Lesson 1: Introduction to God Wrote A Book

All right, let's bow in prayer before we begin. Our Father, our desire is to commit this time to you and in hopes and in our prayers that you would be honored through all that is said concerning your word and through the study that we are beginning this morning.

We pray that you would open our eyes and our minds to your word and give us through this study an appreciation for what you have done in delivering to us your word and in how you have inspired it, how you have preserved it and the ways in which you use it.

We pray that our time here together spent today just in introducing this subject may serve to honor and glorify you in everything and that you would be assisting us in hearing and me in speaking to clearly explain all that pertains to how you've given us your word.

Thank you for your grace and your goodness and we ask your blessing upon our time and our fellowship and our study here this morning in Christ's name, amen.

All right, so today is a little bit of an introduction and this might end up being a little bit of a shorter class than we normally have, but I do have a little bit of bonus content that I'm gonna throw in here this morning that is not in your workbook.

So you'll see on the workbook on the front you have a place there where you can write your name and the date if you want. I would encourage you to write your name on your workbook someplace because if this typically happens, people will leave their workbooks behind.

There'll be three or four of them here and we don't know who they belong to and I'm not a handwriting analysis expert so I can't tell whose book it is and then they'll come back three or four weeks later and say, do you still have my book?

I think I left it here, I don't know where it's at. So just write your name on the front of it and here's how this study is going to kind of unfold over the course of the next several months.

I'm not, though there are 15 lessons in this study, I think the last time we went through this, it took us 22 weeks to go through all the material.

So we kind of divided up lessons into twos or threes and didn't really kind of follow the lesson plan so much as we just went through the material.

I'm gonna try and follow the lesson plan a little bit more tightly this time and it may be more than 15 lessons or 15 sessions that we spend doing this but it's not going to be 15 or 22 lessons all in a row.

It's gonna be kind of like adult Sunday school class has been up to this point. I've got a wedding coming up in March, I'm gonna take a couple weeks off for that and so I'm not gonna be teaching this class but I'm gonna teach probably three or four weeks here in a row and then

I'll take some time off and then we'll announce it so we're gonna know when we're gonna pick it up again and then the next time I teach, it'll be another big chunk like that and the reason being is because basically this whole study falls into three general subjects.

The first one is the doctrine of scripture. What has God given to us? That's inspiration and inerrancy, et cetera. The second section really deals with the textual transmission.

How has God preserved his word and how have the documents been transmitted down to us over time and it deals with not just textual transmission but also textual variance.

Like why is it that you get to the end of Mark chapter 16 and you read that there's a whole half of a chapter there that is not in some earlier manuscripts and other some manuscripts of Mark have a different ending or John chapter seven verse 53 through eight verse 12, the woman caught in adultery.

Why is that? Why does John, the textual variant in John's gospel say that that was not in some of the earlier manuscripts and we have quite a few of those throughout the

New Testament so we're gonna talk about textual variance. What caused them? How do we identify them?

And does the presence of textual variance in the New Testament text give us some indication that we cannot trust the

New Testament text? So we're gonna cover that in the second sort of chunk of lessons and then the third chunk of lessons deals with basically the whole history of how we got our

Bible from the time that it was written. We kind of do an overview of all of church history and talk about early translations and the

Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate and the original printing press and how that caused the spread of the publication of scriptures and then we kind of finish up with some modern translations so that's a brief overview.

There's three sort of basic chunks of the series and we're gonna be going through them in trying to go through them in those chunks.

So I'm on for adult Sunday school class for at least the next three weeks, maybe four depending on how things go and then after that I'll be off for three or four or five weeks or something like that while Jess and Dave go back to, sorry

Jess and Cornell go back to what they were teaching through. Okay. I wanna talk first of all about the necessity of this class.

This class is intended to give us some understanding of how God has communicated his revelation to us. Some people think that scripture came down floating out of heaven on a cloud or a pillow sort of as a complete book with the gold trim and the little tabs for different book divisions and all that already there or that somebody at some point in church history, say 300, 400

AD just decided they were gonna pick a bunch of religious sounding books and throw them all together and call that scripture. There are a lot of misunderstandings and misconceptions about how we got scripture, how the book came to be and one of the purposes of this study is to give us an understanding of how that happened.

Second, to give us an appreciation for the scriptures that we hold in our hands. I don't know if you realize this or not but there are a lot of people who suffered and bled and died so that you could have a

Bible in your language and that is not something that every people group on the face of the planet enjoys and not only do you have a

Bible in your language, you have more translations of the Bible, more different possible renderings of the

Bible in your language than anybody could ever possibly need and you probably have more books in your house, more

Bibles in your house if you're an average American than some third world tribes have in their whole tribe, more copies of scripture and not only that but I have the

Bible on my tablet and I have the Bible on my phone and I have the Bible on my computer. I have the

Bible everywhere I turn I have the Bible so we are a blessed people to have a copy of God's word in our own language that is easy to read and we don't have to die in order to secure a copy of it.

It's prolific, it's everywhere, we have been blessed in that way so I want to the part of the study will help you to give you an appreciation for what other people have gone through so that you could have the

Bible in your own tongue. William Tyndale and John Wycliffe, what those guys suffered so that you could have an

English Bible is almost unthinkable and most Christians who read their English Bibles have no idea who those two guys are.

So we're gonna talk a little bit about that and then the third reason is to equip us to defend the Bible as the word of God and give an answer to every man and that's part of what we're commanded to do in scripture.

How many of you have heard some of these objections regarding scripture? The Bible has been changed hundreds of times over the years.

Have you heard that? Raise your hand if you've heard that. All of us have heard that. On Facebook, on Twitter, from a friend, a co -worker, a spouse, a parent, a child, something like that.

The Bible has been changed hundreds of times over the year as if you could take your modern translation of scripture and compare it to a translation of the

Bible from the 1200s and it would be radically different. You'd open up the Gospel of John and it wouldn't say anything about the deity of Christ and today the

Gospel of John is all about the deity of Christ. It's been radically changed. Or as if reincarnation has somehow been taken out of scripture or the deity of Christ somehow put into scripture or the doctrine of the

Trinity somehow inserted in there or all those passages about women not being able to be pastors and teach men in the local assembly, all of that was added years after the apostles and Jesus, et cetera.

There's all these kind of nonsensical beliefs about scripture and what older versions of scripture contain that we need to kind of dispel some of those.

How many of you have heard this, the Bible is filled with contradictions and errors? Yeah, contradictions and errors, right?

How many contradictions? Well, how many do they say that the Bible's filled with? 100, maybe 1 ,611 contradictions, right?

Josh is a big King James Only fan. So the Bible has all these contradictions and errors.

And when somebody says that, one of my first questions is, can you name one? Just a contradiction, if there's lots, if it's filled with them, then naming one should be easy.

Just give me one example of a contradiction or an error. And by the way, while we're on the subject of Bible contradictions, it is probably good for everybody to have a book on your shelf dealing with supposed

Bible contradictions. There's one by Jason Lyle that I think is the best one. We got that when he was here at the conference.

If you have that, Resolving Bible Contradictions, or I forget what the title of it is, but I've got it in my office. Maybe I'll try and bring it next week and show it to you.

But it is fantastic. It goes through, I don't know, 200, 300, 400, some odd supposed alleged contradictions of Scripture and shows that they're not contradictions when you read them in their context.

How many of you have heard this one? Men with an agenda have changed the Bible to suit themselves over time, right?

What are some of the agendas that they say people have had that made them change the Bibles? Can you give me an example of some? What's that?

Subjugation of women, right? All of the passages that talk about women not being in teaching roles or pastoral roles, all of those were added by the

Pope in 14... They don't know when it was added, but apparently it was added over time just to keep women in subjugation, right?

What are other things they say have been added, Phil? The business about homosexuality is just an interpretation of people who wrote the

Bible. I've heard people claim that, again, reincarnation was in the

Scriptures and they took it out because they didn't like that, that Jesus was an Indian mystic, that Jesus was married, and the apostles, and later on, the

Catholic Church, they didn't like that doctrine, so they took out all the references. How about the gospels that talk about Jesus being married?

Not Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but like Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Judas, Gospel of Peter, Gospel of Mary, all kinds of pseudo -gospels, false gospels that talk about Jesus and supposedly give explanations and details of his life, biographical details of his life.

They contradict the New Testament. Some people will say that there came a point where all those gospels were in our Bibles at one time.

Our Bible had the Gospel of Judas, and Peter, and Thomas, and all those good ones, those are the really good ones. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, at some point, somebody decided that they wanted those gospels in because those gospels taught the things that they wanted taught, and they kicked out all of the other gospels.

Have you ever heard that? What's that? Have you heard those arguments? I've heard those arguments, yeah. Yeah. The Constantine did it in 325.

That's when they decided which books of the Bible should be in there, and nobody knew before 325. Constantine, who ran the

Roman Catholic Church, he decided which books fit the agenda of the Roman Empire, and so he included certain books and excluded certain others on his political agenda, his moral agenda, et cetera.

How many of you have heard this one? The Bible's been translated and retranslated hundreds of times over the years, and so we have no idea what was actually written.

It's like the telephone game. If I were to start over something over here with Josh and tell him a long sentence, and he were to relay it, and we were to just go all the way through the sanctuary, everybody whispering in the ear of the person next to him, and we worked all the way through by the time

I got back here to Eric, would it even resemble what I told you, Josh? Probably not. You did that game in probably grade school or something like that, or you've done a

New Year's party or a Super Bowl party or something like that when the game gets boring. You've done that.

So people say that's what Scripture was like. That's how Scripture came to us. It's just been translated and retranslated. Our English was translated from the

Latin, which was translated from the Greek, which came from the Swahili, which was translated from the Russian, which was translated from the Coptic.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's not true at all. By the way, when people raise that objection about Scripture, I just ask them, my

NASB that I'm holding in my hand, what translation was that translated from? You know what their answer normally is?

I have no idea. They don't have no idea. They repeat these things off the top of their head because this is what they've been told in some

Mother Jones, Vox .com online article that this is how Scripture came to be, and so they repeat that because that's what makes sense to them, even though they don't know.

They can't say. I had this actually. I was sitting down with a loved one, a relative of mine, over the table one day, and she raised this objection to me and said, the

Bible's just been translated and retranslated hundreds of times over the years, so we can't even know what is in it today as actually what was originally written.

And I said, the Bible that I'm reading from has been translated one time from the Greek and the Hebrew and the

Aramaic into English. That's it. That's one translation. Now, the beautiful thing is that I have copies of the

Greek and the Hebrew and the Aramaic text as well as language tools, and so if I doubt the translation of what

I read in the NASB, I can go right back to the original documents and check the translation. And not only that, but there are hundreds and dozens and thousands of people who do that all the time to make sure that what we're reading today in terms of God's translation of God's word is what was originally given to us in those languages.

So that's just one translation, not dozens. How many of you have heard this objection?

We don't have the original, so how can we know what was actually written? We can't check today what we have against what was originally written.

Now, in a sense, that's true. It's true that we do not have the original copy of the

Gospel of John. We don't have that piece of paper. There is no piece of paper with John's sweat on it that he actually wrote in his handwriting.

We don't have that. We don't have that for any book of the Old or New Testament, not one. We have no original copy of the original document.

So the question that we have to ask is, are the copies of those originals or the copies of the copies of those originals, are they reliable?

Can we have confidence, because of how God has preserved his word, that those copies of copies are actually accurate reflections of what was originally written by John?

Because the question is not, do we have the original copy that John wrote? The question is, do we have manuscripts that we can be certain reflect and are actually copies of what

John wrote? Look it, you are not holding in your hand the original copy of this workbook.

You're not. You're holding in your hand a copy of the original of this workbook.

But can you be relatively certain that what you hold in your hand is an accurate reflection, nearly 100 % of the original workbook?

Yeah, Marsha might have changed it over time because of some political feminist agenda. That's possible.

It's possible. Right, so the question that we have to ask is, are the manuscripts that we have, do we have confidence that those are accurate representations of what was originally written?

Okay, how about this objection? We've learned so much through science that disproves the Bible. That's really kind of a, it's kind of an objection of a different order, of a different kind, but it still kind of pertains to this.

Because the answer to that question has to do with what is the nature of Scripture and who wrote it?

And is it a divine book? And does it bear the marks of divinity? Does it bear the marks of divine inspiration, divine authority, divine preservation?

Or is it just the words of men which have moved and shifted over time and been changed and been altered and been corrupted, et cetera?

So those are some of the objections that we're going to answer. I want to talk for a moment just about the level of instruction of what we're going to be dealing with.

This is a subject that could be very technical and very boring. And I realize that.

It's not my intention to be technical or boring. There is information that connected to all of these subjects that we're going to be talking about.

There's information connected to that that is very technical and is far beyond anything that I'm going to be offering in this class.

And I hope, I always hope that there's somebody in the congregation who goes deeper into some of these issues than I've ever gone.

It's not that I or you don't have the ability to understand some of the more complex issues with textual transmission.

It's just that for us to answer the objections that I've just raised, it's not necessary for us to understand all the technical issues of textual transmission.

You don't have to be a James White, a Daniel Wallace, or a

Michael Kruger. Those are scholars who spend their lives doing this stuff. You don't have to have a

PhD in textual transmission or ancient New Testament documents in order to understand some of these simple concepts and be able to offer a defense for scripture.

So I hope that some of you will go a little bit deeper. I want to keep this simple enough that it equips us and doesn't confuse us.

I don't want to impress you with how scholarly this can be or how much I know or big words or any of that stuff. I really want to, you know that our approach here is to really try and put everything, no matter what we teach, on a level that's just accessible to everybody.

So this is something that's understandable. Because if we were to get into some of the deep things that would just bore you, it would bore you and it wouldn't equip you and the whole class would be pointless.

I don't want to do that. Because the skeptic doesn't need the technical information. The skeptic is not getting technical information from Vox or from Mother Jones or from atheistblog .com.

They're not getting technical information there. They're getting recycled tropes, recycled objections that have been dealt with hundreds of times.

They regurgitate them online. They regurgitate them on your Facebook page. They regurgitate them in your conversations.

And they're not technically equipped. They have no idea what the textual transmission of the New Testament looks like.

I have another relative. This is a different one than the she I was talking about earlier. I have another relative.

Actually, he's not related to me. He's an in -law. So this doesn't come from my blood.

He's an in -law and one of his objections is, he will say things like the

New Testament documents cannot be translated or accurately represented or he'll talk about how things have been changed over time.

And oftentimes, you just have to ask him a few questions to realize that he doesn't understand anything about what he's talking about.

So one of the very first questions that I'll ask him is, how much time have you spent reading about or studying the translation of the New Testament text?

Do you know anything about the ancient documents? What they came from? Who collected them? Who found them? The variants?

How we know what has been preserved or not? You just ask some simple questions like that and very quickly, you will see that the objections of the skeptic melt away because they really cannot go past raising the objection.

99 .9 % of skeptics cannot go past raising the objection. So the question really is, are they open to hearing the truth of that?

Now, that's a different issue because you might try and deal with the answer to it by giving them the answer, but if they're not open to hearing the truth of that, then you're just, as one of my

Bible school professors used to say, might as well save your breath to cool your porridge because you're just wasting your breath on them. Remember that,

Chris? One of my Bible school friends is here today. This is Mr. Peeler. He used to say, you gotta save your breath to cool your porridge.

All right, so that's it. We're not going to get into highly technical stuff, though we are going to get somewhat technical in dealing with some of this because you can't avoid that.

And oh, and I do want to offer a bit of a disclaimer here. I am not James White. My first name is James, but my last name is not

White. I'm not James White. I'm not Daniel Wallace. I'm not Michael Kruger. So if you ask me details of P46 or P52 and all of the stuff about Greek and Hebrew and things like that, there are a bunch of questions on a very technical level that I'm not going to be able to answer.

I have read them. I've read the answers. I've studied those things, but I'm probably not equipped, nor am I qualified to go into too much depth beyond what we're going to go.

So I don't want anybody to think that I would think that I'm on that level in teaching through this. This is really intended to be something on a very lay level.

All right, your questions are welcome, and I hope that you have lots of questions and feel free to ask them. There's no such thing as a stupid question. There's only stupid questioners, so don't be afraid of asking stupid questions, because if you have a stupid question, there's probably a lot of other people in the room that have the same stupid question that you do, so just ask it, and I will try my best to answer it in the class if I can, and if I can't,

I will do my best to dig up the answer for you. Oh, and when you're asking questions,

I do reserve the right to tell you we will deal with that in a later lesson. So if you ask the question, and I know we're gonna be dealing with it,

I will just tell you that, and we'll put it off until a later date. All right, here, I'm gonna give you a brief overview of the subjects that we're gonna be covering.

Immediately, we're gonna be talking about inspiration, inerrancy, and preservation of text. How many of you feel comfortable defining inspiration, inerrancy, and infallibility, those doctrines?

How many of you feel comfortable defining that? Raise your hand. If you wouldn't want to define that in a public setting, keep your hand down.

Okay, so a few people feel comfortable with that. We're gonna explain what those mean.

How many of you would feel comfortable having discussions about uncials, minuscules, codex, parchments, the

Texas Receptus, the Vatican Manuscript, the Alexandrian Manuscript, the Sinaitic Manuscript, the Vulgate, and the

Septuagint? You can spell them? Well, that's better than me.

Okay, so we're gonna be talking about some of those things as well, and not in a way that you're gonna be like, oh yeah,

I can get in an online forum and debate the Vulgate with people, or the legitimacy of the textual transmission of the

Septuagint, or something like that. That's not the level that we're gonna be dealing with, but at least later on, when you hear somebody talk about the

Septuagint, or the Vulgate, or the Texas Receptus, or minuscules, or uncials, you're gonna have some idea of what those things are, and why those things are significant.

There's 15 lessons that I mentioned at the beginning, and we may add content with this as we go along.

I've already thought of some bonus material that I wanna give you just here in just a moment. But I wanna go through a little bit here with the lessons that we have planned in this series.

So if you have, I don't know if you have an introduction. If you just have an introduction, just go right to, oh, it just goes right to, there's no table of contents.

Okay, here's an overview of the lessons, and if you wanna flip through your book as I'm going through this, feel free. The first lesson, which is today, was what we're just doing, an introduction to kind of an overview of some of this stuff.

In the second lesson, we're gonna look at the doctrines of inspiration, and both verbal and plenary. And we cover this in our membership class.

We talk about verbal inspiration and plenary inspiration, why those two words are important. When I read through a doctrinal statement of a church, somebody sends me a doctrinal statement and says, what do you think about this?

Is this a church that my kids should attend, or I should be looking at attending? And I read through the doctrinal statement. I'm looking for two key words, verbal and plenary.

Those are two important words when it comes to our understanding of the doctrine of inspiration. So we're gonna talk about verbal and plenary inspiration.

Then we're gonna talk about, in lesson three, the inspiration and what the Bible claims about inspiration, the doctrine of inspiration.

In lesson four, we're gonna talk about the inerrancy of scripture and preservation. Has God preserved his word?

Is there a difference between inerrancy and infallibility? Oftentimes, those two words are confused. They are two separate and distinct ideas.

They're related, but they are distinct. In lesson five, we're gonna talk about how the structure of scripture.

It's a lesson called One Bible, Two Covenants. Why is it that we have an Old Testament and a New Testament? How are they related?

How are they different? How do the Jews structure their Old Testament? Why are there certain books left out of the

Old Testament, like the Apocrypha? And of course, there are certain books that are left out of the New Testament. Why do we structure the New Testament the way it is in terms of the order of the books?

In lesson six, the Bible's beginnings, we're gonna talk about what early writings were like, all the way back to the cuneiform tablets of ancient

Mesopotamia, and then how styles of writing and a philosophy of writing have changed over time, as well as various writing materials, how those have changed over time, from back in stone tablets all the way through to parchments and eventually vellum and animal skins, and how those things are good for preservation and how sometimes they're not good for preservation.

And then in lesson seven, the writing of many books, we're gonna talk about how books of the Bible were copied and circulated, and how the

New Testament gives evidence that there was rapid and widespread circulation of New Testament documents from the very first years after those books were written.

That's key. The New Testament talks about the circulation of the books of the New Testament. Peter talks about Paul's writings, as if he had a collection of them.

Paul quotes Luke's gospel to Timothy. So within 30 years of the writing of, sorry, within 30 years of the death of Jesus, we have the apostle

Paul quoting Luke's gospel as scripture to people who would have been familiar with Luke's gospel.

Within the first few decades of the New Testament, there was rapid and widespread distribution of the

New Testament writings. And that is a key to understanding how God has preserved his word over time for us.

So we're gonna talk a little bit about that in lesson seven, the writing of many books. In lesson eight, we're just gonna study chocolate chip cookie recipes in the

Bible. You can see it there, it's a true story. Chapter nine, lesson nine, we're gonna talk about typos and types.

We're gonna look at the types of errors that were made in copying manuscripts and how those errors affect our Bible today. So you can see that we're dealing with inerrancy and preservation, lessons one, two, three, and four we're dealing with what scripture says concerning itself.

Doctrines of inspiration, inerrancy, infallibility, and what God has said about how he will and promises to preserve his word.

Then we begin to talk about different writing techniques and writing styles with lesson five, six, and seven.

And then we start talking about textual variants in lesson eight, nine, and lesson 10, the

Qumran caves in the Old Testament. What do the Dead Sea Scrolls tell us about the Old Testament? If you're walking through the grocery aisle and you see at the checkout aisle the

National Enquirer that says, "'Dead Sea Scrolls, reveal the world will end "'if the 49ers don't win the Super Bowl this afternoon.'"

Right, do the Dead Sea Scrolls really talk about that? Are there really prophecies in the Dead Sea Scrolls? What do the Dead Sea Scrolls reveal?

What do they contain? What are those books and what relevance do those books have to our New Testament text or to our understanding of the

Old Testament? We're talking about that in lesson 10. And what were the Dead Sea Scrolls? Lesson 11, we're gonna define and defend the canon and look at how the early church determined which books belonged in the

Bible. Why were Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John chosen and why were other gospels rejected?

There were writings that claimed to have come from the Apostle Paul that were not included in our

New Testament. There are writings that we know Paul wrote that are not included in our New Testament. Do you realize that 1

Corinthians is not 1 Corinthians? 1 Corinthians is 2 Corinthians. Paul wrote a book to the Corinthians before 1

Corinthians and 2 Corinthians is not 2 Corinthians. 2 Corinthians is 4

Corinthians because there was a book written between 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians. So, well, no, sorry, there's a book written between what we call 1

Corinthians which is actually 2 Corinthians and 4 Corinthians which is actually 3 Corinthians.

Did I get that right? I hope I got that right. Anyway, there are writings that Paul wrote that are not included in our New Testament. And there are writings that claim to be from Paul that were not included in our

New Testament. So, what is the canon of Scripture? What books belong in and what books belong out and how was that decided and who decided it and what were the criteria?

We look at that in lesson 12. Lesson 13, the Septuagint, the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha and other big words.

What are those? What is the Septuagint, the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha and other big words? Lesson 14, we talk about the

Vulgar Bible and the big picture and this is where we begin to go through the entire history of the

New Testament. We kind of back up from the beginning and we'll deal with the early writings of the New Testament and then we will just unfold it over the centuries and show how

God has preserved his word and how eventually we came to have our modern translations. And then in lesson 15, we will talk about modern translations.

Are they good? What's the difference between them? Can we trust them? Why do I preach out the NASB and not the

NIV? What are the problems, the benefits, the positives and the negatives for all the modern Bible translations?

Why would I recommend the NASB and the ESV and not the NIV or the Living Bible, for instance?

We talk about that. What's the difference between a translation and a paraphrase? The Living Bible is not a translation, it's a paraphrase.

Are you gonna hurt yourself? Yes, and oh, thank you for bringing that up. And we are going to deal with the

King James only issue. In fact, we're gonna deal with that. We're going to deal with it throughout the course, the whole course of all of this that we're dealing with because there are issues in the history of the church that all have to do with, is the

King James Version an inspired translation of the scriptures, right? And how has God preserved his word?

Because those who are in Josh's camp, and I say this loosely because Josh is not in this camp or he would not be sitting in this church for any period of time whatsoever, but the camp or the group that Josh comes from, there are people in Christianity who believe that the

King James Translation of 1611, the authorized King James Translation, is the one that God has preserved and inspired today.

And if you're not reading out of the authorized KJV 1611 edition, you're not actually reading scripture at all.

Amen. Josh gives me an amen for that, right? So in dealing with the subjects of defining, no, yeah, the

Septuagint, the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha, the types and the typos and the various different manuscripts, like we talked about the

Alexandrian manuscript and the Texas Receptus and the Sinaiticus manuscript. We're gonna talk about something called the Eclectic Text.

And what that is, is the different groupings of manuscripts from church history. And the

King James is translated from the Texas Receptus. We're gonna talk about the history of the Texas Receptus. That's a collection of Old New Testament manuscripts called the

Texas Receptus, which is Latin for the received text. And they believe that that is the only standard.

Every other ancient manuscript, if it belongs to Sinai or if it belongs to the

Vatican manuscript, that they're corrupted in some way. Only the Texas Receptus has been supernaturally preserved by God.

So we'll talk about that. And if those arguments fail, of course, then the arguments that the

King James is the only official translation we should be reading, that also fails. So we will deal with that. And then the last,

Lesson 16, is just a Q &A. All right, so I'm about 15 minutes ahead of time.

Are there any questions about what we're covering or how we're gonna cover it or what you can expect that I can answer real quick?

Yes, Peter. We'll address some of the historic

Christian councils only in connection with their bearing upon the preservation of the text, the scripture.

There are church councils that had nothing to do with selecting books or authorizing certain books, et cetera.

We will deal with the Council of Nicaea, because typically that's what people say is when Constantine authorized the certain number of books that blew on the

Old and New Testament. So we'll deal with the Council of Nicaea and what that specifically dealt with.

It was not the New Testament text, and we'll deal with other councils that did weigh in on the

New Testament text. But there are a bunch of church councils in church history that had nothing to do with those, and what we're discussing here. We're not gonna talk about those.

They had, there were councils that dealt with false doctrines or ancient church heresies, et cetera. Okay, any other questions?

All right. So, yes. Oh, yeah.

I don't have that, but I will. A list of recommended reading. In fact, what I'll try and do over the course of the next couple weeks is

I'll put together a list of, like if I had my top five books on this subject, because I have five that I think do the very best job of crystallizing everything, and then other good resources on it.

I will, yeah, and I'll try and I'll print them out, and I'll bring them so that you can include them in the class at some point, yeah.

Good, thanks for that reminder. Yes. Yeah. Am I gonna go over people who preach and teach?

Like Joel Osteen, Beth Moore. Okay, she didn't wanna drop names, but I will. Okay. I'm not gonna go into that necessarily with this, unless it deals with kind of what we're discussing here.

Yeah. Yeah, there is some room for warning there, but I'm not sure we'll deal with it too much in connection with this.

We'll have to see how it unfolds. I don't expect to, but we'll see. Yep, yep, please don't stop.

Please don't hesitate to ask a question. All right, anything else? I know, I promised you a little bit of bonus content.

So this has to do with, and I'm doing this now because next week we're gonna talk about inspiration, but I don't think we're gonna have time in the class for me to handle this, but I'm dealing with a subject now because I'm writing a book on how

God speaks to us. And of course, I believe that God speaks to us through his word and not through a still small voice, a nudging, a prompting, my thoughts, my inclinations, my desires, signs, types, pictures, shapes in the clouds, hundreds of other means.

And so I'm dealing with that subject. And one of the issues that comes up in dealing with that is people like Beth Moore is one,

Priscilla Schreier is another. Charles Stanley, Henry Blackaby, some of those guys, they all will, when they read scripture, one of the things they teach is that the

Bible is God's general revelation. It doesn't specifically tell Jim Osman that he's supposed to marry

Deidre Hayes of Weimar, Saskatchewan. It doesn't tell Jim Osman that he's supposed to be pastor of Kootenai Community Church.

There's no specific instructions to us in scripture. It's just God's general revelation. But out of that general revelation,

God can give us specific revelations, specific words of knowledge from him. When we're reading the

Bible and something jumps off of the page, that's the voice of God. So for instance, Mark Batterson, he wrote the book

Whisper, and he teaches in his book that, well, he tells a story about how his daughter was trying to discern the will of the

Lord for going to a college. And so she read, I'm gonna read the passage to you so that I don't get this wrong.

She read Revelation 4, verse one. And Revelation 4, verse one, she's reading through it.

This is the passage she reads, and this is what jumps off the page. Revelation 4, verse one. After these things, I looked, and behold, a door standing open in heaven, and the first voice which

I had heard, like the sound of a trumpet speaking to me, said, come up here, and I will show you what must take place after these things.

So that's the passage that she read. She discerned, as the words leaped off the page at her, from God's general word, she got the specific word from God that the door standing open in heaven was a reference to the opportunity to go to college.

The voice, which was the sound of a trumpet, was like somebody's challenge to her to go to college, which struck her like a trumpet call.

The words come up were a reference to going north to Tulsa, because that was due north of where they lived, and so that was

God's way of saying the opportunity to go to college, you should follow that, because that's my trumpet call to you, and go up north to Tulsa and attend college there.

That was God's specific revelation to her. Now, I could fill now and four other

Sunday school lessons with examples of this, and I mean multitudes of examples of this from people who teach this theology.

Now, one of the things that they say is that the general word of God is the inspired word of God, and they will affirm this.

It's inspired, it's infallible, it's inerrant. It's the perfect word of God, but it's only

God's general word. God's specific word to you, which he gives when you hear the voice in things leaping off the page like this, some word jumping off the page that strikes you like it's never struck before, that's

God's specific word to you. When God gives you the specific word, it's not necessarily inspired, because God's words that he gives to us in our thoughts, our inclinations, our impressions, our feelings, the signs in the sky, the shape of the clouds, the words jumping off the page of scripture, the still small voice, et cetera, all those various means, those are not inspired.

They're not infallible, and they're not inerrant. Those, you can mistake those. Those can be mistaken. You can get those wrong.

Those are not necessarily accurate. God's word is accurate, but the specific stuff that he gives you out of it is not necessarily accurate.

Now, I have accurately represented what they teach. I have a whole chapter just on this subject in the book. Accurately represented what they teach.

There is a fatal flaw in this thinking. Does everybody wanna take a stab at what it is? There's a lot of fatal flaws in this, so you're probably thinking, man,

I don't know which one he's looking for. Okay, so just let me give you the fatal flaw. The fatal flaw is this. God cannot speak inspired on one occasion and uninspired on another occasion.

God cannot speak inerrantly at one time and errantly at another time.

God cannot speak infallibly in one way and fallibly in another way.

See, therefore, you cannot say that the prophets that speak today, they're errant and fallible and not necessarily inspired, or they're only inspired when they get it right.

But the prophets in the Old Testament and in the New Testament time, they were inspired and infallible and inerrant.

They got spoke infallibly at one point and fallibly at another. That is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of Scripture.

Scripture is inspired and infallible and inerrant. It cannot err, and it is without error, not because it just happens to be the written -down form of the

Word of God. It is those things because of its source. Because God has spoken those things, it is inspired and infallible and inerrant.

So you cannot have God speaking on one occasion and it being inspired, and on another occasion, it being not inspired and fallible and full of errors, or able to err.

You see that? We believe this book is inspired, inerrant, and infallible because of its source, not just because it happens to be written down or because it happens to be old.

Those are not what make it those things. What makes it those things is the fact that its source is God. Because he spoke it, it is those things.

Because God himself breathed it out, it is inspired. Because God himself cannot err, it is inerrant.

And because God himself cannot fail, it is infallible. Because of its source, it is those things, not because it's written or because it's old or because it happened to come from more spiritual men.

So if God is erring and failing in the ways that he's speaking to people and people are getting it wrong and he's unable to communicate them because they're not picking up his whispers, et cetera, then something should tell you that what they're being taught or what they're being told does not come from God because God cannot speak errantly or in uninspired fashion.

All right, so we'll talk a little bit more next week about inspiration, doctrine of inspiration. Yes? That's a different subject.

So I will quickly answer it. We use the term I feel led, and I have a chapter on this in the book, actually, because the

Galatians 5 and Romans 8 use the term led by the spirit. What do those texts mean by being led by the spirit?

It's not referring to receiving still small voices in your head, it's talking about being under the control of the Holy Spirit. Those are the ones who are led by the spirit.

And Paul argues in Romans chapter eight that those who are led or under the control and indwelt by the spirit of God, those are the sons of God.

It has nothing to do with receiving still small voices or divine whispers and following directions that I feel nudging and promptings in my heart.

It has to do with mortifying sin, putting it to death, and walking in the power of the spirit. That's what it means to be led by the spirit.

So yes, I do sometimes feel led to do things. I feel inclined to do things. I felt led or inclined to wear red and gold today.

It was just, was it the Holy Spirit telling me that? No, I felt led to do that. Sometimes I feel led to call somebody or to pray for somebody, right?

There are times during the week when I think of some of you and something you're going through or something that you need, and I do feel inclined in my heart to pray for you.

That's not the voice of God. That might be the work of the spirit of God in directing my heart into a certain path. And if I don't do it,

I'm not necessarily sinning because it's not revealed scripture. But I may feel inclined to do something and I'm free to follow that inclination or to not follow that inclination.

What's the inclination then? It could come from a bad taco that I ate. It could be from something I read.

It could be that I saw a picture of you on the refrigerator or I thought of something that made me think of something that made me think of something that made me think of you.

And so I prayed of you, prayed for you, right? I was watching a video clip on YouTube and it was my niners of beating the

Vikings. And I saw that and I thought, man, that's fantastic. And I was thinking about that and I was thinking about the Vikings and I was thinking about the purple, the purple people eaters.

Nafel was wearing a purple hat on Sunday. I should pray for Nafel. Right, now is that the work of the spirit of God? I don't know, it might be

YouTube's fault that I prayed for you. I don't know what it is, but I can still pray for you. I don't need divine inspiration to pray for you.

I could just, I don't need you to wear a purple hat for me to pray for you. So yes, Peter. Oh, being called to be a pastor.

Look, I didn't do this because I was called to do it. I just did it because I like being in front of people. No, I don't like being in front of people.

How is that different than being called? I didn't receive any audible call to become a pastor of a church. There was an opportunity that was presented to me.

I looked at the education, the training that God had given me, the equipping that God had given me. I looked at my spiritual gift. I looked at the opportunity to do this and I didn't do it because I didn't like roofing.

I just did four houses this last year roofing. I enjoy physical labor. I wasn't trying to get out of anything. I looked at what

God had given me, an opportunity to do something and how he had called and gifted me and equipped me to do it, the education that he had provided and I thought, does this look like a good match?

Could this be a good way of using my time and talents to serve the Lord? And I had a desire to do it and so I did it.

I said yes. There was no divine inspiration. There was no supernatural voice from heaven. There was nothing like that that made me do what

I do. I do believe that in the providence of God, we can look at the providence of God and see how God has directed our steps up to a certain point and then he gives us an opportunity to do something.

I think that we are free in that moment without any kind of direct divine interventionary type of guidance.

We are free to do the one or the other and sometimes we make good decisions, sometimes we make bad decisions.

Maybe this was a bad decision. Time will tell. All right, yes.

Oh yeah, he picked up the phone call and called me. All right, let's, yeah,

Garrett. I'm not saying that, so the question for those who might be watching this recording, the question is that we have the spirit of God in us and we have the mind of Christ in us and the question is am

I saying that they don't communicate in any way so that we are understanding what the spirit wants? I'm not saying they don't communicate in any way.

I'm saying that there's no way of us knowing when they're communicating and when they're not. There's no light on my head that says the spirit of God is communicating to you right now.

Like, listen to it. There's no way that I can know that. I can feel strong inclinations to do something where I feel,

I think the Lord has laid this on my heart. I think that this is what the Lord wants me to do. I feel a strong compulsion to do that.

That's not the voice of God. That's other things that the spirit of God is doing. It's not giving me new revelation. I do believe that God causes us to walk in his steps and that the more we are filled with the

Holy Spirit and filled with the word of God, the more our lives will be in accordance with exactly what God wants us to do and the more he will direct our steps in that path.

But what I cannot do is claim divine inspiration for those decisions or lay the blame or the credit for those at the feet of the spirit of God.

I do believe that it was God's will for me to pastor a church. If I had at any point decided or thought that that was not

God's will, I would have stopped a long time ago. I would have had a lot of reasons to stop a long time ago. But I believe that that was

God's will to do it. I don't believe the Lord spoke to me and told me to do it. I believe that he inclined my heart in a certain way.

I believe that he gave me a desire. He equipped me to do it. He gave me the opportunity to do it and the desire to do it and the opportunity was there and I took it and I did it.

But I can't not claim that that was given to me by direct revelation from heaven. And I don't think it was.

But I do think that it was, I do think that it was an act of obedience on my part to do what God had asked me to do or given me an opportunity to do.

So yeah, back here real quick. Is it okay to say

I feel led or I feel called? I try and avoid that language,

I feel led and I feel called, simply because in our day and age with as loose as Christians are with their vernacular,

I think it is far too easily confused. So I avoid that. Look, I did pray for Nathel this last week.

I would never say I felt led to pray for you. I can go up to Nathel and say, I prayed for you this last week.

Did I feel led? I felt a desire to, I had the opportunity to and I thought of Nathel so I prayed for her. But I avoid that language simply because I think it's not helpful in our day and age.

I felt called to be a pastor. There's probably a time when I would have used that phrase, there's probably a time when in our

Christian culture, that phrase would have been understood to mean something different than it did today. Today you use the phrase

I felt called to be a pastor and they'll say, the people are thinking what you're saying is the Lord spoke to me in my ear and told me that this is what

I should do and I heard that voice, that still small voice, and so that's what I did. That's not what happened.

That's not what I believe happens. So I would say I am a pastor.

I started pastoring 23 years ago or something like that. That's how I would use to describe it.

I did have a desire to do it. I didn't realize I had the desire to do it until I was given the opportunity to do it but I did have a desire to do it.

And Paul says if any man aspires to the office or desires the work of an overseer, it's a fine work that he desires to do. First Timothy three verse one.

I had a desire to do this work, I did. Was I called to it in the sense that I heard a still small voice?

No, I think I was called to it in the sense of the New Testament that I believe this is what God wanted me to do and he directed my steps and my path and then when given the opportunity,

I had to stop and turn around and look at what the Lord had prepared me for and then I realized this is what, this

I think is what he wants me to do. And I had a desire to do it and so I did it. That is the calling of God in the sense that he prepared the steps and in his providence he worked that out.

But at the time, there was no revelation that was given to me to pastor a church. I don't think you need a revelation to pastor a church.

No revelation was given to me because if a revelation had been given to me, then I wouldn't have had such an angst over whether or not to do it.

If a revelation had been given to me to do it, I just would have done it because you don't disobey direct divine revelation.

I think that that's what Garrett was talking about. When we walk in conjunction with the spirit of God and our minds and our hearts are filled with the word of God and we are walking in obedience to the spirit of God and the revealed will of God, I believe

God directs our steps right into what he wants us to do. We will end up doing the will of God by just obeying what is revealed in scripture and we do not need the direct divine revelation to do that.

We simply need to walk in obedience to what has been written and our steps will be pleasing to the Lord, whatever decisions it is that we make in that that is in obedience to him.

Yeah, wow. I tried to get over, I tried to get done early. I told you at the beginning, this could be shorter.

Go ahead. Yeah, that's a good distinction.

Fine. Yeah, the compulsion to do it, not a calling to do it.

I do feel compelled to do a lot of things but when you say call, see, you're using the language of Old Testament prophets. You're using the language of Jeremiah and Isaiah.

I didn't see the Lord high and lifted up on his throne in the glory of his robe filling the temple and I didn't walk up and have him put a burning coal on my tongue and say, go speech my word.

I didn't have any of that. By calling, that's what people talk about. I have no direct divine calling to pastor a church in that sense.

I do have a compulsion to do it and as soon as that compulsion is gone, then

I have no legitimacy to hold this office. If I don't desire to do it, I have no reason to do it.

I shouldn't do it. If the desire goes away and I'm not compelled to do it, what would I be doing? Then there could be no legitimacy to me doing it.

I'll be going back to roofing, yeah. Okay, let's pray and be done. Our Father, we do thank you for the time that we've had here this morning and we thank you again for your word.

You are good to us so far beyond what we deserve in your glory and in your excellence and in your providence.

We thank you for how you guide our steps and our minds and how you use your word to sanctify us in the truth and to guide our steps so that they're pleasing to you and we ask your blessing upon our worship service and our fellowship which is to follow me.

You be honored and glorified through it. We pray in Christ's name, amen. All right, we'll be back next week.