He Who Promised is Faithful – Hebrews 10:23 | Worship Service | The Vulgar Bible and the Big Picture

Guitar is not on, I don't think. You guys are in for a treat today.

How firm a foundation, he says of the

Lord, is laid for your faith in his excellent word.

What more can you say than to you he has said, to you who for refuge in Jesus hath fled?

Fear not, I am with thee, O be not dismayed, for I am the

God and will still give thee aid. I'll strengthen thee, help thee, and cause thee to stand, upheld by my righteous, omnipotent hand.

Can you turn my microphone down in this monitor, please?

And maybe turn me down a little bit in this monitor up here. Okay, testing one two, is that better?

Okay. When through fiery trials thy pathway shall lie,

Thy grace, all -sufficient, shall be thy supply.

A flame shall not hurt thee, I only design,

Thy cross to consume and thy gold to refine.

A soul that on Jesus hath need for repose,

I will not, I will not, desert to dispose.

That soul, though all hell should never to shake,

I'll never, I'll never, I'll never forsake.

I couldn't hear

Jason very well, but... We could, uh,

I could sing this one, then we'd know. I'd be able to sing on this one.

It's okay, it's okay. Nothing bad, but just don't sing, because we don't want...

His love, vast as the ocean,

Loving kindness of the poor and some,

Shed for us His precious blood. Who His love will know, can cease to sing

His praise. He can never be forgotten,

Throughout heaven's eternal day. Mountains of crucifixion,

Fountains open deep and wide. Through the floodgates of God's mercy,

Flood of rest and gracious tide. Grace and love like mighty rivers,

Poured incessant from above. Heaven's peace and perfect justice,

Kissed a guilty man. Who His love that conquered evil,

Christ the firstborn from the grave. Death has failed to be found equal

To the life of Him who saves. In the valley of our darkness,

Daunt His everlasting light. Perfect love and glorious radiance

Has repelled death's hellish night. You ready to go?

So if you're out in the foyer, come on in and find a seat, and we're gonna get started with adult Sunday school class. All right.

So we have a lot of material to cover this morning, so we're gonna get started. Let's bow our heads. Father, we do ask

Your blessing upon our time here that You would grant us grace and help us to understand how we have received our

Bible, how You have worked through history to give us a Bible in our own language. We thank You in advance for what we're going to learn today as we are going to see how so many have suffered and fought and sacrificed to make having a

Bible in our own language a possibility and a reality. And so we are grateful for those men that You have raised up through church history, and we pray that You would encourage our hearts together today to stand strong in the faith and in the truth and to love

You with hearts that are obedient to Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen. So we are in Lesson 14,

The Vulgar Bible and the Big Picture. In our study here of God Wrote a

Book, Lesson 14, The Vulgar Bible and the Big Picture. And I'm going to give you a brief analysis of what is ahead here in the next few weeks.

So this lesson, if I can get through everything that I want to get through today, which will take us through the history of the

English Bible all the way up to the Reformation, if we can get through all of that history today, then next week we will finish up this lesson.

The week after that I'm going to be gone and Jess Wetzel is going to teach adult Sunday school class.

The week after that is Easter Sunday, so there's no Sunday school. We have breakfast and then the week after that will be our final lesson in God Wrote a

Book and we're going to be looking at modern translations and the philosophy of translation, how we get translations and good translations and bad translations.

We'll be going through all of that in the very last lesson. So that's the schedule ahead this week and next week we'll be looking at the history of the

English Bible. The Bible has been translated into about a third of the 6 ,000 languages in the world.

That accounts for about 90 % of the world's population. By some measures or by some counts, there are 350 different English translations of the

Bible, 350 different English translations, and that doesn't mean that you have 350 different versions of who

Jesus was and what he taught. You understand that a translation is simply a translation from Greek and Hebrew into English and so there are that number of different translations.

Another one just came out and was published recently, the Legacy Standard Bible, which I'm very excited about and I got to look at it this morning because somebody has it.

It's kind of an update of the NASB and we'll be talking about that a little bit in a few weeks when we talk about modern translations.

So I have a huge task ahead of me this morning and that is to take a sweeping look at the history of the English Bible since we speak

English and since the majority of the world speaks English and since English is the predominant language around the world today, what should really concern us is how did history unfold to give us as English -speaking people a

Bible in our own language. And so that's what we're going to be looking at today and there's so much that I have to leave out of this that you're going to feel like you're getting a race car tour of church history and you are.

There's a lot that I've had to leave out but I hope that this will help you to think a little bit more clearly about how it is that you got a

Bible in your own language and also give you an appreciation for those who worked so hard to make that possible.

So to do that, we're going to divide all of church history from the time of the apostles till today, we're going to divide that into three chunks of history, three sections or three sort of divisions.

First, we're going to talk about going from the Greek text to the Latin, from Greek to Latin and that would take us from 90

AD to 405 AD and these are the three major divisions that you have in your notes. From the

Greek to the Latin, that's 90 AD to 405 AD, then we're going to look at from the Latin to the

English which is 405 to basically the Reformation or we might call that the pre -Reformation era and then that's what

I'm hoping to cover today is those first two sections and then the last section will be from the Reformation till today, that history of how we got modern translations and that will be,

Lord willing, next week. So the first is the post -apostolic era from Paul to Jerome, 90

AD to 405, so we're going from Greek to Latin, that's the period of time that we're talking about, four or 500 years there, from the time of the apostles to 405, we're really talking about from the time of Paul to the time of a very significant person named

Jerome. How many of you have heard of Jerome, by the way? And you've heard of Jerome's Latin Vulgate? You're going to learn the history today of Jerome's Latin Vulgate.

First, the age of the apostles, and we covered this in lesson seven and I'm not going to go over this because we've kind of been back and forth with some of these but just to recap very quickly, the

New Testament was authored by apostles and those closely associated with the apostles, those books were immediately regarded as scripture, they were preserved, they were copied and collections were made of them, they were circulated widely so that by the end of the first century we had books that were gathered into collection and even bound together as collections of books that were

New Testament text. And we looked at some of the copying processes and we saw the time and attention that went into the translation or the transmission of manuscripts and then we also looked at some of the ways that copyist mistakes make their way into the text and how those are easily identified and what kind of mistakes were made, we covered all of that.

After the lifetime of the apostles, so this is post -100 AD, after the lifetime of the apostles,

Latin became the language of commerce, education, literature and the church. Latin became the common language, it was really the language of the people.

And so with the rise of Latin as sort of the international language of commerce, remember that Greek had been the international language of commerce and trade and education up to that point but Latin soon became the language that everybody spoke and used, there was the need for the scriptures to be put into what they called the language of the people which was

Latin. Now today, Latin is a language that is deader than Custer's horse but in 400,

Latin was the language of the day, everybody spoke it. So there was a need for the scriptures to be put into the language of the people particularly for worshiping and for preaching, something that everybody spoke because very few people spoke or read

Hebrew and Greek but almost everybody spoke and read Latin. So that need for a book or the copy of the scriptures to be in the language of the people resulted in various different translation attempts from those

Greek and Hebrew documents, texts into the Latin language and so there were a number of various kinds of Latin translations.

So there were multiple Latin translations that sort of were making their way around the world and this set the stage for the need for one sort of standard

Latin translation that everybody could use and could agree upon and this is where Jerome comes into it.

Jerome, his name is Eusebius Aeronimus, Eusebius Aeronimus, we call him

Jerome, he was born in 345 A .D. in Striden in Dalmatia. At the age of 12, he was sent by his parents to Rome to study

Latin, grammar, Greek and the Latin classics and he concentrated his education on rhetoric which is the speaking aspect of education and he was really intent and designed his education to pursue a career as a lawyer or as a civil servant.

Originally, he was nominally a Christian up until after he got out of college and then he had a dream in which he saw himself being condemned by God for his lack of devotion.

So Jerome devoted the rest of his life to study scripture. He became a Syrian hermit and he lived in the desert and he studied

Hebrew under the guidance of a Christian Jew. Jerome was one of the very few and we talk about very few,

I mean very, very few Christians who could speak Latin, Greek and Hebrew and who understood all three of those languages.

So as a secretary and assistant to Bishop Damascus of Rome, he began to work on one official translation or edition of the

Latin Bible. He wanted to translate the Old and the New Testaments into Latin and have sort of a consistent translation that would be widely used and that became his sort of life's goal.

He completed the Old Testament in 405 A .D. and it is suspected that he probably completed the

New Testament as well, though some people suggest that he was probably mostly done with the New Testament when he died and that somebody else finished up the rest of the

New Testament translation into Latin. Jerome was excoriated for daring to come out with a new translation which sought to be more accurate than those that existed.

Everybody already had their translations, their Latin translation that they were familiar with that they had grown up with, right?

And so then somebody comes in and says, I think I can make a better Latin translation and what do you say? It is exactly like the

King James, right? What do you mean better translation? I grew up on this. If my Latin translation was good enough for Jesus and the apostles, it's good enough for us.

How dare you try and come out with a more accurate, more reliable, more dependable, consistent translation. I'm familiar with my

Latin translation. Don't go changing horses midstream. That was kind of how people responded to him. People thought it was arrogant for him to go changing the

Bible. And by the way, that's the very same argument, again, as Nathel pointed out, that King James only advocates used today.

It's the same, whenever a new translation comes along, everybody says, well, what was wrong with the old translations?

And that's sort of the standard go -to objection. So Jerome produced what was the common or the popular

Latin Vulgate. And the word Vulgate comes from the Latin Vulgata, which means common or popular.

It was the common Bible, the popular Bible, and so it was the Vulgata or the Vulgate, or you might say the vulgar

Bible. When you talk about somebody who speaks in vulgar language, you talk about somebody who speaks in the common language, right? That's kind of what the word means there.

The word Vulgate was officially tied to Jerome's translation by the Roman Catholic Church but only as late as 1546 at the

Council of Trent. But by the 6th and 7th century, Jerome's Latin translation had become more popular than the old

Latin. So because it was a consistent and sort of a standard Latin translation because it was widely circulated, people adopted it, and it became the

Bible of the day shortly after Jerome's death. Jerome's work was unique because Jerome's was the first translation to translate from the

Hebrew text and not the Septuagint. Remember a couple weeks ago we talked about what the Septuagint is? It was the Greek translation of the

Old Testament. So there had been other Latin translations of the Old Testament, but they were Latin translations from the

Greek Septuagint, which was a translation from the Hebrew Old Testament. So Jerome's was the first Latin translation to translate directly from the

Hebrew Old Testament into Latin, which means that it was probably easier for him to clean things up. The wording would have been a little bit different, and it might have taken people a little longer to warm up to that translation since it would have been different than the translations into Latin previously.

There were some later revisions of Jerome's work. As is common with any translation or edition, it went through various improvements and additions because no translation comes right off of the printers, and Jerome's didn't come off the printing press, by the way.

It would have been handwritten. You understand that. The printing press doesn't come in for another thousand years. But Jerome's translation, when it's first issued, would have had probably spelling mistakes and language mistakes, et cetera.

So there were revisions and cleanups of that translation made. There was a significant revision. It was published in 1227 by Stephen Langton.

That name may sound familiar, but it might not to you. Stephen Langton is the one who eventually added chapter divisions to the

Scriptures, and that, remember, came in 1227. So that's the story of Jerome's Latin Vulgate.

Here are a few things to understand about the significance of the Vulgate. The Latin Vulgate accounts for 10 ,000 of our ancient manuscripts, 10 ,000 of our ancient manuscripts.

So a large portion of our manuscripts of the New Testament from that time period are in the

Latin. The most important translation, the Vulgate, was the most important translation ever made next to the

Septuagint. It was the most influential because it put the Bible in the hands of the common man and was the

Bible of the people for the next 10 centuries. For 1 ,000 years, Jerome's Bible was the Bible of the people in the

Latin. After 1 ,000 years, it would be translated into other languages of the people eventually.

Yeah, Rick? Latin comes from the

Roman language? No, I don't know. Where does Latin come from? I don't know. Does anybody know the answer to that?

What the origins of Latin language are? No. Good question. Google will know.

Google knows everything I don't and some of the things that I do. The Latin Vulgate is also the first book of importance to be printed by movable type.

In 1456, Johann Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany, printed the Gutenberg Bible, and that was a printed copy of Jerome's Latin Vulgate.

Yes? According to Google. According to Google. And Peter's going to Google the rest of that and let us know what that stuff means.

So the Latin Bible published by Gutenberg was a beautiful edition, a beautiful printed edition of Jerome's Latin Vulgate.

The Latin Vulgate is the official Bible of the Roman Catholic Church even today. Any translation that Rome authorizes must be based on the

Latin Vulgate. In other words, Rome is not concerned that it be translated from Greek and Hebrew, but it must be translated from the

Latin Vulgate and based off of that. So Rome will not authorize any translation that comes from Greek or Hebrew, only the

Latin. And thus, the Roman Catholic authorized Bibles are translations of a translation.

See, people charge Protestants with, your Bible, you read, it's just translation of translation of translation of translation.

Actually not. We've covered this before. Our Bibles are a translation of the original documents, Greek and Hebrew. Now, the Roman Catholic Bible is a translation of a translation.

It is a translation into English off of the Latin Vulgate, which is a translation from Greek and Hebrew. All right, any questions about that before we move on?

Yes, Ken. Yeah, there are still some

Roman Catholic churches that do the entire service in Latin. Some very strict, strict conservative

Roman Catholic churches still do all of their service in Latin. So I don't know when that would have officially changed.

Okay. Yep, Greg says Vatican II. All right. Let's talk about the pre -Reformation era from Jerome to Tyndale, and that's 405 to 1525.

405 to 1525. So this covers our, the history of our

Bible from Latin to English. So we've gone from Greek to Latin, and now we're talking about the period of time when the

Bible started to be translated into English. There were a number of incomplete attempts to translate the

Bible into English, and many different men tried to translate it and translated parts of the

Bible into English, but there was never a concerted effort to make Scripture available to the masses for quite a number of years, and the masses could not read

Scripture. Once Latin started to die out and English started to take its place and Christians started, you started to have

Christians in other languages, if you couldn't read Latin, you were cut off. If you couldn't read Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, you would be cut off from God's Word.

So the people did not have books in their own possession, and the church, over the course of that thousand years, the church came to be seen and treated as if it were the translator of the

Bible, so that you had the priest who would take the Scriptures and he would tell you what it meant and he would translate it for you, because people just didn't have the

Bible in their own language. People didn't have access to those documents. Remember, we're still, when we're talking about between 480 and 1 ,000, or 1 ,400, up to the

Reformation, you're still talking about a period of time in which anything that you had in your possession, there was no such thing as a photocopier or a printing press, all you had was a handwritten document, and so getting ahold of a

Bible was a very difficult task, because there just were not a lot of handwritten copies of Scripture available, because every copy had to be hand transcribed, had to be handwritten.

There were a number of notable attempts to translate the Bible into English in 676 A .D.

Caedmon, who was an illiterate monk, retold portions of the Scripture in Anglo -Saxon, which is

Old English, and he was known for putting Scripture to rhyme and song and teaching it to the masses. There was a band, a

Christian band some years ago called Caedmon's Call, and that's where they get their name from, Caedmon. That was 676.

And by the way, how many of you, well, if you went to school before probably 1990, you would have been exposed to Old English, Anglo -Saxon

English style, right? It was very unreadable to us in our modern tongue. Yeah, Beowulf, that was another one.

I was just thinking about that one this morning. In 709, Aldhelm was the first bishop of Shearbourne in Dorset.

He began to translate Scripture into English. He's said to have translated the

Psalms in 735. Beatty translated portions of Scripture into Old English. He finished the

Gospel of John on his deathbed in 735. In 871 to 901,

Alfred the Great, the King of Wessex, translated portions of Exodus, Psalms, and Acts. The Wessex Gospels are the first example of a translation of the

Gospels into Old English, and those were dated after the death of Alfred in the 10th century. In the 900s,

Elpharick, an abbot of Eynsham in Oxfordshire, translated seven books of the

Old Testament, and from the year 676 to 1200, there were select people who translated only parts of the

Bible, and all were translated from the Latin Vulgate and not the Hebrew and Greek. So all the efforts up to about 1200 to translate the

Bible into English were attempts to translate from Jerome's Latin Vulgate into the

English language and most of those Old English languages. Masses of the people were illiterate and were treated to romanticized versions of Scripture and truth with legend mixed in for popular consumption.

That was kind of what people had available to them. William Tyndale later complained that the masses knew more about Robin Hood than they did about the

Bible. So those were the incomplete attempts to translate into English.

So up until 1200, you basically had portions, various portions, in different styles of English cropping up as people attempted to translate from, again, the

Latin Vulgate into English. Now there are some successful English translations, and I'm not going to introduce you to these men, but we're going to cover three men,

John Wycliffe, Desiderius Erasmus, and William Tyndale. Those are the three men we want to look at who made successful English translations.

John Wycliffe first. He is referred to as the morning star of the Reformation, and he lived from 1324 to 1384.

Wycliffe was born at a time of almost national and international misery. When Wycliffe was born, there was a plague that killed 200 people a day in London alone.

That's slightly more than the coronavirus is killing today. 200 people a day in London alone.

Not worldwide. In London alone, 200 people a day were dying. And there were two rival popes who were competing for power and influence.

And Wycliffe in his day saw the same abuses of Roman Catholic monks and Roman Catholic priests that Martin Luther would later identify, and Wycliffe attacked and criticized the wandering friars who robbed people of their money and deceived them.

He wrote against the abuses and the errors of Rome, and he, John Wycliffe, survived every attempt that Rome tried at shutting him down and quieting him.

He survived all of them because they were trying to silence them. But Wycliffe at one time wrote this. The chief cause beyond doubt of the existing state of things is our lack of faith in Holy Scripture.

It is God's pleasure that the books of the old and new law should be read and studied. Well, for that, you needed an

English translation of the Bible. If the people were to read and study God's Word, they needed an

English translation of the Bible. So he decided to translate the Bible into English, and his team of translators set out with three goals in producing the

Bible into English, and these are at the top of page... I don't know what page it is, but their decision to translate the Bible into English.

The first goal was to test and correct the doctrine of the church. Wycliffe wanted the Bible into the

English language so that people could read what Scripture said and then compare it to what he saw going on in the church.

And the result of that, of course, would be not only questioning that authority and questioning the doctrine of the Catholic church, but also an attempt to probably reform that, even though Wycliffe wouldn't have used the term reform in the same way that we would today.

So his goal was to test and correct the doctrine of the church, and you can imagine how well received that was by the church. The second goal was to anchor men's experience in the truth, because up to that time, a lot of the people who traveled the countryside telling stories of the

Bible and relaying what Scripture said would impose upon Scripture all kinds of legends and superstition and traditions and the teachings of the priesthood of the church.

Well, Wycliffe wanted to produce a translation that would anchor men's experience and their thinking in Scripture and not in what they were told by those who taught them

Scripture. And the third was to lead men and women to faith in Christ. Wycliffe completed his

English translation from the Latin Vulgate in 1384. So again, Wycliffe's translation comes from the

Latin Vulgate into English, not going back to Greek and Hebrew, but from the Latin. Here are a few notes concerning Wycliffe's translation.

Its first edition was a literal word -for -word translation, and subsequent editions of Wycliffe's translation attempted to make the

Bible more readable. Sometimes when you translate word -for -word, it's not exactly readable, simply because translating word -for -word from one language into another language is not always easy.

And we're going to talk about this in a few weeks. There are different ways of translating ideas and words, and you can try and be really literal word -for -word, or you can try and catch the idea, ideas -for -idea, and there's sort of a spectrum of translation philosophies there.

Well, his attempt at first was to be very word -for -word, which didn't make it real readable when going from Latin into English. So subsequent editions, he tried to smooth that out a little bit and correct some of the language, make it more readable.

Wycliffe's translation prompted men who were influenced by his translation to preach, and so they would go throughout England and Wales, and they would have a copy of Wycliffe's translation in their hand, and these preachers were called lollards.

Have you ever heard of the lollards? These preachers were called lollards, which meant mumblers. That was sort of the name that people gave to these preachers.

They're mumblers. I would prefer, by the way, that none of you ever refer to me as a lollard. For the first time, the

Englishman had a Bible in his own tongue. The entire Bible in his own tongue for the first time. This is in 1384.

It took that long for that to happen. There were no printing presses at the day, so every copy of Wycliffe's translation had to be copied by hand, again.

Amazingly, there are 20 copies of Wycliffe's translation, 20 copies of the whole Bible that survive until today, only 20, and there are 90 copies of Wycliffe's New Testament that have survived until today.

We must understand Wycliffe's influence on the Reformation. Without the Bible and the common language of the people, there could never be popular support for reforming the church.

Without Wycliffe's influence, this is why he's called the Morning Star of the Reformation, without Wycliffe's influence in getting the

Bible into the language of the people so they could read Scripture for themselves, Martin Luther would have had nothing out of which to launch the

Protestant Reformation, but when people had Scripture in their own tongue and they could read that, and then they could look at what they were being taught and what was going on in the church, they could say, this is not right.

Something is wrong here. This is steeped in tradition and mysticism and paganism, and we need to correct this, and that was what

Luther was trying to do with the Protestant Reformation, and without Wycliffe's translation, his job would have been much more difficult.

People could now, for the first time, see the truth and confront the error in the doctrines and the practices. Well, how did the Roman Catholic Church respond to Wycliffe translating

Scripture into the language of the people? In 1394, they issued a bill to Parliament forbidding anyone to read the

Bible in English without a bishop's license. Eventually, in 1408, it became illegal to read or translate into English without the permission from a bishop.

The Archbishop of Canterbury wrote to the Pope describing Wycliffe as quote, this pestilent and wretched

John Wycliffe of cursed memory that son of the old serpent, close quote. That tells you how the

Archbishop of Canterbury felt about Wycliffe. Making the Bible available to the people was considered by the leadership of the church as casting pearls before swine, because they felt that the

Bible was not given to the people, it was given to the church to distribute and to interpret. So the church moved between 1401 and 1409 to burn at the stake those who were guilty of heresy and what was the heresy?

Anyone found translating a Bible into English or reading a Bible in English was burned at the stake.

In fact, Wycliffe was so hated by the Roman Catholic Church that 40 years after his death, they exhumed his bones and burned them for heresy.

Any questions about Wycliffe? That's all real fun stuff, isn't it? Desiderius Erasmus He was a

Roman Catholic priest and Greek scholar. You may remember his name because there is an infamous series of letters written between Martin Luther and Desiderius Erasmus over the issue of the

Reformation and the issue of the will of man and its part in salvation and regeneration.

So Desiderius Erasmus, he lived at the time of Martin Luther. He was a Roman Catholic priest and a

Greek scholar. He used five Greek texts and produced an English, sorry, he used five

Greek texts and produced a Greek edition of the New Testament. Erasmus had one copy of Revelation to use in producing his

Greek edition of the New Testament and that one copy that he had of the book of Revelation was missing the last page.

So Desiderius Erasmus did something interesting. He took the Latin, Jerome's Latin Vulgate of that last page of Revelation and he translated the

Vulgate back into Greek. He had nothing to check it against.

In the process, Erasmus made up 24 Greek words out of whole cloth which are still in the

Textus Receptus to this day. Erasmus ended up publishing a new

Greek edition of the New Testament and he dedicated it to Leo X who eventually excommunicated Martin Luther and he also published a more accurate

Latin translation of the New Testament in 1516. Now, providentially also around the same time as Desiderius Erasmus in 1476,

William Caxton set up a printing press by Westminster Abbey. In 1490, a paper mill was established in England.

In 1511, Erasmus arrived in Cambridge and at the same time, scholars fled to the West from Byzantine Empire and brought with them priceless

Greek texts. So, just look at how history is unfolding. Before Erasmus lands before Erasmus lands in Westminster in that area, there was a printing press established a paper mill produced and then because of persecution, a bunch of scholars bring all of their

Greek manuscripts west from the Byzantine Empire into Erasmus' area so that he would have all of these

Greek texts and there would be a printing press and a paper mill nearby. How providential is that?

So, as much as I probably suspect that Erasmus was not a believer certainly was not favorable to Reformation doctrines like Martin Luther taught, but by the providence of God, God used

Erasmus to publish a Greek edition of the New Testament and a more accurate translation of the

Latin Vulgate. In 1516, Erasmus was ready to print his Greek New Testament.

He produced five different editions and one found its way to Wittenberg and to Martin Luther. That text, which

Erasmus produced became known as the Received Text or the Textus Receptus and that is the basis of the

King James translation. The Textus Receptus was used by Tyndale in his translation and used also by Martin Luther.

The motive that Erasmus had was to have the original text in the original language available to all men.

So what was Erasmus' desire? To simply have a really good Greek text available for all scholars to read original

Greek. So they wouldn't have to search for different various manuscripts but to publish an entire

Greek New Testament so that everybody could have access to the New Testament in its original tongue. There were other translations from other languages from the

Vulgate before 1500 and I bring up Erasmus simply because his work of publishing the Greek New Testament paved the way for Tyndale to do what he did as well as it paved the way for Martin Luther to have access to those documents so that Luther could produce his translation and also be sort of the driving force of the steam engine behind the

Protestant Reformation. Now there were other translations into other languages from the

Vulgate before the time of Desiderius Erasmus, that is before 1500. In 1466

Germany got a translation 1471 Italy 1474 France 1474

Bohemia 1477 Holland and by 1500 Spain. So you can see that in the last part of the 1400s there was this push to translate from the

Latin Vulgate into all of these various languages, German, French, Italian, Bohemian Holland, whatever they speak and Spanish.

Luther produced his German translation from Erasmus' Greek text in 1522. So any questions about Desiderius Erasmus before we go on to William Tyndale?

Going to see how God is working through history to put all these pieces in place? Now up until now we still do not have a single

English translation of your Bible from the original Greek and Hebrew. They've been translated from Jerome's Latin Vulgate.

That was the standard at the time. It was very difficult to find men who could read all of those various languages and be fluent enough and have the ability to translate.

And along comes William Tyndale born in 1494. Now you can see that Tyndale and Luther and Erasmus these men are all living around the same period of time, right prior to the

Reformation. William Tyndale he is known as the father of the English Bible. He produced the first English translation from Greek and Hebrew.

This is why he is called the father of the English translation. He produced the first English translation of the Bible out of the original

Greek and Hebrew, not relying upon Jerome's Vulgate. Tyndale was a graduate of Oxford University.

He was trained for the priesthood and he came to faith in Christ early in life. He decided that he wanted to give the

Englishman a Bible in his own language which was easy to read. He worked to study the Greek text that was published by Erasmus in 1516.

In 1521 he arrived in Glaucus Cheshire which they make a great marinating sauce by the way to tutor two children of Sir John and Lady Walsh.

While he was in Glaucus Cheshire he debated a priest who maintained, this priest said quote, we would be better without God's laws than the

Pope's, close quote. Well of course this just got under Tyndale's skin to which he replied quote,

I defy the Pope and all his laws if God spare my life or any years I will cause a boy that drives a plow to know more of the scripture than thou dost, close quote.

And this was Tyndale basically going public with his intention to translate the Bible into the English language and to make it available.

Besides the English language Tyndale was a master of six other languages including

Greek and Hebrew. So Tyndale was a master of French, Greek, Hebrew, German, Italian, Latin, Spanish, and English.

What are you doing with your life? I haven't even mastered English. I struggle to come up with Glaucus Cheshire and that's a completely

English word. So Tyndale set out to translate the

New Testament into English from the Greek and the Hebrew and remember how well England received Wycliffe's work? How excited the church was that Wycliffe did what he did?

So while Tyndale had to move out of England to print his Bible so he moved to Hamburg, Germany where he completed his translation.

In 1525 his Bible came off the press of Peter Quintel in Cologne, Germany and enemies of the

Reformation quickly made efforts to kill Tyndale. So remember the Reformation started in 1517, that's

Martin Luther nailing the 95 Theses to the door in Wittenberg. That started in 1517. 1525 is the publication of Tyndale's first edition of the

Scriptures. So Tyndale eventually fled to Worms in Germany, a city that was friendly to the

Reformation where he finished printing the New Testament and early in 1526 Bibles were smuggled into England and they were bought up by people with enthusiasm.

There was, as you can imagine, a lot of opposition to Tyndale. Officials of the Roman church publicly burned and confiscated copies of his

Bible and the church actually collected money to buy up all the incoming copies that he was having shipped across the sea into England.

Bishop Tungstall of London ordered Tyndale's Bibles to be burned on October 15th, sorry,

October 24th, 1526 and here is what he said, quote, The Holy Gospel of God was in the common tongue and intermingled with certain articles of heretical depravity and pernicious, erroneous opinions, pestilent, scandalous and seductive of simple minds, of which translation many books containing the pestilent and pernicious poison in the vulgar or common tongue have been dispersed in great numbers throughout our diocese, which truly unless it be speedily foreseen will without doubt infect and contaminate the flock committed to us with the pestilent poison and the deadly disease of heretical depravity, close quote.

That's how he felt about Tyndale's book. There's something else that we can tell from that quotation.

That is that a thesaurus was obviously published quite a little bit before that was said. Booksellers were warned about receiving and selling

English Bibles and Lutheran books and whether the books were in English or Latin, they were prohibited from buying or selling them.

One example, an old laborer by the name of Harding was found reading his New Testament out by the woods and his house was plundered and under the floorboards more copies of Tyndale's book were discovered.

Harding was hurried to prison and finally burnt at the stake. Tyndale's Old Testament, a note about that, while the church was opposing his

New Testament in English, he set out to translate the Old Testament. In 1530 he published the

Pentateuch. In 1531 he published the book of Jonah. In 1534 he revised Genesis.

In 1534 he published two more editions of the New Testament. So he was busy. The man was busy.

Tyndale promised a revision of his New Testament and between 1525 and 1530 he worked on it moving from city to city while he was often hunted by as many as five different government agents.

The closing years of Tyndale's life were miserable. He was hunted, hated, and pursued. He makes reference to, quote, my pains, my poverty, my exile out of my natural country and bitter absence from my friends, my hunger, my thirst, the great danger wherewith

I am everywhere encompassed and innumerable other hard and sharp fightings which I endure, close quote.

In 1535 Tyndale was betrayed by a Judas -like friend and he was arrested and imprisoned in Vilvoord Castle near Brussels.

In 1536 he was strangled and then burned at the stake and his dying prayer was, Lord, open the king of England's eyes.

You can see next week how that ended up being fulfilled. Yeah, that was cancel culture at its worst.

Yes, that's right. Now here's some notes on Tyndale's Bible. Tyndale's New Testament was not without its flaws.

There was no correct standard of spelling so even the word it was spelled seven different ways in his original

New Testament. It, I -T, even the word it was spelled seven different ways.

I'm not the best speller but I'm not nothing near that. Yes? Oh, could it be that he knew so many languages and a little bleeding in of the other influences?

I don't know how that is. I know that prior to there was no standardized way of spelling

English words as you're going to see here in a moment. There was no standardized way of spelling a number of English words. And so, because the printing press had not, it really took the printing press and the publication and the widespread use of books with certain spellings to standardize the way that words would be spelled.

You understand phonetically how English doesn't follow a lot of the rules and even its own rules often times.

We have rules for the rules that we have of rules in English and so it would take a while for there to be any kind of a standard like that.

Yeah, different ways of spelling things, yep. So Tyndale achieved his goal which was to produce a

Bible in the English that a boy at the plow could read. That was his goal. It was his life goal and he ended up doing that.

It was Tyndale who established the Bible It was Tyndale who established that the Bible should be in the common tongue of the people so that everybody would have access to it.

He coined a number of English words and this just goes to the genius, the brilliance of William Tyndale.

He coined a number of English words that had never existed before. The word Passover, the word scapegoat, mercy seat, and long suffering were words that Tyndale coined, created,

English words he created for his English translation. Some phrases we have only because Tyndale had an ear for language.

You know what an ear for language is? It's that ability to put something into words in a certain way that just kind of rolls off the tongue and is easy to understand and easy to hear.

Tyndale had that ear for language. There are a number of phrases in your New Testament and phrases that we use in English all the time that come out of Scripture that could have been translated otherwise but because of Tyndale's ear for the language, his ability to translate and his sort of giftedness with the

English language we have a number of those phrases today. Let me give you some examples. The phrase salt of the earth from Matthew 5 .13

that could have been translated otherwise. Salt of the earth. That kind of rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? It's in your vernacular.

The word daily bread or the words daily bread the phrase twinkling of an eye from 1 Corinthians 15 .52 the pleasures of sin for a season

Hebrews 11 the phrase let there be light, the powers that be my brother's keeper a law unto themselves filthy lucre, it came to pass gave up the ghost the signs of the times the spirit is willing fight the good fight knock and it shall be open to you a moment in time.

Those were all phrases created by Tyndale and included in his New Testament. You can just hear how those phrases worked their way into our

English vernacular so that even people who are unfamiliar with scripture have heard these phrases, right? Which is part of our culture.

Well, those are the creations of William Tyndale. He heavily influenced the King James Version as 90 % of the 1611 authorized version was copied almost straight from Tyndale's revision of 1534.

In the year of Tyndale's death, one writer wrote with little exaggeration every man hath a testament in his hand.

So then you can see there an example of Tyndale's writings of the New Testament as it would read under letter

G there. The example of Tyndale's Bible, that's 1 Corinthians 13, but you can see how the text reads and looks different.

The spellings, the language and everything is a bit different in his English from the 1300s. Sorry, from the 1500s.

1300s, I'm thinking of Wycliffe. So, that on my computer, the spell check just went crazy with that, those three paragraphs there.

But that's Tyndale's translation. Any questions about William Tyndale? Yes, Nathel.

Due rhymes, we're going to cover that next week, actually. Yep, no, that's okay. We will cover the history of that next week.

Yep, any other questions? Well, I actually got done quicker than I thought. I thought it was going to take another seven minutes to go through that.

But we made it from the time of the apostles up to the time of the Reformation. So, to just quickly recap, we have gone from the time of Paul to the time of Jerome.

That's our first sort of section of church history. From Paul to Jerome, which is from Greek to the Latin Vulgate.

Then we went from the time of Jerome up to the time of William Tyndale or Martin Luther, and really that covers the going from the

Latin into English. And so now, as we end up right just after the beginning of the

Protestant Reformation, we have the first translation of the English Bible, the first English translation of the

Bible that is not from the Latin Vulgate that is from the original Greek and the original Hebrew.

And that thanks to, basically the work of three men, John Wycliffe, Desiderius Erasmus, and William Tyndale.

The Morning Star of the Reformation is Wycliffe, and the Father of the English Bible is William Tyndale. Okay? Any further questions?

Alright, let's pray. And we'll pick it up next week. Father, we thank you for your grace, and we thank you for how you have worked in history.

It is truly amazing, your providence and how you have brought so many various moving parts together to give us

Scripture. And you have worked through history for your own glory and for the sake of your people, so we are grateful that we stand today with so many copies of your

Word available to us, so many translations of your Word available to us, and so many original documents or copies of original documents that have been made available to us.

We are drowning in a sea of wealth in terms of your Word, and so we're just grateful for that.

We praise you for doing it, and we pray that you would make us lovers of your Word and lovers of your truth for the sake of Christ our

Lord. Amen. ...

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... To remove this raiment

And drink strand I contend with these ghosts

And these hosts of bright angels Hosanna Cursed the man that you have made me

And I have nursed the beast That bathes from my blood Save me, save me

Hosanna, Hosanna King, come to set his people free

We cry, raise it up on holy ground

Hosanna, Hosanna We take your life,

Hosanna We take your life

Beneath your heel, the vile serpent

You have carried to the grave the black stain You have torn apart the temple's holy curtain

You have beaten death with death's own game Hosanna, Hosanna Hosanna, Hosanna Hosanna Blood of Jesus, it is like the widow's womb

It's enough to pay the price to set you free It can fill up every jar and every heart that ever beat

When it's all you have, it's all you'll ever need When it's all you have, it's all you'll ever need

Blood of Jesus, it is like the leper's river Running humble, cannot see

Seven times go under, let the water

Closer than I grow Jesus, it is like Elijah's fire

Forever sparked this flame

Eat it Closer than I grow Much I need

Closer than I grow Jesus, it is like the widow's oil

When it's all you have, it's all you'll ever need It is all you'll ever need

I give you praise, oh great invisible God For the moon in the space of a dark night

For the smile on a face in the sunlight I give you praise, oh great invisible

God For the sound of the storm on the window

For the morning adorned with a new snow For the tears on the face of the old man

Made clean by the grace of the good land Invisible God Your face invisible, invisible

God All the works that you have made Are clearly seen in plain as day

So mighty and tender, oh Lord let me

Invisible God And long to see your face invisible, invisible

God All the works that you have made Are clearly seen in plain as day

So mighty and tender, Lord eternal

Your nature, devotion tells the tale

That love is real and so alive I feel you, I hear you, great

God unseen I see you, invisible

God The cold death the winter brings

And the sweet resurrection Sweet invisible

God And beside you,

Hosea, Hosea I hear the sound of the streets of the city I was like a hungry cow till my belly is full

Hosea, my heart is a storm And when

I say I'm sorry, Hosea, Hosea I tell you that my love is true

Till it fades away like a morning dew Hosea, just leave me alone

I have trouble, just look as far as I can see

There's no one here but me,

Hosea I stumbled and fell in the road on the way home,

Hosea Hosea, I lay in the brick street like a stray dog

He came to me like a silver moon With the saddest smile I ever knew

Hosea, carried me in the mess that I made

A barren place where nothing can grow as green as jade

I swear it was the color of hope He turned a stone into a rope

Hosea, Hosea I danced like I did as a young girl,

Hosea Hosea, I am a slave in a heart like no one Like a summer rain and you set me free with that ball and chain

Hosea, it knocked me down, it dragged me out

And left me there for dead It took all the freedom I wanted

Gave me something else instead Blew my mind, it bled me dry

It hit me like a long goodbye Nobody here knows better than I that it's a good thing

Love is a good thing It'll fall like rain on your parade

Laugh, tear you down till your heart just breaks

And it's a good thing Love is a good thing It'll wake you up in the middle of the night

It'll take just a little too much It'll burn you like a cinder till you're tender to the touch

It'll chase you down and swallow you whole It'll make your blood run hot and cold like a thief in the night

It'll steal your soul and that's a good thing Love is a good thing

It'll follow you down to the ruins of the great divide Oh, but love is a good thing

And isn't it? Ooh, take cover

Do not break your will, it'll change your mind

Loose all the chains to the ties that bind And if you're lucky, you'll never make it out alive

And that's a good thing Love is a good thing Blast from a hand grenade

When all that used to matter is blown away There in the middle of the mess it made

You'll find a good thing Yes, it's worth every penny of the price you pay

It's a good thing Love is a good thing Ooh, take cover

Love is a good thing Ooh, take cover

The road is long that leads me home tonight

It disappears into the distant light, my love I'm just a man, always love you the best that I can, my love

Don't give up on Don't give up on Don't give letters that I never did write

All this affection I kept inside my heart Don't give up on Don't give up on Don't give up on Don't give up on my fist in the sky

You were there when I fell to the earth And felt just like we died

And rose again The storm inside was raging

It was howling like the wind at the Pentecost And his love was teaching us a language

We thought Been made clean

Hide you in the canyon flames Deep as an ocean and hot as a thousand suns

We barely survived Voices in the rooms where the children run

The iron central explosion

Stands so tall and so serene So serene

Got two little boys and a girl And we were first in line just to see the show

To count down the seconds as destiny beckons Into the arms of the astral glow

And we're gonna see a rocket We're gonna see a rocket Last through the last of the atmosphere

Drift in an airless ocean In a bliss of mystical motion

I am stuck down here Stuck down here

Just look at the ground on the grassy hill It'll lift you up but it holds you still

Cause gravity binds us, glory defines us A greater pull of a perfect will

And they say the ground is gonna quake and crumb They say the sound's gonna shake my bones

It's so full of meaning, alive and careening Into the grace of the great unknown

And we're gonna see a rocket We're gonna see a rocket Last through the last of the atmosphere

Up and away to the great wide open airless ocean

In a bliss of mystical motion I am stuck down here

East of the moon

Saw the rocket rise in a fiery hue To fight destruction, to ride the eruption

I have found as much is true Bliss ocean

In a bliss of mystical motion I have found as much is true

Oh you're sitting at the movies Watching how the story finds

And when you've seen it all before Still you love to see the heroes save the day

It's a window in the world A little glimpse of all the goodness getting through Moments of truth

Every Sunday morning You can see the people standing in a line

They're so hungry for some mercy For a taste of the communion bread

It's a window in the world

Good morning If you would please stand and join us as we sing

Enter the hallway if you come inside Standing on the promises

Standing on the promises of Christ my King Through eternal ages let

His praises sing For in the highest I will shout and sing

Standing on the promises of God Standing on the promises that cannot fail

When the howling storms of doubt and fear assail By the living word of God I shall prevail

Standing on the promises of God Standing, standing

Standing on the promises of God my Savior Standing, standing

I'm standing on the promises of God What a fellowship, what a joy divine

Leaning on the everlasting arms What a blessedness, what a peace divine

Leaning on the everlasting arms Safe and secure from all alarms

Leaning on the everlasting arms

Are you washed in the blood In the soul cleansing bloodless arm

Made white as snow Are you washed in the blood I'm standing, standing

Standing on the promises of God my Savior Standing, standing

I'm standing on the promises of God Yes, I'm standing, standing

I'm standing on the promises of God Welcome to Kootenai Church this morning

Take this time and greet each other Well good morning everyone

Just a couple of announcements Immediately after our service is the choir practice In this room at the back

If you would like to be part of that Or if you are part of that 12 .15 12 .15

today is the choir practice In the back room there for the Easter Choir And There was something else

Oh, conference registration I needed to make a note of that For our spring equipping conference

With Phil Johnson on the life and legacy of Charles Spurgeon We are capping that at 200 We have 150 people registered for that already

So if you are wanting to be part of that You make sure that you register today or soon And then there's a resurrection morning

Sunday breakfast On April 4th Which is the first Sunday in April And we're going to do a pancake and eggs and ham breakfast

That morning And if you are planning to come to that Please let us know So we can adequately plan for food

And you can sign up on the table that is out in the foyer To let us know how many people are coming with your party

And if you would like to volunteer To be part of that and to help out Talk to Thomas Leo And lastly

We mentioned this or I mentioned this At our annual meeting back in January But you remember if you've been here a while That we had the opportunity to take a tour of the land of Israel And we were making plans to do that We had a number of people who expressed interest in that Upwards of 25 or 30 people

And we had to cancel that obviously Because of all the crazy stuff going on And so we've been able to I've been able to make contact with somebody

Who leads those tours And we have rescheduled that potential tour of Israel It would be

February 8th through the 13th of next year 8th through the 13th

February is the cheapest month of the year to go So if you are interested in going on that tour of Israel I still need to work out details with itinerary

From what I've seen it's better than what we had planned before And so cancelling it may end up indeed being a blessing

February 8th to the 13th And it's a little bit longer time than we had planned before Of quite a few more days than we had planned before And hopefully not much more expensive than what we had planned before So if you're interested in that let me know

Either send me an email or a text or talk to me today after the service So I can put you on a list of people who are interested in that We need to have at least 30 people before we can take that Turn your

Bibles to Psalm 89 Psalm 89 This is a longer scripture reading this morning

As I have said before the best The most perfect part of any service is the reading of scripture

Certainly not our singing and certainly not the preaching But the reading of scripture And so it delights me often times to be able to take and read a longer section

It's not Psalm 119 long But it is Psalm 89 long Psalm 89

This is a psalm that was written It's a masculine of Ethan to Ezra And it is written reflecting upon God's goodness and His faithfulness

Particularly His covenant with David And His promises to David So you're going to see references to God swearing to David And of course references over and over to God's faithfulness

Psalm 89 And you can remain seated for this longer scripture reading Let's pray, or sorry, let's read

We will pray in a moment, let's read first Psalm 89 I will sing of the loving kindness of the

Lord forever To all generations I will make known your faithfulness with my mouth For I have said loving kindness will be built up forever

In the heavens you will establish your faithfulness I have made a covenant with my chosen

I have sworn to David my servant I will establish your seed forever And build up your throne to all generations

The heavens will praise your wonders, O Lord Your faithfulness also in the assembly of the holy ones

For who in the skies is comparable to the Lord Who among the sons of the mighty is like the

Lord A God greatly feared in the council of the holy ones And awesome above all those who are around Him O Lord God of hosts, who is like you,

O mighty Lord Your faithfulness also surrounds you You rule the swelling of the sea

When its waves rise, you still them You yourself crushed Rahab like one who was slain You scattered your enemies with your mighty arm

The heavens are yours, the earth also is yours The world and all it contains, you have founded them

The north and the south, you have created them Tabor and Hermon shout for joy at your name

You have a strong arm, your hand is mighty Your right hand is exalted Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne

Loving kindness and truth go before you How blessed are the people who know the joyful sound

O Lord, they walk in the light of your countenance In your name they rejoice all the day And by your righteousness they are exalted

For you are the glory of their strength And by your favor our horn is exalted For our shield belongs to the

Lord And our king to the Holy One of Israel Once you spoke in vision to your godly ones

And said, I have given help to one who is mighty I have exalted one chosen from the people I have found

David my servant With my holy oil I have anointed him With whom my hand will be established My arm also will strengthen him

The enemy will not deceive him Nor the son of wickedness afflict him But I shall crush his adversaries before him

And strike those who hate him My faithfulness and my loving kindness will be with him And in my name his horn will be exalted

I shall also set his hand on the sea And his right hand on the rivers He will cry to me, you are my father, my

God And the rock of my salvation I also shall make him my firstborn The highest of the kings of the earth

My loving kindness I will keep for him forever And my covenant shall be confirmed to him So I will establish his descendants forever

And his throne as the days of heaven If his sons forsake my law And do not walk in my judgments

If they violate my statutes and do not keep my commandments Then I will punish their transgression With the rod and their iniquity with stripes

But I will not break off my loving kindness from him Nor deal falsely in my faithfulness My covenant

I will not violate Nor will I alter the utterance of my lips Once I have sworn by my holiness I will not lie to David His descendants shall endure forever

And his throne as the sun before me It shall be established forever like the moon And the witness in the sky is faithful But you have cast off and rejected

You have been full of wrath against your anointed You have spurned the covenant of your servant You have profaned his crown and the dust

You have broken down all his walls You have brought his strongholds to ruin All who pass along the way plunder him

He has become a reproach to his neighbors You have exalted the right hand of his adversaries You have made all his enemies rejoice

You also turned back the edge of the sword And have not made him stand in battle You have made his splendor to cease

And cast his throne to the ground You have shortened the days of his youth You have covered him with shame How long,

O Lord? Will you hide yourself forever? Will your wrath burn like fire? Remember what my span of life is

For what vanity you have created All the sons of men What man can live and not see death?

Can he deliver his soul from the power of Sheol? Where are your Former loving -kindnesses,

O Lord, Which you swore to David in your faithfulness? Remember, O Lord, the reproach of your servants How I bear in my bosom

The reproach of all the many peoples With which your enemies have reproached, O Lord With which they have reproached

The footsteps of your anointed Bless the Lord forever. Amen and Amen Will you stand with me as we pray?

Our Father, you are faithful You are faithful to your word You are faithful to your promises You are faithful to your nature

And by your faithfulness and by your grace You have chosen us and called us and saved us And now you preserve us

And we know that your faithfulness endures From generation to generation It will outlive this world, this earth

And this creation For your faithfulness endures forever And we thank you that because you are faithful We can sing and praise and worship you

We can trust you We can hold fast to the hope you have set before us And we can believe upon your promises

Knowing that you never change And that you always fulfill your word Just as you will fulfill your word to David You will fulfill your word to us

And so it is in you and your great grace That we have placed our hope and our confidence And our trust

We love you and we pray that as we worship and reflect Upon your faithfulness today That you would be honored and glorified in the hearts and the minds

And through the praise of your people Both now and forever We ask this in Christ's name. Amen How firm a foundation

These saints of the Lord Is laid for your faith In his excellent work

What more can he say Than to you he hath said

To you his eyes have known

But this faith

For I am thy God And will still give thee aid I'll strengthen thee

Help thee and cause thee to stand Upheld by my righteous omnipotent hand

When through fiery trials Thy pathway shall lie

My grace all sufficient Shall be thy supply

The flame shall not burn thee I only design

Thy cross to conceal And thy gold to refine

The soul that on Jesus Hath leaned or reposed

I will not, I will not Deserve to expose

That soul Though all hell Should endeavor to shake

I'll never, no ever Never forsake

Worship the

King All glorious above And gratefully sing

His punditful love Our shield and defender

The ancient of days Pavilion in splendor

And girded with praise O tell of his might

O sing of his grace Whose throne is the life

Whose cannot be spaced His chariots of wrath

O 'er the thunder -clouds thorn And dark is his path

On the wings of the storm Thy bountiful care

What tongue can recite It breathes in the air

It shines in the light It streams from the hills

It descends from the plain And sweetly distills

In the dew and the rain O children of dust

And feeble as frail In thee do we trust

Nor find thee to fail Thy mercies how tender

How firm to the end Our maker, defender, redeemer

His greater far Than tongue or highest star

And reaches to its death

His son His airy child

He reckons on And pardoned from His sin

O love of God How rich and pure How measureless

And strong It shall forevermore endure

The saints and angels Stone of time

Shall pass away And earthly thrones

Small rocks and hills

God's love so sure Shall still endure All measureless

And strong Redeeming grace

To Adam's grace The saints and angels

Strong O love of God How rich and pure How measureless

And strong It shall forevermore endure

The saints and angels Strong The ocean filled

And were the skies Of parchment made

Were every star On earth a bus

Drive by train To right the wrong Would drain the ocean dry

Nor could the scroll Contain the whole

Though stretched from sky To sky

O love of God How rich and pure How measureless

And strong It shall forevermore endure

The saints and angels In Psalm 27 1 -3 it says

Yahweh is my light And my salvation Whom shall I fear Yahweh is the strong defense of my life

Whom shall I dread When evil doers came upon me To devour my flesh My adversaries and my enemies

They stumbled and fell Though a host encamp Against me My heart will not fear

Though war arise against me In this I trust The grace of God has reached

For me And pulled me from The raging sea

And stayed on the solid

Ground The Lord is my Salvation His strength will help me

Steal these walls I see the dawn

Of his rising sun The Lord is my Salvation Is like the

Lord A God Strong to save Faithful in love

My debt Is paid And the victory won

The Lord is my Salvation And his praise

Will come The Lord is my salvation In times of loss

When I am weak His grace will

Heal these pains The Lord is my Salvation Is like the

Lord A God Strong to Save faithful In love

My debt Is paid and the victory Won The Lord is my

Salvation Is like the

Lord A God Strong to Save faithful In love

My debt Is paid and the victory Won The Lord is my

Salvation Glory be to God Be to God The Son The Spirit Is my

Salvation Is my

Salvation Is my

Salvation As the ocean

As the flood When the prince Of life our ransom

Shed for us His precious Blood Who his

Love can seize

To sing his Praise He can never

Be forgotten Throughout heaven's Eternal days

Of crucifixion

Fountains Open deep and Wide Through the floodgates

Of God's mercy Flowed a vast And gracious tide

Grace and love Like mighty rivers Poured incessant

From above Heaven's Peace and perfect Justice Kissed a guilty

World in love His love that conquered

Evil Christ the first Born from the grave

Death has Failed to be found Equal to the

Life of him who Saves In the valley of Our darkness

Dawned his everlasting Light Perfect love

And glorious radiance Has repelled Death's hellish night

All measure

Mocked and slain And can never die again

Hear his love For all the ages Radiant son

Of heaven he stands His father's children

With his wounded Hail Vast as the heavens

Countless as The stars above Are the souls

That he has Ransomed Precious daughters Treasured sons

We are called to feast Forever On a love beyond Our time

Glorious father Son and spirit Now with men

Are intertwined Now we turn in your

Bibles to Hebrews chapter 10 Hebrews chapter 10

And we're going to read together verses 19 Through 25 Hebrews 10 beginning of Verse 19 therefore brethren since We have confidence to enter the holy place

By the blood of Jesus by a new And living way which he inaugurated For us through the veil that is

His flesh and since we Have a great priest over the house Of God let us draw near With a sincere heart in full assurance

Of faith having our hearts sprinkled Clean from an evil conscience and our Bodies washed with pure water

Let us hold fast the confession Of our hope without wavering For he who promised is faithful And let us consider how to stimulate

One another to love and good deeds Not forsaking our own Assembling together as is the habit of some

But encouraging one Another and all the more as you see The day drawing near Let's pray before we begin

Father It is now Our desire that you would speak to us through your Word we have sung to you

Our praise and our adoration And expressed our affection And we have spoken of your great attributes

And we pray now that as We look at your word and give our hearts And attention to considering your faithfulness

That you would bless Our time of study in your word help us to see The implications of this great

Glorious doctrine of the faithfulness of Our God and help us to live in light of it And to hold fast to our hope

Without wavering firm into the end Because of it we pray that it may Be a motivation for us and that We may see it as the motivation that it truly

Is be honored here through Our consideration of these things in our time And we pray that your word and the

Preaching of it might bless our hearts and Draw the loss to faith in Christ and edify And equip the believers who

Need to know and who need to be Comforted by the faithfulness of our God We pray this in Christ's name

Amen Well before I begin I need to correct an error that I made Last week and a number of people mentioned this

And were gracious enough to point it out So I need to set the record Straight about something And the only way to do this is just to be blunt about it

Dory was not A clown fish A number of people pointed that out First and foremost some of my own children

Over lunch So I called Dory A clown fish and I blew that, my apologies

She's actually a blue tang Or a royal blue tang or a pacific Sorry, blue tang fish

Scientifically I would refer to it as a paracanthropus hepatus I'd Prefer that name

And you, I'm wondering Jim, how much of your week did you spend trying to get The pronunciation of that right

So that's the scientific name And I would say it again But I stuck the landing on that first time through And I'm not going to try it again

The fish is also known As a surgeon fish Because I have no idea

You wouldn't even think that it would be a good idea to have a fish With that kind of memory operating on anybody But it is called a surgeon fish

So I apparently need to spend more time With Pixar movies in sermon prep That's the lesson we can all learn

Now we are back in verse 23 And we've spent two full weeks now looking at What it means to hold fast

The confession of our hope and how to do so Without wavering And so we did that and we are reviewing this section

That has the three let us phrases The three let us exhortations Let us draw near, let us hold fast

And let us consider how we are to prompt one another To stimulate one another To love and to good deeds

And we are to do this in light of the fact that we have this confidence That we have direct access to God We are to do this in light of the fact that we

Are, have a great high priest Over the household of God And this is to motivate us to draw near to him

To hold fast to the confession of our hope And then to encourage others to do that same thing And drawing near means to hold tight

And we are to hold tight to the confession Remember that objective body of truth That is outside of us, the gospel truth

What we all agree together and confess That results in our salvation, that is what we are to hold fast to That is the grounding of our hope

Which is not a wish It's not a wishful thinking It's not wish casting It's actually a confident expectation that we have

Our hope is something future, primarily We have a future hope, we have a present hope We have an anchor for our soul

Which is our hope that we look forward to And we are anticipating in the future That is our hope

So it's not simply what we just wish for All of that hope that we have is grounded In the person and the work of Jesus Christ What he has done on our behalf

That is our confident expectation We are anticipating it It is certain

And because it is certain You and I are called to hold fast to that Without wavering

And that word means without wavering Without bending or without leaning Or without being inclined

Towards the fashions of the fickle Or the whims of the world We are to stand strong and to hold fast

And to not waver And to not bend and to not compromise That's what we are called to do And that's what we've covered so far

Now, today we need to look at the motivation for this So we've looked at the exhortation Let us hold fast the confession of our hope

Then we have to look at the explanation of that We are to do this without wavering And today then we are looking at the motivation

That we are to do this with For he who promised is faithful And this is the last phrase of verse 23 And we will get through the end of this verse today

We are to do this because God Who has promised is faithful So now the question becomes

How is it that God's faithfulness motivates me To hold fast Because that seems to be the motivation

That he gives here You are to do this for, because The view to the fact that God himself

Who has promised these things, our hope He is faithful So we are to hold fast because he is faithful But this passage seems to be describing

Our faithfulness, does it not? Isn't it our faithfulness that is in view? You are to hold fast without wavering

Doesn't that describe your faithfulness? So how is it that a verse That speaks of my faithfulness

My necessity to be faithful Or the necessity for me to be faithful How is it that that is motivated by the fact that God himself is faithful Because the author holds out the faithfulness of God As a motivation for Our own faithfulness

So verse 23 We are to hold fast because He who promised is faithful I want you to read together with me again verse 23

And I'm going to take this opportunity to take my watch off Because my family is obviously texting me Verse 23

Let us hold fast the confession of our hope Without wavering For he who promised is faithful You are to hold fast

Because he is faithful You are able to be faithful And you are able to hold fast

Because God himself The one who has made the promises himself He is faithful Now we speak and sing of the faithfulness of God Scripture repeatedly affirms the faithfulness of God We read of the repeated affirmations of God's faithfulness

In Psalm 89 And in Psalm 89 That word faithfulness comes up over and over again

As the psalmist reflects upon The degradation of the nation of Israel And yet he looks back to God's faithful promise

And his promise to David And reflects upon the fact that God himself Will be faithful to fulfill everything that he said

To David And the psalmist reflects upon the faithfulness of God As an encouragement for him to have hope

Even in the promises of God Because he who promised is faithful So today we are going to have the opportunity to consider some of the implications

Of this great truth Of God's faithfulness We sing of it, we announce it

We rest upon it And listen, your salvation is dependent upon it Your salvation ultimately

Is not dependent on your ability to be faithful to him Your salvation is dependent upon The willingness and the power

And the nature and character of God To be faithful to what it is That he has promised So this word faithful It comes from a family of words

And related to that is the word belief Or faith or trust When it's describing the act

Of having faith It would be translated as believing Or having faith or trusting

Having faith in something, being faithful When it's used as an adjective as it is here of God It describes being faithful or trustworthy

Somebody who is worthy of trust It doesn't describe somebody who is full of faith It describes somebody

Who is worthy of full faith Think of it that way It's not describing God as being one who himself is full of faith

But it's describing one Who is worthy of our full faith When it is used of sayings

Or sorry the word is used of sayings in the New Testament Like it is a trustworthy Or faithful saying

That if any man aspires to the office of overseer It's a fine work that he desires to do It's used in scripture of people

Paul refers to our faithful brother Timothy In Titchicus Paul refers to a faithful servant

Or a faithful slave It's used of Jesus in the book of Hebrews Who is called a faithful high priest

And it's used of God here in this context That he who promised is faithful Describes one

Not who is himself believing In other words God is not believing That's not what we mean when we say that God is faithful But that rather God is the one who is worthy of our full faith

And worthy of our belief and our confidence And our trust Because he is faithful So God is faithful not in that he is full of faith

And we would describe ourselves as being full of faith But we wouldn't describe God as being full of faith

Or even having faith in the same way That you and I do Because God doesn't have faith There's no one and nothing for God to have faith in He is the sole object of saving faith

And he is the sole one who is faithful In the fullest Scripture repeatedly affirms this truth

Of God's faithfulness And I'm going to read to you a list of verses With a few short comments between some of them

And I just want you And this is just obviously a small sampling Of what Scripture says concerning God's faithfulness

But I want you to hear the repeated Affirmations of God's faithfulness And how the authors of Scripture connect

The faithfulness of God to some of his various promises Psalm 33 verse 4 For the word of the

Lord is upright And all his work is done in faithfulness Psalm 36 verse 5 Your loving kindness,

O Lord, extends to the heavens Your faithfulness reaches to the skies Psalm 54 verse 5

He will recompense the evil To my foes Destroy them in your faithfulness

God's destruction of his enemies Is an expression of his faithfulness Very few

Christians, very few people Put those two things together God's destruction of his enemies Is an expression of his faithfulness

You and I, when God Destroys the wicked, we'll say That is exactly what a loving

And just and righteous and holy And faithful God does He keeps his promises

Because God has promised to destroy those Who will not repent and believe When he destroys them, he will be doing so As an expression of his faithfulness

To his own nature and his own character To his own justice Psalm 91 verse 4

He will cover you with his pinions and under his wings You will seek refuge His faithfulness is a shield and a bulwark

Psalm 100 verse 5 The Lord is good, his loving kindness is everlasting And his faithfulness to all generations

Psalm 119 verse 90 Your faithfulness continues throughout all generations You establish the earth

And it stands The continual repetition of the earthly cycles

The fact that the earth today Stands as it does is an expression Of God's faithfulness 1

Corinthians 119 coming into the New Testament God is faithful through whom you are called Into fellowship with his son Jesus Christ Notice there the calling of God and salvation

As an expression or reflection on God's faithfulness 1 Thessalonians 5 Faithful is he who calls you

And he will also bring it to pass 2 Thessalonians 3 verse 3 But the

Lord is faithful and he will strengthen And protect you from the evil one 2 Timothy 2 verse 13 If we are faithless, he remains faithful For he cannot deny himself

Jesus is called faithful in Hebrews 3 verse 2 He was faithful to him who appointed him As Moses was over all his house

Hebrews 3 verse 6 Christ was faithful as a son Over his house whose house we are

If we hold fast our confidence And the boast of our hope firm until the end Revelation 1 verse 5

Describes Jesus Christ as the faithful witness The firstborn of the dead and the ruler of the kings of the earth Revelation 3 verse 4

To the angel of the church in Laodicea Write the Amen, the faithful and true witness That's Christ Revelation 19 verse 11

And I saw heaven opened And behold a white horse And him who sat on it is called faithful And true

And in righteousness He judges and makes war Do you see the destruction of God's enemies?

It's connected to his faithfulness Your salvation is connected To his faithfulness

His judgment is connected To his faithfulness All his works are done in faithfulness

All of them God cannot be unfaithful because faithfulness Is essential to his nature and character

When we talk about the faithfulness of God What we are talking about is something That is true of God because of all of the sum total

Of all of his other attributes So we don't talk about the faithfulness of God Like we talk about his omniscience or his omnipotence

Or his holiness We don't talk about faithfulness in those terms We talk about faithfulness of God Because the faithfulness of God Is what is true of him because All of the other things are true of him

So for instance God is true And he is truth Because God is righteous and he is perfect And he is omniscient and he is omnipotent

Because he is all wise And because he is eternal Because God cannot lie And because he cannot deny himself

And because he is perfect And because he is immutably perfect That is in his perfection

He cannot and he does not change Since there is no change In God's nature or his character

What we see when we behold God In his attributes is his faithfulness He does not change

His nature does not change His character does not change His purposes do not change His promises do not change

His intentions do not change Our God does not change And so what does that look like to us

When we behold that or when we experience it It looks like faithfulness He keeps his word

You know why he keeps his word Because he never changes what he means He doesn't say one thing in one generation

And mean something ten generations later He always keeps his word because God is faithful To keep and to fulfill exactly what he says

And he does not change You see unfaithfulness is always Due to some character defect

Some weakness in us But God has no weaknesses He has no character defects

He has no imperfections And he does not and he cannot change And the reason that God cannot change

Is because change would always have to be in one of two directions He would either have to change to become better Or he would have to change to become worse

If he changes to become worse he becomes less than God If he changes to become better it means that before he changed He was something less than God So God because of his very nature cannot change

Because he is perfect in his knowledge Perfect in his wisdom Perfect in all of his attributes Because those perfections are infinite

And because those perfections are infinite and unchanging Therefore we would look at God and say

He is faithful So faithfulness is an essential character or quality Of God because he cannot be anything

Other than faithful Hebrews 13 .8 says Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever

Describing his divine nature Malachi 3 .6 I the Lord do not change Therefore you oh sons of Jacob are not consumed

James 1 .17 Every good thing is given and every perfect gift is from above Coming down from the Father of lights In whom there is no variation or shifting shadow

His faithfulness is tied to his immutability Because he does not change His perfections make change

And unfaithfulness absolutely impossible Now with man Our unfaithfulness is always due to some

Lack in us You and I are creatures who Are subject to change all the time

You are a different person Right now than you were when you walked into this room You're different Cells in your body have died

Other cells have come into existence Since you walked into this room You have learned things since coming into this room

That you did not know before you walked into that room For instance who was going to be at church today And where you were going to sit

And maybe you even learned something hopefully today About Dory not being a clown fish You might not have known that before you came into this room

Now you know that You're a different person now than you were when you walked into the room And everything you have ever experienced

Is always changing And everything around us is always changing And so when we are unfaithful

In one thing, in a multitude of things In big things or in small things It is always due to some weakness

Or imperfection in us We might be unfaithful because of fear Fear Causes us to not go through with what it is that we promised

We make a promise to something And then something comes up and we think Man I'm not sure I want to do that And so we fear and that causes us to be unfaithful

Or our desires change Or we lose interest in something Suddenly I don't want that anymore

There are things that I wanted 20 years ago I don't want those anymore Why? My desires have changed, I've changed So if I promised something to somebody 20 years ago

And now it's time for me to fess up and fulfill that That could have changed because my desires changed Or my interest changed

Or because I'm weak or I lack resources Or I lack wisdom Or maybe I lack the knowledge to know what it is that I should be promising

Or what it is that I should be intending to do Those are all weaknesses I lack wisdom, I make the wrong promise

Or I make the wrong promise about the wrong time Or the wrong thing, or I'm simply ignorant I can't know the future and so I promise something

But then I'm unable to fulfill and that might be unfaithfulness And it is in a sense But all of those expressions of unfaithfulness

All of those causes of unfaithfulness Are all weaknesses Or defects or deficiencies in us

God has none of those weaknesses And he has none of those deficiencies All of his perfections are infinite

And they are perfect and they are unchanging And therefore he is faithful Since God suffers none of those things

None of these things can be true of God And therefore he cannot be anything but Absolutely and perfectly faithful Therefore his promises cannot fail

Now what is God faithful to? What is God faithful to? If we describe a dog being faithful What do we mean by that?

My dog The most faithful dog you've ever met Now I don't have a dog but I'm speaking hypothetically Right, my dog is the most faithful dog you'll ever meet

I just love him, he's faithful What we mean by that is that Every time

I come home from work He's right there by the door waiting for me When I walk through the door Or he's always by my side Or no matter what happens that dog never leaves me

He is obedient, he does what I ask him to do He's a faithful dog We describe a man who is faithful to his wife We mean that he is faithful to her

And that is he doesn't break his promises to her Or do things that might hurt her Or break his covenant to her He's faithful to some standard

What is God faithful to? We say that God is faithful Scripture affirms that he is faithful But what is

God faithful to? Not what is he faithful to do But what is he faithful to? Great is thy faithfulness

O God my Father There is no shadow of turning with thee Thou changest not, thy perfections they fail not

As thou hast been Thou forever will be Great is thy faithfulness Great is thy faithfulness Morning by morning new mercies

I see All I have needed thy hand hath provided Great is thy faithfulness Lord unto me

That's wrong I'm glad we didn't sing that this morning I mean I understand what the author is getting at But God is not faithful to you

You are not the standard to which God Adheres in his faithfulness What is God faithful to?

He's faithful to himself There is no higher being And there is no higher standard

Than God He's not faithful to you He's not faithful to me Now as we experience

God And as we see him fulfill his promises It sure looks like what? That God is being faithful to me

Because I'm experiencing his faithfulness But when I experience God's faithfulness I'm experiencing nothing more than His faithfulness to do exactly

What he has promised to do God will be faithful To the reprobate whom he cast into hell

Because he has promised to that person That if he will not repent and believe God will cast him into hell

And when God does that and destroys his enemies He will be expressing his faithfulness To do exactly what he has promised to do

With that person And when God says to you Welcome into the joy of your master Well done good and faithful servant

Come on in to the kingdom that I have prepared for you When he does that for you He's not being faithful to you

He's being faithful to do to you exactly What he promised to do So that God is ultimately faithful not to us

Because we change and we're constantly in flux And constantly changing But God is faithful to himself

And that is the God that you ought to want One who is faithful to his word Faithful to his nature

Faithful to his attributes That he cannot and he does not deny himself And there is no greater standard

To which God could be faithful Than to himself So now back to the question What then does all of this have to do with me holding fast

I understand that scripture says that God is faithful I understand what that means Not that he's full of faith But that he is the one who is worthy of full faith

I understand that God is not necessarily faithful to me Though that's how I experience it But ultimately the standard to which

God adheres And is faithful is his own nature His own character, his own word His own being

And since all of that is true, how does that motivate me To hold fast And to do so without wavering

To hold fast my confession of hope How is that a motivation Let me give you three implications of God's faithfulness

This is our outline today and don't panic Because we will get through all three of these So this is the three -point outline

All of that was introductory work And now we're going into the three points So here is what God is faithful to God is faithful to accomplish first of all

All that he has purposed He is faithful to accomplish all that he has purposed Psalm 115 verse 3 says

Our God is in the heavens and he does whatever he pleases Psalm 135 verse 6 Whatever the Lord pleases he does in heaven and earth

And in all the deeps Daniel 4 verse 35 All the inhabitants of the earth are counted as nothing He does according to his will in the host of heaven

And among the inhabitants of the earth And no one can say to him what have you done Isaiah 46 verse 10 God declares the end from the beginning and from ancient times

The things which have not been done Saying my purpose will be established And I will accomplish all my good pleasure

What God purposes He accomplishes And because he is perfect and infinite

In all of his perfections And because he knows everything and is all wise And he is all powerful That means that whatever

God desires to do He has not only the wisdom But also the ability to accomplish it

And so when God purposes to do something He will accomplish What it is that he has purposed to do

So none of God's purposes can ever be frustrated Nobody can ever Ward off his purposes

No one can ever keep him from fulfilling his purposes As I've said before in previous lessons

God does not try He does what he intends to do He accomplishes

What he purposes to accomplish So God never attempts to do anything And then fails to do it or fails to bring it to pass

Everything he brings to pass Is exactly what he has purposed to bring to pass So friend, so Christian If he has purposed your salvation

He will accomplish it Is there anything If you are in Jesus Christ Chosen by the

Father from the foundation of the world If you are in Jesus Christ and atoned for by his blood And regenerated by the

Holy Spirit Then I ask you Is there anything in heaven or on earth In the heights or the depths

Or the length or the breadth Is there any experience, any emotion Any devil, any demon

Any purpose of man, any government Any persecution, anything at all Dreamed up in the wicked heart of men

That can keep God from fulfilling What he has purposed concerning you Isn't that what

Paul says in Romans 8 Did you almost hear the language of Romans 8 working its way in there Nothing shall separate us from the love of God Height nor depth

Anything created, uncreated Anything created, heavens and on earth Spiritual beings, principalities, powers

Nothing can separate you from that Why is that? Because whatever the Lord purposes He does If he has purposed your salvation

You will be saved There is no way you can be lost Because there is nothing to which

God must say Well I tried that but I didn't have the power, I didn't have the wisdom I didn't have the knowledge to bring that to pass

If he has purposed it, he will accomplish it This pertains to your salvation If you have come to his son, the

Lord Jesus Christ If you have repented of your sin And placed your faith in Jesus Christ And God has begun that good work in you

Paul says in Philippians chapter 1 He will complete what he has begun in you All the way to the day of Christ Jesus There is nothing that can happen that will thwart that Or that will keep it from coming to pass

Nothing And so your salvation, if he has purposed it It will happen Unbeliever, be terrified right now

Because if God is intending to damn you There is nothing you can do To avoid that damnation Repent and believe upon the

Lord Jesus Christ That is why when he casts His unbelievers

And his enemies into hell It will be an expression of his faithfulness Because he has promised to do this And he will not change on his promise

Get to the end of your life and you have not trusted Jesus Christ God is not going to say Well I really didn't give you an opportunity

So go ahead, come on in, heaven No He will damn you for your unbelief

And it will be an expression of his justice And expression of his faithfulness Because God is faithful He will accomplish what he has purposed

And second, he will give what he has promised What is it that God has promised? Look at verse 23 For he who promised is faithful The author here has in mind a promise that God has made

God's faithfulness to that promise And God's faithfulness to his word And to his own nature Requires him to fulfill that promise

What is the promise that the author has in mind? What are we to hold fast to? Our confession of what?

Hope. What it is that we hope for And what we have placed our hope in That confident expectation that awaits us

That is what it is that God has promised To all those who are in Jesus Christ He has promised eternal life

Forgiveness of sins Adoption into his family And inheritance with the saints Eternal joys, delights and pleasures in heaven forevermore

The kingdom, a paradise A new creation, resurrection bodies His own glory

Everlasting life, his holiness His righteousness, his joy A reward for your love, your service

Your sacrifice, your faithfulness And a reward for your devotion and affection toward him He has promised all of those things to you

And because he has promised All of those things to you He will receive it

Because he is faithful So he has promised that to you He must fulfill his promise

He must accomplish what he has purposed He must give what he has promised This is actually the motivation that is held fast

And held out to us in Hebrews chapter 6 And if you have a moment Just turn back there, Hebrews chapter 6

I want you to see because these are parallel passages In a sense, Hebrews 6 and Hebrews 10

Both of them are very near to the warning passages That people use to say you can lose your salvation But I want you to notice how the

Unchangeableness of God His immutability and his faithfulness Are held out as the hope Of the anchor that we have in Jesus Christ Hebrews 6, beginning at verse 17

Notice the similar language Notice the language of unchangeableness Of holding fast

The hope that is set before us, the certainty God being faithful Notice the language, Hebrews 6, 17

In the same way God, desiring even more To show to the heirs of the promise The unchangeableness of his purpose

Interposed with an oath So that by two unchangeable things In which it is impossible for God to lie

We who have taken refuge Would have strong encouragement to take hold Of the hope set before us

This hope we have is an anchor For the soul, a hope both sure And steadfast and one which enters within the veil

Where Jesus has entered as a forerunner For us, having become a high priest forever According to the order of Melchizedek Notice the language, sure

Steadfast, certain, immovable Unchangeableness It is impossible for God to lie

Therefore you are to take hold Of the hope that is set before us You have this hope as an anchor for the soul

The author is describing here the hope That we have, this future, certain Expectation is set out before us

And we are called and encouraged And exhorted to lay hold of that And to hold fast to that, why?

Because he who has promised that Very thing, he cannot lie He cannot change, and he who promised

Is faithful, so if God has held out a hope For us, with certainty that hope Will come to pass, and because he is faithful It is motivation for us

If he has sworn that those who come to him By faith in Christ If he has sworn that those who hold fast

Rather than shrink back to destruction Will receive the reward, then friends That is motivation to hold fast because he will fulfill

His promise, imagine that it were something different Imagine that it were the opposite Imagine for a moment that God were fickle

And faithless And that he changed on a whim Or on a dime, that his purposes

Would change, and he might promise something And then never come through with it Imagine for a moment that that were true

What motivation could you possibly have For holding fast to your faith? Because you might

Sacrifice for your whole life You might sacrifice and give up And be steadfast and immovable

And without wavering and cling to him Cling to that promise, God made the promise And you might give up things

During this life, you might sacrifice And serve him, you might endure The hostility of scorning sinners

Who reproach him and reproach you You might suffer the loss of all things For the sake of knowing

Christ Have everything taken away from you And finally suffer a martyr's death Then only to find out what?

That God who promised is not faithful? That he's fickle? That can't be

Do you understand why the faithfulness of God To give what he has promised to give you Is a motivation to cling fast

To it and to not let go And to do so without wavering Without bending, without inclining

Without altering one whip No matter how hostile the world gets No matter how hateful the world gets

No matter what we have to sacrifice Or to endure, no matter what we have to face No matter what lies ahead

That is a motivation for faithfulness Because God who promised these things Cannot lie, he is unchanging

And he is faithful And since he will give to us Everything that he has promised And he will leave none of it out

He will fulfill his every last word to us Since the kingdom is ours

And God cannot be unfaithful to that Because he cannot deny himself He must give to us

What he has promised That's your motivation for holding fast Knowing that you will receive the reward

This is why the warning passage Which comes up beginning in verse 26 And going through the end of verse 31

Of this passage This is why it is such a strong rebuke And such a strong correction

To those who might shrink back to destruction That's why the author says You shrink back to destruction, you give up on that hope

You get exactly what it is that God has promised you It's a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God He himself will take vengeance upon his adversaries

That is what he has promised Shrink back and suffer destruction Or hold fast to what you have laid hold of And receive the benefit

Because he who promised is faithful So since God is faithful He will accomplish what he has purposed

He will give what he has promised And third, he will keep that which he has purchased Scripture commends us to hold fast

To him And scripture promises us that he holds fast to us That he holds fast to us

We sing that song He will hold me fast, he will hold me fast We sang it last week and we sang it the week before that Because I thought

I was going to get to this point Both of the previous two weeks So Josh sang that song as part of the worship We didn't sing it today because somebody thought

They would have thought Josh had no creativity whatsoever To keep what he has purchased

Those who hold fast to him And persevere to the very end They are his and those who shrink back to destruction

Prove that they are not his How is it that you explain people who come to a Profession of faith in Christ Who make a profession of faith in Christ And then they turn away from the church and they walk away

And they want nothing to do with Christianity Or with Christ or with anything regarding Scripture How do you explain those people?

They seem so hot and so passionate And so affectionate to the Lord for a period of time And then they fall away, never to be heard from Never to come back again

Are those people who were believers and then became unbelievers? Are they people who were saved and then became unsaved? Did they lose their salvation?

No, they merely demonstrated That their profession of faith in Christ Was nothing more than a profession It wasn't real and true and genuine saving faith

They were never born again Because Christ himself has promised That he will keep those whom the

Father has given to him Christ himself has promised That he will raise up every last person

Whom the Father has given to him Every last person for whom he has died And been raised again to eternal life

He will keep all of them He will lose none of them That is what he has promised And if Christ loses even one person

For whom he has died Then he has failed to do that which the Father sent him to do And he cannot fail to do what the

Father sent him to do Because he who promised is faithful And the Son promised

That he would raise up every last one Who belongs to him And if he fails to do that Then he is unfaithful

God forbid Christ is not unfaithful He will save and he will make holy

And he will secure Every last person who belongs to him And those who make a pretense of faith

And those who pretend to be saved And who later fall away They demonstrate that they were not his

To begin with This is what 1 John 2 .19 says They went out from among us because they were not of us

If they, that is those who apostatized And went out, if they had been of us They would have remained with us

But they went out from us so that it might be evident That they did not belong to us That is what John says The departure and the apostasy of those who make

Professions of faith in Christ Is an evidence that they do not actually belong to him We hold fast and he holds fast to us

So 1 Peter 1 verse 5 Says that we are protected by the power of God Through faith It is through our faith that we ourselves are protected

By the power of God So there is an element of divine sovereignty And human responsibility Even in the preservation of the saints

Just as there is an element of divine sovereignty And human responsibility in our response to the gospel

So there is also an element of divine sovereignty And human responsibility In our perseverance

And our preservation in the gospel From the human responsibility Side of it

We persevere in the faith Holding fast just as he has commanded us to do And from the divine sovereignty side of that He is the one who holds fast to us

And those who let go of him Are those whom he was never holding to begin with And he never did hold on to them

We hold on to him Because he holds on to us Now imagine for a moment Again another horrific scenario

That it were the opposite Imagine for a moment that your interest into heaven Depended upon your ability to be faithful To every word you have kept

And to have enough faith And to have enough repentance And to have enough belief Imagine that your entrance into heaven

And your receiving of all that he has promised you Depended entirely upon you You know what your response would be?

You know what it should be? Utter despair Utter and total despair Because you could never hold on You could never keep it

And the more that the world would throw at you The more that the world would attack you The easier it would be to just let go

And say okay enough, uncle, uncle I don't want it anymore Just make the pain stop

Make the hostility stop Make the cancel culture stop Make the laws stop I just want to be free

I just want it to be easy That is exactly how real unbelievers are going to respond When and if persecution comes

Time and again Hebrews points us back Not to our faithfulness to him And not to our promises to him

But to his promises to us Time and again it is not our work But his work It is not our faith but his faithfulness

It is not our doing it is his doing It is not our ability it is his ability He who promised is faithful You are able to hold on To the faith once for all delivered to the saints

You are able to hold fast To the confession of your hope Firm and to the end And you are able to do so without wavering

Because he holds you So the only ones who will be able to obey this command Are the ones who are held by Christ himself

And so the author can With great confidence say to believers Hold fast the confession of your hope

And to do so without wavering And do so understanding that he who promised To give you the kingdom is faithful to give you the kingdom

And the response of all God's people Will be amen and amen And I will hold fast And the response of the apostate will say

I am not interested in that But that expression of the heart of God's people

In holding fast to what he has promised Because he is faithful and true That is itself an evidence

That they are saved That is itself an evidence of God's work in them So God is faithful to accomplish

What he has purposed To keep what he has Purchased and to give what it is

That he has promised and so we hold fast And he who promised is faithful With God there is no falseness

There is no fickleness There is no unfaithfulness And he calls us to be the same

So our hope is sure and certain Our salvation is secure Our confidence is unwavering

Our ability to hold fast is sure And certain and our faith is not in vain No sacrifice is too great

No offering is too steep No cost is too unbearable No faithfulness will go unrewarded

If he will reward a cup of cold water Given in his name he will most certainly Keep and reward

The one who holds fast to the confidence That they have without wavering Friends this is what we are called to do

Hold fast to the confidence Of your hope Without bending Without inclining and without wavering

And you are able to do this Because he who promised is faithful To keep you in the midst of that hostility

God does not waver And neither should we He is unwavering in his promise You and I are called to be unwavering

In our holding to his promise Let's bow our heads Father we do love you

And thank you for your great grace The grace of salvation The grace that saves

And secures those who belong to you And our confidence Rests not in our own abilities

Our own faith or our own Our own track record of success But upon your omnipotence

Your infinite wisdom Your perfections and your unchanging nature Thank you that you are faithful Thank you for being a faithful God And for keeping your promises

We know that every promise that you have made Concerning those who are yours Will be fulfilled right down to the last detail

You cannot be otherwise You cannot be unfaithful Everything you have said you have said without wavering And we pray that you would give us grace

To hold fast to the confession of hope that we have To do so without wavering And to do so always remembering That we will receive the reward

Because you who have promised these things to us You are faithful We love you and we thank you for that faithfulness

In Christ's name Please stand Hopelessly lost

Away Oh we Hopelessly lost

The race You Peaceful Hearts always

Hungerful Hearts always

Hungerful Falling hearts always

Hearts always Hunger And we pray

Adore My Healing Heart Always Hunger Do you think

I'm something special Like I know a thing or two I was a boy

Just nine years old I heard The call and came

They buried Me Beneath the water

Then I Rose again Well you know my dad

Was a preacher man I walked the Isle and I took his hand

He said son Just do the best you can And say

The words I believe

He is The Christ Son of the living

God Through the years

I barely Fell I mostly dove right in I drank

So deep From the shallow well Only To thirst again

Well I sang the Hymns that the summer came Then I rocked

And rolled with a lousy Band Till I heard a song that took

My hand And led me as the

Christ Son of the Living God I was blind

But now I see Though I kick and Scream his grace

Is making me So when my body's

Weak and the day is Long When I feel my faith is all

Begun I'll remember when I sing This song

That I believe I believe

He is the Christ Son of the Living God He is

The Christ Son of the Living God Son of the living

God His blood begins to Was dead a murmur

And his heart beats Now everything is changed Cause the blood that brought

His peace with God is racing Through his veins and his heart Beats His living lungs

Expand The heavy his word and flesh

Once more The Lamb of God is slain for us He's a lion ready to rule

And his heart

So crown him The Lord is your defeat

I know

His work's already done

So he's resting as he rises To reclaim the right he won So crown him

As dominion over him So my heart Beats With the rhythm

Of the saints As I look for the seeds the king has sown To burst up from their grapes

I know It's up one gracious step

Oh great And so the winner dies

With a blast of icy wind Like a mournful cry It's giving up the ghost again

Another sheet of snow Melts away to golden green Look at Peter go

He's racing to the tomb to see Where has my Jesus Gone He is not dead

He is risen Risen Indeed Now the flowers

Bloom like a song of freedom Behold the earth is new If only for the season

And so the seed that died For you becomes the seedling Just put your hand into the wound

That bought your healing And let his not

Dead He is risen Risen Indeed Bursts as the earth

In sorrow Mary the sun Will rise again

Mary the sun Will rise again Daughter listen

Listen Daughter listen He speaks your name

And Father Abraham Could not have dreamed of this Could never understand the end

Of all those promises How all the pieces fit Every star and grain of sand

Is safely hid In Jesus' hand Let every tongue

Confess He is not dead

He is risen Risen He is not dead

He is risen Risen Indeed Rise again

Daughter listen Listen Daughter listen