I'm going to conclude here and we've been doing here on Sunday nights looking at the process by which we got our Bible. I know that can be somewhat of a somewhat of a question and a question that isn't perhaps really addressed in the Bible itself, where God just spells it out. This is exactly how I'm going to make sure that the Word endures. But we have the promise of God and we have the plan of God. I believe that He inspired the Word of God, gave the Word of God, not so that it would be only available to one people in one time and one place, but so that His Word would be available to all of us. We'd all have the opportunity to know the truth and to hear God's Word. And so just as God divinely inspired His Word, we've got also had a plan. a divine plan to preserve his word and bring it forward, even through the barriers that existed of time and distance and language and culture and all of those things that we've kind of been addressing. And I've been looking at a passage of scripture here, just with each of these lessons, I would say. And I want you to look, if you would, at Jeremiah chapter 23. I actually came across this. passage again this week, and I love this passage, speaks to the power and the significance of the Word of God and really what the Word of God does, how we can, how the Word of God is meant to be effective and efficacious in our lives, not just to be something that we academically read, but something that truly makes a change in us, does a work in us. Part of this passage, at least, I think will probably be familiar to you, verses here and there, and such a special passage here in Jeremiah chapter 23. And in verse 29 is where I'll start. The question is asked there, it says, He saith, behold, I am against them that prophesy false dreams, saith the Lord, and do tell them and cause my people to err by their lies and by their lightness. Yet I sent them not, nor commanded them. Therefore, they shall not profit this people at all, saith the Lord. And when this people or the prophet or a priest shall ask thee, saying, what is the burden of the Lord? Thou shalt then say unto them, what burden? I will even forsake you, saith the Lord. And as for the prophets and the priest and the people that shall say the burden of the Lord, I will even punish that man in his house. Thus shall you say everyone to his neighbor and everyone to his brother, what hath the Lord answered? And what hath the Lord spoken? And the burden of the Lord shall ye mention no more for every man's word shall be his burden. For ye have perverted the words of the living God, the Lord of hosts, the Lord of the host of our God. And I just kind of came across, I was reading that here, And just in my Bible reading here this week, reading through Jeremiah here recently, and really enjoying reading this book, but we see here the high premium that God puts on His Word, and on His Word being conveyed and communicated with precision, with accuracy, and God is absolutely against His Word being misrepresented. He's absolutely against His Word being perverted. And I think we can say this explicitly with the prophets. The prophets were those who were the ones who delivered the Word of God. The Word of God came by prophecy. The Lord divinely revealed His Word to prophets and they were tasked with a very important task of communicating faithfully and accurately and precisely the Word of God just as the Lord had spoken it to them. And there were grave consequences for doing anything else to that point. And so the word of God came by the revelation of prophecy and to those who God revealed it to. And then there was then a great importance, great premium put on that word being communicated and conveyed accurately going forward. And so the Lord had a plan. I believe that the Lord absolutely divinely superintended the process from start to finish. And we've been looking at some of the different steps in the process of not just the inspiration of the scriptures and the delivery of it, but then the work of the more broad work sense of preservation, that of the word being faithfully cared for and copied and rendered out effectively in manuscripts. And then the process of canonization we even talked about. And then now we're into translation. We started to talk about the translation process last week and the important work that was. And man is involved in every step of this process, from the prophets that received the inspiration of scriptures all the way to those who would translate the scriptures out into the common tongue. And God was serious about His Word from start to finish in every part of it. Every person who took part in any step of the process was accountable very much to God for their end result and their final product there. And many of them recognize that, I would say that. I mean, I've been able to, my privilege here has been to be able to study this much more deeply than I can come and bring out here. But reading the quotations and the citations of many of those who were involved in the process and different steps of the process, they understood that. Those who were faithful and those who were diligent about it and took it very seriously understood that their part in the, the preservation and the communicating and the propagation of the Word of God, they had a very direct accountability to God for that and did not want to put themselves in God's crosshairs, to use an expression. They did not want to invite the displeasure of God on their lives in any way by being deceptive, handling the Word of God deceitfully, and and editing and editorializing in the scriptures, as was the case in some times. One of the things, and we'll look at here tonight, kind of continuing forward into translation and translation really into the English is where we've gotten ourselves to here tonight. One of the things when we talked, when I taught about canonization, one of the questions of the several questions they really were seeking to answer there in that process was, does this book of the Bible, this book of supposed scripture, does it have life-changing supernatural power in it? Is there, is there authority in this, in its message to bring souls to salvation? Is there authority in this message to change lives? and to bring about supernatural and spiritual change and spiritual fruit in a person's life. In many books that were being proposed as part of the scriptures were rejected for that very reason, that there was no life-changing message in it. There was no authoritative message in the book. It didn't have the ability in it. It might have provided some information. It might have provided some other things that might have been nice to think about or entertaining or something like that, but there was no life-changing power in those things. I think we could say the same thing as we kind of come to this matter of English translations. And we'll talk mostly about the King James Bible and the translation into the King James Bible. I've been reading here into this, one of the things that I've been looking at here, and I don't know if your Bible has this, you may or may not know, and if your Bible does have this, you may not have read it, but my Bible, this Bible, has the letter from the translators to the readers. In my Bible, it is pretty small print and it's 18 pages long. It's a lot. And it's written kind of, as you can imagine, it was written in an early 17th century style of writing. So there's a lot of big words, you know, and things like that. And so it's kind of an interesting read and you can read into that and you can see the great the burden of responsibility that some felt when they endeavored into this process. One of the things I said was, they answered the question, why do we need a translation? Why? Because there were many at that time, many translations into English, and there was a lot of confusion. A lot of them were fairly inaccurate and based on of inaccurate text and manuscripts and translations from the original languages into other languages that were pretty faulty. And there was a lot of confusion out there. And so they wanted, the preachers of England wanted one consistent, very well thought out, very rigorously translated Bible to use. And then the product of that was the King James Bible published for the first time in 1611. We'll talk about that here tonight, but since that time, Since that time, the King James Bible quickly overtook all of the other Bibles that were in print at the time, superseded them in really in every way. There were others that were fairly preferred by some groups and were quickly replaced and really fell completely out of print in most cases, except for a few copies that made their way into museums really, but not in the common use, in the daily use of Christians and preachers and churches. And since that time, 400 years, it's been the most widely circulated book and most purchased book in all of human history. And it was a book that absolutely in it has the power of God to save lives, the power of God to change lives. And that wasn't even a question. It wasn't even a question about it until the 1880s or something like that. And for 250, 270 years, it stood really alone in the English language as the Bible that stood alone as the word of God and was commonly used. And really, it's more of a modern era question, to say it that way, of whether or not we should continue to use the King James Bible. But it wasn't a question. For almost 300 years, it wasn't a question of what Bible to use, what Bible churches use. And even when it began to be contended against, It was not a question that really had a wide-sweeping effect until really the mid-1900s when the issue really came to a head. I mean, many of the modern translations have been published in our lifetimes. Some of you are a little older than me, and certainly in your lifetime, and many of them mine, okay? Many of them in mine. And I think we could go back to that same question asked a moment ago. If the King James Bible has a proven track record of saving souls and changing lives, then if it wasn't broke, why were they trying to fix it? And it's a question that I think begs an answer. Why were they trying to fix it? Did they see that there was some flaw, some true genuine error in the text that needed to be addressed? Or were there ulterior motives? And I think based on the character of many of those that were involved, it was very much an attempt to weaken biblical doctrine. It was very much an attempt to try to poke holes in in the foundation of the word of God and of Christianity. I try and weaken its influence on culture and on society. And really most of the detrimental changes that we've seen and particularly in the English speaking church and the American church has come since the Bible version issue has really reared its head in the 60s and 70s and since then. And I think that's not a coincidence. I really think that's not a coincidence at all. And so the study here tonight has brought us to the question of how the Scriptures were translated into English. And again, this cropped up, and I mentioned this last week, this cropped up out of the renewed emphasis on the authority of the Word of God. And that was one of the tenets of the Protestant Reformation. And again, I... not a fan of a lot of what happened in the Protestant Reformation, but one of the things that was a positive out of the Protestant Reformation was a renewed emphasis on the authority of scriptures and the ability of people to have the scriptures in their hands for themselves. The Bible was written in common languages for the common people to be able to have access to for themselves. The Bible was written, the Old Testament was written in Hebrew to the Hebrews and any Hebrew who was literate could read the law of God for themselves. The New Testament was written in a common tongue, a Koine Greek, which was not the high classical Greek. It was the international language of the day, and it was written in that language for a reason, so that anybody who was literate in the common language of the day could read and understand the scriptures. And as we got farther and farther away from these languages, these languages kind of died off from being languages in use and languages that were commonly known, the access to the scriptures got more and more obscure and rare. And that was never to be the case according to God's plan. And so, thankfully, a renewed interest in translating the scriptures into a common tongue for the common man to have began really in English. There were some attempts. in other languages prior to that, but it really, well, John Wycliffe began, he translated his Bible in the late 1300s, about 1380 or so, really, really early in the process and did that, translated it in English. It wasn't a great translation, but it was the best one they had. And he was able to produce it in a relatively compact form and he sent it out with his band of traveling preachers called the Lawlords. And these were gospel preachers who were going around preaching the truth of salvation by grace through faith in Christ alone, which flew directly into the face of the doctrine of salvation that was coming out of the Roman church at the time. And for that, they were widely persecuted. Anybody found in possession of a Wycliffe Bible was going to be arrested and were likely going to lose their lives. And John Wycliffe, John Wycliffe was persecuted and he was ostracized and he was, what's the word I'm trying to say, he was... banished, sent away. He couldn't be in his own country. They sent him out of England. They got rid of him, sent him away to a different country. He was not allowed to come back to his own home country anymore. I can't think of the word. Anyway, he completed that, and it was all because of his attempts. His great sin was putting the Word of God into the hands of unauthorized preachers. The Lollards didn't have a Roman Catholic education and certification. They weren't priests in the Catholic Church. They were not permitted to have the word of God, and yet they did, and they were preaching the gospel, and people were getting saved. And it got him arrested and persecuted. And ultimately, all of those that followed in his footsteps really suffered some of the same fate. The first English Bible that was printed in a printing press was Tyndale's Bible. The Tyndale Bible printed the entire New Testament and then half of the Old Testament. and a relatively good, much better translation than Wycliffe's Bible was, but not a complete Bible. And Tyndale, for his troubles, was arrested and he was strangled to death and they burned his bones. I mean, they were really mad at this guy for daring to try and put the Bible into the common tongue. There was a Bible called the Coverdale Bible, which was the first completed printed Bible in 1535, and then one called the Matthews Bible, which was really the completion of Tyndale's Bible. The other half of the Old Testament was finished in the Matthews Bible, and it was published in 1537. And there were others that followed, the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible, and the Bishop's Bible coming in the successive century, the decades right around then. And all of these, all of those who were involved in these Bibles, in the translation of these Bibles, the production of these Bibles, pretty much were persecuted for their trouble. Many were arrested. Many lost their lives for it. There was a lot of effort to snuff this out and to stop this from happening. And yet, Bibles in English and other European languages at the time, in French and German and Spanish, were going forward in spite of the persecution against it. Translation efforts were going forward in all of these because people wanted to have the Word of God in their hands. And that was an undeniable reality is that people wanted to have the Word of God. And there was an ability now to produce that. Now, most of these efforts and pretty much all of these efforts were the product of really one individual in most cases who really took on the great task of trying to translate the scriptures and do the work for it. And these were, again, sincere and godly men who had good and right motives and did the best they could. Many of these still had a great many inaccuracies in them. But these Bibles and those who translated these Bibles prepared the way ahead of them to really till the ground for a call for the authorized version. These translations At the same time, these translations were being made from the Texas Receptus in the traditional manuscripts. There were other translations that were being produced from the Alexandrian manuscripts, and those things were being propagated also. And so, in 1604, a Puritan conference, they call themselves the Millennium Conference. They did that because there was 1,000 of them. There were 1,000 preachers, pastors, that signed on to this petition to the king, to King James, shortly after he became the king of England. A Puritan conference called on the king to authorize a new translation. And the king approved that work. He approved them to go forward with this. Basically, they asked him, if we start a process of translating an authorized version, are you going to have us arrested and killed and hunted down? And is this going to be essentially a death sentence to the men that are involved in the work? And the king essentially promised that he was going to give them leave to do this. And despite what some may say, this is really the last that King James had to do with the entire process, okay? I know there's a lot of questions about his character and his private life and all these things, and some of those may be true, and really, it's inconsequential when it comes to the Bible that bears his name, because the king had nothing to do with it. The king didn't even fund the work. In fact, the men who translated the Bible didn't get paid for their work. This was not a money-making endeavor for them in any way, shape, or form. They were not even paid for the work that they did, work that took years. They weren't paid for it. The only ones who received any kind of financial support at all were the last 12 who did the final formatting work to prepare the text for printing, and they received a stipend really just to cover their expenses while they finalized the work. But nobody was paid for their translation work. The king didn't have any final say-so or any input at all into the way that things were written, into the way that things were translated. He just said, yes, you can do it, and I won't arrest you. And so he could have been all of the things people say that he was, and it wouldn't matter. He would be no worse than, you know, a biblical king like Cyrus in the Old Testament, who was not a God-fearing king by any stretch, but allowed for the children of Israel to go back to Jerusalem and rebuild the walls and rebuild the temple. It's about as much input as he had in it, right? And so it bears his name. and as the King James Version, but he had no input in it, not even funding it. And so all the questions and criticisms about this king and his character in his private life, as salacious as they may be, bear no consequence at all on the finished product that we have in our hands. Roughly about 50 of the best biblical scholars and linguists, not just of their time, of any time, when you really look at who they were appointed to this task, it started, they were seeking 54. There were a few who were not able to actually go forward with the work. It was about 50 that entered into and engaged in this work of translating the scriptures into English for the authorized version. They were divided into six companies, between seven and 10 men each. And it was kind of regionally arranged. These companies would work together based really on where they were centered out and lived in. These six companies were each given the primary translation work of particular books. Each translator would work on the translation work of a particular book or a particular passage in a book. And then after they would do that work, every other man in their company, six to nine other men in their company, would review their work. And so while he would read his translation of a passage, the other six to nine of them would sit around with a manuscript in another language. in Greek or in Hebrew or whatever it might have been, they would sit there and they would read that and see if they had questions about why he translated a word a certain way. And then when that was done, when they had reviewed every bit of the work they had done in their company, they would send it to the other five companies to do the very same thing. Every book, every chapter, every verse, every word of the King James Bible was reviewed no less than 14 times. each, no less than, some as many as 20 times, and they got difficult passages, and they would go round and round and round to be as precise and as accurate and as true to the original word that was used, using a word-by-word, a verbal verbal equivalence method to be as true to the word that was there in the original text. And they would painstakingly review in the letter to the readers. They say that they were not attempting to be fast about it at all. They were not looking for commendations for speed. They weren't worried about how long it took. They were worried about doing the highest quality job that they could possibly do in translating the scriptures. And why not? They weren't getting paid anyway, right? There was no double my pay for being fast. Amen. Some of the other scriptures, one of the problems that they note with some of the earlier translations that were done along the way was how quickly they were translated. One of the early translations I mentioned last week called the Septuagint. It was the translation of the Old Testament into Greek. And there were 70 translators involved in it. 72 translators that were involved in it. And they did it like in 14 days. And they were not allowed to go back and review their work. And so the Septuagint was full of errors, and true biblical scholars of Hebrew don't have anything to do with the Septuagint because there's so many errors in it. Why? Haste, a lack of just due diligence in the process, because translating from a dead language into a common tongue is hard work, it's difficult. It takes a lot of diligence, it takes a lot of care, it takes a lot of thoughtfulness and carefulness and the King James translators were willing to absolutely do that work. So they would send then each completed book to the other five companies to be circulated through the other five companies for review before it would be sent back to them for one final review again. Finished translations were then sent to a 12-man committee for final approval and preparation for printing. And again, every part of the translation received no less than 14 thorough reviews. Now, no other translation can assert anything close to this. said that the 50 of the best scholars and linguists of really any time were involved in this process. And these are impressive people. We're talking about at a time in the history of the world and the history of England, where the English language was coming to a place of greater formality and standardization. through literature has really come into a place of very, very stable and yet we're still at a place where classical education was something that if you received an education, you were of a wealthy family, received an education as these men were blessed to have gotten, they were taught Greek and Latin and Hebrew from a very early age. The head translator was a man by the name of Lancelot Andrews. I know Lancelot, right? But Lancelot Andrews. And you laugh until you hear about him. And it was a man who was a master, what would be the equivalent of a PhD level understanding, a master in 15 languages. of biblical Hebrew, of Koine Greek, of Greek, of Latin, of Syriac and Aramaic, and all of the languages that were used in the scriptures were translated into earlier translations and earlier editions, not to mention all of the common languages of the day, of French and Spanish and Italian. I mean, this guy was a master in 15 languages. Not just fluent, not just conversant, a master in these languages. I'm talking about men who, like John Boyce, was fluent in Hebrew at age 5. Completely literate, reading, writing, and speaking Biblical Hebrew at age 6. I wasn't fluent in English at age 6. I mean, we're talking about a collection of biblical scholars and linguists that no one today could put together today. It would be a virtual impossibility to gather 50 men that had these kinds of credentials and backgrounds and education, much less the godly sincerity to want to produce a good, the very, very best translation that they could. Classical education in England was at its very peak. Assembling even a fraction of this expertise and ability today would be impossible. You might be able to get a classical education today. You might be able to go someplace like Cambridge or Oxford. Even today, you go to Cambridge and Oxford, and you can get a classical education, and they will teach you classical Greek. But you wouldn't be able to really say you had mastery of it after four years. And it's something that really no one today can come close to this level of education. Again, I say that this was no money-making endeavor for any one of these men. They were not paid for their work and the text of the King James has no, the text itself has no, bears no copyright to this day, never has. And not then, not now. The text of the King James Bible is free to be produced and reproduced and used without copyright, without copyright infringement, without paying royalties. Now you get a study Bible, sometimes you'll see in a study Bible, that there is a copyright in the front. And what's copyrighted in a study Bible are the notes and the notations and the maps and all the things, all the extra textual stuff that's in there. And fine, fair enough, but the text itself has never bore a copyright. It was never meant to bring wealth to anyone who is involved in the process Authorized version was translated into English at the precise time when the language had come to the fullness and richness of its beauty. English Empire was also poised to radically expand. It was really at the point where it was about to become an empire. You get one more monarch past James and we're getting into British Empire era. The empire is about to rapidly expand around the world and with it, The Bible is going to go with them. The Gospel is going to go with them to the New World and to the East and to Africa. The Bible is going to go all over the place just in a few years' time because of this. English would become the bridge language. It was going to become the new trade language, the new common tongue that was spoken everywhere. We're still kind of spoiled in that way where as Americans we can go places and we're in a foreign country and we made no efforts to learn their local language. And we just go around talking like, hey, you speak English, right? And they speak more English than we speak anything of what they speak, right? And they learned English in school. We didn't learn, we didn't really, like I learned Spanish and I didn't really learn Spanish in school. And you didn't really learn German in school. You didn't really learn hardly anything in school. But they learned English. And so it became so important that English became really a universal, worldwide language. And for that, I believe because of the rigors that were put into this translation of the King James. And within a few decades from this point, Authorized version would gain ascendancy over all of the other English translations. The best up to that point was probably the Geneva Bible was probably the most widely used to that point and a fairly good translation for what it was. And even it, even it was completely replaced in the English speaking world by the King James within just a number of years. no other translation effort prior to or since has taken the measures to ensure this level of accuracy and precision. Again, most of those that preceded it were the honest and sincere effort of usually just one man who had a burden to do it and did the best that he could with what he had but did not have the access and the opportunity to have other scholars involved and other voices in the mix and have Each line, each word, each verse reviewed over and over and over and over again by those who had a very good understanding, as good of an understanding of those ancient languages as they did. No other translation since has been able to put together such a strong complement of translators and linguists and biblical scholars as was during the authorized version translation. Virtually all of the modern translations came from the critical text that was produced, the text itself produced much later after this, in the 1880s. The new Greek text, they were calling it the new critical Greek text, was produced in the 1880s, over 250 years after the King James Bible was translated into English. And that text, again, pointed out last week, is inferior to the received text, what was called at the time the majority text. And the scholars involved in the translation of the critical text were inferior to those who had come before them in the translation work leading to the King James Bible. The process that they employed was inferior and had not nearly so many safeguards and rigorous standards by which they were forced to abide by, and if you have inferior text, inferior translators, and inferior standards, you're going to have an inferior product. And that's what they got. An inferior product. And most of modern translations and in the critical text, the critical text by which most of the modern translations come from, used a dynamic equivalence method which was a thought for thought and methodology. And they would take a Greek word and they would say, what the word says is this, but what the word means is this. And, and that's not always so far off. It's not always so far left or right of center, but sometimes it was. And there were some stories where in the process they, they were translating a, They were translating the text into a language of a people that didn't know what sheep were. They didn't have sheep. They didn't have goats, apparently. And so they were going to translate it, the word for lamb. Throughout the Word of God, they're going to translate the words for lamb and sheep. They're going to translate it to pig and swine because those people knew what pigs were. but they didn't know what sheep were. And so rather than saying, okay, we're going to say, we're going to write the word that's there, the lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world, and then we're going to explain to them what a lamb is, and we're going to show them a picture of it. They said, no, we're just going to change it to a word they understand. Can you imagine your Bible saying the pig of God that takes away the sins of the world? And just to say that sounds dirty and irreverent. I feel like I need to hit the altar and pray just for saying it out loud. Can you imagine? But that's where a dynamic equivalence methodology gets you. No modern translation effort could claim the level of scholarship in ancient languages that the King James translators possessed. No modern translation effort implemented such rigorous standards of review and approval as the King James translation insisted upon. And the men who were involved in that process insisted on the King James is so influential that most modern translations had to at least start off very, very similarly to it. They really leaned heavily on the King James Translation and then changed little by little by little. Why? Because it was so influential. They knew if they made radical changes right out of the beginning, it would be outright rejected. They kept the changes, at least early on, very similar, but these changes still lacked the richness and beauty of the 1600s English, and we're talking about atheistic scholars who have said that the King James Bible is the most beautiful piece of writing that has ever been produced, ever, in any language. And people who deny the authority of the Bible, deny the authenticity of the Bible in many ways and still will say that the manner in which the King James Bible is written is more beautiful than anything that's ever been written before in the history of the world. And the modern translation stripped that richness, stripped that beauty, much less weakened biblical doctrines in many cases and robbed many passages of the life-changing, soul-saving power that they were meant to have. And so the revised version, which was the first product from the critical text and translated in like the 1890s or so, There's over 55,000 words changed, removed, or added to the text. And out of 800-some thousand words that the King James Bible has, 55,000, that's 7-10%. We talked about that earlier, 7-10% of the words being just different. And you can't change 7-10% of something without it being 7-10% different. And as the preacher said this many, many years ago in a sermon, and it was really profound, things that are different are not the same. I mean, weird, right? I mean, it's weird. Many versions remove entire verses from the text. Changes made to certain verses change or significantly weaken the truths and the doctrines that they promote, support. Even the New King James Version, which was at least essentially marketed as the King James Version without the archaic language, made much more significant changes to words and verses. And they really did go back to the critical text and they changed some important things in it. And it wasn't just the these and the vows. One of the main arguments made against using the King James is that the archaic words are hard to understand and there's an understandability issue. It's just hard to read. It's hard to understand. And fair, we don't speak in these vowels anymore. We don't speak with the ETH suffix on the end of everything. And when we do that, we do it ironically. This is, to me, I'm sorry, to me this is really kind of a strawman argument, right? It's like, oh, I just don't like the ETH and I don't like the F and the V and the thou and I just think that it's, I think that it's just too difficult. It's not the way we speak anymore and yet those same people would never make a serious argument that the language of Shakespeare needs to be updated. The language of Charles Dickens needs to be updated. The language of Edgar Allan Poe needs to be updated. They don't make that argument. Have you read Shakespeare? I actually do occasionally read Shakespeare. It's much more difficult to understand him than it is the King James Bible, I promise you. And nobody's making a sincere argument, oh, well, Shakespeare, we should just update all the language and take out all the archaic language and just change it. Well, it's poetry and it wouldn't rhyme anymore, guys. And you lose, as you understand, you lose a lot of the richness and the beauty and the appeal of Shakespeare if you modernized all of his language. People wouldn't care anymore, right? Every time you've seen someone do a modern take on a Shakespearean story, it's been terrible, right? Pretty much. You know, Romeo and Juliet set in gangland Chicago. Give me a break. The same people will make the argument that, oh, with King James, I just, I hate the these and the vowels, and I just, I don't like them, and I can't understand them. We can learn to understand them. You really can, I mean, and I think it's much safer and much smarter for us, rather than to change the Scriptures, it's much safer for us to just learn how to understand them, learn how to explain them. I think that it actually challenges us to get in there and really have to study things out. That's not a way I would say things. What do they mean by that? What does that mean? King James is actually very readable and understandable and it's been tested and proven. It was a few years ago, they did that and they compared the readability level, reading level of different Bibles. The King James actually came in as one of the most attainable reading levels of all Bibles that were available at the time. In spite of, in spite of the archaic language, in spite of the these and the thous and the ETH suffix and all that stuff that we hear complaints about. It's not as hard to read as some would make it out to sound like. It really becomes, again, I believe, a straw man argument. Some see King James position as unscholarly and simplistic, and it really comes out of the textual criticism movement that led to the critical text even being produced. Those who say, well, you know, there's no way that something man was involved in could be perfect. And there's always room for improvement. And those all sound like, all their arguments sound like really logical arguments. and completely devoid of faith in God's power, faith in God's promises that He could work in different times and places to produce something that was good and right and in need of no improvement, no re-evaluation. Because when we honestly evaluate the scholarship of the scholarly level of the translation of the different versions out there, there's no denying that there was far higher degree of scholarship put into the King James translation than any other translation that's out there. The critical text translators couldn't hold a candle to the King James translators. They were not worthy to undo their shoelaces. to paraphrase a biblical expression. And so those who make that argument haven't even really looked into it, or if they are, they're ignoring the obvious truth of it, which is that the scholarship in the King James translation was far superior to anything that had come before or since. Many don't want to be, and this is somewhat of an ad hominem, I think, attack against the King James because many don't want to be associated with some who are King James proponents because of their particular spirit and attitude and the way that they comport themselves and the way that they conduct their ministries. And I agree, there are some churches out there that really have a very negative spirit, very mean-spirited attitude and very prideful and superior attitude about themselves because of the stance they take on things like the King James Bible. and they really are combative and argumentative and will turn people off to anything associated with the Bible because that is the issue that they make the biggest issue out of. And I, again, I can understand not wanting to be associated with some of those people, but it's ad hominem to attack the scriptures itself because of the people who promote it. And that's one of the maybe more prevalent issues with with being a King James only believer. Churches that have moved away from, and this seems to be the pattern, and so this is an observation. My observation is that churches, when churches begin to move away from being a King James believing church, a King James only church, they're signaling more than just a move away from the King James. They are signaling a move away from traditional and conservative and fundamental Christianity, fundamental Bible doctrine, they're signaling their move towards differently held beliefs from what they had been associated with, and they move to other versions of Scripture. that are weaker in some ways and have weakened certain doctrines in order to justify a position. Again, that's just an observation of what I've seen. That's anecdote. But very often that is one of the first moves away from sound doctrine is to move away from the King James Bible entirely to move to a more modern version and to make some scholarly excuse for it. And I just close by saying this, in our church, our belief is in the supremacy of the King James Bible for English-speaking people. This is the Bible we're going to use. This is the Bible we're going to teach from. This is the Bible we're going to preach from. This is the Bible we're going to study. This is the Bible we're going to read in private. I don't even own for study, and I am not criticizing you. If you do, I'm just saying for me, I don't even own a study Bible that is a modern perversion. I don't. I've done some comparisons, and you can do those things online. I can do that with an online program. I don't have to own a hard copy of a modern perversion. I don't have to, and I don't. I don't read anything other than the Bible I preach from. And I have that belief in the supremacy of the King James as not just a preference, but as a conviction. And we can I believe we can, and I truly believe we can be firm in that conviction and still reach the modern world for Christ. And it's been done for 400 years already, and the world's been modernizing all around it, and it still works. And no other Bible has the track record of saving souls and changing lives than the King James Bible has, and so there's no reason. It's not broken. So there's no reason to fix it. And we're going to stick by it here. Let's pray. Thank you for your attention to these things over the last couple of weeks. I know it's a little bit different than what we normally do. It felt like it was something that many had been wanting to learn more about, and so we wanted to take a few weeks here and do this. So let's take a time here to pray and respond here. If the Lord speaks your heart here tonight in any way at all, anything you need to pray about, we have time here to pray and respond to the Lord and open our hearts to Him. So the piano's going to play here in just a moment, and as it does, respond as you