How many of you actually read your, what happened? Oh, my computer went dead, that's good. How many of you actually read the first chapter of From the Mouth of God? It's kind of a long chapter, but don't have any fears because we're not going to get anywhere close to finishing it tonight. There's just a lot of stuff to glean, a lot of stuff for us to gather. And we want to really take a deliberate approach through this book, as we did with the other book, in order to gain as much information as we can. And there is a lot to be gleaned from this book. I think it goes without saying that the church of the living God needs the word. I mean, that may sound like something very trite, may sound like something that need not be said. But I think in the day and age in which we live, especially with the de-emphasis that we see on God's word, the shoddy handling of God's word, the maligning and twisting and making the word of God suit our own ends and the pragmatism and so on and so forth that we see running rampant throughout Christendom today, I think it's important just to restate that simple fact. The church needs the Word of God. And we need the Word of God if we are to have any hope at all of conducting our lives in accordance with the expectations and commands of God. Imagine, if you will, a church with no written instruction. What kind of church would we have? Imagine a church without the uniformity provided in the written word of God in terms of its doctrine and its emphasis on practicing that doctrine. Well, this actually leads to the first question on your handout. Why is it important that we possess God's word, not simply according to oral tradition, but in written form? Just throw that out there as a discussion question. And then we'll delve a little deeper into the answer. But why is it important that we have the word of God in written form? Yes, Steve. Well, because you end up with what the Catholics have. In some cases, they go by whatever thing that's blowing in the wind today. They don't actually have, they say they have the Bible, but they don't actually Right. Well, yeah, I think that's important, Steve, because, you know, so many non-Christians today, when they see the church, air quotes, a lot of what they see comes from what they actually see in the Roman Catholic Church. And the Roman Catholic Church is not representative of the true Church of Christ at all. And one of the reasons is they don't have a consistent authority. I'll give you an example. When the pope speaks ex cathedra, every pope who has ever been elected to that position sits in the holy chair, so to speak, and gives, he pontificates, no pun intended, giving all of his faithful followers this rule and that rule and so on and so forth. But guess what? Those things change with every pope. Now the pope is said to be infallible whenever he speaks ex cathedra, or from the chair. But it rarely turns out that way, does it? I mean, as a matter of fact, you'll find pope after pope correcting pope after pope, and it happens all the time. Like Steve said, it's kind of really up to the whim of the day in which the Pope is ministering. You know, the whole idea that certain doctrines come about based upon the way the wind's blowing in society at large is an example of that. And so, really, don't use the Catholic Church as an example. Yeah, John. Do you have something? You're just scratching. No, I was just gonna say that when we have it written, we have a... a means to test the reliability of the transmission of the word. We have a map. Yeah, absolutely. A reliable map from how to get here, or from here to there. Yeah, that's right. Right. You can verify and validate what has been written. You know, there are inherent dangers with oral tradition. How many of you have ever been to a party where you played the whisper game? Ferguson mentions this in his book. You know, you get a line of people or a circle of people and the idea is to hand somebody a little piece of paper and on this piece of paper is Ed Sachs loves his little poodle Maisie. Right? Yes. Yeah. And named her Maisie. And then that's whispered into the ear of the person next to him. And the idea is not to repeat what's been written, but to whisper it person to person to person to person to person. And then the person, the last person who gets whispered to is to announce whatever it is was on the paper. And what do you suppose Ed Sachs loves his little poodle Maisy comes out to be? Well, maybe, but Ed Sachs loves to push up daisies or something akin to that. Yeah, that was very, very inappropriate. I apologize for that. But that's the way the Whisper game is. It can be that hilarious, too, because I've played it before. I've played it with adults, like at, oh, I was gonna say baby showers. Is that, yeah, I've played it at baby showers. But it's really comical sometimes. John, that's enough out of you, buddy. John, the quintessential, John, have you ever been to a baby shower? I figured, yeah. Not everybody can be a mountain man, John. Just saying. But it's funny sometimes how things get lost in oral transmission. And you can imagine if the Bible was transmitted orally. what kind of story we would have over time. Imagine, you know, over even the span of something relatively as insignificant as 5,000 years. What kind of stories do you think we would get if the Bible had been translated orally? And not only that, how many different versions of the story would be available? We get it now. Huh? We get it now. What? You know, my mom says that Mary gave birth, but it just appeared on her arms. Right. Right, so that's the danger of oral tradition, right? I mean, how many versions, how many interpretations, how many different varieties of what they would claim to be the truth would we have? We'd have tons of them. And which one would be true? Well, who knows? Who knows which one would be true? You would never have any point at which to validate or verify what's actually true against a certain standard. Ferguson goes on to cite Bavinck, Hermann Bavinck. Great, great, tremendous theologian. And what he says is this, he says, the written word does not die upon the air, but lives on. It is not like oral traditions subject to falsification. It is not limited in scope to the few people who hear it, but it's the kind of thing rather, which can spread out to all peoples and to all lands. Writing makes permanent the spoken word, protects it against falsification and disseminates it far and wide. This kind of leads to number two, what factual historical evidence do we possess which gives us confidence in the reliable transmission and preservation of God's word down through the ages? Now I realize I didn't give you a whole lot of space to write in, but there's a lot that we're going to cover in this second question. One of the leading claims made by those who seek to discredit The scriptures is the notion that one there are no existing original manuscripts Right and it is true. There are no existing original manuscripts that we are aware of But is that a hindrance to determining the authenticity and validity of the scriptures? No No, because if we assume that the manuscripts we do have in our possession, which we do have some manuscripts that date back to as early as the first century, the later half of the first century, if we're to assume that from the latter half of the first century all the way through till now that we can demonstrate that the scriptures have been preserved in such a way as to keep them intact that whole time, then why can't we roll that back 50 years and assume the same thing? You see what I'm saying? It's ludicrous to say that because we don't have the original manuscripts, that there's no validity in the end product. I would dare say that most of the books on the library shelves History books that all of us really believe just by virtue of the fact that they're history books. Who would lie in a history book, right? But how many original manuscripts do you suppose still exist from those books? Probably none. What do they do with the originals? What are the originals? Most of the older books were written probably longhand on paper. What do they do with that when they publish the book? They throw it away. Or they give it back to the author, and what does he do with it? Puts it up in his attic, and it sits there for any number of years. And those things are discovered from time to time, but we don't emphasize the same standard for those works as we do for the Scriptures. Why? Why? Why must Scripture stand up to scrutiny that we don't apply anywhere else? It's just a fallacious argument. It's really an argument that doesn't hold water. The second claim. by those who seek to discredit the scriptures, is that the scriptures have been rewritten. You've heard this, right? Oh, they're constantly being rewritten, modified, and changed over the years. Well, what's surprising about these is really not how false that claim is, but how many people who should know better actually believe this? When presented with the fact that The facts, history does prove to be a far more interesting thing than these conjectures. Let me just give you a few things to write down in this regard. The Bible you have in your possession tonight, now think about this. The Bible you have in your possession was written over a 1,500 year span. It was written over a period of 40 generations. It was written by over 40 authors. It wasn't written merely by kings and princes and those in positions of power. It was written by who? Kings, peasants, philosophers, fishermen, poets, statesmen, scholars, tent makers. It was written in countless places. Moses wrote in the wilderness, Jeremiah wrote from a dungeon, Daniel wrote on a hillside in a palace. Paul was in prison for a great deal of his writing. Luke was traveling. John was exiled on the Isle of Patmos. And there are many other places and situations in which the Bible was written. It was written on three continents. It was written on the continents of Asia, Africa, and Europe. It was written in three languages. It was written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, and oh, by the way, I might add, three of the most succinct and detail-oriented languages that man has ever known. It was written containing countless controversial subjects, which one might expect would generate opposing opinions. And yet what do we find throughout the scriptures? Not opposing opinions. We find one thread of truth throughout the scriptures. Now think about that in a book that's written under those circumstances over 1,500 years, over 40 generations, by 40 authors from every walk of life, in countless places, on three continents, written in three languages. and concerning a great deal of controversial material, which one would expect one author to contradict the other throughout. You don't see that. You just don't see that. Now, in addition to those things, the Bible is unique in its circulation. It's the most widely circulated book in the history of mankind. It's unique in its translation. By as early as 1966, the Bible had been translated already into 240 languages and dialects, and portions of the Bible, like the book of John, for example, and other portions of scripture were put into 740 plus additional languages and dialects. It's unique in its survival. It's been copied and recopied for hundreds of years before the invention of the printing press. And that didn't diminish its style, it didn't harm its correctness, and it didn't threaten its existence. When compared to other ancient writings, the Bible has more manuscript evidence than any ten pieces of classical literature combined. Now think about that. Bernard Graham wrote this concerning the preservation of the Bible. He said, the Jews preserved it as no other manuscript has ever been preserved. They kept tabs on every letter, syllable, word, and paragraph. They had special classes of men within their culture whose sole duty was to preserve and transmit these documents with practically perfect fidelity. There's no other body of literature, there's no single book that can make that claim. I've told you before, the Jewish scribes, the Emanuenses, who were so patient in penning the scriptures that we have in our possession today, were paranoid to the nth degree concerning their possibly making a mistake in transmitting what had been written. They saw it as such a holy duty that there was a particular class of scribes who would actually make one pen stroke, pray, bathe, and return, only to make another pen stroke, pray, bathe, return, make another pen stroke, and they spent their whole lives just translating pages of the Scriptures. These aren't fairy tales. This is not just something to try to fascinate you that's beyond the realm of reason. This is true. You can read about this in several ancient histories, even in the secular histories, how fanatical the Jews were in ensuring that not one jot or one tittle was erroneously placed into the Word of God. As for the Bible's reliability, And this is another thing, too. People say, well, the Bible's been rewritten and rewritten, and it's been changed, it's been added to. You know, there were pragmatic people who just wanted to add things to the Bible to meet their own needs, and you know, the Catholic Church really kind of hijacked the scriptures, and they made it say what they wanted it to say in order to meet their own ends. None of that is true. There are bad translations. The Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, use what's called the New World Translation. Horrible. Absolutely horrible. They seek to strip Christ of all of his deity, among other nefarious things. Thomas Jefferson wrote his own version of the New Testament in which he literally cut out all the miraculous and left intact only the non-miraculous. We have Good News for Modern Man. We have The Message by Eugene Peterson. Those are horrid translations, and we know that. Now, how do we know that? Because they stand out against what? Against the standard. And what's the standard? The standard is more than 5,000 existing Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. That's amazing, isn't it? Over 5,000 manuscripts exist today, and there are more added to it every year. as archaeological discoveries continue to be made. Philip Schaff, some of you know him, have his history books. Philip Schaff was historian par excellence. He's unparalleled in the field of, especially of Middle Eastern history and European history. But he says in his comparisons to the Greek Testament and the English version, that among all the manuscripts available, there are about 150,000 variant readings. So you're talking about every word in more than 5,000 manuscripts, there are 150,000 variant readings, or ways the text can be read, right? Of these 150,000 variants, only 400 caused scholars to actually stop and scratch their heads. You know, and what does that mean? What's a variant text? Well, Moses jumped on his camel and he went to the well, right? Versus Moses led his camel to the well. That's a variant reading. What does that have to do with any doctrine? Nothing. It's just different in the way it's worded. So there's only 400 of those which cause scholars to scratch their heads. Of these 400 troublesome texts, only 50 of them were characterized as being significant. 50. were characterized as being significant. And of these 50, not one, Schaff wrote, altered an article of faith or a precept of duty which is not abundantly sustained by other and undoubted passages or by the whole tenor of Scripture teaching. Further, Sir Frederick Kenyon, another great New Testament scholar, has said no fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith rests upon a disputed reading of the manuscripts. Now, let that soak in for just a minute. And use that as a suitable defense against those who make these wild, uninformed claims that the scripture is full of errors and contradictions. Years ago, I stood in this very pulpit And it's on Sermon Audio, you can go out there and hear it. I made a wager of sorts. With anybody who's within earshot of my voice, I'll make that same wager tonight. So it'll be on Sermon Audio twice. I will give anybody a check for $1,000 if you can show me a bona fide contradiction in the scriptures. Huh? I thought it was $50,000. $50,000? I don't have $50,000. No. No. No. That was some other preacher. I don't have $50,000. But the point is, you can't do it. Now, you might come up with one English translation against another translation and say, see, there's a contradiction. Where's my $1,000? But what am I going to do? I'm going to take you to the Greek. People say that. They say it all the time. No, they say it all the time, but it's vacuous. There's no substance to it. People like to make claims they have no means of supporting at all. It's really a brush-off thing. They use it as a dismissive tactic. Well, I hear what you're saying about the Bible, and I know you believe that, and that's very good for you. Bless your heart. But, you know, it's full of contradictions. It's riddled with errors. Show me one. Tell me. what you see there that's so erroneous. And they can't do it. They just can't do it. Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about that popped up in a conversation. Elizabeth, thank you for enlightening me on this issue. You remember the conversation we had earlier in the week about the King James Version, right? You don't remember, okay. Anyway, Elizabeth is to thank for this. It was very enlightening. But let me just give you an example from the scriptures. Look in your Bibles at Matthew 9, 13. Hello. Don't fail me now. If you've never been to Bible Hub, you really owe it to yourself to use this tool. I'm going to go to Matthew 9, 13. Is that what I said? I don't know if you can see that. You'll have to trust me. Everybody's familiar with the King James only people, right? They believe very strongly that the King James is the only reliable transmission of God's Word to the English-speaking population. I'm not sure what they make of the Geneva Bible that preceded the King James and other Bibles that came along in English before then, but they make this argument that the 1611 version of the King James Bible is the perfect translation of God's Word into English. And so they go to Matthew 9.13 and they read this. but go ye and learn what that meaneth. I will have mercy and not sacrifice, for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. Okay, good so far, right? And in their decrying or putting down other translations as of the devil, which they are prone to do, they'll say, these new Bible versions have sought to remove the principle of repentance. And they'll say, I can prove it. Look at the New International Version. Go and learn what this means. I desire mercy, not sacrifice, for I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners. Ooh, no repentance. Okay, go down to the ESV, which many of us love and respect. Go and learn what this means. I desire mercy, not sacrifice, for I came not to call the righteous, but sinners. To what? To nothing. Look at the New American Standard. But go and learn what this means. I desire compassion and not sacrifice, for I did not come to call the righteous but sinners. Now, if you're naive enough, you might accept the KJV-only argument, which says, well, the KJV's the standard, and therefore, all these other translations have intentionally left out the command to repent. And you might fall for that, and you might be, you know what, you're right, I see that. You can see it right here. Now, there's something we have to acknowledge here, though. In 1611, when the KJV was being written in honor of King James, none of the scholars who wrote the King James Bible were Greek scholars. I'll go one further. They did not even, in 1611, this wouldn't happen until the 1800s, in 1611, they did not even know what the Koine Greek was. They considered the Greek to be a spirit-inspired language. They had no archeological evidence to support anything resembling Greek, and so they just assumed it's just this, something like hieroglyphics. It's just this spirit-inspired language. How many manuscripts do you think they had of the Greek which had been translated by Erasmus into what's called the Textus Receptus, the Received Text? How many manuscripts do you think they had in the original languages at their disposal when they wrote the King James? Anybody want to guess? Less than a half a dozen. So they had less than a half dozen manuscripts. At latest count, we now have 5,686 manuscripts. And when all 5,686 of these manuscripts were compared, manuscript to manuscript, in preparation to write the New International Version, the English Standard Version, New American Standard, and so on and so forth, the newer translations. They use computers to compare all of the Greek texts. The majority of the Greek texts that they looked at did not contain repentance. That's why it's absent in these newer translations. Well, I'll give you an example. You can go up here and take this verse in BibleHub, and you can click on the Greek. Now, the Greek word for repentance is metanoia. And I realize that not everybody speaks Greek here. But metanoia should be found here if it's to be included in the English translation. If you look at all these words, you can even look at the Here's the transliteration. You'll not find metanoia anywhere. Now what's this based on? Well, it's based upon these manuscript families. The Nestle Greek manuscript family, look at the end. You should see the word metanoia, it's not there. Westcott and Hort, 1881, another of the very popular Greek manuscripts. Nope, you don't see it there either. Westcott and Hort, NA 27, with all the variants. In other words, they looked at everything else. You don't see it there either. Now you do see it in the Byzantine majority text. You do see it in the Greek Orthodox Church. It's right here, Metanoion, right? You do see it in Scribner's Texas Receptus and in Stephanas' Texas Receptus. So you do see it in a few of the versions, but when you compare 5,600 plus of these versions, it doesn't show up there. Now is this a conspiracy? Let me ask you this. If I'm a professor and I'm lecturing a gathering of like 500 students, and I give all the students an assignment to read pages 100 through 150 of their textbooks, and to bring a ruler and a pencil to the next class, Simple, right? And 490 of the students write a note that says, read pages 100 through 150 in the textbook and bring a ruler slash pencil to the next class. And 10 of them write, read pages 100 through 150 in the textbook, omitting the part where you need to bring the ruler and the pencil. Which source has more credibility? The 10 who negated to include the ruler and the pencil? Or the 490 who did include it? It's a no-brainer, right? The 490. Because 490 can't be wrong and 10 people right. It just, it defies logic. The same interpretation method is used when we approach the Greek manuscripts. If 5,300 of the 5,600 plus manuscripts don't include the word repentance, then guess what? It wasn't there. Now, what does that mean? Well, it means it could have been a copyist remark. It could have been a clarification by some scribe somewhere that was then passed down through a few of the manuscript families, right? Now, does this mean that there's this nefarious plot afoot to rid the Bible's teaching of All references to repentance. No, no. Because look over at Luke 5.32. This is, by the way, the cross-reference to this very passage. Luke 5.32. And what do we read there? Somebody read it. Luke 5.32. Don't everybody yell out at once. I have not come to call the righteous, the sinners, to repentance. So the cross references repentance without any disagreement at all. Now look at the Greek. What do you see in all of those Greek texts that we just looked at a minute ago? Metanoian, Metanoian, Metanoian, Metanoian, Metanoian, Metanoian, Metanoian, Metanoian, It appears in every one of the extant Greek manuscripts. What does it tell you? It tells you that it's in Luke 5, but it's not in Matthew 9. Problem solved. There's no nefarious movement afoot to rid the Bible's teaching of repentance, right? Yeah, Irma. What is the acronym MU, and then it says omit? That's the newest manuscripts. The majority family of texts omit this. Some of you who read the NASB, for example, you'll see very often things in italics. In the NASB construct, whatever's in italics, is believed not to be in the originals because it only appears in a few of the available manuscripts. But they include it just to be as accurate as they can. But they want you to know by putting it in italics that it was probably not in the originals because it's not in the majority. Yes. Right. Right. So there is no conflict. Yep. Is everybody clear on that? It's very important because the KJV Only crowd is, in and of themselves, a very destructive movement. Because, I mean, they really want you to think that these new Bible versions are of the devil. That these new scholars have gone in and totally changed everything. And their claims just don't hold weight. A book recommendation for you. Get James White's The King James Only Controversy. James White. Probably the best, one of the best New Testament scholars today, but definitely something that you'll want to read about that controversy because it's crazy. So you see how the majority rules, basically. And in spite of that, the Bible you hold in your lap, as opposed to the Bible he holds in his lap or she holds in her lap, you'll not find any variation in doctrine. How amazing is that? that has been preserved to such a level of specificity that you will not find doctrinal variations. You just won't. Unless you're looking at one of those truly aberrant translations. The King James Only Controversy by James White. Very, very good book. Okay, let's get back to our study of Ferguson's book. Question number three, what life-restoring and transforming goal does God's word have in view, according to Ferguson? He says, God's personal communication to us is intended to bring light to our darkened minds and faith to our dead hearts. This, he says, is why it's important for us to be sure that what we are reading is a message from God. Once we know this, we have all the incentive we need to work hard to understand scripture. We will take whatever steps are necessary to become better acquainted with the mind and will of God in the Bible. Let me just ask you this. Does the word of God have that result in you? Is it transforming? Is it life restoring? I mean, those of us who make a profession of faith can say yes, unequivocally. You know, those of us who have made a profession of faith, not of our own doing, but by faith given to us from God, understand very well what the writer of the Hebrews meant when he said in Hebrews 4.12 that the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, able to pierce to the division of soul and spirit. We know what that means. And again, it doesn't make us better than anyone who is not saved. It's by the grace of God that we are what we are and that we understand what we understand. But this is another claim that's often made by people who are not believers in Christ, and that is, well, you know, you just believe, you have faith in a fairy tale. You have faith in things that can't be demonstrably proven as true. And that's one reason why, you know, here's another long word for you that you've probably written down in your notes before, but that's another reason that we're presuppositionalists, right? That's one reason I'm not an evidentialist. If someone comes to me and says, prove to me that the Bible is the word of, the inerrant, infallible word of God, what's my response? Can't do that. I can't do that. And people are often taken aback by that. Why? Because I have a major presupposition which prevents me from even attempting that. Well, what's your major presupposition? The presupposition is, unless and until you have been granted the ears to hear and the eyes to see by the grace of God and salvation, you and I will never agree that the Bible is the inerrant, infallible word of God. That is our presupposition. I can spend all day reading to you evidence that demands a verdict, volumes one and two. But those books and the multitudes of books that have been written before that book and since that book, those books are not capable of doing what the Word of God alone can do. I mean, I can fill you with facts. I just filled you with some facts tonight about the Bible being written in different places by different people over a huge span of time. And what's the likelihood that all of this would coalesce into 66 books, 39 old, 27 new, and be perfectly cohesive. What is the likelihood? The likelihood is astronomical. I've shared with you before the Philip Stoner's work as a statistician for a magazine called Science Speaks. Back in the 70s, he took out of the 330 plus prophecies in the Old Testament made about Jesus Christ He took only six of those and calculated the odds that any random six of the 330 plus prophecies about Christ could be fulfilled in one man is what? What's the likelihood? He gave us a figure. It's one in 10 to the hundredth power. Everybody remember your exponents? What does that mean? Well, for those of us who are mathematically challenged, he gave that great illustration that we use so often, and that is, you know, you take the state of Texas, you fill it up two feet deep with silver dollars, you pick one up, you draw an X on it with a fat pip magic marker, you lay it down, and you shuffle the whole state of Texas. Now you drop a blind man from a helicopter and tell him he's got one chance to pick up the silver dollar with the X on it. That's 1 in 10 to the 100th power. Those are the odds that any one man would fulfill even six. Can you imagine what the odds are for one man fulfilling all 330 plus prophecies? I mean, 1 in 10 to the 100th power is beyond astronomical. It's beyond inconceivable. It's ridiculously inconceivable. It's absurdly inconceivable. Now, I could give you all that information as an unbeliever, and what are you going to do with that? You're going to say, oh, well, that was a good one. Now I'm going to believe. Now I'm going to become a believer. Now, Paul says in Ephesians 2, we're dead in trespasses and sins. And in order for us to be saved, we must be brought from our dead state to life. And God alone does that. So I can fill you up with all the evidence in the world, and you'll still not have the capability to say, okay, I finally get it. I'm going to decide not to be dead. I'm going to live. Salvation is a miracle. And yet the unbeliever will still insist that we're all just duped. We're all just, you know, wishful thinking. We've all consumed the opiate of the masses, as Marx would say. Well, number four, in what way is the Bible both a divine and a human book? Should the latter reality cause us to question the Bible's truthfulness or reliability? This is another one of my favorites. People say, well, you know, the Bible's just a collection of things written down by man, and man is fallible, and you know. Now, it was transmitted via human instrumentality, right? It is God's word, but it was written down by men. But I would argue that this actually gives the Bible even more credence than less credence. This makes the Bible even more believable than less believable. Because what's the likelihood that a collection of that many men over that many years in that many places could write something as cohesive as the Bible is? You talk about odds, it's unfathomable how that might happen. And yet it did happen. God undoubtedly knew that any claim by man to be in possession of a book written by his literal hand would result in what? What if someone were, you know, you'd be like Joseph Smith, wouldn't you? You know, you'd be carrying the golden plates of Nephi around, insisting that the angel Moroni wrote them with his own hand and that, you know, you and you alone were able to read them because you had to, you know, you had to have a seer stone which he claimed was one of the Urim and Thummim off the breastplate. Never mind. But if you claimed to have this book written directly by the hand of God, what would people say about you? I mean, they think you're crazy now. Oh, you'd really be off the reservation then. Yeah, you do. Right? And what would that look like? You couldn't read it. I couldn't read it. So what was God's solution to that? God said, I'm going to take normal, ordinary, everyday men, and I'm going to speak through them. I'm going to transmit my word through them. In other words, I'm going to exhale my word through their mouths and their hands. Anything else would have caused confusion. What about the idolatry that that book would cause? Yes. What? Do you have a movement of the spirit there? We don't do that here, sister. We're a little more conservative than that. I'm just kidding. Well, how this happens leads to our fifth question. What's meant by the term inspiration? In what way can this term be misunderstood? We talked about this before, right? Inspiration. Poets use this word. I was sitting at my desk just awaiting the descending of the muse. who would enlighten my thoughts. And I was inspired to write this song for you. And then out comes Bye Bye Miss American Pie. Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry. Them good old boys, never mind. Kevin, I know you know that song. I was one of those good old boys. Yeah. Inspiration's a bad word, isn't it? You know, I mean, 2 Timothy 3.16, in some versions, some older English translations, use the phrase by inspiration. The 1560 Geneva Bible did that. But does this mean that the Bible is inspiring, like a poem or a symphony? No, because not all of it is inspiring, as Ferguson points out. As Ferguson says, he says, when Paul wrote that all scripture is inspired by God, he was not thinking about its effect on us, but its source in him. B.B. Warfield is then quoted. You can listen to this. He says, it's very desirable that we should free ourselves at the outset from influences arising from the current employment of the term inspiration. This term is not a biblical term, and its etymological implications are not perfectly accordant with the biblical conception of the modes of the divine operation in giving the scriptures. The biblical writers do not conceive of the Scriptures as a human product breathed into by divine spirit and thus heightened in its qualities or endowed with new qualities, but as a divine product produced through the instrumentality of men. They do not conceive of these men by whose instrumentality Scripture is produced as working upon their own initiative, though energized by God to greater effort and higher achievement, but as moved by the divine initiative and born by the irresistible power of the Spirit of God, along ways of His choosing to ends of His appointment." We don't talk like that anymore, do we? All that to say is that scholars forever have viewed the Bible as having its source in God and God alone. They did not believe it was simply the byproduct of men who had been inspired to write it down. Ferguson clarifies, he says, Warfield meant that scripture's not an object into which God breathed, but something which God himself has breathed out. For this reason, modern Bible translations of 2 Timothy 3.16 render Paul's word theonoustos, as breathed out by God or as God breathed. And this clarifies what I've said a couple of times. God's word is not inspired as much as it is expired. That's why the New Testament often uses expressions like God said, scripture said, and so on and so forth. Well, we're going to look at how this all takes place next week when we look at what is known as concurrence. Just give you a brief definition of that. Concurrence is just the operation of God and man working together to give us the scriptures. How does that happen? We're gonna discuss that next week. Anybody have any questions, comments? Yeah, Todd. Yeah, it's not like the can of tuna in your pantry that's been there forever. It's not expired in terms of invalid. Yeah, very good point. It's expired, yeah. It's important to point out that it's very impressive that there are so many, if you look at the group of translations that use the text, the original, I mean, the Greek manuscripts as their basis, that they come out with something that looks remarkably similar. There's word order differences, but the fact that you have over a thousand pages of text by different people translating, as long as they use the manuscript evidence. Where we see problems is where the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Joseph Smith Bible, the Jefferson Bible, at English translations and translated from English translations. Yes. Yep. Versus looking at the original English translations. Exactly. So it's mind-blowing to me looking at, we have NASBs here and ESBs here. Right. Those two groups of people did not concur, they didn't group evidence together. No. And make a translation. No. They were two totally separate groups of people doing a translation. Right. Yes. The fact that they came up with a translation that's almost identical except for word order in some places. Yep. It's mind-blowing. Well, I'll throw it out. I'll give you a perfect example. How many of you use the ESV? How many of you use it every Sunday? Raise your hand high so I can see. Okay, the majority of you. How many of you use the NASB? Okay. How many of you use another version? And what would that be? King James? New King James? Okay. Holman Christian Standard, but it's still based on the standard. It's probably the NAS. Yeah, okay, so How many of you using the ESV every week? Realize that consistently you may not know this but for 25 years. I've preached from the NASB. I don't preach out of the ESV and yet you're able to read perfectly like John said from your ESV as and follow along with every reference I make and That's amazing that we would have that much continuity. Yeah. Right. Yep. Absolutely. That's true. Yeah. Ed. Wasn't where we were, but yeah. Lay it on us, brother. Yes. Yep. Yep. Yep. And faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. I was given a Gideon New Testament in Psalms and Proverbs in college on a campus. I still have that and I use it for backpacking because it's a little Bible, not the Old Testament. And the people who have been affected by just that one ministry. It's amazing. And Woodcliffe and another Bible translator. people. They're putting it into the hands of people who can read it. And how many people are we going to meet in heaven? And they said, I found the Bible somewhere, I started reading it. And I was saved. Yeah, that's true. That's true. And that kind of goes with what John's saying, too, because faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. By what translation? By nearly any translation. Because they're all internally consistent with one another. They really are. Don't let people tell you that there's errors and contradictions. I wouldn't, you know, if there were I would tell you. I would owe that to you. There just aren't. Your dog Macy's quite the poodle, I'm telling you. Anybody else? Quickly. Yeah, Irma. I was with some friends and they knew that I had started attending this church. And they asked me in a very negative way, do they teach doctrine? And I said, yes, they do. And they just kind of looked at each other and I was like, oh, okay. Why is that such a negative? To them, not to me. Because they don't have any doctrine. Right. That gets... Kevin's like, duh, duh. It is divisive, yeah. It divides the light from the darkness, the fire from the truth, color, the light from the sheep. Yeah, it's pretty divisive, yeah. But the point is to... Those words are often spoken by people who don't really have a bone to pick with doctrine. they're trying to cover up for the fact that they've been negligent and don't know doctrine. Because doctrine does not divide, it does, but it also unites. That's another presupposition that this church shares. As long as we all believe that this is the inerrant and fallible word of God, insofar as it's rightly divided, which you're called to be Bereans to hold me accountable to see if it is rightly divided. I'm called as a pastor to tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, so help me God. And I've been given wonderful tools and an education and so on and so forth to be able to do that. And if we hold that that's our presupposition, that everything this says is true, and it can be known. This is another thing that really is a pet peeve of mine. People say, well, that's just your interpretation. There's only one correct interpretation of the scriptures. In hermeneutics, the science of biblical interpretation and exegesis can bring that meaning out. People are either negligent, they defer to tradition, they defer to laziness, they defer to bad translation habits and so on and so forth. Folks, There's only one translation and it can be known. If I tell you in English, Jeffrey, go to the store and get me a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk. Is there any ambiguity in that? That just frees him to bring me 2%, whole milk, whole wheat, white bread, whatever. There's no ambiguity though in the sentence itself. Go to the store, bring me a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk, right? So why is there this mysterious, all of a sudden if it's written in Greek or Hebrew, there's multiple meanings. And by the way, I told you Hebrew and Greek are the most succinct languages ever. I guarantee you can take this to the bank. What you read in Greek and interpret according to the rules of interpretation, it says exactly what it says. And you can know that just as sure as somebody who's listened to this 1,500 years from now trying to decipher my words. and they heard me tell Jeffrey to go to the store and bring me a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk, they'll be able, if they understand the rules of our English interpretation today, to know that I'm saying what? Go to the store and get me a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk. Folks, it's not. People build that mystique up and it's become that way. They say, well, doctrine divides. Well, doctrine doesn't divide if you rightly interpret the word of God. God says, do not do this. And if we can definitively prove that God said, do not do this, then we're all of the same presupposition that we're not gonna do this. What's divisive about that? Perfect example, the Bible says homosexuality is an abomination. It says that in the English, it says that in the Greek. What does it mean in the Greek, pastor? Means homosexuality is an abomination unto God. Well, hmm, that's doctrinal. I'm not accepting that. Well, it doesn't matter if you accept it. That's what it says. Well, it is sad if you don't, but it doesn't matter if you accept it or not. That's what it says. Are you sure? Somebody debated me once about the meaning of dead in Ephesians 2. You're dead in your trespasses and sins. What does that mean, pastor? The word's necros. What does that mean, dead? What does dead mean? Well, it doesn't mean we're really dead, does it? Don't pull the Monty Python on me. You're not mostly dead. Taking a dirt nap, that's what it means. Yeah, you're dead. Oh, but I'm not, Irm's friend would say, oh no, oh pastor, that's divisive. Cause we're just sick and sin, we're not dead. No, Paul says you're dead!