlying issue is not a ?simpler and more easily understood? version of the Scripture; the issue lies upon that which underlies those ?simpler and more easily understood? words.  

	I could probably make a very readable translation of any work in the French language.  Well, I could except for one small problem: I don?t speak French.  I would have no idea what the words in front of me were as I prepared my ?translation.?

	That is essentially the problem of the modern scholars who make these newer translations.  They have abandoned the preserved Word of God in the Traditional Text and have substituted this Word for the word which they have decided is the words which God really had meant to be there had He not lost control of the process.

	The unmitigated arrogance of this assumption!

	Again, James (The Corruption of the Word) explains the mindset of those who deny that God was able to preserve His Word:

?Modern scholarship denies any role for providential preservation in determining the correct text to follow.  The church [it is alleged] lost the true text sometime around A. D. 300...  This true text was [supposedly] recovered around 1881 and is found in the modern versions.?

	The date of 1881 is used above probably because this was the date of the infamous revision of the English Bible by the Hort and Westcott group.  They had been commissioned to make revision and updates of the King James Version.  Instead they forged an entirely new Greek translation based primarily on the Sinaiticus and Vaticanus manuscripts.  

	That these were two very old manuscripts is not called into question.  What is called into question here is whether or not these were faithful copies of what the original manuscripts contained.  Since there are over three thousand differences between the two in just the Gospels, it would seem rather obvious that one or the other, at the least was untrustworthy.  

	Another thing which calls into question the veracity of this new Greek edition of the New Testament is the fact that the two doctors, Westcott and Hort, had a long history of disdain for the Traditional Text upon which the King James Bible was grounded.  The observation could easily be made that if one really has the predilection to search for trash, the landfill is a good place to start.  
	There were many, many editions of the Scriptures in antiquity which were the product of heretical groups.  Many others were the work of sloppy copyists.  The early church, energized by the Holy Ghost, would see that these copies were inconsistent with the true copies which they possessed.  These flawed copies would end up in a landfill, or more accurately a fire most of the time!

	It is interesting to note that one copy of the two, which remain the basis for almost all of the modern translations, was found in the burning barrel of a monastery while the other was culled from the back of the Vatican library where it had not seen the light of day for centuries.

	Yet, we are reminded that we must trust the ?assured findings? of the critics rather than retain the faith that God could preserve His Own Word.

	Donald Grey Barnhouse (The Bible Under Attack) had this to say about trusting the opinions of those who do not trust the Word of God:

Many times the ?assured findings? of the critic has been found to be wrong.  Until his capital was found, with his name inscribed, critics assured us that Tiglath Pileser of II Kings 15:29 was a fable.  Moses could not have written the Pentateuch, we were assured, as there was no such thing as writing in his day.  However, tablets predating Moses by centuries have been unearthed - with writing on them!  The book of John, we were assured by the scholars, was not written until the third century.  It is fable and myth, we were told.  ?Then a mummy was found in Egypt.  There was definite evidence that the funeral of the man thus mummified had taken place about the year A. D. 100.  The body was encased in a shroud made of several layers of papyrus leaves.  The outer layers were broad leaves; the inner layers were scraps glued together.  Scholars at the Ryland Library in Manchester, England, carefully dissolved the glue that held the pieces of the mummy wrapping.  Right in the middle was a large fragment from the Gospel of John - proof that the fourth Gospel existed as early as the last decade of the first century.  John died about A. D. 90 or later, so this page from his Gospel dates within 10 years of his death.?

	The experts can be wrong.  These scholars will be wrong when they doubt the power and goodness of God toward His churches.

	While there is nothing wrong with Scholarship, ability in this area is among the gifts of God to humanity, there is very much wrong with not trusting the Truth, Love, and Power of The Lord of Hosts!

	We will return to this subject, trust in God as opposed to trust in man in examining the doctrine of the Preservation of the Scripture in next week?s session.

***12 August 2005

INSPIRATION AND PRESERVATION (Continued)

	I wrote, in a letter to the editor of a local paper, a few weeks ago that there are two mindsets among people.  One is that of the theist; the other is that of the secularist.  They will both examine the same data and find differing conclusions due to their preconceptions about what the data must say.

	The secularist will look at scientific data through his lense of secularism.  He will base his findings on his belief that there is no possibility of any supernatural manifestation.  Therefore, when confronted with the evidence of the hand of God in any area, he must find a way to rationalize away that fact because it is not consistent with his preconceived view of reality.

	The theist, meanwhile, will envision a God Who stands outside of human history.  He sees God at the Creative Force which stands outside our known and experienced scientific configurations.  He will understand that God is willing to work in history because he will see evidence of this working of God in the past.  

	When it comes to the doctrine of the preservation of the Scripture, there will also be competing views by those who study the transmission of the inspired Word of God.

	Fuller (Counterfeit or Genuine) makes note of this in an important context:

?Many Theologians such as Young and Skilton believe that the doctrine of preservation guarantees only that no point in doctrine had been affected.  The fact is that there are passages where variant readings do make a difference to the doctrine.  In I Corinthians 15:51, where Paul elaborates on the doctrine of the resurrection, the variants do make a difference to the doctrine.  B and the vast majority of Greek manuscripts read: ?We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.?  But Aleph, A, D, F and G read: ?We shall all sleep, but we shall not all be changed.? D adds to the variants: ?We shall all rise, but we shall not all be changed.?  The Chester Beatty Papyrus reads: ?We shall not all sleep, nor shall we all be changed.?  It is true that for the most part the differences are small and do not affect doctrine, but there are differences that do affect doctrine.?

	The above is why we must assume, from all that we do know about God from His preserved Word, that He would not allow that Word to be lost to humanity and His Own churches.  It is just too important a Word to have been lost and then rediscovered, mostly, by men who have an avowed disdain for the power of God to protect that which He has inspired.

	In order to have a Word which is worthy of being trusted with the eternal destiny of our immortal souls, we must have a Word which God has not only inspired, but also a Word which He has preserved so that we know for a certainty that which He intended to communicate to us!

	There are those who would argue that God has preserved His Word, but that we must search out all the manuscripts and find the one which He used to perform that preservation.  Hills (Believing Bible Study) asks, if this is so, ?Which one?  Has it been found?  Do we really have anything which we can trust now!?

	We would argue that God has preserved His Word in that textual tradition which has been preserved in His faithful churches down through the centuries.  That is, after all, the place where we would expect to find this Word if the Holy Spirit was working upon those churches.

	That these churches did remain true to the Word of God must be considered a ?given? since they were teaching the doctrine of the Apostles in regards to salvation, and general church policy, down through the ages.  

	While the great majority of the Western Church was under the spell of the Roman pontiffs and the Latin Vulgate of Jerome, there were many churches which held true to the revealed Word of God as preserved in the precious texts of the Traditional Text.  

	The Latin Vulgate of Jerome is essentially the text of the modern translations.  It is Alexandrian in its base.  When Constantine had his politically motivated ?vision? of a ?cross? to unite his empire, he commissioned Eusubius to procure fifty Bibles to distribute throughout his realm.  These Bibles came from the scriptoriums of Alexandria.  The Vaticanus and the Sinaiticus are believed to have been two of these Bibles so produced.

	As the church accepted the protection of Rome, they also accepted the Bibles of heretics.  What followed was an ever descending spiral of departure from the ?Faith once delivered.?

	The reformation, flawed as it was, was at least a return to a faith in the Bible, rather than the dictates of men, and the Bible of the faith - the Traditional Text which had been kept alive by churches that were persecuted by the Church partly for having the audacity to hold to the ancient  Greek texts rather than the Latin which had been allowed, by Church decree, to supplant them.

	A quick aside, and one that will probably get me into trouble with some of you: This is exactly the same sort of spirit which pervades many churches today.  God gave His Word under inspiration in the original Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic of the Traditional Texts!  He did not give His Word in English.

	We can revere the King James Bible.  And, we should; after all God has given His stamp of approval and blessing on this translation for over four hundred years.  We can trust the King James Bible because it is such an accurate translation of the texts which God inspired.  But, we cannot claim inspiration for the King James Bible.  This was one of the errors of the Roman Church.  She put her stamp of approval upon the Latin of Jerome rather than to continue to trust upon the Words which God has singularly inspired in those original manuscripts and the faithful copies of the Same.

	We can continue to use the King James Bible.  It is the record of the inspired text for the English reader.  But, we must not fail to continue to trust in that which God did inspire.  Although a good and blessed rendition in English, the KJB is not the originally inspired Word of God.

	As we revere our translation, we understand that this is a step in the preservation of God?s Word to God?s people!

	We should not, must not!, deny this manifestation of His Grace in allowing us to read and study accurate copies of His Inspired Word.

	As for just trusting the ?experts? who would undermine our faith that God has considered His Message for us to be important enough to preserve, Hill notes:

?...if it is right to ignore the providential preservation of the Scriptures in the study of the New Testament books, why isn?t it right to go further in the same direction?  Why isn?t it right to ignore other divine aspects of the Bible?   ...   And why isn?t it right to ignore the doctrines of the Trinity and of the incarnation when dealing with the messianic consciousness of Jesus and the Son of man problem??

	To trust God is to trust that He has given us access to His Message.  It must be so, if He considered His Message to mankind to be important enough to give in the first place, He must have given it via the medium of inspiration to insure fidelity to His Words.  It must also follow, then that He would consider it necessary to preserve this Message.  To have failed to preserve would mean that He counted the Message as unimportant.  For Him to consider His Message as unimportant is to infer that He did not originally inspire that message.

	To have failed to either inspire, or to preserve, would mean that He had allowed both mankind in general and His churches in particular to exist in spiritual darkness for hundreds of years.
	Does that really sound like the God of the Bible?  If God either did not inspire, or did not preserve, His Words, then this is a meaningless question.  In such a case we can have no sure record of either just Who God is, or what He is like.

	We trust the Traditional Text because it?s veracity can be traced back to the early days of His churches upon this earth.  

	We trust the Traditional Text because we trust God.

	We will continue upon this same theme next week.

***19 August 2005

INSPIRATION AND PRESERVATION (Continued)

	 We would contend that the Word of God is sure.  It is a Word which has been inspired by the Almighty God Who created the heavens and the earth.  But, what good is this if it only applies to a lost set of ?original autographs??  To argue such a case is to devalue the meaning of real Bible study to the level of the arcane medieval discussions over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.  

	To ague that the Word is not now in its pristine inspired beauty is to lower our discussions to what might have been, if it was.  Then again, maybe it wasn?t.  Who can tell if we do not have a preserved Word from God?  Without this preserved Word we have nothing upon which to base our doctrine and faith.  Feelings are fleeting and changeable.  Culture remains in flux and bows to the will of sinful mankind.  Only a preserved Word can offer a bedrock of certainty about the important issues of the spiritual reality.

	Only a preserved Word can offer anything more than the educated (and, sometimes uneducated!) guess work of fallible man.  We need to know that the Words of God are as sure as the Word of God.  Without this certainty we have nothing of value.  

	The theological liberal and the conservative fundamentalist who stands by the newer versions, based on an eclectic text from dubious sources, share a common belief in the reliability of the Scripture.

	Back in the latter years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century there was a great debate on the Scripture by the ?modernist? and the ?fundamentalist.?  This debate was about the very nature of the preservation of the Scripture.  The modernist view was that the Bible is not the Word of God; it only contains the Word of God.  

	Hills (Believing Bible Study) argues that this view teaches that God did not preserve His Words.  He merely preserved the essential teaching of His doctrine.  This, it is said, is found in even the worst manuscripts.

	The conservative of this day will deny that he believes it to be true that he only believes that the Bible only contains Word of God.  But, when this same conservative argues that the Traditional Text of the Reformation was a flawed text and needs to be updated because of new archeological finds, his argument allows no other conclusion.

	The Word is important because it is an accurate rendition of the Words which God inspired.  
	Consider this situation: A military unit has been forced from a firebase by the enemy.  They draw back a few miles and regroup.  Then, their commanders informs them that they are going to return to the firebase.  How are they told?  One commander may argue that, ?Men, we are going to go back.  You had better make your peace with God before we try this!?  Another commander might say, ?Gentlemen, we are going back.  This time we are going to take our objective, and we are going to hold it!?

	The same general information is given in both instances.  But the message given forth is different between the two.

	Brethren, we don?t want the information about God.  We want the Words of God given by inspiration and transmitted to us by preservation.  This is the only Word that will edify our souls!

	This is what we have!

	Hills, again, notes:

?Because the Scriptures are God?s revelation of Himself, eternal, forever relevant, and infallibly inspired, they have been guarded down through the ages by God?s special providence, preserved not secretly but in a public way.?

	That public way of preservation is within the true churches of God.  It is a fidelity to this Word which has kept the pure churches pure in their doctrinal base.  It is a lack of fidelity to this Word which has allowed other churches, and great church bodies, to fall into rank heresy, superstition, and sin!

	Look at Matthew 16:15-18.  This is the great affirmation of Peter.  We have looked at this before but it would be good to look once again.

?He [Jesus] saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am?  And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.  And Jesus answered and said, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.  And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.?

	Once again I would caution you that Peter is not the Rock upon which Jesus founded His church.  There is a Greek play on words in which Peter is identified as part of this Rock.  It is very clear that the Rock to which Jesus referred was that confession that Jesus is ?...the Christ, the Son of the living God.?

	What made Peter part of that church which Jesus founded?  It was his adherence to this great statement of faith.  We, those of us who are born again in conversion through faith in the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross, have every right to consider ourselves as ?Peters? in this same sense.  He is part of the church even as we are part of the church.

	Although an important and active member of the early church, owing much to his status of apostle, there is no New Testament evidence that Peter was ever anything more than a partaker in the work of that church.  He is never considered as a supreme authority.  That honor, reinforced by the declaration of Peter, belongs only the Jesus Christ, alone!

	But, what I want us to notice here is how Peter came to the understanding which gave birth to his great statement of belief.  Jesus {verse 17) said, ?...flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.?

	It is not the pronouncements of ministerial committees and college professors, or even learned Bible critics, which reveals the truths of God to the churches, and by extension to the individual Peters of those churches.  The revelation comes from the Father.

	It was the Father who inspired the Words which make up the Word.  To argue that those words have been lost, and the best we can do now is to study to make an approximation of what they once might have said, is to deny the leading of the Father.  That is to, again by extension, cast doubt upon the leading, the goodness, the power, and the teaching of God.  It is to say that He gave His Word to people back in Peter?s day, for instance.  But today we must trust the men who try to reconstruct that Word.

	Flesh and blood did not give us this Word.  God did.  It was not flesh and blood which preserved it.

	God used human men, who wrote as they were moved by the Holy Ghost under the inspiration of God.  (see II Peter 1:21) The men who wrote were mere mortal men.  But the God Who inspired their writings is Supernatural and Powerful in that He could take these men and produce His Book.

	Preservation, in a real sense, is no different.  The copyists who faithfully made copy upon copy of this Word were mortal men.  But the Holy Spirit worked to providentially preserve that which had been inspired.

	About the men so involved in these great task we must note that these, while mortal men, were faithful servants of God.  Other hands wrote other ?scriptures,? so called.  These false scriptures were rejected by the churches where men were led of the Spirit of God, through the true Words of God.

	Notice that Jesus said, in the Scripture quoted above, that the ?gates of hell? would not prevail against His churches.  This has held true throughout the ages in those churches which have held true to that which has been revealed by God.  Those churches which have not trusted this Word of God have been led astray by ?flesh and blood.?

	May we remain on guard, trusting in His True Word, even in this day.

***26 August 2005

INSPIRATION AND PRESERVATION (Continued)

	Once again I have come across the statement that, ?God could have preserved His Word, but it is evident that He did not.?  Both times I have heard this statement it has been from the mouth and pen of Biblical ?educators.?  Once again I am drawn to the words of the Apostle Paul from the Book of I Corinthians, chapter two and verse fourteen.  ?But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.?

	Now, I would not question the salvation of either man who said these things.  I would not question that they may be committed to the things of God, as far as they understand them.  But, I would call into question their understanding of the spiritual nature of this Book.

	Gipp (An Understandable History of the Bible) made a rather obvious observation when he said, ?It is always to be remembered that the Bible is a spiritual book which God exerted supernatural force to conceive; and it is reasonable to assume that He could exert that same supernatural force to preserve.?

	I think it might be helpful to take a short detour from our study of the transmission of the Scripture and look, for a moment, at the spiritual mindset of the natural man and the mind which fully trusts the God of the universe.

	To the natural man, and this includes those who name the name of Christ and yet deny the power of God in any area, this world is all that we can know and understand.  It is reasonable for such a person to examine evidence and conclude that nature and culture are all we can access to understand our present situation. 

	This is the mindset of the evolutionary mode, be it of the species, the geological phenomena, or of the transmission of Scripture.  ?All things are as the natural laws have made them to be.  They and will continue to be in flux in obedience to those natural laws.?   This is his observation from the natural eye.

	To such a one, this is the only logical consensus because that part of his mind which seeks to understand is of the opinion that the natural is all there is.  There is no evidence, to him, that there is any force acting upon time which goes beyond the observable, natural laws of nature.

	The Christian with this mindset envisions a God who sits back in His celestial easy chair and watches events unfold on His T.V. screen.  He may have a great interest in what will happen, but He has just set the drama in motion and now eagerly watches to see what will happen next.  This may not be their verbalized view.  But, this is the simple extrapolation of their pronouncements on temporal matters.

	The theistic mindset, which believes and trusts in the goodness of a Deity, will have another view of things.  He will understand that the God Who stands outside the human view of history is, in fact, the Author of that History.  The natural laws which we observe in the physical world about us are of His creation.  As the Creator of those laws, he has the right, more importantly the ability!, to supercede His Own created laws at any point He sees fit.

	This view understands that God loves the world enough to inject His Own purposes into the affairs of man so that man can come to an understanding of the things man needs to know in order to obtain a full life on this earth, and a home in heaven throughout eternity.

	We may not understand all of His workings.  They may be mystery to us.  But we can observe that He has done so.  (compare John 3:8)

	The person of the natural mindset must, to preserve his self conceived proper order of things, seek to find a reason to rationalize away the supernatural since he cannot accept that this would have taken place.  From such comes the ?hard science? of evolution.   This evolutionary mode is then applied to every sort of endeavor including the theological observations.  To the Christian so blinded by the brilliance of human intelligence, this evolutionary mode extends even to his theology.

	It is the pride of men who believe that they can understand all, and through extension manipulate all, which comes this statement, ?It is obvious that God did not preserve His Word.?

	To argue so, even when it comes via the pontification of great (well, large) so-called fundamentalist colleges and universities, is not a voice of studied reason.  It is a voice of denial of the role of the supernatural in the real life of the real world in which we live.

	Writing in the series of pamphlets on the fundamentals of the faith during the early years of the twentieth century, Bishop (Testimony of the Scriptures to Themselves, article in ?The Fundamentals?) defined the mindset of the spiritual Christian:

?On the original parchment [lies inspiration].  Men may destroy that parchment.  Time may destroy it.  To say that the membranes have suffered in the hands of men, is but to say that everything Divine must suffer, as the pattern Tabernacle suffered, when committed to our hands.  To say, however, that the writing has suffered - the words and letters - is to say that Jehovah has failed.?

	In Matthew 5:18 Jesus made a very interesting statement.  He said, ?For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.?

	Consider, for a moment, the importance of what He said there.  How does this compare to our present discussion?  This is important because the very hope which we have of Heaven lies in our response to this question.

	Jesus said that ?...one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law...?  But, the ?original autographs? of that law had already passed from the scene.  They were gone.  So, if Jesus had only taught the concept of ?inspiration of the original autograph,? He would have been sadly mistaken on this subject.

	If Jesus were mistaken on so important a concept as that of the inspiration of the Scripture, He cannot be Divine.  If He is not Divine, He does not have the ability to be the substitute for my sin.  Simple linear reasoning screams forth that Jesus cannot be the Savior of your soul if the inspiration of God is limited to the original autographs.

	If God could have preserved His Word, ?but chose not to do so,? then Jesus is not the Savior of the world.  He is only a deluded religious teacher who was unable to understand the concepts of his own teaching.

	Think about that!  Either the faithful copies of the originals - which contain the same letters, words and phrases, would carry the same inspiration since they would contain exactly the same Words which God gave, were preserved by His power, or we must abandon the very core of our Christian belief.

	The only other argument allowed is that Jesus was mistaken in His teaching in Matthew.  This, of course, would lead to exactly the same conclusion.

	Bishop continues to argue that God led His people to preserve the text in three ways.  He makes note that there were many trustworthy copies of the originals made.

	These trustworthy copies were then sent over the world as the churches shared these precious manuscripts with other churches of like faith.  So, we would expect to find these texts scattered in the writing of men of God from diverse areas.

	Second, Bishop continues, these copies were read and recopied by faithful Christians over the many years.

	This copying simply means that there would be a linear progression of new texts which were the replicas of the old texts.  The old texts may pass from history; but the new texts would continue the same Message.  Thus, there would be a great unanimity of texts in all areas.  This is unlike the great oldest and best texts of Aleph and B which disagree between themselves 3000+ times in the gospels alone!

	Third, Bishop concluded, ?...untrustworthy copies were not so generally read or so frequently recopied.?  

	These untrustworthy copies, in fact, were put aside and ignored while the true copes were used - and used up!

	That is how the, so-called, oldest and best, were so well preserved.  It is from these ignored copies that the modern Scripture writers try to reconstruct (as best they can) what they argue God was unable, or unwilling, to preserve.

	Bishop, once again, summed up the reality of the situation, ?The parchments, the membranes, decay; the writings, the words, are eternal as God.?

	The reality of the situation is that we either have a preserved written Word which we can trust to give us the Message of God, or we have no Living Word to Whom we can entrust our eternal souls.

***2 September 2005

INSPIRATION AND PRESERVATION (Continued)

	As I sit here in my office writing these words, I have just come from watching the devastation wrought by hurricane Katrina in the Southern U. S.   I lived in Louisiana for some time.  I pastored a church there.  My daughter was born there.  It is heart wrenching to view these scenes and realize that the area will never again be home for some of these people.

	Some have seen the devastation up close and personal and will not be emotionally able to return to the area.  Others have had their financial and physical resources ripped from them by these winds of adversity.  Too many others have departed from this present life due to the havoc of the event.

	The scene reminds me that there are theologians, and Bible scholars, who would allege that this same sort of event has happened to the inspired Word of God through the storms of years and of man?s mishandling of the precious Message.

	These who thus argue would tell us that only they have the ability to restore what God was unable to protect.  They promise us that they will do as good a job as is humanly possible to restore as closely as they can the Words which God might have given us.

	I would say that this is an absurd reasoning, except that it is not absurd.  It is natural man speaking at his best with a lack of faith in the Lord of Glory.  

	I do not want the best humanity has to offer.  That cannot be a certain salve for my soul.  I want the best that God has to offer.  The glorious thing is, this is exactly what He wants for me as well!

	What is absurd is to argue that God would have taken the time to produce His Word but then either lacked the power or inclination to preserve that Word.  Gipp (An Understandable History of the Bible) sums up the case with these words: ?If God has not preserved His words as He said that He would (Psalm 12:5, 7), then He has done something which He has never done before.  He has wasted His time!?

	Gipp also notes, just a few pages earlier, ?A God who would bind Himself to us so inescapably [as to inspire a written word from Himself] must love us and truly desire for us to have His words and to be sure of them.?

	When Ethan, my son, was very young - probably no more than five or six years old, he decided that he would like to grow a sunflower.  He called his sunflower, if memory serves correctly, ?Smiley.?  He began his little project with one sunflower seed in some soil in a Styrofoam cup.  When the flower grew enough the be noticeably different from the weeds and grass outside, he transplanted it.  He prepared a hole in the ground and inserted his small plant.  He patted the soil back in around this plant with his hands.  He watered the plant when the rain strayed from our area for too long.  He hovered about the plant, protecting it when I mowed the lawn.  He shooed away dogs and cats that he felt might hamper his plants health.  He even fed his plant some fertilizer we bought for him.

	His reward was a nearly seven foot tall sunflower with a ?face? of about one foot across.     	
	Why does anyone think that God would do anything less with the Words He gave to His created world?

	God didn?t give His Word to the world simply because He needed something to do one afternoon.  God gave His Word because we needed to hear the Message that He had for us.  The words are important because without the words the Message would be unclear.  

	It is not enough for us to argue that only the ?general message? has been preserved in the differing manuscripts.  The ?general message? is a thing that is subject to the interpretation of man.  We need to know what it was that God said, not what some person might think He might have said.

	If the Message was important enough for God to give to mankind, and to do that by inspiration, then that Word was important enough for God to preserve.  He gave us that Message out of His love to the creature, us.  Do we really want to argue, of God, that this love was so futile, that the Message was unimportant enough, as to be allowed to lie unprotected in the winds and rain of time and sinful mankind?

	Some will, of course, argue that only the original writings were inspired.  This argument is like saying that we know all about the men who built the Roman roadways because some of these roadways have survived.

	We do not!  I don?t know how many men worked on these roads.  I don?t know if these were married men, with their wives and children in tow.  I don?t know if these men who worked on these roads were overseen by harsh soldiers or resourceful foremen.  I don?t know what were the thoughts and dreams of these builders.

	If only the original manuscripts bore the stamp of inspiration, and these are now decayed and lost to humanity, then we do not know - of a certainty - what were the Words which God wanted for us to have.  In this place I must agree with Reid (Is the Bible our Final Authority), who said, ?The idea of defending the error-free status of lost autographs rings hollow.?

	In understanding the beauty and grandeur of the works of Shakespear it is not important that we know we have exact copies of his plays.  It is not important to know, of a certainty, that he wrote alone or with a collaborator.  It is not important to know whether the writings of Shakespear were true history or simple conjecture.

	But, then again, the eternal destiny of my immortal soul does not depend on the works of William Shakespear.

	The same can never be said about the Word of God.  Trusting the Word of God is not a game or a pastime, it is an eternally relevant necessity that the Words which were transmitted to the human writers by the inspiration of God are the very Words, Jot and Tittle, that He intended for us to receive.  To receive anything else is to put our soul?s destiny in jeopardy!

	It is testament to the Love and Care of God that He has preserved His Word for us unto this day.  To say that this is not so is to argue that the Love and Care of God was deemed, by Him, to be more important to a people of an earlier age.

	But, we might ask, ?Which age?  Which people??  Over many centuries, over forty men, many who not only had never met, but who did not understand that some of the others even existed, were used of God to pen His message to us.

	To which of these did His Love and Care extend?  Was it to Moses?  Maybe Amos was the recipient of that support.  David, now there was a man who must have been the one who felt the Love and Care of God as he penned so many of the Psalms.    But, Moses, he never saw those Psalms.  Did not Moses have the Love and Care of God upon his life?  Come to think of it, I don?t really believe that even David had the exact ?proof draft? as written by Moses.

	And, what of the writers of the New Testament?  After all, none of them ever saw an ?original manuscript!?, excepting of course those inspired words of God which they wrote down.  If these manuscripts of the old covenant were subject to addition, deletion, and miscopy by the scribes, as we are assured is the situation by those who only argue for an ?error free original autograph,? how could these New Testament writers have had the Love and Care of God upon their own lives?

	The fact is that the original autograph copies were extremely important.  But, they are no more so than are faithful copies which flow from the preserving power of the Lord of the Universe.  Remember that even the ?original manuscripts? were mere copies of the Word of the Lord.  These human authors were but penmen who wrote the Words of God even as did all the copyist?s down through the ages.

	The ?original manuscript? writers were true to their God, and true to their mission.  But they were not a special breed of humanity.  They were men such as ourselves.  They may have been closer in their walk with God than are most of us.  But, they were still men such as ourselves.

	It was not the men which were of importance; it was the supernatural action of God upon these men as He inspired the Words, which He wanted written to the community of humanity, which bore the importance.  It is not a long walk of faith to simply accept that the same Supernatural God Who inspired would be able to supernaturally preserve His Own Word through other human penmen and copyists.

	Those human penmen and copyists were not important in themselves.  But, the Words which they copied were certainly considered important by God.

***9 September 2005

(INSPIRATION AND PRESERVATION) (Continued)

	In Jeremiah 36:27-32, we are given an interesting insight into the care of God over His Message to mankind.  Baruch, a scribe, had written down the words which God had given to Jeremiah.  Inspiration, we are reminded, lies in the words rather than in the person who holds the pen and makes the actual inscriptions upon the parchment.

	The important part, however, here is that Jehoiakim, the king at Jerusalem, burned this scroll of prophecy.  God called this, ?iniquity,? (verse 31) which deserved punishment.

	The result, here, is that God told Jeremiah to prepare another copy of the prophecy.  This carried the same weight of inspiration as did the original.  But, remember, this was not the ?original autograph.?  It was a copy.

	When we only allow for inspiration to reside upon the ?original autograph,? we limit the ability and power of God in our minds.  We limit His ability to maintain His Message and we limit his power to protect His Message.  The fire of Jehoiakim did not destroy the Message of God.  That Message was settled in Heaven.

	It might be noted that (verse 32) there were even more words added to that Message.  But, each of those words came from God, not from Jeremiah.  

	Hills, (Believing Bible Study) has noted that:

?Some would argue that God providentially guided Westcott and Hort to ?restore? the pure text.  The obvious question is simple: Why did God allow His true text to be hidden from the world for one thousand years, becoming more corrupted with each copyist??

	There are those who would argue that the situation with Westcott and Hort was similar to that with Jeremiah.  There are two glaring dissimilarities between the two occurrences.

	First of all, Jeremiah immediately restored the text to its purity.  He did this under the hand of God.  Whereas the Westcott and Hort group used a committee to examine many various readings of Scripture, they were not the original penmen of that Scripture.  They were attempting to ?restore? what they believed had been lost, through the apparent inattention of God, for well over one thousand years.

	Jeremiah had immediately restored the text with his heart in faith to the God of that text.  The Westcott and Hort team were, one thousand years after the fact, attempting to ?restore? what they believed God had neither the inclination nor ability to preserve.

	The points up the second difference between the Jeremiah restoration and the Westcott and Hort ?restoration.?  Jeremiah used the direct influence of the preserving power of God to effect his restoration.  Westcott and Hort relied upon the best reasoning and instincts of man to change what they did not believe God had been able to preserve, in such a way that they seemed to have felt that they were the overseers of what He ?probably? had ?meant? to say.

	Do you see the difference?  Jeremiah acted from faith.  Westcott and Hort acted from pride and arrogance.  These two, and their committee, honestly believed that they were able to restore, to a degree, what God had allowed to fall into decay and ruin.

	What kind of a God of Majesty did the revision committee of Westcott and Hort imagine in their hearts?

	That same question must be asked of those who envision a ?restored? word to replace the preserved Word of the Reformation in this day!

	Gipp, (An Understandable History of the Bible) asks this question, ?...what if God gave those precious words only to those early writers, then lost them in history, ... where few could visit them and none could trust them??

	That is a reasonable question.  Can we really trust the Words of Life if they may well be simply the words of lie.  These words of Scripture are either God?s Words, or they are not.  If they are not then we are perfectly right to consider that they might not be the original words of the writers.  But, why would we care?  We don?t question the words of others from antiquity.

	The reason we do not seriously question the words of others from antiquity is that they are acknowledged as the words of man.  The eternal destiny of our immortal souls does not ride upon the fidelity of the message of those words.

	But, if those words of Scripture are the Words of God...   Do not we consider God powerful enough to keep preserved His Own Words to us?  That is such an important question that the destiny of your soul rides upon the answer to it.

	Not your answer.  But, the true answer.

	It God has not chosen, or lacked the ability, to preserve the Message which He gave to humankind it would call into question the wisdom of God.  If we believe that God took the time to inspire a Word which He must have known would perish, why?  What would have been His purpose?  Without preservation there is no adequate reason to explain why God had thus inspired the record.  

	This attitude, that God either could not or did not preserve His Word is to call into question the Power of God.  If He is unable to protect His Own Message from the onslaughts of men down through the ages of time, how could He possibly be powerful enough to hold the soul of any of that same race of humans down through the ageless ages of eternity?

	If we do not accept that God has preserved His Word, then we call into question His goodness.  What sort of grace and love is shown by a God Who would allow His revelation, which had to be important to the creature or He?d not have given it, to be seen by only a few and to deny that same revelation to others He had called, such as the reformers, and preachers of, what they believed to be, the Gospel Message for over one thousand years?

	Of course, the bottom line, the important part of this discussion centers on ?What saith the Scriptures.?  Next week we will begin a several week discussion of the Biblical passages that pertain to the preservation of the Word.

	One last question, Is there really any purpose in looking at the Scriptural passages about preservation if we do not have a preserved Word?

	We do have a preserved Word.  As we will see, God promised this.  And, God ain?t lied, yet.  ...and He never will!

***
16 September 2005

INSPIRATION AND PRESERVATION (Continued)

	When we speak of the Preserved Word of God we do not speak of the original autographs.  That should be quite obvious.  God preserved His Word.  He did not preserve the ink and fabric of the original scrolls.

	In the tenth chapter of Acts we see a record of the vision of Peter.  Peter saw, in his vision, the feast of food which was considered as ?unclean? to his religious background.  God told Peter that this was not ?unclean,? because, ?What God hath cleansed, that call not thou unclean.?  (Acts 8:15)  

	This was all part of the mechanism whereby God used Peter to open the Gospel message to the Gentiles.  

	Earlier in the chapter you will find that God was already working on the heart of Cornelius.  God sent an angel to Cornelius to instruct him in that Gospel message.  The angels told Cornelius to send for Peter for an explanation of the Gospel message.

	At first glance, to the casual reader, this just fits in with the flow of the story.  But, consider this point carefully.  Did not the angel understand the Gospel message?  Could not he have conveyed this truth of salvation to the household of Cornelius?   Angels, after all, are throughout Scripture seen to be the bearers of the message of God.  If this was so at the birth of Jesus, for instance, why was it not so with the eternally important transmission of the Gospel message?  It seems somehow out of place that this ?message bearer of God? would call for the intervention of a human as a necessary part of the giving of that message.
	That just didn?t seem to be a Scriptural method of transmission for the message of God.

	But, search out the Great Commission verses of the Gospels.  The responsibility for the transmission of the good news that Jesus died in time so that we might live in eternity, was given to the Christian community.  The individual Christians, that includes each of us, are to be the emissaries of God in this important project of spreading the Gospel message.

	The message, itself, is supernatural.  The energizing factor behind the transmission of the message is the Holy Spirit - again supernatural.  But, the ?nuts and bolts? of the furthering of that message among mankind down through the ages belongs to humans who have been cleansed by the Blood of the Lamb.  

	So also is the transmission of the written Word of God.  The message, in Its inception and production, is supernatural.  The energizing factor behind the transmission and preservation of that message is the Holy Spirit of God working His Own preserving power.  That is supernatural.  But, the ?nuts and bolts? of the preservation and transmission of that Word has been assigned to humans who make up the various true churches of Jesus Christ. 

	That is one of the reasons why we find the true, preserved, Word of God honored among the Bible believing members of the Bible believing churches down through the centuries.

	That is also why the false churches tend to promote a false word of God down through the centuries.  These false churches may have many of the outward trappings of the true churches.  These false churches will also, generally, have much added to, and left out of, the true Gospel message in such a way as to obscure that message.  It is also true that the bible?s of these false churches will appear to be true, at first glance.  But, a further look at these pseudo scriptures will find them to be rife with deletion and addition.  Many will be led astray by the wiles of the tempter.

	The bottom line, on Scriptural transmission, is quite simple: If it is of God, it is perfect and does not need change.  If it is of man it will change with the tides of time.  

	In which place do you look to find the true Message of God?  Do you look in a ?restored? text that man has had to rescue from the inattention of God, or do you look in the text which has been transmitted through the ages, protected by the power of God and carried forth by the true Churches of the God of eternity?

	Fuller (Counterfeit or Genuine) reminds us:

?The doctrine of preservation does not guarantee the preservation of the autographs, for they perished within a few years after their writing.  Neither does it guarantee the accuracy of the copies, because errant men copied them.  It does guarantee, however,  that the complete contents of the Scriptures have been preserved, not in any one manuscript, but somewhere within the manuscript tradition.?

	That is why we go to the Traditional Text to find the Words which God gave to mankind.  That is why we reject the newer texts, although sometimes from very old manuscripts, as inferior.  The preserved Word of God is that which has been available down through the ages.  It was not lost for a thousand years only to be rediscovered by men who doubted the ability of God the oversee His Own Words.

	Read in the fourth chapter of Matthew, Jesus is here recorded as being tempted by Satan.  What was the response of Jesus to each of these temptations?  In verse four Jesus says, ?...It is written....?  In verse seven Jesus says, ?...It is written....?  In verse ten Jesus says, ?...it is written....?  
	In each temptation Jesus responded with the Scripture.  Could He have done this had the Scripture been flawed?  Not likely!

	If the Scripture had been as haphazardly preserved as we are told today, Jesus would have said, ?It is written.?  The easy answer of Satan would have been, ?I know that your translation says that.  But, the oldest and best manuscripts say....?

	In the Temptation accounts Jesus argues with Satan from the Scriptures.  Had there been any mixture of error in those Scriptures, Satan would have gleefully pointed it out!

	One of the principles of the Temptation account is that God has preserved His Scripture.  It is not possible, if one is to be honest in his assessment of the facts, for anyone to read this account and argue that God did not choose to preserve His Scriptures.  God does not change!  If that was His Will in the time which Jesus walked physically upon this earth, then that is still His Will!

	Although the dispensations may change, the principles of God do not change.  Sin is always sin.  Grace is always grace.  And, preservation is always preservation.  To argue that God has not chosen to preserve His Words is to argue that God has changed His principles.  That is to postulate a God Who is a fickle and vacillating Being Whom we cannot trust because He might just change His mind tomorrow.

	What kind of faith can be built upon this shallow and shifting foundation?  Quite simply, the only sort of faith we could build upon this postulate is that of the relativistic culture of our day.  ?If it feels good, do it,? then becomes our doxology.  One man?s faith, or lack of faith, is as good as another man?s religious tradition.  Jesus might not be the only way of salvation because we just don?t know which side of the bed God got up on this day.

	That is not only a foolish doctrine, that is a doctrine without a Scripture.  If we don?t have a certain, preserved Scripture, then we have no Scripture.  All we have left on which to base our faith is our own personal feelings and experience.

	That, my friends, is not Christianity.  It is humanism.  That is not fundamentalism.  That is religious liberalism at its height.  Man, each individual man, becomes the final arbitrator of what is proper and what is not.  Again, this is not Biblical Christianity.  This is religious anarchy.

	We have seen a two-sided, but combined, change brought about by the lack of faith in an established Scripture.  This has affected our society as well as our religious view.  Our society had been founded upon Biblio centric values.  When the underpinning of truth in a revealed and certain Scripture was swept away with the rationalism of the oldest and best revisions, our cultural base was set for a free fall.

	On the religious side of the issue, we have witnessed a great weakening of the faith of the fathers.  We have great ministries which center on survey?s of what man wants rather than on what God has commanded.  The fires of the church cook-outs have replaced the fire of the Holy Ghost upon the hearts and minds of men and women.  

	When not consigned to the scrap heap of political activism, the church is viewed as a social club.  Our purpose as churches is described to us as a social institution, responsible for civic charity.  We have forgotten our mission to build up the saved and win the lost.  We have done so because we have lost our faith in the settled Word of God.

	On the social side, our view of the Scripture as a document which has changed over time, has seeped into the culture at large.  The old concept of right and wrong, good and bad, is now seen as oppressive and outmoded.  ?Right and wrong,? we are told - and we seem to all too often agree with the assessment! - ?Is dependant upon the situation.  What might be right for you may be wrong for someone else.?  The only constant, it seems, is that each person be allowed to do what he desires.

	In truth, the bigger voting block has sway and the individual, in our individualistic society, is forced into a herd mentality of  the diversity of individualism - as long as they all conform to the relativistic morality.

	If you don?t believe that this is true, try preaching Bible morality.  Words like, ?bigot,? ?sexist,? homophobia,? and ?reactionary,? will be used to stone your moral values as though you were Stephen before the religious rulers.  

	This issue of the preservation of Scripture is not an academic discipline.  It is the basis of our entire faith in this life and hope of heaven in the next.

	I promised verses about preservation this week but I?ve pretty well run out of time.  I have looked at one passage and what it has to say about the principle of preservation.  Next week, I promise - Lord willing, to begin with a look at some of the verses which deal with preservation.

***
23 September 2005

INSPIRATION AND PRESERVATION (Continued)

	We?ve spent quite a bit of time in the past few weeks talking about the theory and reasonableness of the doctrine of the preservation of the Scripture.  That can be a good thing.  But, like the car commercial running on T. V. right now, we?ve left the most important part out.  ?What saith the Scriptures??

	No matter how reasonable a doctrine may seem to be, if it is not backed by Scripture it is ?the doctrine of devils.?  (see I Timothy 4:1)

	Before I begin to look at the Scripture, I would like to say that if the Scripture does, indeed - as I have said, teach a doctrine of the preservation of the Scripture, then those who postulate that God has somehow lost control of - or has just refused to preserve those Scriptures, are teaching the doctrines of devils.  It doesn?t matter how many ?Rev.?s,? or ?Professor?s? are before their names, or how many ?Ph.D.?s,? ?D.D.?s,? or even ?Fiddle D.D.?s? come after their name, if they teach a doctrine that is not in accordance with the Word of God, then they are teaching the doctrines of devils.  

	There may be no maliciousness in the intent of their teaching.  They may even be trying to honor God, as they understand Him to be, in their pronouncements.  But, the fact remains that when they disagree with the Word of God they are teaching the doctrine of devils.

	The same goes for any of us, in any of our religious pronouncements, when we stray from the Word of God!

	The first verse I want to look at is really an entire chapter.  Psalm 12, is our first focus.

?1.  Help; LORD; for the godly man ceaseth; for the faithful fail from among the children of men.  2.  They speak vanity every one with his neighbour: with flattering lips and with a double heart do they speak.  3.  The LORD shall cut off all flattering lips, and the tongue that speaketh proud things: 4.  Who have said, With our tongue will we prevail; our lips are our own: who is lord over us?  5.  For the oppression of the poor, for the sighing of the needy, now will I arise, saith the LORD; I will set him in safety from him that puffeth at him.  6.  The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times.  7.  Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.  8.  The wicked walk on every side, when the vilest men are exalted.?

	It seems to me rather clear exactly what this passage is talking about.  Verse six says, ?The words of the LORD...,? are certain things.  Verse seven continues, with no interruption between the two verses, ?Thou shalt keep them...?

	To be completely honest, most of the commentaries I consulted will ascribe these verses (6 & 7) to refer to the people.  I just can?t see this.  It does violence to the clear words of Scripture.  Although the nation to whom the prophecy was given does still exist, it is His Words - not the Godly persons of that day - which have abided, ?...from this generation for ever.?

	At the very least, this has to be a secondary application of this prophecy.  I believe that the sequence of the words and phrases make this the primary application.  If, as verse one plainly says, ?...the godly man ceaseth...,? then if God had prophesied that the people would abide, He has prophesied that they would abide in error.

	If, as the passage plainly implies, the Words of God, are promised to endure, they will endure under the protection of God.

	I would like you to notice what the New International Version has done to verse seven: ?O LORD, you will keep us safe and protect us from such people forever.?  Compare this with, ?Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation.?  ?Them? has been changed to ?us.?  This is the only way which this verse can be made to say what it has not said.

	When you hear the old canard that the newer versions, from different base texts!, do not make any doctrinal changes, remember this verse.

	The Hebrew-Greek Key Study Bible defines the word ?Keep? as:

?...to hedge about (as with thorns), i.e. guard; gen. to protect, attend to, etc.: - beware, be circumspect, take heed (to self), keep (-er, self), mark, look narrowly, observe, preserve, regard, reserve, save (self,) sure (that lay) wait (for), watch (-man).?

	All of these definitions give a picture of someone who has concern for that which he is guarding.  None of these definitions would give us a picture of a God Who had inspired His Word and then sat back to see what might happen to It.

	The word ?keep,? in regards to the Words of God in Psalm 12 means that God would not willingly allow His Words to be lost to mankind for one thousand years, or for one single second!  To say that these Words needed to be restored, at any point in history, is to argue, then, that man somehow wrestled them from the Hand of God.

	That, is a doctrine of devils.

	Again, the Hebrew-Greek Key Study Bible defines the word ?preserve? as:

?...to guard, in a good sense (to protect, maintain, obey, etc.)  Or a bad one (to conceal, etc.); besieged, hidden thing, Keep (-er, -ing), monument, observe, preserve (-r), subtle watcher (-man).?

	I think it is safe to dispense with the definitions ?bad sense.?

	The obvious conclusion is that God preserved His Word; He protected His Word; He maintained His Word.  He even ?obeyed? His Word in the sense that He projected a fidelity to the words which allowed men down through the ages to access faithful copies and discover the Message which He gave to humanity.

	This will have to be our stopping place for this week.  I want to spend some time next week looking at Psalm 119:89.

	Remember that we revere the Bible because it is the preserved Word of God.  If that Bible be not preserved, then we have no knowledge of God, sin, salvation, or the purpose of life upon this earth.  We, in such a case are left to our own intellect and devices to attempt to stand in the spiritual sense.  We couldn?t even know, with any certainty, what (or if!) the spiritual might be in reality.

	Our search for meaning, and for God, would then - of necessity - be centered upon an occult journey.

	But, praise to the Lord of Glory, God has not left us to our own, and by extension Satan?s, devices in our spiritual journeys.  God has given us an inspired, and preserved Word with which to inquire about that which we have need to know.

***
30 September 2005

INSPIRATION AND PRESERVATION (Continued)

	This week we will continue to look at Scriptural verses which teach the doctrine of the Preservation of the Scripture.

	Today we will look at just one verse from the longest chapter in the Bible.  Verse eighty-nine, of Psalm one-hundred-nineteen, says, ?For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven.?

	There are those among us who would argue that this verse has no bearing upon the situation of the Scripture as it pertains to human history.  They will say, ?Of course God has preserved His Word in Heaven.  But, it was lost among sinful mankind until pious persons like Westcott and Hort were able to reconstruct what He said.?

	I see a couple of problems here.  First, even Westcott and Hort did not purport to have reconstructed what God had said.  They only claimed to be able to be closer to what the original writings might have said.

	The basis of the study of Hort and Westcott, Nestle?, and all the rest of the Biblical reconstructionists, begins not in faith, but in doubt.	 That doubt is at the very foundation of their scholarship.  They begin with the premise that God has not been able, or willing, to preserve His Word to mankind.

	This mindset evidences a very low opinion of both God and His Word.  It postulates a core belief that the words of God were not really very important.  It postulates that the arbitrator of the Word of God is not the Power of God; it is the intellect of man.  It is a picture of man deciding what he believes to have been the message of God.

	In this situation the culture of the day is more important than the teaching of God.  In this situation the belief system of man is more important than the Words of God.  In this situation the fidelity of man is more important than the power of God.  In this situation Satan is able to influence the very message of God, in the minds and pens of mortal mankind, into his own teaching.  

	To those who would argue with this assessment, remember that these are not ?pious? men who are trusting God.  These are not ?men of faith.?  These redactors are men who begin with the premise that God did not, or could not, protect His message.  At their core they see the message as unimportant and the power of God as limited.

	Can any good thing, to paraphrase Nathaniel in John 1:46, ever come out of unbelief and a lack of trust?

	The second problem I have with that mindset is the contention that the Word of God would be held in Heaven and lost on earth.  That the Word of God is settled in heaven is beyond question.  But, how do we know that this is so?  Is it not because the Bible tells us this is so?  If we are convinced that the Word was not preserved unto this day, how do we know that this is true?  How do we know that anything else the Scripture has to say is true if God has not preserved His Message to man?

	Hebrews 11:1 tells us: ?Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.?

	In a very real sense, there is no faith in Heaven as we understand faith here on physical earth.  In Heaven we will see the Savior.  In Heaven we will see the fulfilled promises of God.  It is on earth that we need to exercise faith.

	It is also on earth that we have the most need to have a preserved Word of God.  In Heaven is the abode of God.  On earth we trust in that which we have not seen.  We have this trust based on the Message that God has given to us.  If that Word were only preserved in Heaven, we would have ripped from our hearts that which we trust upon to find peace in Heaven.

	I don?t need a road map to get home from the grocery store I go to every week.  I do need a map to go to a place where I have never been.  Out in Arizona is a small town called ?Oatman, Arizona.?  I know it exists.  Some of my ancestors founded the town.  Some day I hope to travel there.  But, I will need a map to be able to find the place.  I know, only generally, where it is.  If I just headed West to Arizona I might not be able to find the town.  But, if I first find it on a map, I can follow the marked route to find the destination.

	General Revelation has placed within our mortal hearts the truth of the place called ?Heaven.?  We know that it exits.  But if we had to wait until we got there to find a road map...  Well, we might not be able to make the trip.  The preserved Scripture, which we have on this earth, is the map which God has preserved for us to find the way to make that trip.

	From our human standpoint it is more important that the Word of God be preserved here, on this earth of history, than that it be preserved only in Heaven.  The God of Love would not allow His Message of Love to be kept just out of our reach in the library of Heaven.

	Finally, the Word of God was not preserved among sinful mankind only.  The repositories in which He Word was transmitted from generation to generation were among His faithful churches of history.  Yes, sinful man did corrupt some copies of the Word.  It is from these that we find those variations which have been shoe-horned into the true record in the modern versions.  It is this traditional text, God honored for hundreds of years, which has been shunted aside in the mind and teaching of scholars who would rather follow worldly advice than God honored principle.

	The Criswell Study Bible tells us, rightly, that, ?This verse avows the immutability of God?s word; it shall stand forever...?  This is correct.  Forever does not have gaps where God decided that maybe He would just let the Word slip away for a while.  God is eternal.  His Word is a Living Word that is eternal in the same sense.   God exists, and works upon this earth, during this time of physical history.  The prophecies of Scripture prove this true.  So, also, does His Word.  Again, the fulfilled prophecies of that Scripture prove this is true.

	Spurgeon said it well (Spurgeon?s Devotional Bible), ?Other things are fleeting and changeable, thy promise is fixed and sure; and this is our soul?s stay in time of trouble.  What should we do if this promise could fail??  What, indeed!  Without the immutability (unchangeableness) of the Scripture, we have nothing upon which to base our faith.  Even the entrance of the Holy Spirit into our lives to guide us is based upon our obedience to this Scripture.  Our obedience to this Scripture is based upon our trust that It is true.  If the Scripture is changeable, It is not true!  It might have been in the past, or in the future.  But, not in both - and all - time spans can It be true!  Simple mathematics: If the Bible was true, and changed, It is not now true.  If It is now true, after change, then It was not true in the past.

	Speaking of Special Revelation (that of the Scripture) as opposed to General Revelation (that of nature), the Concordia Self-Study Bible notes:

?Here God?s word by which he created, maintains, and governs all things ... Stands firm in the heavens.  The secure order of the word, by which He upholds and governs all things, is enduring and trustworthy...  And that is the large truth that confirms the godly man?s confidence in the trustworthiness of God?s word...?

	The Hebrew-Greek Key Study Bible defines ?settled? as:

?...a prim. root; to station, in various applications (lit. or fig.); - appointed, deputy, erect, establish, X Huzzah (by mistake for prop. name), lay, officer, pillar, present, rear up, set (over, up), settle, sharpen, stablish, (make to) stand (-ing, still up, upright), best state.?

	Notice those applications.  The Word of God is something that He has set up, constructed if you will.  By inspiration God has built a habitation for His Message to mankind.  If Satan were to assail a construction of God, do you believe that God would call out for mankind to come and save His construction?   Does God really need our help?  Would God have allowed His edifice of Love to humanity to be torn down by the terrorist attack of Satan?  NO!  For God to have cared enough about His Message to man, to have inspired that Message, means that God considered that Message to contain vital information for the creature.

	For God to have sent His Son into human history, as a sacrifice in the place of the creature, means that He has a love for mankind.  He would not have allowed His special creation of Love, His Word, to fall into disrepair when that Message was so desperately needed to make effectual use of the sacrifice of His Own Son.  To do otherwise would have been to be untrue to His Love and His Son.

	God has promised that His Word would stand ?forever.?  Again, the Hebrew-Greek Key Study Bible defines ?forever? as:

?...concealed, i.e. the vanishing point; gen. time out of mind (past or fut.), i.e. (Practically) eternity; freq. adv. (espec. with prep. pref.) alway (-s), ancient (time), any more, continuance, eternal (for [n-]) ever (-lasting, -more, of old), lasting, long (time), (of) old (time), perpetual, at any time, (beginning of the) world (+ without end).? 

	In other words, forever means just what the English speaker would believe that it would mean.  ?Forever.?

	We?ve all heard someone say, ?What part of, ?No,? did you not understand??  Well, what part of, ?Forever,? did those who argue for a lost, and then restored (mostly) Scripture not understand? 

	If this verse means anything, it means that we do not have a Scripture which was lost to mankind for one thousand years and then, mostly, restored by men who lacked faith in the power of God.

	Just remember, when the margins of your copies of the Bible say that ?the oldest and best manuscripts do not agree,? that means that those ?oldest and best? are wrong.  If they disagree with the preserved word then those spurious words have not been ?forever.?

***
7 October 2005

INSPIRATION AND PRESERVATION (Continued)

	As we continue to look at the issue of what the Bible does say about the doctrine of the preservation of Scripture, let us look at Isaiah 40:8.  ?The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand forever.?  Once again we have that little word ?forever? just as we saw last week in Psalm 119:89.

	This would seem to a troublesome concept to those who deny the eternality of the Scriptural record.  This verse does not say, ?The word of our God shall stand until the faulty copyist makes notations in the margin...?, or ?until the word of God is changed by church councils...,? or ?until the sands of time have obscured the real words.?

	This verse does not say, ?The word of our God shall stand until it is lost.  But, then some men who do not agree that God has the power to preserve that Word will reconstruct what they believe He might have said.?

	There is an important reason why God has promised to allow His Word to stand forever.  The People?s Study Bible recognizes this reason, ?Its [the Word of God] perpetuity is the surest guarantee of our eternity and our happiness as well.?

	We have a ?know so? religion because we have an ?I told you so? God Who has promised that He would preserve His Word for all eternity.

	If the Word is not preserved, we can have no reason to hope that It?s pronouncements are true.  I have belabored this point for the past several weeks.  It remains important.  If the Word of God is not secure, we have nothing which can be trusted to tell us anything about God, or salvation, or the spiritual world.  We are, if the Word be not secure, in worse shape than the infidel for we trust a lie.  Well, maybe not.  But, how would we know if the Word of God, and by extension the Person of God, is not trustworthy in preservation?

	Micah 5:2 says, ?But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be the ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old; from everlasting.?

	When the wise men came to Herod, the king, to inquire the place of the birth of the Messiah, Herod asked the chief priests and scribes where this place might be.  In Matthew 2:5 we see their answer.  ?And they said unto him, In Bethlehem of Judaea: for thus it is written by the prophet...?

	Fuller (Counterfeit or Genuine) notes about this reply to ?...the place of the birth of Christ.  The quotation of the prophecy of Micah depends entirely upon the one word ?Bethlehem,? which is recorded in both passages.?  (The Micah and Matthew passages)

	When one considers that a scant thirty years from the time which these wise men traveled from the east, these same scribes and priests would lead the chant to ?Crucify Him?, in relation to this Messiah, we are struck with their fidelity to a trust in the Word.  They did not believe that the Words of God were untrustworthy.

	Isn?t it amazing to consider that those, humanly speaking, who were the driving force behind the crucifixion of Jesus were truer to their Bibles than are most of those in the fundamentalist movement of today!

	Today far too many of the fundamentalist camp, those who claim a fidelity to the Word of God, do not accept even the pretense of fidelity to the Words of God.  They agree with the skeptic and the cultist that the Word was lost in time.  ?Oh,? they will argue, ?We have reassembled that which God could not keep.  We now have a text much closer to what was originally written under inspiration.?

	What, I continue to ask, can we ascertain from an inspired Word if we are not certain that we know what were the Words so inspired?  Is man stronger than God, so that he can reconstruct that which God had allowed to be lost?  If, as we are told by so many of these faithless fundamentalist?s, the Word was lost somewhere along the way, why do we bother to claim an inspiration for words to which we no longer have access?

	Maybe Jesus did not die on the cross, as Islam preaches.  Maybe Jesus is not God incarnate, as the Jehovah?s Witness? claim.  Maybe Paul was just being foolish, in the third chapter of Galatians, when he argued about the promises of God, ?Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made.  He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ.?  (Galatians 3:16)

	How do we know that these allegations are not true if the Word be not preserved of God!

	Don?t tell me, ?But, the Holy Spirit will guide us into truth.?  How can we even know that this is true if it is not from our understanding of the preserved Word of God?

	Our ?good feelings? are the products of transitory bodies.  Unless we are energized by the Spirit of God our feelings will betray us.  Our feelings cannot understand the things of God because God is Spirit and our feelings are human.  God gave His Word to us so that we would have an anchor to hold our souls even in the storms of human experience.  If the chain to that anchor is burst, if we have lost our written connection to the Truth that God wanted to communicate to us, then we are cast adrift on a sea of spirituality with no map, no guide, and no compass! ...And, no hope.

	But, God has preserved His Word!  He said He would do so.  Folks, God ain?t lied yet; and, He ain?t about to start now.

	History also tells us that God has preserved His Word.  The time honored Traditional Text has been in existence in every time since the original Words were penned by the inspiration of God.  This text has been found in all quarters of Christendom.  This text is our Ark in the flood of despair which has overflowed the world of sin.

	God is good.  He would not leave us without a witness to His love. ...And, He hasn?t!

***
14 October 2005

INSPIRATION AND PRESERVATION (Continued)

	 We begin this week with another Scripture that declares the doctrine of the preservation of Scripture.

	One of the clearest passages in the New Testament as regards to this doctrine is found in Matthew 5:17-18.  Here Jesus says, ?Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets:  I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.  For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.?

	To those who might quibble about the clear meaning of this verse, Fuller (Counterfeit or Genuine) makes clear the point of Jesus? teaching.  ?To whatever the law refers, it is written, or else the use of ?jot? and ?tittle? would not be meaningful.?

	It is clear that Jesus was talking about the written record of God.

	The Ryrie Study Bible argues that, ?The Lord?s point is that every letter of every word of the O. T. is vital and will be fulfilled.?  I would not argue with this assessment.  But, I would add to it.  
	The concept of ?Old Testament? and ?New Testament? is Biblically based.  (see Matthew 16:28) But I would believe that the ?Law? of God refers to more than just the Old Testament Scriptures.

	It is true that in the Jewish reckoning of the O. T. Scriptures, in the day of Jesus physically upon this earth, contained a division of Law, Writings, and Prophets.  So, it might be possible to argue that the reference to ?the law,? at this place in Matthew might refer to just those Old Testament words.  After all, Jesus does speak about these Scriptures as they point to His ministry upon the earth.  But, He was also referring to that which should come after His sacrifice, resurrection and ascension.  He talked about to the end of heaven and earth, and ?till all be fulfilled.?

	In this case it is obvious that He was preauthorizing, what we recognize as prophecy, the continuance of those New Testament Scriptures in the same manner as was He speaking of the Old Testament Scriptures.  To argue otherwise is to divide the Words of God into multiple pieces with some more important than others.

	To say that this verse only applies to the Old, and not to the New, Testament, is to argue that the Old Testament is more closely overseen by God than is the New Testament which contains the record of the life, death, resurrection, and present ministry of Jesus.  It is to argue that the New is somehow less important in the mind of God than is the Old Testament.

	It is also important to notice the verse in context.

	Immediately preceding this prophecy of Jesus concerning the reliability of Scripture are these familiar verses:

?Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.  Ye are the light of the world.  A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.  Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.  Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.?  (Matthew 5:13-16)

	Notice what these verses say about the Christian and his witness.  First, we are to be an influence in the world toward the things of God.  Jesus says that if we were to lose this ability to influence the world, we are useless and might as well be ?...trodden under foot of men.?

	Second, we are called ?...the light of the world.?  That is an important consideration.  A comparison of this passage with the first chapter of the Gospel of John, would show that our ?light? is a reflection.  Jesus is the True Light of the Word.  We are ?lights? only in the sense that we carry forth the truth of Him into the world.  

	A candle is not a light.  It is a ?stick? upon which the light of the fire stands.  It is fuel for the light; but, it is not the light.  We are lights only in the sense that we are called to hold aloft the Truth that Jesus Christ died in time that we might live in eternity.

	Our ?light? is to be blazed into the world.  There is a purpose in this.  We are to use the light of our testimony of Jesus Christ to point people toward the Father.  That is our purpose.  This will lead people to the Savior Who gives us the gift of peace with God and salvation from our sins.

	The last two verses of the Book of Matthew give us these instructions from Jesus:

?Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.  Amen.?  (Matthew 28:19-20)

	I submit that it is not possible that we are able to carry forth the dictates of this Great Commission without a secure knowledge that we have a secure Word from God.  How could we teach ?all things? if we have not a sure Word to tell us of all things?

	How can we be a witness of that which we do not know?  How can we know unless the Scripture gives us illumination.  The Holy Spirit works within our souls to energize and explain the Written Message.  Without that Written Message, we are not able to access all the Spirit has to offer us.  With a faulty, or piecemeal message, we are asking the Spirit to make do with ?second best.?  He has promised to provide us with ?first best,? in an inspired, and a preserved, Message from the God of Heaven.

	Those verses from Matthew, chapter five, which are the direct antecedent of the great affirmation of Jesus as to the reliability of the Biblical Message give us the picture of what is our responsibility with that Message.  God would not give us responsibility to do something with that which He has not given us the access.

	We do not have all of the sermons which Jesus gave upon this earth.  John mentions this toward the end of his Gospel Message. (see John 20:30-31)   But, those that the Holy Spirit saw fit to place in the inspired record are there because they are to speak to us, as well as to those first century hearers.

	Jesus may have told the hearers of this sermon that they could trust the Bible which they had.  But, He was telling us the same thing.  We can trust the Scripture because Jesus said we could do so.  That Scripture is inspired, and preserved, and will not fail unless Jesus was mistaken.

	He wasn?t!

	The challenge for us is to show the confidence in this Scripture so that the world may see the power and love of God.  This will bring honor to the God of that Scripture.  Our trust in the Scripture is a necessary ingredient in our purpose in the economy of God.  Without this trust, and use, of God?s preserved Scripture, we are fit only to be trod under by the feet of men.

	I believe that Jesus paid a great price on the cross so that we would have a much better purpose in our lives for Him!

***
21 October 2005

INSPIRATION AND PRESERVATION (Continued)

	We continue to look at Scriptural references which attest to the Biblical doctrine of the Preservation of Scripture.

	In the twenty-fourth chapter of the book of Matthew, Jesus was speaking about the end-times  when He noted that, ?Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.?  (Matthew 24:35)

	This is an interesting statement.  But, what could it mean?  John 20:30-31 tells us, ?And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book:  But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name.?

	The Bible, here, tells us that some of the acts of Jesus are lost to recorded history.  So, also, are some of His words.  What are we to do, in light of this Biblical revelation, with His statement in Matthew?  Are we to suppose that He was just engaging in hyperbole to emphasize His point about the preceding prophecies?  Maybe we must admit that He was mistaken in this instance.  

	But, to argue either of these theories is to cast doubt upon the prophecies He just uttered.  If He was wrong, or was just using figures of speech, in the one, can we believe the other to be true?  Worse, if He had engaged in error, or enhancing of, His message, could we trust anything He had to say?  Worse, still, if we cannot trust the words of Jesus, can we trust anything else about Him or His message, life or death?  If the answer to any of these questions is ?yes,? we cannot trust Him to be our Savior considering He has shown Himself to be a man, given to boasting and exaggeration as much as any of us.

	This is an important point.  The answer is very simple.  Jesus was still speaking prophecy when He said, ?Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.?  His words had bearing upon what He had already said.  But, they were also a prophecy in their own right.

	As to the first clause of this verse, turn to II Peter 3:10.  ?But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.?

	Sermons could be preached on this verse concerning the final destruction of all sin in the creation of God.  Verse thirteen continues: ?Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for a new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.?   There will come a time when the earth and heavens will be purged of sin and rebellion.  But, there will not come a time when His words will pass away because they are pure; they have proceeded from the breath of God and have no admixture of sin within them.

	The second clause from Jesus? words in Matthew is the promise that we have a sure and certain Word from God.  It will not fail.  The Salem Kirban Reference Bible makes the point, of this verse, that ?Here the Lord asserts the absolute certainty that the events just described will some day come upon the world.?

	That much is true.  But, I would note that there is more.  The Scripture, Jesus here asserts, will never pass away.  We can trust the Words which God has preserved.  To allege that the Scriptures were lost to history and needed to be reconstructed at any point in time is to allege that Jesus was wrong in His statement that His words would never pass away.  It is a theory of doubt and unbelief to argue that new discoveries of ancient texts have shown us to have been using a flawed text.  Hort, Westcott, Tischendorf, and the rest are at odds with the clear words of Jesus Christ.  

	The Traditional Text is not the God honored text because we say It is - or even because history says It is.  The Traditional Text is the God honored text because Jesus Christ said that He guaranteed the preservation of His words.  This is the text of the God fearing churches since the time of the original penning of the inspired message.  If the words of Jesus mean anything, the Traditional Text must be the true, inspired, inerrant, Words of God.  To argue anything else is to argue that God was either mistaken, or that Satan was powerful enough to dislodge the intent of God.

	I can not accept either allegation and still accept Jesus Christ as my Savior.   If He was wrong, or He was not strong enough to defeat the adversary, then He cannot be the propitiation for my sins.  He would not, in that event, have the power to be that perfect sacrifice!

	It is an eternally important fact that Jesus was not mistaken in His prophecy that the words of prophecy, the inspired Scripture of God, would never fail.

	If the testimony of John?s Gospel were not enough to make this point, Mark bears witness to the same words in Mark 13:31.  I know that the so-called ?synoptic Gospels? repeat many of the same events.  That is to be expected since they were covering the same life of the same Person.  But, those points which are reiterated are shown to be points that are important.

	When I was in grade school I hated the drills we had in arithmetic.  They were so boring.  The same thing, over and over, and over and over...    But, it is important to know that 3 x 3 = 9.  It is important to know that by putting posts on sixteen-inch centers the four-foot plywood will fit perfectly and securely.  Without that little bit of math (O. K.  A whole lotta math!), we might not be able to build a structure which would stand through a summer storm.

	God has given us a Structure of His Message that will stand through all the storms of our life.  We know that this Structure will stand through our lives, in part, because It has stood through the storms of the centuries as He said it would.  We can trust His Word because we can trust Him!  But, just as importantly, we only know that we can trust Him because of what His Word has told us about Him!

	Some would argue that this is a circular reasoning.  It isn?t.  It is reasoning supported by two pillars of Truth.  There is also a third Pillar - the witness of the Holy Spirit.  Again, we learn of this Pillar through the Truth of the Scriptural Message.

	The Romans had a system of plumbing by which water was brought into their city from great distances.  They were able to do this because they had observed that water, every single time, flowed downhill.  That single fact was the basis for all of their aqueducts.  Probably through these aqueducts they also learned that water would seek its own level; this made fountains possible without elaborate machinery.

	When they put the apparatus of their aqueducts into motion, they saw the facts which they already knew existed, work to their interests.

	We know that the Scripture is trustworthy because we have seen that to be so in It?s pronouncements.  As we have looked at these statements we have also been able to see that the prophecies of Scripture come to pass - every single time.  Because of the fidelity of God to both His Scripture and to the creature to whom They were given, we have been given the privilege of learning of Him and of experiencing His power and influence in our lives and endeavors.

	When we begin to walk, and work, in the faith described in the Bible, we see the facts which we already know exist begin to evidence themselves in our lives.  The Life Application Bible says, about this verse in Mark, ?God and His Word provide the only stability in our unstable world.  How shortsighted to spend so much of our time learning about this temporary world  ...  While neglecting the Bible and its eternal truths.?

	Again, and importantly, this is so only because we have a Bible we can trust.  We have an eternal Word because the Eternal One has promised it is so.

***
28 October 2005

INSPIRATION AND PRESERVATION (Continued)
	Another place where we see Jesus affirm the doctrine of the preservation of Scripture is in John 10:34 - 36.  ?Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?  If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken; Say ye to him, whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God.?

	First, I think we need to clear up our perception of this reference as it pertains to the deity of Christ.

	The background of these verse was a discussion between Jesus and the Jewish religious leaders.  The discussion had turned to the subject of Jesus? Messiahship.  ?Then came the Jews round about him, and said unto him, How long dost thou make us to doubt?  If thou be the Christ, tell us plainly.?  (John 10:24)

	Jesus answered, ?...I told you, and ye believed not...?  (v. 25)   Jesus continued and ended with the statement which affirmed His deity, ?I and my Father are one.?  (v. 31)    These religious leaders fully understood His meaning.  They were going to stone Him because, ?...thou, being a man, makest thyself God.?   They knew that Jesus had not been talking simply about a ?oneness of purpose;? He had been speaking of being God, not simply of acting in concert with God.

	He never corrected their assumption.  This, unless Jesus is argued to have been misleading His accusers, is confirmation of the fact that He did claim absolute deity in His self.

	His argument in the verses we have referenced is not to deny His essential deity.  The argument is to continue to show the hypocrisy of the men who stood accusing Him.  He said that even the Old Testament Scriptures had called men by this title, who were not of deity in themselves; so, what was wrong with Him to Whom the designation properly applied, using that title of Himself.  He offered proof that this was a true assessment.  (Vv. 36-38)

	Strong (Systematic Theology) makes note that religious leaders (as well as political leaders in the near Theocracy of Israel) were sometimes called ?god.?  Often Scripture calls those who are representatives of God, ?god,? themselves.  This is done since they stand in the place of representing God (examples: Exodus 4:16; 7:2; Psalm 82:6).  But, the connection leaves no doubt as to what is meant.  These are men standing as representatives of God.  

	In the passage we have referenced from John, however, we see a picture of Jesus doing the works of God in concert with, rather than as a vassal of, God.  The association is working as deity rather than in response to the commands of deity.

	The salient point under dissection today, however, is the words, ?...the scriptures cannot be broken.?

	Fuller (Counterfeit or Genuine) notes that the argument of Jesus, quoted from Psalm 82:6, is important to our discussion of inspiration and preservation.  ?Christ?s argument rested on the fact that the Old Testament Scriptures had been preserved.?  It was in light of that preservation that He relied upon them as authority.

	I could argue that my mother once told me, ?Don?t get old and fat at the same time.?  You wouldn?t know whether she had said that or not.  There is no record of this.  All you would have is my word on the subject.  The veracity of the statement would rely upon my both my fidelity to being truthful, and on my often faulty memory.

	I could tell you that Linda said, ?Yes? when I asked her to marry me.  I could produce a wedding license and say that this proves the fact.  But, did she?  Might she have said, ?O. K.??  Or, might she have said, ?Why not??  Might she, even, has asked me.  (Didn?t happen that way!!)

	My wedding license is only a proof that something in the affirmative was said.  But, the exact words...   No.

	I could tell you that once I was speaking to a crowd of preachers.  I gave reference to my use of a C-PAP machine for easier breathing at night.  I mentioned that this machine forces air into my nostrils at night so I?ll not stop breathing due to sleep apnea.  I said, ?This means that I?m not fat.  I?m just full of hot air.?

	This, you can prove.  I have a copy of the DVD made of that meeting.  I can?t get around having said it.  I am guilty.

	Jesus was not appealing to the veracity of the Scriptures as a recollection of what might have been.  He did not say that they gave only an accurate reflection of what might have been said.  He said, ?This is the record.  This happened.?

	The Life Application Bible says, of this passage, ?This is a clear statement of the truth of the Bible.  If we accept Christ as Lord, we must also accept his confirmation of the Bible as God?s Word.?

	That statement above is true.  But, it is not accurate.  We must, of course, if we accept Jesus as the Lord of our lives, accept His word as true.  But, that Word remains true whether we accept it or not.  We know that His Words, and the Words to which He appealed, are true because God has promised to preserve His Word.  Jesus was able to rightly appeal to these words because of the Power of God in the Preservation of those words.

	The Lindsell Study Bible says, ?The Lordship of Jesus requires that Christians believe what Jesus taught.  He never raised a question about any part of Scripture.  He went so far as to assert that even the smallest particle of a word cannot be destroyed without the heavens and the earth first being destroyed.? 

	I agree with what Lindsell said in this place.  Jesus never suggested that any part of the Scripture could ever be lost to His true churches.  His trust in the veracity of Scripture was grounded in the conviction that these were inspired Words which would be kept pure throughout the ages of time and the ageless ?time? of eternity.  He taught the preservation of His inspired Words.

	II Timothy 3:16 gives us another important insight into the preservation of the Scripture.  The amazing thing is that so many of the modern translations will mistranslate this simple affirmation of the inspiration of Scripture.  The verse says, ?All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.?

	How many of the newer translations say, ?All scripture that is inspired...?  Again, something true, but not accurate.

	?All scripture is given by inspiration...,? means that all of the Bible is inspired.  ?All scripture that is inspired...,? means some of the Bible might not be inspired - just those parts which were given by inspiration are inspired while the other parts are not.

	The scholarship of man claims the right to decide which parts are truly inspired and which parts are of the fallible writing of man.  I have a small problem with this view.  If the fallible writing of man is responsible for the non-inspired writing contained in the Scripture, how can we trust the fallible editing of man to decide which is inspired and which is not?  ?Trust me,? we are told, ?I?m the expert.  But, don?t trust the writer, he was just a man.?   Should we add, ?And, don?t trust Jesus when He said the Word would stand.  He was just God.  I am the scholarly expert.?

	Seems to me that this is the opinion put forth.

	The People?s Study Bible rightly notes, ?...limited inerrancy generally leads to unlimited errancy.?

	The mistranslation owes itself to two facts.

	The first of these is that the new translations, almost without fail, use a base text different from that of the Traditional Text used by the translators of the King James Bible.  They use texts cobbled together by various committees and councils.  About the only thing most of these translation committee?s agree upon is that God was not powerful enough, or at least not caring enough, to preserve His Word.

	From this point, a lack of faith in God, the pride of man takes over.  The only Scripture we are allowed to accept, according to these experts is that which they in their wisdom and scholarship have accepted as true.  In effect, since they do not accept a God loving, or competent, enough to keep control of His inspired Word, they have become the arbitrators of what God is allowed to say.

	Thus we are given regular updates and revisions of the Scriptural base which the experts were certain was the closest to the originals.  At least this belief, that their efforts have produced the best possible reconstruction of the Words of God, was so until the publishers decided to put out a new copyrighted text.

	The second fact is that the proper translation would point towards a secure Word which was preserved.  The theology of the ?Bible correcters and custodians? can not allow for a preserved Word because it would blow away, like the fall leafs on a maple tree, their doctrine of an uncertain, unpreserved Scripture.   It would mandate the control of Scripture from their carnal intellectual pride to the Power of the Living God of Eternity.

	That doctrinal base of an unpreserved Scripture is important in what it accomplishes among men.

	From this doctrine flows rivers of polluted water.  But, like all water, it flows downhill.  It flows away from the Throne of Grace, never able to reach unto that Throne.

	With this doctrine we are given a changing message.  We are given a message that ties itself to the culture of the day rather than to the principles of Deity.  

	Look about and see if this is not true.  We have churches which have decided that God might not have meant it when He said that homosexualism was a sin.  We have translations which have decided that it might not be right to translate ?God, the Father,? as is written in the originally inspired Words of God.  That would be offensive to women; so we say ?God, the Father/Mother.?  Jesus is no longer referred to as, ?The Son of God,? as do the New Testament documents.   He is now the ?Offspring of the Eternal.?

	The Words of God are made subject to the conventions of man.  The Truth of the Words of God is allowed only when they agree with the ?feelings? of sinful mankind.  Any Word which doesn?t ?toe the line? of society must be beaten into a vocabulary of submission.

	Our baseless Bibles have birthed a society which calls sin, diversity.   Righteousness is called bigotry and hate.  Standards of right and wrong have given way to a relativistic society which says, ?If it feels good, do it.   And, if you?re big enough to get away with it, it must be right.?

	Without a trust in the influence of the Word which God gave and preserved, we are given no rational to be anything but callous to the plight of others who might accept that narrow Word.  Now, it seems in society at large, are we not compelled to be courteous toward one another even on the natural plane of existence.  Just reference the vindictiveness of modern political debate to see this fact in action.

	Or, reference the attacks on those of us who accept the truth of Biblical preservation from the experts who respectfully disagree with us; we are branded as anti-intellectual and divisive for defending the Word which God has given us. 

	In the culture of the day, ?Have a happy holiday? has replaced ?Merry Christmas? because someone might be offended.  What about those who are offended because their beliefs have been co-opted by those who chose to jeer at them?  Well, those religious people thus offended are just displaying their bigotry.

	I have heard that the British military band played a tune called, ?The Word Turned Upside Down,? when the final victory was won by Washington during the War for American Independence.  How ?Upside Down? has the world of humanity turned since first we began to turn the truth of the God given and Preserved Word of Scripture over to the ash heap of history?

	That is what man, even far too many religious men, has done with these new translations based on false textual bases.

	Do you remember ?Who shot J. R.??  This was from the popular television show, ?Dallas.?  In the last episode of one season, J. R. was shot.  In the opening of the next season, the person who shot J. R. was to be revealed.  During the summer the speculation was enormous as to who among the cast of characters might have done this.  To keep the hype going, the produces - if I recall this correctly - filmed several different episodes so that even the cast could not let out the word of who had fired the shot.  This was done so the T. V. audience would be larger.

	It was!

	Only one of these scripts was correct.

	Only one of the many texts of Scripture is correct.  I?ve read a translation of that one.  It says that mankind will go into the apostasy we see today.  But, it also says that God wins in the end.  Wouldn?t it be foolish to cast your lot with the losing side!  Trust God?s preserved Word in the God honored Translation which was culled from the Traditional Text - the Preserved Text.

	I use the King James Bible because it is true to the True Words which God has preserved for us.   Let us continue to stand for our Lord and His Word.

***
4 November 2005

INSPIRATION AND PRESERVATION (Continued)

	This week we are going to look at a few verses in I Peter that have to do with the doctrine of the preservation of Scripture.  The first of these is verse 23.  ?Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the world of God, which liveth and abideth for ever.?

	At first glance this verse seems to be speaking about salvation.  That is so.  It does speak of salvation.  But, the verse is making the point that our salvation is based upon a response to a record that is certain.

	In the early years of television there was a program about a man who gave away one million dollars, tax free.  It was, of course, a fictional show.  Basically, if someone comes by your house and tells you that they are going to give you, tax free, one million dollars, there is only one thing you can take to the bank - it ain?t gonna happen!

	You?ve probably gotten the e-mails from a man who claims to be a former government official of an African country.  He has thousands of dollars of money that he must find a way to disperse.  If you will only send him, say, $1,000.00, he will send you back $500,000.00.  I don?t have to tell you that this is a scam.  It is not true.

	Some people?s word about things is fictional.  Other people are dealing in dishonesty and their word cannot be trusted, either.  But, the Word of God is certain.  That is why we can trust His offer of Salvation.  It is backed by His eternal Word.

	He promises that we are reborn into an incorruptible salvation because of His incorruptible seed.  That seed is backed by the Word of God.

	In the 1969 professional football Super Bowl, the quarterback of the New York Jets promised that his team would win the game.  He even guaranteed that win.  His team did win.  But, it was not because of his guarantee.  The Jets won the game because they played better.  Perhaps they were given a boost in confidence by their leader.

	We are given a guarantee of salvation.  It is not based on our ?playing the game? better.  It is not based even on our confidence in the God Who made the promise.  Our guarantee is based on the Word of God.  We can have confidence in His Word, to be sure.  But it is not our confidence which is the determining factor.  The determining factor is His fidelity to His Word.  We will live forever because His Word will live, and abide, forever.

	The Hebrew-Greek Key Study Bible defines ?for ever? as: ?...perpetuity (also past); by impli. the world; spec. (Jewish) a Messianic period (present or future); -age, course, eternal, (for) ever (-more); (n-) ever, (beginning of the, while the) world (began, without end.)?

	Notice that ?for ever? reaches back and continues forward.  Our salvation is not simply a thing of time.  It is of eternal duration.  It is of eternity.  

	That same sort of thing must also be said of the Word of God since that is the guarantee of our Salvation.  

	That ?Word of God? is more than simply the Gospel message of salvation, although this is included as part of the message.  Many of the commentaries I consulted gave short shift to the entire message of God in this passage.  They said that Peter was only speaking of the Gospel message of salvation which was being preached.  Reference was made to verse twenty-five.

	Notice, however what verse twenty-five does say: ?And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you.?  The message of the Gospel of salvation is derived from the entire message of God to humanity.  It is an important part of that message.  But there is even more than the simple Gospel of salvation which God wants us to know and study.  Reference I Corinthians, chapter three, and Paul?s use of the terms ?milk? and ?meat? of the Word, in relation to this concept.

	As to the term ?abideth? (and ?endureth? of verse 25), the Hebrew-Greek Key Study Bible gives this definition:  ?...to stay (in a given place, state, relation or expectancy); -abide, continue, dwell, endure, be present, remain, stand, tarry (for) X thine own.?

	Peter is not giving a picture of a Scripture which would be lost in time and need to be reconstructed by those who doubt the power of God to preserve His Word.  Peter was preaching the Bible doctrine of Bible preservation.

	Peter continues the thought in the next two verses:  ?For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass.  The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away: But the word of the Lord endureth for ever.  And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you.?  (I Peter 1:24-25)

	About this passage, the Life Application Bible says, ?...Peter reminds the believers that everything in this life - possessions, accomplishments, people - will eventually fade away and disappear.  Only God?s will, word and work are permanent.  We must stop grasping the temporary and focus our time, money and energy on the permanent - the Word of God...?

	That is a strong statement as to the doctrine of the preservation of Scripture.  The amazing thing, to me at least, is that I culled this statement from a copy of this study Bible which used a modern translation of the Scripture.  This modern translation was based on one of these reconstructed textual bases.

	While arguing that the Words of God were secure and permanent, this edition used as a base text, a foundational text which by its very existence argued something else.  The foundation of the newer versions of the English translations is an eclectic text.  It is argued that this text is necessary because new discoveries of ancient texts have shown the Traditional Text to be flawed.

	This is an argument that God lost control of His Word.  It is an argument that God did not, or could not, preserve His Word.  

	This is also a false argument.  There have been no new ?readings? unearthed since the time that the King James Bible was translated.  

	Our Bible is either preserved or it is not.  But, remember our very Salvation is tied to the promises of God.  God promised to preserve His Word.  If He did not keep His Word on that point can we begin to trust Him in His Word about our Salvation?

	Criswell, in the Criswell Study Bible, also makes mention of the permanence of the Scriptural record.  ?Quoting Isaiah 40:6-8, Peter stresses the enduring nature of the Word of the Lord.  Flesh and all other materialistic features are destined for destruction.  In none of these can one afford to place his trust.  But what God says is permanent, enduring and trustworthy.?

	There are two things I?d like you to notice about what Criswell said.  First, Peter was quoting from the Prophet Isaiah when he wrote, under inspiration, the passage in I Peter.  This, itself, is a picture of the preservation of Scripture.  Would God have led Peter to quote from a Word which was lost and uncertain?  Of course not.  By inspiring this message through the pen of Peter, God was verifying the power of the preserved written Word.

	Second, the only thing which we are given to be trusted is the Word of God.  We can trust This because It has been preserved by God.  Even the witness of the Spirit within us is given so that we may have complete trust in the preserved Word of God.  If it were otherwise we would become, dependant upon our feelings, the arbitrator of the message of God.

	The Spirit indwells us to confirm the preserved Word, and to illumine that Word within our hearts as we read It in our hands!

	We need a secure Word in a changing world.  That is not a new observation.  Always has the world been changing through the years.  Never has the Word of God changed except in the minds of sinful mankind.  God has kept His Word.  If we are to trust Him, and obey Him, we must recognize this fact.

***
11 November 2005

INSPIRATION AND PRESERVATION (Continued)

	Paul begins the third chapter of the Book of Romans with a question which he answers in the very next verse: ?What advantage then hath the Jew? or what profit is there of circumcision?  Much every way: chiefly, because that unto them were committed the oracles of God.?  (Romans 3:1-2)

	The ?oracles? spoken of in the above verses are the Scriptures of the Old Testament.  Griffin (The Bible: Preserved For You) makes note of the care exercised by those ancient Jewish people in the transmission of the sacred text.

?The ancient Hebrew scribes handled the Word of God with extreme reverence.  Their work was done with the utmost care and meticulous fidelity.  No mistakes in copying were permitted.  Copies of the Old Testament were made on sheets of finely prepared animal skins which were sewn together to form long scrolls.  If a scribe made a mistake, the entire sheet had to be destroyed and a new copy written.  To further guard against error, the scribes counted the words and letters of a copy to make sure nothing had been added or left out.  They even went so far as to identify the middle letter on each sheet.  If the middle letter was missing or out of position, they knew a mistake had been made.?

	About the above paragraph, copied from Griffin?s work, I looked up after having copied and saw a red line under the word ?letter? in the next to last line.  This was a function of my word processor alerting me to the fact that I had made a mistake.  I had left the first ?e? out of the word.  
	The ancient scribes did not have word processors to alert them to errors they might have made.  Neither, of course, did they have a cataract on one eye, awaiting removal, that tended to obscure their vision!  But, without this modern invention, they still managed to find a way to make copies without error.

	First of all, of course, there was their religious dedication to the task.  They took extreme care to copy the Word of God as the Words of God.  They knew that they were handling things holy.  Their culture was such that the great awe and reverence of Deity laid heavy upon their hearts, minds, hands and eyes as they went about their sacred task.

	This was no 9 - 5 job in which they were engaged.  They were very cognizant of the fact of the sacredness of their service.  Their minds were not wandering to the nights entertainment.  They were solely dedicated to their consecrated task.  Though they were beset with the cares of the day as are all men, their reverence to the God of the Word held their minds to the task at hand.

	Second, of course, the many safeguards which were set upon their tasks would also guard against the possibility of error.  Those very safeguards argue as to their fidelity to their task.  They would not allow an error to contaminate the religious purity of their task.

	Finally, we need to consider just who were these men that carried forth the task of the scribe.  These were not men culled from the nearest ?temporary hire agency.?  Neither were they young people who had been placing applications at every available job site who would take the first job offered them.  These were professional scribes and copyists.

	This was not a time of universal education.  Not everyone learned the skill of writing.  Only the best educated would be allowed consideration for the task.  Only the best, and most piously dedicated, would be allowed to put pen to vellum to attempt the mission of making copies of God?s inspired Word.

	It was from this same tradition that the copyists of the New Testament writings would emerge.  Of those copyists, may we remember, this was not considered a job or an occupation.  The work of the transmission of the Scripture was not one entered into lightly.  It was considered a holy calling, for a holy purpose, to be done by a holy, dedicated, and competent, person.  To convey the Words of God to a new generation was a high calling and a reverential task.

	In all of this we have not even considered the truth of God?s presence in the preservation of the Scripture.  The very fact that God did originally inspire the Words of His message to man gives us the information that He considered these words important.  This also means that He would wish to have them correctly copied from one generation of man to the next.

	Would God have the power to do this?  Throughout the inspired record we are shown a picture of a God Who is interested in the affairs of His created beings.  We are shown a picture of a God Who was willing to insert Himself, from His eternal realms, into the day-to-day history of His created universe.  God has, obviously, the power to protect His Word should He so choose.  His care in the giving of that message would argue that He would so choose.  His Own recorded Word, as we have seen in the past several weeks, has carried His promise that He would do just that.

	Next week we will look further at the mechanics of the transmission of the New Testament Scriptures.

***
18 November

INSPIRATION AND PRESERVATION (Continued)

	In Brown?s fictional book, The Da Vinci Code, we are treated to pseudo history of a church council deciding which of the many manuscripts would be, and which would not be, allowed to enter in the official canon of Scripture.  This is not true history.

	Although there were councils which recognized as canonical certain Books of the Bible, there was no council which decided to set that role upon any group of Books.  Basically, what happened was that the councils ratified that which the churches had already recognized.  Thiessen (Introduction to the New Testament) noted, ?It is a remarkable fact that no Church council selected the books that should constitute the New Testament Canon.  The books that we now have crushed all rivals, not by adventitious authority, but by their own weight and worth.?

	The Bible, as we have noted previously, is not just another book.  It is altogether another Book.  The Bible is the only inspired (God breathed) Book in the history of this world.  As the God breathed Book, it is alive in a real way.  The Holy Spirit moved upon the various New Testament churches to seek and find the will of God.  In doings so the Spirit lead those churches to find, and accept, just those writings which He had authorized for their use and edification.

	This is one of the reasons why the churches, historically, have had the Word of God.  That, the body of believers in those New Testament churches, was the natural repository of the true Word of God.  Therefore, to argue that the Word of God was lost for a thousand years only to be rediscovered in the burning barrels of a monastery or the back of a library, is to admit to a lack of faith in the God of that Word.

	New discoveries of biblical texts which do not agree with those which are of the Traditional Texts, can never be considered as part of the Word of God because they are not in the proper repository - the churches of Jesus Christ.

	Fuller (Counterfeit or Genuine) has noted that, ?...during the fourteen centuries in which the New Testament circulated in manuscript form God worked providentially through the usage of the Greek- speaking Church to preserve the New Testament in the majority of the Greek New Testament manuscripts.  In this way the True New Testament Text became the prevailing Traditional Text.?

	Fuller continues.  ?When a copy having mistakes was compared with others, the mistakes were easily revealed and easily corrected.?  

	When we have removed our trust from a reliance upon God providentially protecting His Own Word in the fellowship of His Own Churches, we have entered into a shaking and perilous land of winding streets and dark alleys.  We can easily become lost in our own logic.

	By removing our accepted standard from that which was passed down through the Bible trusting churches of history, we are left with no base line of certitude.  If we are to only access as reliable the oldest manuscripts available, one must ask why these are available when most of the rest of their ilk have been lost to history.

	Brown?s answer is that a church council decided that some manuscripts were acceptable and others were not.  At this point, however - following this logic, we are not certain just what it is that we are handling.  

	Suppose a teen-age girl is writing in her diary about her boy friend.  She may use very flattering words to describe the paragon of virtue.  Now, suppose the two have a fight and break up.  What will she now write?  Which of her two manuscripts will accurately describe the young man in question?  Probably neither.

	Now, suppose that there is a group that exits that wishes to portray the Christian faith in an aberrant manner.  They may be doing this to satirize the Christians, or they may have some aberrant theological stances which they wish the Scripture to advance.  They may just ?shade? the message slightly so as to make it seem to agree with their stance.  If, because they were not true followers of Jesus and thus lacked the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit, they die out in time, what of their tracts and nuanced renditions of Scripture?  

	These will tend to die out with them.  If these manuscripts are found, suppose in a hot and dry area such as Egypt, and these are considered the oldest available manuscripts, does this make them correct?  No; of course not.  This only makes them available.  It is from such as these that we have gotten our false base texts of the newer Bible versions.  It is from these that those newer Bible versions have been flawed.

	It is through this continuos copying of manuscripts by the Spirit energized churches of history, which has produced the great majority of the manuscript evidence which has continued to this day, that we ought to look for our manuscript evidence.  This evidence is heavily in favor, as would be expected if God has been in control of His churches, His people, and His Word, that we find the tradition of the Traditional Text.

	This is the text which underlies our King James Bible.

	With the advent of the moveable type printing presses came a renewed interest in the copying of the Words of God.  Hills (The King James Version Defended) has argued that ?The printed text of the Traditional Text was a step in God?s preservation of the True Text of His Scripture.?

	Of course, as with any move of God upon this earth, Satan will attempt to present a falsified message to man.  Such has ever been the case.  In the Garden Satan asked, ?Yea, hath God said...?  In this day he now asks, ?How many ways did God say??, until we have seen the Words of God flooded under a sea of contradictory and false versions.

	May we ignore the muddy waters of the flood of false texts and rely upon the pure water which God has bottled for us in His Own Traditional Text.

<center>

  <div>
<br>
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="https://ad.broadcaststation.net/ads/show_ad.php?width=300&height=250&cache=0"></script>
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="https://ad.broadcaststation.net/ads/show_ad.php?width=300&height=250"></script>
        </div>
<br>
<br>

</center>