Verbal Plenary Inspiration

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Well, this morning, we are going to continue with what we did last time in this conversation.
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We've been talking about the two-fold subject of inspiration and inerrancy.
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Inspiration, you'll remember if you were here, references the source, while inerrancy represents the result.
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Oftentimes people will confuse these two, and they'll use the word inspired and inerrant interchangeably.
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And while they are two sides of the same theological coin, they are not the same thing in regard to what they mean.
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Inspiration, or where this word comes from is the King James Bible translates the word theanoustos as all scripture is inspired by God, and that's where the word inspired is why we talk about the doctrine of inspiration, but the actual use of the word in the Greek theanoustos is theos, which is God, and pneumos, which is breath or breathe.
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And so it literally is that its source is the breath of God.
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God has spoken the word and men of old have written it down, and thus we have it.
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And that's what we talk about.
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Inspiration is the source.
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Inerrancy then is the result.
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And while the inspiration of scripture, we have passages that we could go to like 2 Timothy 3, 16, and 17, and then in 1 Peter and other places where it talks about holy men being carried along by the Spirit.
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We know that these, very specifically taught, the inspiration of scripture is taught in the Bible.
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Inerrancy, however, is an inference.
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If God inspired scripture, then it's inerrant because God himself is perfect, thus we make the necessary inference that scripture is inerrant.
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Now there are places in scripture where we are reminded that the Bible is true, Jesus' scripture cannot be broken, you know, things like that, and the flowers, or the grass withers and the flowers fade, but the word of God will stand forever.
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So this is another about the tenacity of scripture.
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And so there are references to inerrancy in regard to the tenacity of the scripture, but to specifically, the Bible never says no word of the Bible is wrong.
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You know, it says every word is true, and so we can trust that that is in that sense, but you know, inerrancy is sort of a negative, you know, we're talking about inerrant.
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And I remember the first time I used to use that phrase, I tell the story sometimes, it's so funny, when I kind of introduced that phrase being used here at the church, it wasn't a phrase that was used very often before I came, and I started talking about the Bible's inerrant, the Bible's inerrant, the Bible's inerrant, and everybody, I got phone calls, did you say the Bible is inerror? No, I said it's inerrant.
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And so, because errant is wrong, and inerrant is the negation of that, so it's not errored.
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It doesn't contain error.
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And so the source is inspiration, the result is inerrancy.
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And last time we were here, we talked about the different theories of inspiration.
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There are those who think that the inspiration came by way of dictation, God sort of used the men as sort of like first century fax machines, and they just sort of, you know, they sort of zoned out, began to write, didn't really know what they were writing, but they were just sort of used by God to transmit information.
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We don't believe that.
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There are others we looked at last time, partial or degrees of inspiration, intuition, men sort of interpreted what was going on around them and wrote it down, and then illuminating or mystical inspiration, wherein it was sort of, they were enabled by a heightening of their normal senses, you know, these are ways that we would disagree with.
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What view we take on the issue of inspiration, and by we I mean our church and historic Reformed theology, is the last one on number nine, and that is the verbal plenary view of inspiration.
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And this means that we believe that both divine and human elements are present in the production of Scripture, and that the entire text of Scripture, including the words themselves, are a product of the mind of God expressed in human terms and conditions.
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So we do believe that the men who wrote the Scripture, wrote the Scripture themselves.
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We don't believe that there was automatic writing, or some type of a trance, or anything like that.
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We believe that Paul wrote what Paul wrote as Paul wrote it, and John the same, and others.
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And the reason for that is sort of evidential in nature.
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When we read Paul, he uses different language, not a different language, because he's using Greek, but he uses, just like when I speak and Lee speaks, there's a difference in how we talk.
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There's a difference in how we relate information.
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If I wrote a paper, and Lee wrote a paper, we're both going to be speaking English.
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But we both have certain ways of writing that it's obvious that I wrote it, or Lee wrote it, or Mike, or anyone else in this room.
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You know, Miss Anne was a teacher, and so her attention to grammar might be superior to many of us in the room when she sits down and focuses on writing something, whereas, you know, I might have a different focus in mind.
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And that's why when you read, like, Luke and Acts, both written by Luke, you can tell that's different than Matthew.
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Just the very way they use Scripture themselves.
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They quote Scripture differently than one another.
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And so you know it's a different author.
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It's very obvious.
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The writer of Hebrews uses a very high form of the Greek language.
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He uses words and expressions that are more difficult than John.
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Most people, when they begin to study the Greek language, study John's Gospel first.
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Because John uses a very simple, very basic vocabulary, one that, you know, you learn a few hundred Greek words, you've got almost all that John used, and you can work your way through the text.
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So we believe that the men were used as they were in writing the Scripture, but at the same time, we believe that every word they wrote was under the command of God, and under the decree of God, that we didn't get what we shouldn't get, but we got what He wanted us to get.
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So there was a divine carrying along, and that's why I like that passage in Peter where he says the men of holy men were carried along, you know, by the Holy Spirit.
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That's what God did.
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He undergirded these men, and He kept them from error, and that's where we get the resulting doctrine of inerrancy.
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And the objection, if you look at your sheet, you'll notice that each one has the viewpoint and then the objection.
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The objection to verbal and plenary inspiration is that if every word of Scripture were a word of God, then there would not be the human element in the Bible that is observed.
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That is an objection that I would simply say, prove it.
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What you're saying is God can't do something through the means of people, and that's a logically inaccurate statement because we see God doing things through the means of people all the time.
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I use this example a lot, so you may have heard it before.
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But if you think about the issue of childbirth, God ordains the day that a child will be born.
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He ordains the place.
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He ordains their life, and it says He fashions before them their days before they were ever were.
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You know, Psalm 139.
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But there had to be some human interaction.
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There's only been one that we know of in history that didn't involve the meeting of two individuals and the involvement of two, and that was Jesus Christ, who is the only virgin-born man that we're aware of.
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Certainly the only one that Scripture tells us of.
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And so every other person, outside of Adam and Eve, of course, who were created by the hand of God, every other person has come through one means, and that is the means of procreation.
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And because procreation is necessary for childbirth, we know that that event had to have had as much ordination as did the birth.
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So, when we talk about Scripture in writing, we say, okay, well, we can't say that God wrote this if men wrote it.
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Why not? We can say that God created this child in the womb, and yet there was men, action involved, because God decreed it so.
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So I would disagree with the objection here on that basis.
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Yes, sir? God prepared Moses from birth, saved him from early death, and put circumstances in his life to make him exactly the person to write the first portion of the Bible.
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Yeah, he spent, what was it, 40 years in Pharaoh's house, and then 40 years in the house of his father-in-law, right? And so he spent 80 years preparing for the last 40 years of his life.
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It's interesting the way his life worked out.
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And you're right.
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From birth, God had a decree that was being worked out in his life.
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So all that is to speak of what verbal and plenary inspiration is.
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Did you have something, brother? I thought I saw your hand.
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Okay.
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Okay.
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Now, if you'll turn your sheet over to number 10, if you're not already there, from inspiration comes the doctrine of inerrancy, and there are people who believe the Bible's inspired but don't believe that it's inerrant.
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And that may sound funny, but you can, theoretically, believe in one and not believe in the other.
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Because you can believe God inspired the scripture to be written, but not necessarily, I'm not saying that you can do it necessarily logically, but there are people who do believe, well, God inspired the scripture, but that doesn't mean that it's without error, because men were involved and men make errors.
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And that's the argument.
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Well, yes, God inspired it.
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He was involved with it.
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But there are errors because men also were involved with it, and everything that men touch has the capacity for error.
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And so you have inspiration without inerrancy, not normally, but it does come up.
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There are people who believe that.
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Yeah, well, and then there, well, from the issue of inerrancy comes the issue of transmission, translation, and those things, which I'm going to talk about this morning.
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There's a section in our message this morning, Acts 18, 18-23, is what we're going to be preaching out of.
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And in the passage, Paul goes to Ephesus, he goes from Corinth, well, to Centuria, over to Ephesus, and then to Antioch.
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When he gets to Ephesus, he says, he preaches the gospel in the synagogue, and the Jews are like, stay with us, tell us more.
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The first group, outside of maybe the Bereans, who's been like, stay, we want to know more.
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And Paul says, no, I got to go.
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It's like, the other places didn't want you, they ran you out of town.
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You get to the place that likes you, and you're like, nope, got to go.
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It's a very odd situation, but in the King James Bible, it has a line.
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It says, I must need to go to the feast.
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I must go to the feast.
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That line is not in the ESV.
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It's not even in the footnotes.
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It's not in the NASB.
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In fact, it only is in the King James and New King James, and in the footnotes of the NLT and the Holman Christian Standard Bible.
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So it's only in four translations, because it does not have a strong textual basis.
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It's in very few manuscripts, and the manuscripts it's in, there's not a strong basis for the history of the reading.
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So that is what we call textual criticism, and that is different than the study of the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture.
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Just like I always teach this in our new members class, when we talk about inspiration and inerrancy, we are talking about the original manuscripts.
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How many of the original manuscripts do we have? No? Oh, no.
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Original manuscripts? None.
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Zero.
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Yeah.
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We don't have any of the originals.
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I think that was by design.
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I think that God designed it that way, because I think if we had what John wrote, I think if we had John's gospel that John penned himself, I think there would be people all over the world who would make pilgrimages to it.
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I mean, people make pilgrimages to see the Virgin Mary burned into a piece of toast.
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Can you imagine if we had the very writing of John? No.
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No, no, no, no.
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The Dead Sea Scrolls were not New Testament documents.
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The Dead Sea Scrolls were written about 100 years before the New Testament period.
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And the Dead Sea Scrolls were written, we believe, by a group called the Essenes, the Essene community which lived in Qumran, which is near the Dead Sea.
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And they were a group of sort of ascetic Jews who sort of separated themselves out.
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They considered the Pharisees to be corrupt and the Sadducees to be corrupt, so they separated themselves out.
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In fact, some people believe, I don't necessarily, but some people believe John the Baptist might have been influenced some by the Essenes because he was so separated in his life.
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But we know he was separated from birth by God.
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But the Essene community was sort of a very rigid, sort of almost like you would think of the Amish today, sort of separated from society.
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And they separated themselves out.
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They had a scriptorium, which the ruins are still there today.
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You can go and see the ruins of their scriptorium.
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They had a baptistry, which is interesting, because they would bathe themselves before writing scripture.
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It was part of their process.
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We did a study of it in seminary.
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It was kind of neat getting to see the pictures and stuff.
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But the writings of the Dead Sea Scrolls is believed to have come out of the Essene community.
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And they were basically copies where their copyists, their scripture copyists or scribes would simply make copies of the text, very rigid, very specific copies.
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And that's why the Dead Sea Scrolls are so well-written and so well-preserved, because it was basically a scribal community.
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And so they had this.
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And they weren't found until, what was it? Was it in the 40s? Yeah.
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And when they were found, it was amazing.
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What was great about it, though, was that these bear testimony to how accurate our Bible still is.
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Because here are texts that were written 2,000 years ago that have been sealed in containers like this big.
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They're big, big things.
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And the containers were about the size of a small man.
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And they would pull these scrolls out and read them.
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And they were still the same as today.
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That was the beauty of it.
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It just showed 2,000 years ago they were reading the same thing we're reading today.
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And so there was wonderful, especially the Isaiah Scroll.
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The Isaiah Scroll is amazing.
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You can go over there to Israel, and they have the Isaiah Scroll in a museum.
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And it's all stretched out in a circle.
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And you can walk around it and look through the glass and see it.
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And if you knew Hebrew, you could read it.
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But, yeah, the Dead Sea Scrolls are copies.
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We don't have, obviously, the original Isaiah.
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We don't have the original Romans.
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We don't have any of the originals.
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And I think, like I said, I think that was by design.
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What we do have is a textual, historical basis.
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We have 5,700 Greek manuscripts, handwritten Greek manuscripts.
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And on top of that, we have even more of manuscripts that came out after.
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Because within the first 200 years, the Bible, the New Testament, is translated into Coptic, Egyptian, which is Coptic, different languages, Syriac.
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It's translated into the other languages.
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So not only do we have the Greek, but we have the first-generation copies into other languages.
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Or not first-generation.
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First, you have the first generation of translations, is what I'm saying, is being translated into these other languages.
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Then by the 4th century, you have the Latin, which was, you know, which came later.
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So, anyhow, but we don't have the original manuscripts.
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So you do have to do the process of textual criticism to say, okay, there were manuscripts where people made mistakes.
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We don't believe the original had any mistakes, but there are manuscripts where guys add sentences or take sentences out.
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Sometimes it's a simple error of sight.
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Just like if I were to hand everyone in here a piece of paper and say, write this down, you might see something and write it differently.
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Especially if there's similar endings to the sentences or whatever, you might skip a whole line.
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There was one manuscript that's really kind of funny.
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I think I've told this story before.
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But the manuscript, the original manuscript was written in columns like this, where you read here to here to here to here to here, and then you go over here to here to here, right? Well, Coppius didn't know that, and there wasn't much of a gap.
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So he literally wrote from here to here, from here to here, from here to here, and none of the sentences made any sense.
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But you knew it.
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That's the great thing about textual criticism.
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You look at that, and it's like somebody made a boo-boo.
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This guy made a complete error.
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But things like that are obvious.
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There are manuscripts that are missing sections.
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Well, yeah, that's true.
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There is a certain faithfulness in that because he obviously didn't know what he was writing.
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It would be like me, somebody handing me a Spanish Bible and giving me a page of the Spanish Bible, and they said, Coppius, I might know a few of the words, but I don't know Spanish.
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So I would have to trust that the person who came before me had gotten it right.
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And so, yeah, there's a, like I said, textual critical history is a long and valuable study because just like I had the two girls, the two devils here a few years ago, like 2006, 2007, a long time ago, we had a fall festival.
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And the rule for the fall festival is please don't dress in anything that would be sort of dark.
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Just come dressed, if you want to dress up, dress as a clown or something.
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These two girls came up in the most devilishly devil costume you've ever seen.
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They were devilish devils, two teenage girls.
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And they had come as guests of someone else.
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Obviously, we didn't want to give them a hard time because they probably didn't know.
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And if they did know, they didn't care.
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But I ended up sitting down with them in our parking lot because that's where the little festival was, and I talked with them for an hour about their faith, about what they believed.
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And the one girl was an atheist and the other girl was a parrot of the other.
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She didn't really have any idea of what was going on.
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She just, well, you know, what she says is good.
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There's always a leader, you know, among people.
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And I remember the girl saying, she goes, well, you, you don't know what the Bible actually said.
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She said, all you have is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy.
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I said, no, that's not true.
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That's not what we have at all.
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We have one of the most tenacious lines of transmission of any document in history, going back to the first generation of when it was written.
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You know, we have pieces of manuscripts that date back to the early 2nd century, possibly the late 1st century, which is at the same time these things are being written.
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I said, we don't just have copies of copies of copies.
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We actually have sources that go back to the time when they were written.
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And she goes, well, you don't know what it said.
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You don't speak that language.
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I said, well, I have the Greek text.
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I could bring it out here and we could go through it.
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I said, but that's not your problem.
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You really don't care whether or not we know what it says.
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You don't want to believe what it says.
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Even Bart Ehrman, the most famous modern skeptic, when it comes to the New Testament, he's written books misquoting Jesus and all kinds of other books.
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Bart Ehrman will tell you, because he was asked, and I've got it on audio recording.
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He was asked by an atheist on a radio show, well, what do you think the Bible really said? And he said, the same thing that the Bible still says.
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And even though he's gone through all this stuff of how the Bible, the textual variations and all this stuff, well, what do you think the original Bible said? Same thing it says now.
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There's no fundamental change.
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And even he admitted that.
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No fundamental change.
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Now, he would argue that John and Paul and these others are writing from, he would argue that it's not inspired.
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They're writing from their own interpretation of history, blah, blah, blah.
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He doesn't believe the Bible's true.
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But he doesn't deny the Bible's accurate to what they actually wrote.
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And he said to deny that is just to deny how this whole thing has worked out.
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If you don't think you can trust what the New Testament says, you certainly don't think you can trust what Homer wrote is true, the Iliad and things like that.
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Because those, we have, and I've shown you guys this before, but from the time that it was written to the time that it was, the first copies that we have is within just a few years, a few decades we'll say, a few decades of one another.
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From the time Homer wrote to the time the first copy is like 500 years.
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That's the earliest copy we have.
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And yet nobody really denies that we know what Homer wrote.
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So just an interesting little side note there because you mentioned the – Yeah, and the other thing too is there was such a proliferation of copies.
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It wasn't as if one copy was all that people had.
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Once Romans was written, it was copied by so many people and went out so vast and so far that there was no way to bring it back in and make wholesale redactions.
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And that's one of the ways I believe God protected the tenacity was by keeping it from being held in one place.
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Because if you only have one copy, you can make changes to that copy and no one would ever know.
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But if there are 50 copies and they've all gone out, and now you have your one copy, if you make a change, guess what? The other 49 are going to prove that your change was something you added.
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And so the proliferation – the New Testament was different than the Old Testament because within the Old Testament there was sort of a maintaining of the Scripture in the temple and the – they would count out the letters and measure out the letters on the scrolls to make sure that they weren't missing anything.
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They're very specific.
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The New Testament was not that way.
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The New Testament was handwritten on papyrus and it was believed that the early Christians may have been responsible for writing on both sides of the page because they were poor.
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We get early manuscripts, papyri fragments of the New Testament and it's written on both sides.
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People didn't write on both sides of papyri because you had a smooth side and a rough side because when they would press the papyrus read together and make this paper, it had a smooth side that you write on and a rough side that you didn't write on.
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Well, the Christians wrote on both sides because they were poor and they wanted to have these books, these letters, and so they would write on both sides.
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And so sometimes some of the translation or transmission errors or issues are issues of you can't see what they wrote because they were writing on sandpaper or that like sandpaper.
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But yes, to get back to what you were saying, I'm sorry, I sort of lost it for a second, but you had said...
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Yeah, and that speaks to the accuracy.
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It speaks to the fact that we can be confident that what we have is what Paul wrote, it's what John wrote, it's what Jesus said.
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And that's why I can stand up today and say, this is the word of the Lord, this is what he has said.
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And are there going to be times where there's sentences like the one today about Paul going to the Passover or Paul going to the feast, whether or not that was in the original.
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I don't think it was because it doesn't have the evidence, doesn't have the manuscript evidence.
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It's likely something that was what we call a scribal amendation where a scribe in attempting to explain what was happening here, and it could have been a marginal note that made its way into the text.
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How many of you write on the edge of your Bibles? Some of you, right? So let's say a hundred years from now, somebody finds your Bible.
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Now, it's a little different because your Bible is printed and then it would be handwritten.
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But let's say you were writing next to John 3.16, it says, you know, for God so loved the world.
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So you see the word for God, so loved.
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And then you took your pencil, and you went here, and you maybe made a little mark, and you said, much.
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For God loved so much, or for God so much loved the world.
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And that for you is simply something you added in because you were engrossed in God's love and you were excited about God's love, and so you added the word much because it's a reminder to yourself, right, as to the situation.
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Now, let's say this was all handwritten.
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Let's say this was all a handwritten manuscript.
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Your whole Bible is handwritten, and you wrote it.
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It's pretty amazing to even think about that.
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But let's say, that's how people had Bibles, by the way.
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They'd write them, they would get copies, and they'd write themselves a copy of Romans or whatever.
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For God so much loved the world.
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Well, somebody comes along and sees that 50 years, 100 years, 2,000 years after you, and they see that.
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Do they know that that was your extra thought, or do they think you missed when you were copying, and you went back and added that in, and they don't have any other copy to choose from? You can see how that might migrate into this when they make their copy.
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It might migrate in.
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So you can see how what we call a scribal amendation might make its way in, or a scribal note might make.
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If you look at, and you can get high-resolution copies of Codex Sinaiticus online.
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You can go and look at it.
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And that's a 4th century codex written on vellum, so they last quite a bit longer than papyri because they don't wear out like the papyri read would eventually rot and fade.
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But the vellum manuscripts last pretty much forever.
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They're written on animal skins.
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You can see notes in the margin.
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Sometimes the note is a scribal error.
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Sometimes it's a textual note.
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Would you know which should be in and which wouldn't? And that's part of the process of textual criticism, is knowing if you had 50 manuscripts, and 50 of them didn't have that, and the one did, then you'd know it wasn't there.
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But if you only had one, how many manuscripts did the King James translators have? Around...
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Yeah, around a dozen.
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Less than 12, yeah, around a dozen.
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That's how many manuscripts they're working from, versus today.
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We're working from so many more and so much more of a broader collection.
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And that's why we call this, usually it's referred to as the eclectic text because it's a bringing together of several thousand manuscripts versus just the few that were available to the King James translators.
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Does that mean they did a bad job? No, they did a fantastic job with what they had.
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But anyway, we didn't really get to what I wanted to get to, and pretty much time is gone.
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But let me just finish with this.
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Next week we are going to look at these more, and we're going to actually get into, I've been promising it, we're going to get into looking at different things that people claim are errors.
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We've got a whole list of things where people ask the question of, is this an error, is this a contradiction, is this a place where the Bible's wrong? And we're going to look at those.
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But very quickly, if you just look at this sheet, obviously these sort of make sense.
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Complete inerrancy, limited inerrancy, inerrancy of purpose or inerrancy, or the irrelevancy of inerrancy.
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Those are the four things that you've got to kind of keep in mind when you're talking to somebody because somebody might say, well the Bible's inspired, but I don't believe it's inerrant.
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Because they might say, well, I believe it's inerrant when it talks about certain things, but not everything.
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I think it's inerrant when it talks about God loving the world, but I don't think it's inerrant when it talks about Moses having seen a burning bush, or Noah taking two of every kind on the ark.
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Right? I just don't think that was inerrant.
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That's the limited and inerrancy of purpose, they're sort of similar.
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And then the last one is, and you can read this on your own, David Hubbard's position is that it's just irrelevant, it's not an issue, because, you know, we should have a positive view, not a negative view.
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But I would of course, and I'm sure many of you would take the first position, and that is that the Bible is completely inerrant, and it's fully true in all that it affirms.
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And that's my preferred way of saying it.
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And I'll sort of finish with this.
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People say, do you believe the Bible's inerrant? I'll say yes, but I prefer to say, I believe the Bible is true in everything that it says.
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And that's saying the same thing.
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But again, one is a positive statement, one is a negative statement.
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To say it's inerrant, is to say it doesn't have any errors, and again, you're starting with the negative.
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So I just say the Bible's true.
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The Bible's not always, the, the, it's not always giving us all the information that we might want.
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And that's why there are times when you might say, well this contradicts this.
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Well, neither one of them are providing all the information that you might want.
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The Bible's not a history book.
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The Bible's not a science book.
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The Bible is not an atlas.
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The Bible is God's revelation of himself, the man.
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And he reveals himself how he chooses.
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And so, if in Matthew, he chooses to reveal that there was a demoniac who was there in the city, the area of the Gadarenes.
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And then you go over to another New Testament book and it says there were two demoniacs.
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And you say, oh wait a minute, is that a contradiction? No.
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Not a contradiction at all.
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Because the information necessary to understand the story is not changed or altered to create a contradiction.
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Just like this, if I said yesterday, we took our daughter and well, we took all of our children to the Christmas made in the South.
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While we were there, Santa was there.
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And so we took Hope, because she was excited.
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She's four years old and we don't make a big deal about Santa at our house.
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It is what it is.
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And she loved it and she was excited and all she wants for Christmas it seems is a candy cane because that's all she keeps saying is I want a candy cane and Santa gave her a candy cane.
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And so that was great.
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We took a picture of her with Santa and it was wonderful.
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Is that a true story? You assume so.
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JJ was also in the picture.
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And so was Santa's wife.
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But by me not mentioning them, does that make the story untrue? So you don't have to have all the information to make something true.
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And that's what we're going to talk about in the weeks ahead about how we understand the quote-unquote apparent problems in the narratives of Scripture.
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So I hope that was helpful.
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And let's pray.
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Father, I thank you again for this time to study.
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May you bless it to our better understanding of you.
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May you bless us as we go to worship you now in Jesus' name.
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Amen.