All right, we'll be continuing forward here in third message here in a series started recently on the Word of God. And it's kind of interesting, one great preacher of the past said that the sword needs no defense, right? But there are some truths in the Word of God. The Word of God is our defense, say that. And so most of the Word of God is not claiming it's own inerrancy, it's own infallibility, it's own inspiration. We do have truths like that found throughout the Word of God, though, and we're looking at those and hoping just to build our faith and our confidence in the Word of God and the Bible that we hold in our hands here tonight. And so we've been looking at some things that are a little bit more on the technical and practical side and the processes by which we have a Bible today. I'm going to talk about in a moment the sheer scope and the sheer magnitude of how the Bible came together, how we received the Bible, and how it's come to be in our hands tonight. It really is quite an impressive work that can only be attributed to the Lord's guidance, the Lord's providence all along the way. But we've been looking here for a couple of weeks at some truths like this and some important passages of scripture on this topic. And we'll look in 1 Peter tonight in chapter 1, and you can find that here. We'll read it in just a moment, 1 Peter 1. But I believe that the Bible is God's Word. And the Bible tells us that in 2 Peter, that's where we looked last week, that they came forth not by the will of man, but that holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. The product is not of, it is not the product of the will and the effort of man. Again, the sheer magnitude of all that came to pass to bring the Bible together and bring it forward to us today could not possibly be the effort and the will of man. The Bible is God's word and God has had his hand in every step of the process. And that's really what we're investigating here in these messages. talking about the verbal and plenary inspiration of scriptures and that the Lord spoke every word and that every word was spoken by God and that it's kind of both sides of that. It says all scripture is given by inspiration of God. And because all scripture is given by inspiration of God, The corollary to that is that all scripture is then profitable for doctrine, for proof, for correction and for instruction and righteousness. We believe in the inerrancy and the infallibility of scripture that the Word of God is not going to lead one into error and it contains no error, no untruth in it. But not only that, it's not like taking a spelling test and getting 100% on it. Anybody can do that if they study hard enough, but that the Bible is infallible also. Not that it only does not contain error, but that the word of God is infallible. And it is not possible that the scriptures would lead us into error and that which would be displeasing to God. And it's essential, what we believe about the Bible is essential because our beliefs about the Bible, those beliefs determine the degree to which it is authoritative in our lives, authoritative in our homes, authoritative in the church. And we're going to say very clearly that the Bible is the authority of this church. And if we're going to say that, that must mean that we have utmost confidence in the Bible that we have and that we use and that we preach from and that we teach from. And if we don't have the utmost confidence in that foundation of the word of God, then we can't say that it is our authority. It leaves room for subjectivity. It leaves room for opinion. It leaves room for us to make up our own mind about things in important areas of faith and of practice. And so it's of utmost importance that we believe the Bible that we have in our hands tonight is authoritative. It is the very word of God. It is inspired and preserved for us today. And so tonight we'll be delving into some more of those practical and technical aspects related to this process of how we received the Bible, how we have a Bible in our hands tonight. And I'll try to explain all of this terminology. Again, some of this is going to be using some more technical terms, but I'm gonna try to keep it simplified here for us tonight. I know some of this will be some of you will be the first time you've heard some of these terms and I don't want to be confusing tonight, but I do want to explain this process here for us. We understand that ultimately God has been true to his word and gracious to mankind by divinely orchestrating and guiding each step of the process of delivering the scriptures to mankind. We talked about inspiration that God spoke the word to prophets and the prophets spoke those words and wrote those words down to be used and preached and taught, but then to be preserved and carried forward, not just to the generation in which they spoke them, but to every generation. We were having a couple of us having a conversation about the book of Jeremiah before service tonight. And I was thinking about that. I've been reading Jeremiah. We were talking about what a good book it is and what the Lord says to Jeremiah in the very first chapter in his calling, he says, um, before I formed you in the belly, I knew you. And I, and that's a wonderful, wonderful pro-life message for us, right? That God knew Jeremiah and planned for Jeremiah's life to exist before he was even conceived. And it's very clear when it says that, but beyond that, it goes on to say that he ordained him to be a prophet to the nations. Now, Jeremiah lived Jeremiah lived in biblical days, Old Testament biblical days, right at the, in the 600s BC. right around that timeframe, right when Jerusalem was falling to the Babylonians. He lived in the late 1600s. I guess you would call it the late 1600s since time counted backwards at that point, right? So the late 1600s, around 606 BC when Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians. And he lived in that time. Of course, we understand the technology didn't exist for him to be able to speak to a worldwide audience in his lifetime. He didn't have the ability to travel that far. He didn't have the ability to communicate that quickly. He didn't have the ability to replicate, propagate the prophecy that God had given to him. He would have had to have hired all the scribes available to copy out that message and then carry it forward as fast as he ever could. It would have been virtually impossible for Jeremiah in his lifetime to be a prophet of the nations. How was he a prophet of the nations? through the word of God. Through the enduring word of God, he's a prophet of the nations. That the prophecy that God gave to Jeremiah has existed since the time it was inspired by the Holy Spirit and penned down and written down, but then sent forward around the world over and over and over and over again through the holy word of God. God kept his word to Jeremiah, he's a prophet of the nations, just not in his lifetime. And God has kept his promise and been gracious to mankind and to his people by divinely orchestrating and guiding each step of the process that delivered to us the word of God in our hands today. We read in 1 Peter 1, I'll read from verse 17 to the end of the chapter. It says, and if, uh, and if you call on the father who without respective persons judgeth according to every man's work, pass the time of your sojourning here in fear for as much as you know that you were not redeemed with corruptible things as silver and gold from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers, but with the precious blood of Christ as of a lamb without blemish and without spot who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world but was manifest in these last times for you, who by him do believe in God that raised him up from the dead and gave him glory that your faith and hope might be in God, seeing you have purified your soul and obeying the truth through the spirit unto unfeigned love of the brethren, see that you love one another with a pure heart fervently, being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible by the word of God, which liveth and abideth forever. For all flesh is grass, and the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away, but the word of the Lord endureth forever, and this is the word by which the gospel is preached unto you. And so we see, of course, again, reminded, and this was from two weeks ago, we're reminded of the fact that having a Bible we can believe in, a Bible that we can trust, is absolutely essential to everything we preach and teach, down to the very gospel of our salvation. If we don't have a Bible that we can rely on and that we can put our faith in, then the gospel we preach, we can't preach it with confidence. We can't say with confidence, I know that I'm saved. I know that I'm going to heaven when I die. And I know that on the authority of the word of God, on the gospel that I believe, believed in out of the word of God. And so it was absolutely essential. But then he goes on, the verse goes on after that, that's verse 23, we're born again by the word of God. And it says, liveth and abideth forever. Then it goes on to actually verses 24 and 25, quote the book of Isaiah. and quote the book of Isaiah, but reconfirm that thought that the grass withereth and the flower falleth away, but the word of the Lord. endureth forever. The word of the Lord endures forever. And God has promised that in all ages, that the word of the Lord endures forever. And what we're talking about here tonight, going forward from the inspiration, the original deliverance of the word of God from God's mouth to man's ears is how it carried forward from that point forward. Things like preservation and canonization and translation to deliver us a Bible here in our hands tonight. And so the text speaks here of the absolute necessity of the scriptures being not only transmitted by inspiration, but also being preserved and propagated and proliferated around the world and from generation to generation. Again, I've alluded to this here a couple of times, but this is the magnitude of the task of compiling the Word of God and producing the Word of God. Understand that the Bible was written over a period of about 1600 years, that from about 1500 BC, BC 1500 to 100 AD, the Word of God was being produced. The Old Testament was being written really from about 1500 BC to about 400 BC when We have about 400 years of silence between the closing out of the Old Testament with Malachi to the arrival of John the Baptist coming on the scene, making straight the way of the Lord, right? Proclaiming the way of the Lord, making his path straight. The ministry and the revelation of the Son of God in the New Testament, New Testament was written after Christ's ascension from about 30 AD to about 100 AD. And the books of the Bible, meaning that the books of the Bible finished, all of the scripture was written over 2,000 years ago. Between 3,500 and 2,000 years ago, the newest of scriptures is 2,000 years old, nearly. There's 40 plus different human writers, human prophets involved in the process, let's say 40 plus. The human authorship of some books is a little bit unclear, but we believe it's about 40 or so that were involved in the process of writing the 66 books of the Bible. The books of the Bible were originally written in three languages, Hebrew, Aramaic, and a common form of Greek called Koine Greek, but the kind of Greek that was spoken by the common person in the first century, which is an important aspect to understand. It was not written for those who had the highest education, the purest knowledge of Greek. It was the common language. It was for the common tongue. It was written over a span of thousands of square miles. Obviously, much of the scripture was written in and around what we call the Holy Land, but also other parts of the Middle East, Northern Africa, Asia Minor, which is modern day Turkey, Central Asia, over into modern countries of Iraq and Iran. Even somewhat on the European continent, some of the books of the New Testament written from cities in Greece and Macedonia to other places, but written over a span of thousands of square miles. written in various literary styles and genres. The Bible is not just a book all in one style, but yet it's written in multiple, really a compendium of different styles, historical, biographical, poetical, prophetical. Some of it even, right, is correspondence, both official and personal correspondence between the writers and churches and individuals. We see also just distinct personalities of the human prophets evident in the writings that different writers of the scriptures had different styles and was able to use and work through the personalities and characteristics of the prophets he was using as he conveyed the scriptures to mankind and through them. And yet all of this being true, the Bible has amazing harmony. The Bible has amazing cohesion. The Bible has one message, the redemption of mankind. 1600 year period and 40 plus different writers and three different languages and all of these different factors that all come together. And you say, well, all of that comes together. It's impossible that this book would be in agreement and would have cohesion and would have accord, would have one central message and one central theme. And yet it does. Why? Because it's not the work of man. It came not by the will of man. Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. that all scripture is given by inspiration of God. And God is not many, God is one. And so as God delivered his word and chose by this method of human divine inspiration to deliver his word, it was one God delivering his message through many different people in many different places in many different circumstances to bring together one volume of scriptures ultimately that contained the message of man's redemption back to God. This harmony and this cohesion is a result of the divine inspiration of the Holy Ghost. As I've mentioned, 2 Timothy 3.16, 2 Peter 1, verse 21. And we'll focus on three additional aspects of the Lord's divine intervention, the Lord's divine superintendence of the scriptures down to the ages. versus that of preservation, the divine preservation by which is the process by which the written word of God was protected and sustained through the process of time and distance and language barriers and even the attempts to attack it and eradicate it and destroy it. I mean many times and places down through history where the Word of God has been outlawed. There are places right now in the world where the Word of God is outlawed and there have been powerful governments and authoritarian governments and authoritarian religions that have tried to stamp out the Word of God in the hands of the average person. And in times where it was much harder to own and to possess and to purchase and to reproduce the Word of God and yet The Lord has supernaturally preserved His Word for us through all of those barriers and attempts to eradicate it. It's the Word of God. The Bible is eternal. And I quoted from Psalms 119.89 last week, and I will again forever, O Lord, Thy Word is settled in heaven. And that's a wonderful verse for us to understand that the Word of God is eternal. The Word of God has always existed. The Word of God was written before we were and before this world was. Forever O Lord, thy word is settled in heaven. Matthew 24. And I only wrote down the, sorry, I only wrote down the thing. I'm going to look it up. Matthew 24, 35 says, And I like this promise also because the promise does not only apply to the Word of God being settled in heaven, but also being settled on earth. You know, if the word of God was only, if God only promised to preserve his word eternally in the heavens, that does us no good. It doesn't do us any good if God's word is only abiding in heaven, abiding in eternity. That doesn't do us any good. It only does us good if we have the word of God on this earth. If the word of God abides on this earth in our hands, where man can access it, where man can read it, where man can hear the message of the gospel from it. God has promised to preserve his word on the earth as well. Psalms 119 is, of course, a chapter that is entirely focused on the word of God itself. Verse 160 of Psalms 119, he says, thy word is true from the beginning and every one of thy righteous judgments endureth forever. What a wonderful promise that is to us that we can trust the word of God and that the truths of God's word endure forever and the word of God itself will endure forever. But the doctrine of preservation, the doctrine that God has preserved His scriptures for us is, of course, again, a matter of our faith. It's largely a matter of our faith that we believe that God and His goodness, that we believe God and His grace and His mercy, that God and His promise to make salvation available to him that hath ears, let him hear. If that's going to be the case, if man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God, if we are born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible by the word of God, which liveth and abideth forever, if God is going to hold that as the standard of salvation, then God, who is a good God, who is a God that does not lie, who is a God who, is not unjust, is going to see to it that we have the availability of that word of God to be born again by. A good God would not say, the only way you can get saved is if you hear my word and believe it, but I'm not going to give you my word. That's not a good God. That's not a righteous standard. And so largely our belief that God has preserved his scriptures, our belief in that, is based on our belief in God's goodness. It is... kind of absurd to think that God could and that God would supernaturally deliver his word by divine inspiration. We believe that. If you believe that God spoke his words to the prophets and the prophets wrote those words down to be recorded as scripture, if we believe that God inspired scripture, then it would be absurd to believe that God had no plan to preserve and protect that scripture after it was delivered. That God had no part in ensuring and superintending the process. And humans were involved in the whole thing. Humans were involved in the inspiration side of it. God inspired human prophets. They were sinners. We know they were, right? Pick any one of them and you'll find evidence in the Word of God of them being sinners. Don't we have evidence that Moses was a sinner? Don't we have evidence that Peter was a sinner? Like from the narrative about him? Like don't we have evidence that these were sinful people that God was inspiring to do? So we say, well, God could only work through them. Well, don't you think that God could also work through and put in place and prepare and raise up people who are going to ensure the rest of the process? To say that that's impossible is to say that God was not able to. And so it's kind of patently ridiculous to think that God would supernaturally deliver his word by divine inspiration, but have no intent and no plan to preserve his word for future generations. It's no more and it's really no less of a powerful work of God to supernaturally preserve the scriptures. And there's ample physical evidence. There's well-documented processes by which manuscripts were copied. But ultimately, we're going to talk about some of that maybe next week. But ultimately, it comes down to a matter of our faith, a matter of our belief that God did because God is good. Because God wanted us to have his word, God made sure that we would have his word. That's the kind of faith that we have and that we have to have if we're going to believe that God preserved his word. For every evidence that I could throw out and different ones who've studied that could throw out, there's evidence against that, maybe so-called anyway. There's contentions against it, there's arguments against it, there's plausible reasons to disbelieve it. It comes down largely to a matter of our faith. that God did preserve his word because God could and God intended to because it is so essential to our salvation, it is so essential to our beliefs and our doctrine, our understanding of what God would have for us to do. There's this process then out from that of then canonization. And what that is, if you've never heard that term before, it is the process by which books were recognized as inspired scripture and included in the volume of scripture. And then that volume was codified and finalized. And I say very clearly that it's a process by which scripture was recognized as such, and that the word of God at that point was closed down. Now, there's a reason why there was an official process that took place, and there was a council at Carthage in 397 BC, or AD, sorry, 397 AD, because there were gnostic gospels that had come up. There were people who were writing false gospels in the name of biblical characters. You may have heard of the gospel of Philip before, maybe the gospel of Thomas, and understand something, those were written around the time that the Bible finally had to be canonized. They were writing these false gospels under the names of of apostles who had been dead for hundreds of years, and they were writing them under the names of Philip and Thomas in order to give them credence and credibility, but they were written hundreds of years after Jesus had lived and walked the earth, hundreds of years after the men in whose names they bore had laid down their lives for the cause of Jesus Christ, and they were filled with false doctrine. And churches were realizing this was kind of becoming a problem and they needed to close out and clearly identify what was scripture. And so that process took place. But I understand something that the council at Carthage, no church council decided what scripture was. They simply recognized what was scripture at those points. The Old Testament books had been recognized for a long time, again, written and compiled between the years 1500, maybe a little bit before that, and 400 BC. Hebrew tradition holds that it was Ezra the scribe, Ezra the priest that compiled the Old Testament and understand something about the Hebrew Old Testament is identical to the Old Testament that you have. The 39 books of the Old Testament that you have in your Bible is identical to the Hebrew Old Testament. There were books that were excluded from that also. You read sometimes, you read like 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings. You'll see such and such thing was recorded in the visions of the prophet Itto. And I don't know who Itto was. He sounds like he was genuinely a prophet of God. But for whatever reason, the Lord didn't need for us in the annals of history to know what prophecy Edo had to say. Plenty of prophets whose words were never written down. There were other things that were historically accurate in their content, but they had no value to the divine message of the scriptures. And so they were never recognized by anybody as scripture. And so when it came time to codify the volume of scripture, they were excluded from that. The books of the New Testament, of course, were written after the life and the ministry of Jesus Christ after his ascension, written and compiled in the first century. The books of the Bible were not chosen. Books of the New Testament were not chosen by the church council. any church council, but by a particular set of principles, the 27 books of the New Testament were recognized as inspired scripture and the kind of the decree was made so that nothing would be added from that point on. Because again, there were books that were being pseudonymously and falsely written in the name of apostles and and claiming the authority of apostles when they did not have that and they were adding into things that did not agree with the rest of scripture. And so they used a set of principles to recognize these 27 books of the New Testament, just to give them quickly and give some explanation to this. These principles essentially were that the book was written by a man of God. So it was clearly a prophet. an apostle or someone who was under the influence and had the approval of the apostles. There's a few of the New Testament books that were not written by an apostle, but we know that those prophets were under the influence of and under the supervision of apostles. Think about Luke, and we know that Luke extensively traveled and was extensively influenced by Apostle Paul, who wrote 13 books of the New Testament. We know that Mark is that John Mark who also had a relationship with Apostle Paul, but it's also believed to be the nephew of Peter. And so though they were not apostles themselves, they were ones whose writings were under the apostolic authority and they were written in the era of the apostles within the first century. Their messages were not only, the books were not only written by a man of God and a prophet, but the message was also authoritative. that it in some way claims inspiration, in some way makes a statement of the being the word of God, the word of the Lord came, something to that effect, right? Thus saith the Lord. They make clear and definitive statements that it clearly states positions and beliefs and doctrines. It does not beat around the bush. It does not leave things murky and nebulous, but has a clear message to it, an authoritative message to it. The books were chosen and recognized because they were in agreement with other scripture and that they did not contradict scripture, that they did not bring new information and new doctrine into play, but it was in agreement with scripture that was already established as true. that it was spiritually powerful, that the message of that book that was being recognized as scripture had the message of the gospel and it had the power of salvation and it had the spiritual power to affect and change hearts and lives. It wasn't just information. It wasn't just something that was interesting. It was something that a person could read and the Holy Spirit could use to transform their lives. and that they were these books that had been widely accepted and used and circulated in the church since the time of Christ and since the time of the apostles. They were not something that was held to by only a small sect or segment of Christian churches, but something that was widely accepted, widely used and had a long track record of being accepted and used by a sincere and godly Christian people in churches. And so that process was something that, yeah, man was involved in it to a degree, certainly, but it was guided by, I believe, very sound and scriptural principles. And it was not a process by which a church council was choosing what was scripture, but was, was basically setting a precedent that there was going to be no more further open revelation of the word of God was, was finished, finished in the first century and that there was going to be no further additions to that. And then there's a process of translation And we'll get deeper into this next week because this is very, very important, the process of this, but process of translation is the process by which scripture is rendered from its original language into any other language and translations of scripture have been taking place. uh, for a long time. I mean, even prior to the New Testament, um, the Old Testament had been translated, uh, into, into the common Greek and, and there've been attempts to, uh, translate scriptures, um, for a long, long, long time. But the process of translation is the process by which scripture is rendered from its original language into any other language. But God has promised to preserve His Word. I believe God has promised to preserve His Word even through, again, language barriers and through the process of translation as well. It's not to say that every translation effort has been led of the Lord, because clearly that's not the case. But that God can and God did work through those who were sincerely working to translate the scriptures accurately. Again, we'll talk about this more next week, but translation efforts have taken really one of two main approaches, and again, I'm gonna use some kind of technical terms here and explain them to you, but one of those is dynamic equivalence, in which translators attempt to translate the concept and the meaning of words rather than what the words actually say. The issue with that and the danger in that is that it becomes very subjective. I'm trying to infer meaning and write that down. They said something a certain way and we're going to say, well, what they mean by that is this. Well, that leaves it up to me to decide what they mean by that. We have arguments right now in the Supreme Court about a document that was written 240 years ago. 250 years ago, right? We have an argument about that 250 years ago. You think if we leave it up to subjective terms like that, that we'd have an argument about something that was finished being written almost 2000 years ago? Yeah, I think so. I think so. And so there's a danger in that, right? It opens up to, opened up to subjectivity and personal biases and preconceived notions. And then there's an approach called formal equivalence, which is also called verbal equivalence, which is the process by which words and forms are rendered as closely as possible to the original word used. And then from that, we study and we try to understand what is being said by God in our explanations. Dynamic equivalence seeks to eliminate any words that have unclear, ambiguous meanings, but this has often led to outright changes in scripture. Again, there's a lot of proof to this that we'll try to bring the receipts for here in the next couple of weeks, but it's led to a lot of changes in scripture. because of that, but formal equivalence translates to what the scripture says and then that gives the reader the opportunity to read what's there and then to study and to seek the guidance and the illumination of the Holy Spirit to understand what scripture is saying rather than putting God's words through man's lens and and putting our own biases, our own opinions into the word of God. We just simply, the word of God was simply rendered as closely as possible. And then it gives God an opportunity to let us read his word through his lens. And so the Lord can guide in that also. And I understand something about this. Man, man, human instrumentality has been involved in every step of this process. Yeah, men are sinners and men are flawed and failing. And so there's obviously room for error in all of that process potentially. And that's why, you know, why there've been safeguards put into place at different in processes that have been put in place at different steps along the way. And we will talk about that as we get into this, but there've been safeguards put into place in how manuscripts were copied and how seriously that was taken and what the rules were for when a manuscript was to be used and copied or to be destroyed for the errors that were in it. and process put into place to safeguard and check and check and double check and review the work of translation. And some of our modern versions followed the most stringent highest of standards and others did not. And so, yes, man is involved in all this process, but God has promised to preserve his word through all of that. And there have been faithful and sincere efforts made to render God's Word perfectly for us, preserve God's Word perfectly for us to this very day. And I believe that we'll get deeper into this as we go forward in the next week or so. But I know we use some jargon here tonight and some technical terms. But it really is an interesting and unique study and something that we're often not exposed to. But the Word of God, if it's that essential to our beliefs, to our faith, to the very gospel that we believe, then we have to believe that God worked in supernatural ways through every step of the process.