51 - Inspiration

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52 - Illumination

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Well, welcome to the

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Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Systematic Theology. We're glad to have you with us.

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We welcome all of the new students who are with us for the first time. This is Lesson 51, which means you're 50 lessons late.

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In other words, you got to go back to Lesson 1. Why do I say that?

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Well, we've said this several times throughout these classes, but many, many people make a mistake when it comes to systematic theology, and they start in the middle.

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Usually, they start sometimes even at the end. Most doctrines, the two most common doctrines that people start studying systematic theology is the

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Doctrine of Salvation. They get into the Calvinism -Arminianism debate or the Doctrine of End Times, which is the last thing you should be studying, meaning like at the end of your systematic theology.

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But we should start at the beginning with the attributes of God. Now, there's another place that you could start a systematic theology.

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Actually, if you go to a seminary or Bible college, they usually will start you in what we are looking at in this class, which is the

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Doctrine of the Bible. Now, some people start there because everything that they're going to talk about afterwards is based on the

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Bible, and therefore, that's a good starting place. We chose to start with the attributes of God because I believe that all of our theology will be based on the attributes of God.

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Now, the Doctrine of the Bible is not based completely in the attributes of God, so either one is a good starting place.

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So, we are in our book number three, which we are calling

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God Speaks to the World, the Doctrine of the Bible. If you have a syllabus, you can always pick one up at our website or at our store at strivingforeternity .org.

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This is syllabus three for the systematic theology. We're doing this really as one school, and we're going to do an overview of all the theology.

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If you did one class a week right now, you'd be one full year of training.

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And so, we're going to have a lot more because we're only halfway through, but we're going to pick up speed as we go through this book, and then we're going to get into the

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Doctrine of the Church and the Doctrine of End Times, and people will probably get their eggs and tomatoes to throw at me at that point.

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So, we are in lesson number two, Inspiration.

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That is where we are in this lesson. As we go through this, we're going to talk about what it means to be inspired.

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Now, I understand. Some of you heard the term inspired, and you have a view of what that might mean.

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See, some people say, well, I wrote a song or I wrote a poem. I was inspired to write it.

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In other words, the idea being that they just felt moved.

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They had an emotional feeling to write something, put something to lyrics or to poetry or something like that, and people say,

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I felt inspired. In other words, referring to a feeling of being overwhelmed with a thought.

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That's not what we mean when we talk in inspiration, all right? So, we're going to get into that, but let us start with a key text when it comes to the

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Doctrine of Inspiration, and that is 2 Timothy 3 .16. And that says, all scripture, doesn't mean some scripture, all scripture is breathed out.

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Now, stop right there. That word breathed out, we're going to focus in a little bit because that is the very word inspiration, okay?

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Inspired by God or breathed out by God. We're going to explain why this version says breathed out in a little bit.

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All scripture is breathed out or inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for proof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.

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So, when we look at that, in that verse it says, all scripture is given by inspiration is how

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New King James translates it. And while many believers rightly defend the teaching of scripture, very few are able to explain it.

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So, this lesson is going to be designed to provide an understanding of the

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Doctrine of Inspiration. I know that there was a conference recently that they extended the conference and did a four -day conference that just focused on the

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Doctrine of Inspiration because people have such issues and questions with it and people don't really think through what does it mean.

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We recently started a series of Google Hangouts called

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Striving for Eternity Theological Discussions and we did one with an individual discussing can you lose your salvation and this individual had a confused view of this

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Doctrine of Inspiration. If you watched that, you saw that somewhere in there the individual we were discussing with said that God inspired the thoughts but not the words.

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And you're going to see that, you know, as we go through this, we're going to disagree with that. But when we look at the definition, the definition of inspiration, we look at the passage that we had, 2

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Timothy 3 .16, and the word that we saw there, remember

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I said it was breathed out? So, the word there is theos, theos is

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God, and then the Greek word for breathing or, well, it means to actually as you're having breath when you speak.

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You know how when we speak we breathe out? It's the idea of us speaking and the words coming out of us in a breath.

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And that's the idea. It's God breathed. That's literally what the word means.

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Inspiration means God breathed. It means out of his mouth, the way you and I would speak.

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When we speak, we're speaking from our mouth and we're pushing air through our mouth.

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It's a form of almost like a breath, okay? And so, in other words, the scriptures were spoken by God or God breathed.

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That's why we call the Bible God's word because God actually spoke this.

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Now, immediately you're going to go, wait a minute, Andrew. How could God have spoken this when we know who the human authors are?

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Paul, John, Peter, Moses, Samuel. I mean, we know some of the names of the authors of the

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Bible. And yet you say God breathed it out. It's God's word.

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That is the tension that I hope to be able to answer in this lesson. And that is a tension that many have.

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So, let us, as we're defining this concept of inspiration.

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Let's look if you have a syllabus there, if you've purchased one. Defining the concept, it says the

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Holy Spirit super intended the biblical writers so that while they were using their own language, that's your first blank language, culture, that's the second, and individual personalities.

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So, they used their own language, their own culture, and their own individual personalities.

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They inscripturated God's word without error in the original manuscripts.

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Let me break that down a little bit, alright. So, first you have, when you look at the different writers, you see they used their language.

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Some Hebrew, some Aramaic, some Greek. They used their culture.

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You're going to see things in the scripture that are related to their culture that would be different. You're going to see things of their personalities.

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Paul's going to ask for books to be sent or a cloak to be sent. You're going to see personal things about them.

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And yet that's exactly what God intended. The idea of super intended is the idea that God worked through the human authors so that even though they used their own personalities to write and they wrote with their own choice of words, every choice down to the letter was exactly as God intended it.

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So, God worked through them so that they actually wrote what God wanted them to write. Now, this does not mean that the authors were inspired because we know that Paul wrote at least three, probably four letters to Corinthians and we only have two of them in the scriptures.

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So, the authors wrote more than we have. So, it's not that the authors were inspired.

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And it is not the idea, and we're going to get to this in a minute, this idea of dictation. That God told them what to speak.

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Like the Book of Mormon was supposedly God told Joseph Smith every word that was to translate and that's how he did it.

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It was a dictation method and we're going to see that that's not the case. But they used their own language, their own cultures, their own personalities, but in their original, in other words, not the manuscripts we have today, the manuscripts we have today we know have copying errors.

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But the original did not. It was infallible. It was without error. But we don't have the original that we know of.

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But four truths help us understand this concept. All right, so let's look at what we have in our syllabus there.

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Inspiration is ultimately unexplainable. That's your blank there. It is unexplainable.

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Ultimately, in our finite minds, we cannot understand how God can write

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His Word through people. We don't understand that completely. But we accept it for what the scripture says.

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And that's the issue. We have to realize that it's unexplainable. Many things of God are unexplainable. Our comprehension of it can only deal with the product and not the process.

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Okay, so there's your blanks there. We can only deal with the product. We have the Bible. That's the product, the

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Word of God. The process, we're not going to fully understand. And we're going to have some tension there.

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If you have a theological system that has no tension and every single thing is resolved, then you have a man -made systematic theology because man can understand it.

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The fact that you and I can't fully comprehend this should not surprise us. It should be something we expect from a

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God that is so much greater than us, so far out of our league in intelligence.

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We should expect that behavior, that we're going to be limited. Number two, inspiration is exclusive to scripture.

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Exclusive. That's your blank there. Inspiration is exclusive to scripture. Only scripture can be said to be inspired by God.

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What do I mean by this? You know, when people say, and I'm sure some of you watching this have said this yourself, when you say,

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God gave me, fill in the blank. God gave me a verse. God gave me this meaning.

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That's not inspiration, okay? When we talk about inspiration, it is exclusive to the

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Bible. God breathing through people. He's not giving them new revelation that would be outside of scripture, okay?

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So, when you have people that talk about new revelation and it's not part of scripture, this is exclusive to scripture.

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If they're going to say it's new revelation, write it down and start putting that in back of everyone's

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Bible. But inspiration is not applied to your thoughts.

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In other words, God doesn't give you inspired thoughts. There's people that think that because the Holy Spirit indwells us, every thought they have is of the

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Holy Spirit and therefore it's inspired. And that's not true.

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Does the Holy Spirit work through us? Yes, he superintends through us so that there's things, but it's not the inspiration.

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God works in us, but not to produce a product of inspiration like he did with the

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Bible. Okay, number three. It is the writing and not the writer that is inspired by God.

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It is the writing and not the writer. So, this is what I was saying earlier with the dictation method.

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We don't believe, or sorry, this is what is taught when people say that the writers, they're saints and therefore everything they wrote was inspired.

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This is the one that this point would be at that to address that issue. Number four.

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The authors were kept from both error as well as omission.

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Those are your blanks. Authors were kept from both error and as well omission when they inscripturated

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God's Word. So, when they were writing, God actually kept them from making an error, all right?

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God can do that. You and I couldn't. I mean, you get 10 people in a room from around the world and have them write two or three pages describing

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God. You're probably going to get 12 different descriptions, all right? Yet we have 40 different authors of, you know, from different walks of life over 1500 years and they're all agree on who

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God is because God is the single author who worked through many authors, okay?

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So, let's move from the definition to the extent, the extent of inspiration.

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So, here let us first start as we look at this with some of the incorrect views of inspiration, the incorrect views.

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Always good to start with what's wrong then get to what's right, okay? So, some incorrect views.

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First is the liberal view. What is the liberal view? The liberal view is this.

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Those who are theologically liberal identify the Bible as merely a good human book.

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That's your blank there, human book. It's purely a human book. They believe the Bible, they believe that the

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Bible was inspired as any other good book. So, they're using that definition that I said of, that people use of their music or poetry that they were inspired, they were just moved emotionally to write and that is how the liberals would view the scripture, okay, the

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Bible. They would see that as nothing more than a good human book, good literature.

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Letter B there is that this view denies the supernatural, the supernatural or you could self -disclosure origin of God, sorry, of scripture.

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So, the idea there is they're going to deny the supernatural things of the scriptures.

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They're not going to see the Bible as being supernatural. They're going to see that the

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Bible is something that is a human product, purely a human product.

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And you see a lot of men that are, yeah, Princeton Seminary, which used to be a good seminary, not anymore.

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You know, many of the, actually all the Ivy Leagues except one, were all started as seminaries and none of them teach, you know, all of them would be in the realm of liberal theology now.

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And so, they would view that that way. So, the number two is the new evangelical views.

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So, there's some new evangelical views. In other words, in the recent years, some people have come up with some different theories and we're going to give you some what those incorrect views are and some definitions.

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So, first is the illumination theory, the illumination theory. That's your blank there.

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And this is the idea that the human writers of scripture had intensified religious perception.

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In other words, they were somehow like the super spiritual guys. And because of their super spiritual nature, they had a super spiritual perception to understand religious things and it is that perception that gave them the ability to write.

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That's a false view. Number two is the view I mentioned with that Google Hangout we had is the concept theory.

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The concept theory. That's your blank concept. God inspired the thoughts and concepts of scripture, but not the words of scripture.

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Well, that becomes really important because if you think that it's just the concepts, yet we see in scripture where Paul makes a case in Galatians 3 on individual words, where he says that makes a difference between not the seeds of Abraham, but the seed, singular referring to the

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Messiah. Paul seems to indicate that the scripture was inspired by every word because he makes an argument out of the individual tense that it's not plural, but singular.

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So he's not only saying that the words, but even the letters would be inspired because he's making that argument.

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So it would be the concept theory. Third is the potential, potential inspiration theory.

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The potential inspiration theory. That is that only those portions of scripture dealing with salvation are inspired and in error.

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Only those areas dealing with salvation are without error.

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Now, why does this view come in? How's this view come in? Well, this comes in in Genesis chapter 1 and 2.

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What do you mean? Well, this is what I mean. When people want to accept the world's attack on the

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Bible of scientific theories that argue for millions of years and they say, well, we're going to say that really those early chapters of Genesis, they're not inspired.

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The only thing that we can really trust the Bible on is when it comes to salvation.

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Everything else is up to interpretation. This is an argument that came about because they were trying to answer.

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They're trying to figure out how to reconcile these scientific theories with what the scripture said, because they're mutually exclusive.

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And so that caused a dilemma and they wanted to accept what the scientific theories were and the scriptures.

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And how did these people do it? Saying, well, only the areas of salvation.

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That's what's important. I'll tell you where this ended up leading, where this led was to a point of saying that many people started to say, well, we're just going to talk about what the

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Bible teaches on salvation and nothing of culture, nothing of morality, nothing of anything else, just what it relates to salvation.

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And the reality is, is that in the early 1900s, many people gave up the

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Bible and in came a vacuum of secular humanism to answer life's problems.

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We have an answer book from God that gives us the solutions to life's problems, but many rejected it to say, oh, we're just going to talk about salvation and nothing else.

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And that's why so many in our culture today say, look, you save your religion for the church.

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That's where it belongs. It doesn't belong in the marketplace of ideas. It only belongs in the church.

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And then what they want to do is basically put Christianity in a box for church only.

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Just talk to those who already believe, no one else. And that's basically a fruit of this potential inspiration theory.

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One more incorrect view is the Neo -Orthodox view. What is this?

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This view postulates that the Bible potentially, potentially contains the

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Word of God whenever it speaks to you and makes an impact on you.

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This was Karl Barth, really, that started this, a German theologian years ago who in the realm where he was, that people were getting all into intellectual thinking of the

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Scripture and just devoid of how the Scriptures impact our life, he started focusing on the impact of Scripture to our life.

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And where that ended up leading in Neo -Orthodoxism is this idea that the

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Bible potentially contains God's Word, but only when it speaks to you.

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And this is a real problem. This is very common in many churches and people don't realize it.

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They talk about it when God gave me a verse, Jeremiah 29, 11.

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God gave me this promise. He spoke to me. I read this promise that God knows the plans

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He has for me of all good things and I'm just inspired by that. That is inspired by God.

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What about a couple of verses later when it talks about God knows the plan for you, a sword and famine and death?

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How come no one says that ones when they talk about this, right? So, you end up seeing that what people are doing there is they're trying to reconcile the tension by saying, well, it's only inspired to my personal emotions.

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So, it has the potential to be God's Word. Those are the incorrect views. Let us now look at the correct views, the correct views.

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It's always good to look at what's correct. I like this side more. So, the correct views on the extent of Scripture.

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First off, it's infallible. It's infallible.

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This means every word, that's your blank there, word. Every word of the

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Bible is as God intended it to be. We already saw in 2

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Timothy 3 .16, but we also see in Psalm 19, the law of the

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Lord is perfect, revealing the soul. The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.

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So, we have there is that every word, and I already made the argument that Paul in Galatians makes the argument from an individual word.

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We can make the argument from the book of John or 1 John, either one, that we have eternal life because John says,

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I write these things to you who believe that you may know that you have eternal life, present tense.

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Not that you will have, future tense, but that you already have it. You already possess eternal life.

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So, it's infallible. Every word of the Bible is exactly as God intended it to be.

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It's also inerrant. Inerrant. This means the Bible is without error.

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That's your blank there, without error. The focus, this focuses on the necessity, the necessary relationship, sorry, this focuses on the necessary relationship between the accuracy, that's your blank there, the accuracy of the words and the authority, the authority of the message.

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So, again, your blanks are the accuracy of the words and the authority of the message.

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You see, the fact that the Bible is without error means that it's accurate.

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You can trust it. And it's authority. It's an authority. The message of the

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Bible is an authority in our life. So, the person who says, well, I don't believe the Bible, that's nice.

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I mean, so what? God's still going to judge you according to His word. Because it is an authority.

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Whether you accept it or not doesn't make it the authority. That's like a criminal standing before the judge and saying,

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Your Honor, I don't accept you as a judge. I didn't vote for you as judge. Therefore, you can't sentence me to jail.

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Yeah, that's not going to work, will it? No. Why? Because it's not your voting or your approval that makes something the authority.

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Something is an authority because it is the authority. It's by nature of the position.

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And because the Bible is without error, it is by nature an authority.

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All right. Next, number three, it's complete.

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All right. Some call this plenary. OK, you may hear that term, fancy term, but it means it's complete.

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This emphasizes that nothing needs to be added. That's your first blank, added to the

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Bible, and nothing should be removed. That's your next blank. So we shouldn't be adding or removing anything.

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There's no need for it. The Bible is plenary. It's complete. It is what it is, and there's nothing missing.

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So when people talk about the missing books of the Bible, they're not missing. They were never part of God's word.

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All right. Number four, it's authoritative. It's authoritative.

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The Bible is God's self -revelation. That's your blank there. Self -revelation of one who has the right and power to command compliance in thought and deed upon his rational creatures.

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Let's look at some verses here. Acts 17, the times of ignorance

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God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere.

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Wait, God commands all people everywhere? Yes, he has the right to do that because his word is an authority, because he has fixed the day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he appointed.

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And of this, he has given assurance by the rising of him from the dead.

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Also in Romans, we can look in Romans chapter 15, and it says here, when therefore

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I have completed this and have delivered them to them what is been collected,

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I will leave for Spain by way of you. That's the wrong verse.

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So all right, I will correct that. Well, that's the verse that I have in the book.

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That's just not the right one. All right, sorry. But you see in Acts 17 that we're all in a position of having to submit to the authority of God's word.

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Now, as we go through it, if the Bible is infallible, okay, if it's inerrant, if it's complete and it's authoritative, the next one, number five, tells us that it's trustworthy.

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And it should be trustworthy. Because if it's without error, you can trust it.

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If it has no flaws in it, it's trustworthy by nature. All that God says in his word is true or faithful and is either a present reality or shall come to pass.

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In other words, the idea there is that the Bible, his word is true, it's faithful.

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But not everything's happened yet. I mean, Christ is still coming back and there's things he talks about that are still future.

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And some people make arguments because of things that they don't, you know, that they don't understand or haven't been fulfilled yet.

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That doesn't mean that the Bible is in error. It means that we can trust just like he fulfilled all the promises up to now, he's going to fulfill all the promises still yet to come.

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And it is something we can trust. Number six is that it's eternal.

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It's eternal. This means heaven and earth, that's your blanks there, heaven and earth will pass away before God's word will.

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The standards and precepts for character and morality will be in effect throughout eternity.

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In other words, when we talk about morality and things, this is when we know it because it comes from the nature of God and God's not going to change.

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So the moral institutes that we see in the Scripture are not going to go away.

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That which is taught in the Scripture is eternal. And lastly, and this is the one

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I'm going to spend a little bit of time on because this is the one I think we see many people struggle with, and that is that God's word is sufficient.

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God's word is sufficient. What I mean by that is the Bible is sufficient to meet every, that's your blank there, every spiritual need of mankind.

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Specifically, it is sufficient for salvation and spiritual life.

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We can see that in 2 Timothy and verse 3.

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It says in verse 5, sorry, chapter 3 and verse 15. And from your childhood, this is

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Paul talking to Timothy, and how from your childhood you had been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

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All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruction or training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

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So you see here that it's good for every area of life.

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Now we've dealt with this before on other classes, but you see there that there's a, in verse 16, you have, it's profitable for teaching.

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That's teaching is good, good thinking. For reproof, that's bad thinking.

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For correction, that's for good behavior. Okay, training in righteousness, that's good thinking.

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So the, sorry, I said that wrong. Let me try again. Thinking is good, teaching is good thinking.

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Reproof is bad thinking. Correction is bad behavior. Training in righteousness is good behavior.

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So what you see he's doing there in that is trying to say, for everything that's good and bad, whether thought or deed, the

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Scripture is profitable for all that. But that all supports the main thing, which is that Scripture is profitable to make us complete and able to do every good work.

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We also see this in Romans 15 now. Let's bring this up. For whatever is written in the former days was written for our instruction that through endurance, through endurance and through the encouragement of the

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Scriptures, we might have hope. So you see there in there, again, it's saying that everything we have that we need,

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Scripture has the answer for what we need for spiritual need. Now there may be things

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Scripture doesn't answer. If God hasn't revealed that to us, then we don't need to worry about it, okay?

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God didn't try to write a book that would answer every single thing that could ever be asked.

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That's not what it is. But it is answering everything of our spiritual needs. And the area of sufficiency, let me explain how you see this being a struggle for many people.

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Many people will turn to a counselor and say, I need help with a problem.

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And a counselor will say, oh, let me give you some verses to study. No, no, no, a counselor, you don't understand.

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I need... No, you don't. You see, when you say you need something other than Scripture for your spiritual problem, you're arguing, and you may not think about it this way, but this really is what we're doing.

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We're saying the Scripture's not sufficient for my problem. I need something more.

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When people argue that they... Church just is boring. We need to do drama.

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We need to do something to entertain people because we gotta do... We gotta make it more relevant.

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Scripture does not need us to make it relevant. Scripture is relevant to every spiritual need.

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When people try to add relevancy to the Scriptures, what they do is diminish the

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Scriptures. That's what they do. And we don't want to diminish the Scriptures. So when we look at this, we want to say, here is the

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Scripture, and it is sufficient to meet every spiritual need that I have, specifically salvation and my spiritual life, my faith and practice.

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Scripture has the answer. There's many who turn to secular counseling, secular psychology to solve the problems that Scripture has answers to.

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And what they're doing is saying the Scripture's not sufficient for my need. When Scripture tells you as a single person to be content in the state that you're in, and you say,

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I can't be. I need to have a spouse. I gotta go, I gotta do this, or I gotta do that to try to get a spouse.

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Scripture says, be content. Is Scripture sufficient for your need?

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If Scripture says that we should proclaim the Gospel, and not leave any of it out, but proclaim the full

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Gospel, the whole message of God, the full counsel of God, do we leave out the wrath of God, the judgment of God, the penalty of our sin?

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Because we just don't think that's good for people to hear. Well, then you're not believing in the sufficiency of the

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Scriptures. The Scriptures are sufficient to meet every need that we have, and we must trust in that and look to the

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Scriptures to answer life's problems. Turning to one another is fine, but only if one another is turning us back to the

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Scripture. I may not have answers for problems I struggle with, but I may go to friends of mine and say, hey,

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I'm struggling with this. Do you know a good passage of Scripture that would help in this situation?

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We must trust that the Scripture is sufficient. So, the Scriptures are, to look at our list, infallible, inerrant, complete, authoritative, trustworthy, eternal, and sufficient.

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That is the correct view. Now, let's look at some difficulties of inspiration.

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I said there was tension, so let's look at some of that tension, some of the difficulties of inspiration.

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Inspiration of the original writings, that's the first thing we want. Since we do not have the original writings anymore, our acceptance of inerrancy is ultimately based upon faith.

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And that's your blank there. It's ultimately based upon faith. We are going to trust, based on what we see in what we do have of God's Word, that in the original it had no error.

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However, it's not a blind faith. It is a faith based upon very good external evidence, the myriad of old manuscripts and the eternal internal evidence.

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What do I mean by this? We don't have enough time to go into textual criticism, but it is good to look at some of that, and here's what we have.

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What we see here is that when you look at all of the manuscripts, and I understand there's some people that argue that there's so many variants, changes that we have in the different copies, but the reality is that because we have so many changes, we know exactly where all those changes seem to be.

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We may not be able to get back to the original. In other words, one manuscript may say that a king was 40 years old, and another one may say he was 42 years old.

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Which one is right doesn't matter. It really doesn't. We may not be able to get back to the original, but it doesn't affect the meaning of the text.

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You may get some that it could change the meaning, but we can get back to the original.

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We see that in this manuscript it's got some problems and that changes the meaning, but we can know what the original was because this thing that's changing the meaning is really only in one location, in one geographic area, so we kind of isolate it to an area where the mistake was, and the rest of the copies and all the other locations don't have that.

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When you really look at all the variants that people have, there's really only 1 % of ones that we can't get back to the original meaning, and we don't know what the original text said.

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Those are the ones we want to focus on because those are the ones that if there's going to be an error, we can't get back to the original meaning, changes the meaning of the text, what's the answer?

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Well, let me give you some of those. In Chronicles and Kings, you see Solomon had one text has,

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I forget the exact numbers, but it's like 3 ,000 horsemen and 7 ,000 foot soldiers, and the other one has 7 ,000 horsemen and 3 ,000 foot soldiers.

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We don't know which is the original and it changes the meaning, but what doctrine is based on that? None. In some manuscripts, it says

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Jesus was, and this was, if you look at any of the modern writing on this, there is a man who wrote a book called

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Misquoting Jesus and Bart Ehrman's his name, and he's trying to argue that we can't get to the original

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Bible. We don't have the Bible, and his biggest argument, if you're going to make a case, you're going to write a book, you're going to put your best argument forward, right?

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Here was his argument to prove that we cannot know what the Bible said. Some manuscripts say that Jesus was a carpenter, and some say he was the son of a carpenter.

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Really? That's it? That's your best you got? That's your best shot? It changes the meaning, but what doctrine do we have?

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What theological doctrine is based on Jesus being a carpenter or the son of a carpenter? None. You see, because we have so many manuscripts, we know where those changes occurred, and we also know that not one theological doctrine is affected.

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Now you go, oh, but what about 1 John, where there's added phrases that talks about there's three and one, the

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Father, the Son, the Spirit, that's the Trinity. Take it out. I don't need that one verse to prove the

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Trinity, because we can prove the Trinity from a whole lot of verses that are clear, and we don't need that.

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You see, so some people will try to make a case that because something was added, it slipped its way in because that is what the rest of the

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Bible teaches. Someone made a mistake. But we don't need that one verse to prove the Trinity.

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If that's the only verse, that could be an issue. Alright, let's get to the next one to wrap up with this.

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Inspiration and contradictions. Many claim contradictions in Scripture. And while there are difficult places to understand, our difficulty in understanding them should not assume a contradiction, but the lack of evidence for reconciling the contradictions.

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So let me give you some that some people argue. There is one of the Gospel accounts that talk about two blind men.

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One of the Gospel writers say that two blind men were healed of their blindness. Another writer of the

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Gospels just says that speaks of one of the two blind men. Now some people say, see, one passage says there were two, one says there is one.

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That's not a contradiction. That's just that one person is giving more information, that's typically

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Luke who does give you more information, and other writers who focus in on more key things are just focusing on the one blind man that he wanted to focus on.

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And you have something like that where it can be reconciled easily, some of them easily, some not so easily.

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But just because we don't have a way of reconciling them doesn't mean it's a contradiction.

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There are some good answers to some of these issues. Now there are areas, if you look at something like the

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Quran, I would say the Quran cannot be written by God. Why? It has clear contradictions.

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What do I mean by clear contradiction? It defines the Christian trinity as the father, the mother, and the son.

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It says that Christians, speaking of Christians, where supposedly Allah says to Muhammad, have

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I ever told you to worship Mary as God? You see, we don't worship

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Mary as God, and that's the dilemma. They have a clear contradiction in their book.

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Why? Because that is one of definition. Whether there's multiple accounts of the same event, now people try to argue, well, there has to be one source of all the

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Gospels because they all have a similar story. Really? Newspapers, go look at them.

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There's many accounts. If the president speaks, he gives the State of the Union address, you have many newspapers the next day that are going to give an accounting of what the president said in his address.

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Did they all get it from the same source? No, they were all eyewitnesses to it. They all watched and then wrote what they saw.

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Same thing with a sports event. You have all these sports writers, and the next day after the sports event, they're all going to write what happened.

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They're going to have some different details. Each one of them is going to focus on something different. They're going to have a lot of similarity, but because they had a lot of similarity does not mean that they all got it from one source.

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It's that they all were eyewitnesses to the same event. Same thing with the Gospels. They all were eyewitnesses to the same event.

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That's why there's similarity, but they all focus on some different things, and that's why there's differences.

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Let's wrap up with 2 Peter 3 .16. As he does in all his letters, when he speaks to them on these matters, there are some things of them.

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This is speaking of Paul, by the way. This is Peter speaking of Paul. There are some things that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction.

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As they do the other, what's that word? Scriptures. Why do

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I bring that verse in? I bring that verse in for one simple reason. Peter is saying that the writings of Paul are

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Scripture. That's the point of that. They're Scripture. So we have

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Scripture that we could turn to. Peter is saying that Paul's writings were accepted at the time as Scripture.

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So that is the doctrine of inspiration. If you have any questions about this or want to contact us about anything, please email us at academyatstrivingforeternity .org.

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If you want to pick up one of the syllabuses, you can go to store .strivingforeternity .org

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or just go to strivingforeternity .org and you can pick up the syllabus from the store there.

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Lastly, if you would like to help support us, well, not lastly, but if you want to help support us, you can at Amazon.

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Amazon has a program where they will, it doesn't cost you any extra, but if you go to Amazon smile, smile .amazon

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.com, register Striving for Eternity as the ministry, and just as you go and purchase things on Amazon, they will send half a percent to us to be able to allow us to further do the ministry that we do here of discipling people and training people in evangelism and discipleship.

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Now, coming up, if you're watching this live or close to live, April 2015, we have the

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Ohio Fire. That's going to be with the folks from CARM, Matt Slick, Ken Cook.

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I'm going to be speaking along with myself. We have a special pre -conference with the guys from Cross Country Evangelism.

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That's Mike Stockwell and Robert Gray. If you do not know these two brothers, they are dear brothers.

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You want to sign up for the pre -conference. That actually does have a charge. That's $20. The Ohio Fire does not.

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We'll take an offering there. You can get all the details at ohiofire .org, ohiofire .org,

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and you can get that. Also, just in a way, announcements real quick.

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We have the new seminar called the Bible Interpretation Made Easy. If you'd like us to come to your church and do a weekend seminar, we would be happy to and go to your church and train the church to interpret the

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Bible. We argue that we can spend in one weekend, give you tools that will help you interpret the

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Bible and make it easier for you to understand God's Word, which is what we're saying. If this is

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God's Word, all the things we talked about in this lesson about God's Word, how it's authoritative and trustworthy and all this, we want to know how to dig in and study it.

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That's what we're going to do in that seminar and teach you how to do. As we always try to do, we want to encourage you to encourage others.

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We usually have an individual that we put. The reason we do this is it dawned on me and was impressed upon me that most people say the most wonderful things about people when they're dead.

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Have you ever gone to a funeral and people say these wonderful things about the person that's in the casket and gone?

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The person that died probably never knew that most of the people thought the way that you think about them.

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They never heard all those encouraging things. Let's not wait until people are dead to say encouraging things to them.

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We often will have individual people that we put up, but today we're going to do something different and we sometimes do this.

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We would like you, and this is specific to a group of people and that's the parents, we would like you to encourage your children this week.

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Find a way to encourage your children every day this week. Even if you're not watching this live, you're watching it on YouTube later or in the academy class later, go and encourage your children somehow, someway, every day this week.

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Find a way. You know, a really interesting way that my family used to try to encourage one another

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We used to have these little notes that we had and they just said,

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I hope you're encouraged or something like that. And what we would do is we would try to go around the house and secretly do things for one another and just leave the note.

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We each had 10 notes and we would try to, basically the goal was to see if you could get rid of all your notes by the end of the day.

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And if everyone's trying to get rid of all their notes, obviously somebody's getting some notes.

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So it was actually really hard, but what it was training us to do as a family was to try to kind of show more love than we receive.

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It was to try to be more encouraging to everyone else in the family. And so as parents, I want to encourage you to encourage your children this week.

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Next week, and by the way, if you can join in our Facebook group, the

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Striving for Eternity Facebook group, there are questions, the thought questions they have in your syllabus. If you have a syllabus, we're going to post those.

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Please answer them. Even if someone else answers similar to what you were going to say, give an answer. The goal we are trying to do is to create some feedback.

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Better than me just sitting here and talking to a video camera, right? We want to get from you. So it's helpful for us to learn from one another.

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And so I encourage you to get online on Facebook and interact with us there, all right? Next week, we're going to look at the doctrine of illumination and authority.

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That's next week's lesson. And until then, remember to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.