This has been one of those days, it really has. I believe the devil's fighting everything that we're trying to do here with you, and I don't know why. I've never quite figured out why he's afraid of a little bit of truth, but he is. Again, I apologize. I have to sit when I speak or I get myself upset. I want to thank everybody. You have been so gracious. And I mean from the littlest students to the adults and the pastoral staff, you have been so gracious to me and to my grandson. I wrote his mother and told her how you've adopted him and been a blessing to him. I want to thank the musicians. I am envious of you. Brother Wilson, wherever you are, I've never understood how you get those things in your head and then turn them into the beautiful music that we hear here. I've walked for what I consider four days on history. and some of the grandest display of things and reminders of who we are and where we've come from and how good God has been to all of us. Men and women died to do what you and I are doing right now. And God has been so gracious to let us simply sit in peace and enjoy the fellowship and the worship of God according to the dictates of his word in our hearts. I want to thank your gracious pastor. I'm envious of his silver tongue. He is just the most gracious speaker I've ever met. And it seems to flow so naturally. And I am thankful to you and your wife for the privilege that we've had to be here. I don't feel worthy to be in this place. I'll tell you that right now. I have met with the Lord all morning and just pleaded with him that he would help us to say something that'll be a help to you. This is not the normal Sunday morning kind of message. This is the appearance of a new Greek text. You say, preacher, why? Because as you look around this property, This was one day in the mind of your founder. And somehow it was put to paper, and from paper to wood, to hay, to stubble, it was raised up to be this monument to the grace of God that it stands as today. What began in his mind has become a reality. If you were to take the prints that were once drawn to produce these properties, and you were to take the placing of each and every piece of art, and each and every piece of furniture, and every edifice that's in this property, and you said, I'm going to go build this again somewhere else, but. I think I'll just move this a quarter inch and I'll move that a foot this way. And you start to erase the blueprint and change the blueprint, and then you raise it up. You say, look at this, it's a duplicate of the foundation's ministries, but it wouldn't be. It would be different in subtle places that make it a completely different edifice. When we look at the Greek New Testament, the Hebrew Bible as well, and scholars tell us, oh, we only changed it a little bit here and a little bit there. It's death by a thousand pinpricks. And we no longer have the words of God. If you would, this morning, turn with me to 2 Timothy chapter 2. 2 Timothy chapter 2. We've made much of 2 Timothy chapter three through the week. I'll probably refer to it again, but for right now, 2 Timothy chapter two, verse 11. It is a faithful saying, for if we be dead with him, we shall also live with him. If we suffer, we shall also reign with him. If we deny him, he will also deny us. That I understand, this next verse I do not. If we believe not, yet he abideth still, for he cannot deny himself. Of these things, put them in remembrance, charging them before the Lord that they strive not about words to no profit, but to the subverting of the hearers. And here's this famous Sunday school verse that most of us have learned somewhere along the line. Study to show thyselves approved unto God a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth, but shun profane and vain babblings, for they will, notice this word, increase unto more ungodliness. Could we agree that we live in one of the most ungodly ages Christendom has ever known? We have walked away from it in every direction. We have left behind simply the traces of once what was a great Christian heritage. We have forgotten the men and women who have gone before us, who paved a path of blood that leads us to this day. And here we sit. A remnant, a handful of people here and a handful of people there, like Ruth, gleaning from the fields of Boaz, ahead of wheat, ahead of wheat, just to sustain. You say, why would God leave us this way in this last day? I want to say to you something that I believe with all my heart. God had the confidence in you and me that he could use us to be his light in a darkest age. Why didn't he send the Apostle Paul? It was his task to pave the way, to cut the path as Daniel Boone did across this great nation. But it is our job to hold forth the torch until the day of Jesus Christ. Back to the book of Jeremiah chapter 36, a passage I believe appropriate to the message that we would preach today. Jeremiah chapter 36, we've referred to it before, but it will form part of the backbone of what I'll say today. And verse 20, Jeremiah chapter 36, verse 20, they had been digging around in the temple. They came on the word of God and somebody read it, so we better tell the king. We better tell the king. And so they got audience with Jehoiakim. Foul, foul, foul man who now sat astride the throne of Judah. And they went into the king, into the court, but they laid up the roll in the chamber of Elishma, the scribe. Told all the words in the ears of the king. So the king sent Jehudi to fetch the roll, and he took it out of Elishma, the scribe's chamber. Jehudi read it in the ears of the king and in the ears of all the princes which stood before the king. Now the king sat in the winter house in the ninth month, and there was a fire on the hearth burning before him. And it came to pass when Jehudi had read three or four leaves, he cut it with the penknife and cast it into the fire that was on the hearth until the roll was consumed in the fire that was on the hearth. Yet, they were not afraid. Jehudi's scribe is not finished with his work. As we sit here right now this morning, across the world, especially the Christian world, so-called scholars are examining the context of every word of the Bible that you hold in your hand, looking to change just a little bit. Jesus said, not one jot, not one tittle, not one jot, not one tittle, shall be changed till the whole law be fulfilled. Two thirds of my Bible is yet future. God has not finished with his word, nor has he finished with history. And so it shall remain until earth is no more. And then still thy word, O Lord, is settled forever. Forever, O Lord, thy word is settled in heaven. My topic this morning is the appearance of a new Greek text. And as a result of the new Greek text, there's always a new Bible. And so the two run together. And I want to spend a few minutes, but I want to try to keep it as relevant as I possibly can. If you try to follow my notes, you will be thoroughly lost. So just try to draw from what I say. The material that I cover is in those notes, but I am way aside of where I wrote. Let's pray. Our Heavenly Father, when we talk about the word of God, We indeed stand on the holiest of ground. Father, when we talk about those who would define the word of God, who would change the words of God, who would hear a little, dare a little, precept upon precept, line upon line, destroy our Bibles, we have to fight the desire to get angry. We have to leave vengeance in your hands. You said you'd take care of it there in the revelation. We trust you. We want to rise up in fight, but you said the servant of the Lord must not strive. So Lord, you didn't call us to constantly rail on it. In fact, you called us to live your word. So Father, help us in that matter. But Lord, you also told us to study to show ourselves approved to you. And Lord, this morning, though it seems a peripheral issue, we study so that our lives might be acceptable to you. And so that we might rightly divide this book, not divide it to throw it away, but to cut through the dispensational distinctions and be able to apply every letter, every word, every sentence, every paragraph, every chapter, every book, of the Bible to our lives. Would you help us now for the next few moments to give your word the honor it deserves? I would ask in Jesus' precious name. Amen. I heard Dr. John Rice one time say that education or scholarship is a wonderful servant, but a horrible master. You should never allow scholarship to dominate you. It is your tool. It is the thing that God has given to you and me so we might discern the truth and be able to proclaim it with confidence. And that's my desire this morning is to hand you back a Bible that has been attacked now for over 2,000 years, a Bible that has stood the test of time, and yet they are not content to leave it be. There will arise a new Greek New Testament, and with it a myriad of new translations of the Bible. And if you're not careful, they will carry you away. You say, preacher, if we have the word of God intact in the King James Bible, why must we study the Greek and Hebrew? I said the other night, it is important because if I do not know what I'm reading, then I can have to trust somebody that I have no qualifications to trust. and you will be what most Christians are today, I call them Burger King Christians, have it your way. I have a brother-in-law who has a Bible that has 26 translations in it. And you just go through and it gives you the top two or three and you take the one you like. I learned a long time ago, when the Bible rubs me the wrong way, turn me around because the Bible's not moving. And so we look at it. Why do I study the Greek? Well, for one thing, I want to go deeper. In 41 years of preaching the word of God, I have never one time corrected one word out of this book. The man that sits before you, my mentor and my friend, Dr. Wake, he's been studying it and teaching it almost as long as I've been alive. And he has not found a reason to change the translation. Why do we study? to go deeper, to go deeper. The Bible says, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. The Greek word is hamartia. It appears in Judges chapter 20 and verse 16 in the Septuagint. It's a Greek word, don't have Hebrew words there. But in the same book in Hebrew, it has in Judges 20, 16, the Greek or Hebrew word hadah, which is the same word sin. It's the only place in the Bible that it's used that it's not a moral or a spiritual thing. That verse speaks of 700 men of Benjamin who could sling a sling with either hand and hit a target at a hair's breadth and not miss. Not harmatia, not hatah, not miss. And the meaning of the word sin is to miss the mark. For all of sin becomes short of the glory of God. You know that there are about eight or nine words for sin. I'm not going to go through them all this morning, but there are different synonyms for the word sin. They all have to do with shooting a stone at a target. There is the word hamartia, we've already read it. It means to fall short of the target. When you line my life up to the life of the Lord Jesus, who was the incarnate God, omnipotent and yet as frail as you and I, the God who became man, became man. When he faced temptation, he did not sin, but it was not because he was God. It was because he was a man totally surrendered to the will of God. I taught a theology class in a seminary one time. They asked the question, when Jesus walked on the water, did he do it because he was the creator and had power over the water? Or did he do it because he was a man like you and I, completely filled and controlled by the spirit of God? The answer is yes. The answer is yes. He did it for both, but neither caused the other to happen. You say, how can that be? That's the hypostatic union. That is the unique difference. It's a divine human cooperation. The book that you hold in your hand is a divine human cooperation. When the Apostle Paul sat down to write the book of first Corinthians, he refers back to a letter the Corinthians had written to him. And he sat down to write an answer to their questions. And he looked at it when he was done and it was scripture. Daniel sat down. and wrote Daniel chapter 9 and chapter 10 and 11, Daniel chapter 2, Daniel chapter 7, and he looked and he said, what have I written? Daniel chapter 12, verse 4, God said, seal the book, it's not time for you to know. Daniel looked at Jeremiah's writings. They were contemporaries. And he said, blessed be, it's the words of God. We've been here 70 years, we're about to go home. Oh my soul, I can just imagine that blessed old man as he walked into Belshazzar's palace, and there carved on the wall by the finger of God, Menai, Menai, taku ufarsin. And he said, bless God, it's a letter from home. We're going home. The time is over. We're going home. Old Daniel, he knew that because Jeremiah said, it'll be 70 years. Don't tell me that the Bible crossed decades or generations by oral tradition and was moved and changed the minute the ink was dry on the parchment. Peter called, 2 Peter 3.16, Paul's letters and the other scriptures, the words of God. Getting back to sin, I'm getting a little bit far carried away, I'm sorry. There's another word, it's related to the first one, it's hematema, and it means an act of sin. It's an act of sin. I don't just miss in general, I miss specifically when I say, you'll find that word used in, as soon as I find it here, 1 Corinthians 6 and verse 18, where God says, flee, fornication, every sin, every hemartema, every act of sin that a man commits, that a man does, is without the body. But he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body. It's an act of falling short. I preach today, I preach in general, but right now I'm preaching right now. That's the kind of differentiation in Hemartema. There's another one, parabasis. I like this one. Parabasis means to overshoot the target. It means to go beyond and God put up a no trespassing sign and you and I push right past it and live on the other side. Think nothing twice about it. Then this one I remember from the youth, parapetoma. Parapetoma means to fall beside. I lived next to a small, well, small, large mill stream. And we kids were in the mill stream from February on. We quit in November. We gave God the winner. And my mom would say, hey, don't you go in the river, we called it a creek, but don't you go in the creek until it purges. I wouldn't do that on purpose. I'd never disobey my parents on purpose. The penalty was too great. But there were stones that went across the river and we would walk across the stones and oops, if you fell, wet now, might as well stay in. And we were always in by the beginning of March at the latest. Parapatoma means to fall in and not get back up. We all sinned, God said in Romans chapter five, not after the similitude of Adam's transgression. We didn't sin like Adam did because God hadn't give us a law from Adam to Moses. God hadn't told them any, thou shalt not, and they did it anyway. God said they sinned, but just because there's no law to break doesn't mean you don't sin, Parabbasis. And I could go on. There's anomia. I shot an arrow in the air where it fell. I know not where. Without a law, couldn't care less. One of the preachers mentioned al-Sabah the other day, ungodliness. We don't live in an atheistic society. An atheist walks past this church door, drives by and says, oh, those poor deluded people inside. An ungodly person bars the doors and lights it on fire with us in here. An ungodly person hates God, al-Sabah. All those are words that relate to sin. I could go to Psalm 119, the words that relate to the word of God are all highway instructions. The precepts, the statutes, the judgments, the judgment. When you used to drive into Pennsylvania from New Jersey, there was a big sign there and you had speed limit, 65 mile an hour, 65 to 68, $25. You could pick your fine. Those are the judgments, that's what's gonna happen. So that God wrote his word, it is an intricate tapestry, which is woven of some of the glorious, most glorious scarlet gold and silver that we cannot bring completely into English. That's why you study the original languages, not to correct the Bible. The Bible does it, 400 years this book has stood. It doesn't need your help. It'll do just fine. I love this one, Deuteronomy chapter 32, and then I'll get to the message. Deuteronomy chapter 32 and verse 10, God said he led him about, he instructed him, he knew him as the apple of his eye. I don't know if you've ever looked up the apple of his eye. He that touches you touches the apple of his eye. The words in Hebrew are the little man in his eye. God wants you and me to pull so close that when he opens his eyes, he sees himself in my eyes. And when I open my eyes, I see myself in his. That's close. Have you ever been so close to God in prayer that you really were afraid to open your eyes for fear he'd be standing right there? There's times when the heavens seem as brass and the prayers seem to drop from the ceiling. But there are times when you know you have stood or kneeled in the presence of the creator, the sustainer of the universe. Your soul's been humbled and you have worship. Worship doesn't mean singing, though singing can be worship. Praying doesn't mean worship, though praying can be part of worship. Worship in both the new and the old testament means to lay prostate on your face before your sovereign. It is a humbling of self as I recognize his worth, his worthship. These contemporary folks come out, well, I didn't appreciate, I didn't enjoy the worship this morning. Well, that's too bad, it's not about you and me. It's whether he enjoys the worship. I'm so sick and tired of 7-11 choruses. Oh God, aren't you lucky that you have me? Oh, I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna do that. I cannot do a thing without his hand. I cannot do a thing without his attention. Were it not for the Lord, where would Israel now be? The Bible says. I gotta get to the topic or we'll never get done. All right, let me get there. I had to jump over it. We will be getting a new Greek New Testament. Let me just say that very quickly, you've heard about Erasmus, you know that he was the first publisher of the New Testament. Robert Stevens, it may be Estienne if it's in Latin, Etienne if it's in French, doesn't matter. in the 1550s, he added the verse numbers, and he's the first fellow to write the variant readings in, though he still did the Texas Receptus. And then toward the end of the 1500s, Theodore Biza in Geneva, he produced a Greek New Testament, 1598, that became the basis of your King James Bible. In 1881, when Westcott and Hort produced their demonic Bible, one of the associates of the committee, F.H.A. Scrivener, printed the Bible that stands behind the King James Bible. Now, he's been criticized. People have said it's a reverse translation. It is not. Nothing could be further than the truth. He took the 1598 of Beza. He then marked every place that Westcott and Hort deviated. so that you'd know where they were corrupt in it. But he did something else. There are about 165 places where the translators of the King James Bible left Theodore Biza. About 80 or 90 of those, and I have the papers back with my grandson to show you, but about 80 or 90 of those, he simply read the Robert Stevens text instead of Theodore Biza. Most of them were punctuations, spellings of proper names, I mean, it really doesn't matter if you go to the original 1611, S-O-N-N-E is son, S-O-N is son now. When you're dealing with names, you can tell what they are. Besides that, King James has said, don't change the spelling of the name. If we have an English name, you leave it alone. That's why church is in the King James Bible. People want to change it to assembly. Anybody can assembly. Church, because it's my name, comes from the Greek word karyakon, which means that which belongs to the Lord. Across Southern Europe, the word ecclesia moved from language to language. In French, église. in Spanish, Iglesia, please make me right, brother Sorbenes, and in Portuguese, Iglesia. And it stayed the, whatever, the homonym of Iglesia, the called out assembly. But as it traveled into the Germanic peoples, it became the people that belonged to the Lord. I'm proud of that word. I don't mind it in my Bible not one bit. People say, well, they should have translated immerse, I mean baptizing immerse. In 1611, immerse meant put them under. There was no implication of bring them back up. We would not have lasted very long if we immersed, but we can get it if we baptize. Bible words, Bible words. In 1633, a few years after the King James Bible was translated, the Elseviers, Abraham and Bonaventure, put in the introduction of their Greek New Testament the words textus receptus, the text which is received by all. We started using that. Our critics will say to us, which one is the textus receptus? Just like did Jesus walk on the water because he was God or because he was a man filled with the Spirit of God? Yes. Which one? All of them. Well, they're different. Yeah, there's a word or two here and there, a period here or there. But if you were to go, if there was a place where the 5,000 manuscripts of the Greek New Testament are, and you were to reach in and just grab one by sheer random and pick it up, it would say what the Greek New Testament says. I was going to save this for later, but there is not one manuscript in existence of the modern edited Greek text. It leans heavily on Codex B Vaticanus, but you could not pick up anywhere in the world a manuscript, a handwritten transcribed manuscript of the New Testament that matches the modern eclectic text. God promised to preserve his word. He spoke out the Hebrew in Greek. He promised to preserve his word. What you and I are dealing with is not an academic issue. We are dealing with a spiritual issue. Will I believe God about his word? I have to truncate because I know the hour goes and it's Sunday morning. Every textual critic believes a certain a priori, a foundational assumption. That assumption is that the Bible was written by spiritual men, not men filled with the Spirit of God, moved by the Spirit of God. That word pharaoh that's used in 2 Peter is the same word that's used in Acts 27 when the ship that Paul was in was driven by the wind. carried with us whoever he wanted. By that way, Acts 27, 25 is my definition for faith. Wherefore, sirs, I believe God, that it shall be even as it was told me. Hebrews 11.1 might describe faith, Acts 27.25 defines faith. It shall be even as it was told me. If God told me I could walk from here to there without going plop, I'd just have to step over the rail and go. Because faith, believe it's in here. Remember, faith has to put feet and hands to it. Anyway, getting back. They called it the Texas Receptus. Now where's the new one coming from? I need to say this as quickly as I can. It's not hard to do. They believe that men wrote the Bible and then it was left to the ravages of time so that it might evolve like every other ancient book. In fact, that's exactly what Westcott and Hort said. There is not one textual scholar, not Westcott and Hort, not Tregellus, not Lachman, not Bruce Metzger, certainly not Bart Ehrman, not Dan Wallace. There's not one of them that should be permitted to preach from this pulpit. They don't believe the Bible is the words of God. I heard Dan Wallace dismiss half of the book of Mark. I heard him dismiss different things. And he just, he was having a debate with Bart Ehrman and he was just, yeah, I'll stipulate that. So yeah, I'll give that up. No, I don't, I will not stipulate to anything that says my Bible evolved, period. My Bible is the same thing. You say, preacher, where do they get that from? Well, once they decided the Bible evolved, and here's how you get all the new texts. Once they decided the Bible evolved, then they said they could not be in 1516 when Erasmus printed it what it was at the beginning because it would have had to evolve. You've all seen the pictures of Eohippus growing into a Clydesdale. a three-toed collie dog becoming a great big horse. I can believe that. I don't know why in the world anybody in their right mind would buy that idea. We've all seen the progression from the monkey men all the way up. When you see Pythicus in the name, that means monkey. When you see Homo in the name, that means people. They still have not gone to Homo Pythicus. They know it's either a monkey or a man. There's a dividing line. They try to put the same evolutionary power to it. And so then they say, okay, now we have to figure out how we're going to pick between the words. I'm going as quickly as I can. They simply said, if there's a dispute over two readings, take the most obtuse, ridiculous reading that's probably the original. The Holy Spirit of God is a grammatical clown. He doesn't understand how to write a story. He doesn't use adjectives. He puts you in the wrong place at the wrong time. You just pick the worst possible word for that place. If you have a choice of including a reading or omitting it, Mark 16, nine to 20, omit it. If you have a choice between a grammatically consistent reading or inconsistent, choose the inconsistent. If you have a choice of a theologically correct reading or a biblically correct reading where the New Testament agrees with the, or one that doesn't, take the one that doesn't. If you have a choice between a reading that is smooth or a reading that is difficult, choose the difficult one. Now they said, while they were writing the New Testament, see, a scribe, and this is the newest theory by Philip Comfort, a scribe would be copying the New Testament, and all of a sudden he would say, man, that doesn't make sense. There's got to be more to it, and he'd fill it in. Now, you probably can't see this from where you're sitting, but I do weird things. I embrace the fact that I'm a nerd, and I recognize that. Well, I sat down with first Thessalonians in capital letters like the scribes would have copied it back in the day, way back when they were making manuscripts. Do you know that when I copied this, I sometimes wrote a wrong letter and scribbled it out and fixed it. Sometimes I even left a letter or two out and I fixed it. But you know what I never did? I never added one letter at all. It gets to be like typing. Now, some of you ladies and maybe some of you fellas can work a computer and type 150 words a minute, and you can have a conversation while you're doing it. If you're a scribe writing the New Testament, that's exactly what you could do. They were sitting there and they were sitting in benches next to each other, just having a conversation, just copy the text. All right, well, the result of all that is the eternal word of God for this week. I've never figured that out. Last thing, 28th edition of the Greek New Testament came out a couple years ago. Dr. Waite referred to the 26th. They are now on the 28th try to get it right. And they wrote some things in their introduction that I want to read to you. It's just one long paragraph. This 28th edition of Novum Testamentum Gracca is on one hand a thoroughgoing revision of the 27th edition and remains closely related to it in many respects. Yeah, copied it. On the other hand, the new edition presents a fundamentally new concept. at least with respect to the Catholic letters, that's James to Jude, because of this part of the New Testament, the Odysseo Clinium Neor, ECM is already available. The ECM represents a new level of scientific research on the text of the Greek New Testament, offers a text newly established, et cetera. They can just keep on yapping. They said new six times. New, six times, this new edition. The minute they come out with a new one, that refutes everything that's gone before it. The United Bible Society, fifth edition. The Nestle-Allen, 28th edition, same Greek New Testament. That means 27 are no good. They were good last week, they're not good this week. It's a new conception. They have lost the argument on the Alexandrian family, and the Antiochian family, and the Western family. They've lost that argument. They know that they can no longer defend the text on the basis of this family is better than that family. So they said, let's throw them out. Let's throw them out. New concept. First of all, the German Bible Society gathered every variant reading in the entire Greek New Testament. They could get more variant readings in James than there are words. I'm going to prove that in a minute. They gathered them up, they put them all out there. Then what they did is they took manuscript A, and they took every other manuscript that had each word in verse one and they ran a comparison. Then they put A back in the bunch, it took B, and they ran comparisons. Then they put that back, put C, and ran comparisons until they had compared every manuscript to every other manuscript in order. Then they assigned numerical values to each of the words that were in each of the manuscripts. And then they developed an algorithm, like Google and all these computer guys do, that would automatically spit out The proper word of God. Man, they're getting there now. They're gonna get it finished. They got it all right. They said it's a new scientific method. But you know what? They forgot 4,000 of the manuscripts. Just like Dr. Waite showed you, they put an M, well, sometimes they put a B-Y-Z for Byzantine. And they say, they're too much alike, we can't count them. They just copied each other, they're too much alike. Well, that's the whole purpose in this thing was to copy the words of God and maintain them through the centuries. And strangely enough, Strangely enough, even though they've got a whole new system so that we can't say, well, that's an Alexandria manuscript anyway, because they're going by the words. Strangely enough, the word that's in B still finds its way into the text the same way it always did. However, there were 13 changes in James that moved from the new text back to the received text. They threw us a biscuit so we'd get off guard and say, well, if they keep working that process, it's going to work. The appearance of a new test is guaranteed. Let me read their statement. And with that, I'll be done within a second. Got to find the... Oh, I missed. I'm not going to read through here and find it. They said we could only apply this to the book of James to Jude. So we're gonna have to come out with the 29th where we apply it to the Synoptic Gospels. And then we'll have to come out with the 30th where we apply it to the Pauline Epistles. And that's job security, that's job security. They can drag that out over the course, each one of these additions cost like $40 or $50. That's income, that's job security for scholars for the next five or six years. Until they exhaust that then they'll come up with a new system for finding it and there'll be ten more eternal words of God for this week The Bible says that he already made it perfect he already made it perfect There in Psalm 19 hadn't changed any at all Psalm 19 the law of the Lord is perfect You say, preacher, why do you worry about the Greek? Because you're gonna run into it, and all your preacher friends are gonna try to tell you you're just old hick. You're crazy, you're nuts. Well, I may be nuts, but I'm screwed on the right bolt. I am not moving. I am not moving. There's a curse in, come over to Revelation 22 with me. Read it, we haven't read this one but once this week. There's a curse for anyone that tampers with the word of God. Revelation 22, I testify, verse 18, unto every man that hears the words of the prophecy of this book. At the beginning, he said, you're blessed if you hear it. Now he's going to tell you you're cursed if you change it. If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book. Death and hell were cast in the lake of fire, and whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast in the lake of fire. That's one of the plagues. That's one of the plagues. This is a life and death. This is a heaven or hell matter. This is not something to play with. Well, we only changed one eighth of the Bible. Well, cut my arm off. I'll be all right. I can survive with one arm. You want one leg? I can probably get by with that. We'll build some way. No, God said, uh-uh, don't you touch it. And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life. Oh, my soul. Now we're really in trouble. I'm not sure if that's the book of life or the lamb's book of life, but I want my name in both of them. I'm not taking chances. I believe in eternal security, but that verse troubles me. God says you tamper with the word of God and I will take your name out of the book of life. They won't change it to tree of life. I see book of life and out of the holy city from the things that are written in this book. Oh, the Bible says I can know I'm going to heaven. If I allow God to convince my heart that I must believe in him, with the heart man believes under righteousness, with the mouth confession is made unto salvation, for whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. The Lord Jesus said, except a man be born again. That's not a theology. That's not, who are you born againers? That's not a theology. That's a miracle of God. where he transforms the inner man, creates in me a whole new person, the one who was a sinner. Shall we sin that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we that are dead to sin continue any longer therein? I am crucified with Christ. I remember the night. I can see it right now as I say it. I remember the night when God opened my eyes and I understood this verse, I am crucified. They want to change that to, I have been crucified. I walk around a man who is crucified. My sinful self died. I'm crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live. Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. In the life that I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God. who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not frustrate the grace of God. You have a Bible that you can trust. Within the next five years, they will publish another Greek New Testament. And that new Greek New Testament will do its best to take away from the deity of Christ. That next Greek New Testament will do its best to diminish the role of the blood of Christ. It'll do its best to define sin out of my way. It'll do its best to bring the God of heaven down to be like you and me. It'll do its best. to be just like. One of our guys did a study one year. Every new translation of the Bible gets closer to the New World Translation. the Bible of the Jehovah's Witnesses. Because the translators do not believe Jesus is God. The translators do not believe Genesis is literal. The translators do not believe the blood is essential. The translators are just as lost as anybody else walking this world who has not yet trusted Christ. You have a Bible. You have it in English. You have it in the Greek Masoretic text. You have it in the Greek text of the New Testament. It has been established for 400 years, 500 in the case of the Greek text. The 1100 AD, I believe, is the Hebrew text. It is established. I have a rock. I don't hold the rock. The rock holds me. But I have a rock. Samuel set it up. Emanetzer, the rock of God's help. Oh, it picked me up. It digged me out of a miry pit. Digged me, cut me out of a rock, set me on a solid rock and delivered me, changed my life. I have no need to change the book that has changed me. You can trust your Bible. Father, would you bless these few minutes together? Lord, some of the folks sitting here know about the Greek New Testaments. Others, it was, might as well have been Swahili. But Lord Jesus, you want us to be able to stand on your word. There's gonna be some serious storms. There's gonna be some persecutions breaking out. There's already emotional and intellectual attacks on the word of God. Father, we are the off scouring of the earth. We are the biggest troublemakers. They don't like us. We just, they're afraid of the religious right electing people. And all we are is a tiny handful of God's people. They're not afraid of us, they're afraid of you. They're afraid it just might be right. Father, help us to go in the confidence that we hold in our hand the very words of the living God, words that transform. You said all scripture is given by inspiration of God, theopneustos, God breath, God spirit. You breathed into Adam the breath of life. You breathed into our souls the spiritual breath of life, and we have been changed. Father, help us to live in the power of that change. Help us to live in the confidence of the book, the words of God that transformed us. We ask in Jesus' precious name.