Answers In Genesis - Sunday School - Week 5

Good morning. How's everybody doing? Doing good. All right.

Well, let's go ahead and pray. It's the Lord's Day, and the Lord's Day is a Special day, right? It's like getting to go to Disneyland once a week. Right, get together with God's people.

Talk about eternal things. Let's go ahead and pray. Lord, we thank you so much for your wisdom and just giving us one day a week where we can set aside all of our other concerns and labors and just give ourselves to you and your people. we thank you, Lord, for your word.

We ask God that you help us to understand our topic this morning that we be led of Your Spirit. Thank you for each of these individuals that just want to grow in you and grow in understanding your word and how to communicate it. Lord, we'd ask that you'd help us in our circles of influence just to be able to have an impact. And And open up our mouths for the gospel, to be willing to give an answer to those that ask and Lord, we're just, so just blessed to be here and we ask that you would, just be pleased and And enjoyed in Christ's name we pray.

Amen. All right. I hope you guys had a, a great week in the Lord. this last week, I was, studying.

At a restaurant, as I like to do, I, I'm the type of person where I, I can't, it's hard for me to be in the cave for too long in the office with just absolute quiet, no windows. I do a lot better if there's a constant noise of people around me, then I'm not tempted to take a nap. I don't know if any of you guys struggle with that, but if I'm all by myself in my office, it'd be really easy to say, yeah, I'll take a short nap. If I'm out in a public place, it's socially inappropriate for me to lay down.

In my booth at the table, so I'd stay awake and do work. so anyway, I'm at this restaurant and, and a guy, asked me, So what, what do you, what are you studying? What are you preparing for? And I happen to be preparing for elders meeting.

I said, well, I'm preparing for a board meeting at my church. And end up just getting into a conversation with the guy and And it's just amazing. how many people have a rudimentary knowledge of Christianity, but then when you begin to just ask some basic questions about, oh really, why do you believe that? How many people just really don't have much foundation for what they believe?

This guy had grown up, was in his own explanation, was forced to go to church. believed that, believed in God, but he's got his own way to God and, and the Bible is basically just made by man. Yeah, how do that? And it just, just a simple question like that.

He wasn't sure how to explain how he knew that the Bible was only for men. absolutely convinced that, that Noah's flood is just nonsense. I'm just asking him some real basic questions. And And, I, I found that when you just ask questions and, and you just are willing to listen, play with people, and just try to share your insights, a lot of people are actually very open, even in our culture to talking about spiritual matters.

And, And I found that more, the more and more I talk to people, one of the root issues in our, in our country is ignorance. is we no longer live in a culture where people are hearing and being taught anything about spiritual things in the public school. They're not watching TV and getting any of this. They're not watching sports and getting any of this.

And so, if they don't go to church, if they haven't raised in the church, if they don't ever read the Bible, most people just have the basic things that we're learning here at Cornerstone. Most people have never been exposed to. so I just want to challenge you, as we look, as we're talking about some of the things we're talking about in this class this morning, these things are great for our own faith, but these are things to be shared. people just frankly don't know.

And so, one of the goals that I have for myself this year is that everybody that is within my sphere of influence will have heard the gospel. Anybody that knows Mike Berry personally. that they will have heard a basic presentation of the gospel. Could be that they rejected outright.

The guy I was talking to this week, he, he wanted to do a lot of the talking. I kept trying to get to the gospel and he kept had his own little agenda on things. So I just asked him questions and, and tried to, if he asked me any questions, I tried to answer them. So, it's not like we gotta, we gotta press and push.

But if you've got an opportunity to get to talk to people about Jesus Christ's death for, for their sins, that might be something just to think about. the people that are in your life, have they been exposed to the gospel? Maybe I've told you the story already, but, there's a guy, a Muslim man, or he, a former Muslim in Indonesia. That was visiting a missionary on a weekly basis.

He knew this guy was a Christian missionary. And every week, he was waiting for this Christian to share the message of Christianity with him. He was hungry, he wanted to hear it. And every week, the Christian missionary just was a nice guy and would give him dinner and was trying to develop a relationship with them.

And every week, the Muslim would go home like, why won't this guy talk to me about his faith? And then after a while, the Muslim, he started stealing books from the Christian missionary behind his back. He would take books off of the shelf, go home and read it, come back and sneak it back onto the shelf. Finally, the Muslim ran into somebody else who shared the gospel with him.

He received Christ as a savior and then went back to the Christian missionary and said, Why have you never shared the gospel with me? Do you realize I've been stealing books from you for about a year? And the missionary said to him, I've been trying to develop a friendship with you to earn the right to share the gospel with you. And the to which the Muslim man responded, I've been ready to receive Christ for probably 6 months if you just shared it with me.

And we just, you never know what the Lord is doing. there are people in your life right now that the Lord has been preparing and maybe they're, they're right on the brink, right? They're ready to hear the gospel and respond to it. We know Jesus told us the fields are white with harvest, we just need to Open up our mouths and give people an opportunity, right?

So let's be praying for each other, let's challenge each other. this morning, we're gonna be challenging each other with, with the Bible and whether what we have in the Bible has been preserved for us today. So we're gonna try to answer this question. Has the Bible been irreparably corrupted?

This is a very common, Accusation, if you're out, if you're out sharing the gospel with very many people, sooner or later, someone's gonna say, well, there's all kinds of mistakes in the Bible. If you talk to a Mormon friend, they're gonna say, well, we've got the new revelation of the Book of Mormon. we received the Bible insofar as it's been translated properly, but quite frankly, it's been corrupted. You talk to Jehovah Witness, they're gonna say the same thing.

You talk to a Muslim, they're gonna say the same thing. The Bible has been corrupted. And so we're gonna try to answer that question this morning. so we're gonna finish talking about God preserves His word next week.

We're gonna talk about God, God's word being complete in the New Testament canon. And so let's, we're gonna jump right in. Last week, we introduced Some ideas. we started with Isaiah 40:8.

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever. if, if, even if we can demonstrate that the Bible is the word of God in the original manuscripts, and if we can demonstrate that we have the right books and the right canon, We still have the problem of a time gap between when these books were written and how they've been transferred to us today. Theoretically, theoretically, we could have only 50% of the right material in our Bibles, right? It could be that the Old Testament prophets, the New Testament apostles and prophets wrote down their writings and everything they wrote was from God.

But then over time, some of it's been taken out, new materials been put in. And we are here 2000 years after Christ, and maybe only a certain percentage of what we actually have in the Bible is trustworthy and preserved for us. that's the basic thing that we want to address. Have the words of scripture been adequately preserved for us?

Today, it's a huge question. And, you can turn on the television, you'll find shows that will deal with this stuff. This is the idea that a lot of people have in their minds when they talk about the transmission of scripture is they have the telephone game, right? Did you guys ever play the telephone game growing up?

Anybody not play the telephone game? OK. So you're, you put everybody in a circle and one person whispers a phrase or something, just banana, it goes all the way around and you find out what crazy thing has happened by the end. so, there's all kinds of interesting things that can happen as you play the telephone game.

And that's what people's concept is. And, a lot of times when they think of the scriptures. it's, they think that Paul wrote some scriptures and then that scripture was handed over to somebody else. The original was completely torn up, and then that scripture is given to the next person and that one was completely torn up and that we have no historical documents to trace back to to determine what the original was.

It's just oral transfer. And so, of course, if we're just transferring, if, if everything's normal conversation, we're just talking about how human communication rolls. If we've just been whispering this truth from one person to the next person for 2000 years, It's just logical that after 2000 years of whispering the truth to the next generation, That we would just be, it would be completely corrupted out by today, right? If it's, if, if it's all just the telephone game.

and, and you can actually use this when you're talking to people. One of the things I, I've, I've been learning more recently, I wish I'd have known this when I was younger. is when people are making accusations against the Bible or against something in the faith, don't immediately feel like you gotta jump out and, and defend what they're attacking. Try to explain back to them what they're saying and, and at least for the sake of argument, embrace their position momentarily.

So if someone says, yeah, there's, we can't really believe the Bible., it's been, we know it's been corrupted. It's just, who knows what was originally said, if it's even in the Bible anymore. Oh yeah, I've heard that. A lot of people have that same opinion, Joe.

no offense, Joe., are, are you talking about like kinda like the telephone game? one person tells a phrase to another person, it goes around the circle by the end, you get to some wacky phrases. Is that what you're talking about? That's exactly what I'm talking about.

You just embrace their position. And try to repeat back to them what you think they're saying, so at least they know you understand what the objection is, right? But now you're going to show them that the telephone game just completely doesn't work. That's what most people have in mind when they think that there's a problem with transmission.

And so what we're going to try to demonstrate is that's just, that doesn't really work. The reason it doesn't work is because we're not just going back to the last generation. Somebody shared the message with me and now I can only go back to them. We can go back to the manuscripts when, when, what a lot of people don't realize is when, when fresh translations of the Bible are made, they're not just going back to the previous edition.

They're going back hundreds of years to manuscripts and, and sometimes just some basic explanation of all the manuscripts that are available to us in creating new translations is helpful for, for people. Let me give you, first developed this doctrine, what we're going to call the preservation of Scripture from the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith. And this is a doctrine that I would encourage you. It should be in your list of doctrines.

As we talk about bibliology, there is inerrancy, there's sufficiency of scripture, there's the development of the canon, so on and so forth. But the doctrine of preservation should be right up there in your list of, of doctrines. We talked about the doctrine in the Bible. Here's what, how the Baptist Confession of faith puts it.

The Old Testament in Hebrew, which was the native language of the people of God of old and the New Testament in Greek, which at the time of writing, it was the most generally known to the nations being immediately inspired by God. And by his singular care and providence kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentic so as in all controversies of religion, the church is finally to appeal to them. So there's several different doctrines here that are established in this part of the confession of faith.

you have inspiration immediately inspired by God.

This means that God breathed out through the original authors onto the original documents, the autographer. It's immediately inspired by God. and by his singular care and providence has kept in all ages. This is a doctrine that I don't know has been as well established in the minds of a lot of believers.

Just the doctrine of God's providence over the scriptures throughout the ages, and that's what we're gonna develop today. are therefore authentic. So in controversy, so on, we can appeal to them that the Bible as it's been preserved is authoritative and sufficient for the church today. Raise your hand if you have a copy of the 1689 confession of faith.

Excellent. If you don't get one. You get them for free online, but you can also order them, for very cheaply on something like Amazon. this is an excellent historical confession of faith, and I recommend that every believer have, have various confessions of faith because what you have is some of the, some of the greatest pastors in history getting together and praying and trying to in a concise way, put together what the church believes.

And, and so confessions of faith are just excellent resources for studying theology, knowing what we believe, and so on and so forth. Westminster Confession of Faith, I encourage you to read through a cornerstone's confession of faith. it's just a good practice to read through these things. so here's what we're gonna do.

We're gonna develop the doctrine of the preservation of Scripture, and here's what we say this doctrine is. The doctrine of the preservation of Scripture provides the theological construct for answering all questions about the transmission and translation of the scriptures. It's the theological construct. It's important for Christians to have in their minds, what it is they believe as they're trying to answer a question or attack on scripture, right?

If you don't have in your own mind what you believe about something, then you can approach your answer from the wrong vantage point. Does that make sense? I'm gonna try to develop, you can have a lot of the right facts to present to somebody. but we wanna make sure that we have as Christians the right theology in our heads.

That doesn't mean you're always gonna share that theology with every person. Some things are meant to be in the mind of the believer in the backdrop as you're sharing. Some truths are just in the Christian community. These are, this is our basis for sharing, and then some things do get shared with the unbeliever, all right?

like, for instance, like we know in our minds, in our biblical epistemology that Satan has taken captive people in the world to do his will, right? They've been taken captive to do his will, and we're waiting for the Lord to grant them repentance. But you don't necessarily just walk up to every unbeliever and say, you've been taken captive by the devil to do his will. That's information for us, right?

That's not necessarily to share with them. It's just, it gives us compassion as we're sharing the gospel. And so that's the right use of that doctrine. So there's, there's things that we're gonna be talking about here that are for us and some things are for the unbeliever.

and so we're gonna divide this up into three sections, God's determination to preserve His word, our duty, and, to preserve God's word, and then God's our directive from God. So let's first of all hit God's determination to preserve His word. And this is, this is vital for us to recognize that, The doctrine that God has and will adequately protect his written word. We see this in various passages till heaven and earth pass away, one jar or one tittle will by no means pass away from the law till all is fulfilled.

Psalm 119, forever, oh Lord, your word is settled in heaven. So God has determined. to protect his word. This is just something that he is going to do.

And so regardless of the other questions that come up later on what is our responsibility, God has bound himself to preserve his word and so we believe that by faith. one of my, former professors at the master seminary has, had this to say, Doctor William Barrick, Psalm 11989 is the key biblical reference. God's revelatory word is fixed firmly in heaven. Regardless of what might happen to his word on earth, it is securely preserved in his mind, the primary residence of God is in heaven.

So it is only logical that the psalmist would define the presence of the eternal word as the divine abode. And so, let's say theoretically, evil people were able to gather up every single copy of scripture and burn them all. God's word would still exist because it is settled forever. In heaven.

All right? So that's, that's part of our doctrine. And we see various passages that developed this idea from the Psalms, the one that we read from Isaiah earlier, that the flower may fade, right? but the word of the Lord stands forever.

Incorruptible and so on. There's lots of different passages that would develop the same idea. Schaeffer says about preservation, the preservation of the scriptures, like the divine care over the writing of them and over the formation of them into the canon is neither accidental, incidental, nor fortuitous. It is the fulfillment of the divine promise.

So as we're developing the doctrine of preservation, we see it first as a promise that God has bound Himself to. He has promised to preserve. His word. So we believe by faith that God will fulfill His promise.

But secondly, there's our duty. God has promised to preserve his, his word, but he has also given a duty to the church. And let's talk about that duty. the, so the doctrine that God has and will adequately protect his written word, and yet as people have a corporate responsibility to preserve, protect, and proclaim, say it again, preserve, protect and proclaim His word amid attacks from the devil and the world.

we see this in like places like in Proverbs and Revelation, where it says, do not add to or take away from the word of God. In Jeremiah 36:2, Jeremiah is commanded to take a scroll of the book and write it on all the words that I have spoken to you against Israel and so on and so forth. So, Jeremiah was commanded to write down these words, so he had a duty to obey that. Theoretically, Jeremiah could have said, I'm not gonna do that.

And so, he would have not fulfilled his duty to write down the words of God. We're all called to not add to or take away from God's word. But the fact that we are commanded, given these commands implies something. If I'm told not to add to God's word, what does that imply?

That it Yeah, it implies that theoretically I could add to God's word. And if I'm told not to take away from God's word, theoretically, the command is given to me because theoretically I could take away from God's word. This is what Doctor Brick has to say about that. God is the chief operative in the preserving his word and preserving his word unchanged, in heaven.

On earth, however, God's people are responsible for preserving and transmitting the scriptures. A series of repeated prohibitions in Scripture defines accountability for preservation on earth. It should be obvious to the reader that God does not prohibit something that is impossible for an individual to do. When he prohibits lying, it is because an individual is capable of lying.

If no one could tell a lie, God would not need to prohibit lying. That God prohibits the addition to and subtraction from His word is testimony to the fact that his people can and at times do add to his written word or subtract from it. This is a very important aspect of the doctrine of preservation. God has determined to preserve his word.

He's promised to do it, but then he gives a duty to the church. He says, do not add to or take away, and that implies something that we could add to or take away from his word. This is very similar to a lot of other doctrines that we see in scripture. There's the divine prerogative, there's God's sovereignty, and there's human responsibility.

These are two truths that the Bible is very comfortable juxtaposing over and over and over again throughout the Bible and doesn't even seem to be concerned or bothered by putting them right next to each other. The Bible says God's totally in control of all things. Humans are responsible for their actions, God will hold them accountable. And the Bible is very comfortable with both concepts and, and, and we see it in the doctrine of preservation as well.

And so we see pastors like this, do not add to, do not diminish in several different places in the Bible. How have humans added to or taken away from God's word? There are lots of ways we can go in, we can look at history and see lots of different ways that human beings. have attempted to and sometimes succeeded at adding to or taking away from God's word.

Let's give a few examples. There's malicious attempts to destroy like Jehoiaki. We're gonna talk about Jehoiakim, we, we read a little bit of him in chapter 36 Jeremiah last week. He flat out burns an entire scroll.

That was written down by Baruch, that was prophesized from Jeremiah, right? Takes it. This was the autographer, right? This was the actual scroll.

He takes it, rips it, throws it in the fire. That, is taking away from God's word. You have the Inquisition, and we'll talk about the Waldensians here in just a second, trying to take away God's word from, the people, especially in their own language, and, and so on and so forth. you have the The 10 various main persecutions in the 1st 4 centuries of the church, right, you have 10 main, Roman emperors, that persecuted the church and a frequent method was to try to, to get the scriptures away from people and to burn them and take them away from the church.

let's, let's talk about the Waldensians. This is a very interesting, one of my heroes in church history, 2nd or 12th and 13th century. They turned directly to the Bible, placed it in the hands of the people, they translated it into the language of the people and preached it in order that the people might hear it for salvation and discipleship. This was an offshoot, it's not like you have the early church and then you have the dark medieval period, and then you suddenly have the reformation.

a lot of people, they talk about Baptist history. They'll talk about Paul and the apostles, and then the Baptists, right? You just skip over everything else. no, there's lots of really cool, awesome stuff that's happening during this medieval period, and there are a lot of offshoots where people are starting to think and challenge, the churches, the medieval churches control over, doctrine and, and, and so you have some early solo scriptura groups.

The Waldensians are one of those groups. So they began to give the Bible out in the language of the people, and so at the time, the, the church wasn't too happy about that. they traveled as merchants to spread copies of the scriptures. So they're, they're making copies, spreading them around.

many of the Waldensians were killed and the scriptures were taken away from them. However, the Waldensians had memorized the entire Bible. Different families were responsible for different books. So when they were stripped of all their Bibles, they would come together again and recite the whole Bible.

By communal memory, they were able to write it again. this happened several times in their history. They would go off, it was very common like when persecution would come on the Waldensians. By the reason, by the way, do you guys know why they're called the Waldensians?

So their founder is a guy named Waldo, right? Yeah, that's, that was really his name, Waldo. And, and so he was like one of their founding pastors and, and so they would, when persecution would come upon them as a people, they would all go running up into the hills and all the inquisitors would go running up after them and be crying out, where's Waldo? Right?

Yeah, yeah. But it's true. His name was Waldo, and they would chase them up into the hills and frequently they would find them and burn various copies of the scriptures. but they had spread out communal memory of the Bible.

And so let's just say for the sake of speaking, let's say the berries were up in some hill and we got captured and they burned all the copy of the scriptures that we had. And they killed the berries. And so when everybody got back together, they would say, all the berries are gone, there goes first Thessalonians. Right?

Has anybody else got 1 Thessalonians memorized? Well, we've got it, and so they would get together and they would be able to recite the scriptures back to each other and get the scriptures back. Does that make sense? It's pretty, pretty amazing.

period of, of history. And so that's one of the ways that people, it was actually the church, so to speak, of the time that was, was trying to take away God's word, so to speak, at least in the language of the people. other ways, unintentional or intentional copy errors. sometimes there would be copy mistakes that just weren't intentional.

I actually, I, I don't think I sent it to this class yet. I'll remind me and I'll post it. There's an article that just came out recently in Tim Challis's, Tim Challis cites it in his blog. it's an article that challenges the accepted notion.

That early Christian scribes were not professionals. That's like the accepted dogma right now is that the early Christian scribes were just hacks. there was no real professional amongst them. There wasn't a real system, but that's being challenged by a number of textual critics, and there's an article I'll, I'll send you guys that challenges that.

But nevertheless, we do know that there were times as copies are being made where mistakes were made, right? You're looking at one copy, you're copying the next, you're going left to right, you've probably done this. All of a sudden, your eye skips a line, you skip a word, and something can enter into the copy. We're not talking about the original.

We're talking about one copy where there's a mistake. Sometimes there's intentional copy errors, however, this is a very, infamous, the Samaritan Pinatu. Anybody heard of the Samaritan Pinatuch? So what you have is you have the Pentateuch that's originally in Hebrew, right?

the Samaritans are half Jews. They did not like any emphasis on Jerusalem. Whenever they got to any emphasis on Jerusalem or something that would mitigate against Samaritan dogma, they would just change that part of the Pentateuch. And so we can always tell when there's Samaritan copies of the Pentateuch because there's key places in the Old Testament in the first five books where the Samaritans would change things.

To go along with their dogma. Does that make sense? And it's very, so we're not, so in one sense they're trying to change God's word, but in God's wisdom because there's so many other copies we can very easily recognize when we're dealing with the Samaritan Pentateuch. Does that make sense to you guys?

There's also the adulterer's Bible. You guys ever heard of that? That's just a flat out mistake in the printing. In the early version of the King James, in the seventh commandment, there's one version where they forgot to put not in the 7th commandment.

So it said, thou shalt commit adultery. And so they quickly found that error. There was only a few copies printed, so it's called the Adulterer's Bible. there's still, still copies of it that exist to this day.

So, and then there's unintentional, intentional mistranslations. sometimes. there's translations where at the time, translators did the best they could, but they just didn't know. A real famous one is Metanoia, Jerome's Latin Vulgate.

It pretty much came down for hundreds of years as do penance. And then Martin Luther and others are going back to the original manuscripts and saying, wait a second, this doesn't mean do penance, this means repent, change your mind, and that becomes a huge change in doctrine for the Reformation. So, for hundreds of years, everybody's like, OK, let's do penance. Martin Luther and others say, no, no, no, no, let's change our minds about our sin.

Let's repent. that, that becomes a big deal. You have gender neutral translations that are going on today. This is intentional.

new revised Standard Version would be one example where you have like qualifications for elders in First Timothy. It says a husband should have only one wife. Look up the new revised Standard Version. It says, it says, elders should have only one spouse.

Why do they do that? Because they wanna make sure that it's OK to have women pastors and so you say, only one spouse, and then in the footnotes it says Greek says husband of one wife. That's just an intentional, intentional translation, change of translation. the NI the European NIV is gender neutral.

They haven't done it so much in the United States because the United States Christians tend to be more conservative. And you're up there like, yeah, that's cool. We're always about 10 years behind the Europeans, right? false teaching of false prophecy.

people will come along and this is adding to scripture, right? People will just prophesy things, saying they're from the Lord, give thus says the Lord type of speech or false teaching. Tim Challis has a great, blog series that he did a couple of years ago on, false prophets. Imperfect teaching, immature teaching, and false teaching.

In this sense, probably every one of us in this room have added to or taken away from God's word at some point. I've, I've shared this in the past, but it's not uncommon at all for me to go back and look at notes of material that I taught maybe 2345 years ago, and I'm getting ready to reteach that material and I look at this and I'm like, I don't believe that anymore. What in the world was I thinking? So, like 4 years previous, I had taught one basic idea and now I'm, I'm correcting it.

So, hopefully I've come to a more correct view. So whatever I taught 4 years ago was incomplete, right? And then we each have added and taken away from God's word in some way. so, all of us need to be constantly coming to the Lord, asking God to guide us in our study of God's word, even just repenting of, of things that, maybe this is, this can be a real challenge the older we get, right?

when you're a brand new Christian and somebody walks up to you and says, this understanding that you have of the Bible is not correct. This is the proper interpretation, and you've only had the wrong understanding for like a month or two, you're like, oh, OK. But when you've had a wrong understanding of the Bible, say for 25 years, right? And you've taught it to your children, and now somebody comes up to you and they're, they're showing you the, the, the scriptures in a different way.

That takes some humility and a work of the spirit to be able to say, I've misunderstood the Bible for 25 years. That's, that's hard to swallow, right? But hopefully, as we're getting older, that we can in, in humility, admit when the Holy Spirit, we just need to understand that we're finite, God is a gracious God, and, and we're learning things over time. And hopefully, after 25 years, after 30 years, after 40 years, I'm still finding ways that I need to grow and maybe ways in which I've misunderstood the word and need to, to understand it more perfectly, just like Apollo's, right?

One of my heroes on this issue is John MacArthur., regardless of where you might stand, he used to teach a view, called incarnational sonship. and when I was at the seminary in the late 90s, after meeting with many of his Christian pastor friends, Archie Sproul, different people, he began to realize that incarnational sonship, he didn't believe was the biblical view, it was actually eternal sonship. And I was in the chapel at the seminary when he came to speak and stood before all of the seminary professors or professors and the students and said, I have taught the wrong view on, on the sonship of Christ.

I've, I've taught the incarnational sonship view.

I'm now publicly letting everybody know I'm, I'm taking the eternal sonship view. And to me, that's pretty amazing because he had debated this issue, written a book on the issue, had spoken in many different venues about incarnational sonship. And then came to the position that he was wrong. That's, to me, it's a, a pretty amazing and amazing example.

OK, so that's how different ways that we can add to or take away from God's word. Let's talk about how people preserved God's word. what, what things have, has the church done to preserve the word of God? by just humbly teaching, humble teaching that boldly corrects false prophecy.

We hear false prophecy out and, and we speak from God's written word to correct false prophecy. That's a way to preserve God's word. We preserve God's word as we mature in our teaching and learning, that we stay open to the direction of the Spirit. as we're studying, by repenting from adding to and taking away from God's word, that we're always having a change of mind.

historically, we have a lot to thank the various monasteries for. If you study, if you've taken our church history class, you realize that the monasteries were huge in preserving manuscripts, making copies of manuscripts, passing them on. Erasmus' copy of the New Testament would have been absolutely impossible without the preservation work that the monastic movement participated in. So, Erasmus goes and takes hundreds of manuscripts that were at his disposal because of the various monasteries and assembles a single collected version of, of manuscripts with all kinds of technical notes on the various documents and why he's going with certain readings, and that becomes huge for the Reformation, actually becomes huge for the Renaissance in general.

But Erasmus' new collection of the New Testament documents or his, his, edition of the New Testament is one of the, the, the most significant books, in the Renaissance Reformation period. it's, it's unfortunate, a lot of students don't hear about Erasmus' work, when they're learning about the Renaissance. also, let's see here. OK, so that's, those are, those are some of the things that we do.

To, to preserve God's word. And then we'll talk here in a little bit about just the, the blessed work of, textual criticism. This is the whole idea. That God in His providence has left us with, literally thousands of various manuscripts, but he's also gifted many men and women with the ability to comb through these manuscripts and to assemble them to help determine, the right readings.

So we'll talk about that here in just a little bit. So, number 3, so we've got God's determination to preserve His word. our duty to preserve his word, and then now there's our directive from God. What is our directive from God in light of the, Just God's determination and our duty.

As we wanna fulfill our duty in the hope of God's determination. Fulfill our duty to not add to or take away from God's word in the hope that God has already determined to preserve it. So we're not like, we're not out there wringing our fingers and just sweat on our brow, worried that somehow God's word is gonna be lost, and it's purely human effort that's going to preserve God's word. That would be a misunderstanding of the doctrine.

Neither are we just kicking back and saying, oh, it really doesn't matter what I do. God's gonna preserve his word. There's a balance. in bringing in understanding both God's providence and human responsibility in this doctrine.

And so we want to fulfill our duty to do the very best we can by the power of the Spirit, not to add to or take away from God's word, but ultimately, our ultimate hope is in God's promise. And so this is the type of thing that we see actually in the hymn A Mighty Fortress is our God. This is the type of stuff that Martin Luther was battling at the time. And so, you guys probably remember the words of the great hymn.

And though this world with devils filled to threaten to undo us, we will not fear, for God has willed his truth to triumph through us. The prince of darkness grim, we tremble not for him, his rage we can't endure, for low his doom is sure. One little word shall fell him. That word above all earthly powers, no thanks to them abideth.

No thanks to them, there's debate about what he means by that. No thanks to the devils, no thanks to the, the, the, the devil and Satan are trying to destroy his word, but yet his word abides. He could be pointing to the devil. Some people think he's pointing to the Pope and all of his people underneath is what Luther called the monkey.

So the Pope and the monkey that are out there trying to destroy God's word. no thanks to them, it abideth. The spirit and the gifts are ours, though, through Him who with us sight. The goods and kindergo this mortal life also the body they may kill.

God's truth abideth still. His kingdom is forever. They might kill us, but God's truth, His word is going to abide. They can try to burn our Bibles, they can burn us at the stake, the devil can rage, but God wins in the end.

And so, that's the The cry of Martin Luther. Let's go ahead and open up our Bibles back to Jeremiah 36. We're gonna go back to a chapter that we were looking at last week and we're gonna give A little bit of an illustration of this doctrine. From this chapter.

Are you guys hearing me OK or? OK. What? For some reason this week I feel like I have to I feel like I'm having to project.

OK, Jeremiah 36, if you guys remember. we're in the 4th year of Jehoiakim, who's the son of Josiah, and verse 1 tells us this word came to Jeremiah from the Lord. And the Lord says, take a scroll, and you're gonna write down all these things I've said to you all the way back to the days of Josiah. So, there's a lot of stuff written on the scroll.

In fact, it could be that all the prophecies up to this point that we see in the book of Jeremiah are written down. We don't know exactly. So, God speaks to Jeremiah. Jeremiah says, Bruke, come over here and write this down.

Verse 4, Baruch writes it on a scroll. And then, Jeremiah commands Bruke, he says in verse 5, I am confined. I cannot go to the house of the Lord. He's underneath some house arrest or something.

Verse 6, you go therefore and read the scroll during this, these days of fasting. Verse 19, now it came to pass in the 5th year of Jehoiakim, the son of Josiah. they proclaimed a fast before the Lord. Look down to verse 10.

Baruch read the, from the book, the words of Jeremiah in the house of the Lord, in the chamber of Jemariah, the son of Shaphan, the scribe, and so he's reading before all these people. Then in verse 11, Makah, the son of Jemariah, heard all the words of the Lord from the book. And then went down to the king's house, into the scribe's chamber, and there all the princes were sitting, and there's all these different princes. And then in verse 13, then Makaya declared to them all the words that he had heard from Baruch, read in the book.

then verse 14, therefore, all the princes sent Jehudai, the son of Nephaniah, the son of Shalamiah, so on and so forth, to Baruch, saying, Take in your hand the scroll from which you have read in the hearing of the people and come. So Baruch, the son of Neriah, took the scroll in his hand and came to them. Now, If this was just a made up story, there's just too many characters here to follow. There's just too many, Lord said to Jeremiah, who says to Baruch, who says to Makaya, who then there's the princess of Jehidah.

It's just like, let's just keep this simple. There's too many people to follow. The fact that this is, that they're giving us all these details just rings true of the history of it, right? just all the different people that are involved.

And so then Baruch comes and reads in the hearing of these princes. look down to verse 19. Then the princess said the brute, go and hide yourself, you and Jeremiah, and let no one know where you are. That's not very comforting.

But at least the princes are looking out for him. They hear these prophecies, and right away they know. This is not gonna go well for Jeremiah and Baruch. You guys better get out of town.

And so then verse 20 they went to the king. Into the court But they stored the scroll in the chamber of Elishama, the scribe, and told all the words in the hearing of the king. It's very interesting detail. So they, they have the scroll, but they don't bring the scroll with them into the king's chambers.

They just tell him, here's what the prophecy says. So the king sent Jehidah to bring the scroll, and he took it from Elisma's scribe's chamber, and Jehidah, or I'm sorry, Jehudi, read it in the hearing of the king and in the hearing of all the princes who stood beside the king. Another interesting tea tale, verse 22. Now, the king was sitting in the winter house in the 9th month with a fire burning on the earth before him.

In verse 23, it happens, and it happened when Jehuti had read 3 or 4 columns, because this is a scroll, right? 3 or 4 columns, that the king cut it with the scribe's knife, cast it into the fire, that was on the hearth until all the scroll was consumed in the fire that was on the hearth. Yet they were not afraid, nor did they tear their garments. The king nor any of his servants who heard all these words.

Implication is they should have been afraid, but they were not afraid. So now, we've got this whole section of God's word. That had been written down, that has been destroyed and theoretically lost forever, right? The king had a responsibility to preserve the word.

And he decided, not only am I not gonna try to preserve the word, I'm gonna burn it myself. I'm gonna take it out. This is, this is the autographer as far as we know, there were no photocopies. Nobody had scanned it into Google Docs.

It's burned, right? Verse 26, and the king commanded., Jeromiel, the king's son, Zariah, the son of Azel, and Shelemiah, the son of Abdiel, to seize Baruch, the scribe, and Jeremiah the prophet, but the Lord hid them. So God in His providence, we don't know if, if this means that just, the princes before had said, hey, go hide, and so the Lord hid them through his providence, or is there some miraculous thing going on here? We're not really sure.

But verse 27. Now after the king had burned the scroll, The words which Baruch had written at the instruction of Jeremiah, the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah saying, Take yet another scroll and write on it all the former words that were in the first scroll which Jehoiakim, the king of Judah, has burned. And you shall say to Jehoiakim, the king of Judah, thus says the Lord, you have burned the scroll, saying, Why have you written in it that the king of Babylon will certainly come and destroy this land and cause man and beasts to cease from here?

Therefore, thus says the Lord concerning Jehoiakim, king of Judah.

He shall have no one to sit on the throne of David, and his dead body shall be cast out to the heat of the day and the frost of the night. I will punish him, his family, and his servants for their iniquity. I will bring on them, on the inhabitants of, of Jerusalem, and the men of Judah, all the doom that I have pronounced against them. But they did not heed.

And so, and then verse 32, then Jeremiah took another scroll, gave it to Baruch, the scribe, the son of Niah, who wrote on it at the instruction of Jeremiah, all the words of the book which Jehoiakim, king of Judah, had burned in the fire, and besides, there were added to them many similar words. So, what's part of what's interesting here is Jehoiakim burns the copy of scripture. And what he gets in return is another fresh copy with added words authorized by the Lord. We cannot add to or take away from God's word, but God can authorize his own editions, and he has throughout the history of redemption.

He's authorized his own editions until we get to the canon that we have today. I don't know about you, but I frequently thought how tough it would have been to have Jeremiah's job. just imagine Jeremiah walking in to apply for this new job, prophet of Israel, and he looks at the qualifications, the qualification or the job description basically says, You're gonna go out and prophesy that Judah is going to be overrun and overtaken by Babylon as judgment from God, and you're all to submit to this divine judgment and let yourself be carried away into judgment.

And then God will eventually bring you back.

But, so his whole ministry is basically telling people judgment's coming, just get ready, and there's nothing you can do about it. That'd be a pretty fun job, right? And then when he puts his words down, the Lord says, do this. He does it.

The princes read it and they say, you guys get out of town fast. Because we know what Jehoa Kim's gonna do. But so what do we see here in this passage? We see that God's word, God is determined to preserve His word forever.

Right? God's word did not leave God's mind. He, he told Jeremiah and Baruch, they obeyed, they wrote the word down. and theoretically, the king, especially the king, should, he had a responsibility to preserve the word of God, just like all of us do.

But Jehoiakim suppressed the truth and unrighteousness, and he burned it. And yet that was of no threat to God whatsoever. Because ultimately, while we have a duty, God has promised to preserve his word and in this case, he just recites it right back to Jeremiah and gives more promises besides. You and I each have a duty to preserve God's word in our hearts.

As we're reading through the Bible, we first of all read the Bible in faith, understanding that God has preserved his word for us today. and yet we understand that we have a duty in our age. As Christians, all of us have a duty to read God's word and appropriately apply it to our own lives, but not just to us personally, we have a duty to pass it on to our children. And to pass the truth of God's word, the true teaching of God's word onto our children.

a real common question that I'll get from people, in fact, this guy, his name is Jason that I was talking to this week about the Lord. He's a real common objection. People say, I can't believe that Christianity is the only way to God because look at all the other religions out there and all these people that have never heard of Jesus. Here's what I said to him.

I said, how many religions were there when Noah and his family got off the ark? He's like, Well, I guess just one. That's right. There was one true faith with no one in his family got off the ark, and whose responsibility was it to pass on that one true faith to their children?

Well, each of those parents, right? They had a responsibility to pass on God's word, not to add or take away from. And what have human beings done is every generation either fails to give the whole word or they take away from God's word, and then you get to a place where you have literally thousands, perhaps millions of people have never had any contact or at least personally with the true God. And we are culpable for that.

That's not on God. We have a culpability to pass on the truth to the next generation. And if we choose not to pass the truth on to the next generation, And the generation after that walks headlong into ignorance and damnation, who will God hold responsible for that? Us So, what people use as an attack on God, an attack on Christianity is, is really, it's a, it's a finger pointing pointer back.

To the human race, that we consistently do what the Bible says we do. We suppress the truth and unrighteousness. We've been given the truth from God in nature and within our own constitutions. And when Noah got off the ark, they had, he had special revelation from God that everybody knew about.

But what do human beings do with both general and special revelation? They suppress it. In unrighteousness, we hide it, we burn it. We don't want to know the word of God.

So as Christians who are filled with the Holy Spirit, we have a duty in our generation, we have a duty in our generation to preserve God's word in our own hearts. We have a duty to pass it on to our children. And we have a duty to pass on the Word of God to every person within our sphere of influence. There's something that we, we, we can, there's a few things that we can be sure of.

Hollywood is not gonna pass on the word of God, right? The public school system is not going to pass on the word of God. You're just not gonna see the word of God out there being passed, passed around amongst unbelievers. So, who has that duty in this generation?

It's us, it's the church. We have the duty to pass out the word of God so that it can be preserved as it were for the next generation. and so may God give us the power to do that. I, I, I, for one, I'm very grateful to the Lord that in His wisdom, that he has preserved his word through, just thousands of manuscripts.

Next week if we have time, we'll see, what Dan wants to do, but, maybe we'll do a little bit of overview of some of the evidences dealing with all the various manuscripts that are out there and available. I just see the Lord's wisdom and not just dropping down golden plates that can be read behind a curtain with special glasses and then all of your faith is built on one guy's interpretation of these gold plates that nobody's ever seen. No, what we have is literally thousands of manuscripts where nobody could have a monopoly over God's word, right?

And people have tried to have a monopoly over God's word.

People have tried to destroy it. People have tried to change it. The Samaritan Pentateuch comes along and they try to change a little bit, but guess what? There's already hundreds of other copies of God's word out there to where we can recognize when the Samaritan Pentateuch was different.

Right? The adulterer's Bible makes a mistake. Guess what? No problem.

We've already got hundreds of other copies that show us that was a mistake. The problem, maybe I, maybe I can show you one little illustration. Yeah, this right here, we'll end on this. The problem in textual criticism is not that we have any parts of the puzzle missing.

The problem is that we have too many pieces of the puzzle. That's what we're trying to figure out as far as determining the original reading. We have all of the edges and we have every single piece in the puzzle. But over the years, from the, from the human side of things, other pieces have been added to this puzzle.

And so part of the duty of textual criticism is trying to figure out which pieces don't fit. And the blessing is, is, is that with the, just the way with the, with the manifold number of manuscripts that we have, we can determine where the pieces fit to a high degree of accuracy to arrive at the original reading. Does this make sense? so, a mistaken notion that some people have is that when we're looking at our Bibles, the textual critics have assembled, our Old and New Testaments from, a puzzle box that has a lot of missing pieces of the puzzle.

That's not true. We have every single piece of the puzzle. We just have some extra ones thrown in there that we need to determine which ones don't fit and are and get thrown out. Does that make sense?

All right. Let me see, actually, I lied. This is the last thing we'll talk about. So, what is it that we have?

On the left, we have New Testament manuscripts, we have papyri, early codices, minuscules, Byzantine lectionaries. We have all kinds of different ancient versions that we can go back and check. our translation, we have the Latin Vulgate, Latin Vulgate by Jerome, so on and so forth, and we have all the church fathers. It's been said that even if we lost every single manuscript and even the Latin Vulgate and all these other translations, that we could reassemble the whole Bible from just quotes from the early church fathers.

That's how much manuscript evidence that we have, on, on the, on the text of scripture at our disposal. There's no other ancient book that has this type of textual background. Only the Bible has this type of massive library to help assemble and check. and cross-check our resources.

It's pretty amazing the way Lord's decided to do it. All right. Any questions, comments, criticisms, or concerns, Brian? I know O The Wow.

You're kidding. Saw a pastor over here in Riverside when the Iron Curtain was up, memorized. The whole Bible? Wow.

Yeah, yeah, Brian's like a, Brian's like the strongest concordance. Yeah That's amazing. Yeah, Ellison Oh Right. Oh Wow.

Right. Yeah, so Alan's talking about the different Gaus he's discipled, How that, there'll be times well, they, they're looking for the Lord's direction through a dream or through a certain particular response from circumstance or prayer and so just challenge them on, aren't you adding to the Bible? The Bible's giving you, God's given you His word, and we need to be careful about not adding to the scriptures, and just really trying to emphasize these gals, just the sufficiency of scripture.

That's good, yeah, it's true.

A lot of times we're kinda looking for this extra. Direction when it's sitting right there in front of our faces. And if we'll just give ourselves what God has already revealed. A lot of times it's the answer is just right there.

Yeah, one of the key hallmarks of, of cults is they almost always, you, false teaching, they almost always have a, a prophet, an extra profit in their movement that says, the Bible's OK as far as it goes, but here's our prophet that gives us The new improved version. Yeah Almost all of them have. There's, I, I, I, I, I'll have to bring it out. The one of the guy, I was at a conference recently where he gave a really good summary of like real typical things that you see in false religions.

One is they minimize the doctrine of Christ. They almost always add works to the equation of salvation. They almost always have some prophet that you have to listen to, some new prophet. There's a couple of other ones.

So it's like works, prophet. Forget what the other one was. I'll see if I can find that that he had a nice mono or memory device which I've forgotten, which is ironic. Yeah, they minimize the deity of Christ.

Yeah. Yeah, totally. Oh, they always, they'll normally say that the Bible's good so far as it goes, but it's, it's been mistranslated or it's been corrupted. So there's been corruption, so that's why you need their profit, and their profit minimizes Christ and exalts works.

It's like 7:14. All right, let's go ahead and pray. We're a little bit over time. We'll be up here if you guys wanna, if you have questions or fellowship.

Lord, we thank you so much for your promise to preserve your word. well, The flower may fade. We know that your word will endure forever. And we ask Lord that at the same time that we would fulfill our duty to preserve your word as the church, to teach it rightly, to represent you rightly, to repent when we have come to see wrong views or immature views.

And we, we just pray that we be able to pass the torch on to the next generation. And that your spirit would just cause your word to continue to go out. thank you for this time together. As you just be with us as we minister our gifts to each other.

Pray for Pastor Milton as he preaches this morning. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.